WHAT YOU MAKE IT
Finding a child was easy. It always was. You waited outside one of the convenience stores that lined the approach, or trawled a strip mall at the nearby intersections for half an hour. There were always kids hanging around at night, panhandling change for a burger or twenty minutes on a coin-op video game in one of the arcades. Or sometimes just hanging there, with nothing in particular in prospect. You have to have seen something of the world to know what's worth looking for. These kids, the just-hanging kids, had seen nothing – and were mainly willing to be shown pretty much whatever you had in mind.
The only question was which one to pick. Too old, either age, and it looked weird at the gate. Too young, and people tend to wonder where the kid's mother is at. And of course sometimes it depended, and you had to find one that looked just right for the night. Early teens was usually best, acquiescent, not too scuffed up.
It only took Ricky ten minutes to find one. She was sitting by herself on a bench outside the Subway franchise, looking at her feet or nothing in particular, alone in a yellow glow. Ricky cruised by the sandwich store twice in the twilight, noted that though there were two groups of kids nearby, one just a little along the sidewalk and another loitering outside Publix, the girl didn't seem to have a link to either. He parked the car up, let the motor tick down to silence, and watched her a little while. The nearest group of kids walked right by her, in and out of her pool of light, without a word being exchanged. She didn't even look up. She wasn't expecting friends.
Ricky grabbed his cigarettes off the dash, locked the car, and walked over to her.
She glanced at him as he approached, but not with much curiosity. Something told him that this wasn't indifference, but a genuine ignorance of the kind of situations the world could provide. This meant she was even more likely to be what he needed, and it was just good luck for her that it was Ricky's eye she'd caught, instead of some kind of fucking pervert.
‘Waiting for someone?’ he asked, stopping when he was a couple of yards away. She looked up, then away. Didn't even shake her head. He took the last few steps, sat down casually on the next bench along. ‘Right. I know. Just a good place to sit.’
There was no response. Ricky took out a cigarette and lit it, unhurried. She looked maybe twelve years old, pretty face. Blue eyes, fair hair in a ponytail. White T-shirt, blue jeans. Both recently clean. He noticed her eyes follow his match as it skittered across the way and went out. Despite appearances, he had her attention.
‘You hungry?’
She blinked, and her head turned a little way towards him. Something changed. It always did. It's a very elemental question. Even if you've just eaten enough to kill a man, you think about it. Am I hungry? Have I had enough? Will I be okay? And if you're really hungry, the question comes at you like you've just been goosed, like someone's just guessed your worst secret, how close you are to being cancelled out. Ricky knew how it worked. He'd been hungry. You answered the hungry question quietly, so the vultures wouldn't hear.
‘Kinda,’ she said, eventually.
He nodded, looking out across the parking lot for a while. Partly to check how many couples were hefting grocery bags to their breeder wagons; mainly just to let the conversation settle.
‘I could buy you something,’ he said then, casually. ‘What's the matter? Your mom didn't feed you tonight?’
‘Don't have a mom,’ she said.
‘What about your old man? Where's he at?’
The girl shrugged. Didn't matter whether she didn't know or just didn't want to know. Ricky knew she was his.
Ten minutes later, as he watched her wolf down her sandwich and fries, Ricky asked the big question.
‘How'd you like to visit Wonder World tonight?’
It was well after eight by the time they got to the entrance. The queue was pretty short. Ricky knew it would be: they had a parade every night at eight-thirty, down 1st Street, and anyone with park-visiting in mind made sure they were already inside by then. Even the girl, whose name was Nicola, knew about the parade. Ricky told her that this week it was at nine-fifteen because it was a special parade. She looked at him dubiously, but seemed hopeful.
As he turned into one of the lanes and pulled up to the gate Ricky felt a familiar flicker of anxiety. This was the part where it could all go wrong. It hadn't yet, because the kids had always wanted what they thought they were getting, but it could. It could go wrong tonight. It could go wrong any time. He wound the window down.
The gateman's head immediately bobbed down to grin at him. ‘Hi there! I'm Marty the Gateman! How you doing?’
Marty the Gateman was in his late fifties, and dressed in an exaggerated version of the uniform of a cop from the 1940s. His face was pink with good cheer or make-up. Or alcohol most likely, Ricky thought. The other gatemen in all the other lanes looked the same, and said exactly the same things.
Ricky grinned right back. ‘I'm good. You?’
‘Me? I'm great!’ the man said, and then laughed uproariously. When he did this, he leaned back from the waist, placed a splayed hand on either side of his ribcage, and rubbed them up and down with each chortle, like a cartoon. Nicola giggled, twisted in her seat.
Ricky let one hand drop to where the gun rested down between the seat and the door, waited for the man to stop. Fucking loser. He imagined the guy going home after his shift, taking off his stupid fucking costume, whacking off in front of the television or a stack of porno. He had to do something like that. Rick knew he would have done, that's for sure. Couldn't be any other way.
Eventually the man stopped laughing, wiped his eyes. ‘Shee! So! Two happy travellers for Wonder World! You just here for rides and fun and all the magic you can find?’
‘No,’ Nicola said, leaning over Ricky so she could smile up at him through the window. ‘We're visiting Grandma too!’
Ricky relaxed. The girl was going to behave. Better still, she'd got into the part. They did, sometimes. Kids loved make-believe.
Marty winked. ‘Lucky Grandma! She know you're coming?’
‘It's a surprise,’ Nicola said, confidingly. ‘She lives in Homeland 3.’
‘Okey dokey!’ the gateman yelped joyously, pulling a deck of tickets out of one of the oversize pockets on his uniform. ‘So, Mr Dad – how long you going to be spending with us?’
‘An hour, maybe two.’ Ricky smiled. ‘Depends on how strong Grandma's feeling.’
‘Why don't we say three? Can always get you a rebate when you come out.’
‘Sure, Marty. That'd be great.’
‘All-righty!’ Tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, Marty the Gateman tapped some buttons on the control unit on the side of his booth. As he tapped, the buttons got a little larger, and started moving around, so he had to keep his hand darting back and forth to keep up. Two twinkling animatronic eyes appeared at the top of the control unit, and one of them winked at Nicola. Within a few seconds the buttons, which were brightly coloured in primary hues, were a few inches long and bending every which way. Still the man poked at them, huffing and puffing.
‘Hey!’ he said, and Nicola laughed, when a couple of the buttons got even longer and started poking him back. When this gag was done, the gateman held a ticket out towards the machine, a slit opened in the unit in the shape of a cheerful mouth, and the ticket was popped inside, chewed for a moment, and then spat out, authorized. The eye winked at Nicola again, and then suddenly the control unit returned to normal and Marty was waggling the ticket right under Ricky's nose.
Any other time or place, Marty would have lost his hand. But Ricky gave him the money, and the gate opened. The gateman waved at Nicola through the back window.
As the car started to pull forward, all of the faces in the gate structure – each a classic character from a Wonder World cartoon, every one hand-tweaked by liars into joyous perfection – swivelled their eyes towards the car and started to sing.
China Duck was there, Loopy Hound and Careful Cat, B
ud and Slap the Happy Rats and Goren the fucking Gecko and countless others, every face already hot-wired into your mind no matter how hard you'd always ignored them.
‘The magic is what you make it,’ they sang, a sonic tower of saccharine harmonies, ‘make it, make it… The magic is what you…’
Ricky wound the windows up.
Lit a cigarette and stepped on the gas.
The kid was quiet as they headed towards Homeland 3. She had plenty to look at, and she drank it in as though even in darkness it was the greatest thing she had ever seen. Maybe it was. Unlike her, Ricky had seen it all before.
Monorail tracks arced gracefully in all directions, linking park to park. Mostly quiet for the evening, but occasionally a streamlined shape would swoosh past the road or over their heads. Taking happy families out, or back, for the evening: out to ridiculous themed restaurants, or back to dumb-looking resort hotels where overexcited kids would make so much noise you'd want to throttle them, and parents would reconcile themselves to another night without screwing and send out for room service booze instead. Probably even that was delivered by a fucking chipmunk.
Actually, Ricky had never stayed in one of the hotels. Never even been in one: the security was too good. But he felt he knew exactly how it would be. A great big stupid con, like everything else in Wonder World. Set up fifty years ago, and now so vast and sprawling it put most cities in the shade. Rides and enclosures and parks and theatres and ‘experiences’ and crap, all based around a bunch of cartoons and some asshole's idea of the perfect world. There was a fake big game reservation. A bunch of fake lakes, where fish and dolphins and shit swam about, like anyone cared. A fake downtown strip the size of a whole town, where people who were too scared to walk to the corner store in their own stupid bergs could wander around and buy up all the shit they wanted. Some sort of stupid futuristic park, where it was supposed to be like what it would be in a hundred years: like we were all going to be shopping from home and wearing pastel nylon and using videophones – standing in tight little nuclear family groups and talking to Gramps on Mars.
Ricky knew what it was really going to be like in a hundred years, and it wasn't going to be cutesy characters walking around, posing for photographs and making the little kids laugh. It wasn't going to be restaurants where the family could go and get good food and great service for ten bucks a head; it wasn't going to be endless fucking stores full of T-shirts and candy in painted tins, and being able to leave your door unlocked at night and no litter anywhere. It was going to be guns, and stealing things. It was going to be dog eat dog, and he wasn't talking the kind of dog which had some fuckass pimply kid inside, earning chump change for blow. It was going to be taking what you wanted, and fucking up anyone who got in your way. It was getting that way already, and only fools pretended otherwise. That's what kids needed to learn, not crap about talking bunnies. Wonder World pained Ricky personally, which is one of the reasons why he did what he did for a living. He hated the bright colours, the cheer, the stupid, kiddie nonsense, the lies about how the world really was, the conspiracy to believe that there was magic somewhere in the world. He hated it all.
It was a crock of utter shit.
The kid stayed good as he drove, even though weird and miraculous buildings kept appearing in the darkness, each promising fun and games. She didn't ask to stop at every one, like most of them did. She kept quiet until the car swung around in the front of the massive portal into the heart of Wonder World, the original Beautiful Realm park. The gate was like a massive googie castle, every ludicrous ‘50s drive-in and coffee shop-erama mashed joyously together into an eight-storey extravagance that would have taken the Jetsons’ breath away. Whirling spotlights sent beams of light chopping merrily through the night, and characters capered around the entrance, beckoning people in. The girl had wound her window back down by then, and could hear in the distance the sound of drums and music, the singing and dancing inside.
‘The parade,’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘Fuckers did it early. Or maybe it's just beginning.’
She was calm, reasonable. ‘You said we'd see the parade.’
‘We will. It goes on for, like, an hour. We'll just do this thing, and then we'll go catch the end. It's better that way. Most of the people have gone home, you get closer to all the characters.’
‘Really?’ She was looking at him closely, her mouth wanting to smile, but nervous of being let down. Just then one of the lights cut through into the car, showing her in every detail. Pretty little face, red lips that had never been kissed. Big eyes, wanting him to tell her good news, wanting to see nice things.
And tiny new breasts outlined in a T-shirt one size too small. She was perfect, all the more so because she wouldn't even understand what he was thinking.
Ricky decided this one was going to play the game a little longer than most of the others, that she going to learn the facts of life. The facts that had to do with taking whatever he wanted to put inside her. A training session. Save some guy time and effort later on, except Ricky knew there wasn't going to be a later. Usually he lay the kid over the back seat on the way out, put a blanket over them like they were just sleeping, winked at some guy at the gate and laughed with him about how the child had too much excitement for one day. Tonight he'd find a way of getting this one out alive. He'd work it out.
‘Really,’ he said. ‘Trust me.’
She smiled.
Ten minutes later he was scanning street names as he cruised slowly down Homeland 3's main drag. Every now and then they'd pass a toon character, who'd stop and wave at Nicola. Ranging from three-foot dancing toadstools to six-foot ducks, they were freaking Ricky out. You didn't normally see characters roaming this late: they were only there to magic the place up through the day, during the most popular visiting hours. Ricky was having trouble sorting through the names of the streets, which were also the names of fucking characters. Loopy Drive IV, Careful Crescent VI – how the fuck were you supposed to keep track? Nicola wasn't helping, having decided to tell him her life story. She was thinking of shortening her name, and spelling it Nicci, because she thought it was classy and presumably didn't know how Gucci was actually pronounced. She liked cats, like Careful Cat, but dogs were sometimes cute too. She didn't know where Daddy was because she'd never known. She said she didn't have a mommy because real mommies didn't do what hers did, and so two days ago she'd run away from home and she wasn't going back this time.
Jesus, only two days, Ricky was thinking. Are you lucky you ran into me so quick. Going to save you six months of turning into your mommy, then a short lifetime waiting for the hammer to fall. You're a lucky girl, little Nicola. Lucky, lucky, lucky.
Part of him was also shaking, because of what he knew he was going to do later. He didn't normally do it. He just disposed of them. Take a drive down the ’glades, dump the body, no one's going to know or give a shit. He didn't like doing anything else, made him feel like a pervert though he wasn't – he was a professional. Every now and then was okay though, even if it was clouding his mind right now, making it hard to make the street names out. Some guys bought themselves new guns, went on a coke bender, hired a couple of whores. Everyone needs a treat. Incentive scheme. Keeps your wheels turning.
Ricky gripped the wheel tightly, tuned out the noise of the kid's nattering, got himself straight. Eventually he turned the car in what looked like the right direction. Found his way down the grid of streets, each lined with houses, some streets like the 1940s, some the 1950s or 1960s. Or like those times would have been if they hadn't been shit, anyhow. Like those decades were if you looked back at them now and forgot everything that was wrong with them. The streets were quiet, because mostly the people in the houses were too old to be out walking this late.
Homeland 3, along with the four other near-identical districts which spread in a fan around the Beautiful Realm, was one of the newest parts of Wonder World. Five years ago, the suits who ran the parks realized they had yet anoth
er goldmine on their hands: managed communities of old farts. Cutesy little neighbourhoods in the sun, where the oldsters could come waste their final years, safe from the world outside and bad afternoons where they could be walking home from the store they'd used all their lives and suddenly find three guys with knives standing on the corner. Not only safe, but coddled, living somewhere where their grandkids could be guaranteed to want to come see them. You want to go visit Granny in Roanoke? I don't think so. Wonder World? – that's a pretty easy sell. They built the houses, any size, any style, so everyone from trailer trash to leather-faced zillionaires had somewhere to hang their trusses: houses that looked like whatever you wanted from a space podule to a mud hut on the planet Zog. All this and stores and banks and shit, all built to look like what they sold. That's what made it so difficult to find your way around. Was like being in a toy store on acid.
It got so popular that even the smallest houses started getting expensive, and a year ago Ricky had an idea. You've got house after house of old people. With money. People who can't defend themselves too well. With things worth stealing. You get yourself into one of the Homelands – with a cute kid, who's going to question you? – and you help yourself to some stuff, using the kid's voice to get the door open. You're in and out before anyone knows there's a few old people gone to meet their maker sooner than intended: kid's the only living witness, and not for very long. All you got to do is make sure you never get recognized at the gate, and with millions of people going in and out every week, it's never going to happen.
And the kicker – Wonder World covered the burglaries up. Of course they did. Very bad for business, because they showed the magic retreat was a crock of shit. Plus, and here Ricky witnessed something which made perfect sense to him, something which placed the whole world in context as he understood it – the families often didn't make too much fuss. Why? Same reason that, after a couple months, Ricky had a new idea and moved on to a different line of business, made himself a professional.
What You Make It: A Book of Short Stories Page 35