Joyland Read online

  "I guess so."

  "Which means it hasn't. Me...I think if they turned back that sheet and it was my daughter lying there, I'd lose my mind."

  "You don't think Linda Gray really haunts the funhouse, do you?"

  "I can't answer that, because I hold no opinion on the afterlife, pro or con. My feeling is I'll find that stuff out when I get there, and that's good enough for me. All I know is that lots of people who work at Joyland claim to have seen her standing beside the track, wearing what she had on when they found her: blue skirt and blue sleeveless blouse. None of them would have seen those colors in the photos they released to the public, because the Speed Graphics the Hollywood Girls use only shoot black-and-white. Easier and cheaper to develop, I guess."

  "Maybe the color of her clothes was mentioned in the articles."

  She shrugged. "Might have been; I don't remember. But several people have also mentioned that the girl they saw standing by the track was wearing a blue Alice band, and that wasn't in the news stories. They held it back for almost a year, hoping to use it on a likely suspect if they came up with one."

  "Lane said the rubes never see her."

  "No, she only shows up after hours. It's mostly Happy Helpers on the graveyard shift who see her, but I know at least one safety inspector from Raleigh who claims he did, because I had a drink with him at the Sand Dollar. Guy said she was just standing there on his ride-through. He thought it was a new pop-up until she raised her hands to him, like this."

  Mrs. Shoplaw held her hands out with the palms upturned, a supplicatory gesture.

  "He said it felt like the temperature dropped twenty degrees. A cold pocket, he called it. When he turned and looked back, she was gone."

  I thought of Lane, in his tight jeans, scuffed boots, and tilted tuff-boy derby. Truth or horseshit? he'd asked. Live or Memorex? I thought the ghost of Linda Gray was almost certainly horseshit, but I hoped it wasn't. I hoped I would see her. It would be a great story to tell Wendy, and in those days, all my thoughts led back to her. If I bought this shirt, would Wendy like it? If I wrote a story about a young girl getting her first kiss while on a horseback ride, would Wendy enjoy it? If I saw the ghost of a murdered girl, would Wendy be fascinated? Maybe enough to want to come down and see for herself?

  "There was a follow-up story in the Charleston News and Courier about six months after the murder," Mrs. Shoplaw said. "Turns out that since 1961, there have been four similar murders in Georgia and the Carolinas. All young girls. One stabbed, three others with their throats cut. The reporter dug up at least one cop who said all of them could have been killed by the guy who murdered Linda Gray."

  "Beware the Funhouse Killer!" I said in a deep announcer-type voice.

  "That's exactly what the paper called him. Hungry, weren't you? You ate everything but the bowl. Now I think you'd better write me that check and beat feet to the bus station, or you're apt to be spending the night on my sofa."

  Which looked comfortable enough, but I was anxious to get back north. Two days left in spring break, and then I'd be back at school with my arm around Wendy Keegan's waist.

  I took out my checkbook, scribbled, and by so doing rented a one-room apartment with a charming ocean view that Wendy Keegan--my lady-friend--never got a chance to sample. That room was where I sat up some nights with my stereo turned down low, playing Jimi Hendrix and the Doors, having those occasional thoughts of suicide. They were sophomoric rather than serious, just the fantasies of an over-imaginative young man with a heart condition...or so I tell myself now, all these years later, but who really knows?

  When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

  I tried to reach Wendy from the bus station, but her stepmom said she was out with Renee. When the bus got to Wilmington I tried again, but she was still out with Renee. I asked Nadine--the stepmom--if she had any idea where they might have gone. Nadine said she didn't. She sounded as if I were the most uninteresting caller she'd gotten all day. Maybe all year. Maybe in her life. I got along well enough with Wendy's dad, but Nadine Keegan was never one of my biggest fans.

  Finally--I was in Boston by then--I got Wendy. She sounded sleepy, although it was only eleven o'clock, which is the shank of the evening to most college students on spring break. I told her I got the job.

  "Hooray for you," she said. "Are you on your way home?"

  "Yes, as soon as I get my car." And if it didn't have a flat tire. In those days I was always running on baldies and it seemed one of them was always going flat. A spare, you ask? Pretty funny, senor. "I could spend the night in Portsmouth instead of going straight home and see you tomorrow, if--"

  "Wouldn't be a good idea. Renee's staying over, and that's about all the company Nadine can take. You know how sensitive she is about company."

  Some company, maybe, but I thought Nadine and Renee had always gotten on like a house afire, drinking endless cups of coffee and gossiping about their favorite movie stars as if they were personal friends, but this didn't seem like the time to say so.

  "Ordinarily I'd love to talk to you, Dev, but I was getting ready to turn in. Me n Ren had a busy day. Shopping and...things."

  She didn't elaborate on the things part, and I found I didn't care to ask about them. Another warning sign.

  "Love you, Wendy."

  "Love you, too." That sounded perfunctory rather than fervent. She's just tired, I told myself.

  I rolled north out of Boston with a distinct feeling of unease. Something about the way she had sounded? That lack of enthusiasm? I didn't know. I wasn't sure I wanted to know. But I wondered. Sometimes even now, all these years later, I wonder. She's nothing to me these days but a scar and a memory, someone who hurt me as young women will hurt young men from time to time. A young woman from another life. Still I can't help wondering where she was that day. What those things were. And if it was really Renee St. Clair she was with.

  We could argue about what constitutes the creepiest line in pop music, but for me it's early Beatles--John Lennon, actually--singing I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man. I could tell you I never felt that way about Wendy in the aftermath of the breakup, but it would be a lie. It was never a constant thing, but did I think of her with a certain malevolence in the aftermath of the breakup? Yes. There were long and sleepless nights when I thought she deserved something bad--maybe really bad--to happen to her for the way she hurt me. It dismayed me to think that way, but sometimes I did. And then I would think about the man who went into Horror House with his arm around Linda Gray and wearing two shirts. The man with the bird on his hand and a straight razor in his pocket.

  In the spring of 1973--the last year of my childhood, when I look back on it--I saw a future in which Wendy Keegan was Wendy Jones...or perhaps Wendy Keegan-Jones, if she wanted to be modern and keep her maiden name in the mix. There would be a house on a lake in Maine or New Hampshire (maybe western Massachusetts) filled with the clatter-and-yell of a couple of little Keegan-Joneses, a house where I wrote books that weren't exactly bestsellers but popular enough to keep us comfortably and were--very important--well reviewed. Wendy would pursue her dream of opening a small clothing boutique (also well reviewed), and I would teach a few creative writing seminars, the kind gifted students vie to get into. None of this ever happened, of course, so it was fitting that the last time we were together as a couple was in the office of Professor George B. Nako, a man who never was.

  In the fall of 1968, returning University of New Hampshire students discovered Professor Nako's "office" under the stairs in the basement of Hamilton Smith Hall. The space was papered with fake diplomas, peculiar watercolors labeled Albanian Art, and seating plans with such names as Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Zimmerman, and Lyndon Beans Johnson penciled into the squares. There were also posted themes from students who never existed. One, I remember, was titled "Sex Stars of the Orient." Another was called "The Early Poetry of Cthulhu: An Analysis." There were three standing ashtrays. A sign taped
to the underside of the stairs read: PROFESSOR NAKO SEZ: "THE SMOKING LAMP IS ALWAYS LIT!" There were a couple of ratty easy chairs and an equally ratty sofa, very handy for students in search of a comfy make-out spot.

  The Wednesday before my last final was unseasonably hot and humid. Around one in the afternoon, thunderheads began to build up, and around four, when Wendy had agreed to meet me in George B. Nako's underground "office," the skies opened and it began to pour. I got there first. Wendy showed up five minutes later, soaked to the skin but in high good humor. Droplets of water sparkled in her hair. She threw herself into my arms and wriggled against me, laughing. Thunder boomed; the few hanging lights in the gloomy basement hallway flickered.

  "Hug me hug me hug me," she said. "That rain is so cold."

  I warmed her up and she warmed me up. Pretty soon we were tangled together on the ratty sofa, my left hand curled around her and cupping her braless breast, my right far enough up her skirt to brush against silk and lace. She let that one stay there for a minute or two, then sat up, moved away from me, and fluffed her hair.

  "Enough of that," she said primly. "What if Professor Nako came in?"

  "I don't think that's likely, do you?" I was smiling, but below the belt I was feeling a familiar throb. Sometimes Wendy would relieve that throb--she had become quite expert at what we used to call a "through-the-pants job"--but I didn't think this was going to be one of those days.

  "One of his students, then," she said. "Begging for a last-chance passing grade. 'Please, Professor Nako, please-please-please, I'll do anything.' "

  That wasn't likely, either, but the chances of being interrupted were good, she was right about that. Students were always dropping by to put up new bogus themes or fresh works of Albanian art. The sofa was make-out friendly, but the locale wasn't. Once, maybe, but not since the understairs nook had become a kind of mythic reference-point for students in the College of Liberal Arts.

  "How was your sociology final?" I asked her.

  "Okay. I doubt if I aced it, but I know I passed it and that's good enough for me. Especially since it's the last one." She stretched, fingers touching the zig-zag of the stairs above us and lifting her breasts most entrancingly. "I'm out of here in..." She looked at her watch. "...exactly one hour and ten minutes."

  "You and Renee?" I had no great liking for Wendy's roommate, but knew better than to say so. The one time I had, Wendy and I had had a brief, bitter argument in which she accused me of trying to manage her life.

  "That is correct, sir. She'll drop me at my dad and stepmom's. And in one week, we're official Filene's employees!"

  She made it sound as if the two of them had landed jobs as pages at the White House, but I held my peace on that, too. I had other concerns. "You're still coming up to Berwick on Saturday, right?" The plan was for her to arrive in the morning, spend the day, and stay over. She'd be in the guest bedroom, of course, but that was only a dozen steps down the hall. Given the fact that we might not see each other again until fall, I thought the possibility of "it" happening was very strong. Of course, little children believe in Santa Claus, and UNH freshmen sometimes went a whole semester believing that George B. Nako was a real professor, teaching real English courses.

  "Absoloodle." She looked around, saw no one, and slipped a hand up my thigh. When it reached the crotch of my jeans, she tugged gently on what she found there. "Come here, you."

  So I got my through-the-pants job after all. It was one of her better efforts, slow and rhythmic. The thunder rolled, and at some point the sigh of the pouring rain became a hard, hollow rattle as it turned to hail. At the end she squeezed, heightening and prolonging the pleasure of my orgasm.

  "Make sure to get good and wet when you go back to your dorm, or the whole world will know exactly what we were doing down here." She bounced to her feet. "I have to go, Dev. I've still got some things to pack."

  "I'll pick you up at noon on Saturday. My dad's making his famous chicken casserole for supper."

  She once more said absoloodle; like standing on her tiptoes to kiss me, it was a Wendy Keegan trademark. Only on Friday night I got a call from her saying that Renee's plans had changed and they were leaving for Boston two days early. "I'm sorry, Dev, but she's my ride."

  "There's always the bus," I said, already knowing that wasn't going to work.

  "I promised, honey. And we have tickets for Pippin, at the Imperial. Renee's dad got them for us, as a surprise." She paused. "Be happy for me. You're going all the way to North Carolina, and I'm happy for you."

  "Happy," I said. "Roger-wilco."

  "That's better." Her voice dropped, became confidential. "Next time we're together, I'll make it up to you. Promise."

  That was a promise she never kept but one she never had to break, either, because I never saw Wendy Keegan after that day in Professor Nako's "office." There wasn't even a final phone call filled with tears and accusations. That was on Tom Kennedy's advice (we'll get to him shortly), and it was probably a good thing. Wendy might have been expecting such a call, maybe even wished for it. If so, she was disappointed.

  I hope she was. All these years later, with those old fevers and deliriums long in my past, I still hope she was.

  Love leaves scars.

  I never produced the books I dreamed of, those well-reviewed almost-bestsellers, but I do make a pretty good living as a writer, and I count my blessings; thousands are not so lucky. I've moved steadily up the income ladder to where I am now, working at Commercial Flight, a periodical you've probably never heard of.

  A year after I took over as editor-in-chief, I found myself back on the UNH campus. I was there to attend a two-day symposium on the future of trade magazines in the twenty-first century. During a break on the second day, I strolled over to Hamilton Smith Hall on a whim and peeked under the basement stairs. The themes, celebrity-studded seating charts, and Albanian artwork were gone. So were the chairs, the sofa, and the standing ashtrays. And yet someone remembered. Scotch-taped to the underside of the stairs, where there had once been a sign proclaiming that the smoking lamp was always lit, I saw a sheet of paper with a single typed line in print so small I had to lean close and stand on tiptoe in order to read it:

  Professor Nako now teaches at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

  Well, why not?

  Why the fuck not?

  As for Wendy, your guess is as good as mine. I suppose I could use Google, that twenty-first century Magic 8-Ball, to chase her down and find out if she ever realized her dream, the one of owning the exclusive little boutique, but to what purpose? Gone is gone. Over is over. And after my stint in Joyland (just down the beach from a town called Heaven's Bay, let's not forget that), my broken heart seemed a lot less important. Mike and Annie Ross had a lot to do with that.

  My dad and I ended up eating his famous chicken casserole with no third party in attendance, which was probably all right with Timothy Jones; although he tried to hide it out of respect for me, I knew his feelings about Wendy were about the same as mine about Wendy's friend Renee. At the time, I thought it was because he was a bit jealous of Wendy's place in my life. Now I think he saw her more clearly than I could. I can't say for sure; we never talked about it. I'm not sure men know how to talk about women in any meaningful way.

  After the meal was eaten and the dishes washed, we sat on the couch, drinking beer, eating popcorn, and watching a movie starring Gene Hackman as a tough cop with a foot fetish. I missed Wendy--probably at that moment listening to the Pippin company sing "Spread a Little Sunshine"--but there are advantages to the two-guy scenario, such as being able to belch and fart without trying to cover it up.

  The next day--my last at home--we went for a walk along the disused railroad tracks that passed through the woods behind the house where I grew up. Mom's hard and fast rule had been that my friends and I had to stay away from those tracks. The last GS&WM freight had passed along them ten years before, and weeds were growing up between the rusty ties, but t
hat made no difference to Mom. She was convinced that if we played there, one last train (call it the Kid-Eating Special) would go bulleting through and turn us all to paste. Only she was the one who got hit by an unscheduled train--metastatic breast cancer at the age of forty-seven. One mean fucking express.

  "I'll miss having you around this summer," my dad said.

  "I'll miss you, too."

  "Oh! Before I forget." He reached into his breast pocket and brought out a check. "Be sure to open an account and deposit it first thing. Ask them to speed the clearance, if they can."

  I looked at the amount: not the five hundred I'd asked for, but a thousand. "Dad, can you afford this?"

  "Yes. Mostly because you held onto your Commons job, and that saved me having to try and make up the difference. Think of it as a bonus."

  I kissed his cheek, which was scratchy. He hadn't shaved that morning. "Thanks."

  "Kid, you're more welcome than you know." He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes matter-of-factly, without embarrassment. "Sorry about the waterworks. It's hard when your kids go away. Someday you'll find that out for yourself, but hopefully you'll have a good woman to keep you company after they're gone."

  I thought of Mrs. Shoplaw saying Kids are such a risk. "Dad, are you going to be okay?"

  He put the handkerchief back in his pocket and gave me a grin, sunny and unforced. "Call me once in a while, and I will be. Also, don't let them put you to work climbing all over one of their damned roller coasters."

  That actually sounded sort of exciting, but I told him I wouldn't.

  "And--" But I never heard what he meant to say next, advice or admonition. He pointed. "Will you look at that!"

  Fifty yards ahead of us, a doe had come out of the woods. She stepped delicately over one rusty GS&WM track and onto the railbed, where the weeds and goldenrod were so high they brushed against her sides. She paused there, looking at us calmly, ears cocked forward. What I remember about that moment was the silence. No bird sang, no plane went droning overhead. If my mother had been with us, she'd have had her camera and would have been taking pictures like mad. Thinking of that made me miss her in a way I hadn't in years.