The Mammoth Book of Terror (66 page)

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?”

“He knows where we live. He’s a big boy.”

“Rebecca,” I said, but realized I didn’t know what I was going to say. What came out was, “I don’t know. There’s something . . .”

Around us, the sea stirred, began to slap against the shore and the pilings beneath it. We could feel it through our feet. The reassuring beat of the blood of the earth. There was a mist now,
too, and it left little wet spots on our exposed skin.

Rebecca shrugged. “It’s just where my dad is. Where he’ll always be. For me.”

Then we were walking. Again, our footsteps sounded strange, made almost no sound whatsoever. There was still no moon overhead, only grey-white clouds, lit from behind from millions of miles
away. The fishermen had remained in their places, but they’d gone almost motionless, leaning over their lines into the night as though every single one of them had gone to sleep. I saw the
guy who’d caught the ray, but the ray was no longer in his lap, and I wondered what he’d done with it. Looking up, I saw the blacked out buildings of old Long Beach, seemingly further
from us than they should have been, wrapped in mist and scaffolding like mothballed furniture in an attic. By the time we reached our car, the feeling in my chest had eased a bit, and I was no
longer crying and still couldn’t figure out why I had been. Rebecca was shivering again.

“Let’s wait here for him,” I said, and Rebecca shivered harder.

“No.”

She got in the car, and I climbed in beside her. I turned on the ignition but waited a while. When Rebecca looked at me next, she was wearing the expression I’d become so familiar with,
this last, long, sweet year. Eyes still bright, but dazed somehow. Mouth pursed, but softly. “Take me home to see my girl,” she said.

I didn’t argue. I stopped thinking about Ash. I took my wife home to our tiny house.

That was Friday. Saturday we stayed in our neighborhood, took strolls with our child, went to bed very early and touched each other a while without making love. Sunday I got up and made eggs and
wondered where Ash had gone and whether he was angry with us, and then we went hiking up the fire trail behind our subdivision into the hills, brown and strangled with drought. I didn’t
worry, really. But I started calling Ash’s Oakland bungalow on Monday morning. I also called the hospital where he worked, and on Thursday, right when he’d apparently told Ms Paste he
would return, he turned up as scheduled for his shift on the ward. I got him on the line, and he said he had rounds to do and would call me back. He didn’t, though. Then, or ever.

After that, I stopped thinking about him for awhile. Itwasn’t unusual for Ash to disappear from our lives for months or even years on end. I already understood that adult friendships
operated differently from high school or college ones, were harbors to visit rather than places to live, no matter how sweet and safe the harbor. Rebecca never mentioned him. Our baby learned to
walk. The next time I called the hospital, maybe six months ago, I was told Ash no longer worked there.

Last night, late, I climbed out of my bed, looked at my daughter lying sideways, arms akimbo, across the head of her crib-mattress like a game piece that had popped free of its box slot and
rolled loose, and wandered into the living room to read the newspaper. I opened the
Calendar
section, stared at the photograph on the second page. My mouth went dry, as though every trace of
saliva had been sucked from it, and my bones locked in place. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even think.

Staring out at me was a photograph of a merry-go-round horse, tipped sideways as it was hauled out of its storage closet by movers. Its front teeth were chipped and aimed in opposing directions
below the oversized, grinning lips, and its lifted hooves seemed to be scrambling frantically at the air.

LAST ROOFF HORSES SOLD AT AUCTION, read the caption.

I flew through the story that accompanied the photograph, processing it in bits and pieces, while fragments of that tune – the one from the pier – floated free in my head but never
knitted themselves into something I could hum.

Once, these vibrantly painted, joyous creatures spun and flew on the soon-to-be-razed Long Beach Pier . . . The last great work of a grieving man . . . His final carousel, populated with what
Rooff called “The company I crave” after his longtime business partner and reputed lover, LosAngeks nightclub owner and kgendary gambler Daniel R. Ratch, took his own life following a
decades-long battle with a degenerative muscular disease in September of 1898.

The reclusive Rooff and notorious Ratch formed one of the more unlikely – and lucrative – financial partnerships of the fin-de-siecle era, building thousands of cheaply
manufactured carousels, fortune-telling machines, and other amusements of the time for boardwalks and parks nationwide. They envisioned the Long Beach Pier as their crowning achievement, a world
unto itself for “All the laughing peopk . . .,” in Rooff s memorable phrase at his tearful press conference following Ratch’s death . . .

Rooff completed only the carousel and the now-infamous Lite-Your-Line parlor before being fired for erratic behavior and the agonizingly slow pace of his work . . . He disappeared from the
public record, and his death is not recorded.

There was more, but the words had stopped making sense to me. Shoving the paper away, I sat back in my chair. The trembling started a few seconds later.

I can’t explain how I knew. I was thinking of Rooff under that hat, hidden by curtains, working furiously in the candlelight, chanting his dead lover’s name. I think maybe I’d
always suspected, hadn’t admitted. But Ash had made it back to Oakland, hadn’t he? And we’d made it here?