Free Bedbugs by Rick Hautala Page B

just to watch! No, he wanted to touch . . . . He had to feel LaBelle do her dance all around him!
    He made it to Moulton’s Field, and it didn’t take long to find the trailer of the carnival boss, a man named Josh Logan. After telling Logan how he had lost his job at the mill—and conveniently forgetting to mention the fact that he was leaving a family behind—he had himself a job as a roustabout. The pay was minimum wage, just as he had expected, but he would share a trailer with several other men and be provided with three squares a day. All in all, Dennis thought, his prospects were looking pretty damned good. He would be able to keep body and soul together hopefully at least until he could see LaBelle again and maybe meet her. After that, he might think about going back home to Sally and his snot-nosed little brat.
    Maybe. . . .
    By nightfall, the carnival crossed the state line into New Hampshire. Dennis spent most of the night with his new workmates, setting up the carnival in an open field just outside of Franconia. The work was hard—much harder than anything he’d ever done at the mill. Even though the regulars treated him a bit standoffishly, he began to sense a spirit of camaraderie among them, almost like a secret brotherhood, and he felt that—with time—he just might be able to share it.
    But none of that really mattered because what he had come for, what filled his mind all night as he worked, was a vision of LaBelle with her long, sleek, black arms wrapped around him, hugging him tightly . . . her legs squeezing his back as he drove himself deeper and deeper into her.
    The only disappointment Dennis experienced that first night on the job was that he never caught even a glimpse of LaBelle. Apparently she kept to her trailer when she wasn’t performing, and she never came out, even during setup or for the late evening meal. Whenever Dennis got close to her trailer, he would feel a queasy discomfort in his gut as he stared at her closed door, fully expecting to see some man—maybe Josh Logan—step out of her trailer with a self-satisfied grin on his face. What were the chances that a woman like her didn’t already have a man in her life, maybe dozens of men?
    The few times Dennis even mentioned LaBelle to his co-workers, everyone either would look away as if they hadn’t heard him or else cast their eyes to the ground and shake their heads, muttering something under their breaths that Dennis never quite caught.
    It was well past midnight when the carnival was finally set up and ready for the crowds the next day. Feeling bone-tired, Dennis was making his way back to his trailer for some much needed rest. Out of a habit he knew he would follow until he at least caught another glimpse of LaBelle, he detoured past her trailer.
    As he looked up at the full-length sign depicting her dance, his head felt bubbly and light, but the darkened windows stared back at him like cold, uncaring eyes. He knew he would have to seek out his cot before he collapsed right there on the ground, but he lingered, staring at the closed trailer door and letting his fantasies run wild. He was just turning to leave when he heard a faint click and then the high-pitched squeak of a door opening.
    With his heart throbbing heavily in his chest, Dennis looked up at LaBelle’s trailer. He almost convinced himself he was hallucinating when he saw the door slowly swing outward and then stop, less than half-way open. From the darkness within, Dennis thought he saw a soft flutter of motion, black against the darker black of the doorway.
    “It’s very late,” a woman’s voice said.
    It came to him, soft and husky, from out of the darkness. Like the sound of the opening door, this voice seemed more imagined than real. It floated in the night like a moth fluttering close to his ear—a light, powdery sound.
    “I—umm, yeah . . . yeah, it is late,” Dennis stammered.
    He felt a momentary rush of fear that someone would pass by and see