Joyland (11 page)

Chris had known the tedium of folded newsprint, its smudges and its weight, especially in gruesome rain when bike tires vomitted against his back, wetting him twice-over. He had known the two-dollars-an-hour-to-not-kill-his-sister also known as babysitting. But with these exceptions, Chris had never had a job before, had never drawn a regular paycheque or clocked in. Within one cycle of unstacking and restacking, he could tell what Marc was doing. He only had a certain amount of work to do in a given day and he’d obviously run out. Either he was incredibly bored, or he kept moving to protect his livelihood. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t accomplishing anything. He only had to look as though he were useful.

A couple of the flats in the pile were rotten, and Marc pushed on the boards, testing them as if it were of great importance that the flats in the scrapyard be of absolutely the best quality. He retreated a few steps, then flung himself forward, pseudo-karate-kick style. The board snapped. Marc grabbed the broken skid and launched it over his head into the big blue dumpster. When he returned from the dumpster, two mismatched pieces of pipe smacked together intermittedly. He was singing. His voice fumbled across the cement as he picked his way between stacks and dumpsters. Sunlight glinted off the pipe as Marc began to beat it against the slats of one of the skids. Not hard enough to break it, just hard enough to make a dull
thwack thwack, thwack-thwack-thwack.
He stopped and looked around.

Chris plastered himself against the building. He glanced over his shoulder, but the rest of the lot was vacant. The dark hole at the end of the building had swallowed the man-woman and the smokers.

Proximity brought with it a scrambling for memory; panic at being caught, and an immediate rationalizing of fear, why Chris wasn’t just singing the song of the chicken shit even though the brick at his back scratched with breaths going all the way through him. Illegally in Marc’s room, more familiar with his ripe smell than his erupting face, Chris and J.P. had snuck a thousand times to sit cross-legged on the bed, corded to Combat and Air Sea Battle. They kept the volume low to listen for sounds from downstairs. If they got caught there using Marc’s things, going through Marc’s stuff, J.P. said they could say goodbye to their nuts, that his brother was fully capable of extracting a pound of flesh without spilling a drop of blood. Chris doubted somehow that Marc was sharp enough in spite of the ten-point type in the open yearbook. Grade Eleven honour roll: a joke. Thumbing through the black-and-white panorama of student faces, Chris had also noticed that one or two girls’ heads had been removed in perfect circles with an X-ACTO blade, and when he had asked J.P. about it, he’d waved his hand like it was nothing.

“Oh yeah, he likes to do that. Pastes them in his porn mags to make them more real.” Why it seemed juvenile or creepy, Chris couldn’t say. It smacked of JCPenney-underwear-model masturbation, but who was he to judge? At least Marc was able to buy them.

Metal on concrete filled the air. Chris peeked around the corner. Two steel tubs stood together silently. Marc currently hunted in a corner of the scrapyard, his back to Chris. He returned, a plastic pail under one arm. Placing it upside down next to the tubs, he began to beat the pipes across them. The pipes twirled, Sheila E. style. Marc resumed his slow thwacking. He bobbed forward and back, nodding his head, grooving with his eyes closed. “Owner of a Lonely Heart” cracked across the concrete. Marc’s arms continued to swing their rhythmic masochism. Why would he expend all his energy in a pretense of work, then be so completely self-absorbed three minutes later? He stuck his lips out, degenerated into some kind of drum solo of his own invention.

“Loser!” Chris hollered. He took off before Marc could figure out who had yelled it.

Chris had to double back through the A. J. Mitchum Fabricating office to get out of the back lot. The squirrel woman gave him an inquisitive look as he passed through, but didn’t get up from her desk. At least the sandwich was gone. Chris said nothing, just gave her a thumbs-up sign, and walked out fast, the glass door falling between them. He would never work here.

PLAYER 2

If-I-Die-Before-I-Wake had awoken. She practically jumped from her bed, eager for the day. Tammy prided herself on quick response time. Even before she had washed her face, she was aware of her actions.

The ease with which she awoke pleased Mr. Lane. Even in summer, he insisted they all rise at a regular hour. He left for the factory at seven, and appeared consistently in her doorway ten minutes before that. She never moaned or pulled the covers up over her head the way Chris did. After all, she was a spy in training.

A fleet of three planes now drifted across the purple sky, exiting at the top of the screen and reentering from the bottom, almost as if the world were so small, Tammy had flown all the way around it. Chris caught her with a barrage of bullets that streamed from the opposite side. Flying too close to the edge of the screen, Tammy was picked off — burned — her fleet sent reeling. She’d thought she had been chasing Chris, but now it seemed he was chasing her. That was how quickly things turned.

He was up by fifteen games. They’d set out that morning to play all of the twenty-seven versions on the Combat cartridge, the first Atari game they had ever owned, a giveaway that came with the console. Beginning as chubby tanks, they’d chugged through the green field, hide-and-seek behind obstacles and blocks. They shot each other — as many times as possible within the allotted time. Tammy’s favourite was number ten — invisibility — the green playing field empty, yet them still on it, as if in some alternate universe, giving away location only as they shot or got shot. Their tanks would suddenly appear, drilled from one area to another, sometimes bouncing clear through the borders of the screen with the impact.

“’Member when we got this game,” Tammy said, pressing her joystick hard to the side, “and I could barely make the tanks change direction?”

“I
remember,”
Chris enunciated and shot her again.

The scores at the top of the screen began to blink, time almost up.

The second they finished the set, Chris threw down the controller and flipped the on-off switch, dissolving the television into static. He went to the kitchen to call J.P. who, it turned out, had just been fired from the gas station for smoking too close to the pumps. Chris gave the back door a jubilant slam, grabbed his bike, and sailed down the Lane driveway. Tammy carefully wrapped up the cords and stashed the controllers under the TV stand. Even after she watched the screen shudder into darkness, she could hear a faint hum.

When she left the room, it seemed to follow her. When she closed her bedroom door, the hum remained, hovering, invisible. The whole house was flickering, buzzing with it. Tammy put her cheek against the wood panel as she switched the overhead light on-off, on-off, on-off. She couldn’t feel the electricity, she decided. That was impossible.

There was nothing specific she could put her finger on as having changed. The days started and ended the same. Chris snapped like an elastic band thumb-shot in any direction he chose, but even his randomness was expected. The only thing that was different was the direction of Mrs. Lane’s lawn chair as she sat in the fenced backyard, watching the mosquitoes emerge from the hedges. So where did the buzzing come from?

Out in the yard, Mrs. Lane was listening to the plastic chatter of talk radio. Tammy wondered if it might swat down the invisible thing she sensed hovered here inside the house. This microscopic, misanthropic organism. The itching silence that swivelled and circled, waiting for blood.

In spite of the heat in the room, Tammy pulled the curtains to practise her moves. It had not yet occurred to her that Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer” could be a song about anything except dancing alone in one’s room. Tammy lifted the needle, switched albums. The Police. They were the cutest, with their mirrored shades and spiky hair. Sting’s square jaw was like an anvil weighing down her heart.

In the chunk of light that fell through the curtains, she watched dust motes flickering between the windowsill and the Rice-A-Roni-coloured carpet. Flecks of light floated, stirred like gnats when she reached out and swatted her hand through them. Out the window, her mother sat stiffly in the lawn chair. White squares of shirt and shorts bubbled between the nylon chair’s green lattice. What did her mother think about, sitting there staring at the bushes, listening to the Scotts next door? If Tammy was thinking about her mom, did that mean her mom was thinking about her?

They were flesh and blood. It only made sense they should be psychically connected. Tammy decided to send her mother an ESP signal. If she got the signal, she would turn and look at Tammy’s window. Tammy moved closer. She stood to one side of the gap. The nylon curtains that hung over the sheers were scratchy and ropy with smoke. From behind, her mother seemed small, almost as small as Tammy, one knee pulled up, shoulders hunched with nervous tension, even though the very act of sitting and doing nothing should have cancelled out such a thing. Tammy couldn’t know that in another two summers she would grow from four-foot-eleven to five-foot-four — make up the five inches that separated them. She concentrated on the back of her mother’s head, zoomed in, took aim with her eyes.

Mrs. Lane stared straight ahead at the garden.

Tammy never meant to spy on anyone. She hated to think of someone spying on her. Yet she couldn’t seem to stop herself from doing it. Was it so terrible?
If you were a blind person,
Tammy reasoned,
everyone would see you, but you wouldn’t see them.

LEVEL 6:
DIG DUG

PLAYER 2

Tammy put her hands together, tucked her chin, bent her knees, took a breath, and jumped.

With a rush, the surface was broken. Bubbles spurted past her ears. She opened her eyes. Yellow gaseous light wavered above her, drifted languidly down like food-colour droplets dispersing in a vase of water. Tammy saw herself at the bottom of the vase. The rest of the world, a beautiful flower up there, out of sight, ready to suck her up.

She propelled herself along the fat blue lines that striped the bottom of the pool, marking the deep from the shallow. On the incline, she let a small amount of air escape from her mouth, bit by bit, slowly, slowly as she continued through the shallow end. When she reached the far side of the pool her lungs would be empty, but not before. If she could make this underwater lap consistently all week, only lifesaving and mouth-to-mouth would stand in the way of her receiving her Blue badge.

She heard the barrage of bubbles as another swimmer followed her into the pool. She watched the concrete beneath her. Not looking ahead made the journey seem shorter. If she didn’t know how much farther, she simply rationed her breath and kept going until her fingers bashed wondrously into the wall.

When Tammy made contact she sprang up, mouth yawning open for that first flood of air, head huge with the weight of water. Sound surged. On-deck clapping. Screaming. Feet slapping on tile. Of the seven different levels of instruction, each was intent on its own group’s exercises. The echo of human voices bounced up, clung to the long fluorescent lights and metal beams. Indiscriminate noise. Noise without words to it. Tammy breathed in. Oxygen swelled her lungs; she had made it.

The swimming lessons were Mrs. Sturges’s idea. Now that they were spending more time at Warren’s, Sam needed to become a more advanced swimmer. Mrs. Sturges didn’t feel comfortable leaving her alone on the Beach. According to Sam, swimming lessons were
dumb dumb dumb,
but if she had to do something dumb, there had better be a best friend to suffer through it with.

Except Sam would be leaving before the lessons were over. The object was not to obtain her Blue badge, but to become a stronger swimmer. The course was four weeks. By the end of the third, Sam and her mom would be moving out to Mr. Riley’s, leaving Tammy to find another partner from the pool for the lifesaving portion. When, exactly, this decision had been made, Tammy didn’t know. She assumed Mrs. Sturges had known for some time, but that Sam hadn’t. Then again, Tammy couldn’t guess how long Sam might have waited to tell her.

They had been riding in the car with Sam’s older sister, Joyce, who had offered to take them to get French fries at the Drive-Thru.

“Want to see my apartment?” Joyce had asked. “I move in next week.”