Finally, I blew out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding and said, “You’re wrong, Rebecca. You both are.”
“Oh, come on, Elliot. Even when he’s not around, what do we talk about when we talk about Ash? His vests, and his inability to land a life-partner, and his refusal or whatever it is to hold ajob, and the crazy situations he seems to wind up in without even trying, and—”
“There’s a difference between enjoying and mocking.”
That stopped her, and even unlocked her, a little. At least she re-cocked her head so it was facing me. “You enjoy us too much,” she said, and followed Ash.
I was angry, then, and I didn’t go after them immediately. I watched Rebecca approach Ash, stand close to him. They were at the back of the space, now, both seeming to lean forward into the towering white curtain, almost pressing their ears against it. Briefly, it occured to me to wonder where the blonde kids had gone. Fifteen feet or so to my left, the attendant shifted, stared at me, and the change-dispenser rattled against his waist. I started forward, got within five steps of my wife and my oldest friend, and became aware, at last, of the new sounds.
Actually, the sounds had been there all along, I think. I’d just assumed that the murmuring was coming from the ocean, the bursts of rhythmic clatter from the arcade machines. But they originated on the other side of this curtain. For the second time, I thought of the Wizard of Oz crouched in his cubicle, furiously pulling levers to make the world magical and terrible. More magical and terrible than tornadoes and red shoes in green grass and dead or disappearing loved ones and home had already made it.
Ash glanced over his shoulder at me. I stepped forward, uncertainly, and stood behind him. Reaching out slowly, he brushed the curtain with his fingers, causing barely a stir in the heavy material.
“Crawl under?” he muttered. “Just push through?”
He bent to lift the curtain’s skirt, and my wife turned briefly toward me, so that I caught just a glimpse of her face. Her lips had gone completely flat, and all trace of color had leached out of her cheeks.
“You know what’s back there, don’t you?” I said, as the attendant rattled closer, and Ash disappeared under the curtain.
“It’s why we’re here,” said my wife, and followed him.
What struck me first as I struggled through the curtain and shrugged it off was the motion. Even before I made sense of what I was seeing, the whole space seemed to tilt, as though we’d stepped onto some sort of colorful, rotating platform. The color came courtesy of a red neon sign that hissed and spat blue sparks into the air. The sign was nailed to a wooden pillar that had been driven through the planking of the pier right beside where we emerged. I didn’t even process what it said for a few seconds, and when I did, the words meant nothing to me, anyway.
LITE YOUR LINE LITE YOURS
“Change?” murmured a voice, right in front of me, and I jerked back further still, bumping against the curtain and feelings its weight on my back.
The girl who’d spoken couldn’t have been out of her teens. Her skin glowed translucent red in the tinted neon like sea-glass. Her eyes were brown and bright, her lips full but colorless and expressionless. Her brown hair swept up off her scalp and arced in a slow inward curl to her shoulders, but where it brushed her black turtleneck, the tips had turned white, like a breaking wave upside down.
Before I could say anything, she was floating away, the smoothness of her movements terrifying until I realized she was on rollerskates. Her wheels made bumping sounds between the planks.
“Hi, Dad,” Rebecca whispered, shoulders rigid, arms tucked tight to her sides, and I shuddered, my eyes flying around the space.
Mostly, what I saw were machines. Ten stubby, silver pinball tables jammed together end to end at awkward, irregular angles like dodge-em cars between rides. Hunched in identical poses over the glass tabletops were the players, and none of them looked up. They just kept pulling what I assumed were the ball-release levers and then pushing and patting at the flipper controls on the sides. Straight across the space from us, his ass to the drapery that hung from the magician’s hat and divided this space from the night and the open ocean, a fifty-ish, red-haired guy with tufts of wiry beard sprouting from the cracks in his craggy face like weeds through pavement bent almost perpendicular over his machine, whispering to it as his fingers pummeled the buttons. I could just see the ripped, faded American flag design on his T-shirt when he rocked back to jack another ball into play.
“Oh my God, Rebecca. That isn’t—”
“Huh?” she said, still rigid.
Of course it wasn’t really her father, I realized. I’d seen pictures. And anyway, she wasn’t looking at the red-headed man, or any of the other players. She was watching the electric board that hung, like the LITE YOUR LINE LITE YOURS sign, on another wooden pillar across the space from us. It was flashing the numbers 012839. Every few seconds, the numbers blinked.
Abruptly, a bell dinged, and the display on the electric board changed. #5, it read now. And then, CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’RE LITER! Then bumping sounds as the rollerskate girl swept the room, removing quarters from atop each player’s machine, and dropping a single red poker chip at the feet of the red-haired man.
“Change?” she said to us, gliding past without looking or stopping, and abruptly Ash was out amongst them, assuming a place at a table kitty-corner to the American flag man’s. On the board, a new number flashed. 081034. The lever jerking and button tapping resumed in earnest. American flag man never even looked up.
I watched Ash glance at the numbers board, down into his machine, across to American flag man. Then he was pulling his own lever, nodding. There were now five players: two stick-thin older women in matching bright red poodle-skirts, twin sets, and bobby socks, who might have been sisters; a kid in skater shorts with some kind of heavy metal music erupting from the sides of his headphones, as though everything inside his head were kicking and screaming to get out of there; American flag man; and Ash.
“What planet is this?” I murmured, and a bell dinged, and the rollerskate girl circled the room once more while Ash rocked back and laughed and dropped another quarter on his machine-top for the girl to collect.
Closing her eyes, Rebecca surprised me by taking my hand. Then she leaned in and kissed my cheek. “This is where he came. Before he walked out. It’s been just like this for . . . God.” She shuddered. “He’d put us on the merry-go-round, and he’d come in here, and he’d spend his hours. One quarter at a time. Most days, he wouldn’t even take us home. My mom had to come get us.”
Another ding, and the kid in the skater shorts flipped his hands in the air and moonwalked a few steps to his right, then back to his machine to pop a quarter in place just as the rollergirl passed and dropped a red chip at his feet. One of the women in the poodle skirts laughed. The laugh sounded gentler than I expected, somehow. The board flashed, and a new round began.
“Ever played?” I said, holding my wife’s hand, but not too tight. Whatever tension there had been before between the three of us tonight, it was fading, I thought. Around us, the canvas outer draping undulated in slow motion as the sea breeze pushed against and through it. There was another winner, another burst of quiet laughter from somewhere as some lucky soul got liter, another new number flashing. One more sad-magic night with Ash and Rebecca, so long after the last one that I’d forgotten how it felt.
A good while after I’d asked, Rebecca sighed and leaned her head against me. “I miss our daughter,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“Should we call?”
“She’s alright.”
“Look at him,” Rebecca said, and we did, together.
He was bent almost as far over his machine as the red-headed man, now, and when he played, the lights inside it and the red neon from the LITE YOURS sign reflected off his skull, and his vest beat and twitched with the rhythm of his movements, as though we were looking straight through his skin at the mecha
nisms that ran him.
“Poor Ash,” I murmured, though I wasn’t sure why I felt that way, and suspected he’d be furious if he heard me say it.
“I’ll bet you a bag of Patriot Popcorn I can win before he does,” said Rebecca, and she straightened and let go of my hand.
I thought of the fisherman on the empty pier behind us with the ray dying in his lap, the gaggle of beggars, and beyond them, the too-bright streets of downtown Long Beach. “And where will we find Patriot Popcorn, wife of mine, now that the Gap has come?”
“I think I know a place.”
“I bet you do,” I said, and let her go. On every side of us, at all times, at least one person was laughing.
“Change?” said the rollergirl, gliding past, but she executed a perfect stop even before Rebecca got her hand to her pocket. She took my wife’s dollar, nodded. Her turtleneck clung tight to her, and there were tiny beads of sweat along the mouth of it like a string of transparent pearls. The tingle that sizzled through me then was more charged than any I’d felt since adolescence but sadder and therefore sexier still, and I had to bend over until it passed. Whether it was for my wife, the rollergirl, or just the evening, I had no idea.
When I next looked up, Rebecca and Ash were side by side, both bent over their individual metal machines, fingers pushing and pumping while the lights on the metal board flashed and the rollergirl rolled and the ocean breathed, in and out. Not wanting to distract them – and also, for some reason, not wanting to play – I stepped just close enough to see how the game worked.
Inside each machine was a ball chute and a simple, inclined wooden playing board, with metallic mushrooms sprouting out of the center and impeding or – if you were skilled enough – directing the path of the ball. Across the top of the playing board were ball-sized holes numbered one to ten in plain black lettering. The object was to sink one ball in each of the holes corresponding with the flashing numbers on the big board. When you dropped a ball in the correct hole, your machine dinged and the number lit up. First person to light up every required number got a visit from the rollergirl and a red chip dropped at his or her feet as the quarter antes were collected for the next round. Then, with no pause, no stretch-break, no breath, the big board flashed again and the game resumed.
I settled into my spot between Rebecca and Ash, close enough to touch both but a step back. I was watching my wife’s frame rattle as she bounced up and down in her big black shoes, leaned left and then right, and I thought of the new, permanently puffy space on her stomach where her scar was, and where, she said, she could no longer feel anything, which for some reason always made me want to put my hand there. To feel the dead space, where the life inside her had been. I watched her watch Ash between games, heard her gleeful-competitive murmurs.
“Feel that, Ash? That would be my breath on your neck. That’s me passing you by. Again.”
Ash kept shaking his head, staring into his machine and seeming to drag it closer to him with those outsized, outstretched arms. “Not this time,” he kept saying. “Not tonight.”
And I found that I knew – that I’d always known – that Rebecca was in love with him, too. That I was merely the post she and Ash circled, eyeing one another from either side of me but never getting closer than they already were. The knowledge felt strange, heavy in my chest, horrible but also old. As though I hadn’t discovered but remembered it. Also, I knew she loved me, in the permanent way she’d loved her mother, who she’d stayed with, after all. Not that she’d had a choice.
In the back, the man in the flag shirt lit his line, closed his eyes, and slapped the sides of his machine with the heels of his palms. Then the kid in the headphones won again, did his dance. Occasionally, one of the poodle-skirt women won, but mostly they didn’t, and their laughs punctuated each round, regardless. Rebecca bobbed, swore, taunted Ash. Ash leaned over further, grim-faced, muttering, the machine bumping and dinging against him, almost attached to him now like an iron lung. Between and amongst them, the rollergirl skated, collecting quarters, strewing victory chips. At one point, tears developed in my eyes, and I wiped them away fast and thought of the perpetual sprinkles of dried milk that dotted the corners of my daughter’s lips like fairy dust. The stuff that brought her to life.
It was the poker chips, I think, that finally alerted me to how long we’d been standing there. My eyes kept following the rollergirl on her sweeps, tracing her long fingers on their circumscribed, perfectly circular path from machine-top to black change-purse at her waist, white tips of her hair barely caressing the slope of her shoulders. And at last my gaze followed one of those chips as it fell to the floor amidst maybe a thousand others strewn around the ankles of the flag-shirt man like rose petals after a rainstorm.
My head jerked as though I’d been slapped.
“Change?” the rollergirl said as she breezed past me on her path through the players. Had she said that to me every time? Had I answered? And where was the music coming from? I could hear it, faintly. I was moving to it, a little. So was Ash. A gently bouncing fairground whirl, from an organ somewhere not too near. Under the dock? On shore?
Inside me? Because I appeared to be singing it. Sort of. Breathing it, so it was barely audible. We all were, I thought. It was everywhere, floating in the air of this makeshift room like a sea breeze trapped when the curtains dropped. Dazed, I watched Rebecca fish ten dollars out of her jeans pocket without looking up. The rollergirl took it and stood a bankroll of quarters, wrapped tight in red paper like a stick of dynamite, on the rim of Rebecca’s machine. Both of them humming.
“Rebecca?” I said, then said it again, because my voice sounded funny, slurred and slow, as though I were speaking under water.
“Just a sec,” she told me.
“Rebecca, come on.”
“Might as well,” Ash murmured. “I’m almost there. No hope for you.”
My wife glanced up – slowly, smoothly – and caught my eye. “Hear that? You’d think he’d beaten me all his life. Or ever. At anything.”
“I think we should go,” I said, as Rebecca’s head sank down over the metal tabletop again and her hands drifted to the ball-lever and buttons. I said it again, and my words got tangled up in that tune, and I was almost singing them, and then I smashed my jaws together so hard I felt my two top front teeth pop in their sockets. “Rebecca,” I snapped.
And just like that, as though I’d doused her with ice water, my wife shivered upright, and there were shudders rippling all the way down her body. Her skin seemed to have come loose. I could almost see it billowing around her. Then she was weeping. “Fuck him, Elliot,” she said. “Oh, fuck him so fucking much. God, I miss my mom.”
For one moment more, I stood paralyzed, this time by the sight of my weeping wife, though I could feel that tune bubbling up again in the back of my mouth, as though my insides were boiling, threatening to stream out of me like steam. Finally, Rebecca’s fingers found mine. They felt reassuringly bony and hard. Familiar.
“Let’s go,” she whispered, still weeping.
“Come on come on come on Yah? Ash screeched, started to hurl his arms over his head and stopped, scowling as the board flashed the number of the winner and the American flag man closed his eyes and popped the sides of his machine with his palms once more. “I had it,” said Ash, already hunching forward. “I really thought I had it.”
“Time to go, bud,” I told him, pushing my fingers against Rebecca’s so both of us could feel the joints grinding together. She was still shuddering, head down, and the rollergirl glided up and swept a new quarter from Ash’s machine and reached for the top one on Rebecca’s stack and Rebecca swatted the whole roll to the floor. The rollergirl didn’t look up or break her hum as she passed.
“Right now,” Rebecca said, looking up, letting the tears stream down. “It’s got to be now, Elliot.”
“Come on, Ash,” I said. “Let’s go get tapas.”
“What are you talking about?” he said, and the big
board flashed, and he was playing again. The kid in the headphones won in a matter of seconds.
“Ash. We need to leave.”
“Almost there,” he said. “Don’t you want to see what you win?”
“Elliot,” Rebecca said, voice tight, fingers like talons ripping at my wrist.
“Ash, come—”
“Elliot. Run.” She was staring up into the magician’s hat, then at the American flag man, who didn’t stare back, hadn’t ever seemed to notice we were there.
Another number on the board, another flurry of fingers and rattle of pinballs, another burst of laughter from the poodle-skirt women. Then we were gone, Rebecca yanking me behind her like a puppy on leash. Low humming sounds streamed from our mouths as we struggled through the white curtain and just kept going.
“Hey,” I said, trying to shake her fingers just a little looser on my arm, but she didn’t let go until we were through the outer canvas, standing in the biting air on the wet and rotting dock. Instantly, the tune was gone from my mouth and ears, as though someone had snapped shut the lid of a music box. I found myself trying to remember it, and was seized, suddenly, by a grief so all-engulfing I could barely breathe, and didn’t want to. Tears exploded onto my cheeks.
Rebecca stirred, let go of my arm, but turned to me. “Oh,” she said, reached up, stuck her finger in one of my teardrops and traced it all over my cheek, as though finger-painting with it.
“I don’t know why,” I said, and I didn’t. Butithad nothing to do with Ash, or Ash and Rebecca, or Rebecca’s dead mother, or our strange, loving, incomplete marriage. It had to do with our daughter. So new to the world.
“Come on,” she said.
“What about our friend in there?”
“He’ll follow.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
The Mammoth Book of Terror Page 49
