Joyland (10 page)

“She’s warm.”

J.P. let out a low whistle.

Chris stared at the petal-shaped bruises on her thighs. She was dark-haired. Short black shoots flecked her skin, pricking out like thorns — especially the top inside of her thighs, along the neat pink seam of her cotton underwear — as if she’d shaved them, but not today.

“You think they were doing it?” Chris whispered, barely daring to force the words out.

J.P. pulled a face.

“Should we cover her back up?”

Humidity poured the night out, cherry-cough-syrup thick. The image of the girl’s body burned in Chris’s throat like whisky. The boys hung their feet over the edge of the railway bridge, watched their sneakers kick back and forth over the water as it got darker. Even thinking of her made Chris dizzy. He could still feel the warmth of her skin on his fingertips.

Reuben and Dean Easter showed up from selling beadwork chokers and armbands at the festival downtown. Reuben had just buzzed off all his hair, perhaps to differentiate himself from his twin, and J.P. and Chris passed their fingers over it, rattling their lips until the joke grew tired. In exchange for feathered roach clips and beaded soft leather, J.P. and Chris shared their stash — a glorious forty-ouncer, because Doyle hadn’t been coherent enough to remember what they’d paid him.

“Make sure they don’t ask for the stuff back later,” J.P. said under his breath.

Technically, the Easters weren’t Native — “Indian.” Their mother had lost her status when she left the reserve five miles to the west, married her second husband — a Whitey — and settled in town. But it made no difference. In South Wakefield, you had only two options. You were white or you were Indian. And if you looked it, you were it, no matter where else you’d been. Everything shuttled back and forth between town and reserve: love, hate, babies, school buses, racial slurs, cheap cigarettes, knife fights — a border relationship equal to any existing between two trading countries. For about thirty seconds, Chris contemplated pushing J.P. off the bridge. Although Reuben was twice J.P.’s weight, he pretended he hadn’t heard over the first flock of fireworks. Dean was sitting farther away — Chris silently thanked God, because Dean was even bigger and never would have swallowed something like that.

Back and forth they passed the hooch, bright liquid inside a dark bottle. “To Joyland.” Coca-Cola Vicks Vapor Rub. They managed about six slugs each before Chris became completely jumbled, with each gulp feeling a little more possibility that the fireworks would spray down and knock him in the forehead, leave a glowing mark. When he closed his eyes, all he could see were the bruises on the thighs of the girl on Doyle’s couch. But neither J.P. nor Chris said a word about her.

“What’re ya gonna do now, Lane?”

The question came out of nowhere. Chris passed the whisky bottle on to Reuben, almost dropping it into his lap. J.P. and Dean snickered.

“What?” Chris tipped his head back. The night had gotten as smoky as he was drunk, the fireworks’ final shootout already lapsing into a memory.

“With your summer.”

Chris shrugged. “What’re you gonna do?”

Dean threw his arms back-forward in a strangely graceful slo-mo, casting an imaginary line across the thin river. What was Joyland to him?

“Catchin’ three-eyed fish,” Reuben qualified, practically singing. “You should see ’em! Holy . . . Covered in tumours! You dunno what they dump in that river up there.”

“Yeah, go on.”

“Kill us all,” Dean nodded, his face a disgusted fraternal twin to Reuben’s animation. “Poison their own fucken workforce.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll prob’ly get a job,” J.P. said, to Chris’s surprise. When Chris asked him about it again at the end of the night, on the corner where they parted ways, J.P. shrugged before he stumbled off.

Three days later J.P. was doing the six-to-ten shift at Twiss’s Gas ’n Go, the self-serve directly across from the dormant Joyland building. Legally, he wasn’t old enough to work alone, but after his first two shifts, he did anyway. Through the chrome frame of the cubicle, his skinny limbs floated out of a ghost-white T-shirt, an oversize Hanes of his dad’s. The red regulation windbreaker hung on the hook behind him, the white thread of logoed letters folded up on themselves.

Chris parked his bike against the booth, out of view of the street. In the lit Plexiglas cube, the two of them sat, passing a pocket game back and forth. Epoch Man. J.P. took a pack of smokes off the shelf, unwrapped the cellophane.
Players’ Light. Montreal.
He used a lighter from the little plastic sales bin, and then put it back. The open pack flipped in Chris’s direction, but his thumbs were busy. J.P. picked up a different Bic and lighter-flicked in quick succession, watching the blue-gold flame’s instant growth. It rose and vanished, rose and vanished, leaving behind the smell of a gun. A couple of cars pulled up and J.P. took the money. They didn’t need change. They didn’t want receipts. Chris watched bugs gather beneath the station lights like grey haphazard stars. Across the road, the eave had come further loose, and Joyland seemed to have sunk into itself even more.

“If Mr. Twiss thinks you were in the booth, I’ll get in trouble,” J.P. said, holding the smoke in for longer than a half second this time. He blew it out the cash window. “You should get out of here before we close. Twiss comes back for the float.”

J.P. may have been the first to have a job, but Pinky Goodlowe was the first to have a girlfriend. Chris found them sitting on a parking block together outside the variety store where she worked, Pinky’s legs spread wide around the bulge in his Adidas. She leaned her crimped head against his shoulder, one of her flat eraser thumbs casually trailing the area inside and above his knee. The phallic swirl of Nike bounced up and down on each of Pinky’s long white basketball shoes. He’d never committed fully to either brand, had apparently been saving all commitment for her, this large and sudden girl named Donna Jean Tripp.

From a distance, Chris could see her licking his neck, a raw hamburger tongue slipping out of her mouth. Chris’s insides did a slow rotation between revulsion and fascination. As he drew closer, he brought his bike to a slow cruise and waited for Pinky to put a halt to her molestation. A signature of acne scrawled across her sunburnt face. She was one of those girls with skin the same colour as her lips. She looked like she could be the older sister Pinky didn’t have. As Chris approached them and stopped, he saw there were two distinct blue cables on the underside of her tongue. He would think of them long after. Pinky put his arm around her and pulled her closer to him, her head into the crook of his neck, until she became little more than a red mark upon him and Chris couldn’t see her face anymore.

When the gang asked Pinky later what he was doing with her, This Donna, Pinky said she had let him masturbate her with a pencil. He had gone in to buy a Coke, and they had just been talking, hanging out. She had asked him for his number. She handed him a pencil. He told her she had to put it down her shorts, if she wanted his number so badly. He said he wouldn’t write with it unless it smelled like her.

“I dunno,” Pinky sputtered, “I was so
totally
kidding, and then she, like,
did it
, man. She did.”

Chris bit his lip. “That’s vile.” He snickered anyway. He closed his eyes and thought of Laurel Richards, but the pencil only fit behind her ear, or the end of it tapped against her teeth, pausing between her lips.

“Was it wet?” David asked, authority and skeptic simultaneously.

“Dripping.”

“Love built to last,” Kenny had scoffed.

But it did last. The next day Pinky was still hanging out with This Donna. The whole gang of them, including the girl, stood around outside of the booth at Twiss’s until J.P. yelled at them to get the hell away before they got him fired.

They distanced themselves by forty feet at most, taking up residence on the curb. With a doggish grin, David pulled a pencil out of his jean-jacket pocket and slipped it under Donna just before she sat down. She didn’t notice it. Her pink thighs pulped beyond garbardine seams.

“Hey,” David said, “you’re sitting on my pencil.” Giggles. She lifted up one of her sweatpocked legs, ruby pinpricks where she’d shaved. The yellow wood rolled away in two pieces. David snorted into his palm. Even Chris tried not to laugh, his head ducking against his ribbed shirt collar.

This Donna’s face didn’t blink.

“What are you on?” she said to David, seriously, nostrils flaring. Pinky flamed silently, thick ears scarlet. This Donna stood up.

“Your friends are really — really —
juvenile.”
She stalked off. Synchronized to her pace, Kenny’s lips exploded with the puffed air of elephant footsteps. They looked at Pinky, laughing, but instead of joining in, he got up and followed her.

“I better catch up with my old lady,” he mumbled before he went. It didn’t matter that his old lady was only sixteen. Chris could imagine what she would look like in three or four years. Already a wall of acne separated her from them. At any rate, the words
old lady
sounded natural when they fell from Pinky’s tongue, like he had a history with a girl he’d just met, like the future was already fixed.

“You think she did the pencil trick?” Kenny asked when they were long gone.

Chris glanced over his shoulder at J.P. in the booth, arms propellered over the inside glass with a spitty Windex bottle. When he told him about it later, J.P. just shrugged.

A. J. Mitchum Fabricating, the door said in black-and-gold Lettraset. The office smelled of tuna fish and solvent. A woman got up from a desk behind the wood-panel reception counter and peered at Chris with exasperation. Huge gold barrettes stapled into a bush of red hair. On the desk behind her, a half-finished sandwich waited wordlessly on waxed paper.

“I’m interested in summer employment,” Chris said.

“I don’t know nothin’ ’bout what they want,” the woman with the squirrel eyes and squirrel hair told him. “Y’over sixteen?” He nodded. She gave him a knowing look. “We already took a buncha students, so I don’t know if we’re hiring any more. We got an application I can dig out for you,” she said. She glanced back at her desk, but there was nothing on it except for the sandwich. “You’re better off just go round back and ask. Check the tables. Ask for Mr. Abell.”

Across the parking lot, Chris could make out the picnic tables embedded in a patch of green grass spotted with white petals. One short bulky man sat there, a paper painter’s cap atop his round head, a can of pop in his hand. When Chris got closer, he saw that the man was actually a woman, and the confetti on the ground, cigarettes. Chris kept walking.

A couple of guys in ball caps were smoking at the top of a concrete ramp outside a huge rollback door. A gust of heat heaved out into the summer afternoon. It was dark inside, and Chris could see dirty coveralls moving around. A guy inside the dark square gazed over, a pair of dark eyes underneath glasses underneath safety goggles. Then something sparked — followed by a whole shower of sparks — and his face burst bright for a second as he quickly looked back at his hands. Chris physically jumped as metal on metal clanged.

The two guys outside the door eyed him.

“Are you Mr. Abell?” Chris asked the less dirty of the two. The guy held his cigarette like a joint. As soon as Chris asked, he realized the stupidity of the question.

The guy shrugged, shook his head, took another puff from the cigarette cradled between thumb and forefinger. He dropped it at his feet but left it burning. The other guy just smirked.

Chris walked away from the noise in the hole. He headed back past the picnic-table woman. A scrapyard yawned at the other end of the lot. It had been studiously scoped out on previous excursions with J.P. Climbing over railroad ties, scrap wood and metal, they’d entered illegally from the back. They’d planned to lug home materials, build something. Once they’d been yelled at to get off the property. The other time, they’d abandoned a couple of half-rotten wooden flats in a field when they grew tired of dragging them. This time, Chris could say he was looking for Mr. Abell.

Beyond the fence, wood and metal pronged out of the half-dirt half-asphalt yard: misshapen molds, tubs, gears, gigantic packing crates, boards, poles, and wires. A big guy was dragging flats back and forth, stacking and restacking them. Chris froze, hovered three inches from the corner of the building. The wooden flats made a fat
smack smack
when thrown atop one another. The guy bent to grab one of the skids. He hefted it above his head, then slung it on top of the others. The pile wavered, and the guy reached out and steadied it with one hand before it could topple. In profile, Chris could see it was J.P.’s older brother, Marc.

Slouching against the building, Chris tried to decide if he should go over. He watched Marc reach up, pull down the flat he’d just stacked. He lugged it across the yard and lay it where it had been — against the building with a bunch of others. Chris ducked back. Marc went and pulled another flat, carried it, leaned it. Pulled, carried, leaned. Pulled, carried, leaned. When he’d unstacked the entire group, Marc began again. Unleaned, carried, heaved into a stack. Unleaned, carried, heaved into a stack.
Smack, smack. Smack, smack. Smack, smack.