Wild Ride (11 page)

Mab's treacherous heart beat faster, even though she was pretty sure it was the same smile he'd given Shannon, flawed and sweet. And there was sincere admiration in his eyes when he looked at her, and that was just wrong because she was wearing her canvas coat and miner's hat, and even without them, men did not look at her with sincere admiration.

No good can come of this
, she thought.

On the other hand, he'd fed her three hot dogs and three beers and was clearly prepared to shell out more if she wanted it, so points there. And he'd opened up the Fortune-Telling Machine. And there were those stirrings, no doubt helped along by the three beers.

On the other hand, he hadn't told her anything about himself and he'd been whispering in Shannon's ear.

That was three hands.

“Mab?”

“I think I should stop drinking now.”

“Sure.”

The jukebox clicked over to the next song: Brad Paisley's “Alcohol,” and Mab almost dropped her beer as people started to sing along. “It's ten thirty,” she said, stunned. “The jukebox plays this song every night at ten thirty so people will know they have half an hour to closing. We've been here for almost four hours.” She tried to remember what they'd done for four hours. Talked. Well, she'd talked. She still didn't know a damn thing about him except that he was a barmaid-whisperer. “I've been talking for four hours. You're a very generous conversationalist.”

“Thank you,” Joe said. “So you really know this park well. You must know the people pretty well, too. Have you heard any rumors—?”

“No. I wouldn't hear rumors.” She smiled tightly at him. “I've been sleeping in Cindy's extra bedroom, and she's great, but otherwise, I don't see people much. I work a lot at night when no people are around, so I can focus. And I'm leaving the day after Halloween, so there's not much point in pursuing relationships. I'm temporary. I'm always temporary, but I like it that way—”

“You're not temporary,” he said. “You're unforgettable.”

There's something very wrong here
, Mab thought, but then a big bald guy bumped into Joe's back and slopped some beer on his shirt.

“Hey,” the guy said. “Sorry about that.”

“No problem,” Joe said, smiling at him. He held out his hand. “I'm Joe.”

“Karl,” the guy said, gesturing with a beer in each hand. “Glad to meet you. Can't stay. Got a hot one over there, and I think she's ready.” He gestured toward the other side of the Pavilion toward Ashley, looking . . . different, sloe-eyed and slatternly, lounging against one of the Pavilion support posts.

Mab looked at Karl's left hand and the gold band there. “Aren't you married?”

Karl scowled. “What are you, the moral police? You can—”

“She's with me,” Joe said, and when Mab looked at him, his smile was gone and he looked dangerous, his face hard and his eyes sharp.

“I don't ca—” Karl got a look at Joe and stopped. “Sure she is. Sorry about that.” He detoured around Joe, giving him a wide berth, and went back to Ashley.

Mab looked at Ashley, trying to distract herself from feeling good that Joe had defended her. “You know, Ashley's a good-time girl, but I didn't think she'd fool around with a married man. She always seemed like a nice person. Open-minded, of course, but not . . . selfish.” She looked up to see that Joe had stood and was gathering the beer cups and the hot dog wrappers.

“Time to go,” he said. “Show me the rest of the park.”

“Do you know Ashley?” Mab said, getting up, too.

“She was in the Dream Cream this morning, right?” Joe moved away from her toward one of the trash cans next to the Pavilion arches. “Not my type.”

Mab looked back at Ashley, now in an all-hands lip lock with Karl. “Looks like she's anybody's type.” She looked back at Joe and saw that he'd dumped the trash and was heading outside, and she took a step to join him.

“Miss?” somebody said from behind her, and she turned to see the fair-haired guy in Coke-bottle glasses and trilby hat from the Dream Cream holding out her work bag to her, one-handed, as if it didn't weigh anything.

“Don't forget this,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, taking the bag with both hands. “You're a real lifesaver.”

He smiled at her briefly, just a flash, and then turned back to his beer and his notebook, the antithesis of happy, attentive, always-smiling Joe.

Mab watched him for a moment; he was so still in the middle of all the chaos around him, his square shoulders hunched under his jacket, his hand moving with such certainty across the page, making strong neat marks in rapid succession. His concentration was so complete, his movement so sure, that it was almost erotic watching him.

Hard worker
, she thought.

Then Joe called, “Mab!” from outside the Pavilion arch, and she shook her head to get the guy with the glasses out of her brain and went to Joe,
thinking that somebody should tell that guy that work was not everything.

Almost everything, but not quite. Not tonight.

 

“S
o this is the other half of the park,” Mab told Joe when they were walking down the other side of the midway.

“Tell me everything.”

He was very close to her, so she kept up a running patter about the park to distract herself.
I'm babbling
, she thought, and then he put his hand on her back and she talked faster. “This is the OK Corral, it's all games, it went in during the fifties and it looks it. This is the Tunnel of Love—” He slowed as they passed the hideous lump of pink stucco liberally festooned with doves and shells, its wrought-iron railing the only thing about it that was attractive. “—it's a dark ride that's been here from the beginning, but I couldn't find any pictures of it before the fifties.”

“Is it running?”

“Only on the weekends.”

“Good. I'll feed you hot dogs tomorrow and then we'll come here.”

“No, we won't. My mother had an upsetting experience in there, and it makes me . . . I don't like it.” Mab started walking again. “This is the Worm.” She gestured to a creepy children's ride, a mini–roller coaster with a garish, bug-eyed, grinning worm's head, the cars behind it sections of its body. “That's from the fifties. I don't know what they were thinking, putting a worm beside the Tunnel of Love—”

“Upsetting experience?” Joe said, looking back at the Tunnel.

“What? Oh, my mother. Family legend. Not very interesting.”

“I love family legends,” Joe said.

Mab sighed. “When she was eighteen, she and her boyfriend took the slow evening ride, which takes twice as long as the day ride. Nine months later, there was me. She said that something just came over her.” Actually what her mother had said was that she'd been possessed by a demon, but her mother had also been nuts.

“You were conceived in the Tunnel of Love?”

“Well, metaphorically, everybody is. But yes, I was. I started here as a zygote and now I'm back to fix up the place.”

“We're definitely going in there,” Joe said, but he let her pull him away from the Tunnel.

“This is the Roundabout, another old ride that's just beautiful,” Mab said, dragging him past a tilted platform with shell-like cups, “and after that is the other dark ride in the park, the Mermaid World Cruise.” She slowed in front of a seven-foot-tall blue-green mermaid that she'd spent a week repainting and that was now, for the first time, reminding her of Ashley. Same lungs anyway.

“World Cruise?”

“It has these awful little dolls from twelve different countries singing this horrible little song. I think they put it in during the fifties.”

“I can do without that one,” Joe said, and kept walking, but he stopped in front of the carousel.

“And this is where I leave you,” Mab said. “I live there—” She pointed to the pink-striped Dream Cream with its mullioned windows, twenty yards away. “—so—”

“You didn't show me the carousel,” Joe said, and caught her hand.

His hand was warm wrapped around hers, a shock to her system, but the urge to pull her hand away wasn't nearly as strong as the need to leave it there.

He interlaced his fingers with hers and tugged her gently toward the carousel.

“Okay,” Mab said, following him just to keep his hand in hers. “This is the carousel. See?”

“Closer.” He pulled her gently into the shadows and then up onto the carousel platform, out of the orange light on the midway and into the dark among the horses.

“This is a Dentzel carousel,” Mab said, trying really hard to ignore how dark it was and how close he was and how good that was, “which you can tell because there's a lion and tiger on the outer ring. It has four rows of sixty-eight hand-carved basswood animals, eighteen fixed on the outer ring and fifty rising in the inner three rings, plus four mermaid chariots
for people who just like to sit and watch the world go around.” Her voice trailed off because he'd moved even closer and she couldn't talk with her heart pounding that hard. Maybe he was going to kiss her.

Maybe she should take off her miner's hat.

“Stay here,” he said, and stepped off the carousel and into the control booth.

“That's shut down until tomorrow night,” she called to him, trying not to be disappointed, but then the lights sprang to life and the carousel began to revolve, the calliope warming up into a vaguely recognizable melody.

Joe jumped onto the carousel.

“Obviously, you're a man of many talents,” she said, taking a step back as he moved toward her. “There are fourteen hundred lightbulbs on here reflected in the cut-glass mirrors that line the center axis. And twelve polychrome FunFun faces on the outside of the canopy and a really beautiful basswood FunFun statue up there on the roof that I just finished restoring. This thing is a work of art.”

“Yes, it is. Pick a horse.”

Mab looked around as the carousel revolved and the dark park outside slid by them. “I don't ride the rides. I just restore them.”

Joe looked extremely patient. “Pick a horse.”

“Maybe the tiger,” Mab said, trying to move past him to the stationary animals on the outer ring.

“The tiger doesn't move.” Joe put his hands on her waist and made her breath go. “How about this blue one?”

She turned to look, and he boosted her up sidesaddle before she realized what he was doing. She grabbed on to the pole and looked down on him as it rose, and then straight at him as it fell. “This isn't blue. It's turquoise.”

“Close enough,” Joe said, and moved closer.

“Uh,” Mab said, and then stopped, distracted by the music from the calliope, which was now recognizable. “This is ‘What Love Can Do.' I told Cindy it wasn't on here—”

“What's your favorite song?”

Mab's head began to swim, maybe from the spinning of the carousel, maybe from the rise and fall of the horse, maybe from Joe. She leaned her head on the pole and let the horse take her up and down. “I don't do music. There's no place for it in my work.”

“I bet you sing while you work,” Joe said. “I bet you sing this song. And ‘Child of the Wild Blue Yonder.' And—”

“How do you know?” Mab said, taken aback.

He smiled at her again, and her head reeled.

“I've had too much beer,” she said, and slipped carefully off her horse to stand between it and him.

There wasn't much room.

“Good,” Joe said, not moving, and the carousel turned, and the lights blinked, reflecting in the mirrors that lined the center, and the music from the calliope bounced as he leaned in closer.

He's going to kiss me
, Mab thought, trying to breathe.
He's really going to do it.

He stopped millimeters from her mouth and said, “Mab?”

“Yes?”

“You're supposed to close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“It's what people do when they kiss.”

“I never got that,” Mab said. “It's like you said, I want to see what's coming for me—”

He kissed her and she closed her eyes, her head awash with alcohol and the carousel and the music and him, mostly him, tasting of beer and hot dogs and something different but familiar, something sharp and bright, something
like her
—

He smiled against her mouth and then kissed her cheek and the corner of her mouth, and then her mouth again, deeply, while she went dizzy, and then he slid his hand into her coat and under her T-shirt, and the touch of his warm hand on her skin woke her up.

“Hello,” she said, grabbing his hand.

“Hello,” he said against her mouth. “Let's go to your place.”

Mab pulled back. “Just like that?”
Maybe
.

“We don't have much time,” Joe said, moving to her neck. “I'm gone after Halloween, you're gone after Halloween, we're not looking at a long relationship here.”

“True,” Mab said, closing her eyes. His mouth felt great on her neck. And the idea that nothing was permanent was good—how big a mistake could this be?—so she pulled his face back to hers and kissed him again, all that warmth and light, drinking him in, wanting him, feeling her heart lift—

“C'mon,” he whispered. “Let me drag you off to bed.”

The demons will drag you down to hell
, her mother had said.

“Are you going to drag me down to hell?” she asked Joe, her mouth close to his.

He looked startled. “
Bed
, I said bed. Lead you into sin, yes. Hell, no.”

“Huh.” Mab stepped out of his arms so she could get her bearings again. Her mother had been a fruitcake, but this really was moving too fast. “Thank you for the food and drink and the groping, but I think I am going to bed alone now because I have to work tomorrow.” She moved back another step and he didn't follow, just smiled at her as the carousel revolved, which made her inexplicably and uncharacteristically happy.