Joyland

I had a car, but on most days in that fall of 1973 I walked to Joyland from Mrs. Shoplaw’s Beachside Accommodations in the town of Heaven’s Bay. It seemed like the right thing to do. The only thing, actually. By early September, Heaven Beach was almost completely deserted, which suited my mood. That fall was the most beautiful of my life. Even forty years later I can say that. And I was never so unhappy, I can say that, too. People think first love is sweet, and never sweeter than when that first bond snaps. You’ve heard a thousand pop and country songs that prove the point; some fool got his heart broke. Yet that first broken heart is always the most painful, the slowest to mend, and leaves the most visible scar. What’s so sweet about that?

Through September and right into October, the North Carolina skies were clear and the air was warm even at seven in the morning, when I left my second-floor apartment by the outside stairs. If I started with a light jacket on, I was wearing it tied around my waist before I’d finished half of the three miles between the town and the amusement park.

I’d make Betty’s Bakery my first stop, grabbing a couple of still-warm croissants. My shadow would walk with me on the sand, at least twenty feet long. Hopeful gulls, smelling the croissants in their waxed paper, would circle overhead. And when I walked back, usually around five (although sometimes I stayed later—there was nothing waiting for me in Heaven’s Bay, a town that mostly went sleepybye when summer was over), my shadow walked with me on the water. If the tide was in, it would waver on the surface, seeming to do a slow hula.

Although I can’t be completely sure, I think the boy and the woman and their dog were there from the first time I took that walk. The shore between the town and the cheerful, blinking gimcrackery of Joyland was lined with summer homes, many of them expensive, most of them clapped shut after Labor Day. But not the biggest of them, the one that looked like a green wooden castle. A boardwalk led from its wide back patio down to where the seagrass gave way to fine white sand. At the end of the boardwalk was a picnic table shaded by a bright green beach umbrella. In its shade, the boy sat in his wheelchair, wearing a baseball cap and covered from the waist down by a blanket even in the late afternoons, when the temperature lingered in the seventies. I thought he was five or so, surely no older than seven. The dog, a Jack Russell terrier, either lay beside him or sat at his feet. The woman sat on one of the picnic table benches, sometimes reading a book, mostly just staring out at the water. She was very beautiful.

Going or coming, I always waved to them, and the boy waved back. She didn’t, not at first. 1973 was the year of the OPEC oil embargo, the year Richard Nixon announced he was not a crook, the year Edward G. Robinson and Noel Coward died. It was Devin Jones’s lost year. I was a twenty-one year-old virgin with literary aspirations. I possessed three pairs of bluejeans, four pairs of Jockey shorts, a clunker Ford (with a good radio), occasional suicidal ideations, and a broken heart.

Sweet, huh?

The heartbreaker was Wendy Keegan, and she didn’t deserve me. It’s taken me most of my life to come to that conclusion, but you know the old saw; better late than never. She was from Portsmouth, New Hampshire; I was from South Berwick, Maine. That made her practically the girl next door. We had begun “going together” (as we used to say) during our freshman year at UNH—we actually met at the Freshman Mixer, and how sweet is that? Just like one of those pop songs.

We were inseparable for two years, went everywhere together and did everything together. Everything, that is, but “it.” We were both work-study kids with University jobs. Hers was in the library; mine was in the Commons cafeteria. We were offered the chance to hold onto those jobs during the summer of 1972, and of course we did. The money wasn’t great, but the togetherness was priceless. I assumed that would also be the deal during the summer of 1973, until Wendy announced that her friend Renee had gotten them jobs working at Filene’s, in Boston.

“Where does that leave me?” I asked.

“You can always come down,” she said. “I’ll miss you like mad, but really, Dev, we could probably use some time apart.”

A phrase that is very often a death-knell. She may have seen that idea on my face, because she stood on tiptoe and kissed me. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” she said. “Besides, with my own place, maybe you can stay over.” But she didn’t quite look at me when she said that, and I never did stay over. Too many roommates, she said. Too little time. Of course such problems can be overcome, but somehow we never did, which should have told me something; in retrospect, it tells me a lot. Several times we had been very close to “it,” but “it” just never quite happened. She always drew back, and I never pressed her. God help me, I was being gallant. I have wondered often since what would have changed (for good or for ill) had I not been. What I know now is that gallant young men rarely get pussy. Put it on a sampler and hang it in your kitchen.

The prospect of another summer mopping cafeteria floors and loading elderly Commons dishwashers with dirty plates didn’t hold much charm for me, not with Wendy seventy miles south, enjoying the bright lights of Boston, but it was steady work, which I needed, and I didn’t have any other prospects. Then, in late February, one literally came down the dish-line to me on the conveyor belt.

Someone had been reading Carolina Living while he or she snarfed up that day’s blue plate luncheon special, which happened to be Mexicali Burgers and Caramba Fries. He or she had left the magazine on the tray, and I picked it up along with the dishes. I almost tossed it in the trash, then didn’t. Free reading material was, after all, free reading material. (I was a work-study kid, remember.) I stuck it in my back pocket and forgot about it until I got back to my dorm room. There it flopped onto the floor, open to the classified section at the back, while I was changing my pants.

Whoever had been reading the magazine had circled several job possibilities… although in the end, he or she must have decided none of them was quite right; otherwise Carolina Living wouldn’t have come riding down the conveyor belt. Near the bottom of the page was an ad that caught my eye even though it hadn’t been circled. In boldface type, the first line read: WORK CLOSE TO HEAVEN! What English major could read that and not hang in for the pitch? And what glum twenty-one-year-old, beset with the growing fear that he might be losing his girlfriend, would not be attracted by the idea of working in a place called Joyland?

There was a telephone number, and on a whim, I called it. A week later, a job application landed in my dormitory mailbox. The attached letter stated that if I wanted full-time summer employment (which I did), I’d be doing many different jobs, most but not all custodial. I would have to possess a valid driver’s license, and I would need to interview. I could do that on the upcoming spring break instead of going home to Maine for the week. Only I’d been planning to spend at least some of that week with Wendy. We might even get around to “it.”

“Go for the interview,” Wendy said when I told her. She didn’t even hesitate. “It’ll be an adventure.”

“Being with you would be an adventure,” I said.

“There’ll be plenty of time for that next year.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed me (she always stood on tiptoe). Was she seeing the other guy, even then? Probably not, but I’ll bet she’d noticed him, because he was in her Advanced Sociology course. Renee St. Claire would have known, and probably would have told me if I’d asked—telling stuff was Renee’s specialty, I bet she wore the priest out when she did the old confession bit—but some things you don’t want to know. Like why the girl you loved with all your heart kept saying no to you, but tumbled into bed with the new guy at almost the first opportunity. I’m not sure anybody ever gets completely over their first love, and that still rankles. Part of me still wants to know what was wrong with me. What I was lacking. I’m in my sixties now, my hair is gray and I’m a prostate cancer survivor, but I still want to know why I wasn’t good enough for Wendy Keegan.

I took a train called the Southerner from Boston to North Carolina (not much of an adventure, but cheap), and a bus from Wilmington to Heaven’s Bay. My interview was with Fred Dean, who was—among many other functions—Joyland’s employment officer. After fifteen minutes of Q-and-A, plus a look at my driver’s license and my Red Cross life-saving certificate, he handed me a plastic badge on a lanyard. It bore the word VISITOR, that day’s date, and a cartoon picture of a grinning, blue-eyed German Shepherd who bore a passing resemblance to the famous cartoon sleuth, Scooby-Doo.

“Take a walk around,” Dean said. “Ride the Carolina Spin, if you like. Most of the rides aren’t up and running yet, but that one is. Tell Lane I said okay. What I gave you is a day-pass, but I want you back here by…” He looked at his watch. “Let’s say one o’clock. Tell me then if you want the job. I’ve got five spots left, but they’re all basically the same—as Happy Helpers.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He nodded, smiling. “Don’t know how you’ll feel about this place, but it suits me fine. It’s a little old and a little rickety, but I find that charming. I tried Disney for a while; didn’t like it. It’s too… I don’t know…”

“Too corporate?” I ventured.

“Exactly. Too corporate. Too buffed and shiny. So I came back to Joyland a few years ago. Haven’t regretted it. We fly a bit more by the seat of our pants here—the place has a little of the old-time carny flavor. Go on, look around. See what you think. More important, see how you feel.”

“Can I ask one question first?”

“Of course.”

I fingered my day pass. “Who’s the dog?”

His smile became a grin. “That’s Howie the Happy Hound, Joyland’s mascot. Bradley Easterbrook built Joyland, and the original Howie was his dog. Long dead now, but you’ll still see a lot of him, if you work here this summer.”

I did… and I didn’t. An easy riddle, but the explanation will have to wait awhile.

Joyland was an indie, not as big as a Six Flags park, and nowhere near as big as Disney World, but it was large enough to be impressive, especially with Joyland Avenue, the main drag, and Hound Dog Way, the secondary drag, almost empty and looking eight lanes wide. I heard the whine of power-saws and saw plenty of workmen—the largest crew swarming over the Thunderball, one of Joyland’s two coasters—but there were no customers, because the park didn’t open until May fifteenth. A few of the food concessions were doing business to take care of the workers’ lunch needs, though, and an old lady in front of a star-studded tell-your-fortune kiosk was staring at me suspiciously. With one exception, everything else was shut up tight.

The exception of the Carolina Spin. It was a hundred and seventy feet tall (this I found out later), and turning very slowly. Out in front stood a tightly muscled guy in faded jeans, balding suede boots splotched with grease, and a strap-style tee shirt. He wore a derby hat tilted on his coal-black hair. A filterless cigarette was parked behind one ear. He looked like a cartoon carnival barker from an old-time newspaper strip. There was an open toolbox and a big portable radio on an orange crate beside him. The Faces were singing “Stay with Me.” The guy was bopping to the beat, hands in his back pockets, hips moving side to side. I had a thought, absurd but perfectly clear: When I grow up, I want to look just like this guy.

He pointed to the pass. “Freddy Dean sent you, right? Told you everything else was closed, but you could take a ride on the big wheel.”

“Yes, sir.”

“A ride on the Spin means you’re in. He likes the chosen few to get the aerial view. You gonna take the job?”

“I think so.”

He stuck out his hand. “I’m Lane Hardy. Welcome aboard, kid.”

I shook with him. “Devin Jones.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

He started up the inclined walk leading to the gently turning ride, grabbed a long lever that looked like a stick shift, and edged it back. The wheel came to a slow stop with one of the gaily painted cabins (the image of Howie the Happy Hound on each) swaying at the passenger loading dock.

“Climb aboard, Jonesy. I’m going to send you up where the air is rare and the view is much more than fair.”

I climbed into the cabin and closed the door. Lane gave it a shake to make sure it was latched, dropped the safety bar, then returned to his rudimentary controls. “Ready for takeoff, cap’n?”

“I guess so.”

“Amazement awaits.” He gave me a wink and advanced the control stick. The wheel began to turn again and all at once he was looking up at me. So was the old lady by the fortune-telling booth. Her neck was craned and she was shading her eyes. I waved to her. She didn’t wave back.

Then I was above everything but the convoluted dips and twists of the Thunderball, rising into the chilly early spring air, and feeling—stupid but true—that I was leaving all my cares and worries down below.

Joyland wasn’t a theme park, which allowed it to have a little bit of everything. There was a secondary roller coaster called the Delirium Shaker and a water slide (Captain Nemo’s Splash & Crash). On the far western side of the park was a special annex for the little ones called the Wiggle-Waggle Village. There was also a concert hall where most of the acts—this I also learned later—were either B-list C&W or the kind of rockers who peaked in the fifties or sixties. I remember that Johnny Otis and Big Joe Turner did a show there together. I had to ask Brenda Rafferty, the head accountant who was also a kind of den mother to the Hollywood Girls, who they were. Bren thought I was dense; I thought she was old; we were both probably right.

Lane Hardy took me all the way to the top and then stopped the wheel. I sat in the swaying car, gripping the safety bar, and looking out at a brand-new world. To the west was the North Carolina flatland, looking incredibly green to a New England kid who was used to thinking of March as nothing but true spring’s cold and muddy precursor. To the east was the ocean, a deep metallic blue until it broke in creamy-white pulses on the beach where I would tote my abused heart up and down a few months hence. Directly below me was the good-natured jumble of Joyland—the big rides and small ones, the concert hall and concessions, the souvenir shops and the Happy Hound Shuttle, which took customers to the adjacent motels and, of course, the beach. To the north was Heaven’s Bay. From high above the park (upstairs, where the air is rare), the town looked like a nestle of children’s blocks from which four church steeples rose at the major points of the compass.

The wheel began to move again. I came down feeling like a kid in a Rudyard Kipling story, riding on the nose of an elephant. Lane Hardy brought me to a stop, but didn’t bother to unlatch the car’s door for me; I was, after all, almost an employee.

“How’d you like it?”

“Great,” I said.

“Yeah, it ain’t bad for a grandma ride.” He reset his derby so it slanted the other way and cast an appraising eye over me. “How tall are you? Six-three?”

“Six-four.”

“Uh-huh. Let’s see how you like ridin all six-four of you on the Spin in the middle of July, wearin the fur and singin ‘Happy Birthday’ to some spoiled-rotten little snothole with cotton candy in one hand and a meltin Kollie Kone in the other.”

“Wearing what fur?”

But he was headed back to his machinery and didn’t answer. Maybe he couldn’t hear me over his radio, which was now blasting “Crocodile Rock.” Or maybe he just wanted my future occupation as one of Joyland’s cadre of Happy Hounds to come as a surprise.

I had over an hour to kill before meeting with Fred Dean again, so I strolled up Hound Dog Way toward a lunch-wagon that looked like it was doing a pretty good business. Not everything at Joyland was canine-themed, but plenty of stuff was, including this particular eatery, which was called Pup-A-Licious. I was on a ridiculously tight budget for this little job-hunting expedition, but I thought I could afford a couple of bucks for a chili-dog and a paper cup of French fries.

When I reached the palm-reading concession, Madame Fortuna planted herself in my path. Except that’s not quite right, because she was only Fortuna between May fifteenth and Labor Day. During those sixteen weeks, she dressed in long skirts, gauzy, layered blouses, and shawls decorated with various cabalistic symbols. Gold hoops hung from her ears, so heavy they dragged the lobes down, and she talked in a thick Romany accent that made her sound like a character from a 1930s fright-flick, the kind featuring mist-shrouded castles and howling wolves.

During the rest of the year she was a childless widow from Brooklyn who collected Hummel figures and liked movies (especially the weepy-ass kind where some chick gets cancer and dies beautifully). Today she was smartly put together in a black pantsuit and low heels. A rose-pink scarf around her throat added a touch of color. As Fortuna, she sported masses of wild gray locks, but that was a wig, and still stored under its own glass dome in her little Heaven’s Bay house. Her actual hair was a cropped cap of dyed black. The Love Story fan from Brooklyn and Fortuna the Seer only came together in one respect: both fancied themselves psychic.

“There is a shadow over you, young man,” she announced.

I looked down and saw she was absolutely right. I was standing in the shadow of the Carolina Spin. We both were.

“Not that, stupidnik. Over your future. You will have a hunger.”

I had a bad one already, but a Pup-A-Licious footlong would soon take care of it. “That’s very interesting, Mrs… . um…”

“Rosalind Gold,” she said, holding out her hand. “But you can call me Rozzie. Everyone does. But during the season…” She fell into character, which meant she sounded like Bela Lugosi with breasts. “Doorink the season, I am… Fortuna!”

I shook with her. If she’d been in costume as well as in character, half a dozen gold bangles would have clattered on her wrist. “Very nice to meet you.” And, trying on the same accent: “I am… Devin!”

She wasn’t amused. “An Irish name?”

“Right.”

“The Irish are full of sorrow, and many have the sight. I don’t know if you do, but you will meet someone who does.”

Actually, I was full of happiness… along with that surpassing desire to put a Pup-A-Licious pup, preferably loaded with chili, down my throat. This was feeling like an adventure. I told myself I’d probably feel less that way when I was swabbing out toilets at the end of a busy day, or cleaning puke from the seats of the Whirly Cups, but just then everything seemed perfect.

“Are you practicing your act?”

She drew herself up to her full height, which might have been five-two. “Is no act, my lad.” She said ect for act. “Jews are the most psychically sensitive race on earth. This is a thing everyone knows.” She dropped the accent. “Also, Joyland beats hanging out a palmistry shingle on Second Avenue. Sorrowful or not, I like you. You give off good vibrations.”

“One of my very favorite Beach Boys songs.”

“But you are on the edge of great sorrow.” She paused, doing the old emphasis thing. “And, perhaps, danger.”

“Do you see a beautiful woman with dark hair in my future?” Wendy was a beautiful woman with dark hair.

“No,” Rozzie said, and what came next stopped me dead. “She is in your past.”

Ohh-kay.

I walked around her in the direction of Pup-A-Licious, being careful not to touch her. She was a charlatan, I didn’t have a single doubt about that, but touching her just then still seemed like a lousy idea.

No good. She walked with me. “In your future is a little girl and a little boy. The boy has a dog.”

“A Happy Hound, I bet. Probably named Howie.”

She ignored this latest attempt at levity. “The girl wears a red hat and carries a doll. One of these children has the sight. I don’t know which. It is hidden from me.”

I hardly heard that part of her spiel. I was thinking of the previous pronouncement, made in a flat Brooklyn accent: She is in your past.

Madame Fortuna got a lot of stuff wrong, I found out, but she did seem to have a genuine psychic touch, and on the day I interviewed for a summer at Joyland, she was hitting on all cylinders.

I got the job. Mr. Dean was especially pleased by my Red Cross life-saving certificate, obtained at the YMCA the summer I turned sixteen. That was what I called my Boredom Summer. In the years since, I’ve discovered there’s a lot to be said for boredom.

I told Mr. Dean when my finals ended, and promised him that I’d be at Joyland two days later, ready for team assignment and training. We shook hands and he welcomed me aboard. I had a moment when I wondered if he was going to encourage me to do the Happy Hound Bark with him, or something equivalent, but he just wished me a good day and walked out of the office with me, a little man with sharp eyes and a lithe stride. Standing on the little cement-block porch of the employment office, listening to the pound of the surf and smelling the damp salt air, I felt excited all over again, and hungry for summer to begin.

“You’re in the amusement business now, young Mr. Jones,” my new boss said. “Not the carny business—not exactly, not the way we run things today—but not so far removed from it, either. Do you know what that means, to be in the amusement business?”

“No, sir, not exactly.”

His eyes were solemn, but there was a ghost of a grin on his mouth. “It means the rubes have to leave with smiles on their faces—and by the way, if I ever hear you call the customers rubes, you’re going to be out the door so fast you won’t know what hit you. I can say it, because I’ve been in the amusement business since I was old enough to shave. They’re rubes—no different from the redneck Okies and Arkies that rubbernecked their way through every carny I worked for after World War II. The people who come to Joyland may wear better clothes and drive Fords and Volkswagen microbuses instead of Farmall pickups, but the place turns ’em into rubes with their mouths hung open. If it doesn’t, it’s not doing its job. But to you, they’re the conies. When they hear it, they think Coney Island. We know better. They’re rabbits, Mr. Jones, nice plump fun-loving rabbits, hopping from ride to ride and shy to shy instead of from hole to hole.”

He dropped me a wink and gave my shoulder a squeeze.

“The conies have to leave happy, or this place dries up and blows away. I’ve seen it happen, and when it does, it happens fast. It’s an amusement park, young Mr. Jones, so pet the conies and give their ears only the gentlest of tugs. In a word, amuse them.”

“Okay,” I said… although I didn’t know how much customer amusement I’d be providing by polishing the Devil Wagons (Joyland’s version of Dodgem cars) or running a street-sweeper down Hound Dog Way after the gates closed.

“And don’t you dare leave me in the lurch. Be here on the agreed-upon date, and five minutes before the agreed-upon time.”

“Okay.”

“There are two important showbiz rules, kiddo: always know where your wallet is… and show up.”

When I walked out beneath the big arch with WELCOME TO JOYLAND written on it in neon letters (now off) and into the mostly empty parking lot, Lane Hardy was leaning against one of the shuttered ticket booths, smoking the cigarette previously parked behind his ear.

“Can’t smoke on the grounds anymore,” he said. “New rule. Mr. Easterbrook says we’re the first park in America to have it, but we won’t be the last. Get the job?”

“I did.”

“Congratulations. Did Freddy give you the carny spiel?”

“Sort of, yeah.”

“Tell you about petting the conies?”

“Yeah.”

“He can be a pain in the banana, but he’s old-time showbiz, seen it all, most of it twice, and he’s not wrong. I think you’ll do okay. You’ve got a carny look about you, kid.” He waved a hand at the park with its landmarks rising against the blameless blue sky: the Thunderball, the Delirium Shaker, the convoluted twists and turns of Captain Nemo’s water slide, and—of course—the Carolina Spin. “Who knows, this place might be your future.”

“Maybe,” I said, although I already knew what my future was going to be: writing novels and the kind of short stories they publish in The New Yorker. I had it all planned out. Of course, I also had marriage to Wendy Keegan all planned out, and how we’d wait until we were in our thirties to have a couple of kids. When you’re twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It’s only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect you’ve been looking at the map upside down, and not until you’re forty are you entirely sure. By the time you’re sixty, take it from me, you’re fucking lost.

“Did Rozzie Gold give you her usual bundle of Fortuna horseshit?”

“Um…”

Lane chuckled. “Why do I even ask? Just remember, kid, that ninety percent of everything she says really is horseshit. The other ten… let’s just say she’s told folks some stuff that rocked them back on their heels.”

“What about you?” I asked. “Any revelations that rocked you back on your heels?”

He grinned. “The day I let Rozzie read my palm is the day I go back on the road, ride-jocking the tornado-and-chittlins circuit. Mrs. Hardy’s boy doesn’t mess with Ouija boards and crystal balls.”

Do you see a beautiful woman with dark hair in my future? I’d asked.

No. She is in your past.

He was looking at me closely. “What’s up? You swallow a fly?”

“It’s nothing,” I said.

“Come on, son. Did she feed you truth or horseshit? Live or Memorex? Tell your daddy.”

“Definitely horseshit.” I looked at my watch. “I’ve got a bus to catch at five, if I’m going to make the train to Boston at seven. I better get moving.”

“Ah, you got plenty of time. Where you staying this summer?”

“I hadn’t even thought about it.”

“You might want to stop at Mrs. Shoplaw’s on your way to the bus station. Plenty of people in Heavens Bay rent to summer help, but she’s the best. She’s housed a lot of Happy Helpers over the years. Her place is easy to find; it’s where Main Street ends at the beach. Great big rambler painted gray. You’ll see the sign hanging from the porch. Can’t miss it, because it’s made out of shells and some’re always falling off. MRS. SHOPLAW’S BEACHSIDE ACCOMMODATIONS. Tell her I sent you.”

“Okay, I will. Thanks.”

“If you rent there, you can walk down here on the beach if you want to save your gas money for something more important, like stepping out on your day off. That beach walk makes a pretty way to start the morning. Good luck, kid. Look forward to working with you.” He held out his hand. I shook it and thanked him again.

Since he’d put the idea in my head, I decided to take the beach walk back to town. It would save me twenty minutes waiting for a taxi I couldn’t really afford. I had almost reached the wooden stairs going down to the sand when he called after me.

“Hey, Jonesy! Want to know something Rozzie won’t tell you?”

“Sure,” I said.

“We’ve got a spook palace called Horror House. The old Roz-ola won’t go within fifty yards of it. She hates the pop-ups and the torture chamber and the recorded voices, but the real reason is that she’s afraid it really might be haunted.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And she ain’t the only one. Half a dozen folks who work here claim to have seen her.”

“Are you serious?” But this was just one of the questions you ask when you’re flabbergasted. I could see he was.

“I’d tell you the story, but break-time’s over for me. I’ve got some power-poles to replace on the Devil Wagons, and the safety inspection guys are coming to look at the Thunderball around three. What a pain in the ass those guys are. Ask Shoplaw. When it comes to Joyland, Emmalina Shoplaw knows more than I do. You could say she’s a student of the place. Compared to her, I’m a newbie.”

“This isn’t a joke? A little rubber chicken you toss at all the new hires?”

“Do I look like I’m joking?”

He didn’t, but he did look like he was having a good time. He even dropped me a wink. “What’s a self-respecting amusement park without a ghost? Maybe you’ll see her yourself. The rubes never do, that’s for sure. Now hurry along, kiddo. Nail down a room before you catch the bus back to Wilmington. You’ll thank me later.”

With a name like Emmalina Shoplaw, it was hard not to picture a rosy-cheeked landlady out of a Charles Dickens novel, one who went everywhere at a bosomy bustle and said things like Lor’ save us. She’d serve tea and scones while a supporting cast of kind-hearted eccentrics looked on approvingly; she might even pinch my cheek as we sat roasting chestnuts over a crackling fire.

But we rarely get what we imagine in this world, and the gal who answered my ring was tall, fiftyish, flat-chested, and as pale as a frosted windowpane. She carried an old-fashioned beanbag ashtray in one hand and a smoldering cigarette in the other. Her mousy brown hair had been done up in fat coils that covered her ears. They made her look like an aging version of a princess in a Grimm’s fairy tale. I explained why I was there.

“Going to work at Joyland, huh? Well, I guess you better come in. Do you have references?”

“Not apartment references, no—I live in a dorm. But I’ve got a work reference from my boss at the Commons. The Commons is the food-service cafeteria at UNH where I—”

“I know what a Commons is. I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night.” She showed me into the front parlor, a house-long room stuffed with mismatched furniture and dominated by a big table-model TV. She pointed at it. “Color. My renters are welcome to use it—and the parlor—until ten on weeknights and midnight on the weekends. Sometimes I join the kids for a movie or the Saturday afternoon baseball. We have pizza or I make popcorn. It’s jolly.”

Jolly, I thought. As in jolly good. And it sounded jolly good.

“Tell me, Mr. Jones, do you drink and get noisy? I consider that sort of behavior antisocial, although many don’t.”

“No, ma’am.” I drank a little, but rarely got noisy. Usually after a beer or two, I just got sleepy.

“Asking if you use drugs would be pointless, you’d say no whether you do or not, wouldn’t you? But of course that sort of thing always reveals itself in time, and when it does, I invite my renters to find fresh accommos. Not even pot, are we clear on that?”

“Yes.”

She peered at me. “You don’t look like a pothead.”

“I’m not.”

“I have space for four boarders, and only one of those places is currently taken. Miss Ackerley. She’s a librarian. All my rents are single rooms, but they’re far nicer than what you’d find at a motel. The one I’m thinking of for you is on the second floor. It has its own bathroom and shower, which those on the third floor do not. There’s an outside staircase, too, which is convenient if you have a lady-friend. I have nothing against lady-friends, being both a lady and quite friendly myself. Do you have a lady-friend, Mr. Jones?”

“Yes, but she’s working in Boston this summer.”

“Well, perhaps you’ll meet someone. You know what the song says—love is all around.”

I only smiled at that. In the spring of ’73, the concept of loving anyone other than Wendy Keegan seemed utterly foreign to me.

“You’ll have a car, I imagine. There are just two parking spaces out back for four tenants, so every summer it’s first come, first served. You’re first come, and I think you’ll do. If I find you don’t, it’s down the road you’ll go. Does that strike you as fair?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good, because that’s the way it is. I’ll need the usual: first month, last month, damage deposit.” She named a figure that also seemed fair. Nevertheless, it was going to make a shambles of my First New Hampshire Trust account.

“Will you take a check?”

“Will it bounce?”

“No, ma’am, not quite.”

She threw back her head and laughed. “Then I’ll take it, assuming you still want the room once you’ve seen it.” She stubbed out her cigarette and rose. “By the way, no smoking upstairs—it’s a matter of insurance. And no smoking in here, once there are tenants in residence. That’s a matter of common politeness. Do you know that old man Easterbrook is instituting a no-smoking policy at the park?”

“I heard that. He’ll probably lose business.”

“He might at first. Then he might gain some. I’d put my money on Brad. He’s a shrewd guy, carny-from-carny.” I thought to ask her what that meant, exactly, but she had already moved on. “Shall we have a peek at the room?”

A peek at the second floor room was enough to convince me it would be fine. The bed was big, which was good, and the window looked out on the ocean, which was even better. The bathroom was something of a joke, so tiny that when I sat on the commode my feet would be in the shower, but college students with only crumbs in their financial cupboards can’t be too picky. And the view was the clincher. I doubted if the rich folks had a better one from their summer places along Heaven’s Row. I pictured bringing Wendy here, the two of us admiring the view, and then… in that big bed with the steady, sleepy beat of the surf outside…

“It.” Finally, “it.”

“I want it,” I said, and felt my cheeks heat up. It wasn’t just the room I was talking about.

“I know you do. It’s all over your darn face.” As if she knew what I was thinking, and maybe she did. She grinned—a big wide one that made her almost Dickensian in spite of her flat bosom and pale skin. “Your own little nest. Not the Palace of Versailles, but your own. Not like having a dorm room, is it? Even a single?”

“No,” I admitted. I was thinking I’d have to talk my dad into putting another five hundred bucks into my bank account, to keep me covered until I started getting paychecks. He’d grouse but come through. I just hoped I wouldn’t have to play the Dead Mom card. She had been gone almost four years, but Dad carried half a dozen pictures of her in his wallet, and still wore his wedding ring.

“Your own job and your own place,” she said, sounding a bit dreamy. “That’s good stuff, Devin. Do you mind me calling you Devin?”

“Make it Dev.”

“All right, I will.” She looked around the little room with its sharply sloping roof—it was under an eave—and sighed. “The thrill doesn’t last long, but while it does, it’s a fine thing. That sense of independence. I think you’ll fit in here. You’ve got a carny look about you.”

“You’re the second person to tell me that.” Then I thought of my conversation with Lane Hardy in the parking lot. “Third, actually.”

“And I bet I know who the other two were. Anything else I can show you? The bathroom’s not much, I know, but it beats having to take a dump in a dormitory bathroom while a couple of guys at the sinks fart and tell lies about the girls they made out with last night.”

I burst into roars of laughter, and Mrs. Emmalina Shoplaw joined me.

We descended by way of the outside stairs. “How’s Lane Hardy?” she asked when we got to the bottom. “Still wearing that stupid beanie of his?”

“It looked like a derby to me.”

She shrugged. “Beanie, derby, what’s the diff?”

“He’s fine, but he told me something…”

She was giving me a head-cocked look. Almost smiling, but not quite.

“He told me the Joyland funhouse—Horror House, he called it—is haunted. I asked him if he was pulling my leg, and he said he wasn’t. He said you knew about it.”

“Did he, now.”

“Yes. He says that when it comes to Joyland, you know more than he does.”

“Well,” she said, reaching into the pocket of her slacks and bringing out a pack of Winstons, “I know a fair amount. My husband was chief of engineering down there until he took a heart attack and died. When it turned out his life insurance was lousy—and borrowed against to the hilt in the bargain—I started renting out the top two stories of this place. What else was I going to do? We just had the one kid, and now she’s up in New York, working for an ad agency.” She lit her cigarette, inhaled, and chuffed it back out as laughter. “Working on losing her southern accent, too, but that’s another story. This overgrown monstrosity of a house was Howie’s playtoy, and I never begrudged him. At least it’s paid off. And I like staying connected to the park, because it makes me feel like I’m still connected to him. Can you understand that?”

“Sure.”

She considered me through a rising raft of cigarette smoke, smiled, and shook her head. “Nah—you’re being kind, but you’re a little too young.”

“I lost my Mom four years ago. My dad’s still grieving. He says there’s a reason wife and life sound almost the same. I’ve got school, at least, and my girlfriend. Dad’s knocking around a house just north of Kittery that’s way too big for him. He knows he should sell it and get a smaller one closer to where he works—we both know—but he stays. So yeah, I know what you mean.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Mrs. Shoplaw said. “Some day I’ll open my mouth too wide and fall right in. That bus of yours, is it the five-ten?”

“Yes.”

“Well, come on in the kitchen. I’ll make you a toasted cheese and microwave you a bowl of tomato soup. You’ve got time. And I’ll tell you the sad story of the Joyland ghost while you eat, if you want to hear it.”

“Is it really a ghost story?”

“I’ve never been in that damn funhouse, so I don’t know for sure. But it’s a murder story. That much I am sure of.”

The soup was just Campbell’s out of the can, but the toasted cheese was Muenster—my favorite—and tasted heavenly. She poured me a glass of milk and insisted I drink it. I was, Mrs. Shoplaw said, a growing boy. She sat down opposite me with her own bowl of soup but no sandwich (“I have to watch my girlish figure”) and told me the tale. Some of it she’d gotten from the newspapers and TV reports. The juicier bits came from her Joyland contacts, of whom she had many.

“It was four years ago, which I guess would make it around the same time your mother died. Do you know what always comes first to my mind when I think about it? The guy’s shirt. And the gloves. Thinking about those things gives me the creeps. Because it means he planned it.”

“You might be kind of starting in the middle,” I said.

Mrs. Shoplaw laughed. “Yeah, I suppose I am. The name of your supposed ghost is Linda Gray, and she was from Florence. That’s over South Carolina way. She and her boyfriend—if that’s what he was; the cops checked her background pretty closely and found no trace of him—spent her last night on earth at the Luna Inn, half a mile south of here along the beach. They entered Joyland around eleven o’clock the next day. He bought them day passes, using cash. They rode some rides and then had a late lunch at Rock Lobster, the seafood place down by the concert hall. That was just past one o’clock. As for the time of death, you probably know how they establish it… contents of the stomach and so on…”

“Yeah.” My sandwich was gone, and I turned my attention to the soup. The story wasn’t hurting my appetite any. I was twenty-one, remember, and although I would have told you different, down deep I was convinced I was never going to die. Not even my mother’s death had been able to shake that core belief.

“He fed her, then he took her on the Carolina Spin—a slow ride, you know, easy on the digestion—and then he took her into Horror House. They went in together, but only he came out. About halfway along the course of the ride, which takes about nine minutes, he cut her throat and threw her out beside the monorail track the cars run on. Threw her out like a piece of trash. He must have known there’d be a mess, because he was wearing two shirts, and he’d put on a pair of yellow work-gloves. They found the top shirt—the one that would have caught most of the blood—about a hundred yards farther along from the body. The gloves a little farther along still.”

I could see it: first the body, still warm and pulsing, then the shirt, then the gloves. The killer, meanwhile, sits tight and finishes the ride. Mrs. Shoplaw was right, it was creepy.

“When the ride ended, the son of a bee just got out and walked away. He mopped up the car—that shirt they found was soaking—but he didn’t get quite all of the blood. One of the Helpers spotted some on the seat before the next ride started and cleaned it up. Didn’t think twice about it, either. Blood on amusement park rides isn’t unusual; mostly it’s some kid who gets overexcited and has a nose-gusher. You’ll find out for yourself. Just make sure you wear your own gloves when you do the cleanup, in case of diseases. They have ’em at all the first-aid stations, and there are first-aid stations all over the park.”

“Nobody noticed that he got off the ride without his date?”

“Nope. This was mid-July, the very height of the season, and the place was a swarming madhouse. They didn’t find the body until one o’clock the next morning, long after the park was closed and the Horror House work-lights were turned on. For the graveyard shift, you know. You’ll get your chance to experience that; all the Happy Helper crews get cleanup duty one week a month, and you want to catch up on your sleep ahead of time, because that swing-shift’s a booger.”

“People rode past her until the park closed and didn’t see her?”

“If they did, they thought it was just part of the show. But probably the body went unnoticed. Remember, Horror House is a dark ride. The only one in Joyland, as it happens. Other parks have more.”

A dark ride. That struck a shivery chord, but it wasn’t strong enough to keep me from finishing my soup. “What about a description of him? Maybe from whoever served them at the restaurant?”

“They had better than that. They had pictures. You want to believe the police made sure they got on TV and printed in the newspapers.”

“How did that happen?”

“The Hollywood Girls,” Mrs. Shoplaw said. “There are always half a dozen working the park when it’s going full-blast. There’s never been anything close to a cooch joint at joyland, but old man Easterbrook didn’t spend all those years in rolling carnies for nothing. He knows people like a little dash of sex appeal to go with the rides and the corndogs. There’s one Hollywood Girl on each Helper team. You’ll get yours, and you and the rest of the guys on your team will be expected to keep a big-brotherly eye out in case anyone bothers her. They run around in these short green dresses and green high heels and cutie-pie green hats that always make me think of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Only they’re the Merry Chicks. They tote Speed Graphic cameras, like the kind you see in old movies, and they take pictures of the rubes.” She paused. “Although I’d advise you against calling the customers that yourself.”

“Already been warned by Mr. Dean,” I said.

“Figures. Anyhow, the Hollywood Girls are told to concentrate on family groups and dating couples who look over twenty-one. Kids younger than that usually aren’t interested in souvenir photos; they’d rather spend their money on food and arcade games. So the deal is, the girls snap first, then approach.” She did a breathy little Marilyn Monroe voice. “ ‘Hello, welcome to Joyland, I’m Karen! If you’d like a copy of the picture I just took, give me your name and check at the Hollywood Photo Booth on Hound Dog Way as you exit the park.’ Like that.

“One of them took a picture of Linda Gray and her boyfriend at the Annie Oakley Shootin’ Gallery, but when she approached, the guy gave her the brushoff. A hard brushoff. She told the cops later that he looked like he would’ve taken her camera and broken it, if he thought he could get away with it. Said his eyes gave her chills. Hard and gray, she said.” Mrs. Shoplaw smiled and shrugged. “Only it turned out he was wearing sunglasses. You know how some girls like to dramatize.”

As a matter of fact, I did. Wendy’s friend Renee could turn a routine trip to the dentist into a horror-movie scenario.

“That was the best picture, but not the only one. The cops went through all the Hollywood Girl snaps from that day and found the Gray girl and her friend in the background of at least four others. In the best of those, they’re standing in line for the Whirly Cups, and he’s got his hand on her keister. Pretty chummy for someone none of her family or friends had ever seen before.”

“Too bad there aren’t closed-circuit TV cameras,” I said. “My lady-friend got a job at Filene’s in Boston this summer, and she says they’ve got a few of those cameras, and are putting in more. To foil shoplifters.”

“A day will come when they have ’em everywhere,” she said. “Just like in that science fiction book about the Thought Police. I don’t look forward to it, either. But they’ll never have them in rides like Horror House. Not even infrared ones that see in the dark.”

“No?”

“Nope. There’s no Tunnel of Love at Joyland, but Horror House is most definitely the Tunnel of Grope. My husband told me once that a day when the graveyard shift cleanup crew didn’t find at least three pairs of panties beside the track was a slow day, indeed.

“But they did have that one great photo of the guy at the shooting gallery. A portrait, almost. It ran in the papers and on TV for a week. Him snuggled up to her hip to hip, showing her how to hold the rifle, the way the guys always do. Everyone in both Carolinas must have seen it. She’s smiling, but he looks dead serious.”

“With his gloves and knife in his pockets the whole time,” I said. Marveling at the idea.

“Razor.”

“Huh?”

“He used a straight razor or something like it, that’s what the medical examiner figured. Anyway, they had those photos, including the one great one, and you know what? You can’t make his face out in any of them.”

“Because of the sunglasses.”

“For starters. Also a goatee that covered his chin, and a baseball cap, the kind with a long bill, that shaded what little of his face the sunglasses and goatee didn’t cover. Could have been anyone. Could have been you, 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. It showed up very clearly in the Shootin’ Gallery pic. They ran a blowup of the tat in the paper for five days running, hoping someone would recognize it. Nobody did.”

“No leads at the inn where they stayed the night before?”

“Uh-uh. He showed a South Carolina driver’s license when he checked in, but it was stolen a year before. No one even saw her. She must have waited in the car. She was a Jane Doe for almost a week, but the police released a full-face sketch. Made her look like she was just sleeping, not dead with her throat cut. Someone—a friend she went to nursing school with, I think it was—saw it and recognized it. She told the girl’s parents. I can’t imagine how they must have felt, coming up here in their car and hoping against hope that when they got to the morgue, it would turn out to be someone else’s well-loved child.” She shook her head slowly. “Kids are such a risk, Dev. Did that ever cross your mind?”

“I guess so.”

“Which means it hasn’t. Me… I think if they turned back that sheet and it was my daughter lying there, I’d lose my mind.”

“You don’t think Linda Gray really haunts the funhouse, do you?”

“I can’t answer that, because I hold no opinion on the afterlife, pro or con. My feeling is I’ll find that stuff out when I get there, and that’s good enough for me. All I know is that lots of people who work at Joyland claim to have seen her standing beside the track, wearing what she had on when they found her: blue skirt and blue sleeveless blouse. None of them would have seen those colors in the photos they released to the public, because the Speed Graphics the Hollywood Girls use only shoot black-and-white. Easier and cheaper to develop, I guess.”

“Maybe the color of her clothes was mentioned in the articles.”

She shrugged. “Might have been; I don’t remember. But several people have also mentioned that the girl they saw standing by the track was wearing a blue Alice band, and that wasn’t in the news stories. They held it back for almost a year, hoping to use it on a likely suspect if they came up with one.”

“Lane said the rubes never see her.”

“No, she only shows up after hours. It’s mostly Happy Helpers on the graveyard shift who see her, but I know at least one safety inspector from Raleigh who claims he did, because I had a drink with him at the Sand Dollar. Guy said she was just standing there on his ride-through. He thought it was a new pop-up until she raised her hands to him, like this.”

Mrs. Shoplaw held her hands out with the palms upturned, a supplicatory gesture.

“He said it felt like the temperature dropped twenty degrees. A cold pocket, he called it. When he turned and looked back, she was gone.”

I thought of Lane, in his tight jeans, scuffed boots, and tilted tuff-boy derby. Truth or horseshit? he’d asked. Live or Memorex? I thought the ghost of Linda Gray was almost certainly horseshit, but I hoped it wasn’t. I hoped I would see her. It would be a great story to tell Wendy, and in those days, all my thoughts led back to her. If I bought this shirt, would Wendy like it? If I wrote a story about a young girl getting her first kiss while on a horseback ride, would Wendy enjoy it? If I saw the ghost of a murdered girl, would Wendy be fascinated? Maybe enough to want to come down and see for herself?

“There was a follow-up story in the Charleston News and Courier about six months after the murder,” Mrs. Shoplaw said. “Turns out that since 1961, there have been four similar murders in Georgia and the Carolinas. All young girls. One stabbed, three others with their throats cut. The reporter dug up at least one cop who said all of them could have been killed by the guy who murdered Linda Gray.”

“Beware the Funhouse Killer!” I said in a deep announcer-type voice.

“That’s exactly what the paper called him. Hungry, weren’t you? You ate everything but the bowl. Now I think you’d better write me that check and beat feet to the bus station, or you’re apt to be spending the night on my sofa.”

Which looked comfortable enough, but I was anxious to get back north. Two days left in spring break, and then I’d be back at school with my arm around Wendy Keegan’s waist.

I took out my checkbook, scribbled, and by so doing rented a one-room apartment with a charming ocean view that Wendy Keegan—my lady-friend—never got a chance to sample. That room was where I sat up some nights with my stereo turned down low, playing Jimi Hendrix and the Doors, having those occasional thoughts of suicide. They were sophomoric rather than serious, just the fantasies of an over-imaginative young man with a heart condition… or so I tell myself now, all these years later, but who really knows?

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

I tried to reach Wendy from the bus station, but her stepmom said she was out with Renee. When the bus got to Wilmington I tried again, but she was still out with Renee. I asked Nadine—the stepmom—if she had any idea where they might have gone. Nadine said she didn’t. She sounded as if I were the most uninteresting caller she’d gotten all day. Maybe all year. Maybe in her life. I got along well enough with Wendy’s dad, but Nadine Keegan was never one of my biggest fans.

Finally—I was in Boston by then—I got Wendy. She sounded sleepy, although it was only eleven o’clock, which is the shank of the evening to most college students on spring break. I told her I got the job.

“Hooray for you,” she said. “Are you on your way home?”

“Yes, as soon as I get my car.” And if it didn’t have a flat tire. In those days I was always running on baldies and it seemed one of them was always going flat. A spare, you ask? Pretty funny, señor. “I could spend the night in Portsmouth instead of going straight home and see you tomorrow, if—”

“Wouldn’t be a good idea. Renee’s staying over, and that’s about all the company Nadine can take. You know how sensitive she is about company.”

Some company, maybe, but I thought Nadine and Renee had always gotten on like a house afire, drinking endless cups of coffee and gossiping about their favorite movie stars as if they were personal friends, but this didn’t seem like the time to say so.

“Ordinarily I’d love to talk to you, Dev, but I was getting ready to turn in. Me ’n Ren had a busy day. Shopping and… things.”

She didn’t elaborate on the things part, and I found I didn’t care to ask about them. Another warning sign.

“Love you, Wendy.”

“Love you, too.” That sounded perfunctory rather than fervent. She’s just tired, I told myself.

I rolled north out of Boston with a distinct feeling of unease. Something about the way she had sounded? That lack of enthusiasm? I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. But I wondered. Sometimes even now, all these years later, I wonder. She’s nothing to me these days but a scar and a memory, someone who hurt me as young women will hurt young men from time to time. A young woman from another life. Still I can’t help wondering where she was that day. What those things were. And if it was really Renee St. Clair she was with.

We could argue about what constitutes the creepiest line in pop music, but for me it’s early Beatles—John Lennon, actually—singing I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man. I could tell you I never felt that way about Wendy in the aftermath of the breakup, but it would be a lie. It was never a constant thing, but did I think of her with a certain malevolence in the aftermath of the breakup? Yes. There were long and sleepless nights when I thought she deserved something bad—maybe really bad—to happen to her for the way she hurt me. It dismayed me to think that way, but sometimes I did. And then I would think about the man who went into Horror House with his arm around Linda Gray and wearing two shirts. The man with the bird on his hand and a straight razor in his pocket.

In the spring of 1973—the last year of my childhood, when I look back on it—I saw a future in which Wendy Keegan was Wendy Jones… or perhaps Wendy Keegan-Jones, if she wanted to be modern and keep her maiden name in the mix. There would be a house on a lake in Maine or New Hampshire (maybe western Massachusetts) filled with the clatter-and-yell of a couple of little Keegan-Joneses, a house where I wrote books that weren’t exactly bestsellers but popular enough to keep us comfortably and were—very important—well reviewed. Wendy would pursue her dream of opening a small clothing boutique (also well reviewed), and I would teach a few creative writing seminars, the kind gifted students vie to get into. None of this ever happened, of course, so it was fitting that the last time we were together as a couple was in the office of Professor George B. Nako, a man who never was.

In the fall of 1968, returning University of New Hampshire students discovered Professor Nako’s “office” under the stairs in the basement of Hamilton Smith Hall. The space was papered with fake diplomas, peculiar watercolors labeled Albanian Art, and seating plans with such names as Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Zimmerman, and Lyndon Beans Johnson penciled into the squares. There were also posted themes from students who never existed. One, I remember, was titled “Sex Stars of the Orient.” Another was called “The Early Poetry of Cthulhu: An Analysis.” There were three standing ashtrays. A sign taped to the underside of the stairs read: PROFESSOR NAKO SEZ: “THE SMOKING LAMP IS ALWAYS LIT!” There were a couple of ratty easy chairs and an equally ratty sofa, very handy for students in search of a comfy make-out spot.

The Wednesday before my last final was unseasonably hot and humid. Around one in the afternoon, thunderheads began to build up, and around four, when Wendy had agreed to meet me in George B. Nako’s underground “office,” the skies opened and it began to pour. I got there first. Wendy showed up five minutes later, soaked to the skin but in high good humor. Droplets of water sparkled in her hair. She threw herself into my arms and wriggled against me, laughing. Thunder boomed; the few hanging lights in the gloomy basement hallway flickered.

“Hug me hug me hug me,” she said. “That rain is so cold.”

I warmed her up and she warmed me up. Pretty soon we were tangled together on the ratty sofa, my left hand curled around her and cupping her braless breast, my right far enough up her skirt to brush against silk and lace. She let that one stay there for a minute or two, then sat up, moved away from me, and fluffed her hair.

“Enough of that,” she said primly. “What if Professor Nako came in?”

“I don’t think that’s likely, do you?” I was smiling, but below the belt I was feeling a familiar throb. Sometimes Wendy would relieve that throb—she had become quite expert at what we used to call a “through-the-pants job”—but I didn’t think this was going to be one of those days.

“One of his students, then,” she said. “Begging for a last-chance passing grade. ‘Please, Professor Nako, please-please-please, I’ll do anything.’ ”

That wasn’t likely, either, but the chances of being interrupted were good, she was right about that. Students were always dropping by to put up new bogus themes or fresh works of Albanian art. The sofa was make-out friendly, but the locale wasn’t. Once, maybe, but not since the understairs nook had become a kind of mythic reference-point for students in the College of Liberal Arts.

“How was your sociology final?” I asked her.

“Okay. I doubt if I aced it, but I know I passed it and that’s good enough for me. Especially since it’s the last one.” She stretched, fingers touching the zig-zag of the stairs above us and lifting her breasts most entrancingly. “I’m out of here in…” She looked at her watch. “…exactly one hour and ten minutes.”

“You and Renee?” I had no great liking for Wendy’s roommate, but knew better than to say so. The one time I had, Wendy and I had had a brief, bitter argument in which she accused me of trying to manage her life.

“That is correct, sir. She’ll drop me at my dad and step-mom’s. And in one week, we’re official Filene’s employees!”

She made it sound as if the two of them had landed jobs as pages at the White House, but I held my peace on that, too. I had other concerns. “You’re still coming up to Berwick on Saturday, right?” The plan was for her to arrive in the morning, spend the day, and stay over. She’d be in the guest bedroom, of course, but that was only a dozen steps down the hall. Given the fact that we might not see each other again until fall, I thought the possibility of “it” happening was very strong. Of course, little children believe in Santa Claus, and UNH freshmen sometimes went a whole semester believing that George B. Nako was a real professor, teaching real English courses.

“Absoloodle.” She looked around, saw no one, and slipped a hand up my thigh. When it reached the crotch of my jeans, she tugged gently on what she found there. “Come here, you.”

So I got my through-the-pants job after all. It was one of her better efforts, slow and rhythmic. The thunder rolled, and at some point the sigh of the pouring rain became a hard, hollow rattle as it turned to hail. At the end she squeezed, heightening and prolonging the pleasure of my orgasm.

“Make sure to get good and wet when you go back to your dorm, or the whole world will know exactly what we were doing down here.” She bounced to her feet. “I have to go, Dev. I’ve still got some things to pack.”

“I’ll pick you up at noon on Saturday. My dad’s making his famous chicken casserole for supper.”

She once more said absoloodle; like standing on her tiptoes to kiss me, it was a Wendy Keegan trademark. Only on Friday night I got a call from her saying that Renee’s plans had changed and they were leaving for Boston two days early. “I’m sorry, Dev, but she’s my ride.”

“There’s always the bus,” I said, already knowing that wasn’t going to work.

“I promised, honey. And we have tickets for Pippin, at the Imperial. Renee’s dad got them for us, as a surprise.” She paused. “Be happy for me. You’re going all the way to North Carolina, and I’m happy for you.”

“Happy,” I said. “Roger-wilco.”

“That’s better.” Her voice dropped, became confidential. “Next time we’re together, I’ll make it up to you. Promise.”

That was a promise she never kept but one she never had to break, either, because I never saw Wendy Keegan after that day in Professor Nako’s “office.” There wasn’t even a final phone call filled with tears and accusations. That was on Tom Kennedy’s advice (we’ll get to him shortly), and it was probably a good thing. Wendy might have been expecting such a call, maybe even wished for it. If so, she was disappointed.

I hope she was. All these years later, with those old fevers and deliriums long in my past, I still hope she was.

Love leaves scars.

I never produced the books I dreamed of, those well-reviewed almost-bestsellers, but I do make a pretty good living as a writer, and I count my blessings; thousands are not so lucky. I’ve moved steadily up the income ladder to where I am now, working at Commercial Flight, a periodical you’ve probably never heard of.

A year after I took over as editor-in-chief, I found myself back on the UNH campus. I was there to attend a two-day symposium on the future of trade magazines in the twenty-first century. During a break on the second day, I strolled over to Hamilton Smith Hall on a whim and peeked under the basement stairs. The themes, celebrity-studded seating charts, and Albanian artwork were gone. So were the chairs, the sofa, and the standing ashtrays. And yet someone remembered. Scotch-taped to the underside of the stairs, where there had once been a sign proclaiming that the smoking lamp was always lit, I saw a sheet of paper with a single typed line in print so small I had to lean close and stand on tiptoe in order to read it:

Professor Nako now teaches at the Hogwarts Sohool of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Well, why not?

Why the fuck not?

As for Wendy, your guess is as good as mine. I suppose I could use Google, that twenty-first century Magic 8-Ball, to chase her down and find out if she ever realized her dream, the one of owning the exclusive little boutique, but to what purpose? Gone is gone. Over is over. And after my stint in Joyland (just down the beach from a town called Heaven’s Bay, let’s not forget that), my broken heart seemed a lot less important. Mike and Annie Ross had a lot to do with that.

My dad and I ended up eating his famous chicken casserole with no third party in attendance, which was probably all right with Timothy Jones; although he tried to hide it out of respect for me, I knew his feelings about Wendy were about the same as mine about Wendy’s friend Renee. At the time, I thought it was because he was a bit jealous of Wendy’s place in my life. Now I think he saw her more clearly than I could. I can’t say for sure; we never talked about it. I’m not sure men know how to talk about women in any meaningful way.

After the meal was eaten and the dishes washed, we sat on the couch, drinking beer, eating popcorn, and watching a movie starring Gene Hackman as a tough cop with a foot fetish. I missed Wendy—probably at that moment listening to the Pippin company sing “Spread a Little Sunshine”—but there are advantages to the two-guy scenario, such as being able to belch and fart without trying to cover it up.

The next day—my last at home—we went for a walk along the disused railroad tracks that passed through the woods behind the house where I grew up. Mom’s hard and fast rule had been that my friends and I had to stay away from those tracks. The last GS&WM freight had passed along them ten years before, and weeds were growing up between the rusty ties, but that made no difference to Mom. She was convinced that if we played there, one last train (call it the Kid-Eating Special) would go bulleting through and turn us all to paste. Only she was the one who got hit by an unscheduled train—metastatic breast cancer at the age of forty-seven. One mean fucking express.

“I’ll miss having you around this summer,” my dad said.

“I’ll miss you, too.”

“Oh! Before I forget.” He reached into his breast pocket and brought out a check. “Be sure to open an account and deposit it first thing. Ask them to speed the clearance, if they can.”

I looked at the amount: not the five hundred I’d asked for, but a thousand. “Dad, can you afford this?”

“Yes. Mostly because you held onto your Commons job, and that saved me having to try and make up the difference. Think of it as a bonus.”

I kissed his cheek, which was scratchy. He hadn’t shaved that morning. “Thanks.”

“Kid, you’re more welcome than you know.” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes matter-of-factly, without embarrassment. “Sorry about the waterworks. It’s hard when your kids go away. Someday you’ll find that out for yourself, but hopefully you’ll have a good woman to keep you company after they’re gone.”

I thought of Mrs. Shoplaw saying Kids are such a risk. “Dad, are you going to be okay?”

He put the handkerchief back in his pocket and gave me a grin, sunny and unforced. “Call me once in a while, and I will be. Also, don’t let them put you to work climbing all over one of their damned roller coasters.”

That actually sounded sort of exciting, but I told him I wouldn’t.

“And—” But I never heard what he meant to say next, advice or admonition. He pointed. “Will you look at that!”

Fifty yards ahead of us, a doe had come out of the woods. She stepped delicately over one rusty GS&WM track and onto the railbed, where the weeds and goldenrod were so high they brushed against her sides. She paused there, looking at us calmly, ears cocked forward. What I remember about that moment was the silence. No bird sang, no plane went droning overhead. If my mother had been with us, she’d have had her camera and would have been taking pictures like mad. Thinking of that made me miss her in a way I hadn’t in years.

I gave my father a quick, fierce hug. “I love you, Dad.”

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

When I looked back, the deer was gone. A day later, so was I.

When I got back to the big gray house at the end of Main Street in Heavens Bay, the sign made of shells had been taken down and put in storage, because Mrs. Shoplaw had a full house for the summer. I blessed Lane Hardy for telling me to nail down a place to live. Joyland’s summer troops had arrived, and every rooming house in town was full.

I shared the second floor with Tina Ackerley, the librarian. Mrs. Shoplaw had rented the accommodations on the third floor to a willowy redheaded art major named Erin Cook and a stocky undergrad from Rutgers named Tom Kennedy. Erin, who had taken photography courses both in high school and at Bard, had been hired as a Hollywood Girl. As for Tom and me…

“Happy Helpers,” he said. “General employment, in other words. That’s what that guy Fred Dean checked on my application. You?”

“The same,” I said. “I think it means we’re janitors.”

“I doubt it.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because we’re white,” he said, and although we did our share of clean-up chores, he turned out to be largely correct. The custodial crew—twenty men and over thirty women who dressed in coveralls with Howie the Happy Hound patches sewn on the breast pockets—were all Haitians and Dominicans, and almost surely undocumented. They lived in their own little village ten miles inland and were shuttled back and forth in a pair of retired school buses. Tom and I were making four dollars an hour; Erin a little more. God knows what the cleaners were making. They were exploited, of course, and saying that there were undocumented workers all over the south who had it far worse doesn’t excuse it, nor does pointing out that it was forty years ago. Although there was this: they never had to put on the fur. Neither did Erin.

Tom and I did.

On the night before our first day at work, the three of us were sitting in the parlor of Maison Shoplaw, getting to know each other and speculating on the summer ahead. As we talked, the moon rose over the Atlantic, as calmly beautiful as the doe my father and I had seen standing on the old railroad tracks.

“It’s an amusement park, for Gods sake,” Erin said. “How tough can it be?”

“Easy for you to say,” Tom told her. “No one’s going to expect you to hose down the Whirly Cups after every brat in Cub Scout Pack 18 loses his lunch halfway through the ride.”

“I’ll pitch in where I have to,” she said. “If it includes mopping up vomit as well as snapping pictures, so be it. I need this job. I’ve got grad school staring me in the face next year, and I’m exactly two steps from broke.”

“We all ought to try and get on the same team,” Tom said—and, as it turned out, we did. All the work teams at Joyland had doggy names, and ours was Team Beagle.

Just then Emmalina Shoplaw entered the parlor, carrying a tray with five champagne flutes on it. Miss Ackerley, a beanpole with huge bespectacled eyes that gave her a Joyce Carol Oatesian look, walked beside her, bottle in hand. Tom Kennedy brightened. “Do I spy French ginger ale? That looks just a Ieetle too elegant to be supermarket plonk.”

“Champagne it is,” Mrs. Shoplaw said, “although if you’re expecting Moet et Chandon, young Mr. Kennedy, you’re in for a disappointment. This isn’t Cold Duck, but it’s not the high-priced spread, either.”

“I can’t speak for my new co-workers,” Tom said, “but as someone who educated his palate on Apple Zapple, I don’t think I’ll be disappointed.”

Mrs. Shoplaw smiled. “I always mark the beginning of summer this way, for good luck. It seems to work. I haven’t lost a seasonal hire yet. Each of you take a glass, please.” We did as we were told. “Tina, will you pour?”

When the flutes were full, Mrs. Shoplaw raised hers and we raised ours.

“Here is to Erin, Tom, and Devin,” she said. “May they have a wonderful summer, and wear the fur only when the temperature is below eighty degrees.”

We clinked glasses and drank. Maybe not the high-priced spread, but pretty damned good, and with enough left for us all to have another swallow. This time it was Tom who offered the toast. “Here’s to Mrs. Shoplaw, who gives us shelter from the storm!”

“Why, thank you, Tom, that’s lovely. It won’t get you a discount on the rent, though.”

We drank. I set my glass down feeling just the tiniest bit buzzy. “What is this about wearing the fur?” I asked.

Mrs. Shoplaw and Miss Ackerley looked at each other and smiled. It was the librarian who answered, although it wasn’t really an answer at all. “You’ll find out,” she said.

“Don’t stay up late, children,” Mrs. Shoplaw advised. “You’ve got an early call. Your career in show business awaits.”

The call was early: seven AM, two hours before the park opened its doors on another summer. The three of us walked down the beach together. Tom talked most of the way. He always talked. It would have been wearisome if he hadn’t been so amusing and relentlessly cheerful. I could see from the way Erin (walking in the surf with her sneakers dangling from the fingers of her left hand) looked at him that she was charmed and fascinated. I envied Tom his ability to do that. He was heavyset and at least three doors down from handsome, but he was energetic and possessed of the gift of gab I sadly lacked. Remember the old joke about the starlet who was so clueless she fucked the writer?

“Man, how much do you think the people who own those places are worth?” he asked, waving an arm at the houses on Beach Row. We were just passing the big green one that looked like a castle, but there was no sign of the woman and the boy in the wheelchair that day. Annie and Mike Ross came later.

“Millions, probably,” Erin said. “It ain’t the Hamptons, but as my dad would say, it ain’t cheeseburgers.”

“The amusement park probably brings the property values down a little,” I said. I was looking at Joyland’s three most distinctive landmarks, silhouetted against the blue morning sky: Thunderball, Delirium Shaker, Carolina Spin.

“Nah, you don’t understand the rich-guy mindset,” Tom said. “It’s like when they pass bums looking for handouts on the street. They just erase ’em from their field of vision. Bums? What bums? And that park, same deal—what park? People who own these houses live, like, on another plane of existence.” He stopped, shading his eyes and looking at the green Victorian that was going to play such a large part in my life that fall, after Erin Cook and Tom Kennedy, by then a couple, had gone back to school. “That one’s gonna be mine. I’ll be expecting to take possession on… mmm… June first, 1987.”

“I’ll bring the champagne,” Erin said, and we all laughed.

I saw Joyland’s entire crew of summer hires in one place for the first and last time that morning. We gathered in Surf Auditorium, the concert hall where all those B-list country acts and aging rockers performed. There were almost two hundred of us. Most, like Tom, Erin, and me, were college students willing to work for peanuts. Some of the full-timers were there, as well. I saw Rozzie Gold, today dressed for work in her gypsy duds and dangly earrings. Lane Hardy was up on stage, placing a mike at the podium and then checking it with a series of thudding finger-taps. His derby was present and accounted for, cocked at its usual just-so angle. I don’t know how he picked me out in all those milling kids, but he did, and sketched a little salute off the tilted brim of his lid. I sent him one right back.

He finished his work, nodded, jumped off the stage, and took the seat Rozzie had been saving for him. Fred Dean walked briskly out from the wings. “Be seated, please, all of you be seated. Before you get your team assignments, the owner of Joyland—and your employer—would like to say a few words. Please give a hand to Mr. Bradley Easterbrook.”

We did as we were told, and an old man emerged from the wings, walking with the careful, high-stepping strides of someone with bad hips, a bad back, or both. He was tall and amazingly thin, dressed in a black suit that made him look more like an undertaker than a man who owned an amusement park. His face was long, pale, covered with bumps and moles. Shaving must have been torture for him, but he had a clean one. Ebony hair that had surely come out of a bottle was swept back from his deeply lined brow. He stood beside the podium, his enormous hands—they seemed to be nothing but knuckles—clasped before him. His eyes were set deep in pouched sockets.

Age looked at youth, and youth’s applause first weakened, then died.

I’m not sure what we expected; possibly a mournful foghorn voice telling us that the Red Death would soon hold sway over all. Then he smiled, and it lit him up like a jukebox. You could almost hear a sigh of relief rustle through the summer hires. I found out later that was the summer Bradley Easterbrook turned ninety-three.

“You guys,” he said, “welcome to Joyland.” And then, before stepping behind the podium, he actually bowed to us. He took several seconds adjusting the mike, which produced a series of amplified screeks and scronks. He never took his sunken eyes from us as he did it.

“I see many returning faces, a thing that always makes me happy. For you greenies, I hope this will be the best summer of your lives, the yardstick by which you judge all your future employment. That is no doubt an extravagant wish, but anyone who runs a place like this year in and year out must have a wide streak of extravagance. For certain you’ll never have another job like it.”

He surveyed us, giving the poor mike’s articulated neck another twist as he did so.

“In a few moments, Mr. Dean and Mrs. Brenda Rafferty, who is queen of the front office, will give you your team assignments. There will be seven of you to a team, and you will be expected to act as a team and work as a team. Your team’s tasks will be assigned by your team leader and will vary from week to week, sometimes from day to day. If variety is the spice of life, you will find the next three months very spicy, indeed. I hope you will keep one thought foremost in your mind, young ladies and gentlemen. Will you do that?”

He paused as if expecting us to answer, but nobody made a sound. We only looked at him, a very old man in a black suit and a white shirt open at the collar. When he spoke again, it might have been himself he was talking to, at least to begin with.

“This is a badly broken world, full of wars and cruelty and senseless tragedy. Every human being who inhabits it is served his or her portion of unhappiness and wakeful nights. Those of you who don’t already know that will come to know it. Given such sad but undeniable facts of the human condition, you have been given a priceless gift this summer: you are here to sell fun. In exchange for the hard-earned dollars of your customers, you will parcel out happiness. Children will go home and dream of what they saw here and what they did here. I hope you will remember that when the work is hard, as it sometimes will be, or when people are rude, as they often will be, or when you feel your best efforts have gone unappreciated. This is a different world, one that has its own customs and its own language, which we simply call the Talk. You’ll begin learning it today. As you learn to talk the Talk, you’ll learn to walk the walk. I’m not going to explain that, because it can’t be explained; it can only be learned.”

Tom leaned close to me and whispered, “Talk the talk? Walk the walk? Did we just wander into an AA meeting?”

I hushed him. I had come in expecting to get a list of commandments, mostly thou shalt nots; instead I had gotten a kind of rough poetry, and I was delighted. Bradley Easterbrook surveyed us, then suddenly displayed those horsey teeth in another grin. This one looked big enough to eat the world. Erin Cook was staring at him raptly. So were most of the new summer hires. It was the way students stare at a teacher who offers a new and possibly wonderful way of looking at reality.

“I hope you’ll enjoy your work here, but when you don’t—when, for instance, it’s your turn to wear the fur—try to remember how privileged you are. In a sad and dark world, we are a little island of happiness. Many of you already have plans for your lives—you hope to become doctors, lawyers, I don’t know, politicians—”

“OH-GOD-NO!” someone shouted, to general laughter.

I would have said Easterbrook’s grin could not possibly have widened, but it did. Tom was shaking his head, but he had also given in. “Okay, now I get it,” he whispered in my ear. “This guy is the Jesus of Fun.”

“You’ll have interesting, fruitful lives, my young friends. You’ll do many good things and have many remarkable experiences. But I hope you’ll always look back on your time in Joyland as something special. We don’t sell furniture. We don’t sell cars. We don’t sell land or houses or retirement funds. We have no political agenda. We sell fun. Never forget that. Thank you for your attention. Now go forth.”

He stepped away from the podium, gave another bow, and left the stage in that same painful, high-stepping stride. He was gone almost before the applause began. It was one of the best speeches I ever heard, because it was truth rather than horse-shit. I mean, listen: how many rubes can put sold fun for three months in 1973 on their resumes?

All the team leaders were long-time Joyland employees who worked the carny circuit as showies in the off-season. Most were also on the Park Services Committee, which meant they had to deal with state and federal regulations (both very loose in 1973), and field customer complaints. That summer most of the complaints were about the new no-smoking policy.

Our team leader was a peppy little guy named Gary Allen, a seventy-something who ran the Annie Oakley Shootin’ Gallery. Only none of us called it that after the first day. In the Talk, a shooting gallery was a bang-shy and Gary was the bang-shy agent. The seven of us on Team Beagle met him at his joint, where he was setting out rifles on chains. My first official Joyland job—along with Erin, Tom, and the other four guys on the team—was putting the prizes on the shelves. The ones that got pride of place were the big fuzzy stuffed animals that hardly anyone ever won… although, Gary said, he was careful to give out at least one every evening when the tip was hot.

“I like the marks,” he said. “Yes I do. And the marks I like the best are the points, by which I mean the purty girls, and the points I like the best are the ones who wear the low-cut tops and bend forrad to shoot like this.” He snatched up a .22 modified to shoot BBs (it had also been modified to make a loud and satisfying bang with each trigger-pull) and leaned forward to demonstrate.

“When a guy does that, I notify ’em that they’re foulin the line. The points? Never.”

Ronnie Houston, a bespectacled, anxious-looking young man wearing a Florida State University cap, said: “I don’t see any foul-line, Mr. Allen.”

Gary looked at him, hands fisted on non-existent hips. His jeans seemed to be staying up in defiance of gravity. “Listen up, son, I got three things for you. Ready?”

Ronnie nodded. He looked like he wanted to take notes. He also looked like he wanted to hide behind the rest of us.

“First thing. You can call me Gary or Pops or come here you old sonofabitch, but I ain’t no schoolteacher, so can the mister. Second thing. I never want to see that fucking schoolboy hat on your head again. Third thing. The foul line is wherever I say the foul line is on any given night. I can do that because it’s in my myyyyynd.” He tapped one sunken, vein-gnarled temple to make this point perfectly clear, then waved at the prizes, the targets, and the counter where the conies—the rubes—laid down their mooch. “This is all in my myyyyynd. The shy is mental. Geddit?”

Ronnie didn’t, but he nodded vigorously.

“Now whip off that turdish-looking schoolboy hat. Get you a Joyland visor or a Howie the Happy Hound dogtop. Make it Job One.”

Ronnie whipped off his FSU lid with alacrity, and stuck it in his back pocket. Later that day—I believe within the hour—he replaced it with a Howie cap, known in the Talk as a dogtop. After three days of ribbing and being called greenie, he took his new dogtop out to the parking lot, found a nice greasy spot, and trompled it for a while. When he put it back on, it had the right look. Or almost. Ronnie Houston never got the complete right look; some people were just destined to be greenies forever. I remember Tom sidling up to him one day and suggesting that he needed to piss on it a little to give it that final touch that means so much. When he saw Ronnie was on the verge of taking him seriously, Tom backpedaled and said just soaking it in the Atlantic would achieve the same effect.

Meanwhile, Pops was surveying us.

“Speaking of good-looking ladies, I perceive we have one among us.”

Erin smiled modestly.

“Hollywood Girl, darlin?”

“That’s what Mr. Dean said I’d be doing, yes.”

“Then you want to go see Brenda Rafferty. She’s second-in-command around here, and she’s also the park Girl Mom. She’ll get you fitted up with one of those cute green dresses. Tell her you want yours extra-short.”

“The hell I will, you old lecher,” Erin said, and promptly joined him when he threw back his head and bellowed laughter.

“Pert! Sassy! Do I like it? I do! When you’re not snappin pix of the conies, you come on back to your Pops and I’ll find you something to do… but change out of the dress first. You don’t get grease or sawdust on it. Kapish?”

“Yes,” Erin said. She was all business again.

Pops Allen looked at his watch. “Park opens in one hour, kiddies, then you’ll learn while you earn. Start with the rides.” He pointed to us one by one, naming rides. I got the Carolina Spin, which pleased me. “Got time for a question or two, but no more’n that. Anybody got one or are you good to go?”

I raised my hand. He nodded at me and asked my name.

“Devin Jones, sir.”

“Call me sir again and you’re fired, lad.”

“Devin Jones, Pops.” I certainly wasn’t going to call him come here you old sonofoabitch, at least not yet. Maybe when we knew each other better.

“There you go,” he said, nodding. “What’s on your mind, Jonesy? Besides that foine head of red hair?”

“What’s carny-from-carny mean?”

“Means you’re like old man Easterbrook. His father worked the carny circuit back in the Dust Bowl days, and his grandfather worked it back when they had a fake Indian show featuring Big Chief Yowlatcha. ”

“You got to be kidding!” Tom exclaimed, almost exultantly.

Pops gave him a cool stare that settled Tom down—a thing not always easy to do. “Son, do you know what history is?”

“Uh… stuff that happened in the past?”

“Nope,” he said, tying on his canvas change-belt. “History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever-growin pile of crap. Right now we’re standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we’ll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. That’s why your folks’ clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example. And, as someone who’s destined to be buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving.”

Tom opened his mouth, probably to make a smart comeback, then wisely closed it again.

George Preston, another member of Team Beagle, spoke up. “Are you carny-from-carny?”

“Nope. My daddy was a cattle rancher in Oregon; now my brothers run the spread. I’m the black sheep of the family, and damn proud of it. Okay, if there’s nothing else, it’s time to quit the foolishness and get down to business.”

“Can I ask one thing more?” Erin asked.

“Only because you’re purty.”

“What does ‘wearing the fur’ mean?”

Pops Allen smiled. He placed his hands on the mooch-counter of his shy. “Tell me, little lady, do you have an idea what it might mean?”

“Well… yes.”

The smile widened into a grin that showed every yellowing fang in our new team leader’s mouth. “Then you’re probably right.”

What did I do at Joyland that summer? Everything. Sold tickets. Pushed a popcorn wagon. Sold funnel cakes, cotton candy, and a zillion hot dogs (which we called Hound Dogs—you probably knew that). It was a Hound Dog that got my picture in the paper, as a matter of fact, although I wasn’t the guy who sold that unlucky pup; George Preston did. I worked as a lifeguard, both on the beach and at Happy Lake, the indoor pool where the Splash & Crash water slide ended. I line-danced in the Wiggle-Waggle Village with the other members of Team Beagle to “Bird Dance Beat,” “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight,” “Rippy-Rappy, Zippy-Zappy,” and a dozen other nonsense songs. I also did time—most of it happy—as an unlicensed child-minder. In the Wiggle-Waggle, the approved rallying cry when faced with a bawling kiddie was “Let’s turn that frown upside-down!” and I not only liked it, I got good at it. It was in the Wiggle-Waggle that I decided having kids at some point in the future was an actual Good Idea rather than a Wendy-flavored daydream.

I—and all the other Happy Helpers—learned to race from one side of Joyland to the other in nothing flat, using either the alleys behind the shys, joints, rides, and concessions or one of three service-tunnels known as Joyland Under, Hound Dog Under, and the Boulevard. I hauled trash by the ton, usually driving it in an electric cart down the Boulevard, a shadowy and sinister thoroughfare lit by ancient fluorescent bar-lights that stuttered and buzzed. I even worked a few times as a roadie, hauling amps and monitors when one of the acts showed up late and unsupported.

I learned to talk the Talk. Some of it—like bally for a free show, or gone larry for a ride that had broken down—was pure carny, and as old as the hills. Other terms—like points for purty girls and fumps for the chronic complainers—were strictly Joyland lingo. I suppose other parks have their own version of the Talk, but underneath it’s always carny-from-carny. A hammer-squash is a cony (usually a fump) who bitches about having to wait in line. The last hour of the day (at Joyland, that was ten PM to eleven) was the blow-off. A cony who loses at some shy and wants his mooch back is a mooch-hammer. The donniker is the bathroom, as in “Hey Jonesy, hustle down to the donniker by the Moon Rocket—some dumb fump just puked in one of the sinks.”

Running the concessions (known as joints) came easy to most of us, and really, anyone who can make change is qualified to push the popcorn wagon or work the counter of a souvenir shop. Learning to ride-jock wasn’t much more difficult, but it was scary at first, because there were lives in your hands, many those of little children.

“Here for your lesson?” Lane Hardy asked me when I joined him at the Carolina Spin. “Good. Just in time. Park opens in twenty minutes. We do it the way they do in the navy—see one, do one, teach one. Right now that heavyset kid you were standing next to—”

“Tom Kennedy.”

“Okay. Right now Tom’s over learning the Devil Wagons. At some point—probably this very day—he’s gonna teach you how to run the ride, and you’ll teach him how to run the Spin. Which, by the way, is an Aussie Wheel, meaning it runs counterclockwise.”

“Is that important?”

“Nope,” he said, “but I think it’s interesting. There are only a few in the States. It has two speeds: slow and really slow.”

“Because it’s a grandma ride.”

“Correctamundo.” He demonstrated with the long stick shift I’d seen him operating on the day I got my job, then made me take over the stick with the bicycle handgrip at the top. “Feel it click when it’s in gear?”

“Yes.”

“Here’s stop.” He put his hand over mine and pulled the lever all the way up. This time the click was harder, and the enormous wheel stopped at once, the cars rocking gently. “With me so far?”

“I guess so. Listen, don’t I need a permit or a license or something to run this thing?”

“You got a license, don’t you?”

“Sure, a Maine driver’s license, but—”

“In South Carolina, a valid DL’s all you need. They’ll get around to additional regulations in time—they always do—but for this year, at least, you’re good to go. Now pay attention, because this is the most important part. Do you see that yellow stripe on the side of the housing?”

I did. It was just to the right of the ramp leading up to the ride.

“Each car has a Happy Hound decal on the door. When you see the Hound lining up with the yellow stripe, you pull stop, and there’ll be a car right where the folks get on.” He yanked the lever forward again. “See?”

I said I did.

“Until the wheel’s tipsed—”

“What?”

“Loaded. Tipsed means loaded. Don’t ask me why. Until the wheel’s tipsed, you just alternate between super-slow and stop. Once you’ve got a full load—which you’ll have most of the time, if we have a good season—you go to the normal slow speed. They get four minutes.” He pointed to his suitcase radio. “It’s my boomie, but the rule is when you run the ride, you control the tunes. Just no real blasting rock and roll—Who, Zep, Stones, stuff like that—until after the sun goes down. Got it?”

“Yeah. What about letting them off?”

“Exactly the same. Super-slow, stop. Super-slow, stop. Always line up the yellow stripe with the Happy Hound, and you’ll always have a car right at the ramp. You should be able to get ten spins an hour. If the wheel’s loaded each time, that’s over seven hundred customers, which comes to almost a d-note.”

“Which is what, in English?”

“Five hundred.”

I looked at him uncertainly. “I won’t really have to do this, will I? I mean, it’s your ride.”

“It’s Brad Easterbrook’s ride, kiddo. They all are. I’m just another employee, although I’ve been here a few years. I’ll run the hoister most of the time, but not all of the time. And hey, stop sweating. There are carnies where half-drunk bikers covered with tattoos do this, and if they can, you can.”

“If you say so.”

Lane pointed. “Gates’re open and here come the conies, rolling down Joyland Avenue. You’re going to stick with me for the first three rides. Later on you teach the rest of your team, and that includes your Hollywood Girl. Okay?”

It wasn’t even close to okay—I was supposed to send people a hundred and seventy feet in the air after a five-minute tutorial? It was insane.

He gripped my shoulder. “You can do this, Jonesy. So never mind ‘if you say so.’ Tell me it’s okay.”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“Good boy.” He turned on his radio, now hooked to a speaker high on the Spin’s frame. The Hollies began to sing “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” as Lane took a pair of rawhide gloves from the back pocket of his jeans. “And get you a pair of these—you’re going to need them. Also, you better start learning how to pitch.” He bent down, grabbed a hand-held mike from the ever-present orange crate, put one foot up, and began to work the crowd.

“Hey folks welcome in, time to take a little spin, hurry hurry, summer won’t last forever, take a ride upstairs where the air is rare, this is where the fun begins, step over here and ride the Spin.”

He lowered the mike and gave me a wink. “That’s my pitch, more or less; give me a drink or three and it gets a lot better. You work out your own.”

The first time I ran the Spin by myself, my hands were shaking with terror, but by the end of that first week I was running it like a pro (although Lane said my pitch needed a lot of work). I was also capable of running the Whirly Cups and the Devil Wagons… although ride-jocking the latter came down to little more than pushing the green START button, the red STOP button, and getting the cars untangled when the rubes got them stuck together against the rubber bumpers, which was at least four times during each four-minute ride. Only when you were running the Devil Wagons, you didn’t call them rides; each run was a spree.

I learned the Talk; I learned the geography, both above and below ground; I learned how to run a joint, take over a shy, and award plushies to good-looking points. It took a week or so to get most of it down, and it was two weeks before I started getting comfortable. Wearing the fur, however, I understood by twelve-thirty on my first day, and it was just my luck—good or bad—that Bradley Easterbrook happened to be in Wiggle-Waggle Village at the time, sitting on a bench and eating his usual lunch of bean sprouts and tofu—hardly amusement park chow, but let’s keep in mind that the man’s food-processing system hadn’t been new since the days of bathtub gin and flappers.

After my first impromptu performance as Howie the Happy Hound, I wore the fur a lot. Because I was good at it, you see. And Mr. Easterbrook knew I was good at it. I was wearing it a month or so later, when I met the little girl in the red hat on Joyland Avenue.

That first day was a madhouse, all right. I ran the Carolina Spin with Lane until ten o’clock, then alone for the next ninety minutes while he rushed around the park putting out opening day fires. By then I no longer believed the wheel was going to malfunction and start running out of control, like the merry-go-round in that old Alfred Hitchcock movie. The most terrifying thing was how trusting people were. Not a single dad with kids in tow detoured to my pitch to ask if I knew what I was doing. I didn’t get as many spins as I should have—I was concentrating so hard on that damn yellow stripe that I gave myself a headache—but every spin I did get was tipsed.

Erin came by once, pretty as a picture in her green Hollywood Girl dress, and took pictures of some of the family groups waiting to get on. She took one of me, too—I still have it somewhere. When the wheel was turning again, she gripped me by the arm, little beads of sweat standing out on her forehead, her lips parted in a smile, her eyes shining.

“Is this great, or what?” she asked.

“As long as I don’t kill anybody, yeah,” I said.

“If some little kid falls out of a car, just make sure you catch him.” Then, having given me something new to obsess about, she jogged off in search of new photo subjects. There was no shortage of people willing to pose for a gorgeous redhead on a summer morning. And she was right, actually. It was pretty great.

Around eleven-thirty, Lane came back. By that point, I was comfortable enough ride-jocking the Spin to turn the rudimentary controls over to him with some reluctance.

“Who’s your team leader, Jonesy? Gary Allen?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, go on over to his bang-shy and see what he’s got for you. If you’re lucky, he’ll send you down to the boneyard for lunch.”

“What’s the boneyard?”

“Where the help goes when they’ve got time off. Most carnies, it’s the parking lot or out behind the trucks, but Joyland’s lux. There’s a nice break-room where the Boulevard and Hound Dog Under connect. Take the stairs between the balloon-pitch and the knife-show. You’ll like it, but you only eat if Pop says it’s okay. I ain’t getting in dutch with that old bastard. His team is his team; I got my own. You got a dinner bucket?”

“Didn’t know I was supposed to bring one.”

He grinned. “You’ll learn. For today, stop at Ernie’s joint—the fried chicken place with the big plastic rooster on top. Show him your Joyland ID card and he’ll give you the company discount.”

I did end up eating fried chicken at Ernie’s, but not until two that afternoon. Pop had other plans for me. “Go by the costume shop—its the trailer between Park Services and the carpentry shop. Tell Dottie Lassen I sent you. Damn woman’s busting her girdle.”

“Want me to help you reload first?” The Shootin’ Gallery was also tipsed, the counter crowded with high school kids anxious to win those elusive plushies. More rubes (so I was already thinking of them) were lined up three deep behind the current shooters. Pop Allen’s hands never stopped moving as he talked to me.

“What I want is for you to get on your pony and ride. I was doin this shit long before you were born. Which one are you, anyway, Jonesy or Kennedy? I know you’re not the dingbat in the college-boy hat, but beyond that I can’t remember.”

“I’m Jonesy.”

“Well, Jonesy, you’re going to spend an edifying hour in the Wiggle-Waggle. It’ll be edifying for the kiddies, anyhow. For you, maybe not so much.” He bared his yellow fangs in a trademark Pop Allen grin, the one that made him look like an elderly shark. “Enjoy that fur suit.”

The costume shop was also a madhouse, filled with women running every whichway. Dottie Lassen, a skinny lady who needed a girdle like I needed elevator shoes, fell on me the second I walked through the door. She hooked her long-nailed fingers into my armpit and dragged me past clown costumes, cowboy costumes, a huge Uncle Sam suit (with stilts leaning beside it against the wall), a couple of princess outfits, a rack of Hollywood Girl dresses, and a rack of old-fashioned Gay Nineties bathing suits… which, I found out, we were condemned to wear when on lifeguard duty. At the very back of her crowded little empire were a dozen deflated dogs. Howies, in fact, complete with the Happy Hound’s delighted stupid-and-loving-it grin, his big blue eyes, and his fuzzy cocked ears. Zippers ran down the backs of the suits from the neck to the base of the tail.

“Christ, you’re a big one,” Dottie said. “Thank God I got the extra-large mended last week. The last kid who wore it ripped it out under both arms. There was a hole under the tail, too. He must have been eating Mexican food.” She snatched the XL Howie off the rack and slammed it into my arms. The tail curled around my leg like a python. “You’re going to the Wiggle-Waggle, and I mean chop-fucking-chop. Butch Hadley was supposed to take care of that from Team Corgi—or so I thought—but he says his whole team’s out with a key to the midway.” I had no idea what that meant, and Dottie gave me no time to ask. She rolled her eyes in a way that indicated either good humor or the onset of madness, and continued. “You say ‘What’s the big deal?’ I’ll tell you what’s the big deal, greenie: Mr. Easterbrook usually eats his lunch there, he always eats it there on the first day we’re running full-out, and if there’s no Howie, he’ll be very disappointed.”

“Like as in someone will get fired?”

“No, as in very disappointed. Stick around awhile and you’ll know that’s plenty bad enough. No one wants to disappoint him, because he’s a great man. Which is nice, I suppose, but what’s more important is he’s a good guy. In this business, good guys are scarcer than hen’s teeth.” She looked at me and made a sound like a small animal with its paw caught in a trap. “Dear Christ, you’re a big one. And green as grass. But it can’t be helped.”

I had a billion questions, but my tongue was frozen. All I could do was stare at the deflated Howie. Who stared back at me. Do you know what I felt like just then? James Bond, in the movie where he’s tied to some kind of crazy exercise gadget. Do you expect me to talk? he asks Goldfinger, and Goldfinger replies, with chilling good humor, No, Mr. Bond! I expect you to die! I was tied to a happiness machine instead of an exercise machine, but hey, same idea. No matter how hard I worked to keep up on that first day, the damn thing just kept going faster.

“Take it down to the boneyard, kid. Please tell me you know where that is.”

“I do.” Thank God Lane had told me.

“Well, that’s one for the home team, anyway. When you get there, strip down to your undies. If you wear more than that while you’re wearing the fur, you’ll roast. And… anybody ever tell you the First Rule of Carny, kid?”

I thought so, but it seemed safer to keep my mouth shut.

“Always know where your wallet is. This park isn’t anywhere near as sleazy as some of the places I worked in the flower of my youth—thank God—but that’s still the First Rule. Give it to me, I’ll keep it for you.”

I handed over my wallet without protest.

“Now go. But even before you strip down, drink a lot of water. I mean until your belly feels swollen. And don’t eat anything, I don’t care how hungry you are. I’ve had kids get heatstroke and barf in Howie suits, and the results ain’t pretty. Suit almost always has to be thrown out. Drink, strip, put on the fur, get someone to zip you up, then hustle down the Boulevard to the Wiggle-Waggle. There’s a sign, you can’t miss it.”

I looked doubtfully at Howie’s big blue eyes.

“They’re screen mesh,” she said. “Don’t worry, you’ll see fine.”

“But what do I do?”

She looked at me, at first unsmiling. Then her face—not just her mouth and eyes but her whole face—broke into a grin. The laugh that accompanied it was this weird honk that seemed to come through her nose. “You’ll be fine,” she said. People kept telling me that. “It’s method acting, kiddo. Just find your inner dog.”

There were over a dozen new hires and a handful of old-timers having lunch in the boneyard when I arrived. Two of the greenies were Hollywood Girls, but I had no time to be modest. After gulping a bellyful from the drinking fountain, I shucked down to my Jockeys and sneakers. I shook out the Howie costume and stepped in, making sure to get my feet all the way down in the back paws.

“Fur!” one of the old-timers yelled, and slammed a fist down on the table. “Fur! Fur! Fur!”

The others took it up, and the boneyard rang with the chant as I stood there in my underwear with a deflated Howie puddled around my shins. It was like being in the middle of a prison messhall riot. Rarely have I felt so exquisitely stupid… or so oddly heroic. It was showbiz, after all, and I was stepping into the breach. For a moment it didn’t matter that I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.

“Fur! Fur! FUR! FUR!”

“Somebody zip me the hell up!” I shouted. “I have to get down to the Wiggle-Waggle posthaste!”

One of the girls did the honors, and I immediately saw why wearing the fur was such a big deal. The boneyard was air conditioned—all of Joyland Under was—but I was already popping hard sweat.

One of the old-timers came over and gave me a kindly pat on my Howie-head. “I’ll give you a ride, son,” he said. “Cart’s right there. Jump in.”

“Thanks.” My voice was muffled.

“Woof-woof, Bowser!” someone called, and they all cracked up.

We rolled down the Boulevard with its spooky, stuttering fluorescent lights, a grizzled old guy in janitor’s greens with a giant blue-eyed German Shepherd riding co-pilot. As he pulled up at the stairs marked with an arrow and the painted legend WIGWAG on the cinderblocks, he said: “Don’t talk. Howie never talks, just gives hugs and pats ’em on the head. Good luck, and if you start feelin all swimmy, get the hell out. The kids don’t want to see Howie flop over with heatstroke.”

“I have no idea what I’m supposed to do,” I said. “Nobody’s told me.”

I don’t know if that guy was carny-from-carny or not, but he knew something about Joyland. “It don’t matter. The kids all love Howie. They’ll know what to do.”

I clambered out of the cart, almost tripped over my tail, then grasped the string in the left front paw and gave it a yank to get the damn thing out of my way. I staggered up the stairs and fumbled with the lever of the door at the top. I could hear music, something vaguely remembered from my early childhood. I finally got the lever to go down. The door opened and bright Junelight flooded through Howie’s screen-mesh blue eyes, momentarily dazzling me.

The music was louder now, being piped from overhead speakers, and I could put a name to it: “The Hokey Pokey,” that all-time nursery school hit. I saw swings, slides, and teeter-totters, an elaborate jungle gym, and a roundy-round being pushed by a greenie wearing long fuzzy rabbit ears and a powder-puff tail stuck to the seat of his jeans. The Choo-Choo Wiggle, a toy train capable of dazzling speeds approaching four miles an hour, steamed by, loaded with little kids dutifully waving to their camera-toting parents. About a gazillion kids were boiling around, watched over by plenty of summer hires, plus a couple of full-time personnel who probably did have child-care licenses. These two, a man and a woman, were wearing sweatshirts that read WE LUV HAPPY KIDS. Dead ahead was the long daycare building called Howie’s Howdy House.

I saw Mr. Easterbrook, too. He was sitting on a bench beneath a Joyland umbrella, dressed in his mortician’s suit and eating his lunch with chopsticks. He didn’t see me at first; he was looking at a crocodile line of children being led toward the Howdy House by a couple of greenies. The kiddies could be parked there (I found this out later) for a maximum of two hours while the parents either took their older kids on the bigger rides or had lunch at Rock Lobster, the park’s class-A restaurant.

I also found out later that the eligibility ages for Howdy House ran from three to six. Many of the children now approaching looked pretty mellow, probably because they were daycare vets from families where both parents worked. Others weren’t taking it so well. Maybe they’d managed to keep a stiff upper lip at first, hearing mommy and daddy say they’d all be back together in just an hour or two (as if a four-year-old has any real concept of what an hour is), but now they were on their own, in a noisy and confusing place filled with strangers and mommy and daddy nowhere in sight. Some of those were crying. Buried in the Howie costume, looking out through the screen mesh that served as eyeholes and already sweating like a pig, I thought I was witnessing an act of uniquely American child abuse. Why would you bring your kid—your toddler, for Christ’s sake—to the jangling sprawl of an amusement park only to fob him or her off on a crew of strange babysitters, even for a little while?

The greenies in charge could see the tears spreading (toddler-angst is just another childhood disease, really, like measles), but their faces said they had no idea what to do about it. Why would they? It was Day One, and they had been thrown into the mix with as little preparation as I’d had when Lane Hardy walked away and left me in charge of a gigantic Ferris wheel. But at least kids under eight can’t get on the Spin without an adult, I thought. These little buggers are pretty much on their own.

I didn’t know what to do either, but felt I had to try something. I walked toward the line of kids with my front paws up and wagging my tail like mad (I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it). And just as the first two or three saw me and pointed me out, inspiration struck. It was the music. I stopped at the intersection of Jellybean Road and Candy Cane Avenue, which happened to be directly beneath two of the blaring speakers. Standing almost seven feet from paws to furry cocked ears, I’m sure I was quite a presence. I bowed to the kids, who were now all staring with open mouths and wide eyes. As they watched, I began to do the Hokey Pokey.

Sorrow and terror over lost parents were forgotten, at least for the time being. They laughed, some with tears still gleaming on their cheeks. They didn’t quite dare approach, not while I was doing my clumsy little dance, but they crowded forward. There was wonder but no fear. They all knew Howie; those from the Carolinas had seen his afternoon TV show, and even those from far-flung exotic locales like St. Louis and Omaha had seen brochures and advertisements on the Saturday morning cartoons. They understood that although Howie was a big dog, he was a good dog. He’d never bite. He was their friend.

I put my left foot in; I put my left foot out; I put my left foot in and I shook it all about. I did the Hokey Pokey and I turned myself around, because—as almost every little kid in America knows—that’s what it’s all about. I forgot about being hot and uncomfortable. I didn’t think about how my undershorts were sticking in the crack of my ass. Later I would have a bitch of a heat-headache, but just then I felt okay—really good, in fact. And you know what? Wendy Keegan never once crossed my mind.

When the music changed to the Sesame Street theme, I quit dancing, dropped to one padded knee, and held out my arms like Al Jolson.

“HOWWWIE!” a little girl screamed, and all these years later I can still hear the perfect note of rapture in her voice. She ran forward, pink skirt swirling around her chubby knees. That did it. The orderly crocodile line dissolved.

The kids will know what to do, the old-timer had said, and how right he was. First they swarmed me, then they knocked me over, then they gathered around me, hugging and laughing. The little girl in the pink skirt kissed my snout repeatedly, shouting “Howie, Howie, Howie!” as she did it.

Some of the parents who had ventured into the Wiggle-Waggle to snap pictures were approaching, equally fascinated. I paddled my paws to get some space, rolled over, and got up before they could crush me with their love. Although just then I was loving them right back. For such a hot day, it was pretty cool.

I didn’t notice Mr. Easterbrook reach into the jacket of his mortician’s suit, bring out a walkie-talkie, and speak into it briefly. All I knew was that the Sesame Street music suddenly cut out and “The Hokey Pokey” started up again. I put my right paw in and my right paw out. The kids got into it right away, their eyes never leaving me, not wanting to miss the next move and be left behind.

Pretty soon we were all doing the Hokey Pokey at the intersection of Jellybean and Candy Cane. The greenie minders joined in. I’ll be goddamned if some of the parents didn’t join in as well. I even put my long tail in and pulled my long tail out. Laughing madly, the kids turned around and did the same, only with invisible tails.

As the song wound down, I made an extravagant “Come on, kids!” gesture with my left paw (inadvertently yanking my tail up so stringently I almost tore the troublesome fucker off) and led them toward Howdy House. They followed as willingly as the children of Hamelin followed the pied piper, and not one of them was crying. That actually wasn’t the best day of my brilliant (if I do say so myself, and I do) career as Howie the Happy Hound, but it was right up there.

When they were safely inside Howdy House (the little girl in the pink skirt stood in the door long enough to wave me a bye-bye), I turned around and the world seemed to keep right on turning when I stopped. Sweat sheeted into my eyes, doubling Wiggle-Waggle Village and everything in it. I wavered on my back paws. The entire performance, from my first Hokey Pokey moves to the little girl waving bye-bye, had only taken seven minutes—nine, tops—but I was totally fried. I started trudging back the way I had come, not sure what to do next.

“Son,” a voice said. “Over here.”

It was Mr. Easterbrook. He was holding open a door in the back of the Wishing Well Snack Bar. It might have been the door I’d come through, probably was, but then I’d been too anxious and excited to notice.

He ushered me inside, closed the door behind us, and pulled down the zipper at the back of the costume. Howie’s surprisingly heavy head fell off my own, and my damp skin drank up the blessed air conditioning. My skin, still winter-white (it wouldn’t stay that way for long), rashed out in goosebumps. I took big deep breaths.

“Sit down on the steps,” he said. “I’ll call for a ride in a minute, but right now you need to get your wind back. The first few turns as Howie are always difficult, and the performance you just gave was particularly strenuous. It was also extraordinary.”

“Thanks.” It was all I could manage. Until I was back inside the cool quiet, I hadn’t realized how close to my limit I was. “Thanks very much.”

“Head down if you feel faint.”

“Not faint. Got a headache, though.” I snaked one arm out of Howie and wiped my face, which was dripping. “You kinda rescued me.”

“Maximum time wearing Howie on a hot day—I’m talking July and August, when the humidity is high and the temperature goes into the nineties—is fifteen minutes,” Mr. Easterbrook said. “If someone tries to tell you different, send them directly to me. And you’ll be well advised to swallow a couple of salt pills. We want you summer kids to work hard, but we don’t want to kill you.”

He took out his walkie-talkie and spoke briefly and quietly. Five minutes later, the old-timer showed up again in his cart, with a couple of Anacin and a bottle of blessedly cold water. In the meantime Mr. Easterbrook sat next to me, lowering himself to the top step leading down to the Boulevard with a glassy care that made me a trifle nervous.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Devin Jones, sir.”

“Do they call you Jonesy?” He didn’t wait for me to reply. “Of course they do, it’s the carny way, and that’s all Joyland is, really—a thinly disguised carny. Places like this won’t last much longer. The Disneys and Knott’s Berry Farms are going to rule the amusement world, except maybe down here in the midsouth. Tell me, aside from the heat, how did you enjoy your first turn wearing the fur?”

“I liked it.”

“Because?”

“Because some of them were crying, I guess.”

He smiled. “And?”

“Pretty soon all of them would have been crying, but I stopped it.”

“Yes. You did the Hokey Pokey. A splinter of genius. How did you know it would work?”

“I didn’t.” But actually… I did. On some level, I did.

He smiled. “At Joyland, we throw our new hires—our greenies—into the mix without much in the way of preparation, because in some people, some gifted people, it encourages a sort of spontaneity that’s very special and valuable, both to us and to our patrons. Did you learn something about yourself just now?”

“Jeez, I don’t know. Maybe. But… can I say something, sir?”

“Feel free.”

I hesitated, then decided to take him at his word. “Sending those kids to daycare—daycare at an amusement park—that seems, I don’t know, kind of mean.” I added hastily, “Although the Wiggle-Waggle seems really good for little people. Really fun.”

“You have to understand something, son. At Joyland, we’re in the black this much.” He held a thumb and forefinger only a smidge apart. “When parents know there’s care for their wee ones—even for just a couple of hours—they bring the whole family. If they needed to hire a babysitter at home, they might not come at all, and our profit margin would disappear. I take your point, but I have a point, too. Most of those little ones have never been to a place like this before. They’ll remember it the way they’ll remember their first movie, or their first day at school. Because of you, they won’t remember crying because they were abandoned by their parents for a little while; they’ll remember doing the Hokey Pokey with Howie the Happy Hound, who appeared like magic.”

“I guess.”

He reached out, not for me but for Howie. He stroked the fur with his gnarled fingers as he spoke. “The Disney parks are scripted, and I hate that. Hate it. I think what they’re doing down there in Orlando is fun-pimping. I’m a seat-of-the-pants fan, and sometimes I see someone who’s a seat-of-the-pants genius. That could be you. Too early to tell for sure, but yes, it could be you.” He put his hands to the small of his back and stretched. I heard an alarmingly loud series of cracking noises. “Might I share your cart back to the boneyard? I think I’ve had enough sun for one day.”

“My cart is your cart.” Since Joyland was his park, that was literally true.

“I think you’ll wear the fur a lot this summer. Most of the young people see that as a burden, or even a punishment. I don’t believe that you will. Am I wrong?”

He wasn’t. I’ve done a lot of jobs in the years since then, and my current editorial gig—probably my last gig before retirement seizes me in its claws—is terrific, but I never felt so weirdly happy, so absolutely in-the-right-place, as I did when I was twenty-one, wearing the fur and doing the Hokey Pokey on a hot day in June.

Seat of the pants, baby.

I stayed friends with Tom and Erin after that summer, and I’m friends with Erin still, although these days we’re mostly email and Facebook buddies who sometimes get together for lunch in New York. I’ve never met her second husband. She says he’s a nice guy, and I believe her. Why would I not? After being married to Mr. Original Nice Guy for eighteen years and having that yardstick to measure by, she’d hardly pick a loser.

In the spring of 1992, Tom was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He was dead six months later. When he called and told me he was sick, his usual ratchetjaw delivery flowed by the wrecking ball swinging back and forth in his head, I was stunned and depressed, the way almost anyone would be, I suppose, when he hears that a guy who should be in the very prime of life is instead approaching the finish line. You want to ask how a thing like that can be fair. Weren’t there supposed to be a few more good things for Tom, like a couple of grandchildren and maybe that long-dreamed-of vacation in Maui?

During my time at Joyland, I once heard Pops Allen talk about burning the lot. In the Talk, that means to blatantly cheat the rubes at what’s supposed to be a straight game. I thought of that for the first time in years when Tom called with his bad news.

But the mind defends itself as long as it can. After the first shock of such news dissipates, maybe you think, Okay, it’s bad, I get that, but it’s not the final word; there still might be a chance. Even if ninety-five percent of the people who draw this particular card go down, there’s still that lucky five percent. Also, doctors misdiagnose shit all the time. Barring those things, there’s the occasional miracle.

You think that, and then you get the follow-up call. The woman who makes the follow-up call was once a beautiful young girl who ran around Joyland in a flippy green dress and a silly Sherwood Forest hat, toting a big old Speed Graphic camera, and the conies she braced hardly ever said no. How could they say no to that blazing red hair and eager smile? How could anyone say no to Erin Cook?

Well, God said no. God burned Tom Kennedy’s lot, and He burned hers in the process. When I picked up the phone at five-thirty on a gorgeous October afternoon in Westchester, that girl had become a woman whose voice, blurry with the tears, sounded old and tired to death. “Tom died at two this afternoon. It was very peaceful. He couldn’t talk, but he was aware. He… Dev, he squeezed my hand when I said goodbye.”

I said, “I wish I could have been there.”

“Yes.” Her voice wavered, then firmed. “Yes, that would have been good.”

You think Okay, I get it, I’m prepared for the worst, but you hold out that small hope, see, and that’s what fucks you up. That’s what kills you.

I talked to her, I told her how much I loved her and how much I had loved Tom, I told her yes, I’d be at the funeral, and if there was anything I could do before then, she should call. Day or night. Then I hung up the phone and lowered my head and bawled my goddam eyes out.

The end of my first love doesn’t measure up to the death of one old friend and the bereavement of the other, but it followed the same pattern. Exactly the same. And if it seemed like the end of the world to me—first causing those suicidal ideations (silly and halfhearted though they may have been) and then a seismic shift in the previously unquestioned course of my life—you have to understand I had no scale by which to judge it. That’s called being young.

As June wore on, I started to understand that my relationship with Wendy was as sick as William Blake’s rose, but I refused to believe it was mortally sick, even when the signs became increasingly clear.

Letters, for instance. During my first week at Mrs. Shoplaw’s, I wrote Wendy four long ones, even though I was run off my feet at Joyland and came drag-assing into my second-floor room each night with my head full of new information and new experiences, feeling like a kid dropped into a challenging college course (call it The Advanced Physics of Fun) halfway through the semester. What I got in return was a single postcard with Boston Common on the front and a very peculiar collaborative message on the back. At the top, written in a hand I didn’t recognize, was this: Wenny writes the card while Rennie drives the bus! Below in a hand I did recognize, Wendy—or Wenny, if you like; I hated it, myself—had written breezily: Whee! We is salesgirls off on a venture to Cape Cod! It’s a party! Hoopsie muzik! Don’t worry I held the wheel while Ren wrote her part. Hope your good. W.

Hoopsie muzik? Hope your good? No love, no do you miss me, just hope your good? And although, judging by the bumps and jags and inkblots, the card had been written while on the move in Renee’s car (Wendy didn’t have one), they both sounded either stoned or drunk on their asses. The following week I sent four more letters, plus an Erin-photo of me wearing the fur. From Wendy, nothing in reply.

You start to worry, then you start to get it, then you know. Maybe you don’t want to, maybe you think that lovers as well as doctors misdiagnose shit all the time, but in your heart you know.

Twice I tried calling her. The same grumpy girl answered both times. I imagined her wearing harlequin glasses, an ankle-length granny dress, and no lipstick. Not there, she said the first time. Out with Ren. Not there and not likely to be there in the future, Grumpy Girl said the second time. Moved.

“Moved where?” I asked, alarmed. This was in the parlor of Maison Shoplaw, where there was a long-distance honor sheet beside the phone. My fingers were holding the big old-fashioned receiver so tightly they had gone numb. Wendy was going to college on a patchwork magic carpet of scholarships, loans, and work-study employment, the same as me. She couldn’t afford a place on her own. Not without help, she couldn’t.

“I don’t know and don’t care,” Grumpy Girl said. “I got tired of all the drinking and hen-parties at two in the morning. Some of us actually like to get a little sleep. Strange but true.”

My heart was beating so hard I could feel it pulsing in my temples. “Did Renee go with her?”

“No, they had a fight. Over that guy. The one who helped Wennie move out.” She said Wennie with a kind of bright contempt that made me sick to my stomach. Surely it wasn’t the guy part that made me feel that way; I was her guy. If some friend, someone she’d met at work, had pitched in and helped her move her stuff, what was that to me? Of course she could have guy friends. I had made at least one girl friend, hadn’t I?

“Is Renee there? Can I talk to her?”

“No, she had a date.” Some penny must have finally dropped, because all at once Grumpy Girl got interested in the conversation. “Heyyy, is your name Devin?”

I hung up. It wasn’t something I planned, just something I did. I told myself I hadn’t heard Grumpy Girl all of a sudden change into Amused Grumpy Girl, as if there was some sort of joke going on and I was part of it. Maybe even the butt of it. As I believe I have said, the mind defends itself as long as it can.

Three days later, I got the only letter I received from Wendy Keegan that summer. The last letter. It was written on her stationery, which was deckle-edged and featured happy kittens playing with balls of yarn. It was the stationery of a fifth-grade girl, although that thought didn’t occur to me until much later. There were three breathless pages, mostly saying how sorry she was, and how she had fought against the attraction but it was just hopeless, and she knew I would be hurt so I probably shouldn’t call her or try to see her for a while, and she hoped we could be good friends after the initial shock wore off, and he was a nice guy, he went to Dartmouth, he played lacrosse, she knew I’d like him, maybe she could introduce him to me when the fall semester started, etc. etc. fucking etc.

That night I plopped myself down on the sand fifty yards or so from Mrs. Shoplaw’s Beachside Accommodations, planning to get drunk. At least, I thought, it wouldn’t be expensive. In those days, a sixpack was all it took to get me pie-eyed. At some point Tom and Erin joined me, and we watched the waves roll in together: the three Joyland Musketeers.

“What’s wrong?” Erin asked.

I shrugged, the way you do when it’s small shit but annoying shit, all the same. “Girlfriend broke up with me. Sent me a Dear John letter.”

“Which in your case,” Tom said, “would be a Dear Dev letter.”

“Show a little compassion,” Erin told him. “He’s sad and hurt and trying not to show it. Are you too much of a dumbass to see that?”

“No,” Tom said. He put his arm around my shoulders and briefly hugged me against him. “I’m sorry for your pain, pal. I feel it coming off you like a cold wind from Canada or maybe even the Arctic. Can I have one of your beers?”

“Sure.”

We sat there for quite a while, and under Erin’s gentle questioning, I spilled some of it, but not all of it. I was sad. I was hurt. But there was a lot more, and I didn’t want them to see it. This was partly because I’d been raised by my parents to believe barfing your feelings on other people was the height of impoliteness, but mostly because I was dismayed by the depth and strength of my jealousy. I didn’t want them to even guess at that lively worm (he was from Dartmouth, oh God yes, he’d probably pledged the best frat and drove a Mustang his folks had given him as a high school graduation present). Nor was jealousy the worst of it. The worst was the horrifying realization—that night it was just starting to sink in—that I had been really and truly rejected for the first time in my life. She was through with me, but I couldn’t imagine being through with her.

Erin also took a beer, and raised the can. “Let’s toast the next one to come along. I don’t know who she’ll be, Dev, only that meeting you will be her lucky day.”

“Hear-hear!” Tom said, raising his own can. And, because he was Tom, he felt compelled to add “Where-where!” and “There-there!”

I don’t think either of them realized, then or all the rest of the summer, how fundamentally the ground under my feet had shifted. How lost I felt. I didn’t want them to know. It was more than embarrassing; it seemed shameful. So I made myself smile, raised my own can of suds, and drank.

At least with them to help me drink the six, I didn’t have to wake up the next morning hungover as well as heartbroke. That was good, because when we got to Joyland that morning, I found out from Pop Allen that I was down to wear the fur that afternoon on Joyland Avenue—three fifteen-minute shifts at three, four, and five. I bitched for form’s sake (everybody was supposed to bitch about wearing the fur) but I was glad. I liked being mobbed by the kids, and for the next few weeks, playing Howie also had a bitter sort of amusement value. As I made my tail-wagging way down Joyland Avenue, followed by crowds of laughing children, I thought it was no wonder Wendy had dumped me. Her new boyfriend went to Dartmouth and played lacrosse. Her old one was spending the summer in a third-tier amusement park. Where he played a dog.

Joyland summer.

I ride-jockeyed. I flashed the shys in the mornings—meaning I restocked them with prizes—and ran some of them in the afternoons. I untangled Devil Wagons by the dozen, learned how to fry dough without burning my fingers off, and worked on my pitch for the Carolina Spin. I danced and sang with the other greenies on the Wiggle-Waggle Village’s Story Stage. Several times Fred Dean sent me to scratch the midway, a true sign of trust because it meant picking up the noon or five PM take from the various concessions. I made runs to Heaven’s Bay or Wilmington when some piece of machinery broke down and stayed late on Wednesday nights—usually along with Tom, George Preston, and Ronnie Houston—to lube the Whirly Cups and a vicious, neck-snapping ride called the Zipper. Both of those babies drank oil the way camels drink water when they get to the next oasis. And, of course, I wore the fur.

In spite of all this, I wasn’t sleeping for shit. Sometimes I’d lie on my bed, clap my elderly, taped-up headphones over my ears, and listen to my Doors records. (I was particularly partial to such cheerful tunes as “Cars Hiss By My Window,” “Riders on the Storm,” and—of course—“The End.”) When Jim Morrison’s voice and Ray Manzarek’s mystic, chiming organ weren’t enough to sedate me, I’d creep down the outside staircase and walk on the beach. Once or twice I slept on the beach. At least there were no bad dreams when I did manage to get under for a little while. I don’t remember dreaming that summer at all.

I could see bags under my eyes when I shaved in the morning, and sometimes I’d feel lightheaded after a particularly strenuous turn as Howie (birthday parties in the overheated bedlam of Howdy House were the worst), but that was normal; Mr. Easterbrook had told me so. A little rest in the boneyard always put me right again. On the whole, I thought I was representing, as they say nowadays. I learned different on the first Monday in July, two days before the Glorious Fourth.

My team—Beagle—reported to Pop Allen’s shy first thing, as always, and he gave us our assignments as he laid out the popguns. Usually our early chores involved toting boxes of prizes (MADE IN TAIWAN stamped on most of them) and flashing shys until Early Gate, which was what we called opening. That morning, however, Pop told me that Lane Hardy wanted me. This was a surprise; Lane rarely showed his face outside the boneyard until twenty minutes or so before Early Gate. I started that way, but Pop yelled at me.

“Nah, nah, he’s at the simp-hoister.” This was a derogatory term for the Ferris wheel he would have known better than to use if Lane had actually been there. “Beat feet, Jonesy. Got a lot to do today.”

I beat feet, but saw no one at the Spin, which stood tall, still, and silent, waiting for the day’s first customers,

“Over here,” a woman called. I turned to my left and saw Rozzie Gold standing outside her star-studded fortune-telling shy, all kitted out in one of her gauzy Madame Fortuna rigs. On her head was an electric blue scarf, the knotted tail of which fell almost to the small of her back. Lane was standing beside her in his usual rig: faded straight-leg jeans and a skin-tight strappy tee-shirt perfect for showing off his fully loaded guns. His derby was tilted at the proper wiseguy angle. Looking at him, you’d believe he didn’t have a brain in his head, but he had plenty.

Both dressed for show, and both wearing bad-news faces. I ran quickly through the last few days, trying to think of anything I’d done that might account for those faces. It crossed my mind that Lane might have orders to lay me off… or even fire me. But at the height of the summer? And wouldn’t that be Fred Dean’s or Brenda Rafferty’s job? Also, why was Rozzie here?

“Who died, guys?” I asked.

“Just as long as it isn’t you,” Rozzie said. She was getting into character for the day and sounded funny: half Brooklyn and half Carpathian Mountains.

“Huh?”

“Walk with us, Jonesy,” Lane said, and immediately started down the midway, which was largely deserted ninety minutes before Early Gate: no one around but a few members of the janitorial staff—gazoonies, in the Talk, and probably not a green card among them—sweeping up around the concessions: work that should have been done the night before. Rozzie made room for me between them when I caught up. I felt like a crook being escorted to the pokey by a couple of cops.

“What’s this about?”

“You’ll see,” Rozzie/Fortuna said ominously and pretty soon I did. Next to Horror House—the two connected, actually—was Mysterio’s Mirror Mansion. Next to the agent’s booth was a regular mirror with a sign over it reading SO YOU WON’T FORGET HOW YOU REALLY LOOK. Lane took me by one arm, Rozzie by the other. Now I really did feel like a perp being brought in for booking. They placed me in front of the mirror.

“What do you see?” Lane asked.

“Me,” I said, and then, because that didn’t seem to be the answer they wanted: “Me needing a haircut.”

“Look at your clothes, silly boy,” Rozzie said, pronouncing the last two words seely poy.

I looked. Above my yellow workboots I saw jeans (with the recommended brand of rawhide gloves sticking out of the back pocket), and above my jeans was a blue chain bray workshirt, faded but reasonably clean. On my head was an admirably battered Howie dogtop, the finishing touch that means so much.

“What about them?” I said. I was starting to get a little mad.

“Kinda hangin on ya, aren’t they?” Lane said. “Didn’t used to. How much weight you lost?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. Maybe we ought to go see Fat Wally.” Fat Wally ran the guess-your-weight joint.

“Is not funny,” Fortuna said. “You can’t wear that damn dog costume half the day under the hot summer sun, then swallow two more salt pills and call it a meal. Mourn your lost love all you want, but eat while you do it. Eat, dammit!”

“Who’s been talking to you? Tom?” No, it wouldn’t have been him. “Erin. She had no business—”

“No one has been talking to me,” Rozzie said. She drew herself up impressively. “I have the sight.”

“I don’t know about the sight, but you’ve got one hell of a nerve.”

All at once she reverted to Rozzie. “I’m not talking about psychic sight, kiddo, I’m talking about ordinary woman-sight. You think I don’t know a lovestruck Romeo when I see one? After all the years I’ve been gigging palms and peeping the crystal? Hah!” She stepped forward, her considerable breastworks leading the way. “I don’t care about your love life; I just don’t want to see you taken to the hospital on July Fourth—when it’s supposed to hit ninety-five in the shade, by the way—with heat prostration or something worse.”

Lane took off his derby, peered into it, and re-set it on his head cocked the other way. “What she won’t come right out and say because she has to protect her famous crusty reputation is we all like you, kid. You learn fast, you do what’s asked of you, you’re honest, you don’t make no trouble, and the kids love you like mad when you’re wearing the fur. But you’d have to be blind not to see something’s wrong with you. Rozzie thinks girl trouble. Maybe she’s right. Maybe she ain’t.”

Rozzie gave him a haughty dare-you-doubt-me stare.

“Maybe your parents are getting a divorce. Mine did, and it damn near killed me. Maybe your big brother got arrested for selling dope—”

“My mother’s dead and I’m an only child,” I said sulkily.

“I don’t care what you are in the straight world,” he said. “This is Joyland. The show. And you’re one of us. Which means we got a right to care about you, whether you like it or not. So get something to eat.”

“Get a lot to eat,” Rozzie said. “Now, noon, all day. Every day. And try to eat something besides fried chicken where, I tell you what, there’s a heart attack in every drumstick. Go in Rock Lobster and tell them you want a take-out of fish and salad. Tell them to make it a double. Get your weight up so you don’t look like the Human Skeleton in a ten-in-one.” She turned her gaze on Lane. “It’s a girl, of course it is. Anybody can see that.”

“Whatever it is, stop fucking pining,” Lane said.

“Such language to use around a lady,” Rozzie said. She was sounding like Fortuna again. Soon she’d come out with Ziss is vat za spirits vant, or something equivalent.

“Ah, blow it out,” Lane said, and walked back toward the Spin.

When he was gone, I looked at Rozzie. She really wasn’t much in the mother-figure department, but right then she was what I had. “Roz, does everyone know?”

She shook her head. “Nah. To most of the old guys, you’re just another greenie jack-of-all-trades… although not as green as you were three weeks ago. But many people here like you, and they see something is wrong. Your friend Erin, for one. Your friend Tom for another.” She said friend like it rhymed with rent. “I am another friend, and as a friend I tell you that you can’t fix your heart. Only time can do that, but you can fix your body. Eat!”

“You sound like a Jewish mother joke,” I said.

“I am a Jewish mother, and believe me, it’s no joke.”

“I’m the joke,” I said. “I think about her all the time.”

“That you can’t help, at least for now. But you must turn your back on the other thoughts that sometimes come to you.”

I think my mouth dropped open. I’m not sure. I know I stared. People who’ve been in the business as long as Rozzie Gold had been back then—they are called mitts in the Talk, for their palmistry skills—have their ways of picking your brains so that what they say sounds like the result of telepathy, but usually it’s just close observation.

Not always, though.

“I don’t understand.”

“Give those morbid records a rest, do you understand that?” She looked grimly into my face, then laughed at the surprise she saw there. “Rozzie Gold may be just a Jewish mother and grandmother, but Madame Fortuna sees much.”

So did my landlady, and I found out later—after seeing Rozzie and Mrs. Shoplaw having lunch together in Heavens Bay on one of Madame Fortuna’s rare days off—that they were close friends who had known each other for years. Mrs. Shoplaw dusted my room and vacuumed the floor once a week; she would have seen my records. As for the rest—those famous suicidal ideations that sometimes came to me—might not a woman who had spent most of her life observing human nature and watching for psychological clues (called tells both in the Talk and big-league poker) guess that a sensitive young man, freshly dumped, might entertain thoughts of pills and ropes and riptide undertows?

“I’ll eat,” I promised. I had a thousand things to do before Early Gate, but mostly I was just anxious to be away from her before she said something totally outrageous like Her name is Vendy, and you still think of her ven you mess-turbate.

“Also, drink big glass of milk before you go to bed.” She raised an admonitory finger. “No coffee; milk. Vill help you sleep.”

“Worth a try,” I said.

She went back to Roz again. “The day we met, you asked if I saw a beautiful woman with dark hair in your future. Do you remember that?”

“Yes.”

“What did I say?”

“That she was in my past.”

Rozzie gave a single nod, hard and imperious. “So she is. And when you want to call her and beg for a second chance—you will, you will—show a little spine. Have a little self-respect. Also remember that the long-distance is expensive.”

Tell me something I don’t know, I thought. “Listen, I really have to get going, Roz. Lots to do.”

“Yes, a busy day for all of us. But before you go, Jonesy—have you met the boy yet? The one with the dog? Or the girl who wears the red hat and carries the doll? I told you about them, too, when we met.”

“Roz, I’ve met a billion kids in the last—”

“You haven’t, then. Okay. You will.” She stuck out her lower lip and blew, stirring the fringe of hair that stuck out from beneath her scarf. Then she seized my wrist. “I see danger for you, Jonesy. Sorrow and danger.”

I thought for a moment she was going to whisper something like Beware the dark stranger! He rides a unicycle! Instead, she let go of me and pointed at Horror House. “Which team turns that unpleasant hole? Not yours, is it?”

“No, Team Doberman.” The Dobies were also responsible for the adjacent attractions; Mysterio’s Mirror Mansion and the Wax Museum. Taken together, these three were Joyland’s half-hearted nod to the old carny spook-shows.

“Good. Stay out of it. It’s haunted, and a boy with bad thoughts needs to be visiting a haunted house like he needs arsenic in his mouthwash. Kapish?”

“Yeah.” I looked at my watch.

She got the point and stepped back. “Watch for those kids. And watch your step, boychick. There’s a shadow over you.”

Lane and Rozzie gave me a pretty good jolt, I’ll admit it. I didn’t stop listening to my Doors records—not immediately, at least—but I made myself eat more, and started sucking down three milkshakes a day. I could feel fresh energy pouring into my body as if someone had turned on a tap, and I was very grateful for that on the afternoon of July Fourth. Joyland was tipsed and I was down to wear the fur ten times, an all-time record.

Fred Dean himself came down to give me the schedule, and to hand me a note from old Mr. Easterbrook. If it becomes too much, stop at once and tell your team leader to find a sub.

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

“Maybe, but make sure Pop sees this memo.”

“Okay.”

“Brad likes you, Jonesy. That’s rare. He hardly ever notices the greenies unless he sees one of them screw up.”

I liked him, too, but didn’t say so to Fred. I thought it would have sounded suck-assy.

All my July Fourth shifts were tenners, not bad even though most ten-minute shifts actually turned out to be fifteenies, but the heat was crushing. Ninety-five in the shade, Rozzie had said, but by noon that day it was a hundred and two by the thermometer that hung outside the Park Ops trailer. Luckily for me, Dottie Lassen had repaired the other XL Howie suit and I could swap between the two. While I was wearing one, Dottie would have the other turned as inside-out as it would go and hung in front of three fans, drying the sweat-soaked interior.

At least I could remove the fur by myself; by then I’d discovered the secret. Howie’s right paw was actually a glove, and when you knew the trick, pulling down the zipper to the neck of the costume was a cinch. Once you had the head off, the rest was cake. This was good, because I could change by myself behind a pull-curtain. No more displaying my sweaty, semi-transparent undershorts to the costume ladies.

As the bunting-draped afternoon of July Fourth wore on, I was excused from all other duties. I’d do my capering, then retreat to Joyland Under and collapse on the ratty old couch in the boneyard for a while, soaking up the air conditioning. When I felt revived, I’d use the alleys to get to the costume shop and swap one fur for the other. Between shifts I guzzled pints of water and quarts of unsweetened iced tea. You won’t believe I was having fun, but I was. Even the brats were loving me that day.

So: quarter to four in the afternoon. I’m jiving down Joyland Avenue—our midway—while the overhead speakers blast out Daddy Dewdrop’s “Chick-A-Boom, Chick-A-Boom, Don’tcha Just Love It.” I’m giving out hugs to the kiddies and Awesome August coupons to the adults, because Joyland’s business always dropped off as the summer wound down. I’m posing for pictures (some taken by Hollywood Girls, most by hordes of sweat-soaked, sunburned Parent Paparazzi), and trailing adoring kids after me in cometary splendor. I’m also looking for the nearest door to Joyland Under, because I’m pretty well done up. I have just one more turn as Howie scheduled today, because Howie the Happy Hound never shows his blue eyes and cocked ears after sundown. I don’t know why; it was just a show tradition.

Did I notice the little girl in the red hat before she fell down on the baking pavement of Joyland Avenue, writhing and jerking? I think so but can’t say for sure, because passing time adds false memories and modifies real ones. I surely wouldn’t have noticed the Pup-A-Licious she was waving around, or her bright red Howie dogtop; a kid at an amusement park with a hotdog is hardly a unique sighting, and we must have sold a thousand red Howie hats that day. If I did notice her, it was because of the doll she held curled to her chest in the hand not holding her mustard-smeared Pup. It was a big old Raggedy Ann. Madame Fortuna had suggested I be on the lookout for a little girl with a doll only two days before, so maybe I did notice her. Or maybe I was only thinking of getting off the midway before I fell down in a faint. Anyway, her doll wasn’t the problem. The Pup-A-Licious she was eating—that was the problem.

I only think I remember her running toward me (hey, they all did), but I know what happened next, and why it happened. She had a bite of her Pup in her mouth, and when she drew in breath to scream HOWWWIE, she pulled it down her throat. Hot dogs: the perfect choking food. Luckily for her, just enough of Rozzie Gold’s Fortuna bullshit had stuck in my head for me to act quickly.

When the little girl’s knees buckled, her expression of happy ecstasy turning first to surprise and then terror, I was already reaching behind me and grabbing the zipper with my paw-glove. The Howie-head tumbled off and lolled to the side, revealing the red face and sweat-soaked, clumpy hair of Mr. Devin Jones. The little girl dropped her Raggedy Ann. Her hat fell off. She began clawing at her neck.

“Hallie?” a woman cried. “Hallie, what’s wrong?”

Here’s more Luck in Action: I not only knew what was wrong, I knew what to do. I’m not sure you’ll understand how fortunate that was. This is 1973 we’re talking about, remember, and Henry Heimlich would not publish the essay that would give the Heimlich Maneuver its name for another full year. Still, it’s always been the most commonsense way to deal with choking, and we had learned it during our first and only orientation session before beginning work in the UNH Commons. The teacher was a tough old veteran of the restaurant wars who had lost his Nashua coffee shop a year after a new McDonald’s went up nearby.

“Just remember, it won’t work if you don’t do it hard,” he told us. “Don’t worry about breaking a rib if you see someone dying in front of you.”

I saw the little girl’s face turning purple and didn’t even think about her ribs. I seized her in a vast, furry embrace, with my tail-pulling left paw jammed against the bony arch in her midsection where her ribs came together. I gave a single hard squeeze, and a yellow-smeared chunk of hotdog almost two inches long came popping out of her mouth like a cork from a champagne bottle. It flew nearly four feet. And no, I didn’t break any of her ribs. Kids are flexible, God bless ’em.

I wasn’t aware that I and Hallie Stansfield—that was her name—were hemmed in by a growing circle of adults. I certainly wasn’t aware that we were being photographed dozens of times, including the shot by Erin Cook that wound up in the Heaven’s Bay Weekly and several bigger papers, including the Wilmington Star-News. I’ve still got a framed copy of that photo in an attic box somewhere. It shows the little girl dangling in the arms of this weird man/dog hybrid with one of its two heads lolling on its shoulder. The girl is holding out her arms to her mother, perfectly caught by Erin’s Speed Graphic just as Mom collapses to her knees in front of us.

All of that is a blur to me, but I remember the mother sweeping the little girl up into her own arms and the father saying Kid, I think you saved her life. And I remember—this is as clear as crystal—the girl looking at me with her big blue eyes and saying, “Oh poor Howie, your head fell off.”

The all-time classic newspaper headline, as everyone knows, is MAN BITES DOG. The Star-News couldn’t equal that, but the one over Erin’s picture gave it a run for its money: DOG SAVES GIRL AT AMUSEMENT PARK.

Want to know my first snarky urge? To clip the article and send it to Wendy Keegan. I might even have done it, had I not looked so much like a drowned muskrat in Erin’s photo. I did send it to my father, who called to say how proud of me he was. I could tell by the tremble in his voice that he was close to tears.

“God put you in the right place at the right time, Dev,” he said.

Maybe God. Maybe Rozzie Gold, aka Madame Fortuna. Maybe a little of both.

The next day I was summoned to Mr. Easterbrook’s office, a pine-paneled room raucous with old carny posters and photographs. I was particularly taken by a photo that showed a straw-hatted agent with a dapper mustache standing next to a test-your-strength shy. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up, and he was leaning on a sledgehammer like it was a cane: a total dude. At the top of the ding-post, next to the bell, was a sign reading KISS HIM, LADY, HE’S A HE-MAN!

“Is that guy you?” I asked.

“It is indeed, although I only ran the ding-show for a season. It wasn’t to my taste. Gaff jobs never have been. I like my games straight. Sit down, Jonesy. You want a Coke or anything?”

“No, sir. I’m fine.” I was, in fact, sloshing with that mornings milkshake.

“I’ll be perfectly blunt. You gave this show twenty thousand dollars’ worth of good publicity yesterday afternoon, and I still can’t afford to give you a bonus. If you knew… but never mind.” He leaned forward. “What I can do is owe you a favor. If you need one, ask. I’ll grant it if it’s in my power. Will that do?”

“Sure.”

“Good. And would you be willing to make one more appearance—as Howie—with the little girl? Her parents want to thank you in private, but a public appearance would be an excellent thing for Joyland. Entirely your call, of course.”

“When?”

“Saturday, after the noon parade. We’d put up a platform at the intersection of Joyland and Hound Dog Way. Invite the press.”

“Happy to,” I said. I liked the idea of being in the newspapers again, I will admit. It had been a tough summer on my ego and self-image, and I’d take all the turnaround I could get.

He rose to his feet in his glassy, unsure way, and offered me his hand. “Thank you again. On behalf of that little girl, but also on behalf of Joyland. The accountants who run my damn life will be very happy about this.”

When I stepped out of the office building, which was located with the other administrative buildings in what we called the backyard, my entire team was there. Even Pop Allen had come. Erin, dressed for success in Hollywood Girl green, stepped forward with a shiny metal crown of laurels made from Campbell’s Soup cans. She dropped to one knee. “For you, my hero.”

I would have guessed I was too sunburned to flush, but that turned out not to be true. “Oh Jesus, get up.”

“Savior of little girls,” Tom Kennedy said. “Not to mention savior of our place of employment getting its ass sued off and possibly having to shut its doors.”

Erin bounced to her feet, stuck the ludicrous soup-can crown on my head, then gave me a big old smackaroonie. Everyone on Team Beagle cheered.

“Okay,” Pop said when it died down. “We can all agree that you’re a knight in shining ah-mah, Jonesy. You are also not the first guy to save a rube from popping off on the midway. Could we maybe all get back to work?”

I was good with that. Being famous was fun, but the don’t-get-a-swelled-head message of the tin laurels wasn’t lost on me.

I was wearing the fur that Saturday, on the makeshift platform at the center of our midway. I was happy to take Hallie in my arms, and she was clearly happy to be there. I’d guess there were roughly nine miles of film burned as she proclaimed her love for her favorite doggy and kissed him again and again for the cameras.

Erin was in the front row with her camera for a while, but the news photogs were bigger and all male. Soon they shunted her away to a less favorable position, and what did they all want? What Erin had already gotten, a picture of me with my Howie-head off. That was one thing I wouldn’t do, although I’m sure none of Fred, Lane, or Mr. Easterbrook himself would have penalized me for it. I wouldn’t do it because it would have flown in the face of park tradition: Howie never took off the fur in public; to do so would have been like outing the Tooth Fairy. I’d done it when Hallie Stansfield was choking, but that was the necessary exception. I would not deliberately break the rule. So I guess I was carny after all (although not carny-from-carny, never that).

Later, dressed in my own duds again, I met with Hallie and her parents in the Joyland Customer Service Center. Close-up, I could see that Mom was pregnant with number two, although she probably had three or four months of eating pickles and ice cream still ahead of her. She hugged me and wept some more. Hallie didn’t seem overly concerned. She sat in one of the plastic chairs, swinging her feet and looking at old copies of Screen Time, speaking the names of the various celebrities in the declamatory voice of a court page announcing visiting royalty. I patted Mom’s back and said there-there. Dad didn’t cry, but the tears were standing in his eyes as he approached me and held out a check in the amount of five hundred dollars, made out to me. When I asked what he did for a living, he said he had started his own contracting firm the year before—just now little, but gettin on our feet pretty good, he told me. I considered that, factored in one kid here plus another on the way, and tore up the check. I told him I couldn’t take money for something that was just part of the job.

You have to remember I was only twenty-one.

There were no weekends per se for Joyland summer help; we got a day and a half every nine, which meant they were never the same days. There was a sign-up sheet, so Tom, Erin, and I almost always managed to get the same downtime. That was why we were together on a Wednesday night in early August, sitting around a campfire on the beach and having the sort of meal that can only nourish the very young: beer, burgers, barbecue-flavored potato chips, and coleslaw. For dessert we had s’mores that Erin cooked over the fire, using a grill she borrowed from Pirate Pete’s Ice Cream Waffle joint. It worked pretty well.

We could see other fires—great leaping bonfires as well as cooking fires—all the way down the beach to the twinkling metropolis of Joyland. They made a lovely chain of burning jewelry. Such fires are probably illegal in the twenty-first century; the powers that be have a way of outlawing many beautiful things made by ordinary people. I don’t know why that should be, I only know it is.

While we ate, I told them about Madame Fortuna’s prediction that I would meet a boy with a dog and a little girl in a red hat who carried a doll. I finished by saying, “One down and one to go.”

“Wow,” Erin said. “Maybe she really is psychic. A lot of people have told me that, but I didn’t really—”

“Like who?” Tom demanded.

“Well… Dottie Lassen in the costume shop, for one. Tina Ackerley, for another. You know, the librarian Dev creeps down the hall to visit at night?”

I flipped her the bird. She giggled.

“Two is not a lot,” Tom said, speaking in his Hot Shit Professor voice.

“Lane Hardy makes three,” I said. “He says she’s told people stuff that rocked them back on their heels.” In the interest of total disclosure, I felt compelled to add: “Of course he also said that ninety percent of her predictions are total crap.”

“Probably closer to ninety-five,” said the Hot Shit Professor. “Fortune telling’s a con game, boys and girls. An Ikey Heyman, in the Talk. Take the hat thing. Joyland dogtops only come in three colors—red, blue, and yellow. Red’s by far the most popular. As for the doll, c’mon. How many little kids bring some sort of toy to the amusement park? It’s a strange place, and a favorite toy is a comfort thing. If she hadn’t choked on her hotdog right in front of you, if she’d just given Howie a big old hug and passed on, you would have seen some other little girl wearing a red dogtop and carrying a doll and said, ‘Aha! Madame Fortuna really can see the future, I must cross her palm with silver so she will tell me more.’ ”

“You’re such a cynic,” Erin said, giving him an elbow. “Rozzie Gold would never try taking money from someone in the show.”

“She didn’t ask for money,” I said, but I thought what Tom said made a lot of sense. It was true she had known (or seemed to know) that my dark-haired girl was in my past, not my future, but that could have been no more than a guess based on percentages—or the look on my face when I asked.

“Course not,” Tom said, helping himself to another s’more. “She was just practicing on you. Staying sharp. I bet she’s told a lot of other greenies stuff, too.”

“Would you be one of them?” I asked.

“Well… no. But that means nothing.”

I looked at Erin, who shook her head.

“She also thinks Horror House is haunted,” I said.

“I’ve heard that one, too,” Erin said. “By a girl who got murdered in there.”

“Bullshit!” Tom cried. “Next you’ll be telling me it was the Hook, and he still lurks behind the Screaming Skull!”

“There really was a murder,” I said. “A girl named Linda Gray. She was from Florence, South Carolina. There are pictures of her and the guy who killed her at the shooting gallery and standing in line at the Spin. No hook, but there was a tattoo of a bird on his hand. A hawk or an eagle.”

That silenced him, al least for the time being.

“Lane Hardy said that Roz only thinks Horror House is haunted, because she won’t go inside and find out for sure. She won’t even go near it, if she can help it. Lane thinks that’s ironic, because he says it really is haunted.”

Erin made her eyes big and round and scooted a little closer to the fire—partly for effect, mostly I think so that Tom would put his arm around her. “He’s seen—?”

“I don’t know. He said to ask Mrs. Shoplaw, and she gave me the whole story.” I ran it down for them. It was a good story to tell at night, under the stars, with the surf rolling and a beach-fire just starting to burn down to coals. Even Tom seemed fascinated.

“Does she claim to have seen Linda Gray?” he asked when I finally ran down. “La Shoplaw?”

I mentally replayed her story as told to me on the day I rented the room on the second floor. “I don’t think so. She would have said.”

He nodded, satisfied. “A perfect lesson in how these things work. Everyone knows someone who’s seen a UFO, and everyone knows someone who’s seen a ghost. Hearsay evidence, inadmissible in court. Me, I’m a Doubting Thomas. Geddit? Tom Kennedy, Doubting Thomas?”

Erin threw him a much sharper elbow. “We get it.” She looked thoughtfully into the fire. “You know what? Summer’s two-thirds gone, and I’ve never been in the Joyland scream-shy a single time, not even the baby part up front. It’s a no-photo zone. Brenda Rafferty told us its because lots of couples go in there to make out.” She peered at me. “What are you grinning about?”

“Nothing.” I was thinking of La Shoplaw’s late husband going through the place after Late Gate and picking up cast-off panties.

“Have either of you guys been in?”

We both shook our heads. “HH is Dobie Team’s job,” Tom said.

“Let’s do it tomorrow. All three of us in one car. Maybe we’ll see her.”

“Go to Joyland on our day off when we could spend it on the beach?” Tom asked. “That’s masochism at its very finest.”

This time in spite of giving him an elbow, she poked him in the ribs. I didn’t know if they were sleeping together yet, but it seemed likely; the relationship had certainly become very physical. “Poop on that! As employees we get in free, and what does the ride take? Five minutes?”

“I think a little longer,” I said. “Nine or ten. Plus some time in the baby part. Say fifteen minutes, all told.”

Tom put his chin on her head and looked at me through the fine cloud of her hair. “Poop on that, she says. You can tell that here is a young woman with a fine college education. Before she started hanging out with sorority girls, she would have said shitsky and left it at that.”

“The day I start hanging out with that bunch of half-starved mix-n-match sluts will be the day I crawl up my own ass and die!” For some reason, this vulgarity pleased me to no end. Possibly because Wendy was a veteran mix-n-matcher. “You, Thomas Patrick Kennedy, are just afraid we will see her, and you’ll have to take back all those things you said about Madame Fortuna and ghosts and UFOs and—”

Tom raised his hands. “I give up. We’ll get in the line with the rest of the rubes—the conies, I mean—and take the Horror House tour. I only insist it be in the afternoon. I need my beauty rest.”

“You certainly do,” I said.

“Coming from someone who looks like you, that’s pretty funny. Give me a beer, Jonesy.”

I gave him a beer.

“Tell us how it went with the Stansfields,” Erin said. “Did they blubber all over you and call you their hero?”

That was pretty close, but I didn’t want to say so. “The parents were okay. The kid sat in the corner, reading Screen Time and saying she spied Dean Martin with her little eye.”

“Forget the local color and cut to the chase,” Tom said. “Did you get any money out of it?”

I was preoccupied with thoughts of how the little girl announcing the celebrities with such reverence could have been in a flatline coma instead. Or in a casket. Thus distracted, I answered honestly. “The guy offered me five hundred dollars, but I wouldn’t take it.”

Tom goggled. “Say what?”

I looked down at the remains of the s’more I was holding. Marshmallow was drooling onto my fingers, so I tossed it into the fire. I was full, anyway. I was also embarrassed, and pissed off to be feeling that way. “The man’s trying to get a little business up and running, and based on the way he talked about it, its at the point where it could go either way. He’s also got a wife and a kid and another kid coming soon. I didn’t think he could afford to be giving money away.”

“He couldn’t? What about you?”

I blinked. “What about me?”

To this day I don’t know if Tom was genuinely angry or faking it. I think he might have started out faking, then gathered steam as full understanding of what I’d done struck him. I have no idea exactly what his home situation was, but I know he was living from paycheck to paycheck, and had no car. When he wanted to take Erin out, he borrowed mine… and was careful—punctilious, I should say—about paying for the gas he used. Money mattered to him. I never got the sense it completely owned him, but yes, it mattered to him a great deal.

You’re going to school on a wing and a prayer, same as Erin and me, and working at Joyland isn’t going to land any of us in a limousine. What’s wrong with you? Did you mother drop you on your head when you were a baby?”

“Take it easy,” Erin said.

He paid no attention. “Do you want to spend the fall semester next year getting up early so you can pull dirty breakfast dishes off a Commons conveyor belt? You must, because five hundred a semester is about what it pays at Rutgers. I know, because I checked before lucking into a tutoring gig. You know how I made it through freshman year? Writing papers for rich frat-boys majoring in Advanced Beerology. If I’d been caught, I could have been suspended for a semester or tossed completely. I’ll tell you what your grand gesture amounted to: giving away twenty hours a week you could have spent studying.” He heard himself ranting, stopped, and raised a grin. “Or chatting up lissome females.”

“I’ll give you lissome,” Erin said, and pounced on him. They went rolling across the sand, Erin tickling and Tom yelling (with a notable lack of conviction) for her to get off. That was fine with me, because I did not care to pursue the issues Tom had raised. I had already made up my mind about some things, it seemed, and all that remained was for my conscious mind to get the news.

The next day, at quarter past three, we were in line at Horror House. A kid named Brady Waterman was agenting the shy. I remember him because he was also good at playing Howie. (But not as good as I was, I feel compelled to add… strictly in the cause of honesty.) Although quite stout at the beginning of the summer, Brady was now slim and trim. As a diet program, wearing the fur had Weight Watchers beat six ways to Tulsa.

“What are you guys doing here?” he asked. “Isn’t it your day off?”

“We had to see Joyland’s one and only dark ride,” Tom said, “and I’m already feeling a satisfying sense of dramatic unity—Brad Waterman and Horror House. It’s the perfect match.”

He scowled. “You’re all gonna try to cram into one car, aren’tcha?”

“We have to,” Erin told him. Then she leaned close to one of Brad’s juggy ears and whispered, “It’s a Truth or Dare thing.”

As Brad considered this, he touched the tip of his tongue to the middle of his upper lip. I could see him calculating the possibilities.

The guy behind us spoke up. “Kids, could you move the line along? I understand there’s air conditioning inside, and I could use some.”

“Go on,” Brad told us. “Put an egg in your shoe and beat it.” Coming from Brad, this was Rabelaisian wit.

“Any ghosts in there?” I asked.

“Hundreds, and I hope they all fly right up your ass.”

We started with Mysterio’s Mirror Mansion, pausing briefly to regard ourselves drawn tall or smashed squat. With that minor giggle accomplished, we followed the tiny red dots on the bottoms of certain mirrors. These led us directly to the Wax Museum. Given this secret roadmap, we arrived well ahead of the rest of the current group, who wandered around, laughing and bumping into the various angled panes of glass.

To Tom’s disappointment, there were no murderers in the Wax Museum, only pols and celebs. A smiling John F. Kennedy and a jumpsuited Elvis Presley flanked the doorway. Ignoring the PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH sign, Erin gave Elvis’s guitar a strum. “Out of tu—” she began, then recoiled as Elvis jerked to life and began singing “Can’t Help Falling in Love with You.”

“Gotcha!” Tom said gleefully, and gave her a hug.

Beyond the Wax Museum was a doorway leading to the Barrel and Bridge Room, which rumbled with machinery that sounded dangerous (it wasn’t) and stuttered with strobe lights of conflicting colors. Erin crossed to the other side on the shaking, tilting Billy Goat’s Bridge while the macho men accompanying her dared the Barrel. I stumbled my way through, reeling like a drunk but only falling once. Tom stopped in the middle, stuck out his hands and feet so he looked like a paperdoll, and made a complete three-sixty that way.

“Stop it, you goof, you’ll break your neck!” Erin called.

“He won’t even if he falls,” I said. “It’s padded.”

Tom rejoined us, grinning and flushed to the roots of his hair. “That woke up brain cells that have been asleep since I was three.”

“Yeah, but what about all the ones it killed?” Erin asked.

Next came the Tilted Room and beyond that was an arcade filled with teenagers playing pinball and Skee-Ball. Erin watched the Skee-Ball for a while, with her arms folded beneath her breasts and a disapproving look on her face. “Don’t they know that’s a complete butcher’s game?”

“People come here to be butched,” I said. “It’s part of the attraction.”

Erin sighed. “And I thought Tom was a cynic.”

On the far side of the arcade, beneath a glowing green skull, was a sign reading: HORROR HOUSE LIES BEYOND! BEWARE! PREGNANT WOMEN AND THOSE WITH SMALL CHILDREN MAY EXIT LEFT.

We walked into an antechamber filled with echoing recorded cackles and screams. Pulsing red light illuminated a single steel track and a black tunnel entrance beyond. From deep within it came rumbles, flashing lights, and more screams. These were not recorded. From a distance, they didn’t sound particularly happy, but probably they were. Some, at least.

Eddie Parks, proprietor of Horror House and boss of Team Doberman, walked over to us. He was wearing rawhide gloves and a dogtop so old it was faded to no color at all (although it turned blood red each time the lights pulsed). He gave us a dismissive sniff. “Must have been a damn boring day off.”

“Just wanted to see how the other half lives,” Tom said.

Erin gave Eddie her most radiant smile. It was not returned.

“Three to a car, I guess. That what you want?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Fine with me. Just remember that the rules apply to you, same as anyone else. Keep your fuckin hands inside.”

“Yessir,” Tom said, and gave a little salute. Eddie looked at him the way a man might look at a new species of bug and walked back to his controls, which consisted of three shifter-knobs sticking out of a waist-high podium. There were also a few buttons illuminated by a Tensor lamp bent low to minimize its less-than-ghostly white light.

“Charming guy,” Tom muttered.

Erin hooked an arm into Tom’s right elbow and my left, drawing us close. “Does anyone like him?” she murmured.

“No,” Tom said. “Not even his own team. He’s already fired two of them.”

The rest of our group started to catch up just as a train filled with laughing conies (plus a few crying kids whose parents probably should have heeded the warning and exited from the arcade) arrived. Erin asked one of the girls if it was scary.

“The scary part was trying to keep his hands where they belong,” she said, then squealed happily as her boyfriend first kissed her neck and then pulled her toward the arcade.

We climbed aboard. Three of us in a car designed for two made for an extremely tight fit, and I was very aware of Erin’s thigh pressing against mine, and the brush of her breast against my arm. I felt a sudden and far from unpleasant southward tingle. I would argue that—fantasies aside—the majority of men are monogamous from the chin up. Below the belt-buckle, however, there’s a wahoo stampeder who just doesn’t give a shit.

“Hands inside the caaa!” Eddie Parks was yelling in a bored-to-death monotone that was the complete antithesis of a cheerful Lane Hardy pitch. “Hands inside the caaa! You got a kid under three feet, put ’im in your lap or get out of the caaa! Hold still and watch for the baaa!”

The safety bars came down with a clank, and a few girls tuned up with preparatory screams. Clearing their vocal cords for dark-ride arias to come, you might say.

There was a jerk, and we rode into Horror House.

Nine minutes later we got out and exited through the arcade with the rest of the tip. Behind us, we could hear Eddie exhorting his next bunch to keep their hands inside the caaa and watch for the baaa. He never gave us a look.

“The dungeon part wasn’t scary, because all the prisoners were Dobies,” Erin said. “The one in the pirate outfit was Billy Ruggerio.” Her color was high, her hair was mussed from the blowers, and I thought she had never looked so pretty. “But the Screaming Skull really got me, and the Torture Chamber… my God!”

“Pretty gross,” I agreed. I’d seen a lot of horror movies during my high school years, and thought of myself as inured, but seeing an eye-bulging head come rolling down an inclined trough from the guillotine had jumped the shit out of me. I mean, the mouth was still moving.

Out on Joyland Avenue again, we spotted Cam Jorgensen from Team Foxhound selling lemonade. “Who wants one?” Erin asked. She was still bubbling over. “I’m buying!”

“Sure,” I said.

“Tom?”

He shrugged his assent. Erin gave him a quizzical look, then ran to get the drinks. I glanced at Tom, but he was watching the Rocket go around and around. Or maybe looking through it.

Erin came back with three tall paper cups, half a lemon bobbing on top of each. We took them to the benches in Joyland Park, just down from the Wiggle-Waggle, and sat in the shade. Erin was talking about the bats at the end of the ride, how she knew they were just wind-up toys on wires, but bats had always scared the hell out of her and—

There she broke off. “Tom, are you okay? You haven’t said a word. Not sick to your stomach from turning in the Barrel, are you?”

“My stomach’s fine.” He took a sip of his lemonade, as if to prove it. “What was she wearing, Dev? Do you know?”

“Huh?”

“The girl who got murdered. Laurie Gray.”

“Linda Gray.”

“Laurie, Larkin, Linda, whatever. What was she wearing? Was it a full skirt—a long one, down to her shins—and a sleeveless blouse?”

I looked at him closely. We both did, initially thinking it was just another Tom Kennedy goof. Only he didn’t look like he was goofing. Now that I really examined him, what he looked like was scared half to death.

“Tom?” Erin touched his shoulder. “Did you see her? Don’t joke, now.”

He put his hand over hers but didn’t look at her. He was looking at me. “Yeah,” he said, “long skirt and sleeveless blouse. You know, because La Shoplaw told you.”

“What color?” I asked.

“Hard to tell with the lights changing all the time, but I think blue. Blouse and skirt both.”

Then Erin got it. “Holy shit,” she said in a kind of sigh. The high color was leaving her cheeks in a hurry.

There was something else. Something the police had held back for a long time, according to Mrs. Shoplaw.

“What about her hair, Tom? Ponytail, right?”

He shook his head. Took a small sip of his lemonade. Patted his mouth with the back of his hand. His hair hadn’t gone gray, he wasn’t all starey-eyed, his hands weren’t shaking, but he still didn’t look like the same guy who’d joked his way through the Mirror Mansion and the Barrel and Bridge Room. He looked like a guy who’d just gotten a reality enema, one that had flushed all the junior-year-summer-job bullshit out of his system.

“Not a ponytail. Her hair long, all right, but she had a thing across the top of her head to keep it out of her face. I’ve seen a billion of ’em, but I can’t remember what girls call it.”

“An Alice band,” Erin said.

“Yeah. I think that was blue, too. She was holding out her hands.” He held his out in the exact same way Emmalina Shoplaw had held hers out on the day she told me the story “Like she was asking for help.”

“You already know this stuff from Mrs. Shoplaw,” I said. “Isn’t that right? Tell us, we won’t be mad. Will we, Erin?”

“No, uh-uh.”

But Tom shook his head. “I’m just telling you what I saw. Neither of you saw her?”

We had not, and said so.

“Why me?” Tom asked plaintively. “Once we were inside, I wasn’t even thinking of her. I was just having fun. So why me?”

Erin tried to get more details while I drove us back to Heaven’s Bay in my heap. Tom answered the first two or three of her questions, then said he didn’t want to talk about it anymore in an abrupt tone I’d never heard him use with Erin before. I don’t think she had, either, because she was quiet as a mouse for the rest of the ride. Maybe they talked about it some more between themselves, but I can tell you that he never spoke of it again to me until about a month before he died, and then only briefly. It was near the end of a phone conversation that had been painful because of his halting, nasal voice and the way he sometimes got confused.

“At least… I know… there’s something,” he said. “I saw… for myself… that summer. In the Hasty Hut.” I didn’t bother to correct him; I knew what he meant. “Do you… remember?”

“I remember,” I said.

“But I don’t know… the something… if it’s good… or bad.” His dying voice filled with horror. “The way she… Dev, the way she held out her hands…”

Yes.

The way she held out her hands.

The next time I had a full day off, it was nearly the middle of August, and the tide of conies was ebbing. I no longer had to jink and juke my way up Joyland Avenue to the Carolina Spin… and to Madame Fortuna’s shy, which stood in its revolving shadow.

Lane and Fortuna—she was all Fortuna today, in full gypsy kit—were talking together by the Spin’s control station. Lane saw me and tipped his derby widdershins, which was his way of acknowledging me.

“Look what the cat drug in,” he said. “How ya be, Jonesy?”

“Fine,” I said, although this wasn’t strictly true. The sleepless nights had come back now that I was only wearing the fur four or five times a day. I lay in my bed waiting for the small hours to get bigger, window open so I could hear the incoming surf, thinking about Wendy and her new boyfriend. Also thinking about the girl Tom had seen standing beside the tracks in Horror House, in the fake brick tunnel between the Dungeon and the Chamber of Torture.

I turned to Fortuna. “Can I talk to you?”

She didn’t ask why, just led me to her shy, swept aside the purple curtain that hung in the doorway, and ushered me in. There was a round table covered with a rose-pink cloth. On it was Fortuna’s crystal, now draped. Two simple folding chairs were positioned so that seer and supplicant faced each other over the crystal (which, I happened to know, was underlit by a small bulb Madame Fortuna could operate with her foot). On the back wall was a giant silk-screened hand, fingers spread and palm out. On it, neatly labeled, were the Seven: lifeline, heartline, headline, loveline (also known as the Girdle of Venus), sunline, fateline, healthline.

Madame Fortuna gathered her skirts and seated herself. She motioned for me to do the same. She did not undrape her crystal, nor did she invite me to cross her palm with silver so that I might know the future.

“Ask what you came to ask,” she said.

“I want to know if the little girl was just an informed guess or if you really knew something. Saw something.”

She looked at me, long and steadily. In Madame Fortuna’s place of business, there was a faint smell of incense instead of popcorn and fried dough. The walls were flimsy, but the music, the chatter of the conies, and the rumble of the rides all seemed very far away. I wanted to look down, but managed not to.

“Actually, you want to know if I’m a fraud. Isn’t that so?”

“I… ma’am, I honestly don’t know what I want.”

At that she smiled. It was a good one—as if I had passed some sort of test. “You’re a sweet boy, Jonesy, but like so many sweet boys, you’re a punk liar.”

I started to reply; she hushed me with a wave of her ring-heavy right hand. She reached beneath her table and brought out her cashbox. Madame Fortuna’s readings were free—all part of your admission fee, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls—but tips were encouraged. And legal under North Carolina law. When she opened the box, I saw a sheaf of crumpled bills, mostly ones, something that looked suspiciously like a punch-board (not legal under North Carolina law), and a single small envelope. Printed on the front was my name. She held it out. I hesitated, then took it.

“You didn’t come to Joyland today just to ask me that,” she said.

“Well…”

She waved me off again. “You know exactly what you want. In the short term, at least. And since the short term is all any of us have, who is Fortuna—or Rozzie Gold, for that matter—to argue with you? Go now. Do what you came here to do. When it’s done, open that and read what I’ve written.” She smiled. “No charge to employees. Especially not good kids like you.”

“I don’t—”

She rose in a swirl of skirts and a rattle of jewelry. “Go, Jonesy. We’re finished here.”

I left her tight little booth in a daze. Music from two dozen shys and rides seemed to hit me like conflicting winds, and the sun was a hammer. I went directly to the administration building (actually a doublewide trailer), gave a courtesy knock, went in, and said hello to Brenda Rafferty, who was going back and forth between an open account book and her faithful adding machine.

“Hello, Devin,” she said. “Are you taking care of your Hollywood Girl?”

“Yes, ma’am, we all watch out for her.”

“Dana Elkhart, isn’t it?”

“Erin Cook, ma’am.”

“Erin, of course. Team Beagle. The redhead. What can I do for you?”

“I wonder if I could speak to Mr. Easterbrook.”

“He’s resting, and I hate to disturb him. He had an awful lot of phone calls to make earlier, and we still have to go over some numbers, much as I hate to bother him with them. He tires very easily these days.”

“I wouldn’t be long.”

She sighed. “I suppose I could see if he’s awake. Can you tell me what it’s about?”

“A favor,” I said. “He’ll understand.”

He did, and only asked me two questions. The first was if I was sure. I said I was. The second…

“Have you told your parents yet, Jonesy?”

“It’s just me and my dad, Mr. Easterbrook, and I’ll do that tonight.”

“Very well, then. Put Brenda in the picture before you leave. She’ll have all the necessary paperwork, and you can fill it out…” Before he could finish, his mouth opened and he displayed his horsey teeth in a vast, gaping yawn. “Excuse me, son. It’s been a tiring day. A tiring summer.”

“Thank you, Mr. Easterbrook.”

He waved his hand. “Very welcome. I’m sure you’ll be a great addition, but if you do this without your father’s consent, I shall be disappointed in you. Close the door on your way out, please.”

I tried not to see Brenda’s frown as she searched her file cabinets and hunted out the various forms Joyland, Inc. required for full-time employment. It didn’t matter, because I felt her disapproval anyway. I folded the paperwork, stuck it in the back pocket of my jeans, and left.

Beyond the line of donnikers at the far end of the backyard was a little grove of blackgum trees. I went in there, sat down with my back against one, and opened the envelope Madame Fortuna had given me. The note was brief and to the point.

You’re going to Mr. Easterbrook to ask if you can stay on at the park after Labor Day. You know he will not refuse your request.

She was right, I wanted to know if she was a fraud. Here was her answer. And yes, I had made up my mind about what came next in the life of Devin Jones. She had been right about that, too.

But there was one more line.

You saved the little girl, but dear boy! You can’t save everyone.

After I told my dad I wasn’t going back to UNH—that I needed a year off from college and planned to spend it at Joyland—there was a long silence at the southern Maine end of the line. I thought he might yell at me, but he didn’t. He only sounded tired. “It’s that girl, isn’t it?”

I’d told him almost two months earlier that Wendy and I were “taking some time off,” but Dad saw right through that. Since then, he hadn’t spoken her name a single time in our weekly phone conversations. Now she was just that girl. After the first couple of times he said it I tried a joke, asking if he thought I’d been going out with Mario Thomas. He wasn’t amused. I didn’t try again.