Joyland (4 page)

Rows of machines lined up to meet him. Passing through the door, he was greeted by Pac-Man, Pitfall II, Centipede, Tempest, Tron, Dragon’s Lair, Gorf, Pengo, Defender, Mr. Do!, Mario Bros., Frogger, and beyond these two rows more — all of them humming, singing, shrieking, bleeping, burping, and whistling. Staring into their plastic faces, Chris perceived whirled light plotted into some decipherable map. He plunged inside that space and became a swivelling, pivoting hero, with a simple twist of his hand and the ability to remain focused. In Donkey Kong, he climbed up ladders, he climbed out of himself and became the person he had always wanted to be: the kind other kids grouped around to watch play. To admire.

For two years, Chris had paid his dues, leaning carefully over shoulders, trying to see the patterns. He learned from the masters of South Wakefield: Johnny Davis, Mickey Newton, Pinky Goodlowe, among others. Joyland was full of competition, good-natured fuck-yous, two-for-flinchings, and the occasional well-placed jab. A scrawny, intellectual, preteen boy will receive his fair share of pounding, so it was not without fear that Chris had entered Joyland each day. A ten-year-old pipsqueak when the arcade opened, it was there that he had first been dubbed Short Fry. He had learned by observation. Behind the gangs of twelve-year-olds, Chris had clutched his quarters in a sweaty fist, waiting for a machine to come open, the coins heating in his hand. Older guys — fourteen or fifteen — swaggered about the place with the confidence they would not have to wait long for a machine. The true video game gurus held a rank all their own. As if they had absorbed luminosity from the screens, they emanated it from their very hands. In the unspoken pecking order, those first two years, Chris had always been last in line.

Pulling rank more than once, Pinky, the twice-held-back kid from Chris’s class, had given him the chance to play. Two years older than Chris but miles taller and wider, Pinky walked a very thin good-guy/bad-guy line. Pinky was the fifth of five brothers, each of whom had virtually disappeared from South Wakefield by the ages of sixteen or seventeen. The first was killed in a car accident before Pinky was even born. The second went to jail for a knife fight, did his time, then landed back inside almost immediately. The third had gone into the factory early and never emerged again, “making good money on the line,” Pinky said. Chris had never met this brother, though he knew the house on the edge of town with a car graveyard in front and a legend of pot plants in the back. The fourth brother was a free man, but no one knew where he had gone. Pinky said he had left town after knocking up his girlfriend. Other sources said he just didn’t get along with their father. Pinky was famous as the last-chance child. He claimed it was right there in his name, which was his father’s: Peter Goodlowe. But his family just called him Pinky. Maybe his mother was trying that one last time for a girl. Pinky was anything but.

For the number of times Pinky’s fat knuckles reached out to jerk Chris clean off his feet by his collar, they were also used to clear a path for Chris. Pinky had a strange sense of justice that couldn’t be held against him — even if he hadn’t been five-foot-nine by Grade Six.

“Time for Short Fry to play,” Pinky would say, yanking whoever had hogged the machine out of the way. “Okay, Chris, do your stuff,” he’d add, hovering to watch Chris’s moves.

While Pinky acted as sentinel, Johnny Davis was Chris’s true mentor.

From across the room, Chris scrutinized the earnest way Johnny leaned into the machine. The eerie darkness of the arcade emphasized the reflection thrown into his glasses. From a certain angle, Chris could see a pure square of blue-green light wavering overtop Johnny’s eyes: an exact replica of what was on the screen before him. Through the fast-rushing traffic and river logs in Frogger, Johnny bowled forward, pumping the controller, his icon edging upward. The froggish green patch of colour bounded toward home, safety — onscreen and off, the shapes caught on glass in miniscule. He was not just the master of the game. Johnny Davis
was
the game.

Johnny Davis was about five-ten, one hundred pounds. At age twelve, Chris hadn’t even topped five feet, so it was awkward and obvious whenever he tried to look over Johnny Davis’s shoulder to watch him play. Mainly, Chris stood to the side and looked under his armpit. Chris assumed this post for over an hour one day while Johnny was on the Pac-Man game, forcing the yellow mouth through the maze. At one point, Johnny couldn’t outrun the ghosts, and his man spun around and dissolved. He abandoned the machine even though he still had two players left.

“Take over for me,” he said. “I need a smoke break.” He shook the cramps out of his hand and walked away, leaving Chris there to play for him.

Witness to this event were both Kenny Keele and and J.P. Breton. Also nearby was Mickey Newton, second only to Johnny Davis as a player. Chris saw in Mickey’s face a kind of jealousy that should not be permitted to pass from an older guy to a younger one. Chris had been handed the controls to the master’s game. Immediately, Chris felt like Mickey Mouse in
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
He prayed he wouldn’t make such a mess of it.

When Johnny had come back, Chris had earned him a free man and was still going.

“Good moves for a geekboy.” Johnny shook his head and lit up another cigarette right then, dropping the match into the metal ashtray affixed to the machine.

“You always stand there looking under my armpit,” he’d said, watching his disciple eat up the board. “Good thing for you I don’t have B.O.”

Chris had registered his first high score that day, courtesy of Johnny Davis. The rest Chris would get would be his own work.

Now there were a handful of players without games: a circle of smart-mouthed friends and a few clumsily told stories. Johnny kept lighting one cigarette off another and not saying a word. He stared at the building as if he was telekinetic, could tear the chains from the door with his eyes.

“What are we gonna do?” Kenny Keele snivelled. He bobbed his bowl-like feathered haircut. Chris glared at it, though Kenny’s small hawkish face was turned in the other direction. It was about the fiftieth time the question had been voiced in an hour.

“I don’t know about you,” David White said, “but I’m gonna lie in the middle of the road. Over my dead body can they close this arcade. I mean, what the fuck? We can’t play at Circus Berzerk, it’s in a mall! Our moms are there buying groceries and lottery and sweaters and shit. There are little kids climbing all over. You can’t even smoke there.” David flicked his cigarette across the gas station parking lot toward the closed booth. Chris eyed it warily. Red sparks flew up and disappeared.

David had a point. The only other arcade was lame. They had to walk into it through a huge open-mouthed clown face. There was a helium balloon stand in the front. The owner sold ball caps with fake turds on the brims under lettering that read
Shithead,
not to mention squirting flowers, joke birthday candles, sparklers. In Chris’s estimation, whoopee cushions were all right, but not when his best friend’s dad was there buying them.

David stood up. He removed his John Deere cap, his Playboy necklace, his digital watch. He dropped the chain and the watch inside the cap and handed it ceremoniously to Kenny.

“I’ll take that belt buckle off ya,” Dean said. It was as huge as a Harley, equally eagled.

“If I die,” David said, a sudden Southern twang to his voice, “give my mama my love.”

“What about Cindy Hambly?” J.P. snickered, half under his breath. Everyone knew she’d made out with David once, but was dating a high school guy now.

Kenny blinked behind his glasses, and accepted the cap and its contents with a constipated expression Chris recognized as alarmed devotion, vintage Keele.

David stalked to the centre of the road and crouched down, spread-eagle across the centre line, legs waiting for northbound traffic, head and arms waiting for southbound.

“Come on, White,” Chris yelled. “Don’t be such a martyr.”

David held up one hand, middle finger extended, no intention of moving.

“It’s a peaceful protest,” Kenny insisted, and the next thing Chris knew, Kenny had spread himself across the northbound lanes, the John Deere cap carefully folded and clutched atop his chest.

“What the hell,” J.P. said, and left Chris sitting on the curb.

The Easter brothers followed J.P. out, Dean first. Reuben rolled to the pavement after him, propping his head up on his brother’s shins.

Across the street, Joyland glared morosely, the reflection of one streetlight caught in the small high window. Chris had a feeling somewhere inside, coiled like some long sticky thing waiting to snap loose.

“Come on, Lane, show your love!” J.P. yelled.

Chris glanced up at Johnny Davis, Video Game God. He didn’t even bother looking down at them, just stared into the dead-eyed windows of Joyland. The circle at the end of his cigarette glowed orange, made a small perfect hole in the night.

Chris crawled on his hands and knees. Under his palms, the concrete had tiny gritty teeth that left marks in his skin. Rolling slowly onto his back, he lay in the middle of a lane looking up. Waiting.

Gazing up into the night, he willed himself into a different headspace, a time before Joyland, and a time ahead. Suddenly, Chris knew why all the sci-fi series were about searching for a half-extinct human race and trying to get home. He was trying to formulate a theory, distill it from his brain and put it into words — when Johnny Davis jumped off the mailbox.

“What is
this
?” Johnny yelled, as if he had just noticed what they were doing. “It’s like you’re playing chicken without cars. Kid shit,” he said. He turned, kicked the mailbox three times hard. Chris raised himself up on one elbow, watched Johnny lurch all ninety-five pounds into it, the slim tendons in his forearms popping as he rocked the red metal off its legs. In slow-motion the box tipped, then landed on its back, the arrow-like Canadian Postal emblem pointing suddenly skyward. The sound thundered across the gas station parking lot and echoed on the empty highway. Chris could feel the vibrations jolt through him.

The boys in the street sat up on their asses, stared. No one said a word.

Johnny Davis plunged his hands deep into his pockets and walked away slowly, looking nothing like a guy who’d just lost it.

David snorted, and Kenny lay back down, the rubber grip of his running shoe facing Chris. A red bull’s eye of rubber.

Chris turned and watched Johnny Davis trek the entire length of St. Lawrence Street. From a distance, Chris knew they must look like they’d parachuted out of the dark and landed there — arms and legs thrust out haphazardly across the cement, sneakers pointing at the heavens. But Johnny Davis did not glance back. He walked the four blocks up, and when he reached the fork in the road where the downtown intersection began, veered left and passed from sight. It must have taken at least ten minutes. Still, not one set of headlights.

Chris paused another minute, looking up at the sky, willing something to happen.

Nothing did.

When Chris got home, his father’s face was like a blank television.

Mr. Lane hunched in front of the TV, staring at it as if he had only just turned it off. His grey head sunk into his shirt collar. A thirty-eight-year-old force field, emitted invisibly, sealed him inside, determined to make him ancient. Uncanny static crept into his silences, as if the radio broadcaster in his head had run out of things to say at exactly the point Chris passed out of range. Mr. Lane had a remarkable ability to sit for long stretches, doing nothing. When he did speak — as he did now — his voice was gruff.

“Should’ve been home a goddamn hour ago.” What he said was “goddamn” but what Chris heard was Q*bert-ese:
@#*!

“They closed it down,” Chris said, the defence sounding weak as it hit the air.

“Couldn’t use one of those quarters for the phone?” Mr. Lane got up and left the room.

Chris had, of course, been spectator to the goings-on at his friends’ houses when they were getting it. He knew he had nothing to complain about. Had once, in fact, witnessed a whole house constrict with smoke as voices pitched — a result of J.P. having brought him home without asking after ball hockey — the argument hurtling into a chin-to-chin faceoff, hard-ribbed and tense as sexuality.

Yet, Mr. Lane’s words were chosen with great deliberation. A well-placed piece of profanity — even one of the mild swears — carried enough force to knock a tooth out. The Lanes were a family of respect, pride, patience. A family of bullshitters. Chris yearned for a great bloody brawl. Even the kind of daytime television drama that began with innuendo and ended with sobbing. Anything that might breech the barriers.

Any number of elements could, possibly, have shaped Chris’s parents. He had seen pictures of his mother as a seventeen-year-old — before her father died, before she had left the farm because she “didn’t get along” with her mother, repeating only that she “couldn’t stand to stay.” From a young age, Chris played a game of interview, and this was always Mrs. Lane’s answer to that particular line of questioning, no matter how Chris found new ways to phrase it.

“Why did you move to South Wakefield?”

“I couldn’t stand to stay out there. Coming to town was like moving to a city.”