by Joe Hill
“It’s not your job to make sure I get out of Maine,” Jake said, his tone almost mild. “And if I wind up in the state prison, at least I’d get to see you on the weekends.”
“I wouldn’t visit you,” she said.
“Yes you would,” he told her, kissing her cheek, and she blushed and looked upset, and we all knew she would. It was embarrassing how tightly she was wrapped around Jake’s finger, how badly she wanted to make him happy. I understood exactly how she felt, because I was stuck on Geri just the same way.
Six months before, we had all gone bowling at Lewiston Lanes, something to do to kill a Thursday night. A drunk in the next lane made an obscene moan of appreciation when Geri bent over to get a ball, noisily admiring her rear in her tight jeans. Nancy told him not to be vile, and he replied that she didn’t need to worry, no one was going to bother checking out a no-tits cunt like herself. Jake had gently kissed Nancy on the top of her head and then, before she could grab his wrist and pull him back, decked the guy hard enough to shatter his nose and knock him flat.
The only problem was that the drunk and his buddies were all off-duty cops, and in the fracas that followed, Jake was wrestled to the floor and handcuffed, a snub-nosed revolver put to his head. In the trial much was made of the fact that he had a switchblade in his pocket and a prior record of petty vandalism. The drunk—who in court was no longer a drunk but instead a good-looking officer of the law with a wife and four kids—insisted he had called Nancy a “little runt,” not a “no-tits cunt.” But it hardly mattered what he’d said, because the judge felt that both girls had been provocative in dress and behavior and so presumably had no right to be outraged by a little ribald commentary. The judge told Jake it was jail or military service, and two days later Jake was on his way to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, his head shaved and everything he owned stuffed into a Nike gym bag.
Now he was back for ten days on leave. The week after next, he’d board a plane at Bangor International Airport and fly to Germany for deployment in Berlin. I wouldn’t be there to see him go—by then I’d be moved into my dorm in New Hampshire. Nan was on her way elsewhere as well. After Labor Day she started classes at U of Maine in Orono. Only Geri was going nowhere, staying behind in Lewiston, where she had a job with housekeeping at a Days Inn. Jake had committed the assault, but it often seemed to me that somehow Geri was the one who’d received the prison sentence.
Nan was on break, still had a few hours on her shift to go before she was free. She wanted to blow the smell of fried grease from her hair, so we wandered out toward the end of the pier. A salty, scouring wind sang among the guy wires, snapped the pennants. The wind was blowing hard inland, too, coming in gusts that ripped off hats and slammed doors. Back on shore that wind felt like summer, sultry and sweet with the smell of baked grass and hot tarmac. Out on the end of the pier, the gusts carried a thrilling chill that made your pulse race. Out on the end of the pier, you were in October Country.
We slowed as we approached the Wild Wheel, which had just stopped turning. Geri tugged my hand and pointed at one of the creatures on the carousel. It was a black cat the size of a pony, with a limp mouse in its jaws. The cat’s head was turned slightly, so it seemed to be watching us avidly with its bright green glass eyes.
“Oh, hey,” Geri said. “That one looks just like me on my first date with Paul.”
Nancy clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter. Geri didn’t need to say which of us was the mouse and which was the cat. Nancy had a lovely, helpless laugh that went through her whole tiny frame, doubled her over, and turned her face pink.
“Come on,” Geri said. “Let’s find our spirit animals.” And she let go of my hand and took Nancy’s.
The Wurlitzer began to play, a theatrical, whimsical, but also curiously dirgelike melody. Wandering amid the steeds, I looked at the creatures of the Wheel with a mix of fascination and repulsion. It seemed to me a uniquely disquieting collection of grotesqueries. There was a wolf as big as a bicycle, its sculpted, glossy fur a tangled mess of blacks and grays and its eyes as yellow as my beer. One paw was lifted slightly, and its pad was crimson, as if he had trod in blood. A sea serpent uncoiled itself across the outer edge of the carousel, a scaly rope as thick as a tree trunk. It had a shaggy gold mane and a gaping red mouth lined with black fangs. When I leaned in close, I discovered they were real: a mismatched set of shark’s teeth, black with age. I walked through a team of white horses, frozen in the act of lunging, tendons straining in their necks, their mouths open as if to scream in anguish or rage. White horses with white eyes, like classical statuary.
“Where the hell you think they got these horses from? Satan’s Circus Supplies? Lookat,” Jake said, and he gestured at the mouth of one of the horses. It had the black, forked tongue of a snake, lolling out of its mouth.
“They come from Nacogdoches, Texas,” came a voice from down on the pier. “They’re over a century old. They were salvaged from Cooger’s Carousel of Ten Thousand Lights, after a fire burned Cooger’s Fun Park to the ground. You can see how that one there was scorched.”
The ride operator stood at a control board, to one side of the steps leading up to the merry-go-round. He wore a dress uniform, as if he were an ancient bellboy in some grand Eastern European hotel, a place where aristocrats went to summer with their families. His suit jacket was of green velvet, with two rows of brass buttons down the front and golden epaulets on his shoulders.
He put down a steel thermos and pointed at a horse whose face was blistered on one side, toasted a golden brown, like a marshmallow. The operator’s upper lip lifted in a curiously repulsive grin. He had red, plump, vaguely indecent lips, like a young Mick Jagger—unsettling in such an old, shriveled face. “They screamed.”
“Who?” I asked.
“The horses,” he said. “When the carousel began to burn. A dozen witnesses heard them. They screamed like girls.”
My arms prickled with goose bumps. It was a delightfully macabre claim to make.
“I heard they’re all salvaged,” Nancy said, from somewhere just behind me. She and Geri had circumnavigated the entirety of the carousel, examining the steeds, and were only now returning to us. “There was a piece in the Portland Press Herald last year.”
“The griffin came from Selznick’s in Hungary,” said the operator, “after they went bankrupt. The cat was a gift from Manx, who runs Christmasland in Colorado. The sea serpent was carved by Frederick Savage himself, who constructed the most famous carousel of them all, the Golden Gallopers on Brighton Palace Pier, after which the Wild Wheel is modeled. You’re one of Mr. Gish’s girls, aren’t you?”
“Ye-e-sss,” said Nancy slowly, perhaps because she didn’t quite like the operator’s phrasing, the way he called her “one of Mr. Gish’s girls.” “I work for him at the funnel-cake stand.”
“Only the best for Mr. Gish’s girls,” said the operator. “Would you like to ride a horse that once carried Judy Garland?”
He stepped up onto the carousel and offered Nancy his hand, which she took without hesitation, as if he were a desirable young man asking her to dance and not a creepy old dude with fat, damp lips. He led her to the first in the herd of six horses, and when she put a foot into one golden stirrup, he braced her waist to help her up.
“Judy visited Cooger’s in 1940, when she was on an extended tour to support The Wizard of Oz. She received a key to the city, sang ‘Over the Rainbow’ to an adoring crowd, and then rode the Ten Thousand Lights. There’s a photo of her in my private office, riding this very horse. There you go, right up. Aren’t you lovely?”
“What a crock of shit,” Geri said to me as she took my arm. She spoke in a low voice, but not low enough, and I saw the operator twitch. Geri threw her leg over the black cat. “Did anyone famous ride this one?”
“Not yet. But maybe someday you yourself will be a great celebrity! And then for years to come we will be boasting about the day when,” the old fellow told her in an exu
berant tone. Then he caught my eye and winked and said, “You’ll want to drain that beer, son. No drinks on the ride. And alcohol is hardly necessary—the Wild Wheel will provide all the intoxication you could wish for.”
I had finished off two cans of the beer in the car on the ride down. My mostly full wax cup was my third. I could’ve put it down on the planks, but that casual suggestion—You’ll want to drain that beer, son—seemed like the only sensible thing to do. I swallowed most of a pint in five big swallows, and by the time I crushed the cup and tossed it away into the night, the carousel was already beginning to turn.
I shivered. The beer was so cold I could feel it in my blood. A wave of dizziness rolled over me, and I reached for the closest mount, the big sea serpent with the black teeth. I got a leg over it just as it began to float upward on its rod. Jake hauled himself onto a horse beside Nancy, and Geri laid her head against her cat’s neck and purred to it.
We were carried out of sight of the shore and onto the very tip of the pier, where to my left was black sky and blacker sea, roughened with whitecaps. The Wild Wheel accelerated into the bracing, salty air. Waves crashed. I shut my eyes but then had to open them again, right away. For an instant I felt as if I were diving down into the water on my sea serpent. For an instant I felt like I was drowning.
We went round, and I caught a flash of the operator, holding his thermos. When he’d been talking to us, he’d been all smiles. But in that brief glimpse I caught after we started to move, I saw a dead face, expressionless, his eyelids sagging heavily, that swollen mouth compressed into a frown. I thought I saw him digging for something in his pocket—a momentary observation that would end lives before the night was done.
The Wheel went around again and again, faster each time, unspooling its lunatic song into the night as if it were a record on a turntable. By the fourth circuit, I was surprised at how fast we were moving. I could feel the centrifugal force as a sense of weight, right between my eyebrows, and a tugging sensation in my uncomfortably full stomach. I needed to piss. I tried to tell myself I was having a good time, but I’d had too much beer. The bright flecks of the stars whipped past. The sounds of the pier came at us in bursts and were snatched away. I opened my eyes in time to see Jake and Nancy leaning toward each other, across the space between their horses, for a tender if clumsy kiss. Nan laughed, stroking the muscled neck of her ride. Geri remained pressed flat against her giant cat and looked back at me with sleepy, knowing eyes.
The cat turned its head to look back at me, too, and I shut my eyes and shuddered and looked again, and of course it wasn’t staring at me.
Our rides rushed us on into the night, rushed us into the darkness in a kind of mad fury, round and round and round, but in the end none of us went anywhere.
FOR THE NEXT THREE HOURS, the wind blew us up and down the harbor walk, while Nancy completed her shift. I had already had too much beer and knew it and drank more anyway. When a gust got behind me, it felt dangerously close to swooping me off the ground, as if I were as light as newspaper.
Jake and I banged away at pinball in Mordor’s Marvelous Machines for a while. Afterward Geri and I had a walk on the beach that started out romantic—teenage lovers holding hands, looking at the stars—and predictably devolved into our usual giddy game of roughhouse. Geri wound up dragging me by both hands into the water. I staggered in up to my knees and came out with my sneakers squishing, the legs of my jeans soaked and caked in sand. Geri, on the other hand, was wearing flip-flops and had thoughtfully rolled up the cuffs of her Levi’s and made it out breathless with laughter and largely unscathed. I warmed myself back up with a pair of hot dogs smothered in bacon and cheese.
At ten-thirty the bars were so full the crowds spilled onto the boardwalk. The road along the harbor was jammed bumper to bumper, and the night resounded with happy shouts and honking horns. But almost everything else around the pier was closing down or already shut. The Bouncy House and the SS Fuck No had gone dark an hour before.
By then I was staggering with beer and fairground chow and feeling the first nervous clench of nausea. I was beginning to think that by the time I got Geri to bed, I’d be too tired or maybe too sick to report for action.
Funhouse Funnel Cakes was at the foot of the pier, and when we got there, the electric sign over the order window had been shut off. Nancy used a rag to sweep the cinnamon and powdered sugar from the dented counter, said good night to the girl who’d been working the stand with her, and let herself out the side door and into Jake’s arms. She stood on her toes for a lingering kiss, her book under one arm: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.
“Want to get another six on our way out of town?” Jake asked me over her shoulder.
The thought turned my stomach, so naturally I said, “We better.”
“I’ll pay,” Nancy said, and led the way to the curb, just about skipping to be free and with her guy, to be eighteen and in love, on a night where it was still seventy degrees at nearly 11:00 P.M. The wind crazed her curly hair, blowing it around her face like seagrass.
We were waiting for a break in traffic when it all began to go wrong.
Nancy smacked herself on the butt—a provocative thing to do, a little out of character, but then she was in high spirits—and fumbled in a pocket for her cash. She frowned. She searched her other pockets. Then she searched them again.
“Shhhhhoooot . . .” she said. “I must’ve left my money at the stand.”
She led us back to Funhouse Funnel Cakes. Her co-worker had shut off the last lights and locked up, but Nancy let herself in and pulled the dangling cord. A fluorescent tube came flickering on with a wasplike buzz. Nancy searched under the counters, checked her pockets again, and looked in her hardcover to see if she’d been using her money as a bookmark. I saw her check the book myself. I’m sure of it.
“What the heck?” Nancy said. “I had a fifty-dollar bill. Fifty dollars! It was so new it looked like no one had ever spent it before. What the frickenfrack did I do with it?” She really did talk that way, like a brainy girl genius in a young-adult novel.
As she spoke, I flashed to a memory of the carousel operator helping her up onto a horse, his hand on her waist and a big smile on those juicy lips of his. Then I remembered catching a glimpse of him as we were spun past on our steeds. He hadn’t been smiling then—and he’d been poking some fingers into his front pocket.
“Huh,” I said aloud.
“What?” Jake asked.
I looked at Jake’s narrow, handsome face, his set chin and mild eyes, and was struck with a sudden premonition of disaster. I shook my head, didn’t want to say anything.
“Spill it,” Jake said.
I knew better than to reply—but there’s something irresistible about lighting a fuse and waiting for it to sizzle down to the charge, just to hear a loud bang. And there was always something exciting about winding up a Renshaw, for much the same reason. It was why I went into the bouncy house with Geri and why I decided to give Jake a straight answer.
“The operator on the carousel. He might’ve been putting something in his pocket after he helped Nan—”
I didn’t get any further.
“That motherfucker,” Jake said, and turned on his heel.
“Jake, no,” Nancy said.
She grabbed his wrist, but he pulled free and started out along the dark pier.
“Jake!” Nancy called, but he didn’t look back.
I trotted to keep up with him.
“Jake,” I said, my stomach queer with booze and nerves. “I didn’t see anything. Not really. He might’ve been reaching into his pocket to adjust his balls.”
“That motherfucker,” Jake repeated. “Had his hands all over her.”
The Wild Wheel was dark, its stampeding creatures frozen in midleap. A heavy red velvet rope had been hung across the steps, and the sign that dangled from it said SHH! THE HORSES ARE SLEEPING! DON’T DISTURB THEM!
At the center of the carousel was an inn
er ring lined with mirrored panels. A glow showed around one of those panels, and from somewhere on the other side you could hear swanky horns and a tinny, crooning voice: Pat Boone, “I Almost Lost My Mind.” Someone was at home in the secret cabinet at the heart of the Wild Wheel.
“Hey,” Jake said. “Hey, pal!”
“Jake! Forget it!” Nancy said. She was frightened now, scared of what Jake might do. “For all I know, I put my money down for a moment and the wind grabbed it.”
None of us believed that.
Geri was the first to step over the red velvet rope. If she was going, I had to follow, although by then I was scared, too. Scared and, if I’m honest, jittery with excitement. I didn’t know where this was heading, but I knew the Renshaw twins, and I knew they were getting Nancy’s fifty dollars back or getting even—or both.
We wove through the leaping horses. I didn’t like their faces in the dark, the way their mouths gaped as if to shriek, the way their eyes seemed to stare blindly at us with terror or rage or madness. Geri reached the mirrored panel with the light leaking out around its edges and rapped her fist against it. “Hey, are you—”
But no sooner had she touched the panel than it swung inward to reveal the little engine room at the center of the Wheel.
It was an octagonal space with walls of cheap plywood. The motor that drove the central pole might’ve been half a century old, a dull steel block shaped vaguely like a human heart, with a black rubber drive belt at one end. On the far side of the pole was a sorry little camp bed. I didn’t see any photographs of Judy Garland, but the wall above the cot was papered in Playboy centerfolds.
The operator sat at a folding card table, in a ratty, curiously grand chair. It had curved wooden armrests and horsehair cushions. He was slumped over, using one arm as a pillow, and didn’t react as we entered. Pat Boone pitied himself, tunefully, from a little transistor radio on the edge of the table.