Joyland

  "I don't know. Maybe. I love to do research, and I really got into this. I've piled up lots of background stuff for sure, but it's not like I solved the murder of Linda Gray in the college library, or anything. Still...there are things I want to show you. Things that trouble me."

  "Trouble you why? Trouble you how?"

  "I don't want to try explaining over the phone. If I can't persuade Tom to come down, I'll put everything in a big manila envelope and send it to you. But I think I can. He wants to see you, he just doesn't want anything to do with my little investigation. He wouldn't even look at the photos."

  I thought she was being awfully mysterious, but decided to let it go. "Listen, have you heard of an evangelist named Buddy Ross?"

  "Buddy--" She burst into giggles. "The Buddy Ross Hour of Power! My gramma listens to that old faker all the time! He pretends to pull goat stomachs out of people and claims they're tumors! Do you know what Pop Allen would say?"

  "Carny-from-carny," I said, grinning.

  "Right you are. What do you want to know about him? And why can't you find out for yourself? Did your mother get scared by a card catalogue while she was carrying you?"

  "Not that I know of, but by the time I get off work, the Heaven's Bay library is closed. I doubt if they've got Who's Who, anyway. I mean, it's only one room. It's not about him, anyway. It's about his two sons. I want to know if they have any kids."

  "Why?"

  "Because his daughter has one. He's a great kid, but he's dying."

  A pause. Then: "What are you into down there now, Dev?"

  "Meeting new people. Come on down. I'd love to see you guys again. Tell Tom we'll stay out of the funhouse."

  I thought that might make her laugh, but it didn't. "Oh, he will. You couldn't get him within thirty yards of the place."

  We said our goodbyes, I wrote the length of my call on the honor sheet, then went back upstairs and sat by the window. I was feeling that strange dull jealousy again. Why had Tom Kennedy been the one to see Linda Gray? Why him and not me?

  The Heaven's Bay weekly paper came out on Thursdays, and the headline on the October fourth edition read JOYLAND EMPLOYEE SAVES SECOND LIFE. I thought that was an exaggeration. I'll take full credit for Hallie Stansfield, but only part of it for the unpleasant Eddie Parks. The rest--not neglecting a tip of the old Howie-hat to Lane Hardy--belongs to Wendy Keegan, because if she hadn't broken up with me in June, I would have been in Durham, New Hampshire that fall, seven hundred miles from Joyland.

  I certainly had no idea that more lifesaving was on the agenda; premonitions like that were strictly for folks like Rozzie Gold and Mike Ross. I was thinking of nothing but Erin and Tom's upcoming visit when I arrived at the park on October first, after another rainy weekend. It was still cloudy, but in honor of Monday, the rain had stopped. Eddie was seated on his apple-box throne in front of Horror House, and smoking his usual morning cigarette. I raised my hand to him. He didn't bother to raise his in return, just stomped on his butt and leaned over to raise the apple-box and toss it under. I'd seen it all fifty times or more (and sometimes wondered how many butts were piled up beneath that box), but this time, instead of lifting the apple-box, he just went right on leaning.

  Was there a look of surprise on his face? I can't say. By the time I realized something was wrong, all I could see was his faded and grease-smeared dogtop as his head dropped between his knees. He kept going forward, and ended up doing a complete somersault, landing on his back with his legs splayed out and his face up to the cloudy sky. And by then the only thing on it was a knotted grimace of pain.

  I dropped my lunchsack, ran to him, and fell on my knees beside him. "Eddie? What is it?"

  "Ticka," he managed.

  For a moment I thought he was talking about some obscure disease engendered by tick-bites, but then I saw the way he was clutching the left side of his chest with his gloved right hand.

  The pre-Joyland version of Dev Jones would simply have yelled for help, but after four months of talking the Talk, help never even crossed my mind. I filled my lungs, lifted my head, and screamed "HEY, RUBE!" into the damp morning air as loud as I could. The only person close enough to hear was Lane Hardy, and he came fast.

  The summer employees Fred Dean hired didn't have to know CPR when they signed on, but they had to learn. Thanks to the lifesaving class I'd taken as a teenager, I already knew. The half-dozen of us in that class had learned beside the YMCA pool, working on a dummy with the unlikely name of Herkimer Saltfish. Now I had a chance to put theory into practice for the first time, and do you know what? It wasn't really that much different from the clean-and-jerk I'd used to pop the hotdog out of the little Stansfield girl's throat. I wasn't wearing the fur, and there was no hugging involved, but it was still mostly a matter of applying hard force. I cracked four of the old bastard's ribs and broke one. I can't say I'm sorry, either.

  By the time Lane arrived, I was kneeling alongside Eddie and doing closed chest compressions, first rocking forward with my weight on the heels of my hands, then rocking back and listening to see if he'd draw in a breath.

  "Christ," Lane said. "Heart attack?"

  "Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Call an ambulance."

  The closest phone was in the little shack beside Pop Allen's Shootin' Gallery--his doghouse, in the Talk. It was locked, but Lane had the Keys to the Kingdom: three masters that opened everything in the park. He ran. I went on doing CPR, rocking back and forth, my thighs aching now, my knees barking about their long contact with the rough pavement of Joyland Avenue. After each five compressions I'd slow-count to three, listening for Eddie to inhale, but there was nothing. No joy in Joyland, not for Eddie. Not after the first five, not after the second five, not after half a dozen fives. He just lay there with his gloved hands at his sides and his mouth open. Eddie fucking Parks. I stared down at him as Lane came sprinting back, shouting that the ambulance was on its way.

  I'm not doing it, I thought. I'll be damned if I'll do it.

  Then I leaned forward, doing another compression on the way, and pressed my mouth to his. It wasn't as bad as I feared; it was worse. His lips were bitter with the taste of cigarettes, and there was the stink of something else in his mouth--God help me, I think it was jalapeno peppers, maybe from a breakfast omelet. I got a good seal, though, pinched his nostrils shut, and breathed down his throat.

  I did that five or six times before he started breathing on his own again. I stopped the compressions to see what would happen, and he kept going. Hell must have been full that day, that's all I can figure. I rolled him onto his side in case he vomited. Lane stood beside me with a hand on my shoulder. Shortly after that, we heard the wail of an approaching siren.

  Lane hurried to meet them at the gate and direct them. Once he was gone, I found myself looking at the snarling green monster-faces decorating the facade of Horror House. COME IN IF YOU DARE was written above the faces in drippy green letters. I found myself thinking again of Linda Gray, who had gone in alive and had been carried out hours later, cold and dead. I think my mind went that way because Erin was coming with information. Information that troubled her. I also thought of the girl's killer.

  Could have been you, Mrs. Shoplaw had said. Except you're dark-haired instead of blond and don't have a bird's head tattooed on one of your hands. This guy did. An eagle or maybe a hawk.

  Eddie's hair was the premature gray of the lifelong heavy smoker, but it could have been blond four years ago. And he always wore gloves. Surely he was too old to have been the man who had accompanied Linda Gray on her last dark ride, surely, but...

  The ambulance was very close but not quite here, although I could see Lane at the gate, waving his hands over his head, making hurry-up gestures. Thinking what the hell, I stripped off Eddie's gloves. His fingers were lacy with dead skin, the backs of his hands red beneath a thick layer of some sort of white cream. There were no tattoos.

  Just psoriasis.

  As soon as he was loaded up and the ambula
nce was heading back to the tiny Heaven's Bay hospital, I went into the nearest donniker and rinsed my mouth again and again. It was a long time before I got rid of the taste of those damn jalapeno peppers, and I have never touched one since.

  When I came out, Lane Hardy was standing by the door. "That was something," he said. "You brought him back."

  "He won't be out of the woods for a while, and there might be brain damage."

  "Maybe yes, maybe no, but if you hadn't been there, he'd have been in the woods permanently. First the little girl, now the dirty old man. I may start calling you Jesus instead of Jonesy, because you sure are the savior."

  "You do that, and I'm DS." That was Talk for down south, which in turn meant turning in your time-card for good.

  "Okay, but you did all right, Jonesy. In fact, I gotta say you rocked the house."

  "The taste of him," I said. "God!"

  "Yeah, I bet, but look on the bright side. With him gone, you're free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, you're free at last. I think you'll like it better that way, don't you?"

  I certainly did.

  From his back pocket, Lane drew out a pair of rawhide gloves. Eddie's gloves. "Found these laying on the ground. Why'd you take em off him?"

  "Uh...I wanted to let his hands breathe." That sounded primo stupid, but the truth would have sounded even stupider. I couldn't believe I'd entertained the notion of Eddie Parks being Linda Gray's killer for even a moment. "When I took my lifesaving course, they told us that heart attack victims need all the free skin they can get. It helps, somehow." I shrugged. "It's supposed to, at least."

  "Huh. You learn a new thing every day." He flapped the gloves. "I don't think Eddie's gonna be back for a long time--if at all--so you might as well stick these in his doghouse, yeah?"

  "Okay," I said, and that's what I did. But later that day I went and got them again. Something else, too.

  I didn't like him, we're straight on that, right? He'd given me no reason to like him. He had, so far as I knew, given not one single Joyland employee a reason to like him. Even old-timers like Rozzie Gold and Pop Allen gave him a wide berth. Nevertheless, I found myself entering the Heaven's Bay Community Hospital that afternoon at four o'clock, and asking if Edward Parks could have a visitor. I had his gloves in one hand, along with the something else.

  The blue-haired volunteer receptionist went through her paperwork twice, shaking her head, and I was starting to think Eddie had died after all when she said, "Ah! It's Edwin, not Edward. He's in Room 315. That's ICU, so you'll have to check at the nurse's station first."

  I thanked her and went to the elevator--one of those huge ones big enough to admit a gurney. It was slower than old cold death, which gave me plenty of time to wonder what I was doing here. If Eddie needed a visit from a park employee, it should have been Fred Dean, not me, because Fred was the guy in charge that fall. Yet here I was. They probably wouldn't let me see him, anyway.

  But after checking his chart, the head nurse gave me the okay. "He may be sleeping, though."

  "Any idea about his--?" I tapped my head.

  "Mental function? Well...he was able to give us his name."

  That sounded hopeful.

  He was indeed asleep. With his eyes shut and that day's late-arriving sun shining on his face, the idea that he might have been Linda Gray's date a mere four years ago was even more ludicrous. He looked at least a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty. I saw I needn't have brought his gloves, either. Someone had bandaged his hands, probably after treating the psoriasis with something a little more powerful than whatever OTC cream he'd been using on them. Looking at those bulky white mittens made me feel a queer, reluctant pity.

  I crossed the room as quietly as I could, and put the gloves in the closet with the clothes he'd been wearing when he was brought in. That left me with the other thing--a photograph that had been pinned to the wall of his cluttered, tobacco-smelling little shack next to a yellowing calendar that was two years out of date. The photo showed Eddie and a plain-faced woman standing in the weedy front yard of an anonymous tract house. Eddie looked about twenty-five. He had his arm around the woman. She was smiling at him. And--wonder of wonders--he was smiling back.

  There was a rolling table beside his bed with a plastic pitcher and a glass on it. This I thought rather stupid; with his hands bandaged the way they were, he wasn't going to be pouring anything for a while. Still, the pitcher could serve one useful purpose. I propped the photo against it so he'd see it when he woke up. With that done, I started for the door.

  I was almost there when he spoke in a whispery voice that was a long way from his usual ill-tempered rasp. "Kiddo."

  I returned--not eagerly--to his bedside. There was a chair in the corner, but I had no intention of pulling it over and sitting down. "How you feeling, Eddie?"

  "Can't really say. Hard to breathe. They got me all taped up."

  "I brought you your gloves, but I see they already..." I nodded at his bandaged hands.

  "Yeah." He sucked in air. "If anything good comes out of this, maybe they'll fix em up. Fuckin itch all the time, they do." He looked at the picture. "Why'd you bring that? And what were you doin in my doghouse?"

  "Lane told me to put your gloves in there. I did, but then I thought you might want them. And you might want the picture. Maybe she's someone you'd want Fred Dean to call?"

  "Corinne?" He snorted. "She's been dead for twenty years. Pour me some water, kiddo. I'm as dry as ten-year dogshit."

  I poured, and held the glass for him, and even wiped the corner of his mouth with the sheet when he dribbled. It was all a lot more intimate than I wanted, but didn't seem so bad when I remembered that I'd been soul-kissing the miserable bastard only hours before.

  He didn't thank me, but when had he ever? What he said was, "Hold that picture up." I did as he asked. He looked at it fixedly for several seconds, then sighed. "Miserable scolding backbiting cunt. Walking out on her for Royal American Shows was the smartest thing I ever did." A tear trembled at the corner of his left eye, hesitated, then rolled down his cheek.

  "Want me to take it back and pin it up in your doghouse, Eddie?"

  "No, might as well leave it. We had a kid, you know. A little girl."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. She got hit by a car. Three years old she was, and died like a dog in the street. That miserable cunt was yakking on the phone instead of watching her." He turned his head aside and closed his eyes. "Go on, get outta here. Hurts to talk, and I'm tired. Got a elephant sitting on my chest."

  "Okay. Take care of yourself."

  He grimaced without opening his eyes. "That's a laugh. How e'zacly am I s'posed to do that? You got any ideas? Because I haven't. I got no relatives, no friends, no savings, no insurance. What am I gonna do now?"

  "It'll work out," I said lamely.

  "Sure, in the movies it always does. Go on, get lost."

  This time I was all the way out the door before he spoke again.

  "You shoulda let me die, kiddo." He said it without melodrama, just as a passing observation. "I coulda been with my little girl."

  When I walked back into the hospital lobby I stopped dead, at first not sure I was seeing who I thought I was seeing. But it was her, all right, with one of her endless series of arduous novels open in front of her. This one was called The Dissertation.

  "Annie?"

  She looked up, at first wary, then smiling as she recognized me. "Dev! What are you doing here?"

  "Visiting a guy from the park. He had a heart attack today."

  "Oh, my God, I'm so sorry. Is he going to be all right?"

  She didn't invite me to sit down next to her, but I did, anyway. My visit to Eddie had upset me in ways I didn't understand, and my nerves were jangling. It wasn't unhappiness and it wasn't sorrow. It was a queer, unfocused anger that had something to do with the foul taste of jalapeno peppers that still seemed to linger in my mouth. And with Wendy, God knew why. It was wearying to know I wasn't
over her, even yet. A broken arm would have healed quicker. "I don't know. I didn't talk to a doctor. Is Mike all right?"

  "Yes, it's just a regularly scheduled appointment. A chest X-ray and a complete blood count. Because of the pneumonia, you know. Thank God he's over it now. Except for that lingering cough, Mike's fine." She was still holding her book open, which probably meant she wanted me to go, and that made me angrier. You have to remember that was the year everyone wanted me to go, even the guy whose life I'd saved.

  Which is probably why I said, "Mike doesn't think he's fine. So who am I supposed to believe here, Annie?"

  Her eyes widened with surprise, then grew distant. "I'm sure I don't care who or what you believe, Devin. It's really not any of your business."

  "Yes it is." That came from behind us. Mike had rolled up in his chair. It wasn't the motorized kind, which meant he'd been turning the wheels with his hands. Strong boy, cough or no cough. He'd buttoned his shirt wrong, though.

  Annie turned to him, surprised. "What are you doing here? You were supposed to let the nurse--"

  "I told her I could do it on my own and she said okay. It's just a left and two rights from radiology, you know. I'm not blind, just dy--"

  "Mr. Jones was visiting a friend of his, Mike." So now I had been demoted back to Mr. Jones. She closed her book with a snap and stood up. "He's probably anxious to get home, and I'm sure you must be ti--"

  "I want him to take us to the park." Mike spoke calmly enough, but his voice was loud enough to make people look around. "Us."

  "Mike, you know that's not--"

  "To Joyland. To Joy...Land." Still calm, but louder still. Now everyone was looking. Annie's cheeks were flaming. "I want you both to take me." His voice rose louder still. "I want you to take me to Joyland before I die."

  Her hand covered her mouth. Her eyes were huge. Her words, when they came, were muffled but understandable. "Mike...you're not going to die, who told you..." She turned on me. "Do I have you to thank for putting that idea in his head?"

  "Of course not." I was very conscious that our audience was growing--it now included a couple of nurses and a doctor in blue scrubs and booties--but I didn't care. I was still angry. "He told me. Why would that surprise you, when you know all about his intuitions?"