Joyland

“My landlady says he’s a preacher.”

“Indeed he is. Buddy Ross, the man in the white suit. He also has a great head of white hair. He looks like an older version of the Man from Glad in the TV ads. Mega church; big radio presence; now TV. Offstage, he’s an asshole with a few good points.” She poured two cups of coffee. “But that’s pretty much true of all of us, isn’t it? I think so.”

“You sound like someone with regrets.” It wasn’t the politest thing to say, but we were beyond that. I hoped so, at least.

She brought the coffee and sat down opposite me. “Like the song says, I’ve had a few. But Mike’s a great kid, and give my father this—he’s taken care of us financially so I could be with Mike full-time. The way I look at it, checkbook love is better than no love at all. I made a decision today. I think it happened when you were wearing that silly costume and doing that silly dance. While I was watching Mike laugh.”

“Tell me.”

“I decided to give my father what he wants, which is to be invited back into my son’s life before it’s too late. He said terrible things about how God caused Mike’s MD to punish me for my supposed sins, but I’ve got to put that behind me. If I wait for an apology, I’ll be waiting a long time… because in his heart, Dad still believes that’s true.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged, as if it were of no matter. “I was wrong about not letting Mike go to Joyland, and I’ve been wrong about holding onto my old grudges and insisting on some sort of fucked-up quid pro quo. My son isn’t goods in a trading post. Do you think thirty-one’s too old to grow up, Dev?”

“Ask me when I get there.”

She laughed. “Touché. Excuse me a minute.”

She was gone for almost five. I sat at the kitchen table, sipping my coffee. When she came back, she was holding her sweater in her right hand. Her stomach was tanned. Her bra was a pale blue, almost matching her faded jeans.

“Mike’s fast asleep,” she said. “Would you like to go upstairs with me, Devin?”

Her bedroom was large but plain, as if, even after all the months she had spent here, she’d never fully unpacked. She turned to me and linked her arms around my neck. Her eyes were very wide and very calm. A trace of a smile touched the corners of her mouth, making soft dimples. “ ‘I bet you could do better, if you had half a chance.’ Remember me saying that?”

“Yes.”

“Is that a bet I’d win?”

Her mouth was sweet and damp. I could taste her breath.

She drew back and said, “It can only be this once. You have to understand that.”

I didn’t want to, but I did. “Just as long as it’s not… you know…”

She was really smiling now, almost laughing. I could see teeth as well as dimples. “As long as it’s not a thank-you fuck? It’s not, believe me. The last time I had a kid like you, I was a kid myself.” She took my right hand and put it on the silky cup covering her left breast. I could feel the soft, steady beat of her heart. “I must not have let go of all my daddy issues yet, because I feel delightfully wicked.”

We kissed again. Her hands dropped to my belt and unbuckled it. There was the soft rasp as my zipper went down, and then the side of her palm was sliding along the hard ridge beneath my shorts. I gasped.

“Dev?”

“What?”

“Have you ever done this before? Don’t you dare lie to me.”

“No.”

“Was she an idiot? This girl of yours?”

“I guess we both were.”

She smiled, slipped a cool hand inside my underwear, and gripped me. That sure hold, coupled with her gently moving thumb, made all of Wendy’s efforts at boyfriend satisfaction seem very minor league. “So you’re a virgin.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“Good.”

It wasn’t just the once, and that was lucky for me, because the first time lasted I’m going to say eight seconds. Maybe nine. I got inside, that much I did manage, but then everything spurted everywhere. I may have been more embarrassed once—the time I blew an ass-trumpet while taking communion at Methodist Youth Camp—but I don’t think so.

“Oh God,” I said, and put a hand over my eyes.

She laughed, but there was nothing mean about it. “In a weird way, I’m flattered. Try to relax. I’m going downstairs for another check on Mike. I’d just as soon he didn’t catch me in bed with Howie the Happy Hound.”

“Very funny.” I think if I’d blushed any harder, my skin would have caught on fire.

“I think you’ll be ready again when I come back. It’s the nice thing about being twenty-one, Dev. If you were seventeen, you’d probably be ready now.”

She came back with a couple of sodas in an ice bucket, but when she slipped out of her robe and stood there naked, Coke was the last thing I wanted. The second time was quite a bit better; I think I might have managed four minutes. Then she began to cry out softly, and I was gone. But what a way to go.

We drowsed, Annie with her head pillowed in the hollow of my shoulder. “Okay?” she asked.

“So okay I can’t believe it.”

I didn’t see her smile, but I felt it. “After all these years, this bedroom finally gets used for something besides sleeping.”

“Doesn’t your father ever stay here?”

“Not for a long time, and I only started coming back because Mike loves it here. Sometimes I can face the fact that he’s almost certainly going to die, but mostly I can’t. I just turn away from it. I make deals with myself. ‘If I don’t take him to Joyland, he won’t die. If I don’t make it up with my father so Dad can come and see him, he won’t die. If we just stay here, he won’t die.’ A couple of weeks ago, the first time I had to make him put on his coat to go down to the beach, I cried. He asked me what was wrong, and I told him it was my time of the month. He knows what that is.”

I remembered something Mike had said to her in the hospital parking lot: It doesn’t have to be the last good time. But sooner or later the last good time would come around. It does for all of us.

She sat up, wrapping the sheet around her. “Remember me saying that Mike turned out to be my future? My brilliant career?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t think of another one. Anything beyond Michael is just… blank. Who said that in America there are no second acts?”

I took her hand. “Don’t worry about act two until act one is over.”

She slipped her hand free and caressed my face with it. “You’re young, but not entirely stupid.”

It was nice of her to say, but I certainly felt stupid. About Wendy, for one thing, but that wasn’t the only thing. I found my mind drifting to those damn pictures in Erin’s folder. Something about them…

She lay back down. The sheet slipped away from her nipples, and I felt myself begin to stir again. Some things about being twenty-one were pretty great. “The shooting gallery was fun. I forgot how good it is, sometimes, just to have that eye-and-hand thing going on. My father put a rifle in my hands for the first time when I was six. Just a little single-shot .22. I loved it.”

“Yeah?”

She was smiling. “Yeah. It was our thing, the thing that worked. The only thing, as it turned out.” She propped herself up on an elbow. “He’s been selling that hellfire and brimstone shit since he was a teenager, and it’s not just about the money—he got a triple helping of backroads gospel from his own parents, and I have no doubt he believes every word of it. You know what, though? He’s still a southern man first and a preacher second. He’s got a custom pickup truck that cost fifty thousand dollars, but a pickup truck is still a pickup truck. He still eats biscuits and gravy at Shoney’s. His idea of sophisticated humor is Minnie Pearl and Junior Samples. He loves songs about cheatin and honky-tonkin. And he loves his guns. I don’t care for his brand of Jesus and I have no interest in owning a pickup truck, but the guns… that he passed on to his only daughter. I go bang-bang and feel better. Shitty legacy, huh?”

I said nothing, only got out of bed and opened the Cokes. I gave one to her.

“He’s probably got fifty guns at his full-time place in Savannah, most of them valuable antiques, and there’s another half a dozen in the safe here. I’ve got two rifles of my own at my place in Chicago, although I hadn’t shot at a target for two years before today. If Mike dies…” She held the Coke bottle to the middle of her forehead, as if trying to soothe a headache. “When Mike dies, the first thing I’m going to do is get rid of them all. They’d be too much temptation.”

“Mike wouldn’t want—”

“No, of course not, I know that, but it’s not all about him. If I could believe—like my holy-hat father—that I was going to find Mike waiting outside the golden gates to show me in after I die, that would be one thing. But I don’t. I tried my ass off to believe that when I was a little girl, and I couldn’t. God and heaven lasted about four years longer than the Tooth Fairy, but in the end, I couldn’t. I think there’s just darkness. No thought, no memory, no love. Just darkness. Oblivion. That’s why I find what’s happening to him so hard to accept.”

“Mike knows it’s more than oblivion,” I said.

“What? Why? Why do you think that?”

Because she was there. He saw her, and he saw her go. Because she said thank you. And I know because I saw the Alice band, and Tom saw her.

“Ask him,” I said. “But not today.”

She put her Coke aside and studied me. She was wearing the little smile that put dimples at the corners of her mouth. “You’ve had seconds. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in thirds?”

I put my own Coke down beside the bed. “As a matter of fact…”

She held out her arms.

The first time was embarrassing. The second time was good. The third… man, the third time was the charm.

I waited in the parlor while Annie dressed. When she came downstairs, she was back in her jeans and sweater. I thought of the blue bra just beneath the sweater, and damned if I didn’t feel that stirring again.

“Are we good?” she said.

“Yes, but I wish we could be even better.”

“I wish that, too, but this is as good as it’s ever going to get. If you like me as much as I like you, you’ll accept that. Can you?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“How much longer will you and Mike be here?”

“If the place doesn’t blow away tonight, you mean?”

“It won’t.”

“A week. Mike’s got a round of specialists back in Chicago starting on the seventeenth, and I want to get settled before then.” She drew in a deep breath. “And talk to his grandpa about a visit. There’ll have to be some ground rules. No Jesus, for one.”

“Will I see you again before you leave?”

“Yes.” She put her arms around me and kissed me. Then she stepped away. “But not like this. It would confuse things too much. I know you get that.”

I nodded. I got it.

“You better go now, Dev. And thank you. It was lovely. We saved the best ride for last, didn’t we?”

That was true. Not a dark ride but a bright one. “I wish I could do more. For you. For Mike.”

“So do I,” she said, “but that’s not the world we live in. Come by tomorrow for supper, if the storm’s not too bad. Mike would love to see you.”

She looked beautiful, standing there barefooted in her faded jeans. I wanted to take her in my arms, and lift her, and carry her into some untroubled future.

Instead, I left her where she was. That’s not the world we live in, she’d said, and how right she was.

How right she was.

About a hundred yards down Beach Row, on the inland side of the two-lane, there was a little cluster of shops too tony to be called a strip mall: a gourmet grocery, a salon called Hair’s Looking at You, a drugstore, a branch of the Southern Trust, and a restaurant called Mi Casa, where the Beach Row elite no doubt met to eat. I didn’t give those shops so much as a glance when I drove back to Heaven’s Bay and Mrs. Shoplaw’s. If ever I needed proof that I didn’t have the gift that Mike Ross and Rozzie Gold shared, that was it.

Go to bed early, Fred Dean had told me, and I did. I lay on my back with my hands behind my head, listening to the waves as I had all summer long, remembering the touch of her hands, the firmness of her breasts, the taste of her mouth. Mostly it was her eyes I thought about, and the fan of her hair on the pillow. I didn’t love her the way I loved Wendy—that sort of love, so strong and stupid, only comes once—but I loved her. I did then and still do now. For her kindness, mostly, and her patience. Some young man somewhere may have had a better initiation into the mysteries of sex, but no young man ever had a sweeter one.

Eventually, I slept.

It was a banging shutter somewhere below that woke me. I picked my watch up from the night table and saw it was quarter of one. I didn’t think there was going to be any more sleep for me until that banging stopped, so I got dressed, started out the door, then returned to the closet for my slicker. When I got downstairs, I paused. From the big bedroom down the hall from the parlor, I could hear Mrs. S. sawing wood in long, noisy strokes. No banging shutter was going to break her rest.

It turned out I didn’t need the slicker, at least not yet, because the rain hadn’t started. The wind was strong, though; it had to be blowing twenty-five already. The low, steady thud of the surf had become a muted roar. I wondered if the weather boffins had underestimated Gilda, thought of Annie and Mike in the house down the beach, and felt a tickle of unease.

I found the loose shutter and re-fastened it with the hook-and-eye. I let myself back in, went upstairs, undressed, and lay down again. This time sleep wouldn’t come. The shutter was quiet, but there was nothing I could do about the wind moaning around the eaves (and rising to a low scream each time it gusted). Nor could I turn off my brain, now that it was running again.

It’s not white, I thought. That meant nothing to me, but it wanted to mean something. It wanted to connect with something I’d seen at the park during our visit.

There’s a shadow over you, young man. That had been Rozzie Gold, on the day that I’d met her. I wondered how long she had worked at Joyland, and where she had worked before. Was she carny-from-carny? And what did it matter?

One of these children has the sight. I don’t know which.

I knew. Mike had seen Linda Gray. And set her free. He had, as they say, shown her the door. The one she hadn’t been able to find herself. Why else would she have thanked him?

I closed my eyes and saw Fred at the Shootin’ Gallery, resplendent in his suit and magic top hat. I saw Lane holding out one of the.22s chained to the chump board.

Annie: How many shots?

Fred: Ten a clip. As many as you want. Today’s your day.

My eyes flew open as several things came crashing together in my mind. I sat up, listening to the wind and the agitated surf. Then I turned on the overhead light and got Erin’s folder out of my desk drawer. I laid the photographs on the floor again, my heart pounding. The pix were good but the light wasn’t. I dressed for the second time, shoved everything back into the folder, and made another trip downstairs.

A lamp hung above the Scrabble table in the middle of the parlor, and I knew from the many evenings I’d gotten my ass kicked that the light it cast was plenty bright. There were sliding doors between the parlor and the hall leading to Mrs. S.’s quarters. I pulled them shut so the light wouldn’t disturb her. Then I turned on the lamp, moved the Scrabble box to the top of the TV, and laid my photos out. I was too agitated to sit down. I bent over the table instead, arranging and re-arranging the photographs. I was about to do that for the third time when my hand froze. I saw it. I saw him. Not proof that would stand up in court, no, but enough for me. My knees came unhinged, and I sat down after all.

The phone I’d used so many times to call my father—always noting down the time and duration on the guest-call honor sheet when I was done—suddenly rang. Only in that windy early morning silence, it sounded more like a scream. I lunged at it and picked up the receiver before it could ring again.

“H-H-Hel—” It was all I could manage. My heart was pounding too hard for more.

“It’s you,” the voice on the other end said. He sounded both amused and pleasantly surprised. “I was expecting your landlady. I had a story about a family emergency all ready.”

I tried to speak. Couldn’t.

“Devin?” Teasing. Cheerful. “Are you there?”

“I… just a second.”

I held the phone to my chest, wondering (it’s crazy how your mind can work when it’s put under sudden stress) if he could hear my heart at his end of the line. On mine, I listened for Mrs. Shoplaw. I heard her, too: the muted sound of her continuing snores. It was a good thing I’d closed the parlor doors, and a better thing that there was no extension in her bedroom. I put the phone back to my ear and said, “What do you want? Why are you calling?”

“I think you know, Devin… and even if you didn’t, it’s too late now, isn’t it?”

“Are you psychic, too?” It was stupid, but right then my brain and my mouth seemed to be running on separate tracks.

“That’s Rozzie,” he said. “Our Madame Fortuna.” He actually laughed. He sounded relaxed, but I doubt if he was. Killers don’t make telephone calls in the middle of the night if they’re relaxed. Especially if they can’t be sure of who’s going to answer the phone.

But he had a story, I thought. This guy’s a Boy Scout, he’s crazy but always prepared. The tattoo, for instance. That’s what takes your eye when you look at those photos. Not the face. Not the baseball cap.

“I knew what you were up to,” he said. “I knew even before the girl brought you that folder. The one with the pictures in it. Then today… with the pretty mommy and the crippled kid… have you told them, Devin? Did they help you work it out?”

“They don’t know anything.”

The wind gusted. I could hear it at his end, too… as if he were outside. “I wonder if I can believe you.”

“You can. You absolutely can.” Looking down at the pictures. Tattoo Man with his hand on Linda Gray’s ass. Tattoo Man helping her aim her rifle at the Shootin’ Gallery.

Lane: Let’s see your best Annie Oakley, Annie.

Fred: A crack shot!

Tattoo Man in his fishtop cap and dark glasses and sandy blond goatee. You could see the bird tattoo on his hand because the rawhide gloves had stayed in his back pocket until he and Linda Gray were in Horror House. Until he had her in the dark.

“I wonder,” he said again. “You were in that big old house for a long time this afternoon, Devin. Were you talking about the pictures the Cook girl brought, or were you just fucking her? Maybe it was both. Mommy’s a tasty piece, all right.”

“They don’t know anything,” I repeated. I was speaking low and fixing my gaze on the closed parlor doors. I kept expecting them to open and to see Mrs. S. standing there in her nightgown, her face ghostly with cream. “Neither do I. Not that I could prove.”

“Probably not, but it would only be a matter of time. You can’t unring the bell. Do you know that old saying?”

“Sure, sure.” I didn’t, but at that moment I would have agreed with him if he’d declared that Bobby Rydell (a yearly performer at Joyland) was president.

“Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to come to Joyland, and we’ll talk this out, face to face. Man to man.”

“Why would I do that? That would be pretty crazy, if you’re who I—”

“Oh, you know I am.” He sounded impatient. “And I know that if you went to the police, they’d find out I came onboard at Joyland only a month or so after Linda Gray was killed. Then they’d put me with the Wellman show and Southern Star Amusements, and there goes the ballgame.”

“So why don’t I call them right now?”

“Do you know where I am?” Anger was creeping into his voice. No—venom. “Do you know where I am right now, you nosy little sonofabitch?”

“Joyland, probably. In admin.”

“Not at all. I’m at the shopping center on Beach Row. The one where the rich bitches go to buy their macrobiotics. Rich bitches like your girlfriend.”

A cold finger began to trace its course—its very slow course—down the length of my spine from the nape of my neck to the crack of my ass. I said nothing.

“There’s a pay phone outside the drugstore. Not a booth, but that’s okay because it isn’t raining yet. Just windy. That’s where I am. I can see your girlfriend’s house from where I’m standing. There’s a light on in the kitchen—probably the one she leaves on all night—but the rest of the house is dark. I could hang up this phone and be there in sixty seconds.”

“There’s a burglar alarm!” I didn’t know if there was or not.

He laughed. “At this point, do you think I give a shit? It won’t stop me from cutting her throat. But first I’ll make her watch me do it to the little cripple.”

You won’t rape her, though, I thought. You wouldn’t even if there was time. I don’t think you can.

I came close to saying it, but didn’t. As scared as I was, I knew that goading him right now would be a very bad idea.

“You were so nice to them today,” I said stupidly. “Flowers… prizes… the rides…”

“Yeah, all the rube shit. Tell me about the car that came popping out of the funhouse shy. What was that about?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do. Maybe we’ll discuss it. At Joyland. I know your Ford, Jonesy. It’s got the flickery left headlight and the cute little pinwheel on the antenna. If you don’t want me in that house cutting throats, you’re going to get in it right now, and you’re going to drive down Beach Row to Joyland.”

“I—”

“Shut up when I’m talking to you. When you pass the shopping center, you’ll see me standing by one of the park trucks. I’ll give you four minutes to get here from the time I hang up the phone. If I don’t see you, I’ll kill the woman and the kid. Understand?”

“I…”

“Do you understand?”

“Yes!”

“I’ll follow you to the park. Don’t worry about the gate; it’s already open.”

“So you’ll either kill me or them. I get to choose. Is that it?”

“Kill you?” He sounded honestly surprised. “I’m not going to kill you, Devin. That would only make my position worse. No, I’m going to do a fade. It won’t be the first time, and it probably won’t be the last. What I want is to talk. I want to know how you got onto me.”

“I could tell you that over the phone.”

He laughed. “And spoil your chance to overpower me and be Howie the Hero again? First the little girl, then Eddie Parks, and the pretty mommy and her crippled-up brat for the exciting climax. How could you pass that up?” He stopped laughing. “Four minutes.”

“I—”

He hung up. I stared down at the glossy photos. I opened the drawer in the Scrabble table, took out one of the pads, and fumbled for the mechanical pencil Tina Ackerley always insisted on using to keep score. I wrote: Mrs. S. If you’re reading this, something has happened to me. I know who killed Linda Gray. Others, too.

I wrote his name in capital letters.

Then I ran for the door.

My Ford’s starter spun and sputtered and did not catch. Then it began to slow. All summer I’d been telling myself I had to get a new battery, and all summer I’d found other things to spend my money on.

My father’s voice: You’re flooding it, Devin.

I took my foot off the gas and sat there in the dark. Time seemed to be racing, racing. Part of me wanted to run back inside and call the police. I couldn’t call Annie because I didn’t have her fucking phone number, and given her famous father, it would be unlisted. Did he know that? Probably not, but he had the luck of the devil. As brazen as he was, the murdering son of a bitch should have been caught three or four times already, but hadn’t been. Because he had the luck of the devil.

She’ll hear him breaking in and she’ll shoot him.

Only the guns were in the safe, she’d said so. Even if she got one, she’d probably find the bastard holding his straight-razor to Mike’s throat when she confronted him.

I turned the key again, and with my foot off the accelerator and the carb full of gas, my Ford started up at once. I backed down the driveway and turned toward Joyland. The circular red neon of the Spin and the blue neon swoops of the Thunderball stood out against low, fast-running clouds. Those two rides were always lit on stormy nights, partly as a beacon for ships at sea, partly to warn away any low-flying small aircraft bound for the Parish County Airport.

Beach Row was deserted. Sheets of sand blew across it with every gust of wind, some of those gusts strong enough to shake my car. Dunelets were already starting to build up on the macadam. In my headlights, they looked like skeleton fingers.

When I passed the shopping center, I saw a single figure standing in the middle of the parking lot next to one of the Joyland maintenance trucks. He raised a hand to me as I went past and gave a single solemn wave.

The big Victorian on the beach side came next. There was a light on in the kitchen. I thought it was the fluorescent over the sink. I remembered Annie coming into the room with her sweater in her hand. Her tanned stomach. The bra almost the same color as her jeans. Would you like to go upstairs with me, Devin?

Lights bloomed in my rearview mirror and pulled up close. He was using his brights and I couldn’t see the vehicle behind them, but I didn’t have to. I knew it was the maintenance truck, just as I knew he had been lying when he said he wasn’t going to kill me. The note I’d left for Mrs. Shoplaw would still be there in the morning. She would read it, and the name I had written there. The question was how long it would take her to believe it. He was such a charmer, him with his rhyming patter, winning smile, and cocked derby lid. Why, all the women loved Lane Hardy.

The gates were open, as promised. I drove through them and tried to park in front of the now-shuttered Shootin’ Gallery. He gave his horn a brief blip and flashed his lights: Drive on. When I got to the Spin, he flashed his lights again. I turned off my Ford, very aware that I might never start it again. The hoister’s red neon cast a blood-colored light over the dashboard, the seats, my own skin.

The truck’s headlights went out. I heard the door open and shut. And I heard the wind blowing through the Spin’s struts—tonight that sound was a harpy’s screech. There was a steady, almost syncopated rattling sound, as well. The wheel was shaking on its tree-thick axle.

The Gray girl’s killer—and DeeDee Mowbray’s, and Claudine Sharp’s, and Darlene Stamnacher’s—walked to my car and tapped on the window with the barrel of a pistol. With his other hand he made a beckoning gesture. I opened the door and got out.

“You said you weren’t going to kill me.” It sounded as weak as my legs felt.

Lane smiled his charming smile. “Well… we’ll see which way the flow’s gonna go. Won’t we?”

Tonight his derby was cocked to the left and pulled down tight so it wouldn’t fly off. His hair, let loose from its workday ponytail, blew around his neck. The wind gusted and the Spin gave an unhappy screech. The red glow of the neon flickered across his face as it shook.

“Don’t worry about the hoister,” he said. “If it was solid it might blow over, but the wind shoots right through the struts. You’ve got other things to worry about. Tell me about the funhouse car. That’s what I really want to know. How’d you do that? Was it some kind of remote gadget? I’m very interested in those things. They’re the wave of the future, that’s what I think.”

“There was no gadget.”

He didn’t seem to hear me. “Also what was the point? Was it supposed to flush me out? If it was, you didn’t need to bother. I was already flushed.”

“She did it,” I said. I didn’t know if that was strictly true, but I had no intention of bringing Mike into this conversation. “Linda Gray. Didn’t you see her?”

The smile died. “Is that the best you can manage? The old ghost-in-the-funhouse story? You’ll have to do a little better than that.”

So he hadn’t seen her any more than I had. But I think he knew there was something. I’ll never know for sure, but I think that was why he offered to go after Milo. He hadn’t wanted us anywhere near Horror House.

“Oh, she was there. I saw her headband. Remember me looking in? It was under the seat.”

He lashed out so suddenly I didn’t even have a chance to get my hand up. The barrel of the gun slammed across my forehead, opening a gash. I saw stars. Then blood poured into my eyes and I saw only that. I staggered back against the rail beside the ramp leading to the Spin and gripped it to keep from falling down. I swiped at my face with the sleeve of my slicker.

“I don’t know why you’d bother trying to spook me with a campfire story at this late date,” he said, “and I don’t appreciate it. You know about the headband because there was a picture of it in the folder your nosy college-cunt girlfriend brought you.” He smiled. There was nothing charming about this one; it was all teeth. “Don’t kid a kidder, kiddo.”

“But… you didn’t see the folder.” The answer to that one was a simple deduction even with my head ringing. “Fred saw it. And told you. Didn’t he?”

“Yep. On Monday. We were having lunch together in his office. He said that you and the college cunt were playing Hardy Boys, although he didn’t put it quite that way. He thought it was sort of cute. I didn’t, because I’d seen you stripping off Eddie Parks’s gloves after he had his heart attack. That’s when I knew you were playing Hardy Boys. That folder… Fred said the cunt had pages of notes. I knew it was only a matter of time before she put me with Wellman’s and Southern Star.”

I had an alarming picture of Lane Hardy riding the train to Annandale with a straight razor in his pocket. “Erin doesn’t know anything.”

“Oh, relax. Do you think I’m going after her? Apply some strain and use your brain. And take a little stroll while you do it. Up the ramp, champ. You and I are going for a ride. Up there where the air is rare.”

I started to ask him if he was crazy, but that would have been sort of a stupid question at this late date, wouldn’t it?

“What have you got to grin about, Jonesy?”

“Nothing,” I said. “You don’t really want to go up with the wind blowing like this, do you?” But the Spin’s engine was running. I hadn’t been aware of it over the wind, the surf, and the eerie scream of the ride itself, but now that I was listening, I heard it: a steady rumble. Almost a purr. Something fairly obvious came to me: he was probably planning to turn the gun on himself after he finished with me. Maybe you think that should have occurred to me sooner, because crazy people have a way of doing that—you read about it in the paper all the time. Maybe you’d be right. But I was under a lot of stress.

“Old Carolina’s safe as houses,” he said. “I’d go up in her if the wind was blowing sixty instead of just thirty. It blew at least that hard when Carla skimmed past the coast two years ago, and she was just fine.”

“How are you going to put it in gear if we’re both in the car?”

“Get in and see. Or…” He lifted the gun. “Or I can shoot you right here. I’m good with it either way.”

I walked up the ramp, opened the door of the car currently sitting at the loading station, and started to climb in.

“No, no, no,” he said. “You want to be on the outside. Better view. Stand aside, Clyde. And put your hands in your pockets.”

Lane sidled past me, the gun leveled. More blood was trickling into my eyes and down my cheeks, but I didn’t dare take a hand from my slicker pocket to wipe it off. I could see how white his finger was on the trigger of the pistol. He sat down on the inside of the car.

“Now you.”

I got in. I didn’t see any choice.

“And close the door, that’s what it’s there for.”

“You sound like Dr. Seuss,” I said.

He grinned. “Flattery will get you nowhere. Close the door or I’ll put a bullet in your knee. You think anyone will hear it over this wind? I don’t.”

I closed the door. When I looked at him again, he had the pistol in one hand and a square metal gadget in the other. It had a stubby antenna. “Told you, I love these gadgets. This one’s your basic garage door-opener with a couple of small modifications. Sends a radio signal. Showed it to Mr. Easterbrook this spring, told him it was the perfect thing for wheel maintenance when there wasn’t a greenie or a gazoonie around to run the ground-side controls. He said I couldn’t use it because it hasn’t been safety-approved by the state commission. Cautious old sonofabitch. I was going to patent it. Too late now, I guess. Take it.”

I took it. It was a garage door opener. A Genie. My dad had one almost exactly like it.

“See the button with the up arrow?”

“Yes.”

“Push it.”

I put my thumb on the button, but didn’t push it. The wind was strong down here; how much stronger up there, where the air was rare? We’re flying! Mike had shouted.

“Push it or take one in the knee, Jonesy.”

I pushed the button. The Spin’s motor geared down at once, and our car began to rise.

“Now throw it over the side.”

“What?”

“Throw it over the side or you get one in the knee and you’ll never two-step again. I’ll give you a three-count. One… t—”

I threw his controller over the side. The wheel rose and rose into the windy night. To my right I could see the waves pounding in, their crests marked by foam so white it looked phosphorescent. On the left, the land was dark and sleeping. Not a single set of headlights moved on Beach Row. The wind gusted. My blood-sticky hair flew back from my forehead in clumps. The car rocked. Lane threw himself forward, then back, making the car rock more… but the gun, now pointed at my side, never wavered. Red neon skimmed lines along the barrel.

He shouted, “Not so much like a grandma ride tonight, is it, Jonesy?”

It sure wasn’t. Tonight the staid old Carolina Spin was terrifying. As we reached the top, a savage gust shook the wheel so hard I heard our car rattling on the steel supports that held it. Lane’s derby flew off into the night.

“Shit! Well, there’s always another one.”

Lane, how are we going to get off? The question rose behind my lips, but I didn’t ask. I was too afraid he’d tell me we weren’t, that if the storm didn’t blow the Spin over and if the power didn’t go out, we’d still be going around and around when Fred got here in the morning. Two dead men on Joyland’s chump-hoister. Which made my next move rather obvious.

Lane was smiling. “You want to try for the gun, don’t you? I can see it in your eyes. Well, it’s like Dirty Harry said in that movie—you have to ask yourself if you feel lucky.”

We were going down now, the car still rocking but not quite so much. I decided I didn’t feel lucky at all.

“How many have you killed, Lane?”

“None of your fucking business. And since I have the gun, I think I should get to ask the questions. How long have you known? Quite a while, right? At least since the college cunt showed you the pictures. You just held off so the cripple could get his day at the park. Your mistake, Jonesy. A rube’s mistake.”

“I only figured it out tonight,” I said.

“Liar, liar, pants on fire.”

We swept past the ramp and started up again. I thought, He’s probably going to shoot me when the car’s at the top. Then he’ll either shoot himself or push me out, slide over, and jump onto the ramp when the car comes back down. Take his chances on not breaking a leg or a collarbone. I was betting on the murder-suicide scenario, but not until his curiosity was satisfied.

I said, “Call me stupid if you want, but don’t call me a liar. I kept looking at the pictures, and I kept seeing something in them, something familiar, but until tonight I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. It was the hat. You were wearing a fishtop baseball cap in the photos, not a derby, but it was tilted one way when you and the Gray girl were at the Whirly Cups, and the other when you were at the Shootin’ Gallery. I looked at the rest, the ones where the two of you are only in the background, and saw the same thing. Back and forth, back and forth. You do it all the time. You don’t even think about it.”

“That’s all? A fucking tilted cap?”

“No.”

We were reaching the top for the second time, but I thought I was good for at least one more turn. He wanted to hear this. Then the rain started, a hard squall that turned on like a shower spigot. At least it’ll wash the blood off my face, I thought. When I looked at him, I saw that wasn’t all it was washing off.

“One day I saw you with your hat off and I thought your hair was showing the first strands of white.” I was almost yelling to be heard over the wind and the rush of the rain. It was coming sideways, hitting us in the face. “Yesterday I saw you wiping the back of your neck. I thought it was dirt. Then tonight, after I got the thing about the cap, I started thinking about the fake bird tattoo. Erin saw how the sweat made it run. I guess the cops missed that.”

I could see my car and the maintenance truck, growing larger as the Spin neared the bottom of its circle for the second time. Beyond them, something large—a wind-loosened swatch of canvas, maybe—was blowing up Joyland Avenue.

“It wasn’t dirt you were wiping off, it was dye. It was running, just like the tattoo ran. Like it’s running now. It’s all over your neck. It wasn’t strands of white hair I saw, it was strands of blond.”

He wiped his neck and looked at the black smear on his palm. I almost went for him then, but he raised the gun and all at once I was looking into a black eye. It was small but terrible.

“I used to be blond,” he said, “but under the black I’m mostly gray now. I’ve lived a stressful life, Jonesy.” He smiled ruefully, as though this were some sad joke we were both in on.

We were going up again, and I had just a moment to think that the thing I’d seen blowing up the midway—what I’d taken for a big square of loose canvas—could have been a car with its headlights out. It was crazy to hope, but I hoped, anyway.

The rain slashed at us. My slicker rippled. Lane’s hair flew like a ragged flag. I hoped I could keep him from pulling the trigger for at least one more spin. Maybe two? Possible but not probable.

“Once I let myself think of you as Linda Gray’s killer—and it wasn’t easy, Lane, not after the way you took me in and showed me the ropes—I could see past the hat and sunglasses and face-hair. I could see you. You weren’t working here—”

“I was running a forklift in a warehouse in Florence.” He wrinkled his nose. “Rube work. I hated it.”

“You were working in Florence, you met Linda Gray in Florence, but you knew all about Joyland over here in NC, didn’t you? I don’t know if you’re carny-from-carny, but you’ve never been able to stay away from the shows. And when you suggested a little road trip, she went along with it.”

“I was her secret boyfriend. I told her I had to be. Because I was older.” He smiled, “She bought it. They all do. You’d be surprised how much the young ones will buy.”

You sick fuck, I thought. You sick, sick fuck.

“You brought her to Heaven’s Bay, you stayed at a motel, and then you killed her here at Joyland even though you must have known about the Hollywood Girls running around with their cameras. Bold as brass. That was part of the kick, wasn’t it? Sure it was. You did it on a ride full of conies—”

“Rubes,” he said. The hardest gust yet shook the Spin, but he seemed not to feel it. Of course, he was on the inside of the wheel where things were a little calmer. “Call ’em what they are. They’re just rubes, all of them. They see nothing. It’s like their eyes are connected to their assholes instead of their brains. Everything goes right through.”

“You get off on the risk, don’t you? That’s why you came back and hired on.”

“Not even a month later.” His smile widened. “All this time I’ve been right under their noses. And you know what? I’ve been… you know, good… ever since that night in the funhouse. All the bad stuff was behind me. I could have gone on being good. I like it here. I was building a life. I had my gadget, and I was going to patent it.”

“Oh, I think sooner or later you would have done it again.” We were back at the top. The wind and rain pelted us. I was shivering. My clothes were soaked; Lane’s cheeks were dark with hair-dye. It ran down his skin in tendrils. His mind is like that, I thought. On the inside, where he never smiles.

“No. I was cured. I have to do you, Jonesy, but only because you stuck your nose in where it doesn’t belong. It’s too bad, because I liked you. I really did.”

I thought he was telling the truth, which made what was happening even more horrible.

We were going back down. The world below was windy and rain-soaked. There had been no car with its headlights out, only a blowing piece of canvas that for a moment looked like that to my yearning mind. The cavalry wasn’t coming. Thinking it was would only get me killed. I had to do this myself, and the only chance I had was to make him mad. Really mad.

“You get off on risk, but you don’t get off on rape, do you? If you did, you would have taken them to some isolated place. I think what your secret girlfriends have between their legs scares you limp. What do you do later? Lie in bed and jack off thinking about how brave you are, killing defenseless girls?”

“Shut up.”

“You can fascinate them, but you can’t fuck them.” The wind shouted; the car rocked. I was going to die and at that moment I didn’t give shit one. I didn’t know how angry I was making him, but I was angry enough for both of us. “What happened to make you this way? Did your mother put a clothespin on your peepee when you went weewee in the corner? Did Uncle Stan make you give him a blowjob? Or was it—”

“Shut up!” He rose into a crouch, gripping the safety bar in one hand and pointing the gun at me with the other. A stroke of lightning lit him up: staring eyes, lank hair, working mouth. And the gun. “Shut your dirty mou—”

“DEVIN, DUCK!”

I didn’t think about it, I just did it. There was a whipcrack report, an almost liquid sound in the blowing night. The bullet must have gone right past me, but I didn’t hear it or feel it, the way characters do in books. The car we were in swept past the loading point and I saw Annie Ross standing on the ramp with a rifle in her hands. The van was behind her. Her hair was blowing around her bone-white face.

We started up again. I looked at Lane. He was frozen in his crouch, his mouth ajar. Black dye ran down his cheeks. His eyes were rolled up so only the bottom half of the irises showed. Most of his nose was gone. One nostril hung down by his upper lip, but the rest of it was just a red ruin surrounding a black hole the size of a dime.

He sat down on the seat, hard. Several of his front teeth rattled out of his mouth when he did. I plucked the gun from his hand and tossed it over the side. What I was feeling right then was… nothing. Except in some very deep part of me, where I had begun to realize this might not be my night to die, after all.

“Oh,” he said. Then he said “Ah.” Then he slumped forward, chin on chest. He looked like a man considering his options, and very carefully.

There was more lightning as the car reached the top. It illuminated my seatmate in a stutter of blue fire. The wind blew and the Spin moaned in protest. We were coming down again.

From below, almost lost in the storm: “Dev, how do I stop it?”

I first thought of telling her to look for the remote control gadget, but in the storm she could hunt for half an hour and still not find it. Even if she did, it might be broken or lying shorted out in a puddle. Besides, there was a better way.

“Go to the motor!” I shouted. “Look for the red button! RED BUTTON, ANNIE! It’s the emergency stop!”

I swept past her, registering the same jeans and sweater she’d worn earlier, both now soaked and plastered to her. No jacket, no hat. She had come in a hurry, and I knew who had sent her. How much simpler it would have been if Mike had focused on Lane at the start. But Rozzie never had, even though she’d known him for years, and I was to find out later that Mike never focused on Lane Hardy at all.

I was going back up again. Beside me, Lane’s soaking hair was dripping black rain into his lap. “Wait until I come back down!”

“What?”

I didn’t bother trying again; the wind would have drowned it out. I could only hope she wouldn’t hammer on the red button while I was at the top of the ride. As the car rose into the worst of the storm the lightning flashed again, and this time there was an accompanying crack of thunder. As if it had roused him—perhaps it had—Lane lifted his head and looked at me. Tried to look at me; his eyes had come back level in their sockets, but were now pointing in opposite directions. That terrible image has never left my mind, and still comes to me at the oddest times: going through turnpike tollbooths, drinking a cup of coffee in the morning with the CNN anchors baying bad news, getting up to piss at three AM, which some poet or other has rightly dubbed the Hour of the Wolf.

He opened his mouth and blood poured out. He made a grinding insectile sound, like a cicada burrowing into a tree. A spasm shook him. His feet tap-danced briefly on the steel floor of the car. They stilled, and his head dropped forward again.

Be dead, I thought. Please be dead this time.

As the Spin started down again, a bolt of lightning struck the Thunderball; I saw the tracks light up briefly. I thought, That could have been me. The hardest gust of wind yet struck the car. I held on for dear life. Lane flopped like a big doll.

I looked down at Annie—her white face staring up, her eyes squinted against the rain. She was inside the rail, standing next to the motor. So far, so good. I put my hands around my mouth. “The red button!”

“I see it!”

“Wait until I tell you!”

The ground was coming up. I grabbed the bar. When the late (at least I hoped he was) Lane Hardy was at the control stick, the Spin always came to an easy halt, the cars up top swaying gently. I had no idea what an emergency stop would be like, but I was going to find out.

“Now, Annie! Push it now!”

It was a good thing I was holding on. My car stopped dead about ten feet from the unloading point and still five feet above the ground. The car tilted. Lane was thrown forward, his head and torso flopping over the bar. Without thinking, I grabbed his shirt and pulled him back. One of his hands flopped into my lap and I flung it away with a grunt of disgust.

The bar wouldn’t unlock, so I had to wriggle out from beneath it.

“Be careful, Dev!” Annie was standing beside the car, holding up her hands, as if to catch me. She had propped the rifle she’d used to end Hardy’s life against the motor housing.

“Step back,” I said, and threw one leg over the side of the car. More lightning flashed. The wind howled and the Spin howled back. I got hold of a strut and swung out. My hands slipped on the wet metal and I dropped. I went to my knees. A moment later she was pulling me to my feet.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

I wasn’t, though. The world was swimming, and I was on the edge of a faint. I lowered my head, gripped my legs just above the knees, and began taking deep breaths. For a moment it could have gone either way, but then things began to solidify. I stood up again, careful not to move too fast.

It was hard to tell with the rain bucketing down, but I was pretty sure she was crying. “I had to do it. He was going to kill you. Wasn’t he? Please, Dev, say he was going to kill you. Mike said he was, and—”

“You can quit worrying about that, believe me. And I wouldn’t have been his first. He’s killed four women.” I thought of Erin’s speculation about the years when there had been no bodies—none discovered, at least. “Maybe more. Probably more. We have to call the police. There’s a phone in—”

I started to point toward Mysterio’s Mirror Mansion, but she grabbed my arm. “No. You can’t. Not yet.”

“Annie—”

She thrust her face close to mine, almost kissing distance, but kissing was the last thing on her mind. “How did I get here? Am I supposed to tell the police that a ghost showed up in my son’s room in the middle of the night and told him you’d die on the Ferris wheel if I didn’t come? Mike can’t be a part of this, and if you tell me I’m being an overprotective mom. I’ll… I’ll kill you myself.”

“No,” I said. “I won’t tell you that.”

“So how did I get here?”

At first I didn’t know. You have to remember that I was still scared myself. Only scared doesn’t cover it. Scared isn’t even in the ballpark. I was in shock. Instead of Mysterio’s, I led her to her van and helped her sit behind the wheel. Then I went around and got in on the passenger side. By then I had an idea. It had the virtue of simplicity, and I thought it would fly. I shut the door and took my wallet out of my hip pocket. I almost dropped it on the floor when I opened it; I was shaking like crazy. Inside there were plenty of things to write on, but I had nothing to write with.

“Please tell me you have a pen or a pencil, Annie.”

“Maybe in the glove compartment. You’ll have to call the police, Dev. I have to get back to Mike. If they arrest me for leaving the scene or something… or for murder.

“Nobody’s going to arrest you, Annie. You saved my life.” I was pawing through the glove compartment as I talked. There was an owner’s manual, piles of gasoline credit card receipts, Rolaids, a bag of M&Ms, even a Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet asking if I knew where I was going to spend the afterlife, but no pen or pencil.

“You can’t wait… in a situation like that… that’s what I was always told…” Her words came in chunks because her teeth were chattering. “Just aim… and squeeze before you can… you know… second-guess yourself… it was supposed to go between his eyes, but… the wind… I guess the wind…”

She shot out a hand and gripped my shoulder hard enough to hurt. Her eyes were huge.

“Did I hit you, too, Dev? There’s a gash in your forehead and blood on your shirt!”

“You didn’t hit me. He pistol-whipped me a little, that’s all. Annie, there’s nothing in here to write w—”

But there was: a ballpoint at the very back of the glove compartment. Printed on the barrel, faded but still legible, was LET’S GO KROGERING! I won’t say that pen saved Annie and Mike Ross serious police trouble, but I know it saved them a lot of questions about what had brought Annie to Joyland on such a dark and stormy night.

I passed her the pen and a business card from my wallet, blank side up. Earlier, sitting in my car and terribly afraid that my failure to buy a new battery was going to get Annie and Mike killed, I’d thought I could go back into the house and call her… only I didn’t have her number. Now I told her to write it down. “And below the number, write Call if plans change.”

While she did, I started the van’s engine and turned the heater on full blast. She returned the card. I tucked it into my wallet, shoved the wallet back into my pocket, and tossed the pen into the glove compartment. I took her in my arms and kissed her cold cheek. Her trembling didn’t stop, but it eased.

You saved my life,” I said. “Now let’s make sure nothing happens to you or Mike because you did. Listen very carefully.”

She listened.

Six days later, Indian summer came back to Heaven’s Bay for a brief final fling. It was perfect weather for a noon meal at the end of the Ross boardwalk, only we couldn’t go there. Newsmen and photographers had it staked out. They could do that because, unlike the two acres surrounding the big green Victorian, the beach was public property. The story of how Annie had taken out Lane Hardy (known then and forever after as The Carny Killer) with one shot had gone nationwide.

Not that the stories were bad. Quite the opposite. The Wilmington paper had led with DAUGHTER OF EVANGELIST BUDDY ROSS BAGS CARNY KILLER. The New York Post was more succinct: HERO MOM! It helped that there were file photos from Annie’s salad days where she looked not just gorgeous but smoking hot. Inside View, the most popular of the supermarket tabloids back then, put out an extra edition. They had unearthed a photo of Annie at seventeen, taken after a shooting competition at Camp Perry. Clad in tight jeans, an NRA tee-shirt, and cowboy boots, she was standing with an antique Purdey shotgun broken over one arm and holding up a blue ribbon in her free hand. Next to the smiling girl was a mug-shot of Lane Hardy at twenty-one, after an arrest in San Diego—under his real name, which was Leonard Hopgood—for indecent exposure. The two pix made a terrific contrast. The headline: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.

Being a minor hero myself, I got some mention in the North Carolina papers, but in the tabloids I was hardly mentioned. Not sexy enough, I guess.

Mike thought having a HERO MOM was cool. Annie loathed the whole circus and couldn’t wait for the press to move on to the next big thing. She’d gotten all the newspaper coverage she wanted in the days when she had been the holy man’s wild child, famous for dancing on the bars in various Greenwich Village dives. So she gave no interviews, and we had our farewell picnic in the kitchen. There were actually five of us, because Milo was under the table, hoping for scraps, and Jesus—on the face of Mike’s kite—was propped in the extra chair.

Their bags were in the hall. When the meal was done, I would drive them to Wilmington International. A private jet, laid on by Buddy Ross Ministries, Inc., would fly them back to Chicago and out of my life. The Heaven’s Bay police department (not to mention the North Carolina State Police and maybe even the FBI) would undoubtedly have more questions for her, and she’d probably be back at some point to testify before a grand jury, but she’d be fine. She was the HERO MOM, and thanks to that promotional pen from Kroger’s in the back of the van’s glove compartment, there would never be a photo of Mike in the Post below a headline reading PSYCHIC SAVIOR!

Our story was simple, and Mike played no part in it. I had gotten interested in the murder of Linda Gray because of the legend that her ghost haunted the Joyland funhouse. I had enlisted the help of my research-minded friend and summer co-worker, Erin Cook. The photographs of Linda Gray and her killer had reminded me of someone, but it wasn’t until after Mike’s day at Joyland that the penny dropped. Before I could call the police, Lane Hardy had called me, threatening to kill Annie and Mike if I didn’t come to Joyland on the double. So much truth, and only one little lie: I had Annie’s phone number so I could call her if plans for Mike’s visit to the park changed. (I produced the card for the lead detective, who barely glanced at it.) I said I called Annie from Mrs. Shoplaw’s before leaving for Joyland, telling her to lock her doors, call the cops, and stay put. She did lock the doors, but didn’t stay put. Nor did she call the police. She was terrified that if Hardy saw blue flashing lights, he’d kill me. So she’d taken one of the guns from the safe and followed Lane with her headlights off, hoping to surprise him. Which she did. Thus, HERO MOM.

“How’s your father taking all this, Dev?” Annie asked.

“Aside from saying he’d come to Chicago and wash your cars for life, if you wanted?” She laughed, but my father had actually said that. “He’s fine. I’m heading back to New Hampshire next month. We’ll have Thanksgiving together. Fred asked me to stay on until then, help him get the park buttoned up, and I agreed. I can still use the money.”

“For school?”

“Yeah. I guess I’ll go back for the spring semester. Dad’s sending me an application.”

“Good. That’s where you need to be, not painting rides and replacing lightbulbs in an amusement park.”

“You’ll really come to see us in Chicago, right?” Mike asked. “Before I get too sick?”

Annie stirred uneasily, but said nothing.

“I have to,” I said, and pointed to the kite. “How else am I going to return that? You said it was just a loan.”

“Maybe you’ll get to meet my grandpa. Other than being crazy about Jesus, he’s pretty cool.” He gave his mother a sideways glance. “I think so, anyway. He’s got this great electric train set in his basement.”

I said, “Your grandfather may not want to see me, Mike. I almost got your mother in a whole peck of trouble.”

“He’ll know you didn’t mean to. It wasn’t your fault that you worked with that guy.” Mike’s face grew troubled. He put down his sandwich, picked up a napkin, and coughed into it. “Mr. Hardy seemed really nice. He took us on the rides.”

A lot of girls thought he was really nice, too, I thought. “You never had a… a vibe about him?”

Mike shook his head and coughed some more. “No. I liked him. And I thought he liked me.”

I thought of Lane on the Carolina Spin, calling Mike a crippled brat.

Annie put a hand on Mike’s wand of a neck and said, “Some people hide their real faces, hon. Sometimes you can tell when they’re wearing masks, but not always. Even people with powerful intuitions can get fooled.”

I had come for lunch, and to take them to the airport, and to say goodbye, but I had another reason, as well. “I want to ask you something, Mike. It’s about the ghost who woke you up and told you I was in trouble at the park. Is that okay? Will it upset you?”

“No, but it’s not like on TV. There wasn’t any white see-through thing floating around and going whooo-ooo. I just woke up… and the ghost was there. Sitting on my bed like a real person.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk about this,” Annie said. “Maybe it’s not upsetting him, but it’s sure as hell upsetting me.”

“I just have one more question, and then I’ll let it go.”

“Fine.” She began to clear the table.

Tuesday we had taken Mike to Joyland. Not long after midnight on Wednesday morning, Annie had shot Lane Hardy on the Carolina Spin, ending his life and saving mine. The next day had been taken up by police interviews and dodging reporters. Then, on Thursday afternoon, Fred Dean had come to see me, and his visit had nothing to do with Lane Hardy’s death.

Except I thought it did.

“Here’s what I want to know, Mike. Was it the girl from the funhouse? Was she the one who came and sat on your bed?”

Mike’s eyes went wide. “Gosh, no! She’s gone. When they go, I don’t think they ever come back. It was a guy.”

In 1991, shortly after his sixty-third birthday, my father suffered a fairly serious heart attack. He spent a week in Portsmouth General Hospital and was then sent home, with stern warnings about watching his diet, losing twenty pounds, and cutting out the evening cigar. He was one of those rare fellows who actually followed the doctor’s orders, and at this writing he’s eighty-five and, except for a bad hip and dimming eyesight, still good to go.

In 1973, things were different. According to my new research assistant (Google Chrome), the average stay back then was two weeks—the first in ICU, the second on the Cardiac Recovery floor. Eddie Parks must have done okay in ICU, because while Mike was touring Joyland on that Tuesday, Eddie was being moved downstairs. That was when he had the second heart attack. He died in the elevator.

“What did he say to you?” I asked Mike.

“That I had to wake up my mom and make her go to the park right away, or a bad man was going to kill you.”

Had this warning come while I was still on the phone with Lane, in Mrs. Shoplaw’s parlor? It couldn’t have come much later, or Annie wouldn’t have made it in time. I asked, but Mike didn’t know. As soon as the ghost went—that was the word Mike used; it didn’t disappear, didn’t walk out the door or use the window, it just went—he had thumbed the intercom beside his bed. When Annie answered his buzz, he’d started screaming.

“That’s enough,” Annie said, in a tone that brooked no refusal. She was standing by the sink with her hands on her hips.

“I don’t mind, Mom.” Cough-cough. “Really.” Cough-cough-cough.

“She’s right,” I said. “It’s enough.”

Did Eddie appear to Mike because I saved the bad-tempered old geezer’s life? It’s hard to know anything about the motivations of those who’ve Gone On (Rozzie’s phrase, the caps always implied by lifted and upturned palms), but I doubt it. His reprieve only lasted a week, after all, and he sure didn’t spend those last few days in the Caribbean, being waited on by topless honeys. But…

I had come to visit him, and except maybe for Fred Dean, I was the only one who did. I even brought him a picture of his ex-wife. Sure, he’d called her a miserable scolding backbiting cunt, and maybe she was, but at least I’d made the effort. In the end, so had he. For whatever reason.

As we drove to the airport, Mike leaned forward from the back seat and said, “You want to know something funny, Dev? He never once called you by name. He just called you the kiddo. I guess he figured I’d know who he meant.”

I guessed so, too.

Eddie fucking Parks.

Those are things that happened once upon a time and long ago, in a magical year when oil sold for eleven dollars a barrel. The year I got my damn heart broke. The year I lost my virginity. The year I saved a nice little girl from choking and a fairly nasty old man from dying of a heart attack (the first one, at least). The year a madman almost killed me on a Ferris wheel. The year I wanted to see a ghost and didn’t… although I guess at least one of them saw me. That was also the year I learned to talk a secret language, and how to dance the Hokey Pokey in a dog costume. The year I discovered that there are worse things than losing the girl.

The year I was twenty-one, and still a greenie.

The world has given me a good life since then, I won’t deny it, but sometimes I hate the world, anyway. Dick Cheney, that apologist for waterboarding and for too long chief preacher in the Holy Church of Whatever It Takes, got a brand-new heart while I was writing this—how about that? He lives on; other people have died. Talented ones like Clarence Clemons. Smart ones like Steve Jobs. Decent ones like my old friend Tom Kennedy. Mostly you get used to it. You pretty much have to. As W. H. Auden pointed out, the Reaper takes the rolling in money, the screamingly funny, and those who are very well hung. But that isn’t where Auden starts his list. He starts with the innocent young.

Which brings us to Mike.

I took a seedy off-campus apartment when I went back to school for the spring semester. One chilly night in late March, as I was cooking a stir-fry for myself and this girl I was just about crazy for, the phone rang. I answered it in my usual jokey way: “Wormwood Arms, Devin Jones, proprietor.”

“Dev? It’s Annie Ross.”

“Annie! Wow! Hold on a second, just let me turn down the radio.”

Jennifer—the girl I was just about crazy for—gave me an inquiring look. I shot her a wink and a smile and picked up the phone. “I’ll be there two days after spring break starts, and you can tell him that’s a promise. I’m going to buy my ticket next wee—”

“Dev. Stop. Stop.”

I picked up on the dull sorrow in her voice and all my happiness at hearing from her collapsed into dread. I put my forehead against the wall and closed my eyes. What I really wanted to close was the ear with the phone pressed to it.

“Mike died last evening, Dev. He…” Her voice wavered, then steadied. “He spiked a fever two days ago, and the doctor said we ought to get him into the hospital. Just to be safe, he said. He seemed to be getting better yesterday. Coughing less. Sitting up and watching TV. Talking about some big basketball tournament. Then… last night…” She stopped. I could hear the rasp of her breath as she tried to get herself under control. I was also trying, but the tears had started. They were warm, almost hot.

“It was very sudden,” she said. Then, so softly I could barely hear: “My heart is breaking.”

There was a hand on my shoulder. Jennifer’s. I covered it with my own. I wondered who was in Chicago to put a hand on Annie’s shoulder.

“Is your father there?”

“On a crusade. In Phoenix. He’s coming tomorrow.”

“Your brothers?”

“George is here now. Phil’s supposed to arrive on the last flight from Miami. George and I are at the… place. The place where they… I can’t watch it happen. Even though it’s what he wanted.” She was crying hard now. I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Annie, what can I do? Anything. Anything at all.”

She told me.

Let’s end on a sunny day in April of 1974. Let’s end on that short stretch of North Carolina beach that lies between the town of Heaven’s Bay and Joyland, an amusement park that would close its doors two years later; the big parks finally drove it to bankruptcy in spite of all Fred Dean’s and Brenda Rafferty’s efforts to save it. Let’s end with a pretty woman in faded jeans and a young man in a University of New Hampshire sweatshirt. The young man is holding something in one hand. Lying at the end of the boardwalk with his snout on one paw is a Jack Russell terrier who seems to have lost all his former bounce. On the picnic table, where the woman once served fruit smoothies, there’s a ceramic urn. It looks sort of like a vase missing its bouquet. We’re not quite ending where we began, but close enough.

Close enough.

“I’m on the outs with my father again,” Annie said, “and this time there’s no grandson to hold us together. When he got back from his damn crusade and found out I’d had Mike cremated, he was furious.” She smiled wanly. “If he hadn’t stayed for that last goddam revival, he might have talked me out of it. Probably would have.”

“But it’s what Mike wanted.”

“Strange request for a kid, isn’t it? But yes, he was very clear. And we both know why.”

Yes. We did. The last good time always comes, and when you see the darkness creeping toward you, you hold on to what was bright and good. You hold on for dear life.

“Did you even ask your dad… ?”

“To come? Actually I did. It’s what Mike would have wanted. Daddy refused to participate in what he called ‘a pagan ceremony.’ And I’m glad.” She took my hand. “This is for us, Dev. Because we were here when he was happy.”

I raised her hand to my lips, kissed it, gave it a brief squeeze, then let it go. “He saved my life as much as you did, you know. If he hadn’t woken you up… if he’d even hesitated—”

“I know.”

“Eddie couldn’t have done anything for me without Mike. I don’t see ghosts, or hear them. Mike was the medium.”

“This is hard,” she said. “Just… so hard to let him go. Even the little bit that’s left.”

“Are you sure you want to go through with it?”

“Yes. While I still can.”

She took the urn from the picnic table. Milo raised his head to look at it, then lowered it back to his paw. I don’t know if he understood Mike’s remains were inside, but he knew Mike was gone, all right; that he knew damned well.

I held out the Jesus kite with the back to her. There, as per Mike’s instructions, I had taped a small pocket, big enough to hold maybe half a cup of fine gray ash. I held it open while Annie tipped the urn. When the pocket was full, she planted the urn in the sand between her feet and held out her hands. I gave her the reel of twine and turned toward Joyland, where the Carolina Spin dominated the horizon.

I’m flying, he’d said that day, lifting his arms over his head. No braces to hold him down then, and none now. I believe that Mike was a lot wiser than his Christ-minded grandfather. Wiser than all of us, maybe. Was there ever a crippled kid who didn’t want to fly, just once?

I looked at Annie. She nodded that she was ready. I lifted the kite and let it go. It rose at once on a brisk, chilly breeze off the ocean. We followed its ascent with our eyes.

“You,” she said, and held out her hands. “This part is for you, Dev. He said so.”

I took the twine, feeling the pull as the kite, now alive, rose above us, nodding back and forth against the blue. Annie picked up the urn and carried it down the sandy slope. I guess she dumped it there at the edge of the ocean, but I was watching the kite, and once I saw the thin gray streamer of ash running away from it, carried into the sky on the breeze, I let the string go free. I watched the untethered kite go up, and up, and up. Mike would have wanted to see how high it would go before it disappeared, and I did, too.

I wanted to see that, too.