Joyland (15 page)

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 behind 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 Spin. No hook, but there was a tattoo of a bird on his hand. A hawk or an eagle.”

That silenced him, al 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 its 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.”

“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 in spite 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, its 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 you 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 frat-boys 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.