Читать книгу The Redneck Riviera - Richard N. Côté - Страница 10

Fantasia Lingerie Shop

Two weeks later

You look pretty tired, Dolly,” Shaniqua said. “That new boyfriend of yours wearin’ you out already?” The other girls chuckled. It was a slow time of the day for sales. The tourists were still on the beach, the regulars were still at work, and the new strippers in town for Bike Week had already done their shopping for the weekend.

“Don’t worry, ladies, he’s not too hot for me to handle,” Dolly said with a wink. “I’ve been in training for years. But it’s only our second date.”

“You goin’ out on The Love Boat this weekend again?” Harriet asked, snickering.

“It’s not The Love Boat, Harriet. Anyone can buy a ticket on The Love Boat,” Dolly said, sticking her nose high in the air for full effect. “It’s open to the public for cruises. The FunTastic, my dear, is private. A 42-foot-long private yacht. Full bar, kitchen, private salon with TV and surround sound. Sleeps six – by invitation only.”

“Meow,” said Harriet.

“Meow,” said Melissa.

“Eat your heart out,” Dolly said with a grin, flouncing her hair as she walked out the door. “Kenny has custody of April this weekend. Gotta make hay while the sun shines, girls.”

“You make hay in the master cabin yet?” asked Shaniqua.

“None of your business, you little nympho,” Dolly replied. smiling. “Take care of the place. See you Sunday. I gotta change for Willie’s.”

Even before Memorial Day, the traditional start of the summer tourist invasion of Myrtle Beach, the Friday night shift was a killer at Captain Willie’s. By 6:00 p.m., traffic in the two-mile-long Restaurant Row section of King’s Highway between Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach crept along in near total gridlock. Every year, more theaters, theme shows, and amusement parks opened along the Redneck Riviera, bringing with them ever-growing hordes of tourists. The merchants and promoters were already talking about overtaking Branson, Missouri, as the live family entertainment center of the country.

At this rate, pretty soon I’ll need a helicopter to get to work, Dolly thought as her overheated Honda wheezed into the staff parking lot, half a block from the restaurant. By the time she walked across the hundred yards of broiling asphalt, she was already sweating hard.

The crush of hungry tourists and the pace of work were exhausting, but the time flew by quickly, and the tips were pretty good. When the crowd finally left for the stage shows, clubs, bars, and strip joints, Dolly was able to take a break and check on April.

Eighteen years earlier, her widowed mother, Anne, nearly had a fit when she found out that Dolly, seventeen, was pregnant. Then Anne got the really bad news: the baby’s father was none other than Kenny Devereaux, ten years Dolly’s senior.

Dolly had been swept off her feet – and into bed – by an older man, one, she supposed, who could replace the loving, hard-working father she had lost early in life. She got about half of her wish.

Kenny was loving, all right, but a little short in the hard-working department. He was only looking for a pretty young girlfriend who enjoyed good weed, good acid, and good sex anywhere, any time. At the time, Dolly had no problems with that list of priorities. It seemed like a perfect match – until Dolly missed her period, and Kenny found himself in the fast lane to fatherhood.

Anne pressured Kenny to marry Dolly, and he reluctantly agreed. The low-key wedding took place in a small, country chapel near her father’s ancestral home next to the Darlington stock car racetrack.

Six months later, April Moonchild Devereaux – she had been conceived one night while Dolly and Kenny floated among the stars on a cannabis cloud – made her wet-haired debut into the world. Unfortunately, the duties of raising his girl-child proved to be less interesting and more demanding than those of conceiving her, and Kenny soon departed the domestic scene for one more closely aligned with leisure and raising psychotropic herbs.

A decade and a half later, with April now in her late teens, Kenny Devereaux was still a cheerful, long-haired, bearded, acid-head throwback, trapped forever in The Land That Time Forgot. Like his Hippie contemporaries in the late 60s, Kenny had furnished his single-wide trailer with peace symbols, strings of multi-colored love beads, floor pillows, tie-dye throws for the couch, hand-knotted Indian wall hangings, and a two-foot-tall party bong. On a side table, a small candle burned in front of a framed snapshot of Kenny with Timothy Leary. On the walls, day-glo posters of John Lennon, The Maharishi, and Bob Marley still proclaimed the virtues of peace, love, and cannabis sativa.

Unlike the majority of his fellow tune-in, turn-on dropouts of the 60s, Kenny never made the transition from Hippie-dippie-doper into the Real World. Instead, he shifted the evolution of his consciousness into park in the late 70s. He kept body and soul together by working as a part-time motorcycle mechanic in North Myrtle Beach and toured occasionally as a fill-in roadie for the Grateful Dead. The rest of his waking hours were spent acquiring tattoos, raising marijuana in the woods of Horry County, sharing spliffs with the occasional Rastafarian who wandered through Myrtle Beach, and dropping acid with his fellow Deadheads.

His latest girlfriend, Ginger, had added a neo-Nashville patina to his chemically augmented life. She eschewed Kenny’s faded jeans and black Deadhead T-shirts for a more colorful fashion statement. Hers consisted of long, red fingernails, hot-pink Spandex mini-skirts, and tight tube tops, which displayed her two most noticeable charms to best advantage.

As soon as she moved in, she took down the poster of the Maharishi and replaced it with a large, dynamic painting of Elvis at the microphone, rendered on shimmering black velvet and framed in deeply carved, imitation-gold-leaf molding imported directly from Mexico. She completed the merge of cultures with the addition of several fake fur leopard and zebra skin rugs and an heirloom lava lamp.

Dolly’s call to Kenny caught him toking on the bong and watching a wet T-shirt contest on The Playboy Channel. “Hey, Babe, how’s it goin?” Kenny said in a deep voice which sounded like Papa Bear from the Goldilocks kiddie video. “Hear you got a big promotion. Congrats.”

“Thanks, Kenny,” Dolly said. “Sorry to bother you. I’m just calling to find out how April’s doing. Can I talk to her?”

“Sorry, Babe,” he replied. Dolly gritted her teeth. “She’s not here.”

“Where is she, Kenny?”

“I dunno. Out hangin’ with her friends, I guess. She didn’t say.”

“When will she back? I need to talk to her.”

“I dunno. She didn’t say that, either.”

“Dammit, Kenny, we’ve been over this a hundred times. She’s your daughter. Don’t you care where she is and what happens to her?”

“Of course I care, but shoot, Dolly. She’s almost eighteen. Remember yourself when you were eighteen? Didn’t you spend time hangin’ with your friends when you were that age?”

A chill ran through her body when Kenny reminded her of that time in her life: pregnant and ready to deliver April. Dolly visualized her daughter doing the things she did in her seventeenth year. It made her want to scream.

“Can’t she spend time with her friends?” Kenny continued.

“Who are her friends? What are their names? Where do they live? What do they do together? When will she be back?”

“How should I know?” Kenny said defensively. “They stopped by in a car. She got in. They left.”

“So, you don’t know who she’s with, where they live, where they went, what they’re doing, or when she’ll be back. Jesus, Kenny. She’s your own daughter. Aren’t you worried about how she looks? She’s been losing weight. She’s skinny as a rail, she has dark circles under her eyes, and her skin is as white as paper.”

“Whattayamean?” he said. “She looks just like all those high-fashion models in the magazines she reads. Every girl that age wants to look like the models.”

“What kind of father are you? Don’t you know that girl needs direction, guidance, needs attention? She worships you. Why can’t you be as good a father as you are a dope farmer?” Dolly snapped.

Dolly knew the moment the words crossed her lips that she had blown her only chance to get him to pay attention. “Kenny, I’m sorry....”

“Shoot, Dolly, you ain’t told me nothin’ I ain’t already heard from you a hundred times. That’s all you care about – bein’ in control of every person in the world and blamin’ me for your problems. The kid ain’t done you or me or anybody else no harm. She’s out with her friends like every other teenager in the world on a Saturday night, and I’m the lazy dope fiend who’s to blame for it. Well, go take your self-righteous sermon somewhere else tonight, Dolly.” Kenny took a long pull on the bong. The smoke slowly curled out of his nostrils. “Ginger and I are spending some quality time together right now, and your lecture ain’t improvin’ it any. G’bye.”