Rides of the Midway

by Lee Durkee

  Finally he said, “Son, you wouldn’t know the truth if it waltzed up and kicked you in the balls. And quit shaking your damn head before I knock it off its cradle.”

  •••

  When Roger arrived, the redheaded cop started calling Noel she and her and Cinderella here. Roger, in slacks and a plaid shirt, his hair flattened on one side, announced that he was counting to three. “And when I get to three, you’re going to wish you’d told the truth about where you got the alcohol.” He began to count, pausing painfully long between two and three. Then they sat there waiting for Roger to do something. Noel kept looking at his shoes. The cop made a series of popping sounds with his tongue, like pebbles falling into a well. Finally he tossed the legal pad upon the desk and said, “There’s another little matter.”

  •••

  Having returned the Polaroid to the officer, Roger’s hand remained suspended in the air, as if holding an invisible cigarette. Ten more pebbles fell into the well before Roger’s hand dropped out of the air and he turned on Noel and demanded to know, “Who is that woman?”

  “I didn’t do nothing wrong,” Noel said. “He was born that way.”

  The cop asked Roger, “You’ve got no idea who she is?”

  Roger shook his head no. He had never met Miss Weiss, not face-to-face, though they had talked on the phone. Noel was far too drunk to appreciate his good luck, and he was too drunk to panic a minute later when a young black cop entered the small office and said, “Other boy’s mama’s here.” He had a pen sticking out of his mouth that twitched when he spoke. “Want her to come in and join the wingdig?”

  The redheaded cop cringed and covered one blue eye. “Hell, make Carl handle her. He’s good at mothers. He’s about half mother hisself. She at crying yet?”

  “Not the crying type.”

  “Well, thank God for small favors.”

  “Wouldn’t go thanking Him just yet.”

  •••

  For the last time, I have no interest in your infantile little games, I want my son released, and I want him released now. If you have any charges you want to press, fine, have at it, but if you know what’s good for you, sir, you’ll give me my son back now, or I promise you I will have a whole fleet of the most Jewish lawyers you have ever beheld down here on your fat ass in about ten seconds flat—do we understand each other?

  The redhead cop quit eavesdropping and pushed the door the rest of the way open. He led Noel and Roger into the main station, where the entire shift had pivoted to watch Miss Weiss. Wearing the white jeans with a red blouse, she sat facing a metal desk that encaged one bald cop holding up two pink chubby palms and smiling like they were old friends. Miss Weiss did not seem to share his nostalgia. The large room glowed under fluorescent tubes casting a light so nearly blue that the two most noticeable things about every cop there, including the framed black and white glossies of cops on the walls, were the bruises under their eyes and how badly they needed a shave.

  The redheaded officer grinned in the direction of Miss Weiss, then he turned away and sat himself at an empty desk and lost his grin inside a form he began to fill out. If he had recognized her from the Polaroid, he made no indication of it. He motioned for Noel and Roger to sit in the two folding chairs facing the desk. The top margin of the Polaroid was protruding from his shirt pocket. Noel leaned over and willed himself not to get sick. Every once in a while he raised his head to glance over at Miss Weiss, hoping to catch her eye, but she never turned her head in their direction.

  The next day, though, he would remember how she had looked right then—drained, tired, and angry—and it would start to make sense to Noel why no one had recognized her from the Polaroid. Trapped under that blue fluorescence, Miss Weiss had appeared every bit as haggard and sexless as the cops at their desks and the photographs of cops on the walls. She was simply not reconcilable with the naked woman sprawled inside the Polaroid.

  The cop finished the form and tossed the pen on the clipboard in such a manner it appeared the pen had leapt from his hand. He stared at Noel expectantly.

  “Answer him,” Roger prompted.

  “Answer him what?”

  “Answer the man!”

  “She ain’t gonna answer me. Are you, Cinderella?”

  “Throw me in damn jail,” Noel replied and stared across the station to Miss Weiss. She turned very briefly, their eyes met, it was the last time he would ever see her. “I ain’t telling you shit,” he said.

  It sounded like a whip crack the way Roger slapped him across the jaw. The aftershock was a near repeat of Miss Weiss’s tirade except that now everyone was staring at the punk with the bloodshot Mongo eyes and the long hair who did not flinch from the slap but only thinned his eyes and released a slow tight smile.

  “Maybe I did do it,” he said to Roger. “Maybe you’re next.”

  The redheaded cop balled up the form he had been filling out and threw it at Noel, bouncing it off his forehead.

  “Get her outa here,” he said. “Before I start slapping on her too.”

  •••

  The next morning at sunrise, Roger hefted Noel up by the armpits and commanded him to drink a bottle of beer.

  “And I mean every last drop.”

  Noel complied, turning the brown bottle upside down until it was empty. Immediately he felt much improved. He stared up at his stepfather with a confused and somewhat grateful expression. Roger swiped away the bottle and held it up to the light and shook his head dispiritedly. As he lowered the bottle, his vision lit around the bedroom and lingered on a velvet black-light poster of Lynyrd Skynyrd.

  “Get up and mow the yard, now,” Roger ordered.

  “It doesn’t need mowing.”

  Roger started to yell but then caught himself. An idea lengthened his face. “Wait here,” he said and clapped Noel on the shoulder as if to stake him to the bed. While Roger was away, Noel tried to piece together the night. The police station was mostly a blur, but he did remember making Roger stop the car on the drive home so he could be sick. He was still trying to remember when Roger returned up the stairs snipping the air with a pair of sewing scissors. He stood over Noel and said, “We’re going to do a little mowing of our own.”

  Clamping his left hand over Noel’s eyes, Roger channeled his way around the head, here nipping an ear, there burying the point into the scalp. It was more a wrestling match than a haircut. After five minutes, Roger stepped back from the bed and then tilted his chin to each side. Noel sat there on the bed surrounded by a dark wreath of his own hair. Slowly he began to rub his scalp, exploring its gullies and ditches. His fingertips came away whorled with blood.

  Roger took another step backward and smiled.

  “I seen worse,” he decided.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TWO MORE YEARS PASSED and still nobody had been arrested for the murder of Ross Altman. Everyone in town seemed to have forgotten about the incident except Noel, who saw himself perpetually through the lens of that murder. When he shaved, he was a murderer shaving. When he stared at his hands, they were the hands of a murderer. In this light, every good thing that happened to him seemed but a reprieve. And good things did happen. He had a girlfriend. He would be the starting shortstop on junior varsity this year. He had published photographs in the school paper. He slept at night, at least most nights he did. People in general seemed to like him, to be drawn to his mysteriousness. Girls especially liked him. But Noel knew it couldn’t last. He knew what he was and what he was capable of. The certainty that he would get caught had been slowly replaced by the certainty that he would kill someone else, eventually.

  It was October and he was in his room doctoring his driver’s license with a needle and purple ballpoint when his mother called up the stairs to say there was a package for him in the mail. He bounded downstairs and found the lumpy manila envel
ope on the kitchen table. It was from Tommy Weatherspoon.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?” Alise said.

  “I gotta use the bathroom first,” Noel lied and took the package upstairs, where he opened it over his bed. Inside was a rolled-up T-shirt. The shirt was dark red and said Sloppy Joe’s Bar and it bore a round silkscreen portrait of a man Noel would later learn was not Sloppy Joe but Ernest Hemingway. When Noel unrolled the shirt, a copper bracelet fell onto the bed. It was a POW bracelet, the name Noel Weatherspoon inscribed thickly into the copper band.

  Later that day, dressed in ironed jeans and a green button-down shirt, and spitting into a tennis ball can, he chauffeured himself through the churched suburbs carved of piney woods in his ’66 Mustang. He had the POW bracelet in his shirt pocket, and he was once again trying to recall his father’s face, not from the photograph, but his real face on the night of the fair, the night he had boarded the Black Dragon and disappeared forever. For the first time Noel owned a different version of the events that had led up to that night at the fair.

  Tommy had written, “Your mom gave your dad a choice, baseball or her. He wasn’t making any money playing ball, he was always on the road, and he had two boys to support, so I’m not blaming your mom one bit. Anyway he left her and there’s no excusing that, not in a million years. Your mom was the best thing that ever happened to Goose and he was a fool to leave her. He went on to play a few more years of ball and when that didn’t work out he had to join the army. It’s more complicated than that but I’m writing this on a dashboard and it was a long time ago.”

  Twice Noel stopped the car to take a picture but then changed his mind. Every time he lifted his camera these days he was flooded with dissatisfaction. The fault was not in the camera, a weighty box-design Nikon he was buying in installments from a pawnshop. The problem was that, to Noel, the Nikon was simply an accessory to an expensive telescopic lens he half worshiped inside the pages of Photo magazine. The Aleph 2000, the most powerful telescopic lens known to man. With the Aleph 2000, he imagined himself standing in his own backyard and taking pictures of Layle undressing in front of her bedroom window. Then, with a quick adjustment of the zoom, he would be taking pictures of women oiling themselves on the nude beaches of France. Zoom again and he was taking pictures of black girls washing away tribal paint under clear African waterfalls. If he stared through the Aleph 2000 long enough, he would eventually find himself standing in the backyard.

  The Mustang was halfway up the Smokewoods’ dirt driveway when Layle broke from the front door and hurdled a nest of hay, pumpkin, and purple corn to cut in front of the car. Noel slammed the brakes so hard that the spit can lurched between his thighs.

  “Drive!” Layle ordered, swinging into the car and rolling up her window. “Get me out of here!”

  Reverend Smokewood stood in the front doorway cross-armed between a scarecrow and a ghost. Noel averted his eyes and then began to pilot Layle backward and away from her father. The Mustang bottomed out against the road.

  •••

  Tall, thin, strawberry blond, and eternally bitter at not being allowed to try out for cheerleading, Layle Smokewood had a sly way of subverting her beauty to roll her eyes white at the world. Like most girls in tenth grade, Layle had plucked out her eyebrows then stenciled them back on in high arcs above half-moons of aqua shadow, fixing herself with a look of perpetual surprise. But, unlike other girls, Layle had a rose-cheeked complexion, an expressive blush entirely under her control that years later would land her the role of the soft-focus virgin in an ABC soap opera, distinguishing her as the only famous person ever to emerge from Hattiesburg High.

  Usually Noel had to talk to Reverend Smokewood a good ten minutes or so before Layle came downstairs. The reverend enjoyed masking his contempt for Noel by sitting him down in the kitchen and asking him difficult questions on politics or philosophy. Once he had even sounded out Noel’s opinion on euthanasia. A more recent chat had concerned The Exorcist, a movie that for years had been banned in Hattiesburg but that lately a rogue drive-in was threatening to feature. Noel had shirked off an opinion that evening by explaining that his aunts had helped to organize the protests against The Exorcist.

  Brushing at the underside of his bulb nose, the Reverend inquired, “So you are of the opinion the Bill of Rights is not applicable here?”

  “Sir?”

  “The Bill of Rights. You propose to throw it out the window and be done with it?”

  Obviously the reverend thought the movie should be allowed to play. Wanting very much to impress the man, Noel admitted to having read the book.

  “The book? The good book?”

  “The book The Exorcist, sir. I read it kinda by accident a few years ago.”

  The reverend’s face bloated. “Am I to understand they sell this book to minors?” He straightened, as if about to rise and begin litigation, then he grabbed at a legal pad, gouged off the yellow pages until he found a blank one, and dated it with huge numbers before demanding to know where Noel had obtained the book. After scratching down this information and adding a series of exclamation points, he set the pad on the table and in a confidential tone asked, “And you found this book . . . to be . . . sacrilegious?”

  There it was again, that word.

  “I dunno, sir,” Noel replied. “All I know is it scared the blue pee outa me.”

  Having said this, he made a sharp, wet inhalation, like a vacuum cleaner flicked on and off. But, fantastically, or so it seemed to Noel, the reverend began to laugh. He laughed so hard he had to scoot his chair away from the table.

  “Well stated, son,” he said, after exasperating himself. “Very well put.”

  Noel had not for a moment thought the laugh legitimate.

  At the first stop sign, he opened the car door and flung out his dip and poured the Skoal spit onto the street.

  “Jeez-us, it looked like he was gonna bust out crying,” he complained.

  “He’ll get over it.” Layle reached over and combed her hand through Noel’s black hair, which was once again down to his shoulders, except that his shoulders were much wider now. “Noel, let’s get us some liquor tonight, huh?”

  He pretended to bore out his ear. “You know what it sounded like you just said?”

  Layle attempted a wicked smile. Mimicking Noel’s drawl—something she could do disturbingly well—she said, “Let’s get drunker’n Cooter Brown.”

  He drove to Pasquale’s, where he was cooking four nights a week in order to finance car and camera. The booths at Pasquale’s were sequestered by black metal gratings meant to convey a graveyard ambience but that instead lent the restaurant a penal quality. While Layle waited in the corner booth, the one nearest the jukebox and most patched over with duct tape, Noel went to the counter and got two large drafts served inside wax cups sealed with lids. They drank through straws so that no one could tell they were drinking beer.

  Because cheerleading tryouts started Monday, Layle had a lot on her mind that evening. What it came down to was this: her father would not let her be normal. He won’t even let me take parts in school plays unless they exhibit moral character! She rolled her eyes white then caught herself and said, “I do that too much, I know.”

  Noel listened dutifully, every so often getting up for more beer or to refill their platters from the buffet. He went into the bathroom to sip from his inhaler. Dates still spurred his asthma, even though he and Layle had been going steady off and on for almost two years now. October was the worst month for his asthma. He dropped a quarter in the jukebox and selected “Free Bird,” then he sat across from Layle and began to tell her about the letter from his uncle and how he had invited Noel to visit Key West and how Noel planned to manage his uncle’s restaurant someday.

  “I practically run this place already,” he pointed out. “Hey, don’t look at me that way, I’m not
gonna up and leave you here.”

  “If we go to California, to Hollywood, you could be a famous photographer and I could be a famous actress. You could be my personal photographer.”

  “I’m already your personal photographer,” Noel said, which was the truth. He had hundreds of photographs of Layle stroking trees or holding up pets or striking cheerleading poses or attempting sultry stares.

  She was staring at him rather sultrily right now.

  “This is my first beer, ever,” she said. “Who knows, maybe it’ll be a night for firsts.”

  “What’s that supposta mean?”

  “You’ll see.”

  He mulled that over until the free bird was soaring away upon the conflicting winds of three lead guitars, then Noel set the copper POW bracelet between them on the table and said, “Here. I want you to have this.”

  “Nobody wears those anymore,” Layle stated briskly. Then she covered her mouth and said, “Oh. It’s—y’all have the same name.”

  “You don’t have to wear it. I know your old man’ll shit a brick if you do. You can just hold on to it for me, if you want. But if you do put it on, then you can’t take it off, ever. He’ll die if you do—my dad will. That’s what they say.”

  Layle slipped the bracelet onto her left wrist then clasped the band tight. They held hands across the table. Seeing his own name engraved there reminded Noel of the ballads they were studying in English, the ones where the doomed lovers ended up buried side by side . . . and from his heart sprang a blood red rose, and from her heart a briar. . . .

  “You like?” she asked, rattling her wrist.

  Noel spoke through the knot in his throat, saying, “He sees that, he’s gonna make you break up with me again.”

  “I’ll run away if he does.”

  “How come he hates my guts so much?”

  “He doesn’t, he just thinks you’re . . . I dunno. Maybe if you’d get a haircut it would help.”