Joyland (18 page)

The Hamblys were going through a divorce. Not the loud, messy kind, but the kind that snuck up from behind one day, grabbed your arms and jammed a knee in your back — for no reason, just like that, matter-of-fact — and you suddenly found yourself in a full nelson, your head pressed halfway to your knees and your breathing laboured. Except, Chris and J.P. guessed, if you were married to the person, you couldn’t just yell “uncle” and get let back up. When the Hamblys were home, they moved between rooms like robots, their jaws constantly hanging open and nothing coming out, their arms reaching jerkily to change the channel or to press two-dollar bills into Cindy’s palm. The boys assumed that if the Hamblys even noticed what Cindy was doing, they were probably just too consumed by their own problems to care. Even at the time, Chris wondered if there was a distinct dividing line. In the same way that parents were oblivious to kids’ lives, kids were oblivious to theirs.

J.P.’s brother Marc could barely tolerate Adam. He cut out early, barely glancing at their crude pre-Adamic circle of canned pop and Doritos bags.

“Find something to do without
Fairyland
?” Marc oozed irony. He knew full well that within an hour they would be soused, snorting beer through straws, lying on the thin carpet that covered the basement’s cement floor. At least they were using Adam, Marc said, as much as he was using them.

“Bottom-feeder,” he called Adam behind his back. Marc would hawk up phlegm wherever they were standing, the green splooge like a snail-trail of Ghostbusters’ slime.

“Watch out for guys like Granger,” he warned Chris and J.P. with what seemed like unwarranted severity. “They’ll steal the girls your age that you could be dating. They’ll suck them up and they’ll fucken — what’s the word? —
effluviate
them. By the time you’re my age, those girls will be gone. You won’t know what happened to them. If they don’t get knocked up and disappear, they’ll get worn down ’til they evaporate. I’ve seen it before. There were guys like Granger, older than me, when I was your age.”

In spite of his moral righteousness, Marc was hardly a paragon of virtue. Once he had hidden inside the garage and hit J.P. in the chest with a two-by-four. J.P. had told their mom it was Marc who’d left the tire tracks in the front lawn. J.P.’s sobs were hiccupy, high-pitched but held back behind his teeth — desperate-sounding, like a dog’s sharp whimpering — buried deep inside his throat. That was the first time Chris had seen J.P. cry. He remembered when he was eight or nine, that everybody cried at some point — over scrapes, or losing, or not being allowed to have something — and how it had been a defining moment to any friendship. People weren’t really friends unless tears had been shared. Whether Marc had more respect for honest girls than he did for honest guys, J.P. and Chris didn’t know. Marc’s grand theories on What Women Are and What Women Want went untested, mostly because girls were too frightened of him to give him a chance. This was J.P.’s theory. He had never overheard a tittering phone call, yet had often put up with unyielding punishment.

But when Marc said the supply of girls worth having would dry up if Adam Granger didn’t stop “dating down,” Chris had to admit, he had a point.

Now, Adam lounged against the brown floral couch, massive arms hooked back in a display of wingspan like no one else left in their flock. When not one female had arrived at the party by 10 p.m., Adam looked like he was suffering major withdrawal.

“Shhh-i-i-i-i-t,” he said, his feet like battleships on the horizon of the coffee table. “You guys should be grateful. Just starting your first year of high school. Don’t know nothin’. All that pussy waiting for you. Fucken,
everything
waiting for you . . .”

He leaned back, sucked hard on the short brown stogie as if it were a candy stick between his thick fingers. Chocolate-smelling smoke wafted up into his ash-brown hair, and he seemed to turn greyer and greyer with each passing moment. The boys afforded him a silence that could easily be mistaken as awe. They nodded their heads, sipped the bounty Adam had generously bestowed upon them.

“Know what I’m gonna do?” Adam said. He leaned forward, dropped the stub down inside an empty. Smoke rose out in an undefeated wisp. He put one fat thumb over the mouth of the bottle. The brown vapor withered inside the brown glass. “I’m gonna call Cindy. She’ll bring some friends for you guys.”

J.P. kicked Chris under the coffee table. “Scumbag,” he mouthed across the table. Adam was supposed to have called Cindy before he’d come. Apparently he’d been hoping they would coax out some new girls on their own whom he could meet.

Chris heard them before he saw them. The girls. He couldn’t tell how many, or who, besides Cindy, because she was the one talking the loudest. J.P. sprinted upstairs to get the door. Chris sussed them out, shuffling about in the foyer taking off their running shoes. Cindy thumped down the stairs. Behind her jubilance, the other girls threw hesitant shadows against the panelling. The light in the front hall pitched a bright patch across their feet, only their white socks visible from where Chris sat. One pair of sport socks with delicious banana-yellow stripes, two pairs of plain white, and one ankle pair of luminescent pom poms.

Freshly shaven knees brought her down to him on the set of yellow stripes. As they descended, Chris processed the flutter of feathers before he saw their faces. Soft pink wisps billowed on thin leather strands around white cotton shoulders and attached to a roach clip, which in turn attached to the short black hair of Laurel Richards.

When she reached the centre of the room, the light fanned out, framing her face in rose tendrils. The sleeves of her white jacket were pushed up to the elbow, bunching her shoulders out with the extra material. Bangles tangled as her hands clasped in front of her black T-shirt, tightly, in such a way she looked as if she was trying to hide the nails Chris had noted months ago were torn ultra-short from chewing.

She looked at him. All the sound had been sucked from the room, as if into a vortex. He didn’t trust his voice, so he leaned forward and nodded. He hoped he didn’t look like one of those old-time bobbing dolls with its head separate from its body. Even if he did, it didn’t matter. She had come.

LEVEL 9:
VENTURE

PLAYER 2

It was Tammy’s idea that she and Jenny should ride their hockey horses as far as Mr. Sparks’.

Mr. Sparks lived around the corner across from the park. To ride the horses there was not at all like taking their bikes. Taking their bikes would be an obvious sign they had gone missing in action. Leaving them meant Tammy’s parents would assume they were close at hand, not galloping as far away as the park. If they looked for Tammy, it would have been at the Scotts’ or the Stanleys’, or even the VanDoorens’, but definitely not at the Bretons’, and especially not at Mr. Sparks’. Tammy did not consider all of these factors.

She simply said, “Hey, let’s ride to Mr. Sparks’.”

He had just driven by in his Corvette, honking as he rounded the corner. At the stop sign, the window slid down into the door as if melting from the heat.

“Hee hah,” Mr. Sparks called, his thumb and finger hooked in a pistol shape toward the hockey sticks between the girls’ legs. He winked above the mirrored sunglasses he’d let slide down his nose.

“Hi ho, Silver!” He pushed the shades up again, gunned the engine, and drove past.

Tammy sighed. “Cool car.” Intrigued by the decadence of automatic windows, she galloped out into the street and stared after the shiny ass of the white vehicle.

“Awesome,” Jenny said. She lifted her hockey stick up and let it fall. The butt of it banged the concrete, tapped to some kind of tune in her head. “How do you think he knew they were horses?”

Tammy turned her horse, Speed, in the direction the car had disappeared. “Hey, let’s ride to Mr. Sparks’,” she said. Without waiting for Jenny to mount her stick, Tammy was off.

Mr. Sparks was like Buck Rogers if Buck Rogers lived on Earth. He flew past in his white shuttle to unknown destinations. On the TV show, Buck was accompanied by his ally, Hawk, the stoic half-man half-bird with a feather cap for hair. On Earth in the 1980s, Mr. Sparks was a lone man, travelling in his space probe, seeking the lost tribes. Tammy had patiently waited to be discovered, a singular remaining human foraging for friends in the aftermath of the nuclear apocalypse that had occurred, if only in her heart. She imagined wherever Mr. Sparks arrived — the Shell Station to refuel, or the Metropolis Diner downtown — there must be half-clad women with incredibly large hair waiting to brief him on the planetary status and what his next mission might entail.

Even after the show went into reruns, Tammy wanted to be Buck Rogers’ colonel, Wilma Deering. She envied actress Erin Gray’s crinkled space coveralls. Tammy had only the velour halter-shortset that looped around her neck, the elastic top of which occasionally snuck to nipple-level if she wasn’t careful. However, with the help of a borrowed can of hairspray, she was the hair queen on the edge of the stratosphere. Anyone with shoulder-length hair could do a ponytail on one side, but Tammy had once fashioned two on the same side, bunked over top of one another, each with a cherry-red bobble.

“Weirdo,” Chris said when Tammy walked into the room.

“Goof.” She’d gone outside to sit on the porch, waited for Mr. Sparks to drive by, recognize her as his futuristic equal, and invite her into his space car. He would zip them off to some other city where they would eat hot dogs, play skeetball, and go roller-skating. She was ten then. Mr. Sparks had not driven by on that particular day, nor on any other occasion had he stopped to admire Tammy’s radical sense of being, her aptitude for adventure (namely tree climbing), or her ability to stop, drop, and roll. By the age of ten, these were the only survival skills she had acquired, unless Monopoly counted. Now she was eleven and seven months, she assured herself, almost old enough to menstruate, and that meant nearly a woman. With or without Jenny in tow, she was determined to show off her invisible-steed equestrian skills.

“Howdy gals,” Mr. Sparks grinned. The corners of his mouth pushed up in mild amusement. His hands went to his hips as he slouched against the compact, curvy vehicle. He wore work clothes: blue dress pants, short-sleeved white shirt, skinny pink tie already loosened.

“We’re not cowgirls,” Tammy informed him. “We ride Arabians.”

“Oh really? I guess you don’t wear spurs then.”

He winked at her. Heat surged into her cheeks.

“Of course not,” Jenny piped in. “We wear Kangaroos.” She gave her feet a shuffle to show off the brand of the back-to-school shoes she was already wearing.

“Well, if you’re sure you’re not wearing spurs, I guess you won’t wreck the carpets. You can come in for some grub — say, what do Arabian riders eat anyway?”

“Pizza?” Jenny asked hopefully.

“Mangoes,” Tammy answered, her tone an admonishment to Jenny’s woeful lack of authenticity.

“Mangoes and pizza.” Mr. Sparks smirked, and pushed off the car. He swaggered toward the squat brick house with brown awnings, a place Buck Rogers would never have lived, even before being frozen in ice half a millennia before the twenty-fifth century. “Have you ever seen a mango?” he called back over his shoulder. “I don’t think you’d like them.”

The girls followed him up the porch steps. His keys swayed and jingled as he twirled them, his big thumb thrust though the ring. Jenny tugged on the back of Tammy’s T-shirt ever so discreetly. Tammy knew what Jenny wanted without looking at her. She knew Mr. Sparks better than Jenny did. This was her neighbourhood. They weren’t ever supposed to go anywhere with strangers, but Mr. Sparks wasn’t a stranger.

“Don’t worry, girls,” he said as he unlocked the front door. “Your horses will be fine right here. This is where I tie mine all the time.” He nodded to the alcove where the door dropped into the brick, out of sight from the street.

Tammy stood her hockey stick next to the mailbox and Jenny followed suit.

“Will you show us your car?” Tammy asked, determined to detain him before he disappeared forever into the realm of the ordinary — with his bathroom exactly like the Lanes’, and his dinette set, and his television.

He smiled. “Of course,” he said. “After.”

After what?
the girls didn’t ask. Then he was inside. He held the screen door for them. Jenny and Tammy gave each other a quick
what now?
glance. Then they, too, were inside.