Rides of the Midway

by Lee Durkee

  “Orgasm, orgasm, orgasm.”

  “It was like they was possessed or something.”

  “That’s a very astute observation, Noel—orgasm, orgasm, orgasm—because, in case you haven’t noticed it, we women—orgasm, orgasm, orgasm—tend to spend the better part of our lives getting possessed. In one form or another. In orgasm. Orgasm, orgasm. In marriage. In pregnancy. My God, have you ever watched a woman give birth? Talk about possessed!” Then in a much more soothing tone she added, “Or mourning, for that matter. Out-loud mourning. Wailing. That’s another type of possession. Again, for the gals only. Men never wail. That would never do. Have you been eating pineapple, Noel?”

  “Pineapple?” He shook his head.

  “Hmmm . . . I thought I tasted something pineapply.” Lily made a series of smacking noises. “By the way, did I hear you ask Cecilia out to a movie?”

  He nodded, then shrugged.

  “Tell me what it is you most want to do to her, Noel. If you could have your way with her? In your wildest dreams, what would you have sweet young virgin Cecilia doing?”

  Bluntly, and almost in self-defense, he replied, “I’d take her picture naked.”

  “You would?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh my gosh. Can I help?”

  “I don’t think she’d be real big on the idea. She don’t seem the type.”

  “You know the type? You’ve done this before?”

  He shrugged again, this time with only his left shoulder.

  “Well, I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions. I mean, she might be the type. After all, she likes to parade herself in a spangled bodysuit in front of a grandstand full of drunk rednecks. And what you saw tonight, that was pure exhibitionism.”

  “Exhibitionism?”

  “One girl speaking in tongues is all it takes. Other girls get competitive. Women are fiercely competitive, you know that, Noel, correct? Then maybe some guy wants to impress the gals. Toby, our jock, went belly-up tonight—that was a first. Probably he noticed the girls zeroing in on you. Anyway, one by one, they fall. Next thing you know, you’ve got a full-blown glossolalia orgy in your den.”

  “Has that ever happened?”

  “You look confused, Noel.”

  He covered his eyes and muttered, “I think I need some sleep.”

  “Christmas cookies! That’s what I tasted, not pineapple. Cecilia’s Christmas cookies! I’ll have to give her my compliments. She’s quite the little baker.”

  Again Noel did not respond.

  “Is this your first time committing adultery?” she asked him.

  “I didn’t commit nothing.”

  “Bullshit, Noel. Less than an hour after leaving a man’s home you swapped orgasms with his wife—orgasm, orgasm, orgasm—and it’s nothing to be proud of.”

  “Who said I was proud?”

  “You looked a little proud. He’s good in bed, you know? My husband is. That’s why I married him. He was good in bed, and I was sweet seventeen. I was Cecilia. He was thirty.”

  “You were only seventeen?”

  “He’s also a good person. A bit too good at times. And you may very well wonder why it is I’m telling you all this, Noel. And the reason is—are you ready?—it’s because I want you to understand where my loyalty lies. And it’s not anywhere in this car, Noel. Do you understand that?”

  He sensed that a nod was required and so he nodded and said, “You told me if I showed up tonight I’d find out what you were, what religion.”

  “And did you?”

  He considered the black statue, the copulating vampires. . . .

  “Something weird, I bet.”

  “Then you’ll just have to come back next time to find out.”

  “Come back? And be in the same room with your husband and them singing about Jesus?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Kevin won’t notice. He’ll be too busy trying to impress Cecilia, to get her all hot and bothered.”

  “They . . .?”

  “No. And they never will. Nevertheless, she’s got it running down her legs. Speaking of which.” She flicked on the overhead light and pulled taut the lap of her black skirt, exposing a dark wet oval there. “Look at what you did to me, Noel. I’ll have to stand out in the rain to destroy the evidence. One wonders what you’ll be doing after you get home.”

  She turned off the light, then started the station wagon and pulled out of the lot. “Huff Hall!” she announced a few blocks later. “Last stop! Everybody out! Hurry up, I’m already in enough trouble. Cecilia wasn’t the only one performing for you tonight. I was trying to impress you with my brilliance. Were you impressed?”

  Noel lunged over to kiss her, but she pushed him away and said, “Uh-uh, not here, sport. A time and a place for everything. Ecclesiastes, remember?” She pointed at the dorm and ordered, “Go on! Out! Now. There will be other opportunities, I promise.” Then she caught the back of his arm and pinched it hard. “And don’t you dare be thinking about Cecilia while you’re up there in the dark tonight. You think about me. Think about me standing in the driveway holding my skirt up to the rain.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  REVIVAL TENTS AND WANDERLUST EVANGELISTS began to invade Poplarville along with a persistent rumor that Billy Graham himself might soon jet into town to help cleanse the air of the satanic cults known to have hailed from New Orleans if not California. Noel had taken some pictures of the water tower being repainted, and the next day one of these photographs made the front page of the Hattiesburg American. On that same day the Channel 7 News Team confirmed that signs of demonic ceremony had been uncovered at the arson site. In complying with federal investigators, however, the reporters could disclose no further details. This, of course, rekindled speculation to the point where many students fled home early for Christmas break. One girl left without informing anyone, and for a day it was assumed she had been kidnapped and perhaps cast in a blue movie. The last home game at PRC’s Wildcat Stadium, sparsely attended, held an uneasy moment of silence prior to kickoff, then the marching band blared its horns and the Dixie Darlings broke formation and scattered off the field tasseling their fingers in the air.

  “It was all a bad joke,” Noel pleaded to Jay. “I was just trying to get even with you for that electric-fence crap. How was I supposed to know the woods were on fire? Hell, you’re the damn Indian, aren’t y’all suppose to know about putting out campfires and shit? And it was your LSD and it was your idea to go tramping off through the woods and climb the damn tower. Look, I’m sorry, alright? Are you listening, Jay? Did you just hear me say I’m sorry?”

  On the last day of finals, Lily called to say she had the run of the house if Noel cared to venture over. He did and they spent the better part of the afternoon on couch and carpet. Even though Lily would not allow Noel to actually fuck her, he left campus for Hattiesburg the next morning feeling not quite the virgin. On his drive home he stopped and bought a six-pack of beer, which he then placed in the holiday-crowded refrigerator. He was a college student now. That changed things. By late afternoon the beer had been removed. Noel marched to the street and began foraging through the trash barrels. While he was doing this, Ben came outside. Ben these days left an impression mostly of Adam’s apple, braces, freckles, ears, and neck. At sundown every night he had to attach an elaborate headgear that prevented his jaw from growing forward in the night. His curly hair had grown longer and brightened to a flame red, all of which made him easy to spot in the church choir.

  Noel pried open one of the beer bottles with a lighter and offered the beer to Ben, who only glanced at the house and took a step backward. Using a voice too froglike for his soft features, he warned, “Dad’s gonna look out and see you, Noel. You’re just asking for trouble. Sometimes I think you like getting in trouble. What you got against Dad anyway?”

 
It was a fair question, but one that Noel could never explain truthfully, not even to Ben. Noel hated his stepfather for a hundred small humiliations and indictments, but, ironically, it was that one morning of kindness—a gentle hand placed across his mouth—that he would never be able to forgive. His greatest secret had been revealed, and from that morning forward it had been unbearable for him to be in the same house with Roger.

  Noel just shook his head and with a quizzical faraway look in his eyes told Ben, “Wait here.” He went inside and returned carrying a wooden rack that contained six vials of maple syrup that Roger had mail-ordered from Vermont. Each vial was a different color grade. One by one Noel dropped the vials into the garbage. He tossed in the rack then walked over and leaned against the basketball goal Roger had built for them a decade earlier. The goal had a plywood backboard and stood eleven feet high, one foot above regulation. This was yet another reason to despise Roger. Because of that goal, both Noel and Matt owned moon shots that sometimes would pop the net of regulation goals but more often than not would clang off the rim out of bounds.

  Noel asked if Ben wanted to play some one-on-one. “Hell, you’re almost tall as me now. We’ll play to ten by ones, and I’ll spot you five for five bucks.”

  Ben agreed to play but not for money. He could barely dribble and whenever he found himself trapped, he inevitably flailed the ball up into the air backward toward the goal. Noel won 10–5, and after the game they both lay down under the net and stared up through its blue circle, the tops of their head almost touching. Noel, beer bottle resting on his belly, began to tell Ben about college life. Noel had always enjoyed talking to Ben. Ben was never judgmental and always interested. Now Noel told him about Huff and all the drinking and smoking that went on there and about the LSD vision quest.

  “Do you know what you want to be yet?” he broke off to ask.

  “A veterinarian.”

  “Still! And spend your whole life sticking pills up dog butts?”

  Ben laughed, like he always did at Noel’s jokes. His laugh was musical, not at all like Noel’s or Matt’s. Matt was hardly home at all these days. He was always off on a date, a practice, a workout session. He still drank and got stoned, but not with Noel. He seemed to be avoiding Noel.

  Ben wanted to know what being on LSD was like, and Noel was all too happy to oblige. Then he told Ben that he was fucking one of the teachers at school. Practically right under her husband’s nose.

  “Hey, that reminds me, how far you gotten with Tracy now?” Noel asked. Tracy was Ben’s steady. She had brown scour-pot hair and wore braces. “You eating her pussy yet, Ben?”

  Ben shook his head and blushed and grinned and asked, “You ever really done that, Noel?”

  Noel sat up. He traded his empty beer for the brown weather-stripped basketball. “Sheet,” he said and squeezed the ball between his palms. “Is the Pope Catholic? Does a bear shit in the woods?” From that sitting position he leaned back and took a shot and swooshed the net. The ball just missed hitting Ben on the head, then bounced back to Noel, who squeezed it again and began to reiterate how much he liked eating pussy. How, if he could, he’d eat nothing but pussy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Then he asked, “You at least getting any stinky pinky, Ben?”

  Ben went through his retinue of grins, shrugs, and blushes before he admitted that yeah, he had. He was still lying flat on his back, but he had scooted over so that the ball would not hit him if Noel shot again.

  “You made her cum yet?”

  “Cum?” He chaffed at his bottom lip. “How’s that work exactly, with them?”

  “They don’t cum like we do,” Noel explained. “We cum on the outside, they cum on the inside. Besides, they don’t really cum, they cream.”

  “They cream?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ben widened his eyes and held a deep breath. After a moment he asked, “And they can only get pregnant when they’re cumming, right?”

  “I never heard that,” Noel replied. “Who told you that?”

  “Some guys at school. They said girls can only get pregnant when they cum, and they have to be cumming right when the guy is.”

  “So if she don’t cum then you don’t even have to use a rubber or anything?”

  “I guess.”

  Noel considered that. He reached for another beer from the line of bottles he had extracted from the trash barrel.

  “How many of them you gonna drink, Noel?”

  “How many?” Noel wedged the bottle between his legs and leaned back and shot the ball again. This time it clanged off the rim and bounced into the street. “Many as it takes,” he said.

  •••

  Noel spent most of his vacation inside the darkroom developing a semester’s worth of bad photographs. Or at least they seemed bad to him. Worse than bad, boring. But instead of tossing the prints away, which had been his first impulse, he began to experiment with them. It started when he placed a finished print, the one of Jay holding the dead owl, facedown onto a sheet of emulsion paper. Then, by anchoring the sheets with a pane of glass and letting them simmer under a thirty-watt bulb, he created a print of the negative image. Next he tried using the enlarger instead of the light bulb. This worked even better. Soon he was experimenting with hotter temperatures in the baths, the result being a graininess speckled with pockmarks and spidery cracks that made Jay look like some long-dead Civil War soldier.

  Throughout Christmas Eve day, Noel stayed in the darkroom, smoking dope and guzzling beer from aluminum cans that reflected the small red safe light. He did not come downstairs until called to supper, which started at five sharp minus Matt, who arrived unapologetically ten minutes late, causing Roger to backtrack grace over the carved turkey. Noel, both times, refused to bow his head during grace. He finished eating, took his plate to the sink, and without asking to be excused went outside and sat on the woodpile, where he had stashed a case of beer. Into a cold night, near-freezing out, Noel sat in his white dress shirt dipping Skoal and drinking beer and spying inside his own house.

  Later his mother joined him outside. She draped one of Matt’s letter jackets over his shoulders. “Man-o-man,” she whispered, “you must be half froze.” Noel was sitting high up on the woodpile, and she was leaning into him, trying to stay warm. Five minutes passed before she mentioned that there was a Billy Graham special about to start, and didn’t Noel think it’d be a nice gesture, all things considered, if the family watched it together, “like we used to when y’all were kids?”

  “But I’m agnostic.”

  “Yes, Noel, we’re all quite aware you’re agnostic. Maybe you could get that printed on a T-shirt and save yourself the trouble of announcing it every ten minutes. By the way, are you drunk?”

  “I had a few.”

  “It’s Christmas Eve, Noel.”

  “Not for me it isn’t. It’s just Friday night.”

  She sighed then wondered out loud what it would be like to have a houseful of girls. This was her standard whimsical remark whenever exasperated by Noel or Matt. Noel’s standard response was to put his arm around her and assure her it wasn’t nearly as interesting. He did this now.

  “I could do without the interesting,” she told him. “You’ve supplied enough interesting for two lifetimes.”

  They went into the den together and joined Ben, Roger, and Matt in front of A Christmas Eve Celebration broadcast live from Dodger Stadium. Noel hated the Dodgers almost as much as he hated Billy Graham, who was now rehashing the nativity. Flashbulbs strobed the stadium each time he raised his large liver-spotted hands or extended them eagle-armed. Noel could not decide what he hated most, that sweep of hair or that lantern jaw or those quarterback hands. His hate was by no means confined to Billy Graham but spun outward upon Billy’s followers with their eagerness to applaud and pray on cue, their steepled hands and trembling
lips, their gullibility and suspected Dodger loyalty. Roger, his legs crossed womanishly, leaned forward and shut his eyes whenever Billy inaugurated a new prayer. After a while Noel winked at Matt and began to imitate Roger. This started Matt laughing. Roger opened his eyes. Noel quickly straightened his face and returned his attention to the TV, where Billy had settled into some serious lambasting of Bethlehem for its inhospitality. He further noted that, during the darkest hours of our history, the blight and sway of evil resides not only in the inner cities but in the smallest of towns. “Tiny Bethlehem,” he emphasized. “Tiny little Bethlehem.”

  Tiny Bethlehem, Noel mouthed, when suddenly he heard, or thought he heard, the word Poplarville.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Billy said, as if speaking directly to Noel. “Poplarville, Mississippi. Population two thousand. Where just last week the local authorities reported a series of arsons they attribute to devil worshipers, some of them suspected to be high school students.” Billy paused to allow a shudder to pass through the stadium. “Thousands of acres of national forest put to flame in demonic ceremonies. Afterwards the police found the woods littered with occult images—satanic symbols carved into tree trunks the same way teenage boys used to carve in the name of their best gal. No longer. Now, instead of prom dates and ice-cream sodas, we have Kiss concerts and cattle mutilations. We have hardworking farmers finding livestock with their throats slit and their bodies drained of blood. This is not New York City I’m talking about, people! No, not Transylvania! This is Poplarville, Mississippi, Hometown USA!”

  The red ignition behind Roger’s eyes put Noel in mind of bad flashbulb photos. The rest of the family was staring at Noel, but that was different, they were just curious and hoping Noel might be able to elaborate on what Billy was now calling the Poplarville Horror, but Roger’s red eyes—those same X-ray eyes he used to scour luggage at the airport—they peered directly into Noel’s soul and knew that he was the Poplarville Horror.

  Noel stood casually and walked toward the back porch but then stopped at the door he had just opened and turned to face Roger. Right then on the street in front of the house a car hit its brakes. A long screech tailed into silence. Noel smiled and unlocked his eyes from Roger’s and called out, “Hey, Ben, you want a cold one?”