Scare Tactics (5 page)

“Coming right up.” Taryn bustled off to relay his breakfast order to the kitchen.

Nealy only had a few minutes, and Taryn was always busy at this time of the day, so when she served him his eggs over easy and sausage links he said, “Gaynell’s gone on down to Columbus to help out while her sister-in-law’s sick from her gallbladder, and Gaynell’s mama has the kids. I got me two tickets for George Strait at Six Flags which I hate to see go to waste, so like I was wondering—”

Taryn didn’t say anything, just glanced at him in a lively way before picking up another order and hustling it down near where the bearded Englishman was getting up from his stool. Taryn gave the shabby traveler a quick smile and a shrug to indicate she didn’t have the time to talk or get her palm read.

Nealy watched them, his lip curling.
Well, tough luck, pardner. You’re just not that little gal’s type.

Nealy had known Taryn, his wife’s third cousin, most of her life, and had coveted her since she was a ripe fourteen. She was coarsely blond with brown roots, kept her hair that way on purpose, and it didn’t look tacky because she was young enough to get away with anything. She had big dark brown eyes and made them appear bigger with a lot of eye makeup, but she never bothered with lipstick. Her lips were naturally red and so well-shaped it gave him palpitations when he thought about kissing her.

The bearded guy passed behind Nealy with his backpack, and Nealy smelled him: not dirty, exactly, but pungent, an outdoorsman’s taint as if he slept in the woods. Nealy’s eggs got a little cold because he couldn’t concentrate on anything but Taryn and her teasing non-response. She took her time getting back to him.

“You’re not through with that?” she said, looking at his plate.

Nealy nodded and reached for a toothpick. Their eyes met. Taryn gave a little what-the-hell shake of her head and shoulders and smiled and said, “What time?”

“Six-thirty?”

“I’m in
love
with George Strait,” Taryn said severely, as if that let Nealy out. But Nealy felt close to bursting just the same.

“You living over at the Walking Ford Trailer Park?” he asked.

“Uh-huh. Don’t come in, though. Place is chockful of double-wides, and they all look alike. I’ll meet you out by the main entrance. Still driving that silver-and-black Subaru?”

“Best damn truck I ever owned,” Nealy bragged.

Nealy made it through the day without much on his mind but Taryn Melwood. He showered and shaved again when he got off work, polished his boots and put on a string tie. He bought a case of chilled Bud Lights and headed on down 41 to the trailer park, arriving promptly at six-thirty. Taryn was waiting for him, wearing a cute skirt that showed all of her kneecaps. With trick-or-treat eyes and her hair standing out from her head in a calculated tizzy, she looked, the way most of them looked at eighteen, like all of those hard-boiled female rock stars on MTV.

“That hat you got on is just like George Strait’s!” Taryn exclaimed, getting into the cab beside him.

“Yeah, well, does it look as good on me as it does on ol’ Texas George?”

Taryn was in a generous mood. “Nearly as good.”

“That’s okay, honey, I’ll take second place in your heart anytime.” Nealy reached behind him for a beer. “Want one?”

“No, and you don’t neither. Drinking and driving don’t mix, Nealy.”

“Honey, I’m gonna have just this one, then I won’t pop another top until after the concert.”

Taryn sat close to the door with her arms folded.

“I hope not. My best friend Marlene’s just a damn vegetable after what Ollie did to their Torino. Not to mention the kid who went through the windshield.”

“I’ll get rid of this one right now if it bothers you all that much.”

“I just figure I got too much to lose, Nealy. No bout a’ doubt it.”

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 learning 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.