Funland Read Online Free PDF Page A

slender and shapely, but when you saw her from the front, she was a letdown. As if God had decided he’d blessed her enough from the neck down, so he skimped on her face. She wasn’t exactly ugly, but her eyes seemed too close together, her nose small and upturned and a little piggish, and her mouth too wide. Her front teeth jutted out of her gums like white marble slabs.
    Another ball missed the target.
    “Nolan Ryan you’re not, Bozo!”
    The guy flapped a hand at her, put an arm around his girlfriend, and walked away.
    “Come on,” Cowboy said. He stepped over to the man running the concession and passed his Super-Waffle to Jeremy. “Let me have three of those balls, Jim,” he said, handing the man three dollars.
    “Couldn’t hit the broad side of an outhouse if you were inside it!” she called.
    “Get ready to bite the drink, Lizzie!” He hurled the first ball. It slammed the metal target. Lizzie dropped.
    Climbing out, she looked over her shoulder at him. “Nice shot, tenderfoot. Who’s your friend?”
    Jeremy felt heat rush to his face.
    “My pal Duke. New in town. We just met.”
    “Nice to meet you, Duke.”
    “Thanks.”
    She sat on the platform. Cowboy threw. She hit the water again.
    Cowboy smiled. “Only way to get her clean. She never takes a bath, filthy scrug.”
    “Let Duke have a try,” she called as she climbed out.
    Cowboy offered the last ball to him. “Oh, that’s okay,” Jeremy said. “You go on.”
    “Don’t be a woos,” Lizzie yelled.
    With a sigh, he gave the waffle cones to Cowboy and took the ball.
    The beginning of the end, he thought. I’m going to miss by a mile and they’ll know I’m a dip.
    He wound up and fired the ball.
    Right on target!
    It struck the bull’s-eye and bounced off.
    Lizzie’s perch didn’t collapse.
    She cackled and clapped. “Tough luck, Duchess.”
    Shit!
    “You’ve gotta throw it a little harder than that,” Cowboy said, smiling and shaking his head. “Give it another try.” He took out his money.
    “No, no. That’s okay. Some other time. I’m really wasted today. Been moving furniture, unpacking.”
    “Cowboy!” Lizzie shouted through the bars.
    “Yo!”
    “Give Tanya a message for me?”
    “You bet.”
    “Tell her about Janet. I want to bring her along tonight. See if it’s okay, huh? Give me a call later and let me know.”
    “You got it. Adios. Don’t get your tits wrinkled.”
    She suddenly looked as if she burned to punch out his lights.
    Half a dozen people nearby started laughing. Jeremy was too stunned to laugh.
    “Let’s move out, Duke.”
    They hurried away. Jeremy gave a cone back to Cowboy and followed him across the boardwalk. They passed through an open space in the railing and trotted down concrete stairs to the beach.

Four
    “Somebody sure knows how to pick a banjo,” Dave said. The quick, cheery music was barely audible behind the carnival tunes of the rides, the voices and laughter all around him, the screams of people on the high-swinging Viking Ship, the poomphs of the Bazooka guns.
    It seemed to come from somewhere ahead. Dave saw a circle of spectators in the distance, near the north end of the boardwalk.
    “Let’s check it out,” he said.
    “Beats interviewing trolls,” Joan said.
    Since lunch, they had approached a total of seven indigents. None could be coaxed into admitting knowledge of a man named Enoch. Asked if anything strange had happened last night, one told of being beamed up into a hovering spacecraft from the planet Mogo, where a creature like a man-size lizard stuck a tube down his throat and sucked out the contents of his stomach—which the creature drank as it sucked. One said he’d been grabbed by a pair of albinos who tried to drag him under the boardwalk and feed him to their pet spider. A woman had been visited by the Blessed Virgin, who gave her a rough gray stone and said there was a diamond inside. While the woman told her story, she gnawed the rock as if it were a