Dreamland Lake (2 page)

Flip stopped reading and said, “What’s she talking about? We never had any Pony Express around here. That was way out in St. Joseph, Missouri.”

“She’s full of hot air,” I told him. “All she likes is P’s.”

“What?” said Flip.

“P’s,” I said, and pointed them all out. “Look—point,
particular, pride, pioneer, perseverance, primeval, promise, perpetual, progress. She’s in love with P’s. Forget it. Take it back to the library before you lose it and have to pay for it.”

“And dirigibles,” Flip said. “She thought we were going to spend the next century flying around in dirigibles.”

“Yeah,” I said, “dirigibles. That’s a laugh.”

“I’ll tell you another one,” Flip said. “You don’t even know what dirigibles are.” That’s the kind of challenge that used to end up with Flip and me trying to stomp one another’s heads in. But we were in the seventh grade by then, and trying hard to leave that kind of childishness behind us.

“Dirigible is some old kind of airplane,” I said.

“Wrong,” Flip said. “I knew you didn’t know. It’s an air
ship.
A big bag full of hydrogen or helium with a little cabin underneath where people rode—called a gondola. I knew you didn’t know it as soon as I read the word.”

“That’s what I meant,” I replied, and tried to look wise.

“Well, you didn’t,” Flip said, and turned to the Table of Contents to see if the book might pick up any later on. There, about halfway through, was a chapter called “Dreamland Park: Dunthorpe’s Own Coney Island.”

“What’s this?” Flip said.

“Hot air,” I explained. “There’s no such a place as a Dreamland Park around here. It’s something like Estella Winkler Bates would think up when she was getting carried away.”

“I guess I’ll take this home and read it when I have some peace and quiet,” Flip said. He closed the book and tossed it into his bike basket.

But that night, he called up and said Dreamland Park was not hot air, and that it had been an actual amusement park, and that its remains were no more than two blocks from the street we both lived on.

He quoted from Estella Winkler Bates for evidence:

“Knock it off,” I said to Flip. “I can’t take any more.”

“Shut up and listen,” he said.

“Are you going to read out the whole book?” I asked Flip.

“There’s just a little bit more on the park,” he said. “Listen.”

“Shady ladies?” I said to Flip over the phone. “Yuch.”

“Well, anyway, it proves there was a Dreamland Park and a roller coaster. And you know what? There’s a picture of the duck pond. The same bridge and everything. And the tennis clubhouse hangs out over the pond just like the dance palace did in the picture. And there was a roller coaster. A big one.”

“Somehow, I can’t picture a roller coaster in Dunthorpe,” I said. “In Indianapolis, maybe, but not Dunthorpe.”

“Well, I’m telling you it was there, and, if we did a little archaeological spadework, we might come up with some fresh evidence of our own.” So from that day on, we referred to the duck pond as Dreamland Lake, but we didn’t get around to archaeological spadework until early spring.

It was still basketball season, which took up most of our time. I was the tallest seventh-grader, and
Flip was the fastest on his feet. So we had to go out for inter-middle-school basketball. But we were on the bench a lot. Even though I was the tallest, guys a head shorter could outjump me. And though Flip was the fastest, he had no sense of direction at all and often dribbled right up into the bleachers.

It didn’t matter much, though, because the coach saw we weren’t going to be big-time high school material. He concentrated on working up the better players and kept off our backs. “You two have got the natural advantages,” he told Flip and me, “but you’ll never do anything with them.”

So on a mild afternoon in March, Flip and I avoided the gym altogether after school and headed out to Dreamland Lake. Out to where we found the dead man.

We stood on the bank of Dreamland Lake, comparing the present with the picture in Estella Winkler Bates’ book. The cast-iron footbridge over the middle part of the lake was pretty much the way it always had been. From a distance. But now, Park Department sawhorses blocked off the approaches to it on each side because the floorboards were rotted out. The porch of the tennis clubhouse sagged over the south shoreline and needed a coat of paint bad. And back where the roller coaster had been, a jungle of
trees and undergrowth had taken over. A few mallards V-ed across the lake in our direction on the off chance we’d brought bread crumbs.

We walked our bikes around the shore to where a path dipped down into the woods, following the creek that fed the lake. At first, it was like a tunnel of branches, so we left our bikes and went on, bent nearly double. It was damp-smelling and dim inside the woods. Flip sat down on an old concrete block to get his bearings.

“We haven’t explored in here since we were kids and didn’t know anything,” he said. “According to the picture, I figure we’re right about where the roller coaster was. We ought to be able to find part of the foundation or something. They must have had to sink some kind of supports for the superstructure.”

“You’re sitting on one,” I told him.

He jumped up and looked at the concrete thing. Then in his Sherlock Holmes voice, he said, “You know, Bry, I think you’re right for once.” He jumped up on it. “This is one of them! Look—right between my feet is a hole where the wooden beam went in. And straight up, maybe a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty feet. And the track on top of that! And those cars roaring down. Boy! Think of it!”

“Yeah, well, we never got to ride on it,” I said. In the seventh grade, I had the idea that all the parties were over and we’d been born too late.

“Come on,” he said, jumping down. “If we locate all these supports, we’ll be able to trace the route of the roller coaster. If they’re all this big, they still ought to be above ground level.” We found another concrete block, covered with moss and tipped at an
angle, beside the creek. And, on the other side, another one. I jumped the creek to get to it, but Flip was talking as he made his jump and landed with one foot in the water.

It didn’t slow him down any, though. “We’ll just get a rough idea today and come back with graph paper and make a ground plan. It must have been a big devil.” He was plowing on ahead of me, kicking through the piles of wet, dead leaves.

Then I heard him say, “Shoes . . . a pair of shoes.” He was standing still, ankle-deep in the leaves. Before I caught up with him, he’d whirled around facing me. “Behind me,” he said in a funny, tight voice. I couldn’t figure out what had come over him. “Come on,” he said, “we’re getting out of here.” But he didn’t move. And neither did I.

He was swallowing air fast and breathing, “Jesus, oh Jesus.” I looked past him and saw a pair of shoes sticking up out of the leaves at a funny, splayfooted angle. They were leaf-colored and round-toed like old construction boots. They didn’t make any sense to me. I kept staring while Flip kind of half turned and tried to get another look out of the corner of his eye. Underneath the leaves, past the shoes, I saw what looked like a pile of old clothes. And farther up something else, something shiny.

There was a breeze that whisked the leaves around a little. I was staring at the shiny place, and then, right away, I was looking at a grin. A big, yawning grin right down on ground level and a black eye socket. A leaf was over the other one. And some hair on the clean, white bone of a skull’s forehead. I looked at it with both eyes, and Flip looked with one. It was a dead man, but I didn’t know it at first.

The parts seemed all disconnected. Some of it just looked like rags on the ground, except for the grin. I kept looking at it, and my mouth was open like the dead man’s. Then I saw one of the teeth in his jaw was gold. I knew then what I was looking at. I heeled around in slow motion and took off running back the way we’d come.

And when I came to the last concrete block we’d found, I flopped over flat on it and threw up in the creek.

LOCAL YOUTHS FIND VAGRANT
’
S BODY

Two local boys playing in the wooded, marshy area west of the Marquette Park duck pond discovered a badly decomposed corpse late Tuesday afternoon.

Alerted by the boys’ parents, the Police Department made investigation and have cordoned off the area to discourage curiosity seekers. Black Hawk County Coroner V. H. Horvath estimates the middle-aged male may have been dead for as long as three months. Police Chief Ross H. Heidenreich speculates that the man was a vagrant of the type who still follow the disused right of way of the St. Louis, Effingham & Terre Haute Railroad, running along the northern border of Marquette Park. Coroner Horvath has called an autopsy “well-nigh impossible” and has declared the death to be of “presumed natural causes.”

The youngsters, Philip Townsend, 12, son of Commander and Mrs. Wilmer Townsend, 134
Oakthorpe Avenue, and Brian Bishop, 12, son of Mr. and Mrs. Murray Bishop, 243 Oakthorpe Avenue, are students at the Coolidge Middle School.

Though Chief Heidenreich holds out scant hope for a positive identification, he calls for the cooperation of any persons who may have pertinent information.

LETTERS FROM OUR READERS

Sirs:

I feel confident that I speak as the voice of the total Dunthorpe community when I point the finger of scornful accusation at the municipal agencies clearly and wantonly derelict in the duties for which they are more than amply paid.

The Park Department receives our most ringing condemnation for allowing a deceased individual to lie unburied so that
innocent children
at their play are compelled to look upon the
Awful Face of Death.
Any such traumatic experience may well lead to the most
damaging
future consequences in unformed minds. Furthermore, the Police Department deserves official reprimand for turning a Blind Eye to the hordes of tramps and hobos allowed to roam at large within our city limits to trespass, steal, and insult womanhood.

I consider it the civic duty of this newspaper to print my letter in its entirety as a call to action in a community whose public services are a Notorious
Outrage and whose children face a clear and present danger.

Dear Editor:

This letter is about your article in the Wednesday
Call
that tells how Brian Bishop and myself found the dead man.

We were not “playing” in the woods west of the duck pond like you said. We were doing historic research into the roller coaster that used to be there when the duck pond was called by its right name, Dreamland Lake. If you knew Estella Winkler Bateses book on this subject, you’d know this was Dunthorpe’s own Coney Island in the old times.

I’m not twelve years old. I was thirteen Monday and Brian Bishop will be thirteen in one week.

P. S. Also, Brian Bishop’s mom called the police when he got home. My mom didn’t. I did.

If you can’t guess who the Celebrities of the Week were at Coolidge Middle School, you’re no judge of
human nature. Even eighth-graders were asking who we were. Flip got most of the glory, though, because my mom made me stay home from school the next day. She said I’d have to get back on my feed and have a better color before I could go out and face my public.