Carousel Sun Read Free

avoid being splattered with condensation when he snapped a particularly ratty blue tarp off of—
    I blinked.
    It was a rooster.
    Not, mind you, a Herschel-Spillman, sharp-painted, and clean of line.
    The rooster in hand was . . . unfortunate. As if someone, somewhere, had tried to reproduce the original, but found their skill, or their memory, insufficient to the task . . .
    . . . or both.
    It was dirty, this rooster—in need of cleaning and a paint job—but that was just the beginning. The tail feathers weren’t awry, they were downright bedraggled, the eyes were dull, both stirrups were missing, and there was a crack down the dingy yellow neck that was going to have to be—
    I blinked and stepped closer, frowning at the crack and what it revealed.
    “Problem?” Artie asked, obligingly pulling the tarp out of my way.
    “It’s fiberglass!”
    Artie shrugged. “It’s what I got; take ’im or leave ’im.”
    I threw Artie a glare, which he didn’t seem to notice.
    “Where’d you get it?” I asked, buying time. It didn’t matter to me where he’d gotten the stupid bird. For all I knew, or cared, the Enterprise had spun it out of grass and dew.
    Another shrug. “It come in, like it all does.”
    Which was to say: None of your business, Kate .
    Well, okay; we all have our secrets, too.
    I sighed and moved past Artie, walking around the bird in formal inspection. It was depressingly dingy, but elbow grease and paint would fix that. I knelt down and inspected the underside, which was firm and rot-free, got up, brushed off the knees of my jeans, frowned at the tangled mess of a tail, and walked on.
    I came back to my starting point and stood for a long minute, considering. The only real damage was the crack on the neck—and that was why God had given us epoxy—but my inclination was to leave the damn’ rooster right where he was. The thought of mixing fiberglass and wood lacerated my carousel-keeping sensibilities. But, really, prejudice aside, did I have a choice?
    I thought about that hole in the menagerie, and my utter lack of success along other, preferable avenues, and the fines upcoming if I didn’t do some thing—and reluctantly accepted that, no, I didn’t have a choice.
    “I’ll buy him,” I told Artie, with scant grace. “And you’ll bring him.”
    “Be a delivery charge.”
    I looked him in the eye. “Really? A delivery charge, inside the Beach?”
    There was a long, stretched minute while we held eye contact; the air seemed to warm appreciably, and I thought I saw a shadow move in peripheral vision. Inside my head, I heard a sound something like a warning growl. The shadow faded. I concentrated on holding Artie’s eyes with mine . . .
    . . . and he blinked first.
    “Sorry,” he said. “Delivery free inside the Beach—sure it is, Kate. When you want it where?”
    I did a rapid calculation. “Today, at three, at the carousel. How much?”
    “We’ll have ’im down the merry-go-round at three today. Price is four bills.”
    Four hundred dollars was considerably less than I’d expected to pay. Unworthily, I wondered what secret flaw, hidden from inspection, the rooster would be shown to possess, and decided that it wasn’t worth worrying about. I needed a fill-in animal; I had a fill-in animal. Immediate problem solved.
    “I’ll have cash waiting,” I promised.
    He nodded and tossed the tarp back over the rooster.

    Archers Beach Community Federal Credit Union sits right on the corner of Route 5 and Adelaide Road. Since I was going to need four hundred dollars in a couple hours, I stopped to take care of that piece of business. When I came out again, a few minutes later, I stood on the corner and looked down Archer Avenue.
    Archer Avenue is the town’s main business street. It descends a long hill from Route 5 at the top, crossing the Amtrak line, and Grand Avenue, the parallel business street, before dead-ending at the dunes, the beach, and the Atlantic Ocean.
    Since Archers