Susan Elizabeth Phillips - HONEY MOON.pdf

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HONEY MOON

SUSAN ELIZABETH PHILLIPS

ISBN: 0-671-73593-4

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 Epilogue

In memory of my father

A great roller coaster makes you find God when you ride it.

—Anonymous

The

Lift Hill

1980-1982

All that spring Honey prayed to Walt Disney. From her bedroom in the rear of the rusty old trailer

that sat in a clump of pines behind the third hill of the Black Thunder roller coaster, she prayed to

God and Walt and sometimes even Jesus in hopes that one of those powerful heavenly figures would

help her out. With her arms resting on the bent track that held the room's only window, she gazed

out through the sagging screen at the patch of night sky just visible over the tops of the pines.

"Mr. Disney, it's Honey again. I know that the Silver Lake Amusement Park doesn't look like much

right now with the water level down so far you can see all the stumps and with the Bobby Lee sitting

on the bottom of the lake right at the end of the dock. Maybe we haven't had more than a hundred

people through the park in the past week, but that doesn't mean things have to stay this way."

Ever since the Paxawatchie County Democrat had printed the rumor that the Walt Disney people

were thinking about buying the Silver Lake Amusement Park as a location for a South Carolina

version of Disney World, Honey hadn't been able to think of anything else. She was sixteen years old,

and she knew that praying to Mr. Disney was a childish thing to do (not to mention questionable

theology for a Southern Baptist), but circumstances had made her desperate.

Now she ticked off the advantages she wanted Mr. Disney to consider. "We're only an hour from the

interstate. And with some good directional signs, everybody on their way to Myrtle Beach would be

sure to stop here with their kids. If you don't count the mosquitoes and the humidity, the climate is

good. The lake could be real pretty if your employees made the Purlex Paint Company stop dumping

their toxics in it. And those people who are carrying on your business now that you're dead could buy

it real cheap. Could you use your influence with them? Could you somehow make them understand

that the Silver Lake Amusement Park is just what they're looking for?"

Her aunt's thin, listless voice interrupted Honey's combination of prayer and sales presentation.

"Who're you talkin' to, Honey? You don't have a boy in that bedroom, do you?"

"Yeah, Sophie," Honey replied with a grin. "I got about a dozen in here. And one of 'em is gettin'

ready

to show me his dingdong."

"Oh, my, Honey. I don't think you should talk like that. It's not nice."

"Sorry." Honey knew she shouldn't bait Sophie, but she liked it when her aunt fussed over her. It

didn't happen very often, and nothing ever came of it, but when Sophie fussed, Honey could almost

pretend

she was her real mother instead of her aunt.

A burst of laughter sounded from the next room as the Tonight Show audience responded to one of

Johnny's jokes about peanuts and President Carter. Sophie always had the television on. She said it

kept her from missing Uncle Earl's voice.

Earl Booker had died a year and a half ago, leaving Sophie the owner of the Silver Lake Amusement

Park. She hadn't exactly been a ball of fire when he was alive, but it was even worse now that he was

dead, and Honey was pretty much in charge of things. As she drew back from the window, she knew

it wouldn't be much longer before Sophie fell asleep. She never lasted much past midnight even

though she hardly ever got out of bed before noon.

Honey propped herself up against the pillows. The trailer was hot and airless. Despite the fact that

she was wearing only an orange Budweiser T-shirt and a pair of underpants, she couldn't get

comfortable. They used to have a window air conditioner, but it had broken down two summers ago

just like everything else, and they couldn't afford to replace it.

Honey glanced at the dial on the clock sitting next to the bed she shared with Sophie's daughter,

Chantal, and felt a twinge of alarm. Her cousin should have been home by now. It was Monday night,

the park was closed, and there wasn't anything to do. Chantal was central to Honey's backup plan if

Mr. Disney's employees didn't buy the park, and Honey couldn't afford to misplace her cousin, not

even for an evening.

Swinging her feet down off the bed onto the cracked linoleum, she reached for the pair of faded red

shorts she'd worn that day. She was small-boned, barely five feet tall, and the shorts were hand-me-

downs from Chantal. They were too big for her hips and hung in baggy folds that made her toothpick

legs seem even skinnier than they were. But vanity was one of the few faults Honey didn't possess,

so she paid no attention.

Although Honey couldn't see it herself, she in fact had some cause for vanity. She had thickly lashed

light blue eyes topped by dark slashes of brow. Her heart-shaped face held small cheekbones dusted

with freckles and a pert little excuse for a nose. But she hadn't quite grown into her mouth, which

was wide and framed by full lips that always reminded her of a big old sucker fish. For as long as she

could remember, she had hated the way she looked, and not just because people had mistaken her

for a boy until her small breasts had poked through, but because no one wanted to take a person

seriously who looked so much like a child. Since Honey very much needed to be taken seriously, she

had done her best to disguise every one of her physical assets with a perpetually hostile scowl and a

generally belligerent attitude.

After slipping on a pair of flattened blue rubber flip-flops that had long ago conformed to the

bottoms of her feet, she shoved her hands through her short, chewed hair. She performed this action

not to straighten it but to scratch a mosquito bite on her scalp. Her hair was light brown, exactly the

same color as her name. It liked to curl, but she seldom gave it the opportunity. Instead, she cut it

whenever it got in her way, using whatever reasonably sharp implement happened to be handy: a

pocketknife, a pair of pinking shears, and, on one unfortunate occasion, a fish sealer.

She closed the door behind her as she slipped out into a short, narrow hallway carpeted with an

indoor-outdoor remnant patterned in brown and gold lozenges that also covered the uneven floor in

the combination living and eating area. Just as she had predicted, Sophie had fallen asleep on an old

couch upholstered in a worn tan fabric printed with faded tavern signs, American eagles, and

thirteen-star flags. The perm Chantal had given her mother hadn't turned out too well, and Sophie's

thin salt-and-pepper hair looked dry and vaguely electrified. She was overweight, and her knit top

outlined breasts that had fallen like water balloons to opposite sides of her body.

Honey regarded her aunt with a familiar combination of exasperation and love. Sophie Moon Booker

was the one who should have been worrying about her daughter's whereabouts, not Honey. She was

the one who should have been thinking about how they were going to pay all those bills that were

piling up and how they were going to keep their family together without falling into the peckerhead

welfare system. But Honey knew that getting mad at Sophie was just like getting mad at Sophie's

daughter, Chantal. It didn't do any good.

"I'm going out for a while."

Sophie snorted in her sleep.

The night air was heavy with humidity as Honey jumped down off the crumbling concrete step. The

trailer's exterior was a particularly jarring shade of robin's-egg blue, improved only by the dulling film

of age. Her flip-flops sank into the sand, and grit settled between her toes. As she moved away from

the trailer, she sniffed. The June night smelled like pine, creosote, and the disinfectant they used in

the toilets. All of those smells were overlaid by the distant, musty scent of Silver Lake.

As she passed beneath a series of weathered Southern yellow-pine support columns, she shoved her

hands in the pockets of her shorts and told herself that this time she would keep going. This time she

wouldn't stop and look. Looking made her think, and thinking made her feel like the inside of a week-

old bait bucket. She moved doggedly ahead for another minute, but then she stopped anyway.

Turning back the way she had come, she craned her neck and let her gaze move along the sweeping

length of Black Thunder.

The roller coaster's massive wooden frame stood silhouetted against the night sky like the skeleton

of a prehistoric dinosaur. Her eyes traveled up the steep incline of Black Thunder's mountainous lift

hill and down that heart-stopping sixty-degree drop. She traced the slopes of the next two hills with

their chilling dips all the way to the final spiral that twisted down in a nightmare whirlpool over Silver

Lake itself. Her heart ached with an awful combination of yearning and bitterness as she took in the

three hills and the steeply banked death spiral. Everything had begun to go wrong for them the

Susan Elizabeth Phillips - HONEY MOON.pdf

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