Joyland

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.

I took a seedy off-campus apartment when I went back to school for the spring semester. One chilly night in late March, as I was cooking a stir-fry for myself and this girl I was just about crazy for, the phone rang. I answered it in my usual jokey way: "Wormwood Arms, Devin Jones, proprietor."

"Dev? It's Annie Ross."

"Annie! Wow! Hold on a second, just let me turn down the radio."

Jennifer--the girl I was just about crazy for--gave me an inquiring look. I shot her a wink and a smile and picked up the phone. "I'll be there two days after spring break starts, and you can tell him that's a promise. I'm going to buy my ticket next wee--"

"Dev. Stop. Stop."

I picked up on the dull sorrow in her voice and all my happiness at hearing from her collapsed into dread. I put my forehead against the wall and closed my eyes. What I really wanted to close was the ear with the phone pressed to it.

"Mike died last evening, Dev. He..." Her voice wavered, then steadied. "He spiked a fever two days ago, and the doctor said we ought to get him into the hospital. Just to be safe, he said. He seemed to be getting better yesterday. Coughing less. Sitting up and watching TV. Talking about some big basketball tournament. Then... last night..." She stopped. I could hear the rasp of her breath as she tried to get herself under control. I was also trying, but the tears had started. They were warm, almost hot.

"It was very sudden," she said. Then, so softly I could barely hear: "My heart is breaking."

There was a hand on my shoulder. Jennifer's. I covered it with my own. I wondered who was in Chicago to put a hand on Annie's shoulder.

"Is your father there?"

"On a crusade. In Phoenix. He's coming tomorrow."

"Your brothers?"

"George is here now. Phil's supposed to arrive on the last flight from Miami. George and I are at the...place. The place where they...I can't watch it happen. Even though it's what he wanted." She was crying hard now. I had no idea what she was talking about.

"Annie, what can I do? Anything. Anything at all."

She told me.

Let's end on a sunny day in April of 1974. Let's end on that short stretch of North Carolina beach that lies between the town of Heaven's Bay and Joyland, an amusement park that would close its doors two years later; the big parks finally drove it to bankruptcy in spite of all Fred Dean's and Brenda Rafferty's efforts to save it. Let's end with a pretty woman in faded jeans and a young man in a University of New Hampshire sweatshirt. The young man is holding something in one hand. Lying at the end of the boardwalk with his snout on one paw is a Jack Russell terrier who seems to have lost all his former bounce. On the picnic table, where the woman once served fruit smoothies, there's a ceramic urn. It looks sort of like a vase missing its bouquet. We're not quite ending where we began, but close enough.

Close enough.

"I'm on the outs with my

father again," Annie said, "and this time there's no grandson to hold us together. When he got back from his damn crusade and found out I'd had Mike cremated, he was furious." She smiled wanly. "If he hadn't stayed for that last goddam revival, he might have talked me out of it. Probably would have."

"But it's what Mike wanted."

"Strange request for a kid, isn't it? But yes, he was very clear. And we both know why."

Yes. We did. The last good time always comes, and when you see the darkness creeping toward you, you hold on to what was bright and good. You hold on for dear life.

"Did you even ask your dad...?"

"To come? Actually I did. It's what Mike would have wanted. Daddy refused to participate in what he called 'a pagan ceremony.' And I'm glad." She took my hand. "This is for us, Dev. Because we were here when he was happy."

I raised her hand to my lips, kissed it, gave it a brief squeeze, then let it go. "He saved my life as much as you did, you know. If he hadn't woken you up...if he'd even hesitated--"

"I know."

"Eddie couldn't have done anything for me without Mike. I don't see ghosts, or hear them. Mike was the medium."

"This is hard," she said. "Just...so hard to let him go. Even the little bit that's left."

"Are you sure you want to go through with it?"

"Yes. While I still can."

She took the urn from the picnic table. Milo raised his head to look at it, then lowered it back to his paw. I don't know if he understood Mike's remains were inside, but he knew Mike was gone, all right; that he knew damned well.

I held out the Jesus kite with the back to her. There, as per Mike's instructions, I had taped a small pocket, big enough to hold maybe half a cup of fine gray ash. I held it open while Annie tipped the urn. When the pocket was full, she planted the urn in the sand between her feet and held out her hands. I gave her the reel of twine and turned toward Joyland, where the Carolina Spin dominated the horizon.

I'm flying, he'd said that day, lifting his arms over his head. No braces to hold him down then, and none now. I believe that Mike was a lot wiser than his Christ-minded grandfather. Wiser than all of us, maybe. Was there ever a crippled kid who didn't want to fly, just once?

I looked at Annie. She nodded that she was ready. I lifted the kite and let it go. It rose at once on a brisk, chilly breeze off the ocean. We followed its ascent with our eyes.

"You," she said, and held out her hands. "This part is for you, Dev. He said so."

I took the twine, feeling the pull as the kite, now alive, rose above us, nodding back and forth against the blue. Annie picked up the urn and carried it down the sandy slope. I guess she dumped it there at the edge of the ocean, but I was watching the kite, and once I saw the thin gray streamer of ash running away from it, carried into the sky on the breeze, I let the string go free. I watched the untethered kite go up, and up, and up. Mike would have wanted to see how high it would go before it disappeared, and I did, too.

I wanted to see that, too.

August 24, 2012