Joyland (22 page)

“Get — the — fuck — out!” Marc whispered, the words almost inaudible in Chris’s shock. From where Chris lay, J.P.’s older brother was an evil force towering over them, at least ten feet tall and capable of sucking all the blood out of the room with those four whispered words.

Chris left Laurel’s body only because she sprang away from him. Apparently he could come out as easily as he’d gone in. The evidence of what they’d been doing lay against his left leg.

Before Chris could move, Marc had him by two handfuls of T-shirt, ripped him from the bed.

“You get that shit in my bed? In
my
bed?” Marc knocked him against the wall. A crack of heat heaved through the back of Chris’s skull.

Laurel flew across the room to the dresser, her shorts suddenly up, her shirt suddenly straightened. She tremored there for a second; Chris saw her hesitate, then more heat.

Marc pinned his throat with one elbow. “What’s this?” he asked, reaching down between them.

Not that,
Chris thought. “Don’t —” he choked. “Fuck —”

“What? Don’t fuck? Don’t. Fuck.” Marc laughed. His paw swiped around between Chris’s thighs, caught his dick unintentionally, then lunged against it, bagging him. Chris crumpled forward but Marc continued, ungreased the wad that had landed there in blissful surprise during his own, far-less-welcome entrance.

“Don’t fuck. You’re damn right you don’t fuck, not in my bed. Here’s what you can do with this.” His hand was warm and rough. He brought it up to Chris’s lips. Mashed smeared fingers against them. Chris bit down and wouldn’t open. Marc’s other hand prised Chris’s nostrils. The room slowly blued. Laurel screamed, and then J.P. appeared in the doorway. Chris’s eyes watered; blood welled beneath his lips; his mouth reluctantly opened. The hand smashed in, congealed salt smudging Chris’s teeth and chin.

There was no place to go. If he went back to the party now, he would run at Marc, attack him, flailing, essentially sign his own death warrant. Slowly, Chris’s BMX wobbled past A. J. Mitchum Fabricating, the South Wakefield faucet factory, and the cannery where his mother spent days stuffing strips of pork into the beans. Smoke rose against the night in plumes, feathered sulphurous stains against the sky. The town was never asleep, but its insomnia was still and submissive. Chris was too ashamed to cry. At the very back of the cannery parking lot, the cement gave way to a cornfield that had been burnt and left fallow that particular year. Beyond it, Chris knew there was nothing but the highway on the other side, other fields, and infinite rows of telephone-pole webbing. The land was flatter than a sheet of glass. Chris let the bike clatter against the concrete, echo through the empty lot. He stepped off the cement.

There were so few lights he could count them. If the sky was dark, the horizon was darker. A thick black line blotched by the occasional tree.

He turned in three directions. Black line. Black line. Black line.

He put his hands in his pockets and took a deep breath. When he pulled them out, a quarter leapt with them, landed on the mud in front of his feet. Tails. Chris didn’t stoop to pick it up.

Behind him, the small town had managed to cut the horizon, set up factories of light, which quickly, violently bleared.

LEVEL 10:
DONKEY KONG

PLAYER 1

The uneven crescent in front of the building was littered with children — they rolled out of nowhere. Two kindergarten girls on a Big Wheel barrelled toward Chris. They both had sloppy pigtails, one brunette, the other blonde. The brunette hunched on the back, fingers gripping white to the plastic seat as the blonde propelled them forward. The blonde screeched backward on the pedals just before she collided with Chris’s front wheel. Stones scattered. He glanced up nervously at the stucco castle before him.
The Sunset Villa.

“My friend wants to know if you’ll marry her,” said the blonde, jerking a thumb at the one in back, who appeared to have little choice.

Chris’s forehead furrowed. “Sure,” he said. “One condition.”

He was informed, between giggles, that Laurel lived on the top floor, #48C. They led him around back, pointed to the aqua-blue walkways that segmented the bubblegum pink building into horizontal fourths: plastic flower boxes and dirty, daisy-shaped windmills; beer cases stacked up to the windowsills. Some of the windows had floral bedsheets up instead of curtains, but Laurel’s didn’t. Beside the door identified as hers, an oversized patio umbrella crammed against the rail and the wall. Its fringes waved in the wind, little white knotty fingers.

“Shame shame, double shame,” the blonde screamed at her friend as they fled around the front of their building.

Chris scraped his bike against the stucco, leaned it without locking it. He climbed the steel stairs that bridged the back apartments, each footstep ringing. When he reached the first landing, he stood with the imprecise drumming of blood in his veins before he turned and clambered down again. If he could have written a whole song using just the words
chicken shit,
it would play on an endless loop, clicking into place and turning over like an eight-track as he rode away. He grabbed the bicycle and broke fast through the hard ruts of weeds in the railroad yard — avoiding the small peeled eyes in front of the building. White-knuckling the rubber tread of the handgrips, he thought of Doyle’s sofa girl for the umpteenth time. Laid out, exposed. Unaware of someone watching. Somehow, it didn’t seem so unusual now.

“I’m not coming over.” Chris sat at the table, phone propped against his ear, the foundations of a card house on the table before him. His fingers trembled as he added a new layer. “Not as long as that imbecile lives there.” An A-frame of cards leaned against one another, wavered, and stayed.

“Is he there? You didn’t just repeat that. Yeah, yeah you did. In front of him. Well, swift one.” Chris added a new pyramid.

“Haha,” he said, voice flat. “It’s so funny.” Without provocation, the top level collapsed. Chris swiped one hand through the bottom row.

J.P. sat in Chris’s desk chair, legs out on the bed, sweatsocks crossed at the ankles. His lanky legs wore a thick dark sweater of wires. He punched down the keys of the Casio, having sampled the sound of himself belching. The resultant chords burped through air.

“So how come she let you?”

“I hate that thing.” Chris cursed, gave him a look. J.P. knew Chris had gotten it for his last birthday. He’d hoped for a guitar; even an acoustic would have held more dignity than the mini Duran Duran. Uber-gay. “Turn it off.”

“But we could make beautiful music together.” J.P.’s lips shot out like Mick Jagger’s, half-kissy, half-sucky. He made a slurping noise, which Chris ignored, glancing down at the pocket video game in his hand. J.P. straightened his feet out and nudged Chris with them.

Chris kept playing the game.

J.P. nudged again, digging his toes in.

Chris slid toward the edge of the bed. “Don’t be a goof.”

“You’re pussy-whipped,” J.P. spoke into the Casio. “Have you phoned her since?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Puss — puss — pussy — pussy-whipped —” the Casio bleated as J.P. fingered the keys. Three octaves of pussy. Chris glared at the thin white plastic keys beneath the dirty crescents of J.P.’s nails.

“Cut it out.” Chris tossed the game aside. “She probably thinks I’m a creep and a perv, and a wuss to boot.” Chris’s voice rose and cracked. One arm came up repeatedly, the hand at the end of it bunched. They had both avoided any mention of what had happened afterward: a scramble and a toss-out amid J.P.’s protests and David White’s wisecracks. Adam Granger didn’t bother emerging from the basement, the workbench either less sacred to Marc than his own bed, or else simply unnoticed.

“There isn’t anything to tell.”

J.P. kicked Chris off the bed, his legs suddenly straightening, power unprecedented.

The room wheeled. Corners and ceiling ended in an abrupt crack when Chris’s head made contact with the floor. Chris twisted his feet loose of the sheets that followed. He stood quickly, axis off. He sprang up, body still sideways, not navigating, but rather, falling at J.P. Full force, he hammered fist into nearest body part — in his vertigo, shoulder rather than face.

J.P.’s hand bisected Chris’s chest, pushed him backward, fast and easy. Chris springboarded back up from the bed, stopped under J.P.’s glare.

“You should be careful.” J.P. said, the threat enough to cause Chris’s breath to hitch. J.P. rubbed the spot where Chris had pounded him. His eyes slitted. “Her mom and dad were first cousins, you know.”

Chris’s ribs filled with fire. “You’re starting to sound just like your stupid brother.”

J.P. didn’t say anything. He tipped his head back, gazed up at Chris where he stood. Calmly, he pressed several notes on the Casio in slow progression. A simplistic one-handed death march sounded through the room, made up of one-word vulgarity. “Pussy — pussy — pussy — pussy — pussy — pussy —” Chris’s head throbbed.

“At least you don’t have to live with the guy . . .” J.P. said finally, snorting. He turned his head and spat through the screen on Chris’s window. A bubbled white strand hung between the thin black squares, before it dribbled down on the outside.

PLAYER 2

Tammy’s hockey horse lay limply in the driveway where she had dropped it after returning from Mr. Sparks’ house.

Mrs. Lane was in hysterics. Contradictory commands sprang out.
Where’ve you been? Get out of my sight! Don’t even think about going anywhere!
She gripped a Bic lighter in her fist, as if she would strike Tammy with it, set her aflame. Tammy took the most reasonable option under the circumstances.

“It’s your own fault,” Chris told her when she tried to take refuge in his room. “They’re worried you’ll wind up like one of those kids in the McMartin School. You can’t go knocking door-to-door all the time. Shit happens. Molestation, Satanism, sex rings,” he expounded in response to her blank look. “Don’t be a retard.” The door closed in her face.

Tammy descended the porch steps, sat facing the driveway. Blue tubing snaked through the grass around the Scotts’ house. Water spilled onto the curb, sloshed down the street, dropped through the slats of the sewer grate. Through the window screens of the Lane house, her parents’ voices jumped over one another, occasionally landed atop each other and became muddled. Tammy leaned her head on her elbow, watched the pool water drain away.

She sprang off the porch and picked up the stick, threw one leg over it, and trotted around the house into the backyard. Two rungs had been hammered into the tree trunk, a small compromise in the name of Tammy’s new friendship. A pulley had also been rigged — with Mr. Lane’s help — for hoisting books up to the Stadium in a basket, her Walkman and homemade cassettes. She climbed in silence, up into the seven o’clock humidity, the dusk thick with gnat colonies and people calling their kids to come home. The branches bit into her bare feet, her abandoned flip-flops like small blossoms at the base of the tree. From the top she could watch the pool next door being drained and refilled. Partway up the trunk, she stopped.

The curtains were open and the lights were on. Chris jerked around his room, from the dresser to the bed, back to the mirror, to the desk. The bedroom window was high. His head and shoulders floated in disconnect, a blue alligator shirt open at the collar, at his clavicle, the spark of a gold chain from Zellers he had taken to wearing. Hunched, one hand cupped his ear, though he wasn’t wearing the headphones. He twisted then turned back, a scowl marring his mouth, as if he were trying to hear something. His pacing cancelled out interaction with anyone outside of the empty room. In silent petulance, he passed out of Tammy’s line of vision, his head down.

In another frame, her mother was rinsing the supper dishes. An angry fork scraped ceramic. Mr. Lane slumped against the counter on the opposite side of the room. His face was like a brown, popped paper bag.

Tammy wrapped her arms around the tree trunk. The bark pressed into her cheek. She stayed that way, letting the imprint work its way into her skin. Then she felt around the trunk for the small grooves, like lines in somebody’s back. When she found them, she curled her fingers in and began to shimmy upward, bare feet curled around the coarse cortex.