Malus Domestica (23 page)

“He moved away with his girlfriend a couple years ago. They went to …North Dakota? South Dakota? One of the Dakotas. He went to work on the oilfields, Daddy says. We don’t hear from him much. Mama says it’s because of ‘that controllin bitch’ he’s livin with. She don’t let him talk to nobody.”

“Ah.” This topic was a bit out of Wayne’s league.

“So what were you talkin about this morning?” she asked, her face pinching up in a suspicious way, squinting. “When you said you had breakfast with a ghost.”

“My mom died of cancer. This was hers.” Wayne took out the ring around his neck. “Dad and me, we always keep a place for her at the kitchen table. We carry her everywhere we go, Aunt Marcelina says, and Dad says she came down from Chicago with us.” He put the ring to his eye and ogled Amanda through it.

She smiled wistfully. “That’s sweet. I’m sorry about your mom.”

“It’s okay. It’s been a while. …Sometimes I feel like I don’t remember as much about her as I did yesterday.” He tucked the ring back into his shirt. “I don’t like that. I don’t want to forget her.”

“I don’t think you will.” The girl reached over and squeezed his shoulder.

She smelled like flowers, pasty acne ointment, the astringent burn of hairspray. Wayne returned the smile and pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose.

Scraggly pine-trees made a cathedral of the forest around them. The treeline was thick with undergrowth, but Pete picked out a bald spot in the vegetation where rust-colored needles were a carpet under the bushes. Strung across the path was a rusty old barbed-wire fence, presided over by a N
O
T
RESPASSING
sign nailed to a tree and shot full of holes.

Pete stepped on the bottom strand of wire and lifted the top, opening a passage for them. Wayne expected Amanda to say something about the sign, but she never did.

As soon as they stepped into the woods, the day faded into a nether-light, streaming weakly through the pine boughs.

The kids moved deeper until they’d left the constant rumble-and-hiss of the highway behind for the forest’s cloistered hush. They walked for what must have been a half an hour, traipsing through leafy foliage and across patches of crumbly yellow gravel, climbing over fallen trees mulchy with termite-rot.

At one point they passed a little valley with steep banks, trees standing precariously on the edge with their roots clawing at thin air.

Deep and dark, the pit was full of garbage, old garbage in sun-rotten bags, spilling mush and flaky paper onto the ground. Two new-looking bicycles, their wheels bent and their tires flat. A nude, one-legged Barbie-doll. Beer bottles and cans by the legion, glistening brown and black and white in the straw.

“See?” asked Pete. “Wasn’t this better than walking down the street where creepers can pick you up?”

A peculiar feeling of placelessness had come over Wayne—without tall buildings to use as landmarks and reference points, he had lost his sense of direction amidst the endlessly identical trees. He enjoyed being out in nature, but he had developed a creeping sense of panic at not knowing where he was.

“Not really.” Amanda’s gait had become slow and indolent, and she had crossed her arms, her shoulders scrunched against a creeping chill.

Until then, Wayne hadn’t noticed that the afternoon had gotten colder. It was also darker, though they still had plenty of light left. He peered up at the smudge of white sun through the trees and judged that it was probably 6 or 7, on the verge of nightfall.

She tucked her hair behind her ear. “It would have been faster and safer to ride home with our parents. —Or heck, on the school bus, even.”

Pete’s face fell, his expression going from tired, determined, and content down the other end of the spectrum to hurt and exhausted. “Well, I only wanted to
show
you guys something, you know? And I wanted to show the New Guy here around.”

The corner of Wayne’s mouth tucked up in a smile. “I appreciate it. I never been hiking before. It’s nice.” He took a deep breath. “It smells nice.
Pine
smells nice. I like it out here.”

Pete shrugged, as if to say,
See?

“Let’s just hurry up and get home before it gets dark, okay?” Amanda shouldered past them and walked down the trail in her stormy, gangly way, her hair swinging from the back of her head. “I think we’re close enough now that it doesn’t matter.”

The trail had widened and was now quite visible, a thinness that meandered across the woods, occasionally meeting a side trail. Pine gave way to white-barked birch and naked dogwood, and little brooks zagged across their path, giving the kids something to jump over, stepping from stone to stone. Tiny silver fish darted through the brackish water.

Wayne had lapsed into a daydream, staring at his feet, when Johnny Juan said, “Woah. That’s creepy as hell.”

“Oh my God,” breathed Amanda.

Deep in the trees was a clown’s face the approximate size and shape of a supermarket shopping cart.

Rust-stains streaked down from its eyes and mouth as if it were bleeding from the inside. On closer inspection, he saw that it was a sort of cart, a roller-coaster car or part of a carousel. “Is this your surprise?” asked Amanda.

“No,” said Pete, shaking his head and walking away. “That’s neat, but it’s not what I wanted to show you.”

Pine needles and briars choked the passenger seat of the clown-face car. The mess was dark, tangled, ominous. Wayne wanted to get away from it, so he overtook Pete and jogged down the trail.

“Wait up,” said Johnny.

Wayne went down a short slope and found a break in the trees where the last dregs of sunlight slanted in from a clearing. He stepped over a half-buried train track and emerged into what might have been one of the coolest things he had ever seen.

The stark umbrella-skeleton of a hulking Spider ride threw stripes of shadow over them, its suspended cars rusting quietly in the white sun. He had come out onto what appeared to be a go-kart track, a paved oval about ten feet wide and painted green. Grass and milkweed thrust up through cracks.

“Ho-lee Moses.” The forest stood vigil over the ruins of an abandoned amusement park.

A tree grew up through the middle of a small roller-coaster track, shadowing more rusted-out clown-cars and a broken scaffolding no taller than an adult man.

His friends crunched up out of the woods and stood next to him.

“Now
that’s
cool,” said Johnny.

Amanda picked a careful path across the buckled road, stumbling over the asphalt and treading on the tall weeds. “I had no idea this was out here. You found this last summer?”

Pete forged ahead, leading them through an aluminum garage at one end of the track. The ground was oily and nothing grew, which made for easy walking. “Yeah. I came out here to, ahh…look for Bigfoot. My mom said this is the old fairgrounds. It’s supposed to be one of those travelin amusement park things—you know, how they go from city to city, settin up in mall parking lots and stuff. But she said this one, the people set it up, and then they disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Wayne’s neck prickled. A go-kart was overturned against the wall, its axle bent, its guts pulled out. Parts lay strewn around it.

Leading them through the heart of the overgrown carnival, Pete goosestepped and lurched over the dead weeds, trampling briars, sticks cracking under his shoes. “Yeah. She said it happened back in the 80s. Before any of us were born.”

Gradually the brush gave away to open gravel and dirt. “Mom said the city tried to open it anyway, and it ran for like a year, but they couldn’t make any money on it and it was too expensive to clear it out. So they left it here.”

A long arcade leaned over a bushy promenade, its game-booths frothing with hickory and blackberry bushes. H
IT
THE
P
INS
! P
OP
THE
B
ALLOONS
! T
HROW
A
D
ART
! W
IN
A
P
RIZE
!

“Y’all don’t tell her we were out here. She said not to come back. It’s dangerous here.” Pete gazed up at a ten-foot board standing at the end of the concourse, with a round bell at the top. “…Is this what I think it is?”

Wayne came closer. “Hey, yeah. It’s one of those strong-man tester things. Where you hit the thing with the hammer and the slider hits the bell.” He grinned up at his big friend. “Man, I bet you could knock the crap out of this thing.”

“Let’s find the hammer,” said Amanda.

Wandering in separate directions, the children searched through the dry grass and weeds. Johnny and Amanda went to root around under the Spider, while Pete went behind the north side of the arcade. Wayne kept going west, and found himself in an intersection between a funhouse and a caved-in concession stand. The funhouse was sooty black, heavily damaged by fire and overgrown with creepy ivy, so he didn’t bother going in.

The marquee over the concession stand read F
UNNEL
C
AKES
, S
NO
-C
ONES
, C
ANDY
A
PPLES
. The sign underneath the sales counter told him he was in W
EAVER
’
S
W
ONDERLAND,
and
that it was F
UN
F
OR
A
LL
A
GES
!

That must be the person that built and abandoned this place,
he thought, cupping his face against the cloudy windows.

The concession stand was empty except for a chest freezer with the lid open. It was nasty with black gunk.
I wonder what happened to him.
Wayne couldn’t imagine anybody willingly walking away from owning their very own amusement park.

When he looked away, his eyes were caught by a giant contraption down the right-hand street.

Like a flying saucer crashed to Earth, a huge purple Gravitron rested in a bed of brush, its door wide open to reveal a dark mouth. Strips of dead bulbs marched in ribcage rows down its sides and down the frames supporting it from above. Wayne ventured up the bulkmetal ramp into the gawping machine. The curved black walls were lined with padded seats that, in the rundown darkness, could have been gurneys rather than seats meant for park patrons.

A Formica coffee-table stood near the back of the Gravitron chamber, the woodgrain skin rubbed away at the corners. Several half-melted red and white candles stood in brass candelabras around a white bowl.

Wayne crept closer. The bowl was full of some black substance…or perhaps it was the shadows playing a trick on him, he couldn’t tell; the cavernous dark of the machine’s interior made it hard to see.

Picking up the bowl, he tilted it toward the light. Whatever it was, the black stuff in the bowl smelled foul: pennies, cigarettes, burnt hair.

The inside of the bowl was black but dry—burned out, the contents had been cooked. He turned it upside-down to look at the bottom (M
ADE
IN
C
HINA
, maybe?) and saw the jagged rim of a pair of nostrils, and the two guileless eye-sockets of a human skull. The teeth had been sawed away under the nose.

“Uhh!” he exclaimed, snatching his hands away. The skull hit the carpeted floor with a thump.

He felt like he ought to scream. That seemed like the logical thing to do, to draw a great big breath, open his mouth, and belt out the loudest shriek he could muster, but his lungs were too small and he couldn’t get purchase on the air. As if the Gravitron’s door had closed and Martians were sucking out all the oxygen.

“Uhh,” he said again, backing away.

KSSS!
A blast of air came out of the floor behind him and he leapt away in fright, shouting, almost falling over the coffee table.

Finding his feet, Wayne saw that it wasn’t air—it was a
snake,
dear God it was a long fat snake, a firehose the olive-brown of poop, draped across the black carpet in swoopy cursive. Darker markings like Hershey’s Kisses ran down its smooth, flabby sides.

The snake had reared up and now watched him warily, its fat jowls puffing inside its pink mouth, fangs bared.
Damn,
thought the boy,
what do I do what do I do
what do I do?

“HELP!”
he screamed, or that’s what he tried to do, but it came out a whispery squeak, flitting through the constricted tin whistle of his throat. Coiling protectively in the center of the Gravitron, the snake kept hissing at Wayne in that low nail-in-the-tire way, barely audible. It lay between him and the front door of the carnival ride, between the boy and any chance of escape.

“Get out of here!” Wayne snatched up a candelabra and hurled it at the snake.

The candle and candelabra hit the floor and broke into two pieces, whipping over the snake’s head.
Fsssk!
The reptile struck at it as it went by, punching out and withdrawing again.

Wayne stumbled up on top of the creaking-cracking table and pressed himself against the Gravitron wall. The padded gurney-seat behind him was wet and stank of mold.

“Go aw—”
he began to scream, but the snake slithered after him, climbing up. Before he could get away, it jabbed in and bit him on the left leg just below his knee,
fsst!,
fangs stapling through his jeans into the soft meat of his calf.

Startled and confused, Wayne softshoed backwards off the table in a tumble of candles, skidding, collapsing into the floor. His knees and shoulder reverberated against the wooden platform with a kettle-drum
boom-boom.

Coiling on the table, the snake peered up out of the bowl of its chubby chocolate-kisses body, puffy pink yawning, the tip of its tail wriggling as if it had rattles to shake.

Wayne’s leg felt broken. Knife-blades from the sun swarmed and clashed under his skin, fighting each other in the flesh behind the bite, cutting him to ribbons from the inside. The pain was unlike anything he had ever experienced in his life—
burning, pinching, stabbing, angry,
it was hot coals and hornets and rusty nails all mixed together, scraping the bone clean with rending red teeth.