Joyland (30 page)

J.P. had shown up just before he left. Tammy was home alone, and hadn’t felt right inviting him into the house. He’d stood there shuffling, until she slowly crossed the threshold and sat with him on the porch steps in her sock feet. They stared at the neighbourhood. He took his ball cap off and on. He’d written his address on a piece of notebook paper he’d tucked inside. It fell out of the hat into his palm, like a magician’s white rabbit. He unfolded it and refolded it and gave it to Tammy.

“Before it happened —” he faltered. “Tell Chris I didn’t rat,” he said, but then he stood up quickly, and loped off. He didn’t look back when he called, “Goodbye, Short Fry,
junior,”
over his shoulder.

Tammy watched the points of his shoulders through his mesh shirt until he rounded the corner back to what was still, however briefly, his own crescent. Tammy guessed the space between his shoulder blades was the length of her hand, and after he was gone, she sat looking at them. She took the address inside and pushed it under Chris’s soccer trophy. When he came home she would tell him it was there. He would unfold it once, look at it, then put it back without saying anything.

Marc hadn’t gone back to school in September. Instead, he had driven his Barracuda to the city, where he was able to get in at one chemical plant or another. In another half year, Tammy would point to the picture in Chris’s yearbook — the one Marc had shown up to have taken, ten minutes after bludgeoning another boy.

“I knew him,” she would say, in proud, scared whisper, to her friends, though it was only half true. “My brother was
there.
” In black and white, Marc’s mouth would be lopsided, between smile and grimace, his eyes vacant. Like everyone else in the book, he would be reduced to a name in ten-point font while he went on living another life. In this case, forty miles away.

Tammy thought about the Rabbit often. In her dreams, he was rounder, a kind of white sphere of a human hurtling through space. He came out of the dark, and Tammy whirled around. Like the spaceship in a game of Asteroids, she felt herself bombarded by something hard as rock. One night she woke to find his ghost in her room, standing at the foot of her bed, his round shoulders and white neck. She lay very still, afraid to ask what he wanted. When she’d gathered the courage to sit up and open her eyes, she saw it was only her new fall coat on the back of the closet door, a pitch of light through the chink in the curtains. She lay back down, turning her face to the mattress, breathing cold, unsure why the sweat wouldn’t stop.

The pebble remained tucked into the mouth of a doll’s oven, and in shame, Tammy never spoke of it or removed it, its intimacy frightful, far greater than any she had definitions for. The doll’s oven would be sold for a quarter, years later, by her mother at a garage sale, and when Tammy asked about it, some time in her early twenties, no one would be able to recall. Another little girl would discover the pebble, put it in her mouth. When her mother asked
did she have something in her mouth?
the girl would swallow it, and it would disappear in the usual way.

Inside the Lane house, Chris was bopping up and down in the recliner — head heavy with the sounds of the boombox in his lap. Around the headphones, notes from Asia’s “Sole Survivor” leaked out. Chris had been playing it with religious fanaticism since J.P. and the Bretons had moved away.

Grade Nine had welcomed Chris into an anonymity of hooded sweatshirts and brown bag lunches. So far as Tammy could discern, being a South Wakefield legend was like tossing a stone into water. The ripples spread ever-outward — lapping, little tongues at the edges of everything — but the stone itself sank. Tammy watched Chris sit on the bottom of this new experience, a cheap set of orange foam headphones plugging his ears. He’d reverted to his earliest incarnation of Chris. Chris the Smart Guy. Chris the Short Fry. Chris the Uncool. The third week of school, the optometrist had assisted in the reassignment of this social order — written him a prescription for glasses. The living room lights glinted in the lenses, as Chris raised and lowered his head. Thick brown frames served as miniature detention houses for permanently closed, music-blind eyes.

Tammy announced her presence to her parents and went outside again. They nodded. Their faces were like flat dark stones in the wavering light of the television.

The bark of the tree was rough against her fingers. In the cold, it was difficult to grasp the branches. Getting all the way up to the Stadium would be impossible. Tammy settled for the Second Fork. She pulled her Walkman up in the basket. She had made a mixed tape of all her favourite songs. It began with The Beatles’ “Blackbird,” and followed with Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock,” “El Condor Pasa,” and “Bookends.” Then it jumped ahead a decade or so to Yoko Ono’s “Goodbye Sadness.” Tammy’s new favourite colour was grey. It was a good, quiet colour. The colour of the skin of trees.

“Dogtown” drummed through the wires. It seemed to Tammy only natural to explore an affinity for Yoko Ono, the object of John Lennon’s affections.
Season of Glass
was Yoko’s first album after John’s death. Tammy had found it mysteriously in her parents’ collection. A photograph of John’s glasses graced the cover, bloodied, uncleaned since the day he’d been shot. A misty cityscape was visible inside the empty lenses, and a half-empty, half-full glass of water. It gave Tammy chills.

Below Tammy, the Scotts’ pool lay sheathed in plastic. A few puddles punctured the flat black tarp that sealed the water underneath. Dunc Scott was away at school, had packed up his El Camino and driven off weeks ago — stalling at the stop sign and then restarting — disappeared down St. Lawrence Street toward the highway. Every morning Diana Scott withdrew in a car that came to pick her up. Tammy would see her run across the yard, feathery hair sprayed stiff, not moving as she ran. At night, its shape re-emerged as she was dropped off. She had finally claimed that exciting teenage life that Tammy had been waiting to bear witness to. And yet, there was so little to watch.

It was five o’clock. On cue, the lights came on in the Stanleys’ front window. At 5:15, the Stanleys’ pale blue K-car turned the corner and plunged down Running Creek Road as though there were some reason to hurry. Tammy knew better. It reached the Stanley house, and George got out. He shut the door of the car and ambled up the driveway. Inside, his shape passed once before the window, a double outline of the man. He became a faint dark spot behind the curtains, then disappeared into the folds of the house like something fading out. Mrs. Stanley — Rita — arrived a few minutes later. She fetched the dog and steered him down the street and back at a brisk walk. Then their door shut. It would not open again all night.

Down the block, a blue bicycle teetered around the corner, topped by a green windbreaker. Though the bike moved very quickly, the rider seemed precarious, distracted by something — maybe a pant leg about to get caught in the chain. As the speck grew closer, Tammy saw it was a boy — she could tell by the way he rode — someone she had never seen before. She leaned out, squinted down, angled her body between the branches.

A soft, exasperated look flushed his face, as though he wasn’t sure where he had ridden to. He was round and twelve in his puffy football jacket. Immediately, Tammy liked that he would ride so fast, then slow down to catch his breath, losing all the time he had worked to gain. She leaned out a little farther on the branch, and as she did so, it shook, let loose a small leafy gasp.

The boy pressed his brakes.

Something powerful went off in Tammy the Spy, just under her skin. Turbulence, radar, a warning signal. The boy did something completely unprecedented.

He stopped and looked up. He spotted her immediately.

She flattened herself against the trunk of the tree, as if she could become invisible again. He stared at her, then smiled. A slow, gradual, pure smile. He raised a hand. It quivered back and forth like a brown leaf on a branch, then he stuck it back in his pocket and rode away. She exhaled deeply: she’d finally been seen.

PLAYER 1

The eave had been replaced, and a lightbox slotted above the new white metal trough that encircled the building. The sheet of blue plastic that had become its face declared in white lettering:
VIDEO PALACE
. A double door had been carved out, presumably to let in more light. Through the glass, Chris could see the white movie stands, boxes hooked between their thin metal fingers. Row on row.

Something swatted Chris’s thigh. Johnny Davis replaced the ball cap on his curly Breton-like head.

“Short Fry,” he said. He leaned against the side of the building, skinnier than ever, cigarette clutched between his teeth. Chris paused, and his parents went on ahead.

“Johnny.”

Johnny sucked on the cigarette, one hand hovering there, trying to decide if it would take the thing out of his mouth or leave it in.

“Goin’ inside?” Chris asked.

Johnny hunched, grinned around the cigarette. He expelled the smoke. “Short Fry . . .” he said. “It ain’t what it was.”

Chris nodded, and nodded again. That was it. All Johnny Davis would ever have. The end glowed, instantly replaced with ash. Chris ducked inside without glancing back.

A new bell sounded — electronic — as he crossed the threshold.

“Popcorn?” A girl in a uniform shirt greeted him. She scooped readymade popcorn out of a big plastic bag — the kind that cost a dollar from Bargain Harold’s. On the little table in front of her, paper lunch bags overflowed. Chris glared at them.

An immense pristine white counter had been installed at the back of the store. Pink and teal stripes raced diagonally down the wall behind white-framed posters of ’50s stars with updos. Under Chris’s feet was a thin new mat of blue carpet. Suddenly, it was hard to say exactly which machines had been where.

Chris dodged a woman with dangling-ball earrings who leaned past him. Her hair was a fluorescent tangerine hat on her head. She looked like the New Wave version of his mom. She tipped a movie box into her hand, and he stepped back.

He approached the looming counter where Mr. and Mrs. Lane were busy obtaining a piece of blue plastic emblazoned with their family name and a membership number.

He stood behind them, off to the side, with them but not. Behind the counter, the girl moved, made the small stiff gestures that promised absolute efficiency to the customer.

“Have a nice night,” she said in rote to the man in front of Chris as he carried three plastic boxes away.
Have,
Chris thought.
Have. A. Nice. Night.
As if it was a thing a person could choose.

PLAYER 2

Two bold dots drifted through a grey universe. In front was a girl in a pink windbreaker and a turquoise skirt dotted with black stars. About a block behind her, just far enough to go unnoticed, followed the boy with the blue down vest and black sweatshirt. She strode ahead, as if something was waiting for her. In the back, the boy’s hood was up, his head seal-like. As he shuffled forward, one hand clutched a pair of glasses inside the Y pocket on the front of his vest. At separate points, they sailed across St. Lawrence Street and headed behind the Joyland/Video Palace to the railroad track.

She had brought him here, led him. In one of her hands, a quarter. She’d always wanted to do this, set it on the tracks and let the train run over it, to see what would happen. She was just balancing the coin on the rail when a boy’s head edged around the building.

“You better not stand way up there,” he yelled. “Train’ll drag you all the way to Detroit.” It was Chris.

“What are you doing here?”

He shrugged. “I followed you.”

Her eyes narrowed, “I
know
that.”

Chris didn’t properly answer.

They sat on a parking block and waited. The coin balanced on the rail, glinting.

Behind them, the Rolling Stones mural had been painted over with white. A knowing eye could still perceive the ghost of outlines through the rollered two coats. Video Palace was closed for the first time since it had opened: Thanksgiving.

Chris chewed his lip and Tammy watched him. Without unpocketing his hands, he ducked his head to one side, wiped his forehead across the shoulder of his vest, and resumed chewing. A thin line of wet darkened the blue nylon. Tammy didn’t say anything. She watched his face waver, then right itself. In the unwritten journals of Tammy the Spy, Chris never cried; he just sniffed back.

“It’s all so big and dumb,” he said, as if they had been talking all along.

Tammy had been practising the art of nodding her head. But this time, she surprised herself.

“I met him once,” she said, simply.

“Don’t lie,” Chris said. He glared at her and then stared off in the other direction. “I mean it,” he threatened, his voice tight, “I mean —”

He took his glasses out and put them on, removed them, and cleaned the lenses on the fleece that hung from beneath his vest like a pouted lip. He was a dumb hero. His killer-for-hire had been killed; at Chris’s inadvertent instigation, sent eternally away from his little sister, who had been in graver danger than Chris ever had. The universe had interfered, a future photo of Tammy now captioned differently than it might have been. She would graduate, not only eighth grade, but twelfth, university, and beyond . . . She would be bright, happy, unbothered, altogether innocent and tough. He could see the other picture of her, the one that belonged to someone else, some other girl for whom life had been harder, a girl with eyes like cold wet rocks. Chris hiccupped (sobbed?) once — kicked at the gravel beneath their feet — and swallowed, as if he could be rid of the details he didn’t want that easily.