Joyland Read online

  "Go to Joyland on our day off when we could spend it on the beach?" Tom asked. "That's masochism at its very finest."

  This time instead of giving him an elbow, she poked him in the ribs. I didn't know if they were sleeping together yet, but it seemed likely; the relationship had certainly become very physical. "Poop on that! As employees we get in free, and what does the ride take? Five minutes?"

  "I think a little longer," I said. "Nine or ten. Plus some time in the baby part. Say fifteen minutes, all told."

  Tom put his chin on her head and looked at me through the fine cloud of her hair. "Poop on that, she says. You can tell that here is a young woman with a fine college education. Before she started hanging out with sorority girls, she would have said shitsky and left it at that."

  "The day I start hanging out with that bunch of half-starved mix-n-match sluts will be the day I crawl up my own ass and die!" For some reason, this vulgarity pleased me to no end. Possibly because Wendy was a veteran mix-n-matcher. "You, Thomas Patrick Kennedy, are just afraid we will see her, and you'll have to take back all those things you said about Madame Fortuna and ghosts and UFOs and--"

  Tom raised his hands. "I give up. We'll get in the line with the rest of the rubes--the conies, I mean--and take the Horror House tour. I only insist it be in the afternoon. I need my beauty rest."

  "You certainly do," I said.

  "Coming from someone who looks like you, that's pretty funny. Give me a beer, Jonesy."

  I gave him a beer.

  "Tell us how it went with the Stansfields," Erin said. "Did they blubber all over you and call you their hero?"

  That was pretty close, but I didn't want to say so. "The parents were okay. The kid sat in the corner, reading Screen Time and saying she spied Dean Martin with her little eye."

  "Forget the local color and cut to the chase," Tom said. "Did you get any money out of it?"

  I was preoccupied with thoughts of how the little girl announcing the celebrities with such reverence could have been in a flatline coma instead. Or in a casket. Thus distracted, I answered honestly. "The guy offered me five hundred dollars, but I wouldn't take it."

  Tom goggled. "Say what?"

  I looked down at the remains of the s'more I was holding. Marshmallow was drooling onto my fingers, so I tossed it into the fire. I was full, anyway. I was also embarrassed, and pissed off to be feeling that way. "The man's trying to get a little business up and running, and based on the way he talked about it, it's at the point where it could go either way. He's also got a wife and a kid and another kid coming soon. I didn't think he could afford to be giving money away."

  "He couldn't? What about you?"

  I blinked. "What about me?"

  To this day I don't know if Tom was genuinely angry or faking it. I think he might have started out faking, then gathered steam as full understanding of what I'd done struck him. I have no idea exactly what his home situation was, but I know he was living from paycheck to paycheck, and had no car. When he wanted to take Erin out, he borrowed mine...and was careful--punctilious, I should say--about paying for the gas he used. Money mattered to him. I never got the sense it completely owned him, but yes, it mattered to him a great deal.

  "You're going to school on a wing and a prayer, same as Erin and me, and working at Joyland isn't going to land any of us in a limousine. What's wrong with you? Did your mother drop you on your head when you were a baby?"

  "Take it easy," Erin said.

  He paid no attention. "Do you want to spend the fall semester next year getting up early so you can pull dirty breakfast dishes off a Commons conveyor belt? You must, because five hundred a semester is about what it pays at Rutgers. I know, because I checked before lucking into a tutoring gig. You know how I made it through freshman year? Writing papers for rich fratboys majoring in Advanced Beerology. If I'd been caught, I could have been suspended for a semester or tossed completely. I'll tell you what your grand gesture amounted to: giving away twenty hours a week you could have spent studying." He heard himself ranting, stopped, and raised a grin. "Or chatting up lissome females."

  "I'll give you lissome," Erin said, and pounced on him. They went rolling across the sand, Erin tickling and Tom yelling (with a notable lack of conviction) for her to get off. That was fine with me, because I did not care to pursue the issues Tom had raised. I had already made up my mind about some things, it seemed, and all that remained was for my conscious mind to get the news.

  The next day, at quarter past three, we were in line at Horror House. A kid named Brady Waterman was agenting the shy. I remember him because he was also good at playing Howie. (But not as good as I was, I feel compelled to add...strictly in the cause of honesty.) Although quite stout at the beginning of the summer, Brady was now slim and trim. As a diet program, wearing the fur had Weight Watchers beat six ways to Tulsa.

  "What are you guys doing here?" he asked. "Isn't it your day off?"

  "We had to see Joyland's one and only dark ride," Tom said, "and I'm already feeling a satisfying sense of dramatic unity--Brad Waterman and Horror House. It's the perfect match."

  He scowled. "You're all gonna try to cram into one car, aren'tcha?"

  "We have to," Erin told him. Then she leaned close to one of Brad's juggy ears and whispered, "It's a Truth or Dare thing."

  As Brad considered this, he touched the tip of his tongue to the middle of his upper lip. I could see him calculating the possibilities.

  The guy behind us spoke up. "Kids, could you move the line along? I understand there's air conditioning inside, and I could use some."

  "Go on," Brad told us. "Put an egg in your shoe and beat it." Coming from Brad, this was Rabelaisian wit.

  "Any ghosts in there?" I asked.

  "Hundreds, and I hope they all fly right up your ass."

  We started with Mysterio's Mirror Mansion, pausing briefly to regard ourselves drawn tall or smashed squat. With that minor giggle accomplished, we followed the tiny red dots on the bottoms of certain mirrors. These led us directly to the Wax Museum. Given this secret roadmap, we arrived well ahead of the rest of the current group, who wandered around, laughing and bumping into the various angled panes of glass.

  To Tom's disappointment, there were no murderers in the Wax Museum, only pols and celebs. A smiling John F. Kennedy and a jumpsuited Elvis Presley flanked the doorway. Ignoring the PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH sign, Erin gave Elvis's guitar a strum. "Out of tu--" she began, then recoiled as Elvis jerked to life and began singing "Can't Help Falling in Love with You."

  "Gotcha!" Tom said gleefully, and gave her a hug.

  Beyond the Wax Museum was a doorway leading to the Barrel and Bridge Room, which rumbled with machinery that sounded dangerous (it wasn't) and stuttered with strobe lights of conflicting colors. Erin crossed to the other side on the shaking, tilting Billy Goat's Bridge while the macho men accompanying her dared the Barrel. I stumbled my way through, reeling like a drunk but only falling once. Tom stopped in the middle, stuck out his hands and feet so he looked like a paperdoll, and made a complete three-sixty that way.

  "Stop it, you goof, you'll break your neck!" Erin called.

  "He won't even if he falls," I said. "It's padded."

  Tom rejoined us, grinning and flushed to the roots of his hair. "That woke up brain cells that have been asleep since I was three."

  "Yeah, but what about all the ones it killed?" Erin asked.

  Next came the Tilted Room and beyond that was an arcade filled with teenagers playing pinball and Skee-Ball. Erin watched the Skee-Ball for a while, with her arms folded beneath her breasts and a disapproving look on her face. "Don't they know that's a complete butcher's game?"

  "People come here to be butched," I said. "It's part of the attraction."

  Erin sighed. "And I thought Tom was a cynic."

  On the far side of the arcade, beneath a glowing green skull, was a sign reading: HORROR HOUSE LIES BEYOND! BEWARE! PREGNANT WOMEN AND THOSE WITH SMALL CHILDREN MAY EXIT LEFT.r />
  We walked into an antechamber filled with echoing recorded cackles and screams. Pulsing red light illuminated a single steel track and a black tunnel entrance beyond. From deep within it came rumbles, flashing lights, and more screams. These were not recorded. From a distance, they didn't sound particularly happy, but probably they were. Some, at least.

  Eddie Parks, proprietor of Horror House and boss of Team Doberman, walked over to us. He was wearing rawhide gloves and a dogtop so old it was faded to no color at all (although it turned blood red each time the lights pulsed). He gave us a dismissive sniff. "Must have been a damn boring day off."

  "Just wanted to see how the other half lives," Tom said.

  Erin gave Eddie her most radiant smile. It was not returned.

  "Three to a car, I guess. That what you want?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "Fine with me. Just remember that the rules apply to you, same as anyone else. Keep your fuckin hands inside."

  "Yessir," Tom said, and gave a little salute. Eddie looked at him the way a man might look at a new species of bug and walked back to his controls, which consisted of three shifter-knobs sticking out of a waist-high podium. There were also a few buttons illuminated by a Tensor lamp bent low to minimize its less-than-ghostly white light.

  "Charming guy," Tom muttered.

  Erin hooked an arm into Tom's right elbow and my left, drawing us close. "Does anyone like him?" she murmured.

  "No," Tom said. "Not even his own team. He's already fired two of them."

  The rest of our group started to catch up just as a train filled with laughing conies (plus a few crying kids whose parents probably should have heeded the warning and exited from the arcade) arrived. Erin asked one of the girls if it was scary.

  "The scary part was trying to keep his hands where they belong," she said, then squealed happily as her boyfriend first kissed her neck and then pulled her toward the arcade.

  We climbed aboard. Three of us in a car designed for two made for an extremely tight fit, and I was very aware of Erin's thigh pressing against mine, and the brush of her breast against my arm. I felt a sudden and far from unpleasant southward tingle. I would argue that--fantasies aside--the majority of men are monogamous from the chin up. Below the belt-buckle, however, there's a wahoo stampeder who just doesn't give a shit.

  "Hands inside the caaa!" Eddie Parks was yelling in a bored-to-death monotone that was the complete antithesis of a cheerful Lane Hardy pitch. "Hands inside the caaa! You got a kid under three feet, put im in your lap or get out of the caaa! Hold still and watch for the baaa!"

  The safety bars came down with a clank, and a few girls tuned up with preparatory screams. Clearing their vocal cords for dark-ride arias to come, you might say.

  There was a jerk, and we rode into Horror House.

  Nine minutes later we got out and exited through the arcade with the rest of the tip. Behind us, we could hear Eddie exhorting his next bunch to keep their hands inside the caaa and watch for the baaa. He never gave us a look.

  "The dungeon part wasn't scary, because all the prisoners were Dobies," Erin said. "The one in the pirate outfit was Billy Ruggerio." Her color was high, her hair was mussed from the blowers, and I thought she had never looked so pretty. "But the Screaming Skull really got me, and the Torture Chamber...my God!"

  "Pretty gross," I agreed. I'd seen a lot of horror movies during my high school years, and thought of myself as inured, but seeing an eye-bulging head come rolling down an inclined trough from the guillotine had jumped the shit out of me. I mean, the mouth was still moving.

  Out on Joyland Avenue again, we spotted Cam Jorgensen from Team Foxhound selling lemonade. "Who wants one?" Erin asked. She was still bubbling over. "I'm buying!"

  "Sure," I said.

  "Tom?"

  He shrugged his assent. Erin gave him a quizzical look, then ran to get the drinks. I glanced at Tom, but he was watching the Rocket go around and around. Or maybe looking through it.

  Erin came back with three tall paper cups, half a lemon bobbing on top of each. We took them to the benches in Joyland Park, just down from the Wiggle-Waggle, and sat in the shade. Erin was talking about the bats at the end of the ride, how she knew they were just wind-up toys on wires, but bats had always scared the hell out of her and--

  There she broke off. "Tom, are you okay? You haven't said a word. Not sick to your stomach from turning in the Barrel, are you?"

  "My stomach's fine." He took a sip of his lemonade, as if to prove it. "What was she wearing, Dev? Do you know?"

  "Huh?"

  "The girl who got murdered. Laurie Gray."

  "Linda Gray."

  "Laurie, Larkin, Linda, whatever. What was she wearing? Was it a full skirt--a long one, down to her shins--and a sleeveless blouse?"

  I looked at him closely. We both did, initially thinking it was just another Tom Kennedy goof. Only he didn't look like he was goofing. Now that I really examined him, what he looked like was scared half to death.

  "Tom?" Erin touched his shoulder. "Did you see her? Don't joke, now."

  He put his hand over hers but didn't look at her. He was looking at me. "Yeah," he said, "long skirt and sleeveless blouse. You know, because La Shoplaw told you."

  "What color?" I asked.

  "Hard to tell with the lights changing all the time, but I think blue. Blouse and skirt both."

  Then Erin got it. "Holy shit," she said in a kind of sigh. The high color was leaving her cheeks in a hurry.

  There was something else. Something the police had held back for a long time, according to Mrs. Shoplaw.

  "What about her hair, Tom? Ponytail, right?"

  He shook his head. Took a small sip of his lemonade. Patted his mouth with the back of his hand. His hair hadn't gone gray, he wasn't all starey-eyed, his hands weren't shaking, but he still didn't look like the same guy who'd joked his way through the Mirror Mansion and the Barrel and Bridge Room. He looked like a guy who'd just gotten a reality enema, one that had flushed all the junior-year-summer-job bullshit out of his system.

  "Not a ponytail. Her hair long, all right, but she had a thing across the top of her head to keep it out of her face. I've seen a billion of em, but I can't remember what girls call it."

  "An Alice band," Erin said.

  "Yeah. I think that was blue, too. She was holding out her hands." He held his out in the exact same way Emmalina Shoplaw had held hers out on the day she told me the story. "Like she was asking for help."

  "You already know this stuff from Mrs. Shoplaw," I said. "Isn't that right? Tell us, we won't be mad. Will we, Erin?"

  "No, uh-uh."

  But Tom shook his head. "I'm just telling you what I saw. Neither of you saw her?"

  We had not, and said so.

  "Why me?" Tom asked plaintively. "Once we were inside, I wasn't even thinking of her. I was just having fun. So why me?"

  Erin tried to get more details while I drove us back to Heaven's Bay in my heap. Tom answered the first two or three of her questions, then said he didn't want to talk about it anymore in an abrupt tone I'd never heard him use with Erin before. I don't think she had, either, because she was quiet as a mouse for the rest of the ride. Maybe they talked about it some more between themselves, but I can tell you that he never spoke of it again to me until about a month before he died, and then only briefly. It was near the end of a phone conversation that had been painful because of his halting, nasal voice and the way he sometimes got confused.

  "At least...I know...there's something," he said. "I saw...for myself...that summer. In the Hasty Hut." I didn't bother to correct him; I knew what he meant. "Do you...remember?"

  "I remember," I said.

  "But I don't know...the something...if it's good...or bad." His dying voice filled with horror. "The way she... Dev, the way she held out her hands..."

  Yes.

  The way she held out her hands.

  The next time I had a full day off, it was nearly the middle of August,
and the tide of conies was ebbing. I no longer had to jink and juke my way up Joyland Avenue to the Carolina Spin...and to Madame Fortuna's shy, which stood in its revolving shadow.

  Lane and Fortuna--she was all Fortuna today, in full gypsy kit--were talking together by the Spin's control station. Lane saw me and tipped his derby widdershins, which was his way of acknowledging me.

  "Look what the cat drug in," he said. "How ya be, Jonesy?"

  "Fine," I said, although this wasn't strictly true. The sleepless nights had come back now that I was only wearing the fur four or five times a day. I lay in my bed waiting for the small hours to get bigger, window open so I could hear the incoming surf, thinking about Wendy and her new boyfriend. Also thinking about the girl Tom had seen standing beside the tracks in Horror House, in the fake brick tunnel between the Dungeon and the Chamber of Torture.

  I turned to Fortuna. "Can I talk to you?"

  She didn't ask why, just led me to her shy, swept aside the purple curtain that hung in the doorway, and ushered me in. There was a round table covered with a rose-pink cloth. On it was Fortuna's crystal, now draped. Two simple folding chairs were positioned so that seer and supplicant faced each other over the crystal (which, I happened to know, was underlit by a small bulb Madame Fortuna could operate with her foot). On the back wall was a giant silk-screened hand, fingers spread and palm out. On it, neatly labeled, were the Seven: lifeline, heart-line, headline, loveline (also known as the Girdle of Venus), sunline, fateline, healthline.

  Madame Fortuna gathered her skirts and seated herself. She motioned for me to do the same. She did not undrape her crystal, nor did she invite me to cross her palm with silver so that I might know the future.

  "Ask what you came to ask," she said.

  "I want to know if the little girl was just an informed guess or if you really knew something. Saw something."

  She looked at me, long and steadily. In Madame Fortuna's place of business, there was a faint smell of incense instead of popcorn and fried dough. The walls were flimsy, but the music, the chatter of the conies, and the rumble of the rides all seemed very far away. I wanted to look down, but managed not to.

  "Actually, you want to know if I'm a fraud. Isn't that so?"