Twenty Grand (5 page)

Will you marry me? he said.

I saw my sister's shape in the dark, walking toward the car.

Yes, I said.

Have kids? he said.

Oh yes, I said.

My sister's shape was running toward the car.

Kiss my lips, he said, and let me put my tongue in your mouth?

Oh God, I said.

You don't love me, he said.

I do, I said. I just hate to kiss.

Oh, he said. Then he tore out of there fast and put his damp hand on mine and we headed toward the interstate.

T
HE FIRST SUMMER
I was old enough to work, Jacques Michaud opened the alpine slide. The slide was ten miles from the lake, in the mountains. Over the years, various businessmen had leased it for a summer or two and failed to make it a success. But Jacques Michaud was from Canada, and maybe he thought that made a difference. Or maybe he hadn't heard or believed the stories of previous failures, or maybe he thought the economy had changed. At least that was what he said when he hired us, and the economists were saying it, too.

Originally, the place had been a ski area. Thus the lodge, a low, flat, brown-shingled building, and the chairlift, a forty-year-old contraption with shiny red metal slats for seats. The lodge was in a grassy valley and the mountain was covered with pines. It was beautiful. But the peak wasn't the highest in the state, and the slopes weren't the steepest. Sometimes people came from Massachusetts to ski, but mostly they drove right past, headed farther north, to the White Mountains.

After the ski area went bankrupt, someone saw the abandoned lodge and lift and decided to lay down the alpine slide, two parallel cement tracks, each a mile long, that began near the top of the chairlift and wound their way down the mountain through the trees, twisting and dipping over spills of glacial rock until they shot out into the flat fields of the valley. The sleds were plastic and had two steel runners on the bottom. When the brakes were all the way off they could go thirty miles an hour, slipping up the high sides on the curves and lifting slightly from the track on the dips. The ride was two minutes long and you flew down the mountain as you flew in dreams, through seemingly solitary woods that leaned in of their own accord to block out the blue above. It was unforgettable, beyond your control, and you believed you were about to die.

People said the ride was wonderful, but they also forgot that it existed.

In the late seventies, a businessman made the place into a theme park by adding a waterslide. He put a cafeteria in the lodge, a snack shop by the lift, and constructed a craft village, a row of six chalet-style huts where local artisans sold landscape paintings, goddesses carved from driftwood, and candles shaped like frogs. When that park failed, another businessman made a better park by adding the Cannonball, a man-size tunnel you slid through until you were shot out into a pool. The fiberglass tube scratched your ass, and the water that sprinkled down from above made you feel as if you were drowning. The ride was seven seconds long, uncomfortable, and without danger or pleasure, but women's bikini tops sometimes popped off when they hit the pool and, for a while, the Cannonball worked. Then the water park at Bear Beach opened its own Cannonball, and the slide shut down for good.

We had looted it. By “we” I mean all the local teenagers, though my own participation was minor and of a different nature, since I lived nearby and considered it mine. Behind my house, there was an old carriage road that went halfway over the mountain, and when I was twelve and thirteen I'd follow it to its dead end, near the top of the lift, walk down the abandoned slide, and enter the lodge through a broken window. Inside, I took good looks at the cheap white dinnerware and ashtrays scattered around the nubbly blue carpet, tapped my fingers on the stacked-up plastic tables, and inhaled the stink of beer and mildew and the eggy scent of old sex. There were wooden slope signs—
TRIGGER, SPLINTER, BONEBREAK
, and
GUNROCK
—on the walls, and faded pink maps of the ski area, the mountains, the lake, and the state. But what I liked best was to lie back on the hot slide and stare at the sun. Older kids threw parties in the parking lot at night, made bonfires in the acres of dirt, and had sex in the manager's office amid the mouse turds and dust, but they were never subtle or quiet and soon after they got there the police would arrive and shoo them away.

Jacques Michaud was only renting the park, but he used his own money to replace the broken windows and repair the lift. He tore up the old nubbly blue carpet and put down a new nubbly blue carpet and restocked the cafeteria with frozen burgers and hot dogs, cases of soda, and industrial sheets of Jell-O and chocolate cake. He whitewashed the bathrooms and shower huts and planted cheap, hardy, orange brushlike flowers all around the park. Then he polished his car, a black 1956 Jaguar Mark VII sedan, and made stops at businesses all around the area, chatting up owners and dropping off batches of shiny purple brochures. Toward the end of this he drove to the Exxon station where my father worked as a mechanic and asked him if he had any kids, preferably daughters, who could work at the slide.

I was fifteen, and a daughter, and my world was circumscribed. I was expected to earn not less than an A-in school. I ate dinner with my family every night at six and was in bed by ten. I was not allowed to ride in cars with boys. My parents had other rules, all with the same purpose: I could not be alone with a boy. I'd never been kissed. I longed to be kissed. I spent a lot of time at home, in my room. I was also shy, and when I spoke, sarcasm came out of my mouth.

But I could work. My father believed in work, and he was intrigued by Jacques, enough to go on at length about the park's likely failure. Too far from the lake, the motels. No one wanted a dry slide in summer. “He says he's Canadian,” my father said. “But he doesn't have an accent. To me, that means he's brilliant. He seems like a good guy. But I just don't think there's any way he'll make money from the park.”

 

I
RODE MY BIKE
to the interview. Jacques Michaud's Jaguar was parked in the dirt lot outside the lodge. My father had said it resembled a Rolls-Royce, but it looked like a hearse. On the slope beyond the lot, gold grasses waved and the metal towers of the lift glinted white. The wires holding the chairs shimmered like mirages in the heat. A hawk floated in the sky like an ash.

The lodge was so dark that I couldn't see. But I smelled a cigar. Someone—Jacques Michaud, I guessed—said something from the corner. His voice was low but casual, as if he were utterly relaxed. He was sitting at a lunch table. He got up and pulled out a cafeteria chair and told me to have a seat. Then he sat back down. He had a dinner plate in front of him, with the remains of a ham sandwich on it, which he was using as an ashtray.

His skin was dark and his hair was white. Pure white. But he wasn't old—or he was, to me, but not enough to have white hair. He was forty, maybe fifty. It was hard to tell. His body was muscular—he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and his legs were brown, almost hairless, and thick.

I was shocked that he wasn't wearing a suit. I'd worn black polyester pants and a stiff white shirt, which was now wet from sweat, and I had had a lot of trouble pedaling my bike along the highway in my dress shoes.

“Would you like a cigar?” he asked. He waved toward the kitchen. “I have more in back.” He took a puff, held it up, and read the tiny silver letters on the dark-red band. He squinted. “They're not illegal,” he said. “But they're pretty good anyway.”

I considered cigar smoking disgusting and lethal. But I was looking at him and considering having one when he said, “I was kidding.”

I nodded stupidly.

He glanced at his watch. He hadn't seemed to look at me at all. “You're too young,” he said. “But I'll hire you.”

“You haven't even interviewed me,” I said.

“Well,” he said. He put the cigar on the plate. “You seem like an honest person to me. You look honest. And I met your father. He's a good man.”

“He's good at fixing cars,” I said.

He leaned forward. “That's important. It's important to fix cars.”

I wasn't sure what to do with this. I felt as if he were saying something intimate. But he was talking about cars. My father was a shame between us, acknowledged and then forgotten.

What I understood then was that the world was contriving in secret, with swiftness and accuracy, to keep Jacques Michaud from making the park a success. But, Herculean, he was lifting it onto his shoulders. I was invited to be with him while he lifted it. Perhaps I could help.

I liked how he looked. His white hair curled over his broad forehead a bit, which made him seem oddly boyish. He had a wide, hawklike nose, a strong chin, and full pink lips.

“Let's say I interview you,” he said. “I've hired everyone I need. The law says you're too young to work moving machinery. That means you can't load sleds on the lift, top or bottom. So why should I hire you—what can you do?”

My spine straightened. “Well,” I said. “I can stand at the bottom of the slide. I can also sit at the top of the slide and show people how to use their sleds. I know CPR. I could work at the waterslide.” I listed other things. He listened without expression. “I suppose I could work in the cafeteria,” I said. “Though I'd really rather work at the slide—”

“Stop,” he said. “You're hired.”

“Thank you so much,” I said.

He put his cigar on the plate and came around to my side of the table. I stood up. I assumed the interview was over. His hand came out and I stared at it. “Shake hands,” he said.

I did. His hand was large and warm.

“Now we're partners,” he said. Then he gave me some forms to fill out and disappeared into the basement.

I was about to leave when he appeared at the top of the basement stairs. “Hey, Bowman,” he said. “Do you know what I'm counting on to make the park a success?”

I shook my head.

“I'm counting on you,” he said. “You are excellent. I've hired an excellent staff. And you will be excellent, too. I can tell.”

 

N
O ONE HE
'
D HIRED
was over twenty-three, and most were eighteen. The other employees were the most popular people in my school, but because I was the youngest by far they accepted me as a kind of younger retarded sister. We were bonded by the fact that we all loved Jacques. He was the kind of man who was willing to make a group of kids his friends. This didn't mean that we weren't aware of an aura of failure about him, that we didn't sense that he was lonely and sad or feel glad that we weren't him. But he had given us jobs. He paid us more than minimum wage. And he did not require us to wear uniforms. The boys wore dark swim trunks of their choosing and the girls could wear whatever. Most wore bikinis. We were given fifteen-minute breaks every three hours, and during them we were free to ride the waterslide to cool off. The lodge had a bar in the basement that had originally been for skiers, which Jacques didn't open to the public. But sometimes at the end of the day, when the pink sun was lighting just the tips of the wheat around the parking lot and all the customers had left and we'd finished putting the sleds away and hosing the platforms down, he opened it for us.

I went once. The carpet was the same nubbly blue as the cafeteria's—only it hadn't been replaced—and the room had a long black bar, a bunch of barstools, and some wooden tables and chairs. I sat at a table with some other workers and listened to what they said. I was perfectly happy. The bar smelled like incense, grease, and nutmeg. The sun was coming in through the basement window and illuminating the glasses on the tables and the grains in the wood. I could see Jacques at another table. Every few minutes he'd say something, then he'd sit back and his hands would spread in the air. He was talking to Amy Goldman, who'd be a senior in the fall but was already eighteen because a virus had kept her out of school for a year. He was teaching her how to bartend. “At your natural speed,” he said. “Don't rush.”

She said, “One, two, three, four.”

“Good,” he said. “You're a slow counter. That means you count to three and a half. Then stop.” She nodded. “That's it,” he said. “You never need to measure. You just count.” He said something else I couldn't hear, and she laughed. Sometime later, I heard Jacques telling a story. I'd missed the first half. In the second half, a young airline pilot was excited about his new fiancée, who was riding in coach. Once the plane hit cruising altitude, he met up with her in the lavatory. Jacques paused. “And when the stewardess went into the cockpit to ask the pilots how they wanted their coffee,” he said, “the old guy was asleep by himself.”

“No one was flying the plane?” Amy Goldman asked.

Jacques smiled. “No one was flying the plane.” Then he shrugged. “Autopilot usually does fine. In those days, all the airlines had a pretty late retirement age, and the old guy fell asleep a lot.”

“So what happened?”

“They got fired,” he said.

Someone asked him if he'd been the younger pilot.

“No,” he said. He picked up his glass and drank. “The story just went around.”

He went upstairs to use the bathroom then, and when he came back down he sat next to me. “Bowman,” he said. He asked me how I was, and how I liked working at the slide. I said I was good, and that I liked my job. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and said that I'd better go home.

When I got home, I was grounded. From now on, my parents said, I would come home right after work. There was no reason to stay. I told them I'd just wanted to talk. “Talk at work,” they said. “You can talk to those people all day.”

So each night I pedaled home along the highway, almost swerving into the ditch every time a car came, and imagined I was back in the lodge telling stories, even though in real life I almost never talked.

I read books. My favorites were the ones in which young Victorian women were forced by adverse circumstance to have sex with swarthy highway robbers who were twice their age and had impeccable manners and great taste in jewels. On the front of these books, the women's shining satin bodices were being ripped apart not by the big-muscled highway robbers themselves, but by sheer spontaneous combustion, helped along by the women's rapid breathing patterns. The books were all the same. Once the robber gets the woman alone in his ramshackle but comfortable hide-away, which includes a big satin-pillow-filled bed, he looks around, notes the absence of the second bed, and says that if he were a gentleman, he would sleep on the floor. But he is not a gentleman.