Joyland (25 page)

LEVEL 12:
JOUST

PLAYER 1

Laurel pushed the cart through the wide, refrigerated aisle. A woman with skin the colour of sliced ham stood next to her, behind the open cooler door. She had one of those mouths that didn’t quite close. Through the half-misted door, fat bulged her bright pink stretch pants as she bent. She picked up a carton of eggs, opened it to check for cracks. Her watery arms wavered. Laurel’s mom. He wondered what her dad was like, whether it was true what J.P. had said.

Chris looked away. When he glanced back, Laurel was staring straight through him. He lifted his hand in a little wave, but she didn’t blink. The glass door between them fogged.

Mrs. Lane turned into the cereal aisle and Chris manoeuvred the cart after her. Tongue dry, he held up a box of Capt’n Crunch. He clung to it, juvenilely, in reverence of the other capt’n, the first phone-phreaker. Mrs. Lane shot him a look, and the capt’n’s blue hat fell back into line beside the Sugar Pops bear and the Booberry ghost. She handed him a box of Life to put in the cart (packaged in Don Mills, a name as flat and strip-mallish as South Wakefield). Catching his disdain, she defended the choice with commercial sarcasm. “Well,
Mikey
likes it.” She moved to the end of the row and began examining the coffee filter selection. She picked up a package of Size No. 4 (a stellar name, Stellarton) and held onto it. Without looking up, she asked, “Did you know that girl?”

Chris shrugged.

When they reached the checkout, he saw Laurel two lines over, sticking her head up like E.T. Over the chocolate bar racks he watched her crane her neck, black hair push upward above her thin curved brown throat. The red eye under the countertop wavered across the bottoms of packages, bleeding a momentary stain of light into them, instantly seeing their value.

Chris loaded the paper bags into the cart, wheeled it out fast, his mother still dealing out bills.

Tammy once told Chris, in a misplaced fit of trust, that she imagined God as an old man with a beard. She’d gone on to confide that when she had done a particularly bad thing (like not paying attention in class, or imagining stinky Tina Brown’s head exploding during the swelling climax of the Canadian anthem or — worse — during the Lord’s Prayer), she remedied her own sins. In the shape of a cloud, a gigantic hand emerged from the sky at her instigation. She imagined it sweeping across the land. She would watch through the long windows as it swooped through the schoolyard, made of wind, grey curling digits. The feathery hand billowed through all obstacles, came to spank her.

What Chris was supposed to do with this information he was never quite sure. Tucked away, like the rest, it became fodder for jokes and teasing, especially in front of their friends.

“What are you afraid of?” Chris would say, “Hand of God going to come along? Better hold your pants up.”

Corporal punishment was a great source of hilarity. Among all kinds of yanking and shaking and smacking, there was no such thing as an old-fashioned spanking. Only two boys in Chris and Tammy’s entire grade school had received the “Strap.” One was David White. The other was a guy a couple of years ahead of Chris, who later faded from South Wakefield as easily as Pinky Goodlowe’s older brothers. Pinky himself had had tons of trouble. There had been a time in fourth grade (before he had grown so huge), when Mrs. Mackie would walk by his desk, grab him by the collar, haul him up, and whack his blue-jeaned ass several times, hard and in quick succession — often without provocation. David became another of these targets, eventually sent to the vice principal’s office for the legendary Strap. Throughout the middle years, he bore the story with pride. He had accomplished something so terrible, no one could ever hope to reach his level.

On this particular end-of-August morning, it was he who put the pieces of Chris’s semiprivate plan in place. Standing behind Joyland waiting to meet Adam, Chris was soon descended upon by David and Kenny, Dean and Reuben. Chris heard them before he saw them, a long way off, Kenny wailing something ahead, David answering only by skidding his BMX across the pavement, issuing a sandy screech, perhaps leaving behind snaking trails of black. When they popped around the corner of the building, Chris had half a mind to pull an instant, imaginary Samurai sword from behind his back and lop them to pieces. Instead, he did his best nod-and-ignore: just hanging out behind the old arcade, nothing special, what you up to? A nod could say all that and more. Dean slowed his bike and Reuben jumped off the back pegs where he’d been standing. His belly rippled beneath his orange T-shirt.

“So, we gonna kick that white fart’s ass?”

You could put the whole world in Reuben’s mouth, as per usual,
Chris thought.
White fart’s ass?

“Heard you got yourself a mercenary, Lane,” Dean said. He slicked his hair back under his hands, reknotted the elastic at the base of his neck, the bike wheel turning off to one side indifferently as soon as he let go of the handlebars. He swivelled it back around, and leaned against the wall without getting off, perched high, shoulder pressed against the brick. How twin brothers could be so drastically different, Chris had been attempting to figure out since sixth grade.

“Schwatzaneggah,” Kenny riffed. “Arnold!”

David jumped off his bike, flipped it upside down on the pavement, gave the tire a spin and deserted it that way, standing on its handlebars. He dropped to the parking block and, squatting, began marking the ground with circles using a stone. He untied the red bandana from his jeaned thigh and mopped sweat from his forehead, before fastening it there, humming the Stones’ “Start Me Up” faintly. The collar and sleeves had been ripped off his T-shirt, and a Playboy bunny emblem glinted in the white divot of his clavicle. Under its leaden head, a bowtie wrapped its silhouetted cartoon esophagus. David’s skin showed through the large blank hole of its eye. He moved sticks and stones around with a kind of clunky authority.

“Skinny motherfucker getting uppity,” David said, looking up at Chris with a grin. “I got your back. At least you scored the lady before the shit hit the fan.” David extended an open five. Laurel would disappear between their hands. Turn into a single stroke of applause, a light slap. Chris knew it was gross to celebrate it that way, that his mother would choke. Over David’s shoulder, Kenny’s face was that of someone who hadn’t been invited to a party. Chris reached out and slapped the open palm, David pretzeling into a variety of knuckle-locks before letting go, eyes fixed on Chris’s.

Adam showed up late. At least he had had the sense not to bring Cindy. Sweat crawled through the maze of hair on his mammoth legs and curled it into thin brown rivers. Brut aftershave drifted across the small circle. David was already outlining the plan with the help of the makeshift markers. David and Chris met head-to-head over the circle of pebbles, knocking knowns and unknowns out of the stone-rubbed spheres and trajectories on the cement, easily as marbles (a game none of the boys had ever mastered). While they talked, Adam Granger hovered overtop of them, stretched his arms out over the backs of their shoulders as if they were in a football huddle. His shadow was shortened — thrown in a fat blob by the morning sun, across the cement under their feet.

The next day was Registration Day. Marc had been working on his Barracuda all summer. It was his intention to have it ready to drive into the student parking lot on his first day of Grade Twelve — half a week away. He had driven it out in the country to a guy who was supposed to do good, cheap paint jobs. Tomorrow, Marc would still be like them, still riding his beat-up ten-speed with the tape unravelling from the curved handles. Like them, he would pedal over to the high school in the afternoon to stand in line and fill out forms, receive his class schedule, get his picture taken for his student card. He would wear a black muscle shirt to show off the barbell shoulders on either side of his head. Wear a stupid grin across his pasty face.

David outlined it all like a movie segment, some kind of shakedown, excitement weakening the plotting as he got ahead of himself. “And then, Lane, Lane, I’ll hold him, and you drop kick ’im. And then, I’ll say —”

Dean lost his reserve, sprang from his bike, descended on Reuben with a flying forearm smash, spokes and tires clattering to the pavement behind him. The two of them jockeyed around, Dean fitting Reuben snugly into a Camel Clutch, Reuben all grunt.

“— and then you’ll say —”

“Look, I got my own way of dealing with Breton,” Adam declared, adding rather grandly, “If you don’t mind,” like it was a simple matter of manners, all of David’s cut-downs unnecessary. Unvoiced promises of future twelve-packs and mickeys of rye led David to agree far quicker than Chris had expected he might. He had just been laying down the bare bones, man, just the bare bones.

Adam’s sticky arm lay across Chris’s back with the weight of wet cement. When he tried to shift away, Adam tightened it. In the heat, Chris could feel the clammy cold in Granger’s skin, and a wave of nervousness set in, scrambling from Chris’s spine on down. Marc would kill him when this was all over; there would be one moment of vindication and then Chris would be dodging him for months. Granger, at seventeen, had an armour of muscle, a fortress of wheels. He would never be caught walking home alone after school.

“Look, where’s J.P. in all this? You don’t really think you can just send Lane here up to the doorbell while Granger hides in some bush, do you?” Kenny spouted at the three of them with exasperation. “I mean . . . here’s J.P., and this is J.P.’s brother. You can knock Marc off his bike maybe, but you can’t kick his teeth in or anything. You just can’t do that in front of a brother.” The Only Child had spoken an unbearable truth.

Kenny’s gaze flicked Chris’s way. They stood, hands on knees facing one another. At his raised voice, even Reuben and Dean quit their scuffle and sobered up.

“He won’t,” Chris said. He nodded to Adam, their faces almost close enough to touch. Adam’s irises were snuff brown, splintered like amber, and black knots of pupil were caught in the centres like flies. “You won’t, right?”

The barbs of Adam’s eyebrows twitched. He unhooked his arm from Chris and David’s backs, held up his hands,
What-me?
style.

“Kid — sh-i-i-i-i-i-t,” he drawled. His deliberate slowness gave doubt room to bloom. The words rolled off his tongue heavy as silver. Chris could have taken a marker and written his name in the space between the syllables. Then Adam reached down and absently scratched his balls beneath his Adidas, as if the whole thing meant that much to him. “Nothin’ — but — kid — shit,” he muttered, and hooked the testicle-tainted hand around Chris’s shoulder again, gripping Chris’s bare arm firmly.

Chris flew over the streets as if his tires weren’t touching the ground. He thrust through hollow air. The night spun like a quarter on its edge. Streetlights skimmed by, snapping into motion with him. His nylon jacket — not his favourite, not the jean jacket — puffed out on either side of his body, billowed in the wind, crackled like a pale blue shell. He fell into the feeling of careening. Putting his head down, he rode on.

When he stopped, he did so suddenly, body going vertical, full force on the brakes.

Looking up, he fixated on the platforms of her building. He stood there, listening to his heart in his chest, his breathing regulating. She was just some girl. He didn’t know anything about her except her favourite game. That, and how she felt from the inside. He imagined the body as an enclosed system — a perfect case — all its circuits and synapses snapping within.

The lights around the apartment building gave a purplish glow, turned the night into a bloodstain. When Chris ran his tongue over his upper lip, it was hot and sticky — salty, like tears. He stood for another minute, listened to his breath rise up, shakily, like wings beating.

PLAYER 2

Tammy stared at the screen, its turquoise light infused with wisdom, excitement. The television could so suddenly become aglow with text, code. She knew this from watching Chris. Letters and numbers placed in specific order between brackets.

Tammy understood brackets. They surrounded thoughts that were unnecessary. In novels she had often found that brackets contained the best information, the humourous additions. Asides. She liked that word,
aside.
On days when Chris had been playing ball hockey with J.P. and they couldn’t use his sticks, Tammy and Jenny had lain together on Tammy’s skinny twin bed, facing one another. Each had clasped a paperback of her own. After every page, Jenny would trail one finger down the right-hand margin scanning for hyphens.

“This page has two —” she would whisper, for no particular reason. Jenny loved hyphens. Tammy, brackets.

Tammy stared at the blank TV screen. Jenny was away on family vacation — Niagara Falls and Marineland.

The Lanes had been there last summer. Tammy had hyperventilated in the House of Frankenstein. In its narrow maze of black walls and mirrors, a real guy opened a real door and said, “Unh,” waving a flashlight or a club — Tammy was not sure which. She knew there must have been a light beam or a camera somewhere whose path she kept walking into. She banged against the walls, and the walls began to close in on her slowly. The narrow passageway appeared narrower, narrower, narrower, mean and dark. When he opened the door again, she wanted to grab onto his black coveralls and cry, because he was human, at least, however automated his “Unh!” routine. Where was the exit? Where was the next doorway? Everything seemed like a doorway, but when she put her hand out, her skin only made contact with mirror, reflected back at her the space she was walking out of. There was nothing to walk into. Chris had raced ahead, laughing. He was in the sunlight by the time her breath began coming hard and hurried through her chest, the wind in her like an angry thing trying to claw its way out.