乐土 英文名著｜第2章

  When I walked out beneath the big ar-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 cat-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 Heaven’s 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 bea-if you want to save your gas money for something more important, like stepping out on your day off. That bea-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 bea-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 Rozola 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 cat-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 pin-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, whi-those on the third floor do not. There’s an outside staircase, too, whi-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, whi-was good, and the window looked out on the ocean, whi-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 ri-folks had a better one from their summer places along Bea-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 mu-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 sandwi-(“I have to wat-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, whi-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 lun-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 stoma-and so on…”

“Yeah.” My sandwi-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, whi-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 cat-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?”