Rides of the Midway

by Lee Durkee

  “After the River? I’m gonna apply up to Starkville, to the architecture school there. It’s supposed to be like boot camp almost. I started working construction, gofering, when I was ten. I know how buildings work, how they go up. Then, once I get that degree, I’m heading straight to either New Orleans or Saint Louis, and I’m gonna design these big-ass skyscrapers made out of nothing but glass and mirrors. Kind you stare right at but all you see is sun and clouds.”

  “You gonna take Cindy with you to State?”

  “No. I already told her I’m not getting hitched up until after my first building’s finished. These local gals—you better watch yourself, Spoon—they come to the River for one reason, and that’s to latch on to some guy and show him the field or the factory. That ain’t for me.”

  “Ain’t for me neither.”

  “Know what my old man told me once? Back when I had my first real girlfriend. I was about thirteen. He took me fishing, rowed us out to the middle of a lake, then he crossed the oars at his feet and looked me hard in the eye and he said, Son, just ’cause a girl lets you play with her peehole, don’t let her get you by the balls.”

  “Naw,” Noel said, giggling. “Your old man said that?”

  “I swear he did.”

  “He used to play pro ball, didn’t he, your dad? That’s what everybody around Huff says. That your old man played safety for the Saints.”

  Jay did not answer, only stared into the fire. Finally he said, “Hey, I got an idea,” and he walked to the truck and began rummaging inside its bed. He returned with a long thick rope coiled around his neck. The rope was knotted at foot-long intervals and tied to a grappling hook. He was carrying a can of spray paint with a red top and an extra flashlight.

  Noel grinned, asked what all this was for.

  “Somethin’ I designed special. I hadn’t planned on using it tonight, but now I’m thinking what the hell? C’mon, get up. Follow me.”

  He handed Noel a flashlight and set off into the woods.

  Noel hurried to catch up. For the first hundred yards or so he paid little attention to where they were going, but then he began to worry about getting lost. They kept following their flashlight beams, Noel occasionally wriggling his up at strange sounds inside the trees. After about a mile, they stepped into a round clearing that contained a circular fence fifteen feet tall that listed outward. The fence, topped by four orbits of barbed wire, enclosed a water tower that also seemed to loom in their direction. It had one flashing red light on top and two smaller ones along its catwalk. The word POPLARVILLE was belted in black letters around the bulb, which appeared powder blue in the starlight.

  Not using his own voice but imitating somebody at the dorm, somebody Noel could not pinpoint, Jay said, “Well, will you looky here. And they just repainted her too. Not one lick’a graffiti up there.”

  Noel moved in to investigate. Already he had spotted a gap in the barbed wire. The fence had black triangular signs crimped onto it. He came closer and saw that the black triangles contained red lightning-bolt logos. He had just turned to warn Jay that the fence was electric when Jay shot past him, sprinting full speed at the fence and then hurdling into the air. His hands and upper body hit first. The fence caved inward then trampolined back out but did not throw Jay off. His body shivered, then his head lagged away from the fence, but still he clung there like a locust husk. Noel stood ten feet away, his own arms and shoulders making involuntary jerks and starts, as if he were the one being electrocuted. Then, riding a wave of curse words, he hurled himself at Jay and half hooked, half blocked him off the fence and onto the grass.

  An ant bed of electricity crawled out of Noel’s body and vanished into the ground. Jay was sprawled facedown beside him. Noel touched Jay’s arm like whisking a hot iron, then he turned Jay over and splayed one palm over his chest. But Noel’s own heart was thudding too hard inside his hand for him to ascertain anything that way. He lowered the side of his head to Jay’s chest. At first he did not hear anything except an eerie seashell noise, but then he heard something different, something deeper, like a low rumble rising out of Jay’s chest, an avalanche rolling closer that balled up Jay’s body as laughter poured out of him into the night.

  The laughter contorted Jay. Again and again he tried to uncurl and apologize, but he could not. After ten minutes of this he was on his knees, still trying to stop laughing. His cheeks were wet and he was in pain and holding his ribs. Finally he managed to say, “I’m sorry, Spoon, I couldn’t help it. I swear. They did it to me first. Hutch and some other seniors did. Don’t be mad.” Recovering a bit more, he glanced up and explained, “It’s another of their traditions. And I shoulda known better too, because we used to sell the same lightning-bolt signs at the hardware store where I worked. Hey, don’t be mad, Spoon. I built you that circle of rocks, remember? Anyway, now you can do it to someone else.”

  Noel marched to the fence and fed his hands to it, then he climbed to the top and straddled the gap in the barbed wire. He dropped down and stalked beneath the insect legs of the water tower into the crisscrossed darkness and there he stopped to wipe at his eyes. The shadows from the stays and shrouds formed a giant spider’s web upon the grass, which was tinted red from the catwalk lights high above. Noel remained standing there until Jay had climbed over. From the darkness, dry and deadpanned, Noel called out, “That rope for what I think it’s for?”

  Jay apologized again, this time without laughing, and said yeah, he’d come up with a plan. “To get even with Hutch. Hell, you don’t like him any better than I do, right? Didn’t y’all two get into it once back in the fall?”

  They could hardly see each other. Noel grunted and said, “Yeah, him and two other seniors tried to throw me in the shower. I tagged him one, kinda by accident, split open his eye. I was just trying to get loose. Then he went around telling everybody how he was gonna kick my ass. But he never did shit.” Noel curbed the happiness in his voice and spat. “I was the only freshman not thrown in the shower.”

  “See, that’s another of their damn traditions. They do whatever they feel like to us freshmen.”

  “I thought you was dead back there. It wasn’t funny.”

  Jay apologized again, then he warned, “But if we do this, Spoon, you gotta keep your mouth shut afterwards. You can’t go telling anybody it was us.”

  “Don’t worry, I can keep a secret. What you gonna write up there anyway?”

  “Hutch is a fag!”

  Noel winced. “That’s cold,” he said.

  “You can see it from town, the tower,” Jay said. “And from the highway.”

  “Well, we gonna climb that son-a-bitch or what?”

  Jay removed the rope from his neck and took two steps backward and started swinging the hook, feeding it more and more line so that its circle widened. When he released the slack, the hook soared up and clanged against the iron ladder. After a dozen throws, he snagged the bottom rung then jimmied himself up using the knots as handholds and letting his legs drag limp behind him. Noel went next, clawing with hands and boots. Soon they were both climbing the ladder toward the blinking red lights. The canopy of pine tops passed beneath them. Sweeps darted out from their nests along the bottom of the tower. Noel’s cheap cowboy boots kept slipping. Twice he banged his chin on the ladder. The last time he did this, he dropped his flashlight, which somersaulted down in loops of light, then shattered into darkness.

  Eventually the ladder gave way to the catwalk, which circled the tower, a few yards below the word POPLARVILLE. The bulb’s outward curve formed a slanted roof they had to duck under as they explored the flashing red-lit perimeter. Hey, Jay, I’m a damn bird! Noel kept shrieking and then pretending to launch himself over the rail. Once he did this so convincingly that Jay grabbed the neck of Noel’s hunting coat. They ended up sitting on the leeward side with their knees up, their backs pressed against the tow
er. From there, they watched the treetops sway in the wind. The can of red spray paint was set between them.

  “I’m just about ready for this shit to wear off,” Noel said.

  “Yeah. But it’s supposed to last all night, at least.”

  “That wasn’t funny, what you did back there.”

  “I said I’m sorry. Anyway, it’s not my fault, it’s like some kinda disease everybody in my family has, like the practical-joke disease.”

  Noel was watching Jay’s hands as he said this. The hands appeared to be playing castanets. Jay held them draped over his knees, and whenever he spoke, it was like one of his hands was asking the other one a question.

  “What else you hear about my dad, besides that he played for the Saints?”

  After a moment of adjustment, Noel replied, “Nothing, I don’t think.”

  Jay straightened his legs so that, from the shin down, they stuck out through the rail and were tinted red. He said that his father still held the Saints’ team record for most interceptions in one game. “Three snags.” He pressed the tip of his tongue upward, which made him appear to have a swollen upper lip. “Really it just tied the old record. Some other guys had done it too.” It was his right hand that appeared to be talking now. “I don’t even remember him playing football, all I remember’s him limping around that car lot smiling them gold caps at everybody and trying to interest them in a damn Pacer. After he blew out his knee, that’s what he did, opened an AMC dealership in Laurel. And built us a pool in the backyard, because my mom always joked she’d leave him if he didn’t build her a pool. She used to be a Miss Mississippi, a long time back. My dad, he’d come home from the lot every day and make himself a big ol’ martini, then just start staring down into that pool, like his best friend had drowned in it. Wouldn’t even answer us. We’d be yelling out that dinner was ready, nothing, he just kept staring into the deep end. Next morning there’d be another martini glass down on the drain I’d have to dive in and get. You ever tasted a martini?”

  Noel shook his head.

  “They’re nasty.”

  Noel blew air through his lips then wished out loud that they’d brought some beer up here with them. “I could use a cold one right now.”

  “Yeah. Hey, you hear I played quarterback in high school?”

  Noel said no, he hadn’t heard that either. But it was easy enough for him to imagine Jay at quarterback. Tall, lean, and clean-cut, the kind of lopingly graceful kid that coaches love.

  “My senior year we went oh and ten,” he confided. “Oh and ten—you believe that?” He packed his can of Happy Days, making the clap clap clap sound in the dark. “It wasn’t my fault either,” Jay said after taking in a dip. “No D. No front line. I was like the Archie Manning of high school ball. They’d just prop them boys up in front of me, like cardboard cutouts or something.” Jay spat through the grillwork floor and laughed. “And I wasn’t half bad neither. I could chunk it. And could scramble too. Coach knew it. Knew it wasn’t my fault. He used to apologize to me after games. And my old man, he shoulda known it better’n anybody. But oh and ten, that’s hard to take. I don’t know about Hattiesburg, but, shoot, in Laurel, when it comes to high school ball, people take that shit way too personal. It was like my old man was the laughingstock because his son played quarterback on the losingest team in school history. Every game I’d be out there scrambling my ass off—I was the leading rusher on the team—but all that mattered was oh and ten. Nobody was buying his cars either. And he blamed me for it. I know he did. He never said it outright, but he dropped all these little hints, made sure I knew. I mean, the man was selling AMCs, the most suck-ass vehicles in the history of the automobile. Pacers, man. Shaped like UFOs. You ever seen a Pacer?”

  Noel nodded and said yeah.

  “Not many you ain’t. They’re ugly as hell, aren’t they?”

  Noel agreed that they were.

  “Look just like UFOs, don’t they?”

  “Yeah. Fuck a Pacer. Hey, didn’t AMC make them Gremlin things too?”

  “Gremlins, Pacers, Brats, Marlins. All the classics. Let me tell you, it didn’t have nothing to do with oh and ten.”

  They fell quiet. Later, when they started talking again, it was about the real Archie Manning. Noel said that his mom had been about half in love with Archie. She’d get tears in her eyes watching the Saints crumble every week with Manning all bandaged back together. Jay was describing how one time Manning had passed underhanded, with three men on his back, forty yards downfield. Underhanded! And on the damn numbers! Jay thumped his chest. Then, as if there were some logic connecting that pass to his father, he said, “My old man killed himself, you probably heard about that too, huh?”

  Noel had not and said as much.

  Jay was nodding vigorously. “Last summer. I’m the one that found him, in the car lot. He had a garden hose leading in from the exhaust. He was just sitting there in the driver’s seat, both hands still on the wheel, like he was driving. Inside a maroon Pacer. One he musta known wasn’t nobody ever gonna buy anyway. That’s why he picked it, I bet. A purple damn UFO Pacer. Man died inside the ugliest car in the universe.”

  Noel could not think of anything to say to that. His legs had started vibrating. A shooting star forked overhead, and Jay pointed to it and said make a wish. Unable to stop his lips from moving, Noel was letting different conversations play out inside his head. These conversations felt very real to him. He even suspected he might be communicating with Jay telepathically. Noel was telling him all about his own father and him disappearing that night at the fair. Then he told about the no-hitter and about Vietnam. And maybe Noel was using telepathy, because suddenly Jay asked, “What about your old man—what’s he do?”

  Noel reeled off most everything he had been thinking. He finished, then caught a breath and added, “My uncle, he thinks my dad might still be alive over there, in Vietnam. But he ain’t. Alive, I mean. He’s dead. I know he is.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I seen his ghost is how.”

  It took a moment before Jay asked when Noel had seen this ghost.

  “Why you damn whispering, Jay?”

  Jay repeated the question a bit louder, but he still hushed the word ghost.

  “I seen him lots of times. Whenever I get fucked up enough.”

  “You seen him tonight?”

  “Hell, he’s sitting next to you right now.”

  Jay jerked around to check, and Noel started laughing.

  “Naw, he ain’t up here. Yet. But I heard him out in the woods earlier, at least I think I did. Had some drinking buddy of his out there with him this time.”

  Jay wanted to know if the ghost had ever said anything. “It ever tell you how it died? Ain’t that what ghosts always do?”

  “It ain’t a it, it’s a he, and besides, I already know how he died. My mom put a cigarette out on him.”

  “Say again?”

  “My mom, she put a cigarette out on him. On this old photograph of them together. Melted a hole all the way through his heart. Way I figure it, right then, the second she did that, boom—he got bayoneted or shot or something.”

  “She did what?”

  Noel tried explaining it again. Then he added, “That’s why I don’t let nobody take my picture, if I can help it. It’s like giving them a voodoo doll of you.”

  “You’re the one always taken everybody’s picture.”

  “Yeah, I know, but don’t you think it’s weird that somebody can be looking at a picture of you right now and you don’t even know it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I do. And you know what’s even weirder? You ever see a picture of some beautiful chick smiling up naked at you, and it’s about a hundred years since she died of old age? Now, that is weird,” he said, resolute.

 
He cracked the knuckles on both fists against the catwalk floor, then he unbuttoned the hunting coat. He could not see his breath anymore, but he could still hear the wind blasting against the opposite hemisphere of the tower.

  “You should tell him to go to the light. That’s what you’re supposed to tell ghosts to do.”

  Noel snorted and said yeah, he’d heard that too. “I don’t think it’s that damn simple.”

  When the talk dwindled, Noel once again took up the conversation inside his head. His own hands were playing the castanets now. Noel was the left hand, Jay was the right hand, like a puppet show. The left hand started describing all its many problems, including its failures with girls, but the right hand interrupted and said, Hey, that’s alright, Spoon, no biggie, I know you ain’t gay or nothing. Hell no, I ain’t, insisted the left hand, then it went on to confess that it had lied about Layle too. She probably wasn’t a Rams cheerleader, though she might be, she was pretty enough, and anyway they’d been broke up since tenth grade. The right hand laughed, said, Hell, everybody lies about chicks, Spoon. Then the left hand began to describe the murder of Ross Altman and how it had felt, feeling someone die underneath you, and how it was a head rush, kinda the same way getting into a fistfight was a rush. The left hand described what it was like to step back and see a dead body there and to know you’d made it dead and how from then on you knew that was something you could do . . . how it was like the beginning of something instead of the end.

  He wedged his left hand under his thigh. Turning to Jay, whose eyes stared straight ahead unblinking, Noel asked, “Did I say anything out loud just then?”

  “Whoa,” Jay said, hugging himself. He glanced warily at Noel. “Swear to God, Spoon, I’as just astral traveling my ass off.”

  “You wasn’t any fuckin’ astral traveling.”

  “I swear I was. It was like I just rode on outa here.”

  “Where’d you go to?’

  “I don’t even know. Outer space, I guess. There were all these stars passing by on both sides of me.”