Rides of the Midway

by Lee Durkee

For the next few minutes Noel tried to astral travel but instead ended up daydreaming.

  “Hey, your old man,” he said. “You reckon he ever got his own universe? For getting all them interceptions?”

  Jay did not answer at first, but finally he whispered, “Man, I wouldn’t wish that universe on a dog.”

  The deflated way Jay had said that made Noel want to cheer him up. He picked up the can of spray paint and asked if Jay was ready to do some damage. But Jay shook his head and replied nah, he’d changed his mind. He wasn’t in the mood anymore. “Anyway, I wasn’t planning it for tonight, I was planning it for the night before Christmas break. We’ll come back and do it then. Leave a little Santa Claus for ol’ Hutch.”

  “Hell, you’re just scared.”

  “No. Can’t stand up is all.”

  Noel took the can and ducked around the catwalk into the wind until he saw the sprinkle of lights he figured to be Poplarville. As he shook the agitator, he longed for something more spectacular to write than Hutch is a fag!, something so startling that the town below might never recover from it, something they’d be talking about for years. He kept clapping the agitator until an unfortunate inspiration came to him. At the time it seemed very funny and near-perfect, like a gift. Later, though, he would have a lot of trouble explaining this feeling to Jay.

  To reach high enough for his design, he had to prop himself up on the guardrail and list his body into the bulb, bracing his free hand to its surface. Using this method, and stretching his painting arm, he made the top curve of a giant eye. Then he made the bottom curve and reddened in the eyeball and filled the whites with squiggly veins. He thickened the outside lines. Then he stepped down off the rail and had a look. He shook the can as he thought. Below the eye, he wrote the letter s. Shuffling along the catwalk, he finished the word satan, blood red on baby blue. He came down a line and added is king! Then next to this he painted a huge red pentacle. Finally he looped in the number 666 and tried to circle it except he ran out of paint before he could enclose the top. The Number of the Beast appeared cupped, as if riding a boat.

  Noel’s heart was racing now; he felt suddenly overwhelmed by what he had done and no longer certain that it was strictly hilarious. In the soft darkness he kept studying the giant bloodshot eye until something resembling hunger bloomed inside him. He stretched arthritically and loosened up his legs by shaking them, then he hunch-paced around the catwalk to where he spotted false dawn, a red saw-blade sun cutting through the horizon of pine.

  “Jay,” he called out after a moment, his voice sounding almost bored. “The damn woods are on fire.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE FIRE HAD FANNED OUT in two directions. Inside the clearing it seemed to be slithering under the pine straw and only occasionally surfacing to consume a fallen tree and then moving along that tree like a bridge that led back underground. One of these red veins had crept dangerously near the pickup, and there was the strong smell of burnt rubber in the air. The high flames were off in the distance, but now the wind had changed again and was lashing the fire back into the clearing. Noel, his cheeks scorched with tears, searched through the area more from memory than from sight. He had already found the ice chest and thrown it into the truck bed. Jay was gunning the engine and screaming at him to get inside, but Noel stood his ground and surveyed the camp one last sweep. Finally he dashed across the dead fire pit and grabbed up the football, which had Jay’s name markered across it, and carrying the ball like a fullback he bowled himself into the front seat of the moving truck.

  On back roads they worked their way north and half an hour later emerged from the woods with the sun breaching the treetops and deer bolting across the highway. Noel was already grilling Jay. If anyone asked, they’d been in Bogalusa all night. He made Jay recite the names of certain Bogalusa bars and he affixed a chronology to their night. “And I swear, Jay, if you tell one person the truth—you listening?—just one, then it’ll get out, it’s guaranteed to. Don’t even tell Cindy. She already thinks we hit Bogtown last night, right?”

  “She kept accusing me of us going to that strip bar there.”

  “That Pink Paradise place?”

  “Yeah, the one where Hutch and them said you can finger off your waitress for five bucks.”

  Noel grew thoughtful a moment before deciding, “Don’t say we went there. I don’t think that place even exists. Maybe it used to, but not anymore. I think we all made it up somehow.” He snapped his fingers. “What we need now is a car wash—the kind where you plug in quarters. And tomorrow morning, early, you gotta drive to Laurel and get some retreads put on—I’ll pay for it—but don’t get them anywhere around here ’cause people might be asking questions.”

  “Damn, Spoon. You got a good . . . criminal mind.”

  They returned to campus after washing the truck. From the top floor of Huff, they stared out the hall window at the black cauliflower-shaped cloud to the south. Then they showered and changed and went to the cafeteria. The LSD had not yet finished with Noel. His heart stormed and he had to keep fighting back waves of euphoria. The cafeteria was empty at this early hour. Its buffet resembled the plastic food inside the refrigerators at Sears. Noel was still hungry, but he couldn’t eat. All he got was coffee. Same with Jay. Rolling the go cups in their hands, they walked back outside and headed to the center of campus, to the small amphitheater there.

  The amphitheater was old and dilapidated. Gray pigment mottled the pillars backing the stage, each pillar supporting the weight of one virtue printed on top of it in uncial lettering. TRVTH, Noel read. Weeds pushed through the concrete stage. Yellow danger ribbons cordoned off one whole section of seats, and dried sunflowers and old newspapers ratted from inside the chorus pit. They sat a dozen rows up from the grass courtyard and Noel had just started grilling Jay again when Cindy McGee yelled their names and came jogging down the steps toward them.

  Breathless and tanned and with nest-brown eyes, Cindy wore a yellow running suit with a yet yellower bow tied around her long brown ponytail. Noel watched her descending the steps, and as he was doing this, the acid flared inside him and suddenly it was as if he were wearing X-ray glasses. The yellow running suit kept dissolving and revealing her naked and so beautiful that it hurt to look at her. Her breasts were large and had centers like brown flowers. He had to look away.

  And while he looked away, he was remembering something Jay had told him. A few weeks earlier Jay had confided that Cindy’s left breast was considerably larger than her right.

  “She’s even got names for them,” Jay had added, nodding gravely.

  “Names? Like what?”

  Jay had hesitated then said, “Like Sleepy and Doc.”

  “Sleepy and Doc! Those are damn dwarves.”

  “I know they are. She’s got names for everything.”

  “For everything?”

  Noel stole another glance at her while she kissed Jay, but her jogging suit had reappeared. Then Cindy reached down and played with his hair and asked about Bogalusa. She always held her breath as she spoke, and the longer the string of words, the faster she had to say them.

  “Bogalusa’s Bogalusa,” Jay replied matter-of-factly.

  “Yeah,” Noel said. “Same ol’, same ol’.”

  “Y’all went to that girlie bar, didn’t you? You did, I can tell just from looking at you two.”

  “No way,” Noel replied. “We knew better than to disturb you at work.”

  He peeled back the cup lid. Inside the blackness of his coffee, he began to watch Cindy on stage, her large mismatched breasts hidden by feather and cymbal and wild ropy hair. When he blew across the coffee, she commenced to tremble and dance. Using a circus-man’s voice, Noel barked, Ladies and gentlemen—I give you Cindy McGee and her sexy cymbal review! Submitted for your approval!

  Nobody laughed except Noel, who had set down his
coffee to make a crashing cymbal motion. His laughter collapsed him onto the cement bleachers and left him staring up at the blue sky.

  “Hey, that Rebecca friend of yours,” Noel asked from that angle, “she still wanna go out with me?”

  “Not after last night,” Cindy replied very dryly.

  “Last night?” he asked and shot Jay a stay-calm look. “What about last night?”

  “Y’all two weren’t the only ones who had a night on the town. Becky and I went into Hattiesburg, to that disco Pat McCool’s, and we ran into some girls from your old high school, Noel.” She stopped jogging in place to stare him down. “They said you used to get suspended for fights all the time and that you were a drug pusher too.”

  “Pusher,” Jay said and giggled.

  “Who told you that?” Noel asked, surprised at how unconcerned his voice sounded.

  “I can’t tell you her name, she made me promise not to. It was like she was scared of you. She said everybody used to call you Moon Man, and that you once killed a boy in a baseball game, that you were a pitcher and hit him in the head with the ball and it killed him.”

  A flock of small crows landed in the oval of grass beneath the stage. Noel sat up and watched the crows and made a scooping motion with his chin as if he were about to reply, but before he could Jay asked, “That true, Spoon?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” He waited a bit longer, then said, “But it wasn’t with a pitch, it was with him trying to block the plate on me and I ran into him. That’s why I quit playing baseball.”

  “Jesus,” Jay said.

  The crows scattered overhead, and Noel pretended to take a forlorn interest in their flight. Every once in a while he’d steal another glance at Cindy just to make sure her clothes hadn’t dissolved again.

  “I was all-stars and everything. Better’n my brother Matt even. I probably could’a gone pro too, but I didn’t want no one else to get hurt. I was like the Shane of baseball.”

  Cindy wiped at her brow with her biceps then turned to Jay and put her hand under his shirt around his ribs and hinted, “I think Noel wants to be left alone right now.”

  Which was not true either. Being left alone meant having to rummage through another plane-wreck of lies. Still, he received her stage direction and nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “that’d be cool, if y’all don’t mind.”

  Jay patted him on the back and asked if he was okay.

  “Sure,” he replied. “No biggie.” Then he stared away and inhaled sharply, his gaze falling a few rows below them to where a class was gathering. All the students were carrying identical white paperback Bibles.

  “You sure?” Jay asked, but Cindy had already taken him by the arm and was leading him up the stairs.

  Noel did not watch them go but instead imagined them looking back down at him from the top of the amphitheater, at the figure of solitude he cut there.

  As soon as they were gone, he started replaying the conversation in his head. He’d had the strangest impulse while talking to Cindy and Jay. Though he had overcome it, he had been overwhelmed by the sudden desire to tell the truth. He had felt it tugging upon him, the urge to confess to the murder of Ross Altman the exact way it had happened. Until that moment, the truth had always seemed to be his greatest obstacle, not something that he could use to explain himself to other people and maybe even to himself. He rolled the warm cup in his hands while his mind balked at all the lies. A life’s work of them. Lies sprawled as far as the eye could see. What else was there in his universe? Lies and pornography and lies and drugs and lies and petty violence? Thinking that, he laughed. Then he laughed harder because it had just occurred to him that his alibi for the forest fire was a strip bar that did not even exist. For a long time he sat there, as if riding a seesaw, rising with euphoria, plummeting with paranoia, and all the while eavesdropping on the class below him.

  It was, best he could figure, a Bible class. The students did not appear nearly interested enough for it to be a devotional group. The teacher was in her mid-thirties, with a wide, attractive mouth and short blondish hair feathered back and tucked behind her ears by a pair of red-rimmed sunglasses pushed back like a headband. Her accent was tough to pin down. It sounded precise and aristocratic and a bit fake. Kentuckian, he guessed, though he had never met anybody from there. Her clothes were equally odd. A tight white T-shirt he could see the pattern of her bra through and baggy yellow pants that tapered at the ankle. But the oddest thing about her was her tongue. It was bright green.

  Midway through her lecture, she reached down and unbuckled her leather sandals and took them off and held them behind her back as she tried to rally a discussion, urging everyone to speak out, “Even you girls, God forbid.” But the girls in the class remained moody and remote. What discussing took place, the boys accomplished. Every few minutes the teacher would visor a sandal to her forehead and smile Noel’s way. Meanwhile, the class discussion kept lagging and finally it stopped altogether. The teacher pouted and dropped her sandals and started updrafting her hands, but the class remained definitely mute. She stared up at Noel again, as if in him she had found an advocate, then she announced very vindictively that she was going to tell the class another story. The students groaned in unison, and that made her smile.

  “Our story,” she began, “will be about Saint Thomas, who seems to have mystified us into silence. But it is also the story of the human soul. Or so its authors would have us believe. Though we can’t always trust stories, can we? Stories, like authors, and teachers, are often suspect.”

  Two army helicopters, one with double rotors, thundered over the amphitheater, drowning out her voice. Noel, who had a pretty good idea where those helicopters might be heading, watched them grow smaller against the blue sky. After the roar had subsided, the teacher continued her pantomime, gesturing wildly and mouthing her words. None of her students thought it was funny, although Noel did. Finally she stopped her gesticulating. She took a breath and said that perhaps we did not know that Jesus had a brother. “But he did,” she confirmed. “Two at least. And one of these was his twin. And not only his twin, but his identical twin. Yes, Saint Thomas and Jesus were identical twins. Or so the Bible tells us. And we all know the Bible to be infallible, the word of God. If you don’t believe me, just go ask your parents.”

  Noel, in spite of himself, began rummaging through the carnage of lies. He was still constructing various alibis when three girls stood, the prettiest one tapping her wristwatch. Smiling acididly, the teacher watched them ascend the cement steps. A few minutes later the class scattered from the amphitheater, the teacher shouting out some last threats about the upcoming final. Noel leaned back on his elbows and sniffed the air and closed his eyes to let the lids absorb the sunlight.

  A woman’s voice said to him, “Pearls on the swine. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  She was sitting down beside him and also leaning back on her elbows, glancing over at Noel as if to attune her posture to his.

  “Those little tramps, they were passing notes again, weren’t they? I should have confiscated them and read their little fantasies out loud to the entire class and scarred them for life. That’s how they used to do us back in Virginia.” She scanned Noel’s face for a reaction. “Ahh well, it didn’t go so hot today. But maybe I gave them something to think about while they’re staring up at the ol’ ceiling fan. One never knows the full effects of one’s dealing—true?”

  Noel pushed himself up and asked, “What kind of teacher are you?”

  She answered him too honestly, which, he guessed, was how she answered most questions. She said, “The kind who is about to be fired. A fact which is not lost on my students and which robs me of any authority. And, like most things wounded, makes me very dangerous.” She sighed and while flexing her toes in the sunlight she introduced herself as Lily Frank and held out her hand for Noel to shake. Her upper teeth had a slight
medicine stain along the tops. She wore an Irish wedding band that Noel noticed when she leaned forward and wrapped each hand around an ankle then arched her back and neck. Holding this posture, she asked if she might have a sip off of that coffee.

  “I’m a caffeine junkie,” she told him as she removed the lid. She took a sip, then stuck out her green tongue and thrust the coffee back at him and complained, “That’s colder’n a witch’s tit, Noel.”

  “Yeah, sorry, I kinda forgot to drink it.”

  She brightened and said that happened to her too, especially with wine. Sometimes when she cleaned up—which wasn’t very often—she found three or four full glasses hiding around the house. “Poor lost wine,” she lamented.

  Noel asked what other classes she taught.

  “Comparative Religion,” she said. “I lobbied for that class for months and then nobody signed up for it and I got stuck with two sections of Bible Study, again.”

  After saying this, she burped very loudly.

  “Do you know your tongue is green?” he asked her.

  “Green?” she said, as if she would have preferred most any other color. “Oh damn, the jawbreakers.” She opened her wicker purse and tilted it at Noel. Her wallet and keys rested on a sea of candy. “Leftovers from Halloween,” she explained. “And I’m stingy as hell with it. It’s got to last me all year.” Then she asked, almost suspiciously, if Noel wanted a piece, and when he shook his head no—he still could not imagine eating—she pretended to be greatly relieved. She removed a folded handkerchief from the purse and began to lick it. “God, no wonder they were staring at me like I was the Wicked Witch of the East.” She showed Noel her tongue and asked if it was still green. It was, but not as brightly so. He told her it was okay now, then he asked why she was getting fired.

  “What a rude question.” She had a way of nodding and squinting and focusing with her mouth. She considered the question in this manner, then admitted there was no getting around it. “Blasphemy. Utter blasphemy. And they would have fired me right on the spot except my husband teaches here too—everybody thinks he’s Mr. Wonderful—so now, during Christmas break, I get to appear before some judicial board, which I’m quite looking forward to, even though the verdict is a foregone conclusion. After that, they burn me at the stake. But at least I get to finish out this semester. The class that just fled”—she made a motion like slapping someone with the back of her hand—“I’m going to fail them all. Except for maybe one cute guy. My little way of saying Sigh Oh Nara.”