He shrugged. “Don’t know. They just got here.” He took a swig of Coke, belched, and smiled.
“That Meg’s pretty cute, though, ain’t she? Shit! My cousin!”
I didn’t want to comment, though I agreed with him.
“
Second
cousin, though, you know? Makes a difference. Blood or something. I dunno. Before, we never saw ’em.”
“Never?”
“My mom says once. I was too young to remember.”
“What’s her sister like?”
“Susan? Like nothing. Just a little kid. What is she, eleven or something?”
“Woofer’s only ten.”
“Yeah, right. And what’s Woofer?”
You couldn’t argue there.
“Got messed up bad in that accident, though.”
“Susan?”
He nodded and pointed to my waist. “Yeah. Broke everything from there on down, my mom says. Every bone you got. Hips, legs, everything.”
“Jeez.”
“She still don’t walk too good. She’s all casted up. Got those—what do you call ‘em?—metal things, sticks, that strap on to your arms and you grab ’em, haul yourself along. Kids with polio wear ’em. I forget what they’re called. Like crutches.”
“Jeez. Is she going to walk again?”
“She walks.”
“I mean like regular.”
“I dunno.”
We finished our Cokes. We were almost at the top of the hill. It was almost time for me to leave him there. That or suffer Eddie.
“They both died, y’know,” he said.
Just like that.
I knew who he meant, of course, but for a moment I just couldn’t get my mind to wrap around it. Not right away. It was much too weird a concept.
Parents didn’t just
die
. Not on my street. And certainly not in car accidents. That kind of thing happened elsewhere, in places more dangerous than Laurel Avenue. They happened in movies or in books. You heard about it on Walter Cronkite.
Laurel Avenue was a dead end street. You walked down the middle of it.
But I knew he wasn’t lying. I remembered Meg not wanting to talk about the accident or the scars and me pushing.
I knew he wasn’t lying but it was hard to handle.
We just kept walking together, me not saying anything, just looking at him and not really seeing him either.
Seeing Meg.
It was a very special moment.
I know Meg attained a certain glamour for me then.
Suddenly it was not just that she was pretty or smart or able to handle herself crossing the brook—she was almost unreal. Like no one I’d ever met or was likely to meet outside of books or the matinee. Like she was fiction, some sort of heroine.
I pictured her back by the Rock and now I saw this person who was really brave lying next to me. I saw horror. Suffering, survival, disaster.
Tragedy.
All this in an instant.
Probably I had my mouth open. I guess Donny thought I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Meg’s
parents
, numbnuts. Both of ‘em. My mom says they must have died instantly. That they didn’t know what hit ’em.” He snorted. “Fact is, what hit ’em was a Chrysler.”
And it may have been his rich bad taste that pulled me back to normal.
“I saw the scar on her arm,” I told him.
“Yeah, I saw it, too. Neat, huh? You should see Susan’s though. Scars all
over
the place. Gross. My mom says she’s lucky to be alive.”
“She probably is.”
“Anyhow that’s how come we’ve got ’em. There isn’t anybody else. It’s us or some orphanage somewhere.” He smiled. “Lucky them, huh?”
And then he said something that came back to me later. At the time I guessed it was true enough, but for some reason I remembered it. I remembered it well.
He said it just as we got to Eddie’s house.
I see myself standing in the middle of the road about to turn and go back down the hill again, go off by myself somewhere, not wanting any part of Eddie—at least not that day.
I see Donny turning to throw the words over his shoulder on his way across the lawn to the porch. Casually, but with an odd sort of sincerity about him, as though this were absolute gospel.
“My mom says Meg’s the lucky one,” he said.
“My mom says she got off easy.”
Chapter Four
It was a week and a half before I got to see her again apart from a glimpse here and there—taking out the trash once, weeding in the garden. Now that I knew the whole story it was even harder to approach her. I’d never felt sorry. I’d rehearse what I might say to her. But nothing sounded right. What did you say to someone who’d just lost half her family? It stood there like a rock I couldn’t scale. So I avoided her.
Then my family and I did our yearly duty trip to Sussex County to visit my father’s sister, so for four whole days I didn’t have to think about it. It was almost a relief. I say almost because my parents were less than two years from divorce by then and the trip was awful—three tense days of silence in the car going up and coming back with a lot of phony jolliness in between that was supposed to benefit my aunt and uncle but didn’t. You could see my aunt and uncle looking at one another every now and then as if to say Jesus, get these people out of here.
They knew. Everybody knew. My parents couldn’t have hidden pennies from a blind man by then.
But once we were home it was back to wondering about Meg again. I don’t know why it never occurred to me just to forget it, that she might not want to be reminded of her parents’ death any more than I wanted to talk about it. But it didn’t. I figured you had to say
something
and I couldn’t get it right. It was important to me that I not make an ass of myself over this. It was important to me that I not make an ass of myself in Meg’s eyes period.
I wondered about Susan too. In nearly two weeks I’d never seen her. That ran contrary to everything I knew. How could you live next door to someone and never see her? I thought about her legs and Donny saying her scars were really bad to look at. Maybe she was afraid to go out. I could relate to that. I’d been spending a lot of time indoors myself these days, avoiding her sister.
It couldn’t last though. It was the first week of June by then, time for the Kiwanis Karnival.
To miss the Karnival was like missing summer.
Directly across from us not half a block away was an old six-room schoolhouse called Central School where we all used to go as little kids, grades one through five. They held the Karnival there on the playground every year. Ever since we were old enough to be allowed to cross the street we’d go over and watch them set up.
For that one week, being that close, we were the luckiest kids in town.
Only the concessions were run by the Kiwanis—the food stands, the game booths, the wheels of fortune. The rides were all handled by a professional touring company and run by carnies. To us the carnies were exotic as hell. Rough-looking men and women who worked with Camels stuck between their teeth, squinting against the smoke curling into their eyes, sporting tattoos and calluses and scars and smelling of grease and old sweat. They cursed, they drank Schlitz as they worked. Like us, they were not opposed to spitting lungers in the dirt.
We loved the Karnival and we loved the carnies. You had to. In a single summer afternoon they would take our playground and transform it from a pair of baseball diamonds, a blacktop, and a soccer field into a brand-new city of canvas and whirling steel. They did it so fast you could hardly believe your eyes. It was magic, and the magicians all had gold-tooth smiles and “I love Velma” etched into their biceps. Irresistible.
It was still pretty early and when I walked over they were still unpacking the trucks.
This was when you couldn’t talk to them. They were too busy. Later while they were setting up or testing the machinery you could hand them tools, maybe even get a sip of beer out of them. The local kids were their bread and butter after all. They wanted you to come back that night with friends and family and they were usually friendly. But now you just had to watch and keep out of the way.
Cheryl and Denise were already there, leaning on the backstop fence behind home plate and staring through the links.
I stood with them.
Things seemed tense to me. You could see why. It was only morning but the sky looked dark and threatening. Once, a few years ago, it had rained every night of the Karnival except Thursday. Everybody took a beating when that happened. The grips and carnies worked grimly now, in silence.
Cheryl and Denise lived up the street across from one another. They were friends but I think only because of what Zelda Gilroy on
The Dobie Gillis Show
used to call propinquity. They didn’t have much in common. Cheryl was a tall skinny brunette who would probably be pretty a few years later but now she was all arms and legs, taller than I was and two years younger. She had two brothers—Kenny and Malcolm. Malcolm was just a little kid who sometimes played with Woofer. Kenny was almost my age but a year behind me in school.
All three kids were very quiet and well-behaved. Their parents, the Robertsons, took no shit but I doubt that by nature they were disposed to give any.
Denise was Eddie’s sister. Another type entirely.
Denise was edgy, nervous, almost as reckless as her brother, with a marked propensity toward mockery. As though all the world were a bad joke and she was the only one around who knew the punchline.
“It’s
David,
” she said. And there was the mockery, just pronouncing my name. I didn’t like it but I ignored it. That was the way to handle Denise. If she got no rise she got no payoff and it made her more normal eventually.
“Hi Cheryl. Denise. How’re they doing?”
Denise said, “I think that’s the Tilt-a-Whirl there. Last year that’s where they put the Octopus.”
“It could still be the Octopus,” said Cheryl.
“Unh-unh. See those platforms?” She pointed to the wide sheets of metal. “The Tilt-a-Whirl’s got platforms. Wait till they get the cars out. You’ll see.”
She was right. When the cars came out it was the Tilt-a-Whirl. Like her father and her brother Eddie, Denise was good at mechanical things, good with tools.
“They’re worried about rain,” she said.
“
They’re
worried.” said Cheryl. “
I’m worried!
” She sighed in exasperation. It was very exaggerated. I smiled. There was always something sweetly serious about Cheryl. You just knew her favorite book was
Alice in Wonderland
. The truth was, I liked her.
“It won’t rain,” Denise said.
“How do you know?”
“It just won’t.” Like she wouldn’t let it.
“See that there?” She pointed to a huge gray and white truck rolling back to the center of the soccer field. “I bet that’s the Ferris wheel. That’s where they had it last year and the year before. Want to see?”
“Sure,” I said.
We skirted the Tilt-a-Whirl and some kiddie boat rides they were unloading on the macadam, walked along the cyclone fence that separated the playground from the brook, cut through a row of tents going up for the ring-toss and bottle-throw and whatever, and came out onto the field. The grips had just opened the doors to the truck. The painted grinning clown head on the doors was split down the middle. They started pulling out the girders.
It looked like the Ferris wheel all right.
Denise said, “My dad says somebody fell off last year in Atlantic City. They stood up. You ever stand up?”
Cheryl frowned. “Of course not.”
Denise turned to me.
“I bet you never did, did you?”
I ignored the tone. Denise always had to work so hard to be such a brat all the time.
“No,” I said. “Why would I?”
“Cause it’s
fun!
”
She was grinning and she should have been pretty when she grinned. She had good white teeth and a lovely, delicate mouth. But something always went wrong with Denise’s smile. There was always something manic in it. Like she really wasn’t having much fun at all despite what she wanted you to think.
It also disappeared too fast. It was unnerving.
It did that now and she said so only I could hear, “I was thinking about The Game before.”
She looked straight at me very wide-eyed and serious like there was something more to come, something important. I waited. I thought maybe she expected me to answer. I didn’t. Instead, I looked away toward the truck.
The Game, I thought. Great.
I didn’t like to think about The Game. But as long as Denise and some of the others were around I supposed I’d have to.