by Jay Varner
We passed Mifflintown, Port Royal, and Newport — small towns built along the Juniata River, towns just like McVey-town and Lewistown. Near Newport the Juniata flowed into the Susquehanna, which then snaked next to the highway for miles. My dad drove for two hours straight. Billboards advertising rides at the park appeared near Harrisburg: the Coal Cracker, the Pirate Ship, the Comet, and most impressive of all, the Superdooperlooper, a looped roller-coaster (“The first on the East Coast!”) that I had begged to ride with my father ever since I first saw it. Instead, each year I waited with my mother outside the ride’s gate and watched him strap into one of the seats. He waved and was then whisked down the track.
“I’d love to take you on it,” he always said with regret when the ride finished. “But you’re just too short. Maybe next year. It sure was fun, though.”
I was sure that I had grown tall enough for it this year. In January, when my class took the President’s Physical Fitness Test in gym class, I was the tallest of my class and probably in the whole first grade. I could already jump and grab the monkey bars on the playground during recess — something even few second-graders could do.
“Dad, do you think I can ride the Superdooperlooper with you this year?”
“We’ll see,” he said. “I hope so. You think you’re ready for it? Your mom’s still too scared to get on it.”
“You couldn’t pay me to get on that thing,” she said.
Her favorite ride was the Kissing Tower, a nearly 350-foot tower with an escalating and rotating cabin shaped like a Hershey Kiss. Though the panoramic view of Hershey and its surrounding fields looked impressive the first time I had ridden it, the tower had since become the epitome of boring, made even worse by the ride’s custom: couples kissed when the cabin reached the top. But when I saw the tower rise on the horizon in a kind of Emerald City–like awe, I wriggled in my seat — that tower always meant that Hershey Park was only minutes away.
Life-size mascots of Hershey bars, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and Kisses walked among the crowds inside the park, posed for pictures with families, and waved to the kids. There were water rides, roller-coasters, bumper cars, and arcades. By afternoon, we had covered only half the park and my feet already ached. My parents looked tired and sweaty from the impenetrable heat and humidity.
My father sat down on a bench, moving slowly, as if his joints needed to be oiled. My mother searched for food and drinks. We rested a few minutes, listening to the distant scream of riders plummeting down hills on roller-coasters. The sweet smell of cotton candy and chlorine-soaked water mixed in the air. Dad removed his hat and wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his shirt. My mother walked back from one of the food vendors with a tray of hot dogs and Cokes. She sat next to my father and handed me a drink. Then she paused and studied his flushed face.
“What’s wrong? Do you want some water? You don’t look so good.”
He shook his head and sighed. “I just feel wiped out all of a sudden.”
She patted his back, concerned, and offered him a Coke. It was the first time I had ever seen him worn out like this, especially on our outing at Hershey Park. Usually he marched over the paved paths with vigor, delighting in the rides almost as much I did.
We sat a few minutes longer. Sweat beaded down my father’s forehead, and his eyes looked glassy and bloodshot.
Finally, he cleared his throat and stood. “Ready to get back at it?”
“You sure you feel okay?” my mother asked.
He smiled and rolled his eyes. “I’ll be fine. Besides, we only get here one day a year. Might as well make the most of it.”
We escaped more than just the fire company during our little vacation — for that one day there was no mention of Helen and Lucky. Though my father had never said so outright, I sensed that his family had never taken a vacation when he was a child. He never spoke of good times or having fun with his family — it was as if those times were secret.
One time I asked if Lucky ever played catch with my father or his brothers. “Nope,” my dad said but he offered no explanation why, or about how it made him feel. I guessed that it was because Lucky worked a lot on construction projects, seasonal work with few jobs during the winter months.
I wondered if my dad felt neglected like me. One time, while my father sat on the living room floor playing Chutes and Ladders with me, the alarm codes sounded on his pager. He leaped up from the game, kicked the board and its plastic pieces into the air, and dashed for his bunker boots in the bedroom. At over six feet tall, my dad looked like a giant inside our tiny trailer. When he jumped up that day, adrenaline lifted him off the ground so high that he smashed his head on a light mounted in the hallway ceiling. Shards of glass sprinkled down onto the linoleum, but he didn’t stop for a second; he just ran out the door. I cried throughout the night, wanting him back home, sitting on the floor with me.
But at Hershey Park I had him all to myself, even if it was for just a day. And my father seemed to love it. We threw kernels of corn into some of the park’s streams and watched fat ducks peck at the water. He laughed with me.
At dusk, we finally came to the Superdooperlooper. The roaring cars breezed past overhead and passengers screamed. I had seen boys in the park not much older than I was wearing I SURVIVED THE SUPERDOOPERLOOPER! T-shirts.
“Can we get on it, Dad?” I tugged on his hand. “I know I can do it this year.”
“I don’t know, Shorty,” he said. “Unless you sprout about two inches in the next minute, I don’t think you can.”
“Come on, Dad, can’t I get on?”
My mother smiled and shrugged. “This is all he talked about last week when you were at work.”
My dad squeezed my hand. “Maybe next year. You’ll grow by then.”
“You promise?”
“Promise,” he said. He walked through the gate and toward stairs leading to the boarding area. He turned and held his hand over his chest. “We’ll ride it together next year, scout’s honor.” I felt a pang of sadness, reminded of what it would be like the rest of the year, when I would be left alone when he went to the firehouse.
Our final ride of the day had always been the Giant Wheel, a Ferris wheel with round, cagelike seats instead of benches. We ascended into a sky now matted with the deep purples and blues of the approaching night. Hershey Park spread out below us, a switchboard of twinkling lights. Across the maze of food stands and rides, the Kissing Tower glimmered like a monument.
Leaving the park hurt worse than the year-long wait to return. I grabbed my father’s wrist and looked at his watch, begging not to leave — we still had fifteen minutes, enough time for one more ride. As we walked toward my father’s truck, my feet felt sore. Other families walked next to us — exhausted parents yelled at their screaming children and told them that the park was closing. My father wobbled a bit, the same as he’d done sometimes when he returned from a fire.
“Hey, Dad, did you ever come here when you were a kid?”
“Nope,” he said.
“Pappy Varner never took you?”
“We never went on vacation,” my father said. “But after I graduated high school, I went to Disney World with a friend of mine.”
“Really? You think we could go there some time?”
“We should,” he said. “One of these days, sure.”
When he climbed into his truck, he sighed and waited a moment to turn the key. On the ride home, I didn’t play any Beach Boys songs. We sat in silence, my head resting against my mother’s arm. I was already dreaming of next year’s trip, praying I would grow just a few more inches so that I could ride the Superdooperlooper.
When we drove back through McVeytown, my dad picked up his radio microphone.
“Chief Eighty, signing back in.”
Seven
Lucky continued his Saturday morning fires throughout that summer and started bringing a friend along with him. The man had an unkempt beard, greasy hair, and always wore jeans that hung low around
his waist, exposing his butt.
“Mom, who’s that guy with Lucky?” I asked the first time he showed up. “He looks like one of those guys we see hitchhiking along the highway.”
My mother walked to the living room window and looked out. Without saying a word, she turned and locked the front door. Then she crossed the trailer and locked the back. She had never done this before. Something was wrong.
“Mom, who is he?”
“His name is Ricky Trutt,” she said. “And you are not to go outside when he’s here. Do you understand me?”
“I don’t go out anyway.”
She knelt next to me and placed her hands on my shoulders. “Do not go outside when he’s here. Do you understand?”
“Okay,” I said, even though I wondered why.
Every Friday night we went to Lewistown for groceries. Small shops lined Valley Street, the main street through Lewistown: Kay’s Sporting Goods, Video Vendor, Foss’s Jewelers, and C. G. Murphy’s, which still had a lunch counter. Families and couples walked the streets at dusk and window-shopped. Teenagers cruised past the cannons perched on the lawn of the Civil War – themed town square. While my mother shopped for groceries at the Giant Store, my father sometimes took me along with him for a visit to the Coleman House, the hotel Lucky and Helen owned.
The building sat on that town square and dated back to the late 1800s, when Lewistown had begun to transform into a tidy little city. Once, it had been a popular and respectable place. A man named Harry Gardiner, who my father said was called the Human Fly, had as a publicity stunt climbed the outside of the seven-story hotel in the 1920s. In the years since then, the quality and care had declined. By the time my grandparents purchased it for next to nothing, the hotel housed Lewistown’s riffraff— the low cost of rooms was cheaper than renting an apartment. Most of the residents were men soaked in cheap liquor and dressed in stained clothing. Many were also Lucky’s friends.
“Grandma and Pappy will be glad to see you,” my dad said as he opened the glass door to the building’s lobby. “I bet Grandma will even give you some candy.”
“No, Dad, please no candy. Last time it was terrible.”
At Halloween the year before, my dad had painstakingly painted my face in a clown disguise and insisted on taking me to the hotel to show his parents. As usual, Helen cooed and hawed; Lucky, though, propped his feet on the counter and stared at the opposite wall. The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups Helen gave me that day looked like they were covered with cataracts, misshapen and hazed over with the kind of whiteness teachers at school warned us not to eat. I was certain that the candy in that display case near the front hotel’s desk hadn’t been freshened since last Halloween.
A television in the lobby blasted Wheel of Fortune. Three grizzled men sat on couches and stared in silence at the screen. The upholstery was ripped in spots, revealing yellow foam. The tiled floor had probably been white at one time; it now resembled the crusted bug shield on the hood of my father’s truck.
Helen, wearing a flower-print dress, stood behind the display case and wrote inside a log book next to the cash register. She looked up and smiled.
“Oh Lucky, look who’s here,” she said. “It’s Jay and Denton.”
Lucky sat in a recliner behind the counter reading National Geographic. He stood and placed the magazine on the seat of the chair.
“You ever read National Geographic, boy? You should. It’d make you smart.”
“Come on back here and give your grandma a big hug,” Helen said. She opened the flimsy particle board gate to let me behind the counter. “You want some candy?”
“He doesn’t need any,” my dad said. I squeezed his wrist and smiled up at him — if I held on to him, perhaps I wouldn’t be forced behind the desk for that dreadful hug. The scent of Helen’s cheap perfume always seemed to cling to my clothes.
“Well, guess what?” my dad said. He smiled and paused, letting the tension build. “We found a house.”
Lucky tongued at his toothpick. “Did you now?”
“Looks like we’ll be moving in by March or April,” my dad said.
“Oh Lucky, can you believe it?” Helen said. She turned to Lucky and smiled. “A new house. I can’t wait to see it. How big is it? Does it have a dining room? You should at least have a dining room. And you’re still going to build a basement, right?”
My dad nodded and explained that the doublewide was twice the size of our current trailer. He’d already made the calls to contractors for estimates on a basement.
“And you’re still putting it where our old house used to be?” Lucky asked. He flicked the toothpick into a trash can behind the counter. “Lot of good memories there.”
“Remember my ring, Lucky?” Helen asked. She turned to me, her mouth loose and smiling. “The first wedding ring your grandfather bought me, I took it off to wash dishes and I put it on the windowsill. And wouldn’t you know, it fell out the window and onto the ground. I never found it after that.” She scratched at her knee and lifted the purple dress up so high that it exposed a thick, panty-hosed thigh. I’d noticed this habit before — she often pulled up her dress, exposed her legs, and sometimes caressed her thighs.
“I looked high and low for that ring,” Lucky said. “I didn’t want to lose it.”
A lost treasure hunt flashed in my mind, a Saturday spent climbing over those busted concrete slabs, gliding a metal detector over the ground, all in search of that lost diamond ring.
“So it’s still there?” I asked. “Do you think it might still be worth something?”
“ ’Course it’s worth something, boy,” Lucky said. “It’s a diamond. You think they’re free? In Africa, little boys like you get told to go into mines to dig them out. And if they don’t dig in the mines, they get sold to people who’ll make them behave.”
My dad and his parents chatted for a few minutes about the trailer and about the fire company. Lucky listened with a blank stare while Helen nodded and smiled. When Lucky asked my father to look at a window in one of the rooms upstairs, I begged him to take me along with him. The only remotely fun part about visiting the hotel was riding the elevator — an old-time contraption with a lever that had no doubt once been run by a bellhop. My father pulled the latticed metal gate across the elevator’s doorway and then yanked the lever. After a jerk, the cables grinded and we rose to the third floor, where my dad stepped out and told me to wait inside the elevator. He walked down the hallway and went into a room. The mud brown carpet looked polka-dotted with black stains. The entire place smelled of turpentine and dirty socks. After a few minutes, my dad came out of the room and we descended back to the lobby.
“Fixed it,” my dad said. “The spring inside was busted. I left the window open. Stunk pretty bad in there.”
Lucky nodded and thanked him. He eased back into his recliner again, the National Geographic in his hand. “I think Ricky Trutt and I might be up again soon. Got some old mattresses I want to burn up.”
My father dug both hands into his pockets. “Didn’t I tell you what Teena said about Ricky?”
Lucky stared back, unblinking and angry. “You told me. And you can tell her that it’s my ground. I can do what I want on my ground.”
“Dad, come on,” my father said. “I’ll help you burn them. He doesn’t need to come along.”
“If she doesn’t like him, then you tell her to leave,” Lucky said. “I don’t tell her who she can talk to. Ricky’s coming and that’s all there is to it.”
My dad didn’t speak. The sound of Jeopardy! spilled over the lobby. He glanced at his watch and said that we should leave. He took my hand and we walked out of the hotel. I wondered what my mother had said about Ricky Trutt and just why she always locked the doors when he came around.
My father stared blankly out the windshield as he drove.
“Dad, what happened to that house near our trailer?” I asked.
“Which house?”
“Your old house, when you were a ki
d,” I said. “The one we’re going to put the trailer on?”
He held his stare for a moment and cleared his throat. “You know, that’s funny. It burned down.” His voice softened. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as if nervous. “I remember losing all my toys. Slot cars, Rock’em Sock’em Robots, Lincoln Logs, and LEGOS. Board games too, like Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders.”
These were the same toys that he had bought me for Christmases and birthdays. If he never played with them as a child, I wondered why he never wanted to play with me now.
“All the photos burned up too,” he said. “I don’t even have any pictures of me when I was your age.”
“How did it catch on fire?” I asked.
“Just an accident,” he said sharply. “It was an accident. That’s why you should always be careful with matches and things like that. Fire is dangerous.”
Lucky stopped his weekly fires at the hole — it would soon be excavated with backhoes, and then bricklayers would arrive to lay the cinder-block foundation. One Saturday night at the end of August, my mother and I walked around the heavy, iron I beams that sat next to the hole. I begged her to watch me balance myself on the beams like a tightrope walker. My dad promised to come outside and play Wiffle ball with me once he got off the phone. Probably talking to one of his friends in the fire company, I thought.
The back screen door on the trailer slammed shut and he walked across the driveway and onto the dirt. He glanced at my mother, sighed, and then looked toward the horizon. He often did this when nervous, as if he wished he were following the sunset to somewhere else. He jingled change in his pockets.
“That was my mother on the phone,” he said. “Dad’s on his way up here to burn some things from the hotel.”
“Some things?” my mother said. “You said he wasn’t coming back.”
My father tugged the bill of his hat, rubbed his neck, and said, “It’s his ground. I can’t tell him not to.”
She crossed her arms and looked toward the highway. “Well, it’s too late now. Here he comes.”