Rides of the Midway

by Lee Durkee

  “That’s another one, Clyde,” O’Cochran informed him. “That makes thirty-five sightings total, so far. Twice last week’s record.”

  Clyde poured himself a mug of coffee then moved to the window and raised the blinds. Staring up at the blue sky, he whispered, “Make that thirty-six.”

  “Great God, no! Not you too, Clyde?”

  Clyde continued staring up and out the window. Finally he replied, “Early this morning, right after you called me outa bed. It just about blew my car off Duck Pond Road. All these little windows going around it and shaped just like one of those Mexican hats. It wasn’t very big either, couldn’ta been holding more’n a couple of ’em inside. My engine died and I just sat there in the middle of the road watching it disappear.”

  “Well, I heard it all,” O’Cochran muttered resentfully, letting the phone ring beneath his hand. “Now I heard it all.”

  “Maybe the world is coming to an end. Maybe it’s time to get right with the Lord.”

  O’Cochran frowned and asked, “You right with the Lord there, Taylor?” But Taylor was busy on the phone. O’Cochran shook his head and smiled at Noel next. “What about you, son? You right with the Lord?”

  Still standing, Noel cleared his throat and asked for a lawyer.

  “Son, before we do that, I think we agreed I was gonna ask you a question this morning.”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “That your answer?”

  “Yes sir. I want a lawyer.”

  “You don’t need one, son. You free to go.”

  Spinning his chair around to face Taylor, who was still on the phone, O’Cochran stated, “In light of new information, we’re being so kind as to suspend all charges until further review.” He picked up the plastic bag that held Noel’s belongings and tossed it over the desk to Noel.

  “What kind of information?” Noel asked after a moment.

  Again O’Cochran studied the young officer, this time with outright disapproval, and while doing so he explained, “You need to call home, Noel. There’s been a dread development.”

  “A what—?”

  “A death in the family, I’m afraid. That all-star brother of yours, he was in a car wreck late last night.”

  “Matt’s dead?”

  “I’m afraid so. Your RA called us a few minutes ago.”

  He shoved the phone to the front of the desk and said dial nine to get out.

  Noel dialed nine and then the number.

  Matt answered the phone before it even rang.

  This astonished them both.

  Matt shouted, “Hell, Noel, I’as just picking up the phone to call you!” and Noel shouted, “I thought you was dead!”

  Matt, though by all counts alive, sounded enormously drunk, especially for seven a.m.

  “We been calling you since yesterday, Noel. Wherea’hell you been at?”

  “Jail.”

  “Jail!”

  “Matt, what’s going on? I don’t understand, they told me you were dead.”

  It occurred to Noel that if nobody was dead, then he might be going back to jail.

  Matt had started coughing. He coughed so hard that after a minute of it he set down the receiver. Noel waited. Finally Matt’s voice returned. “I thought I was gonna—” But the coughing erupted again. This time, instead of setting the phone down, Matt hung it up. Noel had to redial the number. Matt picked it up on the third ring. He was still coughing.

  “Matt, let me speak to Ben, okay?”

  “Noel, that you? I was just about to call you. Man, we been searching for you since . . . where’a hell you been?”

  “Listen, Matt. This is important. Put Ben on the phone, okay? Wait! Don’t set the phone down. Matt, do me a favor, please, I want you to tell me, real slow, take a deep breath, then tell me what’s going on.”

  It took some deciphering, but what Matt seemed to be saying, between jarred hiccups that backtracked his sentences, was that Ben had been killed last night in a one-car wreck.

  “We been calling you ever since, Noel. Where you been at?”

  “Matt, you sure it’s Ben that’s dead?”

  “He’s dead, Noel. I swear he is.”

  “I believe you,” Noel said. “Matt, I gotta hang up now. I’m on my way home. Tell Mom I’m on my way.”

  As soon as he hung up, the phone rang again. O’Cochran pointed his pencil at the neighboring desk and said, “Taylor here’ll give you a lift back to school. It ain’t your brother plays ball?”

  “No sir. It’s my younger one.”

  He nodded and said, “Taylor, get the boy started home.”

  •••

  “Back seat,” Taylor ordered and did not say another word until, parked outside of Huff, he twisted around to face Noel through the wire cage. “Just for the record, all that stuff yesterday, that was a big acting job. You understand?”

  Throughout the drive Noel had studied a pockmark in the window to his left. Now he reached up and tried to rub it, but the mark was on the outside of the glass.

  Taylor continued, “I want you to understand this. That stuff we planted on you, we was never gonna charge you with that. That woulda been wrong. We were just trying to get information outa you. You understand?”

  Noel nodded vaguely. He had just noticed his Mustang in the lot. The angle of the sun made it appear the headlights had been left on.

  “We wanted to find out your source. To scare you into telling us. That’s our job. We didn’t do nothing wrong. Besides, you had it coming.”

  While Taylor waited for a response, Noel placed a hand on the door rest, fitting two fingers inside the hollow where the ashtray had been removed. His other hand was still holding the plastic bag.

  “Good cop, bad cop. It’s a trick. A technique. Look—never mind that—here’s what I want you to remember. Listen up.” He swatted the cage. “Hey, you listening? What’d I just say?”

  “Good cop bad cop.”

  “Okay. Now here’s the part I want you to remember. See, I was just doing my job yesterday, being the good cop. I’m not your buddy. I guess I’m sorry your brother’s dead and all, but what I really want you to understand is that personally you make me sick.”

  Noel let his focus drift upward until he found the Bud-man sticker pasted onto his dorm-room window. He had the feeling that he was still up there, incredibly stoned, spying down at himself inside the police cruiser.

  “What’d I just say?”

  “You’re sorry my brother’s dead.”

  “What else?”

  “I make you sick.”

  “Good. Now get out.”

  The locks on both back doors sprang up. This startled Noel, then he got out and started walking toward the dorm. He knew he had to pack before leaving. He knew he wasn’t coming back here ever.

  “And close the door!”

  Noel stopped walking. He went back and shut the door. Taylor was rolling up the front window. As he did this, the sunlit glass dissolved Taylor’s face and replaced it with Noel’s.

  He remained standing in the parking lot a long time after the police cruiser had driven off. As seen from behind the Bud-man sticker, Noel appeared to be leaning forward as if trying to recognize the invisible driver of an invisible car.

  •••

  An ambulance was parked in the middle of the front yard, its red light rotating almost imperceptibly in the bright sunlight. Cars lined both sides of the street and filled the driveway and most of the front yard. Noel had to park along the side of the house. Before going inside—he did not want to go inside—he took out the yellow stationery and read it one last time. There was no letter from Lily, no explanation for anything. It was just some quote that made no sense to him. It said:

  Do not speak t
o me of the wickedness of the world and all its sins. Deplore that you still see wickedness at all. Deplore that you see sin everywhere you look. If you want to help the world do not condemn it. Do not weaken it more. For what are sin and misery but results of weakness? The world is made weaker and weaker every day by such teachings. Men are taught from childhood that they are weak and sinful. Teach them instead that they are all wonderful children of immortality, even those of us who are trapped in its weakest manifestations.

  The poet/saint Vivekananda

  Noel crumpled up the letter and was once again staring at the spinning red light atop the ambulance when suddenly the front door to the house burst opened and two medics emerged from inside carrying Matt between them on a gurney.

  At first Noel did not recognize his own brother. Matt’s Irish features appeared too delicate and pale, angelic almost, as if in death he had found some inner serenity that had evaded him in life. But this serenity proved short-lived. Halfway across the yard Matt sat bolt upright on the gurney. Like a king on a litter. The medic behind Matt, a stocky blond man sporting a General Custer mustache, made to push Matt down and strap him to the gurney, but Matt seized the medic’s arm and sank his teeth into the underside of the wrist. Together they tumbled onto the lawn, the gurney flipping over on top of them.

  Matt came up first and had stabbed the steel toe of his boot three times into the medic’s rib cage before the second medic caught Matt from behind in a full nelson and slowly bent him forward into the grass. This second medic was large and his arms were thick with black hair. He continued to hold Matt’s face down in the grass. They were like a statue there.

  Noel was content to watch, he did not want to fight, and anyway that should have been the end of it . . . but, no, General Custer climbed to his feet and while holding his ribs he walked over and delivered a kick to Matt’s tailbone that knocked Matt over onto the ground. There was grass in Matt’s mouth.

  And suddenly Noel felt solid again. He shoved the crumpled note into his pocket, got outside, took a good running start, and blindsided Custer, spearing him in the back and also catching both of his arms. Next he planted the sole of his right boot into the medic’s spine and pushed him away from his own hands. When the medic screamed, Noel applied even more torque then released Custer, who shot forward and sprawled facefirst into the red cross on the side of the ambulance. As he sagged to the grass, the burly medic started backing away from Noel and yelling to his partner, “Get up! Get inside! They’re damn crazy!”

  The ambulance worked its way between the parked cars, then, as soon as it hit pavement, it peeled out and began to fishtail down the street. The driver blared the siren then shot the bird out the window. The ambulance topped the hill and disappeared, but for the next ten minutes its siren kept threading off, then welling up again, as if the medics were circling the block, planning a final assault.

  The peace after a fight is a peace nonetheless. You notice things. The life force of a pair of boots. The geometry of hubcaps. Sitting on the grass, Matt drew his legs inward and hunched forward over a wrinkled cigarette, which he attempted to salvage by smoothing between his fingers. He kept shaking his head as if someone were administering smelling salts. A thin red mustache lined his upper lip. It looked like something a kid might get from drinking Kool-Aid. Noel squatted beside his brother and made a flute with a blade of grass held between his thumbs. After blowing into it a few times, he said, “Saved your ass again, huh, bro?”

  Matt frowned then lit the wrinkled cigarette.

  “Shit,” he said ruefully. A moment later he added, “Regular bunch of Florence Nightingales.”

  Noel listened to the siren. Their relatives were still crowding the front doorway, and their mom had started across the lawn toward them. She was walking too slowly, though. Matt lowered his voice to explain that Doc Martin had left a whole bottle of tranquilizers for Roger.

  “These little bitty white pills. But Rog wouldn’t take them. So I took them.” He made a wrenching sound then spat. “Nothing happened. So I took more. Last thing I remember . . . hey, did we talk on the phone?”

  Noel patted him on the back and shushed him and said, “Mom’s coming.” Then he stood and hugged her. Someone else must have put on her makeup for her. Her eyes shone glassy and swollen, and her hands moved with a thickness, an absentness. She was wearing a plain black dress that made her skin look very pale. Her dark hair was pulled back tightly and it was streaked with white strands. When she had finished hugging Noel and describing how sad she was and how badly Roger was taking it all, she turned to Matt and said, “Hon, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t wake you up. I found these sleeping pills next to your bed.” She shook the bottle to prove it was empty. “And I thought I’d lost you too. I thought I’d lost you both.” Her whole body trembled then, but instead of crying she reinforced her smile and stared down the street, as if confused at the sight of all these cars.

  “Sleeping pills!” Matt said. “Those were damn sleeping pills?”

  “What did you think they were, hon?”

  This information seemed to help Matt arrive at a strategy because suddenly he bowed forward onto all fours and while crawfishing backward he began to vomit in a straight line onto the lawn. Alise plucked grass from his hair as he did this. She warned Noel, “Don’t pay any attention to Roger today. He’s delirious. But don’t turn your back on him either.”

  Then she resumed her long sleepwalk back across the lawn and into the house.

  “Jesus,” Noel said. “What they got her on?”

  Matt ignored the question and fished his lit cigarette out of the grass and blew the mowing off of it.

  “Shit,” he mused. “Ain’t this just like us.”

  Eventually they had to go inside. Roaming Baptist women were dousing the house with pie plates and casserole dishes. Male relatives Noel had thought long dead now stood propped inside every corner. The two brothers silenced each room they entered, Noel with his arm around Matt, guiding him. Only the kitchen had been posted off limits to the relatives. Quarantined by grief, Roger sat alone at the breakfast table, staring straight ahead, as if watching a very sad movie projected onto the refrigerator door. Noel helped Matt into a chair, then sat across from Roger, blocking his view of the refrigerator, and that stirred Roger awake. With deep sincerity, and even a logic, he focused on Noel and then asked, “Why not you, for that matter?”

  “Hush! Don’t pay him any mind. The doctor had to give him a shot. When he wasn’t looking. Like you do a child.”

  Alise began thumping through the cabinets, as if this were a stranger’s kitchen. Eventually she placed an apple pie on the table in front of Noel. An index card folded lengthwise was trapped under the cellophane. Noel’s name was written across the card in purple ink.

  “A pretty girl brought this by for you. She seemed disappointed you weren’t here.”

  Noel opened the card, which said: Noel, I am so sorry about your brother. I didn’t know him but everyone says what a saint he was. Call me if you need someone to talk to. Love, Amber Smith. ps: I’ve never baked a pie before it’s probably awful.

  His mother asked who was Amber Smith.

  “Just some girl I used to date.”

  “Pretty. Skinny. But pretty.”

  She cut three ragged slices out of the pie with a butter knife. Neither Roger nor Matt touched theirs. Noel gulped down his portion and when he had finished, Alise scooped out some cold ham-and-cheese casserole onto his plate. Noel shoveled that down too, unaware of the look of disgust Roger had fixed upon him. Matt was experimenting with Noel’s magic eight-ball key ring. He clasped the eight ball prayerlike in his hands before peering inside at its answer.

  “Saw you on the news this morning,” Roger whispered dryly. Then he leaned forward to add, “No, she doesn’t know, but you can bet the whole rest of the town does by now.”

 
Noel started eating again, but he was still staring at Roger.

  Matt unclasped the eight ball and said, “Noel, it says here we should take a little ride. For our own safety.”

  He slung the keys across the table at Noel, who blocked them onto his plate.

  “You gonna eat those too?” Roger asked.

  Noel picked up the keys and started cleaning the cheese off them.

  “You better drive,” Matt said. “I’m still seeing double everything.”

  Alise asked, “Y’all are leaving already?”

  “Yeah,” Matt replied.

  “Well, change into your black suits first.”

  They went upstairs to change. Noel came back into the kitchen with his suit on, but Matt headed straight to the car. Alise was sitting across from Roger now. Noel walked up behind her chair and she reached backward around his neck and whispered in a voice not altogether gentle, “Take care of your brother today. He’s blaming himself. And remember, the service at the funeral home starts in two hours. I want y’all there on time.” Noel started to leave then, but she called his name and stopped him at the doorway. “Sober,” she added.

  Inside the car, Matt held out two pills, dull black and worn-looking. Noel asked what they were. Matt said, “I’ll tell you afterwards,” then gulped one down dry. Noel studied Matt’s face a moment before swallowing the other one.

  “Well?”

  “Cyanide.”

  “That ain’t funny, Matt.”

  “Wasn’t supposed to be funny. C’mon, hurry up, we ain’t got long to live. Closest one’s next to Pasquale’s now. Only it ain’t Pasquale’s no more.”

  “Closest what?”

  “Closest what-do-you-think.”

  At the first intersection Noel put the car in park and revved the engine.

  “I’m asking you nice, Matt.”

  Matt stopped fiddling with the broken air conditioner to reply, “I already told you. Rat poison.”

  Noel stuck his arm out the window and signaled the car behind them to go around.