Joyland (6 page)

“Whad’you want to do tonight?” J.P. asked. “Cuz there’s this guy I heard about . . . Doyle. He can get you anything. You just show up.”

Chris nodded and didn’t say anything. In his chest, his heart flickered and buzzed. He ran his tongue over his lips nervously. Mrs. Lane picked up a cloth and began wiping down the kitchen table. Chris turned round again, uncoiling himself to watch the trail the dishcloth left behind — side to side — as it dried, its easy rhythm slowing things down inside him.

“I have that ten bucks I owe you,” Chris said finally, just before he hung up.

Chris watched his most recent recruit skitter away from the stick that had fallen, like an act of God, across its path. It was one of those little red ants — mean buggers — and it reared back and squiggled around, as if in a state of shock, unsure of what its next action should be. It proceeded on a new track, rushing into it decisively, as if called by a collective consciousness back to the mound. When Chris dropped the stick again, the ant reacted immediately, no disorientation. It pivoted and changed direction, branching away from the stick entirely, a wide-angle turn. Chris blocked its path.

Tammy came running down the street, a pink plastic skip rope trailing behind her.

“I jus’ talked to Jen,” she panted, “and she’s marching with her dance class, and —”

The brown twig came down in front of the red ant again, and Chris laughed. He had this idea of a cartoon insect, rearing up with large white eyes. An invisible sound bubble of what the ant might say if it could talk. The collective consciousness cursing.

“— she says there’s a frog race again this year. Downtown. After the parade.”

“Uh-huh.”

“D’you ’member when you entered, and your frog just sat there, until almost the end, and by then all the other frogs had jumped out of bounds?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

Tammy had developed this annoying new habit of saying, “Remember when . . .” about almost anything. As if it hadn’t been just a couple years ago. As if Chris had a tumour in his brain and had forgotten everything.

“We should get us a frog, huh? I think we could catch one if we went on our bikes down to the crick.” She spoke fast and Chris looked up, hunched his shoulders at the word —
crick
, he hated it, like a bug scratching its legs together,
crick, creek
— squinted into the sun to see her. Tammy’s hair had scrunched its way half out of its ponytail, and she was wearing a pair of his old Adidas shorts. They looked funny on her, the little upside-down V’s at the sides stretched open to accommodate her. Even though she had a basic eleven-year-old stick figure, nothing fit. Skinny skin expanded the second she put it under clothes, like one of those miniature foam monsters from the novelty store. Sunk underwater, they swelled like tongues. Tammy wasn’t large, just awkward. The fact that she kept trying to wear his old clothes probably didn’t help. It simply reinforced the fact that she was a girl. She was an embarrassment.

“Tammy, why don’t you —”

“We could go get one right now, Chris. If you don’t want to enter, I could. If you’ll help me catch one, we can —”

“Tammy. Sit down for a minute.”

She dropped onto the grass like she’d been shot. Her face was as red as her T-shirt. His old T-shirt.

“You’re gonna wear yourself out before the parade even starts,” he told her. “Whad’you do, drink Coke for breakfast?” Chris looked down, realized the ant had long ago escaped. He snapped the stick in half and tossed it into the gutter.

“What time is it?” Tammy asked for about the thousandth time.

“Ten after ten.”

“Fifty minutes until the parade. We could —”

“Did I ever tell you what happened after the frog race?”

She shut up, rolled onto her side. One hip jutted up from the grass like a bike tire, the white stripes on the dark shorts making her somehow rounder.

“Do you have your period yet?” It was one of those questions Chris hadn’t considered asking. It just popped out, because he had suddenly thought of it and wanted to know. Tammy flipped onto her stomach and put her head down on her arms, as if by turning that part of her body away it would deflect his question.

There was a long silence. Chris stared at her but she didn’t look at him or answer. She picked at the grass, pulling individual strands up by their roots before flicking them away. Her hair fell across her red face.

“You know I don’t,” she said finally, flicking the grass in his direction. “Why are you being mean?”

“I’m not.”

The sky above them was a clean, clear blue. Chris lay back and gazed up into it. Clouds burst open like big white peonies. Two were exchanging foam, underneath, just at the corner. Chris could see they would eventually morph into something else. He could hear Tammy, about a yard behind him, kicking one running shoe against the other.

“You should be careful,” he said, without looking at her. “At the arcade yesterday —”

Clunk,
went her running shoes. He closed his eyes.

“J.P. —”

Clunk.

“Guys are going to —”

Clunk.

“You don’t look like those girls yet but —”

Clunk.

Their parents hadn’t told Chris a thing about sex. It was as if it didn’t exist as long as they didn’t talk about it. The idea of extruding some new kind of substance was so strange, almost like communicating with outer space. The blue sheets, especially, were the perfect backdrop for his message. The lines of lust were obvious as paper airplanes. On the patterned sheets — thin blue and green stripe — his testament was more discreet. There, even the smallest drops clung and would not let go. Like dots of braille — if one wasn’t looking for them they weren’t noticeable. Once, Chris had been able to transport the fluid all the way to the bedside table and across the digital clock. Dried, like candle wax, across the red stick numbers. It remained, however faintly, over a year later, a lingering streak of this substance his body was constantly producing. Chris imagined it as a dispatched satellite, video footage in outer space: a living thing removed, projected, a flickering replica of human existence. Like starlight, it stayed long after the actual heat formation had dissipated or burned out. Chris waited to see how much time would pass before it was discovered, until it began to have meaning. Without any consultation, he had joined the leagues of boys across the nation engaged in the employment of socks. Socks were excellent resources. He could leave them crumpled and crusty beneath the bed, casual clues. If anyone noticed, they didn’t say a word.

Of course, his employment had begun much earlier, gradually, before building to full-time occupation. At the age of ten, Chris’s body had Barbapapa-ed out from underneath him, formed its own confused shape in his hands. Rollercoaster first-cart fear rumbled low in his guts. He held it tight as the crossbar, waited for it to go down, and eventually realized it wouldn’t. The thing stuck there, immobile. When it melted all over him, vomit-warm and candy-apple-sticky, he realized he was sick — really sick — that he needed to go to the hospital. He swabbed himself clean with terry cloth — his nearby bathrobe — and lay shivering in bed all morning. A cartoon conversation converged between his shoulders, angel on one, devil on the other, to tell or not to tell. Thankfully, not to tell won out and Chris was chicken-souped by lunchtime and back to school, furiously head-ducking the usual
Where-were-you
s. As if this indignity wasn’t enough, until Grade Six Sex Ed., he mistakenly believed a tampon was something a girl used to apply makeup. He felt it was his duty, somehow, to make sure Tammy knew things before they happened to her. Meanwhile, she naively shrugged her hair back and panted “Tell me,” to his friends in dark arcades.

But what Chris had just said was all he could manage. Neither of them spoke for a long time. Then her shadow pitched across him as she sat up.

“What about the frogs?”

A lone Galaga game stood inside the doorway of Jorge’s Pizza, splintered linoleum peeling out from underneath it. Someone had used Liquid Paper to change the last “a” to “oober”:
Galagoober.
The sight was enough to make Nolan Bushnell cry. But the Pong pioneer would never see it. Chris Lane was the only one to bear witness.

He walked up to the counter to ask for change. Sad curtains had been stretched back and pinned on either side of fat windows using flat gold thumbtacks. A fleet of dark woodgrain tables stretched, waiting, their lone occupants precision-centred twenty-five-cent vases. From these, plastic rosettes erupted on dust-furred felt stems. Seven or eight of them surfed the moatish light between the counter and the windows looking out on the street. The counter was tall, the space behind it raised so that the proprietor would have towered over the establishment had she not been a woman of minimal height. She emerged reluctantly, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. A brandy-coloured EXIT sign burned behind a wooden hallway of doors labelled with figurines of pants and skirt. Chris proffered the purple ten with the factory smokestacks face up. Wilfrid Laurier, two red two-dollar bills, and four shiny silver caribou replaced it.

Waiting for J.P., Chris dropped into the deceptive repetition of the machine. The switch had been set to run fast by the owners, probably to clear kids like him out of the foyer quickly. He was not thrown off balance by the difference. He rammed his ship from side to side, picking off insects, though he longed for a Galaxian machine rather than this sequel, most often considered superior. Galaxian had a sameness he enjoyed, with its chunky graphics and unchanging board. Its insects fell leisurely, rhythmically. Space was its own silent music. The Galaxian bullets had a delay, were almost impeded, chug-chugging their way through the sky as the enemy armada broke formation to leaf their way down. Chris could fall into a kind of stupor and meld with the game, changing his speed as he advanced steadily through levels, never needing to adjust his tactics.

CHALLENGING STAGE, the present machine chimed.

There was a Galaga at Circus Berzerk in the mall, but no Galaxian. Already Chris was mapping, mentally tallying the (limited) resources of South Wakefield post-Joyland. No Galaxian anywhere. Space Invaders had breeched the divide between arcades and restaurants, its popularity granting machines access to new venues; Galaxian was a glorious follow-up, the first full-colour video game. Yet the donut shops were now rationed with Ms. Pac-Man table games, a lone Donkey Kong Jr., and one old Football table with a Trak-Ball. Defender guarded the lobby of the Metropolis Diner. The bowling alley ought to have been a thriving base, but its agents had clung to pinball, refusing to accept a new plan of action, eventually stocking with a meagre five machines — by that late date, not one Galaxian among them.

Chris traced a family tree of games backward: Galaga, Galaxian, and Space Invaders, the grandaddy of alien gatecrashers. He imagined them in Texas, rows of ten-gallon hats bent into the cabaret containers of the machines, brushed felt bending beyond the wood-grain lips, a protest of Bible-belters mouthing,
Space Invaders ARE SIN!
, the machines slowly scooping out their march of destruction in ice cream parlours: Farrell’s and DQs across the Lone Star state, across all of America. Mesquite residents, mad as hellfire, had taken the matter all the way to the Supreme Court in an attempt to ban the video game from their community. Chris always envisioned it like that, people on two sides suddenly in the same room, as if the corridors of law offices could be lined with the games and their gamers to make the illustration complete, horrified Christians in suspenders, a pack of judges’ robes joining the play. A crunching, tinkling panel-sized Taito-licensed-by-Midway drawing of conflict. A knob stationed in the centre for Control.

Meanwhile, Tokyo was all lights, yen falling like rain, the music of space plinking down narrow streets until the coin shortage forced the government to quadruple its supply. Chris leaned back and shot this third wave of third-wave Invaders — oh Galaga! — his ears echoing with the singing of coins across an ocean, six years after the fact. Tokyo had really had them: whole buildings dedicated to one game. He stood before the gleaming mouth of an arcade filled exclusively with Space Invaders, Space Invaders, Space Invaders, Space Invaders, and more Space Invaders. Then, as the blue moth craft swooped down, Chris shot and it evaporated. There was only South Wakefield, a lousy pizza parlour. Japan was a calligraphy of vector lines, another language, a two-dimensional icon from another game. It didn’t even exist. South Wakefield was a flock of ships above Chris’s tapping fingers, the broken flooring under his soles, and the Portuguese owner-lady staring at him with eyes of brooding boredom.

When J.P. arrived, Chris committed suicide. He’d used up two quarters. He dumped the remaining $9.50 into his friend’s outstretched hand.

J.P. scoffed, annoyed.

“You’re late.”

The South Wakefield Canada Day festivities had not changed since 1975, the first year Chris remembered them clearly. That day held the newness of a crisp dollar bill in comparison to today’s sweaty quarter. As Chris and J.P. left the pizza place, they were caught in a surge of sunburned moms, complaining toddlers in tow.

“You should’ve seen us try to get the car here this morning.”