Joyland (13 page)

J.P. glanced at Chris, who balled waxed paper and stuck it back in his bag.

“I thought you said Lane wouldn’t go there again.” Reuben arched googly eyes in J.P.’s direction, and Dean snorted, pulling at the elastic on his ponytail as an obvious means to lower his face, brown strands looping and relooping at the back of his head.

“What?” Chris glared at them.

J.P. smirked and wouldn’t meet Chris’s eyes. He pulled his ball cap off and poured water from a jug across the back of his neck, sopping it up with his T-shirt.

Reuben burst: “J.P. said Doyle calls you his squaw.”

“That’s not why I don’t want to go back there,” Chris said. He let the sentence hang like a threat, though stacked next to a word like
squaw
, his ambiguity seemed only more incriminating. He picked up a stick and swiped it through the dirt, drew
tight little circles with it, didn’t look at any of them. He
had masturbated over the girl and then felt guilty about it, the end result heavy as willow bough falling across his lap, the remembered outlines of her bruises swimming up at him reluctantly from the slough. Squirting in one’s own lap over a messed-up — possibly abused — chick wasn’t noble, Chris didn’t need to remind himself. He had wiped it up with an old T-shirt and alley-ooped it —
two points
— into the wicker hamper. The sound of the tossed shirt landed like a sack full of spit, sunk to the bottom and stayed there for days.

The only girl he had ever seen in her underwear. The little hairs on her thighs, her clogged mascara eyelids, spidered the back of his throat, fissured it with flame. Her story hovered in the shade pattern of the overhead light of his bedroom just after his mother had come and switched it off. Blobby and misshapen. The girl who slept on Doyle’s couch. The girl who slept with a dealer twice her age.

“You know why,” Chris said eventually, impatience puffing the words. He tossed the stick aside and stood up, walked away, heat surging up from his body into his face. He turned his back quickly so they wouldn’t see, tried to inject some swagger into his walk as he headed toward the trashcan at the corner of the field to dispose of the remains of his lunch.

When he glanced back, J.P. was twirling his finger in the universal symbol for crazy.

Behind the boys, up by the barn, an unexpected figure had appeared. Chris bit his lip, forehead furrowed, held his breath. The horizon vacillated with veins of heat, as if Chris peered through warped glass.

It was his dad.

Mr. Lane’s stocky figure was unmistakable. He was wearing jeans and steel-toes, a none-too-clean white T-shirt, like he had driven directly from the factory. When he spotted Chris, he used his whole arm to beckon.

The field trudged beneath Chris. Then the field tore.
You don’t find someone in the middle of nowhere unless it’s crucial,
Chris thought, but the thought didn’t have words. The thought was nothing but dirt.

Individual stones of gravel. Chris’s forehead rattled against the glass.

“Yep.” Mr. Lane said it from the back of his throat. He gestured vaguely but Chris didn’t look over. In Chris’s peripheral vision his father’s jaw clenched. Stones drilled the ditch as the car accelerated over the dirt road.

“’Fraid I didn’t drive out here to take you for ice cream. . . .”

The replay of words slogged back and forth through Chris’s brain, his father still squinting into the bright distance like he’d done at the field. They’d stood there, facing each other. A pair of half-pocketed hands for Mr. Lane, false calm, Chris with fists hip-gripped and ribs fiery. His father had told him before he could regain his breath. The effort of crossing from the cornfield to the farmhouse hitched in Chris’s lungs as his father had said it, quietly, his eyes wet as sucked grapes.
“Your grandpa’s dead.”

A woman at the farmhouse had stood monitoring the scene with a garden hose, a tray of blood-coloured petunia perfuming the oily air, her chin digging into her pink shoulder as she strained, cocking her head to listen. Grated breaths piled and eventually regulated. Staring at the soil on his shoes, all Chris could think about was planting one of them far up her cottagey ass. She had twisted the spout to Off and dropped the hose suddenly, walking into the mud room as if she could read his thoughts.

Now the car pulled from the McClellan Sideroad across the highway and into a small dirt lot where Chris knew people parked for car pool if they were driving into the city. Mr. Lane killed the engine and they sat there, the hood ornament facing a sea of dried grass.

“Is Mom meeting us? What are we waiting for?” At least he had come, hadn’t made Chris finish out the day.

Mr. Lane didn’t answer. His front teeth emerged from his upper lip to bite the bottom one. He glared at the landscape before them, a scant wind rustling the bleached knives of weeds. Beyond, telltale lines of green — corn and tomato fields — cut the sky. Behind them, the bunker of the highway. Chris watched what his father apparently watched, the hard grass folding against itself. Acres of it, roiling, dirty yellow.

A series of telephone posts toothpicked the county. Chris’s eyes followed wires like connect-the-dots, as far as he could see. One-o’clock high, a thick sun poured its contents into the car, the air conditioning canned with the ignition. Chris rolled down the window. Light played on the stems in patches, wheat-white and gold. Chris’s father’s father had once driven him to Lake Michigan to sit like this and stare at the waves. It had been mid-February and they didn’t get out of the vehicle, Grandpa Lane hulking in the driver’s seat — swirled in the smell of car grease, stale coffee, and spearmint — religiously fixated on the breakers pounding the peppered beach.

Chris’s eyes fastened reluctantly on his dad — the deep divot in his upper lip, cheeks infinitely slacker than his tense body.

“What was he like, when you were my age?”

“What was
I
like when you were a kid?”

Chris scraped a grubby nail along the armrest. The memory wasn’t much more than a touch, a hand measuring the top of his head against a door frame, his cotton chest when Chris fell asleep against him on the couch in front of the TV.

Mr. Lane’s short, thick fingers caterpillared up and down the steering wheel.

They exchanged looks, Mr. Lane’s eyes briefly bemused.

“The same,” Chris said quickly. “Taller.”

The hand gestured, half off the wheel, rolling back to the knuckles, the upturned shrug of a thumb.
There you go,
it said.
There you go.

Mr. Lane blinked, twice, the smile fading. He pinched the key ring between his thumb and forefinger, jangled it and the engine flipped to life. They pulled out of the lot quickly, as if they’d never been there, the car kicking dust in the side mirror, like the Looney Tunes’ Roadrunner when it zoomed ahead of Wile E. Coyote.

ACME,
Chris thought,
a suitcase-sized home-funeral kit.
He bit his lip though it wasn’t funny.

It would not be the last death, but Chris didn’t know this yet. The one thing a person could count on was death; it never ended. In its silence, the Lane house felt like someone had sucked all the air out of it. The four members of the family walked from room to room, waiting to find out when the funeral would occur. Nobody cried. Even Tammy didn’t cry. She snuck in and out, as if on tiptoe, looking to Chris for clues. Mr. Lane had said very little since he had picked Chris up from the field. Dusk had turned the house swampy with heat; Mrs. Lane took Shake ’n’ Bake out of the oven, nearly dropping the pan as the thin kitchen glove burned through. She bit her cheek from the inside, sucked it into a tight dimple to absorb the pain, extracted her swollen fingers and ran them under cold tap water.

The drumsticks lay on their plates uneaten. Canned green beans swam in water. The chocolate Wagon Wheel Chris had ingested at lunch turned in his stomach. Tammy took her knife and carefully edged the beans away from the instant mashed potatoes. A moat of water and the white and brown pattern on the Corningware formed between the food items as she separated them. Only Mr. Lane picked his chicken clean to the bone. At the end of the meal, the phone rang.

Mrs. Lane jumped up, but Mr. Lane stood slowly. She moved out of his way and he picked it up, but didn’t speak. Chris imagined Uncle Bill, standing in Grandpa’s apartment among his things. Mr. Lane bent over the sideboard, back to the room, one fist supporting him, grunted into the mouthpiece. “Yep. Yep.” When he let the phone fall back onto the hook and faced them, his stony gaze took each of them in separately.

“Saturday.” The word was a sentence.

Chris stared at his plate and didn’t move. He knew he should stand up and clear them. Under the table, Tammy’s running shoe bumped against his leg and rested there, as if she thought it were the stem of the table. He didn’t shake it off. This narrow cavity of time was important, more important than what they would fill it with — tomorrow or the next day — how they would act at the funeral, or in any of the days to come after.

On Friday, the morning of the visitation, Chris went into his parents’ bedroom for the shoe polish, but sat down on their bed kicking his feet instead. His dad stood at the mirror, clearing his throat, knotting and unknotting different ties, all of which made his face look strange and separate, cinched off from his body. For no reason that he knew of, Chris sat there, staring at his father’s back. His shoulders were a stranger’s: a pressed shirt.

As Chris stared, the great body fell into itself, crumbled, came apart. Massive shoulders quivered with unvoiced sobs. Chris’s legs stopped swinging. All of the sound in the house — the shuffling of other rooms, the talk radio down the hall — rushed toward his father. It was absorbed into his silence, where he stood — shaking.

The car edged forward toward the dark mouth of the tunnel. The radio went stop-and-start. Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers dissolved entirely. Mr. Lane reached over and flicked the station off. Portals of light whizzed past. Chris counted each of the bulbs attached to the stone wall. Underwater. Under the Detroit River. Mr. Lane rolled his window down a crack. The smoke of a cheating cigarette crept out. Carbon-monoxide lingered in the tunnel, and beneath the congestion, a liquid heat. The passage between the two countries was a reservoir of stale air.
Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-two, thirty-six, forty . . .
Chris skipped and estimated. He turned his face to the dim interior. The tunnel lights pitched across his parents’ expressions in rippling squares of white and grey: his mother pinched in profile, his father segmented by the mirror, the penumbrae of their heads from behind.

The car slowed as it rounded the corner and joined the line with the rest. In increments, it crept toward the slant of daylight where the tunnel ended. A circuit of booths lay on the borderline, red and green stoplights above each — a string of Christmas lights in the July sun. United States customs officers bobbed in and out.
Where are you from? Where are you heading? How long do you expect to be away?
Without emotion, they waved the Lane car through.

It was a three-hour drive and Tammy was fidgeting. She wore an old summer dress, blue and white with a drop waist. Last year’s ruffles made a rumpled V across her new chest. She pulled the seat belt off and rearranged her clothes. She picked at her nylons, pulled them out away from the sweat of her legs, let them snap back. It was her first funeral. Chris’s Grade-Eight grad suit already felt tight in the shoulders. She turned to him, plucking at the hem of her skirt.

“D’you want to play the alphabet game?”

Chris shook his head.

The sky outside the window was a pale robin’s egg. Beyond the concrete wall of the highway, it was all Chris could see. Detroit protected its neighbourhoods from their tourist eyes, despite the number of times the Lanes drove through it. Chris stared up at the cloudless expanse overhead. Far away, on the other side of the sky, the atmosphere gave way. The blue became airless and black. Chris dropped his forehead against the window, as if he could get closer to that crisp otherworld.

He began to tunnel through it. The layer of air above the station wagon fought him, but eventually he escaped its pressure, penetrated the ether. His shovel scraped. He came up against a coffin where, in Dig Dug, there should only be a rock to stand in his way. Pookas and Fygars paced back and forth in invisible trenches on either side of him. Chris burrowed beneath the chimerical casket, leaving a vacancy where he had passed. The coffin quivered, then collapsed. It plunged through the sky and broke, smashed on the concrete in front of the Lane car. Mahogany thunder rumbled. Splinters separated instantaneously from the varnished box, shot toward the windshield and deflected, clattering, rolled to the shoulder like discarded bones. Brass handles snapped on the cement: small bright boomerangs dinging off the highway divider. Chris’s father changed lanes swiftly, easily avoiding the collision. He reached out and flipped down the sun visor without seeming to notice the obstacle Chris had discovered and dropped across their path.

Chris reclined against the seat with some force.

“Don’t you think black holes are the saddest thing? There’s no matter. They’re collapsed universes.”