Page 21 of Joyland

"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. "Touche. 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 rearranging 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 midd

le 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--"

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