"Well, we ought to do something," he said. "Go out and celebrate sometime or something." He spoke out of his general pleasure with things, but the idea in his mind was that he would take Teresa out somewhere sometime and they would be alone together.
But the kid, Michael, piped up, "We could go to the fair. There's a fair. Junie went to it, Junie at school. We could go."
And Teresa looked at Shannon expectantly.
So what the hell, the next day, Sunday, when Teresa and the boy came home from church, Shannon took them to the fair.
It was really just a carny on the edge of the city. The usual rides and booth games trucked over from the last town before being trucked over to the next. The kid thought it was magical, though, and that was fun even for Shannon. Michael's usual solemn demeanor fell away. He kept running off to one thing and then another, shouting, "Can we go on this? Can we do this?" The Ferris wheel, the bouncy castle, the whirligig. "Can we do this? Can we do this?" Shannon bought him cotton candy and taught him how to throw one of the lightweight baseballs at the booths. After spending about a million dollars on balls, the kid actually knocked over one of the targets and won a stuffed frog worth maybe a buck-fifty. That practically rocketed him into the stratosphere: "Look, Mama, I won, I won!" He held the frog in a death grip the rest of the day.
Shannon could tell it made Teresa happy to see the boy so excited. Whenever Shannon turned to her, she lit up and gave him a big smile. It really got to him. The smile was about the kid, sure, and he was glad to see that, but it got to him and it made him wonder if they could send the kid off somewhere for a while so he could kiss her. After the way she'd looked at him in the backyard, he was pretty sure she wanted him to.
It was a bright, warm afternoon. Saturday's rainstorm had left the air feeling fresh and clean. The weather brought the people out and as the day wore into blue evening, the fair grew crowded. Shannon and Teresa and the kid had to push their way through the mob and wait on line for the rides, but the kid didn't seem to mind.
He went on the carousel. He wanted Shannon to come along, but Shannon wanted a chance to be alone with Teresa. Maybe the kid understood that, because he tugged at Shannon for only a few seconds, then went off on the ride by himself.
The carousel was small, with colored light bulbs flashing and a calliope playing fairy-tale music. The kid went around on his painted horse every few seconds, waving to them so that they had to wave back. There was no time to go after the kiss. But Shannon and Teresa were standing next to each other behind a low metal barrier and she had one hand on the top of the barrier, leaving the other free for waving at the kid. After about the fifty-seventh time the kid went by, Shannon figured why not and reached out and put his hand over Teresa's hand where it sat on the barrier. He heard Teresa take a deep breath, and then she wrapped her hand around his. Shannon remembered the first time a girl had let him slide his fingers down her pants, when he was thirteen, the first time he had actually felt the magical damp portal into her flesh. It had set off a pretty substantial explosion in him, an expanding fireball filling him with flame. But this was on another order of magnitude, this was nuclear, and it was just her hand in his. Her hand in his and the carousel bringing the kid around and the cheap carny colored lights and the calliope music, that's all. But he really was crazy about her, he really was. He'd never felt anything like it. He turned to look at her, and she looked at him and smiled again, and that was pretty nuclear, too.
Then a movement caught his eye and his glance shifted, and he saw the man who had been following him all this time.
It was that same guy, the same damned guy with the shaved head and the watchful eyes and the cheap suit. It was a different cheap suit this time, but the exact same motherfucker otherwise, large as life, Shannon was sure of it. In that first moment, when Shannon first shifted his gaze from Teresa's smile and saw the bastard through the crowd, the guy was just standing there, just staring his way.
There could be no doubt about it anymore: the guy was watching him.
He was over by the wheel-of-fortune booth. The big wheel was turning and its colored lights blinking behind him. The flashing colors played on him and the fair lights washed over him so Shannon could see him clearly even in the twilight. The bald-headed goon saw Shannon look at him. Caught off-guard, he started. The next moment, he hurried away, losing himself in the crowd.
Shannon felt sick inside. Who was this guy? A cop? He had to be. What else? Deep down, Shannon had known all along that something like this would happen, that someone would find him. But why did it have to be now, so soon? Why couldn't it be in a few months or a year or a couple of years when he'd had a chance to live out his new life, when he'd had a chance to be with Teresa?
The sickness turned to anger in him. He let go of Teresa's hand and said, "I'll be right back, okay?"
"What's wrong?" she said.
"Nothing. I'll be right back."
He left her and plunged into the crowd, going after this guy, this bastard, meaning to run him to ground.
The next minute everything was racing past him and everything was racing inside him, too. The glittering lights of the turning carousel and the muscular rise and fall of the Ferris wheel and the strangely deadpan faces of parents and their children raced past on both sides of him, and his chaotic angry thoughts raced inside him, disconnected. He didn't know exactly what he was planning to do. But something. He wasn't going to just stand around and let this bastard follow him and torment him from a distance. If the guy was a cop, well, let him show his hand. Or if he wasn't a cop. Maybe he was something else, like a blackmailer or something-or an agent of Benny Torrance, out for revenge. Whatever. Never mind. If he had some proof of who Shannon was, let him bring it out. If he wanted to make a play, let him make it. Christ, couldn't Shannon have ten seconds to hold his girl's hand at the fair like anybody would? Was that too goddamn much to ask from the universe?
He reached the wheel-of-fortune booth, where the guy had been. He was breathless, tense and sweating, the wheel's colored lights flashing in his eyes and the barker calling to place your bets, take your chances. Jostled by some dick-swinging trucker who was swaggering past, Shannon turned unsteadily, scanning the people moving along the line of game booths toward an octopus ride-eight seats spinning round and round and up and down on the end of mechanical arms.
He saw-he thought he saw-the back of that bald head in the crowd by the octopus. He went after it, turning his body and using his hands to work his way past the people jammed up in front of him.
He reached the octopus, the seats going up and down above him, the calliope music playing loudly in his ears. But the bald guy was already gone, lost in the crowd…
No, wait, there he was. At the carnival's exit. Walking fast into the parking lot, walking toward that car of his, that same pale green Crown Victoria with the scrape on the side. Shannon saw its red taillights blink once as the guy pressed the button on his key to unlock it. No chance to catch up to him now, no chance to stop him.
Shannon stood helplessly, jostled by the crowd. He watched helplessly as the guy pulled the car door open and lowered himself inside.
A moment later, the Ford was pulling away.
When Shannon got back to the carousel, the boy, Michael, was leaning against his mother's jeans and sobbing. He was clutching her leg with one hand and clutching his stuffed frog to his runny nose with the other.
"He thought you left," Teresa told Shannon. She didn't sound angry or anything, but she gave him a look of deep meaning, and Shannon understood that this was some kind of big deal because of the kid's father being dead and all. He felt bad about it. He had to force his thoughts back from his run across the carnival, back from that bastard making his getaway in the Ford. He had to force his attention back to the boy-who really did look pretty pitiful clutching his buck-fifty stuffed frog like that.