American Morons Page 6

  “Is this safe, Rebecca?” I asked.

  She’d seemed lost in thought, staring after our would-be muggers, but now she brightened again, so fast I got dizzy. “We’ll let Ash go first. Drive everyone back with the vest.” She flicked his front with her fingers, and I felt a flicker of jealousy, couldn’t believe I was feeling it, and made myself ignore it.

  Of course, Ash did go first. The lights and the pavilion and the curtain floating on the wind drew him. Me, too, but not in the same way. Rebecca waited for me to return her smile, then shrugged and stepped off behind our friend. I followed.

  “They used to sell T-shirts from a stand right there,” she said as we walked, gesturing at the empty space to her left. “Army camouflage. American flag prints. They sold candy popcorn, too. My dad always bought us the Patriotic Bag. Red cherry, blue raspberry, vanilla.”

  “Are there such things as blue raspberries?” Ash asked, but Rebecca ignored him.

  “Lot of patriotic stuff, come to think of it. I wonder why. Bicentennial, maybe?”

  If she was asking me, I had no answer. Periodically, one of the streetlamps buzzed or flickered. No moon. Our footsteps echoed strangely on the wet wood, sounding lighter than they should have. Not one of the fishermen glanced our way, though one twitched as we drew abreast, hunched forward to work furiously at his reel, and yanked a small ray right up into the air in front of him. It hung there streaming, maybe a foot across, its underside impossibly white, silently flapping. Like the ripped-out soul of a bird, I thought, and shuddered while the fisherman drew the ray toward him and laid it, gently across his lap. It went on flapping there until it died.

  We’d all stopped in our tracks at the fisherman’s first movements, and we stayed there quite a while. Eventually, Ash turned to us and nodded his head. “I have missed you, Rebecca,” he said. “You, too, Elliot.” But he meant Rebecca. He’d always meant Rebecca, and had told me so once, the night before graduation, on one of the rare occasions when he got high, just to see. “Count on you, I do,” he’d told me. “Worship her.”

  Tonight, Rebecca didn’t respond, and eventually Ash started toward the pavilion and the lights beneath it. We followed. I walked beside my wife, close enough for elbow contact but not manufacturing any. Something about the flapping ray reminded me of our daughter, squirming and jerking as she scrabbled for a hold in the world, and I wanted to be back at our house. In spite of the calmer, sadder way Rebecca had been this past year—maybe even because of it, though I hated thinking that—I loved our home.

  “What made the merry-go-round so amazing?” I asked.

  “The guy who designed it—Rooff, I think?—he’s like the most famous American carousel builder. Or one of. He did this one in Rhode Island or Vermont, when they broke it up and sold off the horses, they went on eBay for $25,000 apiece. But this one…”

  In the quiet of the next few seconds, I became aware, for the first time since we’d reached the pier, of the sounds. That wind, first of all, sighing out of the blackness to crash against the fortified city and then roll back. The ocean, shushing and muttering. The boards creaking as fishermen shifted or cast and seagulls dropped out of the dark to perch on the ruined railings. And, from straight ahead, under that darkly gleaming steel hat, an incongruous and unidentifiable tinkling, almost musical, barely audible, like an ice cream truck from blocks away.

  “You should have seen their faces, Elliot. You would have loved them.”

  I blinked, still seeing the ray. “Really?”

  “Rooff—the designer—he made them after his business partner died. His best friend, I guess. To keep himself company or something. I met this older man from the Carousel Preservation Assemblage who—”

  “The Carousel what?” I said, and smiled. It really was astonishing, the people Rebecca knew.

  “I met him at that open city planning meeting down here a couple years ago. The one about the development of the rest of downtown? The one I came home so upset from?”

  “That would be every city planning meeting,” I said. My smile faded, and the musical tinkling from the end of the pier got just a little louder.

  “Anyway. These horses, Elliot. They were just…the friendliest horses I’ve ever seen. They all had huge dopey smiles on their faces. Their teeth either pointed out sideways, or else they were perfect and glowing. Their sides were shiny brown or black or pink or blue. Their manes all had painted glass rubies and sapphires sticking out of them, and the saddles had these ridiculously elaborate roses and violets carved into the seats. Hooves flying, like they just couldn’t stand to come down, you know? Like it was too much fun just sailing around in a circle forever. The Preservation guy said Rooff installed every single one of them, and every cog of every machine down here, by himself, at night, by candlelight. As some kind of tribute to his friend or something. Said he was a total raving loon, too. Got involved in all kinds of séances trying to contact his friend after he died. Wound up getting publicly ridiculed by Harry Houdini, who broke up one of his little soirées, apparently. Died brokenhearted and penniless.”

  “Your kind of guy,” I said. And I thought I understood, suddenly and for the first time, just how badly Rebecca’s father had hurt her. Because he’d been her kind of guy, too.

  Unlike me.

  “Yep,” said Rebecca, and her face darkened again. Her mood seemed to change with every breath now, like the pattern of shadows on the pier around us. “Anyway, this is where we came. My dad’d plop us on the merry-go-round, hand the operator a fistful of tickets, and there we’d stay while he went and…well. I’m not going to tell you.”

  Ahead, Ash reached the hanging drapes, which, up close, were stained and ratty and riddled with runs. Without turning around or pausing, he slipped inside them. Instantly, his form seemed to waver, too, just like the lights, as though he’d dived into a pool. I stopped, closed my eyes, felt the salt on my skin and smelled fish and whitewater. And smog, of course. Even here.

  “Why won’t you tell me?”

  “Because I’m pretty sure you’re going to get to see.” She passed through the drapes, and I followed.

  I don’t know what I was expecting under the hat, but whatever it was, I was disappointed. The space under there was cavernous, stretching another thirty yards or so out to sea, but most of it was empty, just wood planking and the surrounding shroud flapping in the wind like the clipped and tattered wings of some giant ocean bird. Albatross, maybe. At the far end of the space, another white curtain, this one heavier and opaque, dropped from rafters to dock, effectively walling off what had to be the last few feet of pier and giving me uneasy thoughts about the Wizard of Oz behind his screen. A mirror-ball dangled overhead, gobbling up the light from the fixtureless hanging bulbs suspended from the rafters and shooting off the red and green and blue sparks I’d seen from down the pier.

  Spaced around the perimeter of the enclosure, and making the tinkling, bleeping noises we’d heard from outside, were six or seven pre-video arcade games, and stationed at the one directly across from us, elbowing each other and bobbing up and down, were two kids, neither older than seven, both with startlingly long white-blond hair pouring down their backs like melting wax. The one on the left wore a dress, the one on the right jeans. Of Rebecca’s grinning horses, the only possible remnant was the room’s lone attendant, who was hovering near the kids but looked up when we entered and shuffled smoothly away from them, head down, as though we’d caught him peeping at a window.

  “Come here,” Ash said, standing over one of the machines to our left. “Look at this.”

  We moved toward him, and as we did, the attendant straightened and began to scuttle over the planking toward us. Despite his surprising grace, he looked at least a hundred years old. His skin was yellow and sagging off his cheeks, his hair white and patchy. His shoulders dipped, seemingly not quite aligned with his waist, and his fingers twitched at the fringes of his blue workman’s apron. It was as though nothing on that body quite fit, or had b
een his originally; he’d just found the shed exoskeleton and slipped inside it like a hermit crab. I couldn’t take my eyes from him until he stopped in the center of the room.

  “Hey,” Rebecca said to Ash. “You’re good.”

  “Sssh,” Ash murmured. “Almost got it. Shoot.” There was a clunk from the machine, and I stepped up next to him.

  “We had one of these at the 7-Eleven by my house,” I said.

  Simple game. You stuck your hands inside the two outsized, all-but-immovable gloves on the control panel. The gloves controlled a sort of crane behind the glass of the machine. You tried to maneuver the crane down to the pile of prizes encased in clear, plastic bubbles below, grab a bubble in the jaws of the crane, then lift and drop it down a circular chute to the left. If you got the bubble in the chute, it popped out to you, and you claimed your prize. I couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone win that game.

  “Let me try,” said Rebecca, and slid a quarter into the slot and her hands into the gloves. She got the crane’s jaws around a bubble with a jiggly rubber tarantula inside and dropped it before she got it anywhere near the chute’s mouth.

  “I’m going again,” Ash said, slotting home another quarter.

  Behind us, the attendant wriggled two steps closer. His hands fumbled at the work apron, and I finally noticed the change dispenser belted around his waist and rattling like a respirator. The thing was huge, ridiculous, had to have housed fifty dollars’ worth of quarters, and could probably accommodate ten years’ worth of commerce on this pier, given the traffic I’d seen tonight. The man looked at me, and a spasm rolled up his arms—or maybe it was a gesture. An invitation to convert some money.

  “Fucksicle,” Ash said, kneeing the machine as another plastic bubble crashed back to the pile.

  “Now, now,” I said, reaching for both his and Rebecca’s shoulders, wanting to shake free of the attendant’s gaze, and also of the mood I could feel rolling up on all of us like a tide. “Is that the Middle Path? The elimination of desire or whatever—”

  “Don’t you mock that,” Ash snarled, half-shoving me as he whirled around. His face had gone completely red again, and at his sides his fists had clenched, and I wondered if some of the assumptions Rebecca and I had been making—about whether he’d actually been in a boxing ring, for example—weren’t years out of date.

  Startled, shaking a little, I held up a hand. “Hey,” I said. “It’s just me. I wasn’t—”

  “Yes you were,” Rebecca said, and my mouth fell open, to defend myself, maybe, at least from my wife who had no right, and then she added, “We both were. Sorry, Ash.”

  “I’m used to it,” he said, in his normal, expressionless voice, and wandered away toward the next machine.

  For a while, Rebecca and I stood, not touching, watching our friend. I hated when Rebecca went still like this: head cocked, hands in her pockets, green eyes glazed over. At least right now she was doing it during an argument, and not over breakfast coffee, in the midst of reading the paper, just because. Daphne, having sickened of being chased, turning herself into a tree.

  Finally, I blew out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding and said, “You’re wrong, Rebecca. You both are.”

  “Oh come on, Elliot. Even when he’s not around, what do we talk about when we talk about Ash? His vests, and his inability to land a life-partner, and his refusal or whatever it is to hold a job, and the crazy situations he seems to wind up in without even trying, and—”

  “There’s a difference between enjoying and mocking.”

  That stopped her, and even unlocked her, a little. At least she re-cocked her head so it was facing me. “You enjoy us too much,” she said, and followed Ash.

  I was angry, then, and I didn’t go after them immediately. I watched Rebecca approach Ash, stand close to him. They were at the back of the space, now, both seeming to lean forward into the towering white curtain, almost pressing their ears against it. Briefly, it occurred to me to wonder where the blond kids had gone. Fifteen feet or so to my left, the attendant shifted, stared at me, and the change dispenser rattled against his waist. I started forward, got within five steps of my wife and my oldest friend, and became aware, at last, of the new sounds.

  Actually, the sounds had been there all along, I think. I’d just assumed that the murmuring was coming from the ocean, the bursts of rhythmic clatter from the arcade machines. But they originated on the other side of this curtain. For the second time, I thought of the Wizard of Oz in his cubicle, furiously pulling levers to make the world magical and terrible. More magical and terrible than tornadoes and red shoes in green grass and dead or disappearing loved ones and home had already made it.

  Ash glanced over his shoulder at me. I stepped forward, uncertainly, and stood behind him. Reaching out slowly, he brushed the curtain with his fingers, causing barely a stir in the heavy material.

  “Crawl under?” he muttered. “Just push through?”

  He bent to lift the curtain’s skirt, and my wife turned briefly toward me, so that I caught just a glimpse of her face. Her lips had gone completely flat, and all trace of color had leached out of her cheeks.

  “You know what’s back there, don’t you?” I said, as the attendant rattled closer, and Ash disappeared under the curtain.

  “It’s why we’re here,” said my wife, and followed him.

  What struck me first as I struggled through the curtain and shrugged it off was the motion. Even before I made sense of what I was seeing, the whole space seemed to tilt, as though we’d stepped onto some sort of colorful, rotating platform. The color came courtesy of a red neon sign that hissed and spat blue sparks into the air. The sign was nailed to a wooden pillar that had been driven through the planking of the pier right beside where we emerged. I didn’t even process what it said for a few seconds, and when I did, the words meant nothing to me, anyway. LITE YOUR LINE LITE YOURS….

  “Change?” murmured a voice, right in front of me, and I jerked back farther still, bumping against the curtain and feeling its weight on my back.

  The girl who’d spoken couldn’t have been out of her teens. Her skin glowed translucent red in the tinted neon like sea glass. Her eyes were brown and bright, her lips full but colorless and expressionless. Her brown hair swept up off her scalp and arced in a slow inward curl to her shoulders, but where it brushed her black turtleneck, the tips had turned white, like a breaking wave upside down.

  Before I could say anything, she was floating away, the smoothness of her movements terrifying until I realized she was on roller skates. Her wheels made bumping sounds between the planks.

  “Hi, Dad,” Rebecca whispered, shoulders rigid, arms tucked tight to her sides, and my eyes flew around the space.

  Mostly, what I saw were machines. Ten stubby, silver pinball tables jammed together end to end at awkward, irregular angles like dodge-’em cars between rides. Hunched in identical poses over the glass tabletops were the players, and none of them looked up. They just kept pulling what I assumed were the ball-release levers and then pushing and patting at the flipper controls on the sides. Straight across the space from us, his ass to the drapery that hung from the magician’s hat and divided this space from the night and the open ocean, a fifty-ish, red-haired guy with tufts of wiry beard sprouting from the cracks in his craggy face like weeds through pavement, bent almost perpendicular over his machine, whispering to it as his fingers pummeled the buttons. I could just see the ripped, faded American flag design on his T-shirt when he rocked back to jack another ball into play.

  “Oh my God, Rebecca. That isn’t—”

  “Huh?” she said, still rigid.

  Of course it wasn’t really her father, I realized. I’d seen pictures. And anyway, she wasn’t looking at the red-headed man, or any of the other players. She was watching the electric board that hung, like the LITE YOUR LINE LITE YOURS sign, on another wooden pillar across the space from us. It was flashing the numbers 012839. Every few seconds, the numbers blink
ed.

  Abruptly, a bell dinged, and the display on the electric board changed. #5, it read now. And then, Congratulations! You’re Liter! Then bumping sounds as the roller-skate girl swept the room, removing quarters from atop each player’s machine, and dropping a single red poker chip at the feet of the red-haired man.

  “Change?” she said to us, gliding past without looking or stopping, and abruptly Ash was out amongst them, assuming a place at a table kitty-corner to the American flag man’s. On the board, a new number flashed. 081034. The lever-jerking and button-tapping resumed in earnest. American flag man never looked up.

  I watched Ash glance at the numbers board, down into his machine, across to American flag man. Then he was pulling his own lever, nodding. There were now five players: two stick-thin older women in matching bright red poodle skirts, twin sets, and bobby socks, who might have been sisters; a kid in skater shorts with some kind of heavy metal music erupting from the sides of his headphones, as though everything inside his skull were kicking and screaming to get out of there; American flag man; and Ash.

  “What planet is this?” I murmured, and a bell dinged, and the roller-skate girl circled the room once more while Ash rocked back and laughed and dropped another quarter on top of his machine for the girl to collect.

  Closing her eyes, Rebecca surprised me by taking my hand. Then she leaned in and kissed my cheek. “This is where he came. Before he walked out. It’s been just like this for…God.” She shuddered. “He’d put us on the merry-go-round, and he’d come in here, and he’d spend his hours. One quarter at a time. Most days, he wouldn’t even take us home. My mom had to come get us.”

  Another ding, and the kid in the skater shorts flipped his hands in the air and moonwalked a few steps to his right, then back to his machine to pop a quarter in place just as the roller-skate girl passed and dropped a red chip at his feet. One of the women in the poodle skirts laughed. The laugh sounded gentler than I expected. The board flashed, and a new round began.