Fluke (10 page)

I used to like to think that, somewhere in the world, a woman spent Mother’s Day wondering about me, or a man spent October 17 thinking about his child that was born on that day, but I quit those thoughts.
 
Rather than pursue any knowledge of my heritage, I played with the hand that I was dealt, and it had treated me fine so far.
 
I had decided that my parents were right about it.

****

The ride ended, and we exited the car once the man came to us and unlocked the safety bar.
 
After a brief second spent gaining my equilibrium back, I put my arm around Sara’s waist, and we stepped off the steel platform to the hard-packed dirt below.

“Well, Miss
DuBeau
, did you enjoy your Ferris wheel ride?” I asked her, keeping my spirits up despite the questions gnawing at me.

“Yes, I did, Mister Fluke, and I thank you very much.” She smiled at me, and we walked aimlessly for a few moments.

The lights were flashing all around us, multi-colored lights with no pattern, no rhyme nor reason.
 
People walked by us…kids, parents, young couples holding hands, and the one thing everyone had in common was laughter.
 
The carnival was a well of good moods for thousands, and it was being tapped generously tonight.

Sara’s mood showed no reflection of her brief trance from minutes before.
 
She was smiling and looking around, as interested and excited as a little kid.
 
Her eyes lit up when she saw a snack booth containing a cotton candy machine.

“You know what it’s time for?” she asked, poking me gently in the side with a fingertip.

“Umm…time for a nap?” I ventured, joking.

“No, silly.
 
Time for a big old batch of cotton candy,” she said.
 
She grabbed my forearm and started pulling me in the direction of the snack booth.

“I thought you wanted a candy apple,” I commented, allowing myself to be pulled along.

“I changed my mind…I’m a woman, remember?”

God, did I.
 
How could I forget?

We reached the booth and stood in line behind two teenage girls.
 
The large lady behind the counter was wrapping the wispy pink filaments onto a white cardboard cone, rolling it until the cotton candy formed a basketball-sized lump on the cone.

“Oh, decisions, decisions,” Sara said, turning to me.
 
“Do I want blue or pink?”

“Let me think.
 
Well, it tastes the same no matter what color it is, like pure sugar on a stick,” I responded cynically, pinching her side lightly, enough to make her jump.

“Hey!” she said, laughing, pulling back.
 
“No tickle! Just for that I’ll get one blue and one pink!”

“Man, you’ll be wired all night after all that sugar,” I commented, smiling.

Seductively, she looked at me and said, “Oh, and you’d love that, Adam.”

Wow
.

She turned to ask the lady for a pink and a blue when I felt the tap on my shoulder. It was a light tap, gentle enough to not seem rude, but hard enough for me to know it was there.
 
It felt like a woman’s tap, I thought, irrationally.
 
How does a woman tap, Adam-boy? I turned around and saw Heather standing there.

Shit
.

“Hey there, Fluke,” Heather said, crossing her arms over her chest.
 
She was staring at me with a look that could have been either angry, aloof, or a combination of both. She was wearing a denim skirt with a green T-shirt, and I briefly thought to myself that she looked really good in it.
 

“Hi, uh, Heather,” I said, feeling very close to the edge of something.
 
“Enjoying the carnival?” I asked her, feeling stupid but not knowing what else to say.

I saw her peer over my shoulder to where Sara was getting her pink and blue cotton candy.
 
She looked back at me.

“Is she one of the things you’re working on right now?” I thought she sounded a bit hurt.
 
Or maybe that was just my recently inflated ego talking.

Look, Adam-boy, you lucked into Sara.
 
That doesn’t make you some kind of heartbreaker.

I started tap-dancing.
 
“Look, Heather, I didn’t mean…”

“Here, Adam, hold this,” Sara said in my right ear.
 
I glanced over to her, and she was holding out a wad of pink cotton candy.
 
She was struggling just a bit, with cotton candy in each hand, and a few dollar bills sticking out from between her fingers.
 
She looked up and realized that I was talking to someone.
 
I reached out and took the pink cotton candy from her.

“Oh, hi,” she said, smiling at Heather.
 
“I’m Sara.” Sara wiped the residual sugar from her hands onto her shorts and held her hand out.
 
Heather reached out and gave it a small shake.
 
Two women that I could have taken out tonight, standing within five feet of each other, shaking hands, me in the middle.
 

“I’m Heather.
 
I work, well…worked, I guess, with Adam at the Pizza Palace.
 
Nice to meet you.” Heather smiled and I grasped at a fleeting thought:
maybe this won’t go so bad.

“Well, I guess we sort of have something in common.
 
You worked with him, I was his last delivery,” Sara joked.
 
She moved a hand to my back, and I felt fingertips begin to rub up and down my spine.

“Really? I didn’t know that,” said Heather, shooting me a quick glance.
 
Actually, it was more like a glare with sharp teeth.
 
Heather had never asked me why I quit Perry’s so suddenly, and now I think she was starting to understand.

Feeling extremely uncomfortable and not knowing what to do, I shoved the cotton candy into my face, tearing a hunk off with my teeth and letting it hang.
 
The sugary sweet substance melted the instant it hit my tongue, and a large portion stuck to my lower lip and hung down to my chin.
 
I let it rest like that for a moment and looked back and forth between Heather and Sara.

“Is there something on my face?” I asked, feigning ignorance.

Sara started laughing at my joke; Heather glanced at me and shook her head.
 
One woman that I chose to take out, and one that will probably no longer talk to me, standing within five feet of each other, me in the middle, I thought.

Sara reached up and pulled the sticky candy from my chin and popped it into her own mouth.
 
I watched her eyes close and her tongue move out to lick her lips and realized that I was with the woman I wanted to be with.

“Well, we’re off to the Tilt-A-Whirl,” I said, ready to move on from this awkward moment.
 
“It was good seeing you, Heather.”

“Yeah, you too.
 
Nice meeting you, Sara,” Heather said, turning to walk away.
 
“I’ll talk to you later, Fluke.” It sounded like a threat when she said it.
 
Sara and I stood eating cotton candy as Heather walked off in the direction of
L’Amour
.

“She was nice.” Sara said.
 
Either she had missed or was choosing to ignore how strange that situation had been for me.

Yep, I thought, Heather is nice. But she was no Sara.

“Come along, now.
 
We’re
gonna
tilt and whirl, then we’ve got to hit the ring toss.
 
I’m feeling lucky tonight,” I told her.

“So do I,” Sara said, wrapping her arm around my waist and squeezing me close.

It was a really good time after that, the best time I had had in a long while.

****

Sean and I had a theory about the beach at night and the effect it had on women.
 
It was a great aphrodisiac, but not something to throw around to any woman available.
 
It took a special woman to be a partner on a night beach outing, someone who would appreciate it, someone who was capable of feeling it like we felt it.

Sean often said, “It’s powerful, man.
 
The sand squeaking under your feet, the slow crashing of the waves, the moon reflecting off the water.”

I agreed with him wholeheartedly on that.
 
My addendum to that thought was that it wasn’t just the physical characteristics of the beach at night, it was the readily available and welcome sense of isolation, of ownership, you could achieve.
 
A beach so long, an ocean so big, could make you feel like it belonged to you and no one else.
 
It was a perfect place to be alone and write, think, listen to music, drink, all of which I had done on the beach at night.
 
Alone.

Sean had found at least four “special” women that he had taken to the beach at night.
 
Four that I knew of.
 
Up until last week, I had found none.

****

“Park over here,” I told Sara, pointing at a half sand, half asphalt area located off the side of the road.
 
The area was bordered by highway 98 on the left and by a white sand dune to the right.

She pulled into the area and shut off the engine.
 
The silence was big and not at all uncomfortable this time.
 
The uncomfortable silences were growing rare between Sara and I, and moments like the night I picked her up at her apartment almost seemed funny to me now.
 
The silences we had now were comfortable, and neither one of us felt the need to fill them with chatter.

“Watch out opening your door,” I told her, even though traffic was light.
 
It was a Monday night, nearly midnight, and the majority of the traffic was on the other side of the road, cars full of happy people leaving the carnival, heading home.

On our own way home, I had told Sara to make a U-turn in order to bring us to the spot we parked at.
 
It was my favorite piece of beach, not trampled by sunburned tourists, not littered by drunken teenagers, and best of all, not blotted out by condominiums.
 
I often thought of it as
my
beach, as I had spent several hours at the section by myself and had only encountered two other people in all the time I spent there.
 
Those encounters consisted of me sitting on the sand just out of the tide’s reach and silently watching the people walk by, hoping they wouldn’t be prompted to talk to me.
 
Whether it was because of the headphones I usually wore on the beach, or the fact that I may have looked a bit like a drifter, neither one spoke to me.

This section of highway was lined with dunes, massive white ones, scattered with sea oats which wafted back and forth in the warm, light breeze.
 
After removing our sandals and tossing them in the back seat, Sara took my hand, and we started walking towards the sound of the water.

The rest of our time at the carnival had been good, and neither of what I considered incidents, the brief trance on the Ferris wheel or the meeting with Heather, came back up between Sara and I.
 
We rode a few more rides, and I lost at the ring toss (she goosed me as I threw what would have been the winning ring, and it actually hit the vendor’s foot, to the delight of two small children watching).
 
I
did manage to win her a medium-sized teddy bear at a game in which I had to pop balloons by tossing darts at them.
 
She had seemed delighted with the teddy bear, naming him
Flukey
, and talking to him as though he were a real live companion with us.

“Want a soda, Adam?” she’d ask me.

“Sure,” I’d respond.

“And how about you,
Flukey
?”

It was silly, and it was fun.
 
Most of the rides had stopped running, and only a small fraction of the flashing lights were still flashing by the time we left.
 
When we got into her car, she actually buckled the teddy bear in the back seat.