Rides of the Midway

by Lee Durkee

  For now, though, crumpled onto the toy box, naked except for a pair of white briefs, he simply broke down, and before he could stopper himself he had confessed too much to his stepfather, not only about his previous night’s failure with Amber, but his whole history of such lackluster performances spilled out. “Something’s wrong with me,” he kept interjecting as he spoke nonstop a dizzying twelve minutes, a young man not accustomed to telling the truth and, oddly, feeling more than ever as if he were lying. The bedroom dissolved under his humiliation and only reappeared when Roger interrupted him by urging, “That’s enough, Noel. That’ll do.” But Noel could not stop, not until Roger placed a palm across his mouth. A moment later, tentatively withdrawing the hand, Roger said, “I think I got the idea.”

  To give him credit, he tried, Roger did, but in the end the best he could do was to clasp Noel’s shoulders, lift his raggedy body up off the toy box, then squint at his stepson in a harsh, reassessing survey that concluded with him squeezing Noel’s shoulders inward and shaking him like a Coke machine.

  “Throw me out the damn window,” Noel dared him. “I know you want to.”

  That made Roger smile, and the smile made him glance away, out the window and then down to the wrecked car. The smile vanished and he flutter-cleared his throat and said he could at least explain some of what happened last night. “The part after you got home.”

  Around three in the morning, Roger began, Noel had banged into the house and made so much noise that Alise had gotten out of bed to check on things. She had found Noel in his bedroom, talking to himself, pacing and weeping. At first she could not make him notice her; then, when he suddenly did notice her, he started telling her, over and over, how much he loved her, only her. “You kept saying that even if you went to jail, that it didn’t matter, that you still loved her. Do you remember any of this, Noel?”

  He reared his head and shook it.

  Still eyeing the wrecked car, Roger said, “Noel, there’s been plenty of times I wanted to throw you out windows. This ain’t one of them.”

  •••

  The rest of the family went to church while Noel slept in tics and starts. Later, Roger climbed the stairs wearing his navy blue pinstripe with a wide silver tie, the same color as his hair now, which was thinning and combed back over his temples. He nudged Noel awake then said he had run into Doc Martin after church and had made Noel an appointment. On Friday, he added with a hopeless shrug.

  “You told him!” Noel shouted, wide awake now.

  “Noel, we have to do something. We need to get this looked at.”

  Roger removed the green rubber band from the Sunday Hattiesburg American and tossed the paper onto the bed. Trying to make it sound like a joke, he said, “Probably you should check the paper, make sure you didn’t run nobody over last night.” He started nodding. His nods wandered the room, glancing off the posters. When he spoke again, he spoke haltingly.

  “The insurance—won’t cover this—but maybe—we can work something out—some sort of loan—against your college money. What I was thinking—maybe it’d be a good idea—for now—to keep it in the backyard—the car, I mean.”

  Hide the evidence, Roger was saying.

  •••

  Noel shook out the front page and began to search for himself among the headlines and police reports. No citizens had been sideswiped, no hit-and-runs, no high-speed chases ending in balls of fire. He studied a description of a young knifeman beneath a photograph of a liquor store that had been robbed, and he compared his physique and clothing with that of a suspicious character seen loitering outside a restaurant hours before it had burned to the ground. Another rape had been committed, the MO meeting that of the infamous Westside Rapist, his sixth victim. Noel studied the features of the artist’s rendering until the penciled face of the rapist, like so many toothpicks fitted together, seemed to grin up at him.

  A pang of heartburn caused him to lower the paper and that’s when he spotted the Nikon. Set on the dresser’s edge and facing the foot of the bed, the camera seemed to be watching him. Noel tried to ignore the camera by raising the paper again. It was not so much that the rapist’s face seemed animate, it was that the individual pencil lines seemed intent on something. After a moment Noel had to pull back to even see the finished product as a face instead of as an army of lines. Finally he dropped the paper and got out of bed and limped across the room to the camera.

  Just as he had feared, an entire roll of film had been shot. He rewound the film and removed the cartridge. Listening to the dwindle of a distant siren, he examined the camera for any further clues or abrasions, then he set it down again and entered the darkroom.

  He took his time developing the negatives. After he had smoked half a joint, he turned on the overhead light and clipped and pinned the negatives. Then he lifted the magnifying glass and nudged the swivel stool closer.

  The first negative showed a naked girl with straight grayish hair foamed out around her, as if she were lying in the surf. Her eyes were white slits that burned like wicks. The camera angle was that of someone standing above her near her feet. Her breasts were small, the nipples fine white dots, her pubic hair a spray of white seaweed. Her left side was outlined by a white pool where the flash had created a shadow. Within this bright pool her body appeared dark and fertile and possibly afloat. The dark scars on both knees stood out like glyphs, and the stark white wound on her neck made it appear as if whatever had killed her had first fed on the whiteness inside her.

  Now and again Amber’s hands and legs had been repositioned, but never in such a way as to appear natural. In the last few negatives her breasts had grown larger, lending the impression that Amber had been sat up and propped against the tree house wall for these shots.

  Is she passed out? Noel wondered. Or is she dead? Did she OD? Or did I kill her?

  When he came down to supper, his mother was already seated and did not look up. She finished eating and took Noel’s plate, which had not been touched, and scraped every pea and every scalloped potato back into the serving bowls, then she forked his minute steak onto the platter and carried his plate to the sink on her way out of the kitchen.

  Noel waited until everyone had left the table, then he walked out the front door with the measured steps of an astronaut. In the half dark, with a chipped moon far away and waning, he inspected the damaged craft that would never get him home again. A rear tire was shredded, the front passenger-side corner a metal accordion. The headlights and casings were equally smashed, the front fender bent upward, the rear one downward. He knelt with one hand touching a whitewall tire. The section behind the door had sidelonged against something painted cherry red, lending the impression that the Mustang’s white paint job was bleeding. A gorged taillight hung by wires.

  Eventually he stood and opened the trunk, which was empty except for the usual garbage and spare. He began to breathe again and walked around and collapsed into the front seat. After recouping there, he turned the ignition. The speakers exploded full blast and he killed the engine then ejected the cassette. After waiting for his heart to lull, he started the car again and forced it into drive. The Mustang groaned into the backyard. He parked it behind the woodpile then sat in the broken automobile until well past dark and in all this time exonerated himself of nothing.

  The passenger door opened and Matt slid into the other bucket seat. Matt was wearing a sky-blue tank top he only put on after lifting weights. Taking in a dip, Matt mumbled something Noel could not understand then added, “Man, I had to get outa there. Everyone’s walking around like some kind of funeral.”

  “No kidding, I hadn’t noticed.”

  Matt started pumping his left arm, stroking that bicep with his right hand.

  “You even know what’s on your neck?”

  “Yeah. It’s about the last thing I kinda remember.”

  “Tha
t’s the biggest one I ever saw.”

  “Maybe I can enter it in that book of records.”

  “Yeah, right next to the world’s biggest fuckup.”

  In his brother’s voice, Noel detected something dangerously close to contempt; it was as if Matt were experimenting with ways that Noel could be approached other than with fear and admiration.

  “Go easy, Matt, I been in better moods.”

  “You remember seeing me last night? After you came upstairs?”

  Noel shook his head no, and Matt began to describe how at three in the morning he had been awakened by the commotion of Noel falling down the stairs. “You fell down it sounded like about three times and you was about to go over again, but I grabbed you by the camera strap and pulled you the rest of the way up. Then you walked right past me without saying a word, like you’d made it all by yourself.” Their breathing had fogged the windshield. Matt reached up and scrubbed the glass with his right hand. Looking at the finger-paint pattern this left, he recalled, “It drives Rog batshit you do that with your hand. He won’t say nothing, but he’ll just about strangle the steering wheel.”

  Noel waited for Matt to continue.

  “Try it sometime,” Matt suggested.

  “Is that when Mom came up?”

  “You remember that?”

  “No. Rog told me that part.”

  “Yeah, Mom. She stayed in your room a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “I dunno. Maybe a half hour. Then, soon as she left, I tiptoed over, opened your door, and stuck my head inside. Know what you were doing?”

  Noel massaged his fingertips deep into the corners of his eyes and waited and then asked, “What?”

  “Praying. Down on your knees. Like dry-heaves praying. And your hair, man, it was sticking straight out every which way. It wasn’t like any kind of praying I’d ever seen either. It gave me the creeps. Then you opened your eyes and stared straight up at me. Like you was about to suck my blood. I got the fuck outa Dodge, man. Locked my damn door too.”

  Matt leaned out of the car to spit in the grass.

  “Praying,” Noel said reflectively.

  “Yeah. Praying like a damn vampire.”

  Noel sat there shaking his head at odd intervals. He had forgotten that Matt was in the car with him until Matt startled him by saying, “Hey, you still coming to my doubleheader Wednesday, right? It’s against damn Petal, you gotta be there.” There was a definite trace of reconciliation in Matt’s tone. “You do, I promise you’ll get some good shots of me going deep.”

  Matt left and fifteen minutes later someone knocked on the passenger window then opened the door and got inside.

  “Hey, Ben,” Noel whispered.

  “Ya’alright?” Ben asked and Noel replied, “Yeah, I guess.”

  In his fourteenth year now, Ben had grown too tall too quickly. His jeans were highwaters, like always, and he was wearing a gray sweatshirt that had once been Noel’s but that was still too big for Ben. His neck was too long and his reddish hair was short and bowl-shaped curly. They sat together a long time not saying anything. Then all at once Noel began to cry. He cried very rhythmically up and down, like someone riding a horse over rocky terrain. Ben put his hand on Noel’s kneecap but did not say anything. When Noel’s sobs got particularly bad, Ben would squeeze the knee a little. Finally Noel stopped. A few minutes later he said gruffly, “Shit, maybe I should go back to bed, huh?”

  “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea,” Ben replied softly.

  •••

  Noel crept downstairs to the phone and dialed Amber’s number. It was late, he wasn’t sure how late, and he had just awakened from a terrible nightmare. On the eighth ring a man answered the phone very curtly. Noel whispered, “Go out and look in the tree house, now, it’s real important,” and hung up the phone.

  •••

  “Here, this is for you. I’m damn retired.” The two of them were alone in Pasquale’s. Noel was working sandwich board and register, Tim was working pizza board. Even at work Tim dressed neatly: starched shirt, creased jeans, and a white twice-folded apron. Tim opened the shoe box and whistled into it.

  “Are you crazy? There’s seven whole lids in here. At forty a pop, that’s—”

  “Quit sounding like the damn ACTs. It’s yours, just shut up and take it.”

  Tim stashed the box under the counter then continued assembling the electric cheese grater.

  “So what’s the verdict?” he asked. “You fuck her or what? You’d be about the only guy in history who didn’t.”

  Noel composed his thoughts, abandoned them with a shrug, then explained, “We did some ’ludes, that’s all.”

  “I heard she’s got brain damage.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t fuck her brain.”

  “You did fuck her, then.”

  Following an even longer hesitation, Noel said, “No, I didn’t. At least I don’t think I did.”

  “You’re lying your ass off.”

  Tim was slicing plastic wrap off the blocks of pale cheese and periodically brushing the hair away from his face with his knife hand. He balled up the plastic and shot it at the trash can, but the plastic unraveled in midair and the shot fell short. He said, “Speaking of ACTs, I heard you were the first one out of the auditorium.”

  “Yeah.” Noel flicked a quarter so that it spun across the cutting board. “I didn’t even know they were giving those today.” The quarter spun so quickly that both its heads and tails sides were visible at the same time. Noel watched this until the quarter died tails up. “I was so stoned I just filled in the dots, spelled out my name with dots.”

  “Weatherspoon is to smoking dope as sunset is to . . . ?”

  “You probably aced it, huh?”

  Tim said yeah, probably, he usually scored okay on those types of tests. “Besides all you need is a fifteen to get into USM. Even someone with brain damage could make that.”

  “Not me. Anyway I don’t even care about USM. As soon as I graduate, I’m heading straight to the Keys and getting a job bartending at my uncle’s restaurant down there. I already wrote him I was coming.”

  “At that chop-suey joint?”

  “It’s Vietnamese—his wife’s Vietnamese. Chop suey’s Chinese, I think. Too bad that wasn’t on the ACTs, I’d have gotten one right.”

  Quartering the blocks of cheese, Tim said, “If Weatherspoon’s boat is traveling, in reverse, at sixty miles an hour on a sunny day and leaves the dock at two a.m. into a ten-knot wind with fifty-three gallons of gasoline, a kilo of redbud, eight fifths of tequila, and sixteen quaaludes . . . then, taking into account the Doppler effect, how long will it take his boat to reach the bottom of the sea?”

  The phone rang. Noel grabbed it and said, “Pasquale’s.”

  “First off, why’d you call my house last night?”

  “I didn’t call your house.”

  “He went out there.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “My dad. He found that tequila bottle plus some roaches. I’m grounded for about a year. Thanks a lot, Moon Man.”

  “Somebody called your house?”

  “You are such a liar.”

  “Hey, take it easy. Maybe one of your neighbors saw us out there and called—you ever think of that?”

  “Speaking of my neighbors, did you get into a wreck that night after you left?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Well, somebody plowed into our neighbor’s Chevy. It was parked on the street. They said the car that hit it was white.”

  “Who said?”

  “The police. They came around asking if we’d seen anything. It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “Hell no it wasn’t. Hey, you didn’t go telling the cops it wa
s me, did you?”

  “I don’t tell cops nothing. Besides, I was in bed so hungover I could hardly breathe. Which reminds me. Did anything else happen that night? I want to know if it did.”

  Noel had already pulled the receiver as far away from Tim as the cord would allow. Now he turned his back and whispered, “Look, I’m sorry I called your house, okay? I was scared you were dead out in the tree house, OD’d or something. I had this dream you were hanging from that rope. It was the most real dream I ever had.”

  “Are you gonna tell me what happened that night or not?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Shoot. I remember swallowing that ’lude, that’s all she wrote.”

  “Nothing. Nothing happened.”

  “You swear?”

  “I swear nothing happened.”

  After a pause, she said, “You’re about the only guy I’d believe that coming from.” Then she hung up.

  •••

  The day, back in tenth grade, when Noel had been kicked off the team, that was the day he had stopped begrudging Matt his success in baseball. Now, every time Matt stepped to the plate, Noel sprawled forward over the home team’s dugout to focus his Nikon. Matt was deserving of a personal photographer. Although only a junior, he had already begun an assault on the school’s record books. Doubles and stolen bases were the first milestones to fall, but it was ground-rule doubles that were Matt’s specialty. Something about his stroke, from either side of the plate, dictated that the ball take one grasshopper leap and skid over the fence. Also, with the help of a sympathetic home team scorer, Matt had played the entire season errorless at third base. His arm was a gun. He could throw runners out from his knees. Noel had documented this a number of times, and two of his shots had made the local sports page. All the sportswriters fawned over Matt, what with him being the most prominent white athlete to come through Hattiesburg High in years. The only broken record the sportwriters did not dwell upon in their columns was the fact that Matt had been ejected from five games in one season.