American Morons Read online

  “Ever played?” I said, holding my wife’s hand, but not too tight. Around us, the canvas outer draping undulated in slow motion as the sea breeze pushed against and through it. There was another winner, another burst of quiet laughter from somewhere as some lucky soul got Liter, another new number flashing. One more sad-magic night with Ash and Rebecca, so long after the last one that I’d forgotten how it felt.

  A good while after I’d asked, Rebecca sighed and leaned her head against me. “I miss our daughter,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  “Should we call?”

  “She’s alright.”

  “Look at him,” Rebecca said, and we did, together.

  He was bent almost as far over his machine as the redheaded man, now, and when he played, the lights inside it and the red neon from the LITE YOURS sign reflected off his skull, and his vest beat and twitched with the rhythm of his movements, as though we were looking straight through his skin at the mechanisms that ran him.

  “Poor Ash,” I murmured, though I wasn’t sure why I felt that way, and suspected he’d be furious if he heard me say it.

  “I’ll bet you a bag of Patriot Popcorn I can win before he does,” said Rebecca, and she straightened and let go of my hand.

  I thought of the fisherman on the empty pier behind us with the ray dying in his lap, the gaggle of beggars, and beyond them, the brightly lit streets of downtown Long Beach. “And where will we find Patriot Popcorn, wife of mine, now that the Gap has come?”

  “I think I know a place.”

  “I bet you do,” I said. On every side of us, at all times, at least one person was laughing.

  “Change?” said the roller-skate girl, gliding past, but she executed a perfect stop even before Rebecca got her hand to her pocket. She took my wife’s dollar, nodded. Her turtleneck clung tight to her, and there were tiny beads of sweat along the mouth of it like a string of transparent pearls. The tingle that sizzled through me then was more charged than any I’d felt since adolescence but sadder and therefore sexier still, and I had to bend over until it passed. Whether it was for my wife, the roller-skate girl, or just the evening, I had no idea.

  When I next looked up, Rebecca and Ash were side by side, both bent over their individual metal machines, fingers pushing and pumping while the lights on the metal board flashed and the roller-skate girl rolled and the ocean breathed, in and out. Not wanting to distract them—and also, for some reason, not wanting to play—I stepped just close enough to see how the game worked.

  Inside each machine was a ball chute and a simple, inclined wooden playing board, with metallic mushrooms sprouting out of the center and impeding or—if you were skilled enough—directing the path of the ball. Across the top of the playing board were ball-sized holes numbered one to ten in plain black lettering. The object was to sink one ball in each of the holes corresponding with the flashing numbers on the big board. When you dropped a ball in the correct hole, your machine dinged and the number lit up. First person to light up every required number got a visit from the roller-skate girl and a red chip dropped at his or her feet as the quarter antes were collected for the next round. Then, with no pause, no stretch-break, no breath, the big board flashed again and the game resumed.

  I settled into my spot between Rebecca and Ash, close enough to touch both but a step back. I was watching my wife’s frame rattle as she bounced up and down in her big black shoes, leaned left and then right, and I thought of the new, permanently puffy space on her stomach where her scar was, and where, she said, she could no longer feel anything, which for some reason always made me want to put my hand there. I watched her watch Ash between games, heard her gleeful, competitive murmurs.

  “Feel that, Ash? That would be my breath on your neck. That’s me passing you by. Again.”

  Ash kept shaking his head, staring into his machine and seeming to drag it closer to him with those outsized, outstretched arms. “Not this time,” he kept saying. “Not tonight.”

  And I found that I knew—that I’d always known—that Rebecca was in love with him, too. That I was merely the post she and Ash circled, eyeing one another from either side of me but never getting closer than they already were. The knowledge felt strange, heavy in my chest, horrible but also old. As though I hadn’t discovered but remembered it. Also, I knew she loved me, in the permanent way she’d loved her mother, whom she’d stayed with, after all. Not that she’d had a choice.

  In the back, the man in the flag shirt lit his line, closed his eyes, and slapped the sides of his machine with the heels of his palms. Then the kid in the headphones won again, did his dance. Occasionally, one of the poodle-skirt women won, but mostly they didn’t, and their laughs punctuated each round, regardless. Rebecca bobbed, swore, taunted Ash. Ash leaned over farther, grim-faced, muttering, the machine bumping and dinging against him, almost attached to him now like an iron lung. Between and amongst them, the roller-skate girl skated, collecting quarters, strewing victory chips. At one point, tears developed in my eyes, and I wiped them away fast and thought of the perpetual sprinkles of dried milk that dotted the corners of my daughter’s lips like fairy dust. The stuff that brought her life.

  It was the poker chips, I think, that finally alerted me to how long we’d been standing there. My eyes kept following the roller-skate girl on her sweeps, tracing her long fingers on their circumscribed, perfectly circular path from machine-top to black change-purse at her waist, white tips of her hair barely caressing the slope of her shoulders. And at last my gaze followed one of those chips as it fell to the floor amidst maybe a thousand others strewn around the ankles of the flag-shirt man like rose petals after a rainstorm.

  My head jerked as though I’d been slapped.

  “Change?” the roller-skate girl said as she breezed past me on her path through the players. Had she said that to me every time? Had I answered? And where was the music coming from? I could hear it faintly. I was moving to it, a little. So was Ash. A gently bouncing fairground whirl, from an organ somewhere not too near. Under the dock? On shore?

  Inside me? Because I appeared to be singing it. Sort of. Breathing it, so it was barely audible. We all were, I thought. It was everywhere, floating in the air of this makeshift room like a sea breeze trapped when the curtains dropped. Dazed, I watched Rebecca fish ten dollars out of her jeans pocket without looking up. The roller-skate girl took it and stood a bankroll of quarters, wrapped tight in red paper like a stick of dynamite, on the rim of Rebecca’s machine. Both of them humming.

  “Rebecca?” I said, then said it again, because my voice sounded funny, slurred and slow, as though I were speaking under water.

  “Just a sec,” she told me.

  “Rebecca, come on.”

  “Might as well,” Ash murmured. “I’m almost there. No hope for you.”

  My wife glanced up—slowly, smoothly—and caught my eye. “Hear that? You’d think he’d beaten me all his life. Or ever. At anything.”

  “I think we should go,” I said, as Rebecca’s head sank down over the metal tabletop again and her hands drifted to the ball-lever and buttons. I said it again, and my words got tangled up in that tune. I was almost singing them, and then I smashed my jaws together so hard I felt my two top front teeth pop in their sockets. “Rebecca,” I snapped.

  And just like that, as though I’d doused her with ice water, my wife shivered upright. Shudders rippled all the way down her body. Her skin seemed to have come loose. I could almost see it billowing around her. Then she was weeping. “Fuck him, Elliot,” she said. “Oh, fuck him so fucking much. God, I miss my mom.”

  For one moment more, I stood paralyzed, this time by the sight of my weeping wife, though I could feel that tune bubbling up again in the back of my mouth, as though my insides were boiling, threatening to stream out of me like steam. Finally, Rebecca’s fingers found mine. They felt reassuringly bony and hard. Familiar.

  “Let’s go,” she whispered, still weeping.

  “
Come on come on come on Yah!” Ash screeched, started to hurl his arms over his head and stopped, scowling as the board flashed the number of the winner and the American flag man closed his eyes and popped the sides of his machine with his palms once more. “I had it,” said Ash, already hunching forward. “I really thought I had it.”

  “Time to go, bud,” I told him, pushing my fingers against Rebecca’s so both of us could feel the joints grinding together. She was still shuddering, head down, and the roller-skate girl glided up and swept a new quarter from Ash’s machine and reached for the top one on Rebecca’s stack and Rebecca swatted the whole roll to the floor. The roller-skate girl didn’t look up or stop humming as she passed.

  “Right now,” Rebecca said, looking up, letting the tears stream down. “It’s got to be now, Elliot.”

  “Come on, Ash,” I said. “Let’s go get tapas.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said, and the big board flashed, and he was playing again. The kid in the headphones won in a matter of seconds.

  “Ash. We need to leave.”

  “Almost there,” he said. “Don’t you want to see what you win?”

  “Elliot,” Rebecca said, voice tight, fingers like talons ripping at my wrist.

  “Ash, come—”

  “Elliot. Run.” She was staring up into the magician’s hat, then at the American flag man, who didn’t stare back, hadn’t ever seemed to notice we were there.

  Another number on the board, another flurry of fingers and rattle of pinballs, another burst of laughter from the women in poodle skirts. Then we were gone, Rebecca yanking me behind her like a puppy on a leash. Low humming sounds streamed from our mouths as we struggled through the white curtain and just kept going.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to shake her fingers just a little looser on my arm, but she didn’t let go until we were through the outer canvas, standing in the biting air on the wet and rotting dock. Instantly, the tune was gone from my mouth and ears, as though someone had snapped shut the lid of a music box. I found myself trying to remember it, and was seized, suddenly, by a grief so all-engulfing I could barely breathe, and didn’t want to. Tears exploded onto my cheeks.

  Rebecca stirred, let go of my arm, but turned to me. “Oh,” she said, reached up, stuck her finger in one of my teardrops and traced it all over my cheek, as though finger-painting with it.

  “I don’t know why,” I said, and I didn’t. But it had nothing to do with Ash, or Ash and Rebecca, or Rebecca’s dead mother, or our strange, loving, incomplete marriage. It had to do with our daughter. So new to the world.

  “Come on,” she said.

  “What about our friend in there?”

  “He’ll follow.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  “He knows where we live. He’s a big boy.”

  “Rebecca,” I said, but realized I didn’t know what I was going to say. What came out was, “I don’t know. There’s something—”

  Around us, the sea stirred, began to slap against the shore and the pilings beneath it. We could feel it through our feet. The reassuring beat of the blood of the earth. There was a mist now, too, and it left little wet spots on our exposed skin.

  Rebecca shrugged. “It’s just where my dad is. Where he’ll always be. For me.”

  Then we were walking. Again, our footsteps sounded strange, made almost no sound whatsoever. There was still no moon overhead, only gray-white clouds, lit from behind from millions of miles away. The fishermen had remained in their places, but they’d gone almost motionless, leaning over their lines into the night as though every single one of them had gone to sleep. I saw the guy who’d caught the ray, but the ray was no longer in his lap, and I wondered what he’d done with it. Looking up, I saw the blacked-out buildings of old Long Beach, seemingly farther from us than they should have been, wrapped in mist and scaffolding like mothballed furniture in an attic. By the time we reached our car, the feeling in my chest had eased a bit, and I was no longer crying and still couldn’t figure out why I had been. Rebecca was shivering again.

  “Let’s wait here for him,” I said, and Rebecca shivered harder.

  “No.”

  She got in the car, and I climbed in beside her. I turned on the ignition but waited a while. When Rebecca looked at me next, she was wearing the expression I’d become so familiar with during this last, long, sweet year. Eyes still bright, but dazed somehow. Mouth pursed, but softly. “Take me home to see my girl,” she said.

  I didn’t argue. I stopped thinking about Ash. I took my wife home to our tiny house.

  That was Friday. Saturday we stayed in our neighborhood, took strolls with our child, went to bed very early and touched each other a while without making love. Sunday I got up and made eggs and wondered where Ash had gone and whether he was angry with us, and then we went hiking up the fire trail behind our subdivision into the hills, brown and strangled with drought. I didn’t worry, really. But I started calling Ash’s Oakland bungalow on Monday morning. I also called the hospital where he worked, and on Thursday, right when he’d apparently told Ms. Paste he would return, he turned up as scheduled for his shift on the ward. I got him on the line, and he said he had rounds to do and would call me back. He didn’t, though. Then, or ever.

  After that, I stopped thinking about him for a while. It wasn’t unusual for Ash to disappear from our lives for months or even years on end. I already understood that adult friendships operated differently from high school or college ones, were harbors to visit rather than places to live, no matter how sweet and safe the harbor. Rebecca never mentioned him. Our baby learned to walk. The next time I called the hospital, maybe six months ago, I was told Ash no longer worked there.

  Last night, late, I climbed out of my bed, looked at my daughter lying sideways, arms akimbo, across the head of her crib mattress like a game piece that had popped free of its box slot and rolled loose, and wandered into the living room to read the newspaper. I opened the Calendar section, stared at the photograph on the second page. My mouth went dry, as though every trace of saliva had been sucked from it, and my bones locked in place. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even think.

  Staring out at me was a photograph of a merry-go-round horse, tipped sideways as it was hauled out of storage by movers. Its front teeth were chipped and aimed in opposing directions below the oversized, grinning lips, and its lifted hooves seemed to be scrambling frantically at the air.

  Last Rooff horses sold at auction, read the caption.

  I flew through the story that accompanied the photograph, processing it in bits and pieces, while fragments of that tune—the one from the pier—floated free in my head but never knitted themselves into something I could hum.

  Once, these vibrantly painted, joyous creatures spun and flew on the soon-to-be-razed Long Beach Pier…The last great work of a grieving man…His final carousel, populated with what Rooff called “the company I crave” after his longtime business partner and reputed lover, Los Angeles nightclub owner and legendary gambler Daniel R. Ratch, took his own life following a decades-long battle with a degenerative muscular disease in September of 1898.

  The reclusive Rooff and notorious Ratch formed one of the more unlikely—and lucrative—financial partnerships of the fin-de-siècle era, building thousands of cheaply manufactured carousels, fortune-telling machines, and other amusements of the time for boardwalks and parks nationwide. They envisioned the Long Beach Pier as their crowning achievement, a world unto itself for “all the laughing people…” in Rooff’s memorable phrase at his tearful press conference following Ratch’s death….

  Rooff completed only the carousel and the now infamous Lite-Your-Line parlor before being fired for erratic behavior and the agonizingly slow pace of his work…He disappeared from the public record, and his death is not recorded.

  There was more, but the words had stopped making sense to me. Shoving the paper away, I sat back in my chair. The trembling started a few seconds later.
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  I can’t explain how I knew. I was thinking of Rooff under that hat, hidden by curtains, working furiously in the candlelight, chanting his dead lover’s name. I think maybe I’d always suspected, hadn’t admitted. But Ash had made it back to Oakland, hadn’t he? And we’d made it here?

  Then, abruptly, I was up, snatching my keys off the hook next to the kitchen sink and fleeing toward our car while that incomplete tune whirled in my head and the whole last night with Ash spilled in front of my eyes in kaleidoscopic broken pieces. I don’t remember a single second of the drive down the freeways, couldn’t even tell you whether there was traffic, because all I was seeing were the homeless men and the sores on their arms and the way their mouths moved as they chanted their rhyme. Then I was seeing the ray flapping in midair, lifted out of the waves just as we passed, as though the whole scene had been triggered by our passing. The disappearing blond children, the arcade machine attendant’s graceful shuffle and the sound he made. The rose-petal poker chips. The tinkling machines. The glide of the roller-skate girl, and the skater kid’s moonwalk, and the American flag man. And the poodle-skirt women’s perpetually smiling faces. Most of all, their faces, and it was their laughter I was hearing as I skidded into that giant, empty parking lot and jammed my car to a stop and leapt out, hoping, praying.

  Even the streetlights were gone, and the dark pier jutted crookedly over the quietly lapping water like the prow of a beached ship. No magician’s hat. Nothing on the pier at all. Overhead, I saw stars, faint and smeared by the smog, as though I were viewing them through a greasy window. Behind me, the new old city, safely shut down and swept clean for the night, rocked imperceptibly on its foundations. A wind kicked up, freezing cold, and I clamped my arms to my chest and crouched beside my car and wished I’d remembered a jacket, at least.

  Finally, I let myself think it. Sort what I’d been hoping. Which had been what, exactly? That I’d find the auctioneer still here? That the movers would still be emptying the last pieces out of the warehouse, and maybe I could…