Rolling Thunder

4

A team of paramedics climbs up the telescoping ladder off the back of a fire truck.

They administer some drugs to see if they can get Mrs. O’Malley’s heart to quiver a little, stimulate some kind of shockable rhythm.

It doesn’t work.

One of the guys takes over for Ceepak. The other one radios the hospital.

The doctor at the other end calls it.

Mrs. O’Malley is officially dead.

The paramedics climb back down the steep aluminum ladder to the fire engine below.

We don’t want the civilians trying to do that, so Ceepak and I will stay up here with the stranded roller coaster train until it starts rolling again.

Why’d they throw the emergency brakes?

This is what I’m thinking as Mr. O’Malley, with Ceepak’s assistance, slowly climbs back into the first roller coaster car so he can cradle his dead wife’s head in his lap.

They should’ve let the damn train keep going till it reached the end of the line. It would’ve saved us five minutes.

It could’ve saved Mrs. O’Malley’s life.

“Mommy’s dead?” This from Mary O’Malley, squirming in the first row of the second car. She’s the oldest of the five O’Malley children, maybe thirty-five, but she sounds like she’s six.

I nod because I’m closer to her than Ceepak. “Yeah.”

Believe it or not, Mary giggles.

“What are you gonna do now, Momma’s Boy?” she leans forward to tease Skip in the car in front of hers.

Skip glares over his shoulder. Hard. I see tears in his eyes.

“She didn’t want to ride this stupid ride! Kevin made her!”

“Shut up, Skippy,” says big brother.

“She was afraid of roller coasters.”

“I said shut up.”

Skippy sniffles. Poor guy. He has a hard time hiding his emotions. Doesn’t make you prime police cadet material, something I know Skippy still wanted to do, even though his summer as an auxiliary cop didn’t end with a job offer. Friends tell me he signed up for one of the New Jersey police academies, paid his own tuition. I guess that didn’t pan out, either. He never graduated. Still works at his dad’s miniature golf course.

“Momma’s Boy, Momma’s Boy!”

“Okay, you guys,” I say as I work my way up the walkboard. I need to be closer to Mary, who’s rocking back and forth in her seat. A side effect of her meds, I’m guessing. “We should probably lower those safety bars.”

“Good idea,” says Mayor Hugh Sinclair, who’s seated beside Cliff Skeete in the second row of car number two. They lower their safety bar. So does just about everybody else. I hear the crickety-clink-clicks all around me.

Except in Mary’s row.

“What can I tell ya, Danny Boy?” says her snotty brother Sean seated beside her. “Me and Mare be lunchin’, livin’ on the edge.” From six feet away, I can smell his breath. It reeks of booze. And it’s ten o’clock in the morning.

“Lower your damn safety bar, Sean!” This from Kevin O’Malley. He’s the oldest boy. Sean’s the youngest.

“Yo, bizzle. Chill.”

“Lower it!”

Meanwhile, up front, Mr. O’Malley is still sobbing and stroking his dead wife’s hair.

“Officer?” Uh-oh. The mayor. Talking to me.

“Yes, sir?” I say.

“Is it possible for us to ride this thing down to the finish line? Now?”

“Hang tight,” I say. “We’re working on getting everybody down safely.”

“For rizzle?” says Sean, who, I’m remembering, is a major-league butt wipe. “From over here it looks like you popos be doing shiznit.” He pulls out his cell phone. Starts thumb-texting someone.

I turn to face Ceepak who has climbed off the track and is back up on the narrow-gauge walkboard.

“What’s our play?” I ask.

And that’s when I hear Mary stumble up and out of the roller coaster.

“Whoa!” says her drunken brother as their car rocks like a canoe.

“I’m a little birdy,” says Mary, flapping her arms.

She’s teetering on the walkboard. Three feet in front of me. Fifty feet above the pier below.

“Danny?” This from Ceepak. Behind me.

“Give me your hand, Mary.”

“I’m a little birdy.” More arm flaps.

“Mary?” Mr. O’Malley shouts. “Sit down! Now!”

“Sit,” echoes Kevin.

She doesn’t. She skips backward. Doesn’t hold on to the handrail. She’s too busy fluttering her arms up and down.

“Okay, Mary,” I say with a smile. “Time to fly back to the nest.”

We’re about four cars up the coaster now. Everybody who isn’t staring at crazy Mary is staring at me, the crazy cop about to plummet with her off a rickety track propped up by knotty pine chopsticks.

We clear the train completely. Keep climbing up the steep incline.

I glance over my shoulder.

Ceepak is maybe twenty yards away, now. He needs to stay with the others. Stop anybody else from going for a stroll. I glance down at the fire truck. Fortunately, they’re not sending up the ladder again because it would probably just freak Mary out.

I’m on my own.

But maybe the fire guys have one of those trampoline-type nets from the circus to catch us when we fall.

“Careful!” I say because Mary is about to bang her head on a crossbeam because she’d have to turn around to see it.

She stops. Glares at me. I can see white flecks of dried spittle in the corners of her crooked smile. Her glasses are so thick they’re magnifying lenses that turn her brown eyes into giant hamburger patties.

“I can fly!” She looks over the edge. We’re way high up. Down below, there’s nothing but a crazy crisscross of wood.

Mary grabs one of the chaser-lightbulbs that line the railing. Squeezes it. Crushes the glass globe like it’s an eggshell.

She giggles when it shatters. I see blood in her palm.

She reaches for the next lightbulb down the line.

“Hey,” I say, “remember Ken Erb?”

Mary tilts her head sideways like a sparrow contemplating sunflower seeds. “Ken Erb?”

“He always had those bird kites. Remember? He’d bring ’em to Oak Beach. You were there. I remember. With your brothers. Watching Ken fly his kites.”

Mary smiles. “Pretty colors.”

“Yeah. And the white dove. Remember the white dove? How about the eagle? Oh, man, the eagle was awesome!”

Mary nods.

“You wanna go see ’em? You wanna go see Ken’s kites?”

Another nod.

“Okay. Here. Take hold of my hand.”

She takes it. Smiles.

“We’re going down to Oak Beach to see Ken’s kites, okay?”

“Okay.”

“But first we have to get back in the roller coaster.”

“Can we get ice cream, too?”

“Sure.” I grip her hand. It’s sticky where it’s bloody. “What’s your favorite ice cream, Mary?”

“Chocolate. With sprinkles.”

Now I’m the one walking backward. “Cool. I like sprinkles, too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus, you’re a fucking pussy.” Her voice is straight out of The Exorcist.

Okay. That caught me off guard. But Mary is still holding my hand, we’re almost back to the roller coaster car, and neither one of us is dead.

She can call me anything she wants.

The controller at his computer console down in the operations trailer was able to manipulate the track brakes in such a way that he can safely roll the coaster down to the unloading shed.

It’s like a funeral train now. Carrying the corpse of Mrs. Jackie O’Malley and twenty-nine mourners. Since there were no empty seats, Ceepak and I decide to walk down the tracks.

Okay, we could’ve climbed down that fifty-foot-long ladder to the fire truck, but I kind of voted against that option. I hate climbing a ladder to clean leaves out of a gutter.

“You handled that quite well, Danny,” Ceepak says over his shoulder as we tiptoe down a hill on the walkboard.

“Thanks. I was scared.”

“You didn’t show it.”

“Well, inside, I was freaking out.”

“Me, too.”

I laugh. “No way.”

“Trust me,” he says. “My adrenaline was pumping when Ms. O’Malley headed up that hill. I was afraid we might have two deaths to deal with this morning.”

Wow. Who knew? The big guy is human. He just knows how to hide it.

By the time we make it down to the bottom, the medics are already zipping up Mrs. O’Malley’s body bag.

A nurse of some sort-she’s dressed in those cartoon cat-and-dog scrubs pediatric nurses wear so kids don’t bawl their eyes out when they see a needle-is bracing Mary O’Malley by the elbow. Must be her full-time caregiver except for when Mary is asked to pose in happy family portraits for PR purposes.

“Well done, men,” says Mayor Sinclair, striding over to me and Ceepak. “You two handled a very difficult situation extraordinarily well. I’ll be sure to put in a good word with Chief Baines.”

He winks. Ceepak nods.

The mayor folds a stick of gum into his mouth. “We’ll close down the ride for a week. Have the grand reopening next weekend when all this is behind us.”

He flips a hand toward the roller coaster cars.

By “all this” I guess he means Mrs. O’Malley dying.

“And,” says the mayor, lowering his voice, “let’s not talk to the media today. Fortunately, most of the folks in line were locals. This thing will blow over pretty quickly. Shouldn’t impact our summer season.”

The mayor smiles. Waiting for Ceepak and me to say, “Sir, yes, sir,” or lick his boots or something.

We just stand there. Kind of grim-faced.

Somebody died this morning.

“Okay. Glad we had this chat.” The mayor surveys the small crowd clustered near the exit ramp. “Cliff? Skeeter? Hey, buddy, got a second?”

He rushes over to the DJ, who twirls around and jabs a microphone in his face.

“Mayor Sinclair. You were up there with me on the roller coaster. How did it feel to be stranded like that?”

The mayor swats at the mic as if it were an annoying little gnat.

“Turn that goddamn thing off!”

Five seconds later, on the big outdoor speakers, I hear an echo of the mayor’s words, only the “goddamn” is gone. Thank goodness for the five-second delay. Something Cliff and I could’ve used back in high school when we ran our DJ business and I dropped an F-bomb at a birthday party when an amplifier unexpectedly shocked me. It was the kid’s sixth. We were supposed to be spinning discs so he and his buddies could dance the Hokey Pokey and play musical chairs. We had not been hired to give adult vocabulary lessons.

“We should head back to the house,” says Ceepak. “Write this up.”

He’s right. There’s no longer any need for crowd control. That long line? It’s gone. The ride is shut down. Those kids wore high heels and duct-taped sandals to their shoes in vain.

We wait for the paramedics to carry Mrs. O’Malley’s body down the exit ramp to the waiting ambulance. It looks like Mr. O’Malley will ride in the back with his wife.

I see Skippy take Mary’s other elbow as he helps the nurse escort her to a parked SUV for the ride home.

“Don’t worry-I’ll handle things here,” I hear Kevin O’Malley tell his dad as the paramedics close up the barn doors on the back of their vehicle.

Ceepak and I march down the exit ramp.

“Hola, babe!”

When we hit the boardwalk, we see Sean O’Malley swilling a beer out of a brown paper bag as a hot Hispanic chick in a skimpy black bikini sashays over to join him. Sean, who has the tightly bloated look of somebody who drinks beer for breakfast, tosses his empty can into a trash barrel and wraps his arm around his hot date so he can goose her booty.

“I got your text!” says the girl.

“Cool.”

The girl swirls her tongue around inside Sean’s ear.

He grins. Maybe belches.

Bikini Babe clutches Sean’s shirt with two greedy hands. “Ding dong, the witch is dead,” she purrs.

Sean’s grin grows wider.

“Totally.”