Joyland (38 page)

You saved my life,” I said. “Now let’s make sure nothing happens to you
or
Mike because you did. Listen very carefully.”

She listened.

Six days later, Indian summer came back to Heaven’s Bay for a brief final fling. It was perfect weather for a noon meal at the end of the Ross boardwalk, only we couldn’t go there. Newsmen and photographers had it staked out. They could do that because, unlike the two acres surrounding the big green Victorian, the beach was public property. The story of how Annie had taken out Lane Hardy (known then and forever after as The Carny Killer) with one shot had gone nationwide.

Not that the stories were bad. Quite the opposite. The Wilmington paper had led with DAUGHTER OF EVANGELIST BUDDY ROSS BAGS CARNY KILLER. The
New York Post
was more succinct: HERO MOM! It helped that there were file photos from Annie’s salad days where she looked not just gorgeous but smoking hot.
Inside View,
the most popular of the supermarket tabloids back then, put out an extra edition. They had unearthed a photo of Annie at seventeen, taken after a shooting competition at Camp Perry. Clad in tight jeans, an NRA tee-shirt, and cowboy boots, she was standing with an antique Purdey shotgun broken over one arm and holding up a blue ribbon in her free hand. Next to the smiling girl was a mug-shot of Lane Hardy at twenty-one, after an arrest in San Diego—under his real name, which was Leonard Hopgood—for indecent exposure. The two pix made a terrific contrast. The headline: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.

Being a minor hero myself, I got some mention in the North Carolina papers, but in the tabloids I was hardly mentioned. Not sexy enough, I guess.

Mike thought having a HERO MOM was cool. Annie loathed the whole circus and couldn’t wait for the press to move on to the next big thing. She’d gotten all the newspaper coverage she wanted in the days when she had been the holy man’s wild child, famous for dancing on the bars in various Greenwich Village dives. So she gave no interviews, and we had our farewell picnic in the kitchen. There were actually five of us, because Milo was under the table, hoping for scraps, and Jesus—on the face of Mike’s kite—was propped in the extra chair.

Their bags were in the hall. When the meal was done, I would drive them to Wilmington International. A private jet, laid on by Buddy Ross Ministries, Inc., would fly them back to Chicago and out of my life. The Heaven’s Bay police department (not to mention the North Carolina State Police and maybe even the FBI) would undoubtedly have more questions for her, and she’d probably be back at some point to testify before a grand jury, but she’d be fine. She was the HERO MOM, and thanks to that promotional pen from Kroger’s in the back of the van’s glove compartment, there would never be a photo of Mike in the
Post
below a headline reading PSYCHIC SAVIOR!

Our story was simple, and Mike played no part in it. I had gotten interested in the murder of Linda Gray because of the legend that her ghost haunted the Joyland funhouse. I had enlisted the help of my research-minded friend and summer co-worker, Erin Cook. The photographs of Linda Gray and her killer had reminded me of someone, but it wasn’t until after Mike’s day at Joyland that the penny dropped. Before I could call the police, Lane Hardy had called me, threatening to kill Annie and Mike if I didn’t come to Joyland on the double. So much truth, and only one little lie: I had Annie’s phone number so I could call her if plans for Mike’s visit to the park changed. (I produced the card for the lead detective, who barely glanced at it.) I said I called Annie from Mrs. Shoplaw’s before leaving for Joyland, telling her to lock her doors, call the cops, and stay put. She
did
lock the doors, but didn’t stay put. Nor did she call the police. She was terrified that if Hardy saw blue flashing lights, he’d kill me. So she’d taken one of the guns from the safe and followed Lane with her headlights off, hoping to surprise him. Which she did. Thus, HERO MOM.

“How’s your father taking all this, Dev?” Annie asked.

“Aside from saying he’d come to Chicago and wash your cars for life, if you wanted?” She laughed, but my father had actually said that. “He’s fine. I’m heading back to New Hampshire next month. We’ll have Thanksgiving together. Fred asked me to stay on until then, help him get the park buttoned up, and I agreed. I can still use the money.”

“For school?”

“Yeah. I guess I’ll go back for the spring semester. Dad’s sending me an application.”

“Good. That’s where you need to be, not painting rides and replacing lightbulbs in an amusement park.”

“You’ll really come to see us in Chicago, right?” Mike asked. “Before I get too sick?”

Annie stirred uneasily, but said nothing.

“I have to,” I said, and pointed to the kite. “How else am I going to return that? You said it was just a loan.”

“Maybe you’ll get to meet my grandpa. Other than being crazy about Jesus, he’s pretty cool.” He gave his mother a sideways glance. “I think so, anyway. He’s got this great electric train set in his basement.”

I said, “Your grandfather may not want to see me, Mike. I almost got your mother in a whole peck of trouble.”

“He’ll know you didn’t mean to. It wasn’t your fault that you worked with that guy.” Mike’s face grew troubled. He put down his sandwich, picked up a napkin, and coughed into it. “Mr. Hardy seemed really nice. He took us on the rides.”

A lot of girls thought he was really nice, too,
I thought. “You never had a . . . a vibe about him?”

Mike shook his head and coughed some more. “No. I liked him. And I thought he liked me.”

I thought of Lane on the Carolina Spin, calling Mike a crippled brat.

Annie put a hand on Mike’s wand of a neck and said, “Some people hide their real faces, hon. Sometimes you can tell when they’re wearing masks, but not always. Even people with powerful intuitions can get fooled.”

I had come for lunch, and to take them to the airport, and to say goodbye, but I had another reason, as well. “I want to ask you something, Mike. It’s about the ghost who woke you up and told you I was in trouble at the park. Is that okay? Will it upset you?”

“No, but it’s not like on TV. There wasn’t any white see-through thing floating around and going
whooo-ooo.
I just woke up . . . and the ghost was there. Sitting on my bed like a real person.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk about this,” Annie said. “Maybe it’s not upsetting him, but it’s sure as hell upsetting me.”

“I just have one more question, and then I’ll let it go.”

“Fine.” She began to clear the table.

Tuesday we had taken Mike to Joyland. Not long after midnight on Wednesday morning, Annie had shot Lane Hardy on the Carolina Spin, ending his life and saving mine. The next day had been taken up by police interviews and dodging reporters. Then, on Thursday afternoon, Fred Dean had come to see me, and his visit had nothing to do with Lane Hardy’s death.

Except I thought it did.

“Here’s what I want to know, Mike. Was it the girl from the funhouse? Was she the one who came and sat on your bed?”

Mike’s eyes went wide. “Gosh, no! She’s gone. When they go, I don’t think they ever come back. It was a
guy.
”

In 1991, shortly after his sixty-third birthday, my father suffered a fairly serious heart attack. He spent a week in Portsmouth General Hospital and was then sent home, with stern warnings about watching his diet, losing twenty pounds, and cutting out the evening cigar. He was one of those rare fellows who actually followed the doctor’s orders, and at this writing he’s eighty-five and, except for a bad hip and dimming eyesight, still good to go.

In 1973, things were different. According to my new research assistant (Google Chrome), the average stay back then was two weeks—the first in ICU, the second on the Cardiac Recovery floor. Eddie Parks must have done okay in ICU, because while Mike was touring Joyland on that Tuesday, Eddie was being moved downstairs. That was when he had the second heart attack. He died in the elevator.

“What did he say to you?” I asked Mike.

“That I had to wake up my mom and make her go to the park right away, or a bad man was going to kill you.”

Had this warning come while I was still on the phone with Lane, in Mrs. Shoplaw’s parlor? It couldn’t have come much later, or Annie wouldn’t have made it in time. I asked, but Mike didn’t know. As soon as the ghost went—that was the word Mike used; it didn’t disappear, didn’t walk out the door or use the window, it just
went
—he had thumbed the intercom beside his bed. When Annie answered his buzz, he’d started screaming.

“That’s enough,” Annie said, in a tone that brooked no refusal. She was standing by the sink with her hands on her hips.

“I don’t mind, Mom.”
Cough-cough.
“Really.”
Cough-cough-cough.

“She’s right,” I said. “It’s enough.”

Did Eddie appear to Mike because I saved the bad-tempered old geezer’s life? It’s hard to know anything about the motivations of those who’ve Gone On (Rozzie’s phrase, the caps always implied by lifted and upturned palms), but I doubt it. His reprieve only lasted a week, after all, and he sure didn’t spend those last few days in the Caribbean, being waited on by topless honeys. But . . .

I had come to visit him, and except maybe for Fred Dean, I was the only one who did. I even brought him a picture of his ex-wife. Sure, he’d called her a miserable scolding backbiting cunt, and maybe she was, but at least I’d made the effort. In the end, so had he. For whatever reason.

As we drove to the airport, Mike leaned forward from the back seat and said, “You want to know something funny, Dev? He never once called you by name. He just called you the kiddo. I guess he figured I’d know who he meant.”

I guessed so, too.

Eddie fucking Parks.

Those are things that happened once upon a time and long ago, in a magical year when oil sold for eleven dollars a barrel. The year I got my damn heart broke. The year I lost my virginity. The year I saved a nice little girl from choking and a fairly nasty old man from dying of a heart attack (the first one, at least). The year a madman almost killed me on a Ferris wheel. The year I wanted to see a ghost and didn’t . . . although I guess at least one of them saw me. That was also the year I learned to talk a secret language, and how to dance the Hokey Pokey in a dog costume. The year I discovered that there are worse things than losing the girl.

The year I was twenty-one, and still a greenie.

The world has given me a good life since then, I won’t deny it, but sometimes I hate the world, anyway. Dick Cheney, that apologist for waterboarding and for too long chief preacher in the Holy Church of Whatever It Takes, got a brand-new heart while I was writing this—how about that? He lives on; other people have died. Talented ones like Clarence Clemons. Smart ones like Steve Jobs. Decent ones like my old friend Tom Kennedy. Mostly you get used to it. You pretty much have to. As W. H. Auden pointed out, the Reaper takes the rolling in money, the screamingly funny, and those who are very well hung. But that isn’t where Auden starts his list. He starts with the innocent young.

Which brings us to Mike.