Joyland Read online

  "Good. Stay out of it. It's haunted, and a boy with bad thoughts needs to be visiting a haunted house like he needs arsenic in his mouthwash. Kapish?"

  "Yeah." I looked at my watch.

  She got the point and stepped back. "Watch for those kids. And watch your step, boychick. There's a shadow over you."

  Lane and Rozzie gave me a pretty good jolt, I'll admit it. I didn't stop listening to my Doors records--not immediately, at least--but I made myself eat more, and started sucking down three milkshakes a day. I could feel fresh energy pouring into my body as if someone had turned on a tap, and I was very grateful for that on the afternoon of July Fourth. Joyland was tipsed and I was down to wear the fur ten times, an all-time record.

  Fred Dean himself came down to give me the schedule, and to hand me a note from old Mr. Easterbrook. If it becomes too much, stop at once and tell your team leader to find a sub.

  "I'll be fine," I said.

  "Maybe, but make sure Pop sees this memo."

  "Okay."

  "Brad likes you, Jonesy. That's rare. He hardly ever notices the greenies unless he sees one of them screw up."

  I liked him, too, but didn't say so to Fred. I thought it would have sounded suck-assy.

  All my July Fourth shifts were tenners, not bad even though most ten-minute shifts actually turned out to be fifteenies, but the heat was crushing. Ninety-five in the shade, Rozzie had said, but by noon that day it was a hundred and two by the thermometer that hung outside the Park Ops trailer. Luckily for me, Dottie Lassen had repaired the other XL Howie suit and I could swap between the two. While I was wearing one, Dottie would have the other turned as inside out as it would go and hung in front of three fans, drying the sweat-soaked interior.

  At least I could remove the fur by myself; by then I'd discovered the secret. Howie's right paw was actually a glove, and when you knew the trick, pulling down the zipper to the neck of the costume was a cinch. Once you had the head off, the rest was cake. This was good, because I could change by myself behind a pull-curtain. No more displaying my sweaty, semi-transparent undershorts to the costume ladies.

  As the bunting-draped afternoon of July Fourth wore on, I was excused from all other duties. I'd do my capering, then retreat to Joyland Under and collapse on the ratty old couch in the boneyard for a while, soaking up the air conditioning. When I felt revived, I'd use the alleys to get to the costume shop and swap one fur for the other. Between shifts I guzzled pints of water and quarts of unsweetened iced tea. You won't believe I was having fun, but I was. Even the brats were loving me that day.

  So: quarter to four in the afternoon. I'm jiving down Joyland Avenue--our midway--while the overhead speakers blast out Daddy Dewdrop's "Chick-A-Boom, Chick-A-Boom, Don'tcha Just Love It." I'm giving out hugs to the kiddies and Awesome August coupons to the adults, because Joyland's business always dropped off as the summer wound down. I'm posing for pictures (some taken by Hollywood Girls, most by hordes of sweat-soaked, sunburned Parent Paparazzi), and trailing adoring kids after me in cometary splendor. I'm also looking for the nearest door to Joyland Under, because I'm pretty well done up. I have just one more turn as Howie scheduled today, because Howie the Happy Hound never shows his blue eyes and cocked ears after sundown. I don't know why; it was just a show tradition.

  Did I notice the little girl in the red hat before she fell down on the baking pavement of Joyland Avenue, writhing and jerking? I think so but can't say for sure, because passing time adds false memories and modifies real ones. I surely wouldn't have noticed the Pup-A-Licious she was waving around, or her bright red Howie dogtop; a kid at an amusement park with a hotdog is hardly a unique sighting, and we must have sold a thousand red Howie hats that day. If I did notice her, it was because of the doll she held curled to her chest in the hand not holding her mustard-smeared Pup. It was a big old Raggedy Ann. Madame Fortuna had suggested I be on the lookout for a little girl with a doll only two days before, so maybe I did notice her. Or maybe I was only thinking of getting off the midway before I fell down in a faint. Anyway, her doll wasn't the problem. The Pup-A-Licious she was eating--that was the problem.

  I only think I remember her running toward me (hey, they all did), but I know what happened next, and why it happened. She had a bite of her Pup in her mouth, and when she drew in breath to scream HOWWWIE, she pulled it down her throat. Hot dogs: the perfect choking food. Luckily for her, just enough of Rozzie Gold's Fortuna bullshit had stuck in my head for me to act quickly.

  When the little girl's knees buckled, her expression of happy ecstasy turning first to surprise and then terror, I was already reaching behind me and grabbing the zipper with my paw-glove. The Howie-head tumbled off and lolled to the side, revealing the red face and sweat-soaked, clumpy hair of Mr. Devin Jones. The little girl dropped her Raggedy Ann. Her hat fell off. She began clawing at her neck.

  "Hallie?" a woman cried. "Hallie, what's wrong?"

  Here's more Luck in Action: I not only knew what was wrong, I knew what to do. I'm not sure you'll understand how fortunate that was. This is 1973 we're talking about, remember, and Henry Heimlich would not publish the essay that would give the Heimlich Maneuver its name for another full year. Still, it's always been the most commonsense way to deal with choking, and we had learned it during our first and only orientation session before beginning work in the UNH Commons. The teacher was a tough old veteran of the restaurant wars who had lost his Nashua coffee shop a year after a new McDonald's went up nearby.

  "Just remember, it won't work if you don't do it hard," he told us. "Don't worry about breaking a rib if you see someone dying in front of you."

  I saw the little girl's face turning purple and didn't even think about her ribs. I seized her in a vast, furry embrace, with my tail-pulling left paw jammed against the bony arch in her midsection where her ribs came together. I gave a single hard squeeze, and a yellow-smeared chunk of hotdog almost two inches long came popping out of her mouth like a cork from a champagne bottle. It flew nearly four feet. And no, I didn't break any of her ribs. Kids are flexible, God bless 'em.

  I wasn't aware that I and Hallie Stansfield--that was her name--were hemmed in by a growing circle of adults. I certainly wasn't aware that we were being photographed dozens of times, including the shot by Erin Cook that wound up in the Heaven's Bay Weekly and several bigger papers, including the Wilmington Star-News. I've still got a framed copy of that photo in an attic box somewhere. It shows the little girl dangling in the arms of this weird man/dog hybrid with one of its two heads lolling on its shoulder. The girl is holding out her arms to her mother, perfectly caught by Erin's Speed Graphic just as Mom collapses to her knees in front of us.

  All of that is a blur to me, but I remember the mother sweeping the little girl up into her own arms and the father saying Kid, I think you saved her life. And I remember--this is as clear as crystal--the girl looking at me with her big blue eyes and saying, "Oh poor Howie, your head fell off."

  The all-time classic newspaper headline, as everyone knows, is MAN BITES DOG. The Star-News couldn't equal that, but the one over Erin's picture gave it a run for its money: DOG SAVES GIRL AT AMUSEMENT PARK.

  Want to know my first snarky urge? To clip the article and send it to Wendy Keegan. I might even have done it, had I not looked so much like a drowned muskrat in Erin's photo. I did send it to my father, who called to say how proud of me he was. I could tell by the tremble in his voice that he was close to tears.

  "God put you in the right place at the right time, Dev," he said.

  Maybe God. Maybe Rozzie Gold, aka Madame Fortuna. Maybe a little of both.

  The next day I was summoned to Mr. Easterbrook's office, a pine-paneled room raucous with old carny posters and photographs. I was particularly taken by a photo that showed a straw-hatted agent with a dapper mustache standing next to a test-your-strength shy. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up, and he was leaning on a sledgehammer like it was a cane: a total dude. At the top of the ding-post
, next to the bell, was a sign reading KISS HIM, LADY, HE'S A HE-MAN!

  "Is that guy you?" I asked.

  "It is indeed, although I only ran the ding-show for a season. It wasn't to my taste. Gaff jobs never have been. I like my games straight. Sit down, Jonesy. You want a Coke or anything?"

  "No, sir. I'm fine." I was, in fact, sloshing with that morning's milkshake.

  "I'll be perfectly blunt. You gave this show twenty thousand dollars' worth of good publicity yesterday afternoon, and I still can't afford to give you a bonus. If you knew...but never mind." He leaned forward. "What I can do is owe you a favor. If you need one, ask. I'll grant it if it's in my power. Will that do?"

  "Sure."

  "Good. And would you be willing to make one more appearance--as Howie--with the little girl? Her parents want to thank you in private, but a public appearance would be an excellent thing for Joyland. Entirely your call, of course."

  "When?"

  "Saturday, after the noon parade. We'd put up a platform at the intersection of Joyland and Hound Dog Way. Invite the press."

  "Happy to," I said. I liked the idea of being in the newspapers again, I will admit. It had been a tough summer on my ego and self-image, and I'd take all the turnaround I could get.

  He rose to his feet in his glassy, unsure way, and offered me his hand. "Thank you again. On behalf of that little girl, but also on behalf of Joyland. The accountants who run my damn life will be very happy about this."

  When I stepped out of the office building, which was located with the other administrative buildings in what we called the backyard, my entire team was there. Even Pop Allen had come. Erin, dressed for success in Hollywood Girl green, stepped forward with a shiny metal crown of laurels made from Campbell's Soup cans. She dropped to one knee. "For you, my hero."

  I would have guessed I was too sunburned to flush, but that turned out not to be true. "Oh Jesus, get up."

  "Savior of little girls," Tom Kennedy said. "Not to mention savior of our place of employment getting its ass sued off and possibly having to shut its doors."

  Erin bounced to her feet, stuck the ludicrous soup-can crown on my head, then gave me a big old smackaroonie. Everyone on Team Beagle cheered.

  "Okay," Pop said when it died down. "We can all agree that you're a knight in shining ah-mah, Jonesy. You are also not the first guy to save a rube from popping off on the midway. Could we maybe all get back to work?"

  I was good with that. Being famous was fun, but the don't-get-a-swelled-head message of the tin laurels wasn't lost on me.

  I was wearing the fur that Saturday, on the makeshift platform at the center of our midway. I was happy to take Hallie in my arms, and she was clearly happy to be there. I'd guess there were roughly nine miles of film burned as she proclaimed her love for her favorite doggy and kissed him again and again for the cameras.

  Erin was in the front row with her camera for a while, but the news photogs were bigger and all male. Soon they shunted her away to a less favorable position, and what did they all want? What Erin had already gotten, a picture of me with my Howie-head off. That was one thing I wouldn't do, although I'm sure none of Fred, Lane, or Mr. Easterbrook himself would have penalized me for it. I wouldn't do it because it would have flown in the face of park tradition: Howie never took off the fur in public; to do so would have been like outing the Tooth Fairy. I'd done it when Hallie Stansfield was choking, but that was the necessary exception. I would not deliberately break the rule. So I guess I was carny after all (although not carny-from-carny, never that).

  Later, dressed in my own duds again, I met with Hallie and her parents in the Joyland Customer Service Center. Close-up, I could see that Mom was pregnant with number two, although she probably had three or four months of eating pickles and ice cream still ahead of her. She hugged me and wept some more. Hallie didn't seem overly concerned. She sat in one of the plastic chairs, swinging her feet and looking at old copies of Screen Time, speaking the names of the various celebrities in the declamatory voice of a court page announcing visiting royalty. I patted Mom's back and said there-there. Dad didn't cry, but the tears were standing in his eyes as he approached me and held out a check in the amount of five hundred dollars, made out to me. When I asked what he did for a living, he said he had started his own contracting firm the year before--just now little, but gettin on our feet pretty good, he told me. I considered that, factored in one kid here plus another on the way, and tore up the check. I told him I couldn't take money for something that was just part of the job.

  You have to remember I was only twenty-one.

  There were no weekends per se for Joyland summer help; we got a day and a half every nine, which meant they were never the same days. There was a sign-up sheet, so Tom, Erin, and I almost always managed to get the same downtime. That was why we were together on a Wednesday night in early August, sitting around a campfire on the beach and having the sort of meal that can only nourish the very young: beer, burgers, barbecue-flavored potato chips, and coleslaw. For dessert we had s'mores that Erin cooked over the fire, using a grill she borrowed from Pirate Pete's Ice Cream Waffle joint. It worked pretty well.

  We could see other fires--great leaping bonfires as well as cooking fires--all the way down the beach to the twinkling metropolis of Joyland. They made a lovely chain of burning jewelry. Such fires are probably illegal in the twenty-first century; the powers that be have a way of outlawing many beautiful things made by ordinary people. I don't know why that should be, I only know it is.

  While we ate, I told them about Madame Fortuna's prediction that I would meet a boy with a dog and a little girl in a red hat who carried a doll. I finished by saying, "One down and one to go."

  "Wow," Erin said. "Maybe she really is psychic. A lot of people have told me that, but I didn't really--"

  "Like who?" Tom demanded.

  "Well...Dottie Lassen in the costume shop, for one. Tina Ackerley, for another. You know, the librarian Dev creeps down the hall to visit at night?"

  I flipped her the bird. She giggled.

  "Two is not a lot," Tom said, speaking in his Hot Shit Professor voice.

  "Lane Hardy makes three," I said. "He says she's told people stuff that rocked them back on their heels." In the interest of total disclosure, I felt compelled to add: "Of course he also said that ninety percent of her predictions are total crap."

  "Probably closer to ninety-five," said the Hot Shit Professor. "Fortune telling's a con game, boys and girls. An Ikey Heyman, in the Talk. Take the hat thing. Joyland dogtops only come in three colors--red, blue, and yellow. Red's by far the most popular. As for the doll, c'mon. How many little kids bring some sort of toy to the amusement park? It's a strange place, and a favorite toy is a comfort thing. If she hadn't choked on her hotdog right in front of you, if she'd just given Howie a big old hug and passed on, you would have seen some other little girl wearing a red dogtop and carrying a doll and said, 'Aha! Madame Fortuna really can see the future, I must cross her palm with silver so she will tell me more.' "

  "You're such a cynic," Erin said, giving him an elbow. "Rozzie Gold would never try taking money from someone in the show."

  "She didn't ask for money," I said, but I thought what Tom said made a lot of sense. It was true she had known (or seemed to know) that my dark-haired girl was in my past, not my future, but that could have been no more than a guess based on percentages--or the look on my face when I asked.

  "Course not," Tom said, helping himself to another s'more. "She was just practicing on you. Staying sharp. I bet she's told a lot of other greenies stuff, too."

  "Would you be one of them?" I asked.

  "Well...no. But that means nothing."

  I looked at Erin, who shook her head.

  "She also thinks Horror House is haunted," I said.

  "I've heard that one, too," Erin said. "By a girl who got murdered in there."

  "Bullshit!" Tom cried. "Next you'll be telling me it was the Hook, and he still lurks b
ehind the Screaming Skull!"

  "There really was a murder," I said. "A girl named Linda Gray. She was from Florence, South Carolina. There are pictures of her and the guy who killed her at the shooting gallery and standing in line at the Whirly Cups. No hook, but there was a tattoo of a bird on his hand. A hawk or an eagle."

  That silenced him, at least for the time being.

  "Lane Hardy said that Roz only thinks Horror House is haunted, because she won't go inside and find out for sure. She won't even go near it, if she can help it. Lane thinks that's ironic, because he says it really is haunted."

  Erin made her eyes big and round and scooted a little closer to the fire--partly for effect, mostly I think so that Tom would put his arm around her. "He's seen--?"

  "I don't know. He said to ask Mrs. Shoplaw, and she gave me the whole story." I ran it down for them. It was a good story to tell at night, under the stars, with the surf rolling and a beach-fire just starting to burn down to coals. Even Tom seemed fascinated.

  "Does she claim to have seen Linda Gray?" he asked when I finally ran down. "La Shoplaw?"

  I mentally replayed her story as told to me on the day I rented the room on the second floor. "I don't think so. She would have said."

  He nodded, satisfied. "A perfect lesson in how these things work. Everyone knows someone who's seen a UFO, and everyone knows someone who's seen a ghost. Hearsay evidence, inadmissible in court. Me, I'm a Doubting Thomas. Geddit? Tom Kennedy, Doubting Thomas?"

  Erin threw him a much sharper elbow. "We get it." She looked thoughtfully into the fire. "You know what? Summer's two-thirds gone, and I've never been in the Joyland scream-shy a single time, not even the baby part up front. It's a no-photo zone. Brenda Rafferty told us it's because lots of couples go in there to make out." She peered at me. "What are you grinning about?"

  "Nothing." I was thinking of La Shoplaw's late husband going through the place after Late Gate and picking up cast-off panties.

  "Have either of you guys been in?"

  We both shook our heads. "HH is Dobie Team's job," Tom said.

  "Let's do it tomorrow. All three of us in one car. Maybe we'll see her."