Joyland (24 page)

PLAYER 1

Padded leather hugged his ears, and Chris ducked with the weight of the headphones. He closed his eyes and let the music form a wall between himself and the rest of the room, where Tammy lay reading on the couch, her head in their father’s lap, the television now blaring silently.

The finger-picked opening of the Scorpions’ “Still Loving You” spilled into Chris’s ears, shook him to the core. The whispered first verse built into straining climax and Chris grasped the tape cover in his fist, blindly. His chin thrust out, Tilt-a-Whirling to the song’s beat. Behind his lids, Laurel transformed into the mysterious woman from the black-and-white cover, a half-nude evening-dressed fantasy in his arms, skin shadowed at its softest points, dark head thrown back, lips showing the trace of a smile as he lay the most chaste kiss upon her throat. Between the dirge of Klaus Meine’s vocals and the surge of Rudolf Schenker’s guitar, Chris clung to the image, crossed and uncrossed his sneakers, slouched down into the velour recliner.

The music climbed, then faded from one ear. Chris opened his eyes. He unhooked the headphones, jiggled them. He settled back down. The song smoothed.

Absently, Mr. Lane began to stroke Tammy’s hair. His thick fingers fluttered over her brown head tenderly.

“I will be there, I will be there,”
a voice murmured in Chris’s ear. His left ear only.

Mr. Lane stared at the television. Tammy turned a page. His hand stilled. She glanced up, backward. He didn’t notice. Her head wriggled, a command. He looked down. They exchanged glances.

Schenker ran up and down the strings as if he were swinging from them. Chris pushed the working side into his ear with his fingertips.

Mr. Lane smiled, lay his hand across the crown of Tammy’s head, continued stroking.

Chris snapped the tape player off, pulled the headphones out by the cord, went to check the adapter in the stereo. He yanked the cord out again, tossed the headphones forcefully into the seat he had vacated.

“They’re not working well anymore,” he said.

“Already?”

Light pitched a patchwork of vines across Chris’s closed face, the white and green of the curtains Mrs. Lane had chosen for his room earlier that month. Chris had shrugged,
I don’t care, I don’t care,
to each suggestion from the catalogue, sitting on the scourge of the old comforter while Mrs. Lane grandly tore down the juvenile wall covering — a paper museum of antique cars — small shreds of it sticking like ghosts. Perhaps she had been urged to redecorate after brooming the sock knots and popcorn kernels of Kleenex from beneath the bed, but Chris had no proof except that Tammy’s room had gone elaborately untouched. Now the light was thick and willowy through the cotton-poly, and Chris turned over. He ignored his father’s command to get up. Mr. Lane must have leaned through the doorway, watched his son yank the pale blue sheet over his back and head with a hand more alive than his noggin.

Chris awoke later that morning to the sound of breaking glass. Across the street, the VanDoorens were transporting materials from one truck bed to another, a wash of fragments falling. Immediately Chris went to the Atari, ignoring Tammy’s pleas to watch
The Price Is Right.

“Ten minutes,” he told her, and collapsed into the easy side-to-side of it, a state of simple hand-eye forgetfulness. Time was allowed to pass unnoticed outside the borders of the screen. Ten minutes buckled into twenty, twenty to thirty. Eventually, Tammy won by squawk factor.

Defeated, Chris jumped on his bike and rode to the donut shop, where there was a Donkey Kong Jr. In Donkey Kong Jr., the game roles suddenly reversed; Mario became the villain, a captor, and the ape a trapped, tormented creature needing to be saved by his son, a diapered hairy version played by one Chris Lane. He stoicly gripped the controller. The baby gorilla frowned, face full of emotion.

By this time next week, Chris would be scuttling through the halls of the high school like all the other ninth graders, searching desperately for room numbers. A couple of the older guys he knew would send him to the opposite side of the school for a room they knew was just around the corner, others would give him an affectionate and thoroughly undeserved gotchie pull in the bathroom between classes, maybe even gas pedal him like a grade-schooler: tip him upside down, use his ankles like a steering wheel, accelerate a cruel sneaker against his crotch. He could already imagine it with clarity.

“Faggot” would follow him. There was no doubt that J.P. had deliberately deleted Laurel’s role from the scene in Marc’s bedroom. Given the lack of information forthcoming from Chris, the cum-eating episode had already superceded what came before it, he was certain.
Chris “cum-eater” Lane, come over here.
He could hear the easiest and kindest of taunts; the unkindest he didn’t want to imagine. After-the-facts could be uglier than actuals. Smart Guy and Short Fry were lifeboats now.

Almost more imposing was the actual idea of faggotry. Chris had never known a real-life gaylord, though they’d been weeded out like McCarthy reds on the playground. At some point between Grades Four and Eight, everyone had had his week in the role of the faggot, whether it was a one-recess boycott or perpetual gym classes of last-player-picked and hard-whipped dodge balls to the balls, hockey stick slashes to the nuts, no doubt bruising tennis-ball bright. Alone among clapping hands and backslaps. Did Kenny Keele count? With his JCPenney catalogue haircuts, his incomplete baseball-card sets, secret beakers full of urine and food dye, he was perhaps the furthest along the queer metre. The Robin to Chris’s third-rate Batman. And if Kenny was gay, undoubtedly Chris couldn’t be so far removed . . .

Sure,
he assured himself. Sure he liked girls. But he also liked wanking it.

He swung hand-over-fist upward. Former hero Mario had sent traps down the vines, their teeth clamping hungrily toward Chris, Chris the next-generation ape in this post–Donkey Kong version. Down and up again. He was having his third bad game in a row. He knew that when danger was near, it was faster and easier to slide down the vines than to try to outclimb it. Yet he kept trying to get above it, dying needlessly.
Even in the world of video games,
Chris thought,
gravity applies.

Adam Granger came into the donut shop with Cindy. She headed up to the counter, opening her jean purse. As he passed, he gave Chris a jab in the kidneys. Adam’s eyes were full of chlorine, though neither of them smelled it.

Chris acknowledged him with a nod, proceeded to the second board where he had to scale the chains, avoid the birds, force the keys upward to unlock his papa, the mighty gorilla in a cage at the top of the screen. Chris pinged one of the birds with an apple.

“Whatever, whatever —” Adam was saying to Cindy. “Something chocolate. Maybe sprinkle. Oh yeah, sprinkle, sprinkle, sprinkle.”

Chris’s eyes flicked sideways for a fraction of a second. Adam’s hand had settled on Cindy’s back pocket. Immense fingers protruded from a fingerless black leather glove.

Chris purposefully let himself kick the bucket, the baby ape falling to the bottom of the screen, waving his arms in a flailing parody of death.

“Granger,” he said, practically squeaking.

Adam pivoted slowly.

“You got any?” Chris lifted his fingers to his lips quickly.

Cindy singled several quarters from her shoulder bag and slid them across the laminate, and the three of them left together.

Without discussing it, the teenagers headed down the street toward Joyland and into the back alley. Adam led the way, lumbering, feathering his hair with his fingers. Chris trailed one hand along the wall. Stray bumps of mortar flicked his fingernails. The colours of the lolling open mouth lingered under his flattened palm.

Adam held the joint in his mouth and attempted to spark it up. He flicked the lighter a few times, took a quick, forceful toke, managed to illuminate the tip. The paper glowed and shrivelled slowly. He held his breath, face a tight line with the effort. He extended the joint to Chris. The weed deposited a burning across his palette. Chris sucked hard on it anyway, flint floating through his throat. He held it down and stared at the fat red mouth on the wall. Adam snickered around his own mouthful of smoke. Cindy sat down on the ground and peeled open their donuts.

Chris’s stomach knotted. He was a new Chris. A Chris who did not care. Instant-satisfaction Chris. Anti-introspective Chris. Cool-at-all-costs Chris. He took another drag and tried not to cough it out.

“Hey.” Adam nodded toward Joyland. “Donkey Kong. ‘How high can you get?’” It was a reference to the original game, the apes that appeared in between each board, the slogan spelled out across the screen as the player moved up a level and continued climbing. Chris burst out laughing, the smoke lost. He leaned against the wall choking. Choking and giggling.

“Has it hit you already?” Adam asked.

Chris leaned against the building and laughed. “I don’t feel anything.” There was only one reason for him to be there, and it had nothing to do with getting high. “Granger,” he said. He passed the joint back.

“Hey . . . you ever . . .” Chris cleared his throat. “Y’ever knocked someone off his bike and just . . . pounded him?”

Adam paused, doobie halfway to his lips. Through half-stoned, skeptical lids, he sized Chris up.

“Sure.” He inhaled.

Then the air came at Chris, thick and throbbing. He felt the spot his ass made where it leaned against the wall. He knew it would be covered in a layer of white dust whenever he pulled away, but he didn’t feel he could move. He would stand right there in that same spot forever. He loved everything about that spot. He loved everything. He had never been so happy. He laughed until his eyes teared up.

“Oh shit,” he said. His voice was loose and far away. “Shit, shit, shit.” He wiped his eyes and looked down at the hands he had wiped them with. They were dusty from running them along the surface of the wall.

Cindy looked up from the parking block where she sat, laughed through lips ringed with chocolate.

“Hey . . .” she said. “Hey Smart Guy.”

PLAYER 2

Ahead of her, the building exposed a bulbous splash of colour above its concrete knees.

Tammy picked her way through the Yellow House’s backyard. Every kid to the east of the VLA subdivision had learned that if one walked between the Yellow House and the Rock Garden House, the hedge at the back of both properties could be hopped, landing the explorer, approximately, at Joyland.

Today, Chris was the rabbit. Prompted by his annoyance at losing the television, Tammy had slowly trailed him, a simple, reticent revenge. His destination — the donut shop — proved dull. She had been on the verge of entering to persuade him to buy something for her, when her original rabbit appeared from nowhere. He pulled up in the rusted pool-duty pickup truck —
Granger Inground
emblazoned on the side — and a slim blonde girl with hoop earrings and jelly shoes jumped out. It was Cindy Hambly, who had been in Chris’s class since kindergarten. She walked past a stunned Tammy without acknowledging her. Adam was on the other side of the truck, his back to Tammy where she sat on a parking block, bike leaning against the shop sign. It hadn’t taken a genius to deduce their destination when the three of them exited together and headed down the street, Adam abandoning his vehicle, Chris leaving his bike locked where it stood against a parking metre.

Doubling back, Tammy reduced the danger of being caught.
When in doubt, always double back.
Her brain had begun a parade of such basic adages, for this was the first time since she had witnessed Diana Scott’s kiss that anything had come of Tammy’s low-key loitering. The encounter in the park with Adam Granger had happened so quickly she’d had no time for basic spy prep. Now she knelt, wiping her sweat-lined palms on the grass of the Yellow House. Furtively glancing over her shoulder at its dark windows, she missed the joint as it made its first round. When she peered through the branches again, careful to keep head low, she saw only Adam Granger smoking. Chris was laughing at something he had said.

How they knew one another, and why they were there, smoking together, Tammy couldn’t decipher. But it was bad. Breath swung through her ribs. Why was Adam with Cindy, when only yesterday he’d told her about the girl who lived in the Sunset Villa? Cindy Hambly lived on Bienville, directly behind Running Creek Road, one crescent over from J.P.’s. And why was her brother hanging out with them at all?

Behind Tammy came the scuffle of a hose tugged across concrete. Someone had emerged from the Rock Garden House through a side door, still out of sight. Tammy half-army-crawled, half-bolted, took off down the Yellow House sidewalk running.