Joyland (17 page)

Tammy had developed a bit of an interest in the Olympics, in spite of herself. While Carl Lewis was the obvious favourite, Chris also had an interest in the female athletes. He kept feeding Tammy interesting tidbits, and she kept acting as if she were supremely uninterested. Later, she would find herself requoting them with great authority — for Jenny’s benefit of course.

“Did you know that between 1926 and 1966 women were barred from marathon-running? They thought women were physically incapable, that their health would be placed in jeopardy if they were allowed to compete,” Tammy echoed. “In 1966 Roberta Gibb ran, but she had to sneak in.”

Chris had memorized the women runners’ previous race times as if they were poster girls’ measurements. It all came down to American Mary Decker and South African Zola Budd, who was running for Great Britain.

“Well, duh,” Tammy sassed, like Chris hadn’t pasted up pictures and stats all over his corkboard since Decker won the World Championship in the Soviet Union the year before.

Cross-legged at the coffee table, Tammy markered a marquis on a sheet of typing paper. Inside it, Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man kissed. Their bodyless heads streamed with motion lines, as if they had just glided in, one from either side. The only difference between them was her pink hair bow and a long extra line behind her, a notion of greater acceleration behind her blank yellow face. Below the decapitated couple, four ghosts stood, ablaze with their names, like movie stars. Tammy plucked turquoise and yellow markers from her pack and added light lines to the frame, a flashing facade.

She half-watched the race and half didn’t. She got excited when events were introduced, but they took too long to finish, and she lost interest. She was marking a heart between he and she when Chris shouted. Tammy looked up in time to watch Mary Decker nosedive onto the grass on the inside of the track, hands spread out in front of her.

“Jesus!” Chris yelled.

Mrs. Lane ran in from the kitchen, where she’d been attempting the art of from-scratch microwave lasagna, one eye trained on the screen of the microwave, and one ear tuned to the TV in the living room. There was a snapping in the room as Chris turned the knob back and forth between the Canadian and American channels, trying to get the best coverage. A strange smell began to permeate the household, and in the other room the microwave wailed.

Tammy fled the scene. Outside, she grabbed hold of the bottom branch, swung up into the green folds of the tree. Branches pulled her muscles out and up past the third fork in the trunk, into the place she had named the Stadium, because she could sit on one branch and use a lower parallel one as a footrest. This lookout point faced the park, far away across six rooftops. In the evenings, she could often see baseball practices, dark figures circling like tiny dots.

But it was still afternoon and the only place to look was down, at the Scotts’ pool, where Diana was lounging face down on the blue raft, blue water behind her pitching light up at Tammy. It took a full ten seconds before Tammy realized why Diana was face down.

Beneath her long thin body lay another body. It seeped out from under Diana like a second skin she was shedding. It was male — Tammy knew by the leg hair, plastered in black trails across its shins. The two were lying very still, which was why, at first, Tammy didn’t see him. She watched as Diana’s long brown hair swung sideways. Their mouths stuck together in an ugly, sinewy tunnel of tongue. Tammy didn’t know the boy, and there was something about him that didn’t seem real, the way his head reclined, his expression unmoving even as his cheek muscles flexed in accommodation of their union. Diana’s body seemed to be sealed to his, in spite of the bathing suits that clung to them, darkly, wetly. It was their skin that bothered Tammy, the nonchalant closeness of it. Diana raised herself from the waist up and Tammy focused on the gold V between them where their navels faced off, subcontiguous. Rising above, a purple bikini top. Below, their abdomens sealed in nylon that seemed superfluous. They were like morphed creatures.

Twigs snapped as Tammy hurried to exit the tree. Partway down, she stopped to see if they were still at it. At that moment, he moved. One hand, spreadeagle, clenched the slick fabric over Diana’s bum. The other grasped one handle of the raft. With a sudden twist he rocked to one side and rose above her, thrusting them both into the water with a shriek, sending the floater jetting into the air. When they emerged from the bubbles, she clung to him laughing, their hair plastered like plastic helmets against their heads. Tammy watched hands moving underwater, like little goldfish. The boat floated upside down, bottomside white.

Inside, on her bed, Tammy played the scene over and over again. As much as she tried to stop it, it seeped in, circling.
Is love so careless?
she wondered. One day there was no one, and the next, there you were, sprawled out on top of one another. Somehow she always thought there’d be more dates, more roses, more time in-between. This was what she had been waiting for, and now it sank to the bottom of her stomach with the heaviness of a candied apple. Through the walls, she could hear Chris changing channels. The ongoing commentary on Zola and Mary. She felt hot and sticky inside. She lay face down on the pillow and pushed her pelvis against the mattress until she could feel the sun move off in the other direction. She closed her eyes, and half-naked bodies merged with the bodies of runners. When she opened them again, it was evening. She could hear the sound of Chris playing the Atari. It sounded like an electronic fireworks, and clapping, like something large and real.

Jenny put down the pink plastic horse she had been manoeuvring across the beige carpet. She moved closer to the television, her eyes on the back of Chris’s shoulders. Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Sue poured from the box in the centre of the screen and milled through the maze, Atari-retarded, not exactly hell-bent on haunting him. Chris steered the yellow head around the dividers, gobbled a power pellet, and crunched two ghosts in quick succession. Tammy’s blue horse reared back on its hind legs. It was almost unthinkable, someone feeling toward her brother the way Tammy felt about Bo from
The Dukes of Hazzard.
Even more emphatic was Tammy’s crush on Face from
The A-Team.
Tammy had written the actor’s name in her best cursive again and again:
Dirk Benedict, Dirk Benedict, Dirk and Tammy.
Jenny leaned in on one hand, closer to Chris and the Atari console. Tammy imagined her going home and writing:
Christopher Lane, Chris Lane, Chris and Jen.

Unless Chris was present, Jenny didn’t pay much attention to the Atari, or to video games of any sort. In the first days of their new best-friendship, Tammy boasted about having been to Joyland and, especially, having been there on closing day. Portioned out and wrapped in whispers, these bits of information were given like love notes, or like small frantic stories about sex. An exchange of information not meant for adult ears. But they meant very little to Jenny, were received like obligatory valentines. If Jenny’s older brother had frequented the arcade, he had not passed on its legacy in the way that Chris had. Jenny was that one child of ten unaffected by the trends and passions of her peers. Mouse Trap, Q*bert, Donkey Kong: she had little interest in playing any of them. The matter was simple. There weren’t any horses in the games.

“Let’s go outside,” Tammy declared, standing. Jenny looked up at her blankly. She glanced back at the pointed white shoulder blades of Chris’s T-shirt as she followed Tammy out.

As the heads of Chris’s hockey sticks emerged from the garage, they became Arabian stallions. The girls galloped up and down the driveway. Every time, the game followed the same pattern. Jen’s horse was named Shadow, Tammy’s, Speed.

1. They encountered villains. Beneath their running shoes, asphalt sank into the sands of foreign beaches. The girls could outride every trouble, and as they fled, their steeds’ hooves pounded louder than their sneakers, threw up dust in their wake. Each became one with her horse, ribs heaving as the horses’ would, hair warm from the sun. The Scotts’ front lawn was a green ocean, their backyard, a hidden mountain stream always beyond the girls’ reach, much though their horses yearned to drink there and kept returning to the outback, a sparse line of bushes to peek through and nose between.

2. They discovered other horses. Beautiful as their own, but roaming free and wild, Jenny and Tammy coveted them, torn between their faithful animals and these. In the end they vowed to capture and train them alongside their own.

3. They were watched. The day of the horses’ capture, they discovered the animals were smarter than they’d credited. The failing effort to seize the horses was being monitored by secret trainers. This was the scenario with which they met Lucas Wolf and Jonathon Rider, who — thankfully — bore absolutely no resemblance to guys Jenny and Tammy had ever seen, and who eventually would become their boyfriends. At this time, there was much riding off alone and hand-holding with imaginary figures, arms thrust out from their sides. Triumphant one-sided fists represented the entwined.

By August, they’d allowed the game to morph.

1. Their horses were actually unicorns that had existed in a disguised state for centuries in order to protect themselves from extinction.

2. The girls retained their pretend potential boyfriends, but under no circumstances was the secret revealed to them.

Even this variation began to grow tiresome as the summer continued to rear its straw-coloured head. The day after the Zola-Mary incident, Tammy miraculously conceived of a new plot. It broke tradition right at the beginning of the game.

1. Instead of a glorious flight to safety along the beaches and into the mountains, they were overtaken.

2. The horses were set loose by the perpetrators, and

3. The girls were gagged and taken hostage.

“Why did they take us hostage?” Jenny struggled against the invisible bonds on her wrists and ankles.

“I don’t know . . .” Tammy called from the maple tree where they’d tied her. “They want something from us?”

“They let our horses go.”

“Then they must want something else.”

The plot always took shape like an uncharted pattern. They could see the twists and turns before they occurred, yet once they followed it, they could rely only on quick manoeuvring to get them out of corners. Jenny and Tammy both knew they were in a corner now, and though Tammy couldn’t put a name to it, she was certain they were thinking of the same escape.

The grass at Tammy’s feet was tufted and dry as she shrugged. Jenny shimmied closer, crab-walking on what were supposed to be bound hands.

“They want us?”

In the next five minutes, the deed was done, two effective invisible men had entered the garden dungeon, forced Jen’s and Tammy’s legs apart, and taken the thing they knew so little about. With as much struggle as the girls could provide — “We’re bound, remember?” — they lay beneath the maple, about three yards away from one another, watching each other’s knees slowly bend outward as unseen hands assaulted. Tree boughs swayed against the sky. The pale green underside of maple leaves flicked against bold blue as Tammy imagined him — a faceless, nameless powerful Him — rising over top of her there. She closed her eyes.

Tammy found out later the Him was Jonathon Rider after all. She had found a new game plan for meeting them.

PLAYER 1

Twenty-four bottles of Bud stood guard over the Breton basement, empties and fulls lined up on the table like opposing football teams. Adam Granger was the provider, everyone’s second-best supplier of illicit things. If the boys couldn’t find Doyle, they could probably get Adam Granger to buy them alcohol. If they couldn’t find J.P.’s brother Marc, they could probably get Adam Granger to drive them to the arena or Circus Berzerk. If they couldn’t get any of the girls in their class to go out with them, they could probably get Adam Granger to tell what going out with them was like.

He was eighteen years old and dating Cindy Hambly, who’d been in Chris’s class since kindergarten. Cindy Hambly was the one and only girl Chris Lane had ever danced with —
Eyes-like-Lake-Michigan,
according to the last graffitied page of his Grade Seven Science textbook in conjunction with fumbled imaginings. Certainly there were crasser things he could have written. Eyes-like-Lake-Michigan had almost kissed him in a birthday party closet, a game of two minutes, but he’d shifted into shy mode after six seconds and burst through the door before her lips reached further than the nib of one embarrassed earlobe. Unfortunately, Cindy turned faster than an American Flyer miniature train. The little engine that could — and did — the memory now stashed behind a wall of garage junk in Chris’s brain. That winter, she had dated David White, who fell from her list after waving his finger around under all the boys’ noses. Adam was the solution to the Grade Eight graduation, but, in spite of his guest pass, he’d been turned away at the door. His exclusion had only served to endear him further to Cindy.

Adam had been charged for statutory rape, though not convicted. His previous girlfriend, Amy Leeland, had been thirteen. He got off because, at the time, he’d been seventeen. How seventeen and thirteen were any different from eighteen and fourteen, no one really knew. But he was definitely chargeable now. Why Cindy Hambly’s father hadn’t torn Adam into bite-sized pieces already, J.P. and Chris could only speculate.