Funland (28 page)

They reached the curb. Shiner unlocked the passenger door for Jeremy, then walked around the front of the car.

“You sure look nice tonight,” he said as she slipped in behind the steering wheel.

“Thanks. You too.”

He wished she were wearing a dress, but she looked awfully good in the white jeans. And he liked the way her blouse seemed so light and clingy. If he held her, it would feel slick and he would be able to slide it on her skin.

She had an aroma that made him think of the way the air might smell in a forest after a spring rain.

She started the car and pulled away from the curb. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “and there’s no law says we
have
to go to this thing at Tanya’s. It’s going to be a bummer, you know. A lot of talk about that guy who kicked it. We could do something else. Go to the movies or fool around at Funland or something.”

“Don’t you
want
to go?” Jeremy asked.

“If you do. I’m just saying we don’t have to.”

The idea of going to a movie or to Funland with Shiner excited him. On the other hand, he hated to miss Tanya’s party.

“I’m pretty curious about it,” he said.

“Okay. We’ll go, then. No problem.”

“Are you sure?”

“It was just a thought. And, I mean, we
should
go. Tanya wants everyone to be there. I’ve just got cold feet, I guess.”

“You’re scared?”

“No, not scared. A little nervous, maybe. I don’t know, I have this feeling I’m going to wish we’d stayed away.”

“Maybe we’d better not go, then,” he said, being gallant and self-sacrificing and feeling dismal about it.

“No. Hey, you don’t want to miss the thing. And I’m not sure whether I do or not. Maybe it’ll be terrific.”

“Let’s just go for a while,” Jeremy suggested. “Just put in an appearance and see what’s going on. Then, if we feel like it, we’ll split.”

“Sounds good to me,” Shiner said.

He settled back into the car’s bucket seat.

The rest of the trip was wonderful. Jeremy felt nervous, but excited too. He was alone in the car with Shiner, his girlfriend, his actual girlfriend who wasn’t a dog, who was—as Letter-man would put it—“a fabulous babe.” She was beautiful and his. And they were on their way to a party. At Tanya’s. Where anything might happen but where one thing would happen for sure: he would be in Tanya’s presence. And she wasn’t a fabulous babe, she was a Force of Nature.

It’s really happening, he assurred himself. Right now. To me.

When Jeremy came out of his reverie, he saw that they were on a residential street that he’d never seen before. “Where are we?”

“You might call it ‘the other side of the tracks.’”

“Huh?”

“We’re heading into the north end. Where the rich folk live.”

“Tanya lives over here?”

“Sure. She’s loaded. Her father’s a chiropractor and her stepmother’s a lawyer.”

“If they’re so rich, why does she have to work?”

Shiner steered the car into a narrow lane that slanted up a wooded hillside. “Well, she obviously doesn’t have to. She likes it. Look what she does. She’s a lifeguard. Stands around on the beach all day, looking fabulous, the center of attention for every guy within eyeball distance—and now and again she gets to play hero.”

Shiner sounded a little amused, and maybe as if she were above such things herself.

“You kind of sound like you don’t like her,” Jeremy said.

“No, I like her fine. I just don’t
adore
her the way everyone else does.”

Is she including me? Jeremy wondered. Does she know? How could she?

Shiner stopped at a Y in the road. She took a sheet of paper from the blouse pocket over her left breast and unfolded it. In the faint, bluish light of dusk, Jeremy saw that it was a rough map drawn with a ball-point. Shiner frowned at it for a while. Then she swung to the left and drove slowly up the road.

Jeremy could see no houses. Just woods and sometimes a driveway entrance with a mailbox beside it. The houses, he guessed, were hidden in the trees far above the winding road and far below it.

“How did you meet Tanya?” he asked, wanting to get away from the subject of adoration. “You don’t go to the same school, and she lives…Do you live up here too?”

“Hell, no. I’m over on…in your neighborhood. I met her by hunting out the trollers. Everybody in town was talking about them—and Great Big Billy Goat Gruff. I started sneaking out late at night, and pretty soon I found them. I just explained that I wanted to join up, and why.”

“Because of your sister?”

“Right. And they put me through the initiation. I’ve been with them ever since.”

“Was it always the same kids?”

She nodded. “Mostly. A couple of them moved away, and Randy wasn’t with them yet. He got involved after Tanya pulled him out of the drink. She did mouth-to-mouth, and he woke up and figured he’d died and gone to heaven. He’s been one of her worshipers ever since.”

Shiner stopped. She peered through the windshield at the road sign, then checked the map again. “Okay, that’s Avion,” she said, nodding to the right. “Her place should be the third driveway.” She drove forward.

The third driveway was on the left side of the road, and slanted upward with a steep grade. Shiner shifted to first gear, turned onto the driveway, and started to climb it slowly, the engine racing. Jeremy wasn’t sure what he expected to find at the top. A cabin or cottage would’ve seemed about right. But when the road leveled off and the forest opened, he saw something that looked very much like a southern plantation house—complete with a veranda and white columns. He supposed it was smaller than the real thing, but it seemed awfully big to be sitting up here above Boleta Bay.

The whole top of the hill must’ve been lopped off to make room for the house, its three-car garage, and grounds. The driveway looped around the front lawn and led to a broad paved area to the right of the garage. There, five other cars were already parked.

Shiner parked beside a Jeep that had a Confederate flag on its radio antenna.

She took hold of Jeremy’s hand as they walked toward the veranda. Her hand felt moist.

She really
is
nervous about this, Jeremy realized. Why? What does she think might happen?

At the top of the stairs they stopped in front of twin oak doors. Jeremy pushed the doorbell button. From inside came the sound of chimes playing a few bars of “My Old Kentucky Home.”

“Are they southerners?” Jeremy asked.

“Who knows? Tanya isn’t. She grew up here.”

The door on the right swung open.

“Howdy there, Duke, Shiner.” Cowboy clapped him on the shoulder. “Long time no see, pardner.” The whole right side of his head looked like one huge bandage with a big hump where his ear must be. He wore his old battered Stetson. There were a few bandages on his arms, and Jeremy could see others through the thin white fabric of his T-shirt.

“Come on in, folks. Join the party.” As they followed him across the foyer, he said, “I hear you aced a troll last night. Fuckin’-A, and I missed it.”

“How are you feeling?” Shiner asked him.

“Like the old lady that bit the hatchet.”

He led them down a staircase into a huge carpeted room with furniture along the paneled walls, a pool table, and a bar at the far end. All the trollers were there.

Jeremy’s eyes sought out Tanya. He spotted her bending over the pool table, lining up a shot. She was barefoot, wearing white shorts and an oversize shirt with tails so long that they almost covered the shorts. The shirt was a plaid of bright blue and yellow. The way she was bent over, its loose front probably didn’t even touch her body.

Karen, standing beside Nate at the other side of the table, looked as if she might be trying for peeks.

Tanya banked the eight ball into a corner pocket and punched her fist into the air. Nate shook his head. Apparently the shot had just won the game for Tanya.

Randy, at a corner of the table, waved a greeting toward Jeremy and Shiner.

Tanya set her cue stick on the table, turned around, and smiled. “Glad you made it,” she said, coming forward. Jeremy saw the way her shirt moved, and quickly raised his eyes to her face.

Someone patted his rump. He looked over his shoulder and tried to keep his smile as he met Heather’s tiny piglike eyes.

“How’s it hanging, Duke?” she asked.

He shrugged.

Samson, behind her, winked and hoisted a glass full of red liquid.

Liz, off to the side, held a glass with the same stuff in it.

The three of them—Heather, Samson, and Liz—had all been at the bar a minute ago when Jeremy first scanned the room.

Heather bumped soft bulges against Jeremy’s side. “Why don’t you get some punch and join the party?” she said.

“What’s the occasion?” Shiner asked, slipping an arm around Jeremy’s back as if to let Heather know he wasn’t available.

“Let’s just call it a wake,” Tanya said. “A tribute to the ‘good troll.’”

“Only good troll’s a dead one,” Cowboy added. “Shit, I should’ve been there.”

“And I thought
I
was good at the high dive,” Liz said, hooting out a laugh. “That guy did the best damn triple-back-somersault…”

“He lost points on his entry, though,” Samson said.

“Yeah. I’d only give him an eight.”

Some of them laughed. Shiner didn’t. Neither did Nate.

“I propose we all get drinks,” Tanya said, “and hoist one to the memory of the good troll.”

She led the way to the bar, stepped behind it, and uncapped a liter bottle of rum.

“Yo ho ho,” Heather said.

Tanya dumped half the bottle’s contents into the cut-glass punch bowl. The liquor slurped into the red juice with soft plopping sounds. Setting the bottle aside, she stirred with a glass dipper.

When everyone held a glass full of the spiked punch, she raised her own glass. “To the one who took the big dive,” she toasted, “and shall be known henceforth as Fish Food.”

“I’m not going to drink to that,” Nate muttered.

“Lighten up, would you?” Tanya said. “He was a fucking
troll.”

“He was a human being, and we killed him.”

“We didn’t kill him. It was an accident.”

“A lucky accident,” Liz added.

“And I missed it,” Cowboy said.

“We murdered him,” Nate said.

Tanya stared at him. She looked annoyed, frustrated. “It was an accident. He would’ve been okay if he hadn’t been a fat slob. He would’ve been okay if
your
Ferris wheel had safety bars worth a shit.”

Nate’s face went slack. “You think I don’t know that?” he asked, his voice little more than a whisper.

“Okay,” Tanya said. “We went out to nail a troll and we nailed one. He happened to die. All the moaning and whining in the world isn’t going to bring him back to life.”

“Who’d
want
to?” Liz said.

“So let’s just have a good time, huh? I didn’t ask everybody over here to bellyache about it. The whole idea’s to loosen up, have some drinks, fool around, and put the whole thing behind us. We all know what happened out there. None of us is happy about it.”

“Speak for yourself,” Liz said. “Me, I think it’s great. One less troll in our faces. We oughta do it to all of ’em.”

Grinning, Cowboy rubbed her hair. She smiled and put an arm around him.

“I’m with Liz,” Samson said. “Fuck ’em all. The deader the bedder.”

Nate gave him a betrayed look, then turned his eyes to Tanya. “It has to stop. We should’ve stopped it a long time ago. It’s just been getting more and more out of hand. Something like this was bound to happen…”

“You sound like that shit editorial in the paper.”

“That shit editorial was right! We proved it right last night, didn’t we? And don’t give me this crap about not being happy about it. You were
delighted
that the old guy fell. You’ve been itching to…You tried to set the one on fire Tuesday night!”

“Could’ve had us a weenie roast,” Cowboy said.

“Are you all crazy?”

“It’s war, man,” Samson said.

“What’d they ever do to you?”

“They piss me off.”

“Oh, isn’t that wonderful. They piss you off, so you kill them?”

“You dumb fuck, that was an accident and you know it.”

“You’re in this because of me,” Nate said. “Same with you, Cowboy. Remember? I wanted you to help me kick ass because of what they did to Tanya. You never had anything much against the trolls.
I
talked you into it. And it’s time to stop. We kicked ass. We paid them back a hundred times over. For Tanya
and
for Shiner’s sister.”

Nate’s fierce eyes moved across the faces of the trollers and stopped on Randy. “What’ve you got against them? Nothing, that’s what. You just have this thing about Tanya. Is it worth killing for? Same with you, Karen.”

Smirking, Karen gave him the finger.

“What’d they do to you, Heather? You’re just in it for the company. And great company we are! Lose some weight and join the world.”

Heather pressed her lips together and blinked at him.

Nate’s eyes met Jeremy’s. “I don’t know what your story is. Do you hate the trolls? Do you want to kill them? Or is this just some kind of a social club like it is for Heather?”

Jeremy, face hot, didn’t dare speak.

“Some goddamn war,” Nate said, glancing at Samson.

“You’ve had your say,” Tanya told him. Her voice sounded calm but hard. “Now, get out of my house.”

“Call it off,” he said. “You’re the only one who can. You tell them it’s over, and it’s over.”

“All that’s over is you and me.”

“You’re right about that.”

For just a moment she looked stunned. As if she’d expected him to be staggered, maybe to relent or ask for forgiveness. Jeremy got the feeling that she didn’t
want
to lose him. Her upper lip made a tiny twitch. “Go on,” she said. “Get the fuck out of here.”

“You’re obsessed, Tanya. Don’t drag them all down with you.”

“Get out!”

He set his glass on the bar counter. “I’m leaving. Anybody else? Samson? Cowboy?”

“Not me,” Samson said. “Sorry, pal. I’m with Tanya on this one. We gotta clean the place up. I’ll quit my trolling when I can walk around all day without some slime bag asking me for two bits.”