Rides of the Midway

by Lee Durkee

  “Notice there is no knob,” Matt called up, trying to sound like a TV preacher. “The door must be opened from within.”

  Noel lowered himself down the stairs, then he came around and sagged into the first pew. “I ain’t letting in nobody hangs with sheep,” he said, then cradling his head in his hands.

  “You gonna be sick?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’m gonna go find Ben.”

  For a while Noel remained in the pew holding his head. He was hearing the dogs still. A whole prison-break worth of dogs. He tried to diminish their barking by staring hard at the bright red hymnal slotted in front of him. Then he got an idea.

  •••

  That night he dreamt that he looked down into Ben’s casket and saw his younger brother pieced together with stained glass.

  He awoke at daybreak in his old bedroom and was attempting to repair the previous night into some semblance of time travel when his mother flicked on the light and ruthlessly announced breakfast to be ready. He limped downstairs into the kitchen, where Matt was slumped over his plate as if pegged to the chair back. The table was covered with food. Scrambled eggs, biscuits, gravy, bacon, sliced ham, sausages, grits, and one large coagulated bottle of squeeze ketchup that any moment now Roger would spurt onto his eggs. Roger raised the bottle. Pointing it first at Matt, then at Noel, he warned, “Just y’all remember something today. Ben would have wanted some good to come of this.” Then he inverted the red bottle and farted ketchup over the mound of scrambled eggs.

  After breakfast, Noel wandered outside to his car to search for his black tie. He had forgotten about the hymnals until he saw them scattered over the back seat. Fifty of them, at least. He leaned against the car a minute, regrouping. He was doing his best to hide the red hymnals under laundry and camera equipment when Matt came outside to smoke a cigarette.

  “What are all them books doing in your back seat?” he asked.

  “We stole them from the church. You don’t remember that?”

  “The church?”

  They decided to leave early for the service. That way they might have a chance to replace the hymnals, and anyway Matt still wanted to view the body. There were already a few cars in the parking lot when they arrived. Noel followed Matt up the steps. There was a distinct boot print dead center in the back of Matt’s suit coat. Inside, the church was cold and utterly silent. The clockwork shadow of ceiling fans spun over the pews. Beneath the slumbering pictorials, a boy was fitting candles into brass holders and a woman with pins in her mouth was attaching a red velvet curtain to the base of the elevated coffin. The coffin reminded Noel of a magician’s prop, something from which a beautiful naked woman might emerge. They stood in the alcove beside a wooden podium that held an open guest book bisected by a pink ribbon. Matt had started to sign it when Noel said, “I don’t think we’re suppose to do that. We ain’t guests.”

  Matt scratched out his name then let the pen hang by its yellow yarn. Almost shyly, he cut his eyes to Noel’s scuffed wingtips. Then his focus drifted higher to encompass the entirety of his brother’s suit and person. “Man, we look dug up,” he concluded. He sighed, shook his head, then started marching down the aisle into the chapel and downhill toward the coffin. Noel watched the boot print on Matt’s back. The woman with pins in her mouth stood and moved to the side. Reaching the casket, Matt fingered the lid before raising it. It locked into place and he released the lid cautiously before glowering down into the casket. His hands were steepled in front of him. Above the pulpit, the sun reached the stained glass and filled the back of the chapel with watercolor light. Noel backed away from the podium, but before he could escape outside he heard a noise that sounded to him like a turkey gobble.

  This noise sent him reeling into the sunlit courtyard, his heartbeat pounding on his headache. He found a cement bench and rested there bent over until he heard more cars starting to arrive. Then he got up and staggered across the street to an air-conditioned drugstore. They didn’t sell coffee, so he settled for a large bottle of baby aspirin. He crammed a fistful of the orange tablets into his mouth and made his way back to the street, but now he had to wait for a lull in traffic. Most of the cars were filled with relatives or family friends. He could not help but imagine how he looked to them. The devastated black suit. The long black unwashed hair blowing behind his shoulders. The redness of his eyes, the black circles beneath them . . . the giant aspirin bottle clutched in his hand. Watching the people inside the cars, Noel tried to time that instant of recognition, that fleeting moment where, according to Roger, a person can foretell your entire future.

  After a number of false starts, he lunged across the road and worked his way through the courtyard, pinballing away from relatives, well-wishers, and do-gooders. Then he spotted Tracy. She was walking between her parents in a slinky black dress, her brown hair longer and less frizzy, her figure much more assertive than Noel remembered it. Seeing Noel, she checked her parents and walked over. She did not smile but approached him slowly, like he was something wild and uncaged.

  They traded awkward hellos and stared down at the sidewalk. Tracy was wearing heels with thin black straps across the feet. Noel’s navy-blue wingtips were caked with orange dirt.

  Tracy said, “I guess we should be going inside, huh?”

  Noel did not look up or reply.

  “Ben’s going to have them spilling into the aisles.”

  “He was the best person I ever knew,” Noel said.

  Tracy made a wafting motion with one hand and asked, “Are you drunk?”

  “No. Just hungover as hell.”

  “What happened to your suit?”

  He stared down at his torso a long moment before shrugging.

  Tracy hesitated then said, “Yeah, Ben was almost too good.”

  “Too good? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Too good for this world.”

  “Is that why you broke up with him?”

  “You are drunk.”

  “Or was it that he didn’t have a fast enough car for you, something like that?”

  “Don’t,” she said.

  Noel snapped his fingers, pointed at her.

  “You’re not wearing glasses! That’s what’s different.”

  “Contacts,” she admitted, lowering her brown eyes. “Don’t make me cry or I’ll have to take them out.”

  “And you got rid of them braces too. Damn, girl, that’s what it was, huh? You musta had all sorts of young studs asking you out.”

  “Goodbye, Noel.”

  “Wait!” After a confidential stumble forward, he glanced around and settled on her shoes again, then he asked if she’d heard anything about Ben taking drugs on the night of the wreck.

  She rolled her eyes to say, “You mean about him being on X? Everybody’s saying stuff like that. I don’t believe a word of it. Do you?”

  “X? What’s X?”

  “Ecstasy. It’s some new drug, supposed to make you love everybody.”

  “Ben already loved everybody.”

  “Maybe you could use some of that, huh?”

  “Yeah, I could use a whole truckful about right now.”

  Tracy quit smirking to ask if it was true about Ben being naked when he wrecked. “That’s just talk, right?”

  “Hell no, he wasn’t naked. And his head wasn’t cut off, and his damn ghost ain’t walking down the highway looking for its left nut either.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t even know.”

  Her foot began etching in the sidewalk pine straw. There was brown pine straw everywhere. No grass to be seen.

  Tracy asked, “You think it’s my fault, don’t you, that Ben killed himself?”

  “He didn’t kill himself.”

  “But I heard�
�”

  “Shut up.”

  “Excuse me?”

  This came from her father, who had stepped forward, but Tracy turned and told him to wait. Mr. Carmody halted, but very reluctantly. Almost as tall as Noel, he had a small head and black hair oiled sideways. He shingled houses for a living and looked strongly disproportioned.

  “I can handle this,” she told him.

  Noel whispered, “Can I just ask you one question?”

  “You’re going to anyway.”

  He held the question in his mouth, tasting it. The taste was venom and bile, the taste of grief.

  “If you hadn’t broke up with Ben, you think he’d still be alive?” he asked.

  The way she closed her eyes made her face appear, momentarily, to be smiling. She spoke slowly, as if from inside a trance. She said, “You want to know who it was I heard sold him X?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Noel replied, hoping that it wasn’t Tim. “Because I’m gonna kill whoever did.”

  “I heard it was you.”

  All at once there was shouting, motion, then Mr. Carmody had both his hands on Noel’s shoulders, a gesture that gave the appearance of condolence or benediction, but the grip was too tight and the hands were positioned too close to the jugular. Grittingly he stated that these were tough times. “Tough all around. My family’s going inside now to pray for your brother. Who we always liked and welcomed into our home. Be that as it may, if you ever touch my daughter again, I’ll break you damn neck. Do we understand each other, son?”

  “I’m not your son.”

  “Do we understand each other?”

  “All I said was—”

  “Do we understand each other?”

  “Yes sir, we do.”

  •••

  He found Matt sitting on the gravel lot with his back resting against the front wheel of the Mustang. He handed Matt the plastic bottle. Matt shook out some candy aspirin and started chewing and then returned the bottle along with some comment wholly indistinguishable. Noel, after pouring more aspirin into his own mouth, had to tilt back his head to say, “I told you not to go look, didn’t I?”

  “It was like they’d—”

  “Shut up, Matt. I don’t want to hear it.” While saying this, Noel had to stopper the aspirin back into his mouth.

  They kept chewing, both of them squatted down in the shade like aborigines.

  “We should head in,” Noel said after a while and started to brush the orange pellets off his suit collar.

  “It looked like they—”

  “Matt. Shut up.”

  Matt picked up the front apron of his tie and used the back of it to wipe his nose. Then he said, “It didn’t even look like Ben, it was some scarecrow of Ben, like something they’d burn of Ben at a football game.”

  Noel stood up and walked away toward the church.

  •••

  Baptists know their songs by heart, especially the hymns they use to serenade the dead. The immediate family took up the front pew, Noel by the aisle, then Matt, Alise, and Roger. The Reverend Smokewood stood on the far side of the casket gripping the altar podium. Waiting for the perfect pitch of silence to begin the service, he stared down at the giant black leatherbound Bible as if trying to intimidate it. Roger had requested Smokewood for the service, and although Noel had anticipated this, he still had trouble recognizing the man. Smokewood’s chest had dropped into his belly, and his baldness had subdued the military air that lingered now only in the metallic eyes enlarged by tiny round spectacles that made his head look tumorously large. This defeated appearance made it all the more startling when he began the service a cappella. His voice had survived, at least. The congregation moved their lips to “Amazing Grace,” not sure whether or not they were supposed to join in. The reverend had a cigar smoker’s baritone that boomed through the song until he came to the saved uhh-uh wretch li-hike meeee! part. The reverend knew better than to sing that part pretty; instead he hung it out to dry. Hearing it, you could tell, here was a man who has truly been wretched. It was the best rendition of “Amazing Grace” Noel had ever heard.

  But then the eulogy began. Glaring directly at Noel and Matt, and standing so close to them that twice Noel had to blink spittle from his eye, the reverend came around the casket and Cain-and-Abeled them. At first Noel could not believe what he was hearing, but then he recalled Roger’s warning at breakfast—that Ben would have wanted some good to come of this—and then he understood the eulogy to be part of some larger strategy to dog-catcher his soul.

  The reverend clenched his fists and cried out, “And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother?”

  “You bastards,” Noel said, more breath than words.

  Now Smokewood assumed the cowering mannerisms of Cain in order to reply, “I know not. Am I my brother’s keeper?” He mouthed the question, then began to repeat it over and over, his tone changing from that of Cain’s trembling alibi into a stern philosophical dilemma. Am I my brother’s keeper? The second time that Noel said you bastards it was audible throughout the church. Everyone heard it except perhaps for the reverend himself, who had been catching his breath to shout, “And God said unto Cain, The VOICE of THY BROTHER’S BLOOD it CRIETH unto me from the ground. IT CRIETH! UNTO ME! FROM THE GROUND!”

  The last time Noel said you bastards he timed it so that it rang like a bell inside the church. Then he turned to Matt for some mirror of outrage, but instead he found his brother to be weeping, his chin held high as if hooked from beneath, his eyes locked into the reverend’s. Noel elbowed Matt, elbowed him hard in the biceps, then stood to face Smokewood, whose eyes never wavered from reeling in Matt. Noel began to step backward up the aisle. Very solemnly. Like a groom in reverse. And as he did this, he called out Matt’s name louder and louder as the distance between them increased. In a voice equally determined, the reverend was thundering, “And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is more than I can bear. More than I can bear! I shall be a fugitive. A FUGITIVE! A vagabond on the earth. A VAGABOND!”

  The wooden front door to the church was enchantingly small. It was over three hundred years old and had been shipped from England. As a child, Noel’s favorite moment at church was at the very end of the service when Reverend Smokewood would march to that elfish door and fling it open, allowing in a tunnel of sunlight, then he would bellow, “NOW GO OUT THERE AND DO GOOD!” Noel’s back was now pushing against this door. The entire congregation had contorted around to stare up the aisle at him, everybody except for Reverend Smokewood and Matt. In that hushed and encapsulated moment, Noel braced his shoulders hard against the top of the doorframe, then he shouted his brother’s name one last time before wheeling forever out of that church and into sunlight.

  He walked across the courtyard and swung into his Mustang, banging its door into the neighboring sedan. As he backed the car around, he could hear the congregation singing, “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.” He centered the church in the rearview and sat there pumping the brake pedal. “C’mon, Matt, c’mon,” he kept chanting, but when the church door finally opened, it was not Matt who came out, it was a woman, and not his mother, and not anyone he recognized. Walking toward him, she started off looking older but by the time she reached the car she had grown much younger. Dangerously thin, dressed in a pleated black dancer’s skirt with black leotards below and tight black ribbed shirt above, Amber appeared torn between death and disco. Noel might not have recognized her at all had it not been for the long mercury-colored hair that spilled into the car when she framed her face in the rolled-down window.

  They studied each other a moment, then Noel grinned and thanked her for the pie.

  “I bet it was awful.” She smiled with the tip of her tongue touching her upper lip. “Hey, you remember calling me last night?”

  “Last night?”

  “About t
hree in the morning.”

  “Nah, really? Did I say anything stupid?”

  “No. You were real sweet. Most of it was hard to make sense of, but I was glad you called, it was sweet.”

  Noel checked the rearview and told her he had to get going. He asked if she needed a ride anywhere.

  “You act like somebody’s chasing you.”

  “I feel like somebody’s chasing me.”

  Amber leaned inside the car and brushed against Noel as she plucked the black film container off the center console. “Still taking pictures, huh?” She shook the film cartridge next to her ear and asked if these were of his girlfriend. “I heard she’s real beautiful, that she’s a Dixie Darling and everything.”

  Noel geared the car into drive and pressed his foot on the brake. “She ain’t my girlfriend, not anymore,” he said. “I broke up with her.”

  “You did! Why?”

  “Shoot. You ever hear that song ‘Superfreak’?” He half sang a few lines. Then, as soon as he had Amber laughing, he reached out and took the film from her.

  “I always liked that song,” she said.

  “Amber, I gotta be heading out. But there’s something I need to tell you first.”

  “Is it about my brother?”

  He nodded and said, “Yeah, it is.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Noel,” she said quickly. “I’m sorry I tried to make the police think it was you. I never shoulda done that. If they had ever arrested you, I would have said something, I promise I would have.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I did it,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”