by Farris, John
Nealy took one long sip, then threw the Bud Light can into a ditch; Taryn started to warm up to him again right away. Their date was all he could have hoped for, and George Strait put on a hell of a show at Six Flags. The crowd made him sing “Amarillo by Morning” twice. They stood down front and Taryn held on to Nealy with both hands, although her eyes seldom left the stage. Nealy wasn’t unhappy about her devotion to the country singer, figuring that all the unrequited affection in her small body was just going to flow his way once they left the amusement park. Taryn clung to him all the way through the parking lot, and when they were alongside his Subaru, Nealy gave her a quick kiss, which she returned open-mouthed and with a little pelvic thrust to go with it.
“Hey, darlin’,” Nealy said in a husky voice, “you want to come home with me tonight?”
“I kind of do,” Taryn said, and they snuggled all the way back to Carver County, so close she had to shift gears. Taryn even shared a beer with him.
Taryn went straight into the bathroom when they reached Nealy’s house. He opened another beer and went through a small collection of video tapes he and Gaynell kept way back on the shelf in their closet where the kids wouldn’t be likely to find them. He put Miami Hot Bodies on the VCR, then took off everything but his undershirt and his pearl-gray Stetson. When Taryn came out of the bathroom wearing only a pair of lime-green panties she glanced at the action on TV and smiled.
“I don’t need that to get me in the mood,” she said. She was slightly flushed all over, as if she’d been looking at herself in the mirror and biting her lip and fingering her nipples to make them hard. “I’m in the mood already, no bout a’ doubt it.” Nealy’s own body temperature rose a couple of degrees. Taryn sat on his knee and helped herself to his can of Bud Light. A little of the beer ran down her chin, and Nealy was quick to lick it off.
Taryn chuckled and was trying on his hat when they heard a car in the drive. She looked Nealy in the eye and said, “That better not be who I think it is.”
But the dogs weren’t barking, which was the tip-off. Taryn hit the floor running, shut herself in the bathroom, then thought better of it. She came out with her clothes in both hands, trailing her dusky pantyhose, dropping a Capezio. She was still trying to pick up the shoe, swearing under her breath, when Gaynell came in the door calling cheerfully to her husband.
“Dora wasn’t near sick as she thought she was. Nealy? You awake? What’s that moaning and groaning, honey, you looking at those sexy movies again? Shoot, those women can’t do a thing I can’t do better.”
“Get your pants on!” Taryn whispered to Nealy, who was just sitting in shock at the foot of the bed with his hat covering his hard-on. But it was already too late to think about getting dressed; Gaynell was halfway down the hall. Taryn shook her head in exasperation, squared her shoulders, and when Gaynell reached the doorway and came to what looked like a skidding stop said sweetly, “Hello, Gaynell. I reckon I was just leaving, wasn’t I?”
Gaynell got her jaw back in alignment and said to her sorry-looking spouse, “You didn’t. Did you? Nealy Bazemore, you good-for-shit peckerwood!”
“Didn’t do a thing,” Nealy mumbled, as if he were drunk or dazed.
“And that’s a fact,” Taryn said indifferently, forgetting about her wisp of a bra and pulling on her blouse. There were red spot6 on her cheeks.
“Yet! That’s what y’all mean! Didn’t do nothing yet, just fixing to. Afraid to show me what you got under that hat, Nealy? And you! Taryn Melwood, you goddamn little tramp, it’s high time somebody whipped your butt to a frazzle!”
“Not my butt needs whipping,” Taryn said resentfully, staring her down while hastily buttoning the blouse over her breasts. “Just give me half a minute more and I’ll be out of here, and we’ll forget all about this.”
Sensing her equal in Taryn, Gaynell turned on her husband, who was still sitting with his knees together and his hat in his lap. Despite his circumstances he couldn’t keep his eyes from the TV, where an acrobatic redhead and two young men were coming to simultaneous climaxes.
“In my house! How do you get the goddamn nerve to hustle up this piece of trash as soon as my back’s turned—bring her to my house—the bed I sleep in—”
Gaynell gushed tears like a dynamited dam, looked around for a weapon, seized an ornate metal-framed photo of her parents and started to heave it at Nealy. He went backward off the bed. Gaynell hesitated in mid-throw, saw that she would probably miss, and looked at Taryn. Gaynell was, in spite of her outrage, afraid of the girl, who she knew had a lot of meanness in her. Her third choice of a target was the TV, with its exhausted, groaning lovers. She hit the TV dead center but only cracked the protective screen. Gaynell wailed at her ineptitude, turned and ran from the bedroom. Taryn balanced on one foot to slip on a shoe.
“Where do you keep your guns?” she asked Nealy. “Den. Gun cabinet’s locked.”
“Gaynell any good with a butcher knife?”
“How the hell would I know?”
Taryn put her other shoe on. “You just may be about to find out.” She parted the drapes, raised a shade, and kicked out one of the window screens.
“Hey,” Nealy protested, “where you going, hon?”
“Nealy, you horse’s butt. Want me to stick around and we’ll all play Trivial Pursuit later? Here she comes back again. Don’t call me. No use to tell her where I work, neither, because I just quit.”
Taryn heard Gaynell start up again inside the house. Nealy yelled back at her, finally showing some balls, Taryn thought as she crossed the front lawn. Nealy’s hunting dogs were in an uproar in their kennel. Taryn, walking fast, hit the road and didn’t look back.
The night was warm, almost sultry. Not a breath of air stirring. There was a three-quarter moon overhead. Taryn paused for a look around. It was late, almost two-thirty in the morning. And here she was stranded a long way from the Walking Ford Trailer Park.
Taryn put her hands on her hips. The least Nealy could do was give her a lift home, but she wasn’t about to go back into his house and wind up the innocent victim of a serious domestic disturbance. She looked at Gaynell’s car, a white late-model Camaro she hadn’t taken very good care of. The engine was still ticking. All Taryn needed, she figured, was the keys. Later she could call them and tell them where to find the Camaro.
She went reluctantly up to the porch.
Gaynell was loud and obscene, having reached that stage where she was practically begging Nealy to hit her. He’d hit her, all right, raise a couple of lumps, and by then Gaynell would be so turned on he’d have to fuck her, which was the other thing Gaynell was after; by morning they’d be lovey-dovey again.
Taryn looked through the screen door. Gaynell had dropped her purse on a lamp table in the living room. Her key ring was beside the purse.
Taryn opened the door a squeaky few inches, tiptoed inside the living room. Gaynell was screaming that if Nealy paid half the attention to her she deserved, then he wouldn’t have to go scrounging for pussy on the side. Taryn smiled tensely. She snatched up the keys with a surge of elation and heat it; she didn’t care if they heard the screen door banging shut behind her, but probably they hadn’t. There was a lot of breakage going on simultaneously with Gaynell’s recriminations. And good old Nealy had that fed-up tone of voice that meant he was about to take his hand-tooled leather cowboy belt to her.
To Taryn’s ears the Camaro sounded like a cement mixer when she started it, but she didn’t care about that, either. Unfortunately the damn car shook until her teeth rattled. Didn’t Gaynell know about tune-ups? Not only did the Camaro handle badly, it was almost out of gas. Taryn headed south on the Etowah Pike toward an all-night Spur station at the intersection with U.S. 41.
The Camaro had a coughing fit just as Taryn passed the Mt. Pisgah cemetery and almost directly in front of the long-shut *Star-Light* Drive-In theatre, where she’d spent many Saturday nights when she was in middle school, giving and receiving sticky kisses and l
earning basic anatomy. The car coasted to a full stop a hundred yards past the barricaded theatre driveway. Steam was rising from under the hood. Taryn smacked the steering wheel and the horn honked feebly. She couldn’t believe how bad her luck was tonight.
The pike was deserted; in this part of Carver County there wasn't a house or a light for half a mile. The front seat of Gaynell’s car was a pigsty: cookie crumbs and styrofoam containers from Burger King and a plastic baby bottle with some soured milk left in it. Taryn was disgusted at the prospect of sitting tight until somebody came along to help her out. A couple of mosquitos were giving her fits. But it was a good two miles down to the highway. What the hell was she supposed to do?
Taryn rolled up the windows to keep other insects out and slouched uncomfortably, arms folded, teeth gritted, wishing she had a Coke and a joint. She stared through the bleary windshield at the pale oblong of the drive-in screen, trying to remember the last picture she’d seen there. Who she’d seen it with. Oh ... it was that dumb jock Luther Phillips, who’d got her so hot and then had to go from car to car looking to borrow a rubber off somebody. Taryn made another effort to get comfortable, wondering what had happened to ol’ Luther—
The windshield took on a glow and Taryn raised her head. Lights of a car, or a truck, traveling north. Taryn gave serious thought to her options. Her heartbeat had picked up and her skin was prickly.
Uh-uh.
Trying to flag down a stranger on a deserted road could lead to a lot worse things than a couple of boring hours in a stalled car. Better to lay low and let him—or them—pass by.
Taryn scrunched down behind the wheel and waited. It was a pickup truck (she guessed) from the sound of it, maybe Nealy’s. She wondered if he’d finished whupping that bitch Gaynell and was out looking for her. Maybe if she just sneaked a peak—but if it really was Nealy, he’d know his own wife’s car; by now he’d have stopped and hollered for her. Also the truck was coming from the wrong direction, not from the vicinity of Nealy’s house.
Taryn continued to lay low as the pickup idled opposite the Camaro. Now her heart was really thudding. The driver had turned his side-mounted spot on the parked car. If he was sitting up high in the cab of that truck, couldn’t he make her out? Taryn slumped lower, her chin almost touching the bottom of the steering wheel.
Finally—it seemed like half a lifetime to Taryn, with that big spot lighting up the Camaro—he got tired of looking at whatever he was looking at, and drove on.
Taryn breathed heavily, more shaken by the experience than she cared to think about. She felt trapped in the Camaro, bathed in sweat, itchy all over. Maybe, she thought, this isn’t the best place for me.
Because someone else could come along any minute, looking for something to rob, and when he found her in the car—
Taryn raised up enough to look back over the seat. The pickup truck had disappeared on up the road; at least she couldn’t make out the taillights, and she could see pretty well to the point where the road curved past the cemetery hill.
She grabbed her purse and got out of the Camaro, then remembered the keys and reached back inside to take them from the ignition. She had an idea, for what it was worth. There just might be a safe place close by, where she could spend what was left of the night.
• 2 •
One Dark Hour to Go
Before abandoning the Camaro, Taryn opened the trunk. Even without a flashlight she found what she was looking for, a tire iron. She took it with her.
There was no problem getting to the drive-in. The road was barricaded off the pike to keep kids from driving down there and parking, and to keep out those people looking for a place to dump trash. The main gates, she was sure, would be chained. But the road was unobstructed beyond the barricade, just a little weedy, with slash pine close on both sides. She walked watchfully by the light of the moon down the middle of the asphalt road, not wanting to turn an ankle in a chuckhole.
The box office was just that, a box not much larger than a telephone booth, and empty—no place to sit or lie down in there, and when she looked through the barred ticket window she heard a scuttling noise. Rat, maybe. Taryn shuddered and went on to the gates. The high wall of the outdoor theatre echoed the slightest sound: pebbles kicked away as she walked, a flattened aluminum can skittering over the blacktop ... her own breathing, but maybe she just imagined she heard that.
It was spooky here, she had half a mind to go back. But when she turned and looked toward the pike she could barely make out the Camaro parked there. She had come a long way. And she was suddenly afraid, achingly afraid, of being out here by herself in the middle of the night.
Just as she’d thought, there was a big rusted padlock on the gates. She used the tire iron, making a lot of noise as she pried the hasp of the lock out of the wood. She tried to ignore the noise and concentrated on thinking about the good times she’d had here just a few years ago, when the *Star-Light* was about the only place in the south county where, if you were underage, you could still have some fun. Part of the fun had been to sneak in for free, usually in the trunk of Walter Bevins’s old Caddy. All of them just about suffocating if the line was long ... but she didn’t want to think about suffocating, she was feeling crawly up and down her spine, and beginning to panic.
The lock-plate screws pulled out of the old wood of the left gate and Taryn staggered back, dropping the tire iron. It missed her foot but grazed an ankle. Grimacing, she stooped to rub the anklebone and, in the midst of this movement, saw something, like a partially shielded flashlight beam in the pine woods beside the drive. But it came and went so fast she couldn’t be positive what it was. Just a wink from a strong light.
Was somebody out there?
Oh, Jesus, Taryn thought, and she groped for the tire iron. When she had it she stood with her back to the gate, knees together, staring at the woods, breathing through her mouth, a habit carried over from childhood when she was unhappy or overwrought. But there was nothing more to see. Nobody drove by on the pike. She glanced down at the L.C.D. display of her watch.
Twenty minutes to four.
Only one dark hour to go, then the sky would begin to lighten and there would be southbound traffic, early birds on their way to the Perimeter to work, she’d get a ride home ...
Taryn tucked the tire iron under one arm and pulled at the heavy rusted chain that held the gates together, cringing at the noise she made but desperate to be inside, not just standing there with the moon full in her face, casting a smudge of shadow against the fence boards, the faded remnants of old movie posters pasted there.
Eastwood, Redford. Those were some real men. She regretted the impulse that had prompted her to go out with Nealy Bazemore, even if they were related on his wife’s side. All along she’d planned to go right home after the George Strait concert, although she was well aware of what that cuss Nealy had on his mind, but then something happened like it always happened, she couldn’t help kissing him, and after the kiss she’d thought, Well, just this one time, even if he is a married man ... shit! Now look. Stranded at the damn *Star-Light* with—
With nothing. Stop it. Nothing and nobody’s here, you’re all by yourself and it’s maybe a little more than an hour to sunup, so stop! Just stop scaring yourself.
Straining, Taryn shoved open the heavy gates, slipped into the drive-in, paused for a few moments, trembling from exertion, then put all of her weight into closing the gates behind her.
There.
She felt better right away, at home here and oddly nostalgic as she looked around at the acres of hard-packed clay in front of the single screen, which was dilapidated after more than four years of neglect, shot full of holes in a few places from kids using it for rifle practice. But she remembered how the screen had looked in the theatre’s heyday, with huge misty images playing over it, films she hadn’t paid all that much attention to except for Rocky and First Blood—when Stallone was featured at the *Star-Light* Drive-In she was there to see the movie, period. Th
ere had been in-car speakers once, but they were long gone, only a squat forest of iron pipes set in cement remained. To her right was the low building that once housed the projection booth and refreshment stand. The neon had been removed from above the long counter, the iron grill was down and probably locked. She assumed the projection booth was locked up too, but her tire iron would get her in.
As she headed for the building Taryn smiled, thinking about the time she and Jaymie Walraven had laced Becky Pratt’s strawberry Frostee with Milk of Magnesia, getting back at Becky for putting caterpillars in Jaymie’s popcorn—caterpillars, gross! She couldn’t remember which of them had come up with the idea to spray-paint Lost my cherry to Hilda Berry on Steve Webley’s car while he and Hilda were bare-assed in the back seat. But the worst, absolutely the grossest, thing that had ever been perpetrated at the *Star-Light*—
Taryn came to a dead stop, freezing from the roots of her hair down to the small of her back.
The door of the projection booth a dozen feet away was not locked, as she had anticipated. Because the door was opening, even as she stood there gawking like a ninny at it. Creaking just a little on its hinges. Opening slowly, so slowly—
She was off like a shot, running a weaving course through the stuck-up pipe posts, just missing a couple of them, knowing she must not slow down to look back but more afraid of not knowing who might be after her, how close he was: so she risked it, glanced wildly over one shoulder and saw—Taryn stumbled to a stop, leaned against a decapitated post, and was choked with laughter, even as her heart continued trying to jump into her throat. She tingled all over.
The cur dog she had disturbed was still standing a few feet outside the doorway, looking at her, probably as scared as she had been. At a glance she realized he was too thin and pathetic to be any kind of threat to her—but there went her idea of spending an hour or so in the projection booth, not after that dog had been hanging around. More than likely the booth would be a flea circus, and flea bites were worse than mosquito bites anytime.