Summer of Light

by W. Dale Cramer

  15

  * * *

  The road to hell is paved with tourist dollars.

  THE KIDS were out of school for a week in February for no apparent reason, except that the school board had decided to give them more time off during the winter—the latest move in the ongoing battle to force kids to go to school year round so working moms wouldn’t have to feel guilty about summers. Mick didn’t see the vacation coming, but Layne did. She cheated. She looked at the school calendar. She had scheduled the week off for herself before she even knew Mick was going to be out of work. Now, since they were all free at the same time for once in their lives, she planned a real vacation.

  He’d never actually laid eyes on it, but Mick knew that somewhere—probably in the Library of Congress or someplace like that—there existed a Supreme Parenting Handbook. It was carved out of stone, and chiseled somewhere on the first tablet was a law that stated very clearly, “While your children are still young enough to believe in Santa Claus, you must take them on a vacation to that shining city in central Florida.” It was Law. He wasn’t sure what would happen if they failed to comply with The Law, because as far as he knew, no one had ever had the guts to deliberately flaunt it.

  He tried. Mick didn’t think they needed to spend the money, so he put up a valiant fight, but in the end The Law won. In the end, he discovered he couldn’t win an argument about money because he wasn’t making any.

  So it was inevitable. They would make a pilgrimage to that vast playground where fantasy reigns and the surly bonds of earth are temporarily lifted, along with your wallet.

  The friction started early, when Mick began referring to the place as Hell. He had developed a bit of an attitude.

  Layne planned their trip to Hell like a military campaign, mapping out weeks in advance where they would stay and which theme park they would target each day. She felt sure late February was a perfect time to go because nobody else would be there and the Brannigans would have the parks pretty much to themselves. Much later, Mick would point out that her reasoning was probably sound because the greater part of New York City and a fair portion of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Canada, the Dominican Republic and South America had thought precisely the same thing.

  They drove all day Saturday and stopped about an hour short of Hell, where they checked forty or fifty places before finding a vacancy at the Oasis Motel. The sign said Free H O, contl bkfst. Mick stood in line thirty minutes to get to the desk, where the night guy informed him, while digging in his ear with his car key and running a finger down his dwindling list of rooms, that the next day was the biggest race of the year at Daytona, and he was in possession of what he was pretty sure were the last two available rooms between Atlanta and Miami. He would be very happy to provide Mick with a clean room—although there were no nonsmoking rooms left—but if he wanted to think about the price he needed to step aside because the gentleman behind him already had his Platinum Card out of his wallet.

  * * *

  Mick flicked a dead roach from the pillow. “Isn’t that supposed to be a mint?”

  “In some countries, but I’m not sure about Florida. Mustn’t be prejudiced,” Layne said.

  He stomped a bug into an asterisk on the carpet and went to get a Kleenex, but when he came back he couldn’t find the asterisk. Apparently the shag carpet had been chosen for its camouflaging properties.

  “And the TV doesn’t work, either,” he growled. “Yessir, free HBO.”

  Layne shrugged. “The sign said ‘Free H-blank-O’. Maybe it was supposed to be a 2.”

  The next morning they turned down the free “contl bkfst” and ate at the Waffle House, after which a toll booth got them in the spirit of the place by charging two dollars for the privilege of driving down the highway to Hell. They had reservations for the rest of their stay, and since they couldn’t check in until later Layne decided they would go straight to one of the parks and spend the day frolicking—put the bad start behind them. While they sat in a twomile line of cars watching the engine overheat they learned from the radio that they’d fetched up in Hell during the biggest convention week in the area’s long, proud, convention-mongering history. Forty-five minutes and seven dollars later they parked the car and started the long hike to the ticket office, where they stood in line for twenty minutes to hand over a mortgage payment for a three-park pass, then stood in line another fifteen minutes for the tram ride to the actual gates of the park, where there was a tenminute line to get in.

  Once inside, the lines vanished. A line requires definition—it isn’t a line if no one can tell where it starts or where it ends, or who’s in it and who’s not. Inside, there was only a great, oozing, shifting sea of humanity as far as the eye could see. They didn’t exactly walk, they just drifted like jellyfish from one attraction to the next. Every now and then Mick got a glimpse of the trappings of the park itself, and from what he could see over the heads of the crowd it was magnificent, a wonderland of brightly colored plastic.

  Mick started making up his own names for the rides. They inadvertently waited ninety minutes to ride The Spleen Buster—to be fair, they didn’t know they were in line for the first hour—and then found out at the door that Dylan wasn’t tall enough. All was not lost, though. Mick spent most of the ninety minutes with his nose pressed to the shoulder blade of a three-hundred-pound cabbie from Brooklyn who turned out to be a really nice guy. He promised to write.

  It was just as well they didn’t make it onto The Spleen Buster. Dylan had been on a roller coaster once and hated it. He wanted nothing to do with any so-called amusement that went clacking up into the sky and then plummeted back to earth. He only wanted to ride the kiddie rides—the little teacups and such. He started crawfishing at the sight of the roller coaster. And then they lost Layne in the crush.

  After they regrouped—Layne spotted them by shinnying up a lamppost—Ben said he was thirsty, so Mick fought his way to a pop stand where he gave the guy a twenty for five bottles of Coke. The guy rolled his eyes, muttered something about “hicks” and told Mick he was short four dollars. Later, when she got knocked down and trampled, Toad was lucky enough to land on top of a map somebody had thrown away. From the map Mick learned that the park consisted of six major rides—by major they meant no pregnant women, heart patients, neck braces, small children or sissies—six kiddie rides, eighteen brassy, obnoxious, Broadway-style reviews, four hundred and thirteen “restaurants” where you could buy a small Coke for nine dollars and a hotdog for seventeen, and nine hundred and six trinket shops where you could buy cheap plastic souvenirs for a king’s ransom. In spite of the prices, it seemed everywhere Mick went he could hear some fat guy in plaid Bermuda shorts, dress shoes, brown socks and a pork-pie hat braying about how cheap everything was.

  They had to hurt a few people to do it but they finally made it onto two of the major rides before the park closed. Actually, it was just Toad, Ben and Mick riding the first one because Dylan dug his heels in and started screaming. Layne took him to the teacups while the rest of them stood in line for a sadistic roller coaster Mick called Permanent Brain Damage. Most of the people coming off the ride stopped in the gift shop and bought a T-shirt with the name printed on it. Every major ride had a gift shop at the end so people couldn’t escape without winding their way through a maze of T-shirts, key chains and coffee mugs, all with the name of the ride printed on them. It was a great marketing strategy because it allowed parents, who couldn’t possibly make it to daylight without their kids dragging stuff off the shelves and begging to buy it, to shell out several hundred more dollars for the privilege of advertising the place.

  The other ride they managed to fight their way onto was a nice relaxing river float where their boat drifted past an assortment of rubber dinosaurs roaring at them from the banks, then plunged over a two-hundred-foot cliff into a pond. The name of that one was either Compressed Vertebra or Death by Drowning—Mick vacillated because his short-term memory was getting a little spotty by then. Dy
lan rode that one with them. He got on the ride before he found out about the plunge over the cliff, but when that boat tilted up and started clacking he knew what was about to happen. Mick had to hold him down hard to keep him from jumping out. He thought for a minute Dylan was having a seizure.

  The combined effect of the full day was a bit like being mugged by a motorcycle gang, keelhauled, robbed and left for dead, but the weather was nice. Bloody but unbowed, they hobbled the six miles back to the Explorer. The drive to the motel turned out to be a leisurely two-hour crawl in bumper-to-bumper traffic through eight miles of potholes, striped plastic barrels, jackhammers and flashing yellow lights.

  “All things considered,” Mick said, “a lot more relaxing than the park. But for another two hundred a night we could have stayed inside and avoided all this.”

  “Relax,” Layne said, winking and nodding toward the kids. “This is supposed to be fun.” She’d been reading the brochures again.

  They checked into their deluxe accommodations—the room came with a little refrigerator—then went out for dinner at the same time as everybody else in the western hemisphere. They waited an hour for a table, then paid a car note for some spectacularly mediocre spaghetti.

  The next morning they got up early and waited an hour for a breakfast table, then muddled through rush-hour traffic to the next park on the list. It was pretty much the same as the first one, except the lines were longer. For the whole two hours Mick spent waiting in line to ride Soiled Trousers there was a tattooed pagan girl from the Bronx pressed so hard against his back he was afraid he’d have permanent imprints from various body rings. She slapped him once, but he assured her he was just checking to make sure his wallet was still there.

  The most popular ride in the park was the one where a rubber shark roared at them and simulated cannon splashes filled their shoes with water.

  After the first couple days Mick learned to carry a backpack full of iced-down soft drinks with him. He figured it saved roughly a hundred and fifty dollars a day, plus it dripped ice water down the back of his pants, which cooled him off, and it prevented any further body-ring imprints on his back. Two days in the trenches had taught him well. He was a battle-hardened veteran.

  The last morning, while the Explorer was stuck in traffic on the way to yet another theme park, it started to rain. Hard. Mick looked around at the faces. They looked like a Marine recon platoon on the way back from Vietnam. Out of the blue, Layne turned to the kids and asked, “What do you say we just go home?”

  Ben, who was looking kind of shell-shocked until she said that, sat up.

  “I want to go home and sit on the couch and watch TV.”

  “I wanna doe play with Andy,” Dylan said.

  “I miss my climbing tree,” Toad chirped.

  Layne saw Mick’s chin quivering and misunderstood. She put her hand on his arm, gently.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “We can use the last day on our pass anytime. It never expires. We’ll just save it for the next time we’re down this way.”

  He thought about this for a long time, trying to find the right words. It was not easy, and they had left Hell far behind before he spoke again. The windshield wipers were slapping softly and the kids were unconscious in the back, sleeping off the sensory overload.

  “Layne?”

  “Yes?”

  “Um, about using our pass the next time we come this way?”

  “Yes?” She was smiling, bless her heart.

  “I’d rather be staked out naked to a fire-ant bed and forced to watch soap operas while a patch-eyed pirate with Parkinson’s removes my pancreas with a sharp stick. Yo-ho, yo-ho.”

  It was a bull’s-eye, and like a thousand other times in his life he immediately wished he hadn’t said it. Layne’s lips disappeared.

  “You’ve done your best to ruin this trip for all of us,” she said quietly. “I wish you wouldn’t complain so much.”

  Pride got the better of him, and he joined battle. Like two old warships, they sat there and let each other have it, broadside, driving up the expressway. They didn’t notice when Dylan woke up and let himself out of his car seat, or even when he climbed up between them—they just kept firing over his head. He sat down on the console, staring out the front of the car, and started singing the Barney song. When they ignored him, he sang louder.

  Dylan didn’t sing particularly well but he was definitely loud. He drowned them out. When Layne told him to get back in his car seat he ignored her and sang louder. When Mick threatened him he sang louder still. Finally, they went to neutral corners—Mick kneading the steering wheel and muttering to himself, Layne steaming up the window on the passenger side. When they stopped fighting, Dylan stopped singing. For maybe another five minutes he just sat there between them on the console holding his knees, then he turned around, climbed back into his seat and latched himself in.

  16

  * * *

  Livestock.

  MAYBE it was the first signs of spring—daffodils, little clumps of lavender thrift blooming at the ends of the driveways, clouds of redbuds lining the roads. Whatever caused it, Mick got a case of spring fever. If he’d had any sense he’d have gone fishing, but the malady manifests itself in a thousand different ways, and he ended up buying chickens instead. Hap’s brother sold them to him, six of them. They were shiny, black, healthy-looking laying hens, and Mick brought them home in a crate and let them run loose in the backyard while he and Dylan rounded up some pipe and roofing tin, and borrowed a bender from Hap. It took the better part of a day to build a good solid chicken coop on the edge of the woods down behind the house—two plywood sides to keep the wind off, with chicken wire around the rest, a tin roof, a place to roost and a long shelf where they could lay eggs.

  For the first two weeks he kept them penned in the coop so they’d get used to laying their eggs there and not scatter them all over the woods. Then he started letting them out during the day and spent the next two weeks trying to convince Andy they weren’t his private hunting stock.

  Those chickens were weird. He couldn’t tell what it was they were eating, but they were always pecking at something. They’d pounce on the handfuls of chicken feed Dylan scattered on the ground every morning, but then they’d clean that up pretty quick and go right back to bugs and grass. Sometimes, on up in the warm part of the day, they’d dig holes in the dry dirt up against the house behind the shrubbery, then squirm down in there and fling dirt all up in the air.

  He never did figure out why, but they hated the nice comfortable chicken coop he built for them, and they would only go in it at sunset when they were ready to climb up on the roost for the night. They laid eggs behind the bushes, under the deck, in the woodpile, under the swing set—everywhere but in the nesting place he’d built for them in the coop. Every day was an egg hunt, and Dylan loved it. It took a while to figure out that a couple of them were laying their eggs in the doghouse. Mick had built the doghouse when Andy was a pup, and like everything else, he overdid it. He roofed it with leftover shingles from the house, insulated the walls with Styrofoam, lined the floor with carpet, cut a vent in the back and put it in the shade up under the deck so it would stay cool in the summertime.

  Andy wouldn’t go near it. He hated that doghouse, but the chickens loved it. They paraded in and out all day long like it was a convenience store or something. Mick tore out the carpet and put straw in it. Crawling in the doghouse and looking for eggs was the highlight of Dylan’s day. Sometimes he’d just sit in there for a while, holding a chicken, stroking its feathers, rubbing his face against its back. The chickens didn’t seem to mind, and whenever Mick found something Dylan liked he tried to let him do it. His therapist said it was important to give Dylan some slack and let him “seek out sensory experiences commensurate with his level of development.” So Mick let him play with the chickens all he wanted. He was way too clumsy to catch them in the open, but when he hemmed one of them up in the doghouse he’d sit in there and pet it f
or an hour.

  Dylan was afraid of a lot of things. Some of his fears were so strange it took a while to figure out what they were. Besides normal stuff like rats and heights he was scared of antiques, clowns, anything bright yellow, and anybody dressed up like an animal. When they went to Hell there were people walking around dressed up like cartoon characters, and when the big duck tried to come up and shake hands with Dylan he bolted screaming between Mick’s legs, scampered up his back like a monkey and latched onto his neck. Almost choked him to death. But the darkness and tight spaces inside the doghouse never bothered him at all. It was as if he needed close confinement sometimes, as if his world needed closer horizons.

  Dylan liked the chickens so much that when Hap told Mick his brother had a goat he wanted to get rid of Mick took it without a second thought and put it in the backyard. It was a small goat, some kind of dwarf, the color of a deer except for a white saddle across her back, and she loved Dylan right from the start. Whenever she saw him in the yard she’d run to him, put her face under his arm and let him scratch behind her ears. She didn’t do that with anybody else, just Dylan. He didn’t give her a name, though, he just called her “the doat.”

  Andy liked the doat, too. After he got yelled at once or twice he wouldn’t give chase while Mick was around, but as soon as Mick turned his back he’d hear bleating and hoofbeats and he’d know Andy was at it again. He kept a pretty close eye on the sliding glass door, too, because once or twice the goat bolted for it when Andy was after her. He didn’t even want to think about what might happen if the two of them got loose in the house.