Home > Tempting Fools(12)

Tempting Fools(12)
Author: Darien Cox

Yeah. Definitely a fake name.

I took in a sharp breath as a skeleton face greeted me on the homepage. It took me a moment to realize I was looking at Orion. The header of his page was a gossamer image of him in white makeup with thick black paint around the eyes and nose like a skull. Something about the makeup was familiar, like I’d seen this exact design before, but couldn’t immediately place it.

Below was a short list of category links to click, and my brow furrowed as I read through them. It appeared Orion was a somewhat diversified weirdo, but clearly an active one, which was more than I could say for myself. The site itself was minimalist in beige and gold, the little category blocks lighting up green as I hovered my cursor over them. The top one was for Psychic Readings. Then Three Hills Gifts, a store name I vaguely recognized as someplace down near the hillocks and hiking trails. I clicked on it out of curiosity. The page seemed little more than an advertisement for the shop, and there was no explanation as to what the gift shop had to do with Orion himself. But on closer inspection, there was a photo of the storefront at the bottom, and a small sign in the window read ‘Gifts, Oddities, Psychic Readings’ so I guessed there was my answer.

The below links read ‘Hillock Tourism Council’ and at the very bottom, ‘Hillock Beach Club’.

I was dumbstruck with indecision for a moment, because I knew the Hillock Beach Club and wondered what the hell it might have to do with Orion. But curiosity led me to choose the one that most surprised me—that the mouthy clown I’d met last night was involved with the tourism council. It struck me as a rather stuffy pursuit, and perhaps more of a grownup endeavor than I’d expect from the guy who’d spun his tires and left me choking in a cloud of dust.

I clicked on the page, which was fairly boring, just a lot of text with a background photo of the seashore and three hillocks. It started with a sappy diatribe about how much Orion loved serving on the tourism council, and how much Hillock Beach meant to him, calling it his ‘ocean jewel’ and his ‘safe harbor’. I huffed. “Whatever, dude.” There were several spelling errors, and I ordered myself not to judge. Orion called me judgmental last night, and that assessment was still ringing in my ears.

It got duller from there. I scanned the text, which told me the council had aided in transforming Hillock Beach into an internationally recognized visitor destination. I snorted. “Internationally?”

I read on. Vibrant region, historical legacy, cultural heritage blah, blah, blah. There was a contact number and an email address. I left the Tourism Council page and clicked on ‘Hillock Beach Club’, my eyes widening at the large photograph at the top. It was a wide shot of…someone with an incredibly fit body, half naked on a beach doing a kind of backbend as he twirled fire batons. I assumed this was Orion, his face and body painted in the black and white skeleton makeup, like the closeup on the main page. He wore only a small green grassy skirt that resembled a loincloth. Once I got finished being envious of his smooth, tanned abs and toned leg muscles, I read the caption under the photo: Orion at Hillock Beach Club. It was dated last summer, and suddenly I realized why the skeleton paint was so familiar to me.

I’d been to Hillock Beach Club, many times. I’d had drinks on the beach deck with friends, dined there with my wife, my kids. The food was amazing, as was the entertainment. I’d seen the dancers perform there before, and I recognized the ensemble Orion was almost wearing in the photo. We were told their green grassy skirts represented the hillocks, and the black and white skeleton paint related to the legend of a dead army entombed within them. I’d say it was rather insensitive to said deceased ancients, but then I didn’t believe hillocks could grow up out of the earth and swallow people overnight, so I doubted the mythological army ever existed.

Regardless, it was morbid as fuck now that I thought about it, but then much of Hillock Beach’s tourist draw dealt in various shades of morbid. But it was also sexy, and I stared dazedly at the photo of Orion, his arched back, the circle of fire around him, tensed arm muscles as he swung the batons. It was a side view and his face was painted, but I could still tell it was him, the longish hair with the curled ends flying wildly all over his head.

I wondered if I’d unknowingly seen Orion dance before. I tore my eyes from the photo and read the short print below it, stating that Orion appeared at the beach club on Thursday nights. I tucked that information away in my mind and clicked over to his Psychic Readings page, disappointed that there were no more photographs of him…which reminded me I was being creepy. While the fire dancing photo certainly showed…a lot of Orion, I found myself wanting to see his face again. His natural face, not all painted up as a skeleton, but like he’d looked last night, with nothing but black liner around his eyes. I kept trying to picture his face in my mind, his smile, the way his dark eyebrows rose when I called him a conman.

But this final page had only text. It went on for a couple paragraphs about how Orion was a psychic intuitive. It included a list of customer testimonials, and then booking information at the bottom. As I scrolled the cursor over the text, a little automated square popped up, informing me that my location had been tracked to Hillock Beach, and asking if I wanted to book a reading. Panic gripped me as I wondered how closely Orion Starr scrutinized his site visitors. I clicked out of the website and slapped my laptop closed like someone had walked in and caught me watching porn.

After one more cup of coffee, I walked the half mile down to the beach, enjoying the quiet morning and the scent of freshly cut grass mingling with the salty air. Many of the other houses on my street were vacation rentals, stacks of beach chairs resting against porch railings, outdoor showers, flipflops strewn across the lawns. Flags waved from awnings, pinwheels spinning frantically alongside pink flamingos and other lawn ornaments. Trails of sand embedded in grass, Styrofoam boogie boards, and colorful plastic pails and shovels. When I was married, we lived in a less touristy, residential part of Hillock, and I recall thinking I’d ‘made it’ for moving farther from the beach. I supposed it was a side-effect of growing up here, influenced by peers who broke off into little camps and cliques based on who lived where.

But since my life blew up and I had time to reflect, that attitude had been not only snotty, but stupid—the beach was kind of the point of a beach town, and if you didn’t like it, just move somewhere else. I was enjoying being here in the thick of things again, starting to appreciate the rough earthiness of my environment. This gave me hope that I was not only adjusting finally to my new circumstances, but perhaps regaining something significant I’d lost sight of along the way.

When I reached the end of my street, I turned left onto Sandy Drive, which ran parallel to the seawall. My dad’s house was the fourth on the right, and I could already see Mrs. Amador in the next yard down, hanging washing on the line, her short red hair tucked under a pink cap. Pausing, I glanced toward the beach to my right, considering walking the rest of the way on the seawall so I wouldn’t have to talk to her, but at that very moment, she spotted me and waved. I continued on, plastering a smile on my face as I approached.

“Hello, Kurt!”

“Hi, Mrs. Amador.”

“Oh come on now, you can call me Liz.”

I stepped through the gate of the short fence that surrounded my father’s yard, noting that his back door was open behind the screen. He was home. His Town Car was parked in the driveway, and I frowned as I spotted a new dent on the left front fender. I’d been trying to get him to have his eyes checked, but that went over about as well as anything else I tried to get him to do. “Is he home?”

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