Funland (12 page)

Still wasn’t fair, though.

He took another tug at the bottle, then reached it back toward Mag.

She waved it away. “G’on, keep it,” she said. “I got more.”

Whenever he saw Mag around, she seemed to be equipped with a fresh bottle. And it was usually good Scotch, not cheap wine. He didn’t know what her story was, but figured maybe she got disability pay. She didn’t seem crippled up, but she might’ve pulled a cheat on the state. That would explain her riches. Disability was a lot more than general relief, maybe three times as much. On the other hand, maybe she had some money put away. Or she might just be better at begging. He’d seen her at it, now and again, and she never outright asked for money. All she did was look her marks in the eye and say, “God bless you,” and more often than not they’d fork over some change.

Charlie kept the bottle and worked on it, and it was good stuff. It heated him up. It gave him a buzz. By the time he finished the bottle, he was following Mag up the stairway to the motel’s balcony.

She unlocked the door of room 210, and they stepped inside. Charlie shut the door. Mag flicked a wall switch, and a lamp came on beside the bed.

“Land,” she said, “ain’t this the berries, though?”

Charlie stood by the door and watched while she wandered the room. She seemed awfully chipper about being here. She found a wine bottle in the wastebasket and upended it, dribbling the last few drops into her mouth. On the dresser was a pack of Salems. She shook a cigarette out, stuck it between her lips, and fired it with a match. She ran her hands over the bed. Plucking the cigarette from her mouth, she picked up a pillow and rubbed her face with it. She stopped at each of the open suitcases and inspected what was inside. Then she went into the bathroom.

From where he stood, Charlie couldn’t see what she was doing in there. Maybe she’d found something good. He hobbled forward and stopped when he spied her through the doorway.

Mag’s coat was a heap on the floor. She stood behind it, unbuttoning the front of her sweater. The cigarette hung from a corner of her lips, its ribbon of smoke curling into one eye and making her squint. She got the sweater off, dropped it onto her coat, and started fumbling with the buttons of her old plaid shirt.

“What’re y’doing?” Charlie asked.

“Mind yer own beezwax.”

“I wanta go.”

“Tough toenails.”

“I’m gonna miss out.”

“You already missed out. Stop your bellyaching.”

He guessed she was right. Even if they left right now, it would all be over by the time they got back. “No fair,” he muttered.

“This here’s your first clean-up,” Mag said. “You oughta be happy you ducked it this long.”

“Poop,” Charlie said.

Mag scowled at him, and pulled her shirt off. She wore a gray sweatshirt. She started lifting that, and Charlie caught a glimpse of gray skin blotchy with sores and scabs. He turned away fast.

Mag giggled. “Oooo, Charlie’s shy.”

“Ain’t neither,” he said. But he didn’t look again. He crawled onto the bed and flopped. The sheet felt smooth and good against his face. It smelled nice too. He supposed it smelled from the woman they got. Oh, she was sure something, and he was missing all the fun.

He heard water start to splash, heard the skidding clink of a shower curtain.

He closed his eyes.

“Hey! Looky here.”

He woke up, rolled over, and saw Mag in front of the dresser, facing him. She wore a low-cut white nightie that he could see right through and wished he couldn’t. A string of pearls hung against her bony, mottled chest. There were rings on her fingers, bracelets on her wrists, and a pearl earring on each ear. The lobes of her ears dripped blood onto her shoulders. Her lips were red and glossy. She was grinning at Charlie with brown stubs of teeth as she drew a brush through her long black hair.

“Ain’t I the purty one?” she asked.

“Like a whore that’s three weeks dead,” he told her.

Her eyes bugged out. She hurled the brush. It clopped Charlie over the left eye. As he dropped onto the bed, she rushed at him, squealing. He rolled away and curled up, hugging his head. The mattress rocked him as she leapt onto it.

“No-count cockless bag of shit!” she cried out.

Charlie yelped and whimpered as she pranced on the mattress, kicking and stomping him, as she sat on him and yanked his hair and rapped his head with sharp knuckles. Finally she left him alone. But he didn’t move.

When he heard her weeping, he sat up.

Mag was sprawled on the carpet, hands tight against her face.

He got up and went to her.

He kicked her in the ribs.

“Even-Steven,” he muttered.

She just stayed there sobbing while Charlie gathered up the man’s clothes and toiletries and took them to the suitcase.

In a pants pocket, he found a wallet with almost three hundred dollars tucked inside the bill compartment. He didn’t dare take any of the twenties. He’d be in trouble, sure, if he tried that. A few months back, Edgar’d been on clean-up and the next day Nasty Nancy spied him paying for a quart of bourbon with a ten-dollar bill. When you went on clean-up, it was okay to keep clothes. But nothing else.

Edgar claimed he found his ten on the beach. Nobody bought the story, though, and they’d made him “walk the house.”

Charlie fingered through the money again. Along with the twenties and a few tens in the man’s wallet, there were eight one-dollar bills. Charlie thought he might take a chance on some of those. Who was to say he didn’t get them from some generous marks?

He glanced over his shoulder at Mag. She had rolled onto her side, and her head was turned away from him.

Nobody’d ever know.

But suddenly his last sight of Edgar filled his head and Charlie shuddered, legs going weak and shaky, scrotum shrinking tight, ice in his stomach, gooseflesh crawling up his spine.

With trembling hands he closed the wallet and slipped it into the pocket of the man’s pants. In a front pocket he found a key case. He kept that, and put the pants inside the suitcase.

As he shut the suitcase, Mag came up beside him. He cringed and raised his arms to protect himself, but she didn’t strike.

“Let me in there,” she said. Charlie stepped back. She brushed past him and stepped to the corner near the wall. There, she opened the woman’s suitcase. She peeled the nightie off. Charlie squeezed his eyes shut. “Damn fool,” she muttered. When he opened them again, she had on shiny pink panties and was stepping into a pair of green slacks. She fastened the slacks. Grinning at Charlie, she lifted a black bra out of the suitcase and draped it over his face. Then she lifted out a green pullover sweater. She put it on. Sighing, she rubbed it against her belly and hanging breasts. “Nice,” she said. “You get yourself some nice duds, Charlie.”

“I like what I got,” he told her.

“Damn fool.” She unclasped the pearl necklace and dropped it into the suitcase. She tossed in the rings. She took the earrings from her bloody lobes. Charlie saw that the earrings were for pierced ears, and hers weren’t pierced. At least they hadn’t been.

She took white socks and tennis shoes from the suitcase, put them on, then went to the closet and came out wearing the woman’s nylon windbreaker. She retrieved her clothes from the bathroom and stuffed them into the suitcase. After that, she wandered around gathering the rest of the woman’s things.

“You got the keys?” she asked.

Charlie held up the key case. She plucked it from his hand.

They latched the luggage, and Mag went to the door. Charlie lifted both suitcases off their stands. He followed her outside.

In the east, the sky was pale. But the sun wouldn’t be up for a while yet. From the balcony’s height, he had a good view. He saw no one. The street in front of the motel was deserted. There were about ten cars in the parking lot.

Mag hurried ahead of him. He struggled along with the heavy suitcases. By the time he came to the bottom of the stairs, Mag had already found the car to match her key. It was a blue BMW. She opened the trunk while Charlie hurried across the parking lot.

He swung the suitcases into the trunk.

Mag, in the driver’s seat, leaned over and unlocked the passenger door for him. He climbed inside. The car smelled new.

Its engine thundered to life. Mag backed it up, then swung it toward the exit.

“How ’bout a ride?” Mag asked, gunning it onto the street.

“I wanna get back,” Charlie said.

“Yer too late for the fun.”

Maybe not, he thought. “I don’ care,” he told her.

She muttered something that Charlie couldn’t make out. But she took him toward Funland, the car weaving a little as she raced it up the middle of the street and sped through the blinking red traffic light. She stopped it with a hard lurch that flung him at the dashboard.

“You take the stuff,” she told him.

She gave him the keys. He opened the trunk and removed the suitcases. Then he stepped to her window and handed back the keys.

“What’re y’gonna do?” he asked.

Mag grinned at him. “Take her for a spin. Don’t ya fret, fool, I’ll leave the thing a good ways off.”

The car squealed, laying rubber, and shot away, heading north.

Charlie picked up the suitcases.

He lugged them up the stairs to the boardwalk.

He wondered how long they’d been gone. Too long, probably. The fun was sure to be over by now.

Never knew, though.

Sometimes it lasted pretty long.

He quickened his pace.

Twelve

Robin crawled out of her sleeping bag. The morning was gray with fog. Shivering, she sat on the nylon bag. She searched her pack, took out fresh underwear and socks, her blue jeans and sleeveless shirt. She swept her eyes over the tops of the dunes surrounding her encampment. She saw nobody, and the sand was piled high enough to conceal her from anyone who might be nearby.

Quickly she slipped the folded money out of the front of the underpants she was wearing. She tucked the bills into the front pocket of her jeans. Then she took off the T-shirt and panties she’d slept in and put on the clothes from her pack.

She had used her rolled windbreaker for a pillow. She picked it up, uncovering the sheathed knife that lay on her ground cloth. Once she had the windbreaker on, her shivers subsided.

She slipped the knife into a side pocket of her pack.

Then she put on her hiking boots. The chill of them seeped through her socks, but her body heat quickly warmed them.

She stood up and climbed the sand slope. From the top she had a clear view of the rolling grass-tufted dunes and the flat beach stretching out to the ocean. Gulls whirled and swooped through the gray air. A man was running along the shore, his black Lab trotting at his side. Far down the beach, in the area near Funland, a man was hunting for treasure with the help of a metal detector. Even farther away, surfers stood around in their wet suits and others were on the water—some riding in on combers, but most of them either paddling out, belly-down on their boards, or already way out on the rolling slate of the sea, legs dangling, roosting there as if content to sit.

Her attention strayed from the surfers as she noticed someone descending the main stairs from the boardwalk. A woman in a white sweatshirt and red shorts, a satchel swinging at her side. She was a long way off.

Those were the stairs that Robin had gone down last night, and she was amazed that she had walked so far.

The kid by the ticket booth had really spooked her. The kid, and his friends who hadn’t shown up yet. They had to be trollers. Why else would they be meeting there at that hour?

Robin looked the other way.

She had put just about as much distance as possible between herself and the kid. No more than forty or fifty feet ahead, a chain-link fence marked the end of the public beach. Beyond it, set far back from the shore, stood somebody’s house.

The tide was in now, waves washing past the end of the fence. Last night she could’ve stepped around that post without getting her feet wet, and taken refuge beyond the barrier. But she’d been reluctant to trespass.

Her place in the dunes, she thought, had been fine.

The kids hadn’t found her there.

She wondered if they’d tried.

“Now, there’s as fair a maiden as ever claimed a heart.”

Robin whirled around. The man stood on the crest of the dune behind her campsite. A bum. Fat and old and wearing soiled clothes, a knobby staff in one hand. She felt squirmy inside as she wondered how long he’d been watching her. Had he been hiding, spying on her while she dressed?

“Professor E. A. Poppinsack,” he said, doffing his hat. The hat was a faded brown bowler. Red feathers, tucked into the band on each side, stuck up like wings. He was bald, but he had a thick mustache with ends that curled up in points. He wore a dirty buckskin jacket, fringe swinging in the breeze, and plaid pants that looked more suited to a golfer roaming the links than a bum on the beach. “Top of the morning to you, dear. Have a spot of tea?”

Robin shook her head. “Sorry,” she told him. “I don’t have any.”

“Ah, but I have. Join me, won’t you? Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad tales of the deaths of kings.” Without waiting for a reply, the man turned away and descended the slope. He held his staff high. Its tip twirled a bit when he was out of sight.

Odd bird, Robin thought. But she’d liked the merry twinkle in his eyes, and he’d seemed harmless enough. His outfit made him look, somehow, like a medicine man—the kind of fellow who might have wandered into frontier towns, hawking elixir from the back of his wagon.

Curious, she followed him over the dunes. His encampment was directly behind hers, forty or fifty feet further inland, in a depression surrounded by high drifts of sand.

“Welcome to my estate,” said Poppinsack. He gestured to his rolled sleeping bag. Robin sat down on it. The old man crouched over the pot of boiling water on his propane stove, and added more water from a canteen.

“All the comforts of home,” Robin said.

“Indeed, unemcumbered by the nuisances of mortgage, tax, insurance, and utilities. God provides, Poppinsack abides.” He fetched tea bags from the bulging pocket of his buckskin coat, turned off the flame beneath the pot of roiling water, and plopped in the two bags—along with their strings and paper tabs. “Shall we allow that to steep for a bit?” he asked.