Twenty Grand (6 page)

She tells him he is disgusting, a villain, a scoundrel, that her father will discover the abduction and will take revenge, likely with dogs.

The robber finds this laughable.

“It is not in my nature to force you, Carlotta,” he tells the woman once they are in the bed. “But I will have to kiss you, you know….”

With one thick finger he compels her to look into his face. His black eyes are smoldering like burning bread. His lips are so rough they are cracked into segments.

“After all,” he says, “I went to such trouble to abduct you.”

“No,” Carlotta whispers. “I loathe you…loathe you…”

Two brief pages later, she's pregnant and locked in a tower.

I prayed that something similar would happen to me.

 

J
ACQUES LIVED
in an empty room in the lodge's basement, behind the manager's office. It had one small window at ground level, which he sometimes threw a blanket over. On the floor was a clock radio and a queen-size mattress. The only other furniture was a dresser full of T-shirts and shorts. On the dresser was a picture of a babe. An older babe, but a babe—a redhead with an angry look on her face. The woman was Jacques's dead wife. Or that was what we'd heard. Her death had left Jacques alone in the world. He missed her every day. He'd traveled all around the globe. Now he thought he'd settle down. He'd picked New Hampshire because he'd heard it was beautiful. Second only to Canada. He'd seen the park, and it had seemed like a great opportunity. A beautiful niche in the mountains. Cheap rent. He contacted the owners, and had them lend him the keys. He'd carried a sled up the mountain and ridden it down. He'd made up his mind right then. He didn't see how such an incredible feeling couldn't be a success.

We were not excellent workers, mostly because we were stunned by the pleasure of one another's company. Soon our legs became scraped from lifting sleds, and our arms grew sore and then muscular. Our skin turned gold. Our fifteen-minute breaks stretched to thirty. Instead of half price, our snacks were free, because the snack-stand crew, a lower echelon of workers who were trapped in grease and darkness, offered them to us that way.

The waterslide had an office, a white cement room that looked out onto the pool through a window, and in it was a black vinyl chair that rolled on three silver wheels, the fourth having been lost, some water-stained pamphlets on how to perform CPR, and an enormous black stereo with two cassette decks that played a joyous cacophony of Megadeth and the Beastie Boys. This office became the site of passionate and private discussions, during which the participants leaned a chair against the door and propped a mat over the window.

On the platform at the top of the lift, teenagers stretched into strange nature-worshipping poses and smoked cigarettes. Their job was to tell customers to raise the safety bar, to help them off the chairs, and to hoist the sleds from the chair backs, but when no customers were visible they sat in a circle on the platform and told dirty jokes and played cards.

The mountain crew was always thirsty and sending someone down the hill for drinks. The waterslide crew was thirsty and hungry, too. As the youngest, I was chosen, no matter where I was stationed, to make the food run. Under the yellow awning of the snack stand, I'd order three large nachos with extra cheese, six raspberry slushies, three cheeseburgers, and five chili dogs. The server would pack everything into a shallow cardboard box, and I'd give him the soft, ripped bills I'd collected. He'd push them back. On my return along the sandy path to the slide, Jacques sometimes passed by, walking slowly, wearing shorts and an old polo shirt, tight under the arms. He'd look up and nod, appearing to see only me, not the box.

I wondered how he could notice so little. I guessed he was preoccupied. He'd hoped we'd have six hundred people a day, and we hadn't yet. He was always chatting up the customers and making lists of needed supplies, and every day at noon he drove to a different neighboring town to distribute brochures. He kept a few in the pockets of his shorts, and sometimes he'd absentmindedly shove them farther in, because the tips stuck out. He'd had them printed himself, and on the front was a picture of Amy Goldman. I could understand why. She was the most glamorous, if not the most beautiful, girl in school. Within a week of the park's opening, she was dating Dave Z., the assistant manager and second-oldest employee of the park. He was going back to college in the fall, and she had another year of high school, so by necessity it was a turbulent and passionate affair, one that touched us all. Dave Z. had blond hair and a deadly smile full of teeth. He never spoke to us except to tell us to do something, and then he called us kids. It seemed fitting and tragic that Amy Goldman should be his. She was a blond goddess—five foot eight with strong legs, a waist like a man's neck, and the largest breasts it was possible to have without their being too big. Her posture was as straight as if she were walking at sea. Her skin was bruised apricot, her nose hooked, and her eyes green. Her smile could make any of us agree to perform the dingiest tasks—spraying down the concrete floors of the bathrooms, for example, or cleaning up a shit someone had taken on the men's-room floor. At the waterslide, she always wore a red bikini, and when she leaned forward to blow her whistle or tell a child to move away from the bottom of the slide there was an ever so slight bulge of flesh beneath her breasts.

She and Dave Z. did it in the waterslide office on the black vinyl chair. They did it in the showers on a cloudy afternoon. They did it in Jacques Michaud's office, on his desk, when Jacques Michaud wasn't there.

Jacques Michaud was oblivious. He walked around the sandy paths of the park with his head down, looking for pieces of glass. When he looked up, he seemed to be staring at a lone house—the local millionaire's—on the pine-covered mountain opposite.

 

O
CCASIONALLY
,
Amy and I worked together at the top of the slide. Where, because I couldn't work the lift, I spent a lot of time—in a high, sunny, sandy clearing, surrounded by white pines and hemlocks and scraggly junipers—showing the people who emerged from the path in the woods how to use their sleds. One afternoon, it was slow, and Amy and I were left sitting in the sun by ourselves. She was wearing her bathing suit to tan.

I asked her what the virus was that had kept her out of school for a year. She said the doctors had had about five different explanations and that none of them had made sense, that they'd tested her for everything, even syphilis. Sometimes her arm had been numb, or her leg, off and on, for a night or a day; and she'd felt tired. One doctor had told her that it was growing pains. Another had said that she was depressed. She laughed and said that it didn't matter now, because she was fine.

She took a carrot stick out of a Baggie and offered me one.

“It made me realize that I should study more,” she said. “Once I get to college, I'm going to study all the time.”

She tucked her hair behind her ears and smiled. Her cheeks were round when she smiled, and she suddenly seemed very young. I smiled, too, for no reason, and a bunch of kids came out of the woods with their sleds, laughing and shouting, then stood by the slide for five minutes arguing over who was faster. They made us count down for them so that they could race, in sets of two. After they left, it was quiet. Two dark-blue dragonflies sloped through the clearing. I stared at the red berries on the junipers, the shiny green leaves of the checkerberries below—and then I asked her when Jacques had taken the picture for the brochure. She said a few days before the park opened. I asked her if he'd paid her to do it. She shrugged and said that he'd offered, but she'd said no. She didn't see why he should. “It wasn't a big thing,” she said.

“Did he take it himself?” I asked.

She stared at me. “Of course he took it himself. He's not a millionaire.” She frowned a bit. “He was very sweet,” she said. “It wasn't weird.”

I nodded. Then she asked me if I had a boyfriend. I shook my head.

“Well, you're not missing anything,” she said. “It's a pain in the ass.”

I nodded.

She leaned back, and closed her eyes.

 

B
Y LATE
J
UNE
,
we didn't have six hundred people a day. We didn't have five hundred. For three days it rained, and when the sun came back the chairlift malfunctioned and for two days Jacques sold half-price tickets.

My father tallied the gross income from three hundred customers a day on the back of our electric bill, subtracting estimated employee incomes and making various other columns under an all-caps heading, “OVERHEAD,” and concluded that Jacques couldn't be making a profit.

But I thought he was. He had an air of contentment. He spent every morning checking the mechanics of the slide, and he was especially careful about the sleds. He made the maintenance guys check every sled every day—Were the runners straight? Did the brakes work?—which seemed excessive, since each rider had to check the brakes before heading down, and you didn't need a brake. A ride without brakes was a wild ride. We'd all done it, and we all had slide burn as a result. It was a strange wound. Only the first few layers of skin, whatever portion had skimmed the slide—usually the knees, or the backs of the arms, or thighs—and the burns didn't bleed; they oozed pink fluid. They could be as large as a hand or as small as a dime, and they hurt, but only until the EMT in the emergency shack put the iodine on. Then they stung for an instant and pulsed for a few days. They faded to a slippery shine, a pale shade of lilac, and seemed to travel, so that months later you'd be looking for one, to show someone, and it would be somewhere else on your arm, somewhere different from where it had been. Or maybe you'd just remembered it wrong.

Jacques caught me pushing one of mine with a thumb one day when I was working at the bottom of the slide. The day was slow, and everything smelled like heat: the slide, my skin, the dirt that slid along the ground in the breeze. Jacques grabbed my arm, glanced at the burn, and said that it was pretty good. Then he stood next to me and looked around the park. A group of maintenance guys were shuffling by on their way to the sled-repair shack, where they got high between jobs. Jacques watched them go. His feet were spread wide in the dirt and he crossed his arms over his damp shirt. Then he asked me which one of them I had a crush on.

I looked at them. They were all gaunt, except for one, who had dark hair, a paunch, and a soft, dopey look. I shrugged.

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

I watched him walk off toward the waterslide. When he got there, he waved to the people by the pool, of which there were only two, because Amy Goldman and Dave Z. weren't present. Jacques stopped in front of the closed office door. The mat was over the window. He stood there, looking at the mat, for about ten seconds. Then he turned around. He glanced at the chubby, sunburned lifeguard who'd stood up from his stool out of nervousness. “Wrong office,” he said. He turned when he was halfway down the ramp. “If you see Dave Z.,” he said, “tell him to stop by and see me.”

Dave Z. wouldn't tell anyone what Jacques said that day. But after that he made small talk with the customers, cleaned his nails when he thought no one was looking, and said “Please” and “Thank you” when he told us to do something.

 

O
N THE LAST DAY
of June we had a hundred and thirty-two guests. Jacques stopped me as I was delivering a box of cheeseburgers to the waterslide. His face was red from heat, and the fabric under his arms was yellow. He gestured to the people waiting to ride the lift. “You see this?”

I nodded.

His hand dismissed the line. “You'll wish for this in July,” he said. Then he tugged his baseball cap down, put his hands in his pockets, and trudged toward the lodge.

But when the Fourth came it was so humid that the air seemed tinged by the colors of people's clothes. Dewdrops formed on the slide, and every half hour two of us had to ride down pushing towels in front of our sleds with our feet to dry it off. We never closed unless we felt drops or saw lightning—so we were open, but no one came. That night the fireworks above the lake were blurry, and mosquitoes made a faint sound like the echo of a tuning fork.

It wasn't just us. The economy was strong, but our town was dead. The swarm of tourists that had arrived in past years hadn't materialized. The boardwalk at Bear Beach was quiet, the lake a vast blue. Lone motorboats buzzed by empty beaches. Our local news reported that the people who'd come to our town in the past, mostly from Massachusetts, weren't coming now because they had more money now and could go to Europe.

“I could have told him,” my father said. “The alpine slide is just not a great idea. I'm not sure why he thought he could do what no one else could.”

Jacques announced a tightening of the belt. He spoke about the difference between the behavior he'd seen and the behavior he wanted to see. He said that he thought we could work a little harder. He said it with perfect equanimity, and soon afterward Amy Goldman and Dave Z. quarreled. He was going back to college in a month. He was thinking about the future. He wanted to date other people. She gave him an ultimatum. Out of all or nothing, he chose nothing. Now when he spoke to her it was the same way he spoke to everyone else, to tell her to hose out the rest rooms. Their awkwardness would have affected us, but we were busy working hard, which was difficult, since it was quiet and there was little to do.

In mid-July, we each met with Jacques Michaud in his office to see if we'd get a raise. When I went in he was sitting behind his desk, a dinged-up metal one that had been in the basement office for at least ten years. He was smoking a cigar.