Twenty Grand

by Rebecca Curtis

  The mountain crew was always thirsty and sending someone down the hill for drinks. The waterslide crew was thirsty and hungry, too. As the youngest, I was chosen, no matter where I was stationed, to make the food run. Under the yellow awning of the snack stand, I’d order three large nachos with extra cheese, six raspberry slushies, three cheeseburgers, and five chili dogs. The server would pack everything into a shallow cardboard box, and I’d give him the soft, ripped bills I’d collected. He’d push them back. On my return along the sandy path to the slide, Jacques sometimes passed by, walking slowly, wearing shorts and an old polo shirt, tight under the arms. He’d look up and nod, appearing to see only me, not the box.

  I wondered how he could notice so little. I guessed he was preoccupied. He’d hoped we’d have six hundred people a day, and we hadn’t yet. He was always chatting up the customers and making lists of needed supplies, and every day at noon he drove to a different neighboring town to distribute brochures. He kept a few in the pockets of his shorts, and sometimes he’d absentmindedly shove them farther in, because the tips stuck out. He’d had them printed himself, and on the front was a picture of Amy Goldman. I could understand why. She was the most glamorous, if not the most beautiful, girl in school. Within a week of the park’s opening, she was dating Dave Z., the assistant manager and second-oldest employee of the park. He was going back to college in the fall, and she had another year of high school, so by necessity it was a turbulent and passionate affair, one that touched us all. Dave Z. had blond hair and a deadly smile full of teeth. He never spoke to us except to tell us to do something, and then he called us kids. It seemed fitting and tragic that Amy Goldman should be his. She was a blond goddess—five foot eight with strong legs, a waist like a man’s neck, and the largest breasts it was possible to have without their being too big. Her posture was as straight as if she were walking at sea. Her skin was bruised apricot, her nose hooked, and her eyes green. Her smile could make any of us agree to perform the dingiest tasks—spraying down the concrete floors of the bathrooms, for example, or cleaning up a shit someone had taken on the men’s-room floor. At the waterslide, she always wore a red bikini, and when she leaned forward to blow her whistle or tell a child to move away from the bottom of the slide there was an ever so slight bulge of flesh beneath her breasts.

  She and Dave Z. did it in the waterslide office on the black vinyl chair. They did it in the showers on a cloudy afternoon. They did it in Jacques Michaud’s office, on his desk, when Jacques Michaud wasn’t there.

  Jacques Michaud was oblivious. He walked around the sandy paths of the park with his head down, looking for pieces of glass. When he looked up, he seemed to be staring at a lone house—the local millionaire’s—on the pine-covered mountain opposite.

  OCCASIONALLY, Amy and I worked together at the top of the slide. Where, because I couldn’t work the lift, I spent a lot of time—in a high, sunny, sandy clearing, surrounded by white pines and hemlocks and scraggly junipers—showing the people who emerged from the path in the woods how to use their sleds. One afternoon, it was slow, and Amy and I were left sitting in the sun by ourselves. She was wearing her bathing suit to tan.

  I asked her what the virus was that had kept her out of school for a year. She said the doctors had had about five different explanations and that none of them had made sense, that they’d tested her for everything, even syphilis. Sometimes her arm had been numb, or her leg, off and on, for a night or a day; and she’d felt tired. One doctor had told her that it was growing pains. Another had said that she was depressed. She laughed and said that it didn’t matter now, because she was fine.

  She took a carrot stick out of a Baggie and offered me one.

  “It made me realize that I should study more,” she said. “Once I get to college, I’m going to study all the time.”

  She tucked her hair behind her ears and smiled. Her cheeks were round when she smiled, and she suddenly seemed very young. I smiled, too, for no reason, and a bunch of kids came out of the woods with their sleds, laughing and shouting, then stood by the slide for five minutes arguing over who was faster. They made us count down for them so that they could race, in sets of two. After they left, it was quiet. Two dark-blue dragonflies sloped through the clearing. I stared at the red berries on the junipers, the shiny green leaves of the checkerberries below—and then I asked her when Jacques had taken the picture for the brochure. She said a few days before the park opened. I asked her if he’d paid her to do it. She shrugged and said that he’d offered, but she’d said no. She didn’t see why he should. “It wasn’t a big thing,” she said.

  “Did he take it himself?” I asked.

  She stared at me. “Of course he took it himself. He’s not a millionaire.” She frowned a bit. “He was very sweet,” she said. “It wasn’t weird.”

  I nodded. Then she asked me if I had a boyfriend. I shook my head.

  “Well, you’re not missing anything,” she said. “It’s a pain in the ass.”

  I nodded.

  She leaned back, and closed her eyes.

  BY LATE JUNE, we didn’t have six hundred people a day. We didn’t have five hundred. For three days it rained, and when the sun came back the chairlift malfunctioned and for two days Jacques sold half-price tickets.

  My father tallied the gross income from three hundred customers a day on the back of our electric bill, subtracting estimated employee incomes and making various other columns under an all-caps heading, “OVERHEAD,” and concluded that Jacques couldn’t be making a profit.

  But I thought he was. He had an air of contentment. He spent every morning checking the mechanics of the slide, and he was especially careful about the sleds. He made the maintenance guys check every sled every day—Were the runners straight? Did the brakes work?—which seemed excessive, since each rider had to check the brakes before heading down, and you didn’t need a brake. A ride without brakes was a wild ride. We’d all done it, and we all had slide burn as a result. It was a strange wound. Only the first few layers of skin, whatever portion had skimmed the slide—usually the knees, or the backs of the arms, or thighs—and the burns didn’t bleed; they oozed pink fluid. They could be as large as a hand or as small as a dime, and they hurt, but only until the EMT in the emergency shack put the iodine on. Then they stung for an instant and pulsed for a few days. They faded to a slippery shine, a pale shade of lilac, and seemed to travel, so that months later you’d be looking for one, to show someone, and it would be somewhere else on your arm, somewhere different from where it had been. Or maybe you’d just remembered it wrong.

  Jacques caught me pushing one of mine with a thumb one day when I was working at the bottom of the slide. The day was slow, and everything smelled like heat: the slide, my skin, the dirt that slid along the ground in the breeze. Jacques grabbed my arm, glanced at the burn, and said that it was pretty good. Then he stood next to me and looked around the park. A group of maintenance guys were shuffling by on their way to the sled-repair shack, where they got high between jobs. Jacques watched them go. His feet were spread wide in the dirt and he crossed his arms over his damp shirt. Then he asked me which one of them I had a crush on.

  I looked at them. They were all gaunt, except for one, who had dark hair, a paunch, and a soft, dopey look. I shrugged.

  “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  I watched him walk off toward the waterslide. When he got there, he waved to the people by the pool, of which there were only two, because Amy Goldman and Dave Z. weren’t present. Jacques stopped in front of the closed office door. The mat was over the window. He stood there, looking at the mat, for about ten seconds. Then he turned around. He glanced at the chubby, sunburned lifeguard who’d stood up from his stool out of nervousness. “Wrong office,” he said. He turned when he was halfway down the ramp. “If you see Dave Z.,” he said, “tell him to stop by and see me.”

  Dave Z. wouldn’t tell anyone what Jacques said that day. But after that he made small talk with the customer
s, cleaned his nails when he thought no one was looking, and said “Please” and “Thank you” when he told us to do something.

  ON THE LAST DAY of June we had a hundred and thirty-two guests. Jacques stopped me as I was delivering a box of cheeseburgers to the waterslide. His face was red from heat, and the fabric under his arms was yellow. He gestured to the people waiting to ride the lift. “You see this?”

  I nodded.

  His hand dismissed the line. “You’ll wish for this in July,” he said. Then he tugged his baseball cap down, put his hands in his pockets, and trudged toward the lodge.

  But when the Fourth came it was so humid that the air seemed tinged by the colors of people’s clothes. Dewdrops formed on the slide, and every half hour two of us had to ride down pushing towels in front of our sleds with our feet to dry it off. We never closed unless we felt drops or saw lightning—so we were open, but no one came. That night the fireworks above the lake were blurry, and mosquitoes made a faint sound like the echo of a tuning fork.

  It wasn’t just us. The economy was strong, but our town was dead. The swarm of tourists that had arrived in past years hadn’t materialized. The boardwalk at Bear Beach was quiet, the lake a vast blue. Lone motorboats buzzed by empty beaches. Our local news reported that the people who’d come to our town in the past, mostly from Massachusetts, weren’t coming now because they had more money now and could go to Europe.

  “I could have told him,” my father said. “The alpine slide is just not a great idea. I’m not sure why he thought he could do what no one else could.”

  Jacques announced a tightening of the belt. He spoke about the difference between the behavior he’d seen and the behavior he wanted to see. He said that he thought we could work a little harder. He said it with perfect equanimity, and soon afterward Amy Goldman and Dave Z. quarreled. He was going back to college in a month. He was thinking about the future. He wanted to date other people. She gave him an ultimatum. Out of all or nothing, he chose nothing. Now when he spoke to her it was the same way he spoke to everyone else, to tell her to hose out the rest rooms. Their awkwardness would have affected us, but we were busy working hard, which was difficult, since it was quiet and there was little to do.

  In mid-July, we each met with Jacques Michaud in his office to see if we’d get a raise. When I went in he was sitting behind his desk, a dinged-up metal one that had been in the basement office for at least ten years. He was smoking a cigar.

  “I don’t need a raise,” I said. I told him I was worried about the park. I explained it stupidly, in detail. I was so nervous I was stuttering. He grinned.

  “We’re doing okay,” he said. “We’re doing all right. Don’t worry about the park.” Then he said something strange. He said I was the best worker he had. He said that I had the nicest smile. He said that I made customers feel happy they’d come. “Everyone should treat customers like you treat them,” he said. “You think I haven’t seen you, but I have. You work hard.”

  On my way out, he stopped me. “Come by after work and have a drink with us sometime,” he said. “Stay and talk.”

  I wanted to. But from then on the gatherings were canceled, because the next day, a day when we were actually busy, a woman came down the slide with her face burned off. It was a beautiful morning, and an alabaster light had clapped down over the entire park. Mica gleamed on the sandy paths, and the upturned orange flowers were white at their tips. I was stationed at the bottom of the slide. I’d been telling people to hurry up and get off so that the people behind them could come down. The woman’s sled was moving slowly. She was leaning forward, but she had no momentum and the sled just stopped fifty feet up the hill. I yelled at her to keep going, and then two sleds came down fast behind her and bumped her rear and her sled inched forward a bit. She looked up. Her cheeks, nose, and forehead were the red of semiprecious gems. She didn’t move—she sat in her sled and stared ahead. A line of kids waited morosely behind her while I climbed up the hill. I helped her up and pulled her sled off the track. The woman walked with me quietly. She had short curly brown hair, thinning at the crown, and was stout. She was maybe thirty-five or forty. I asked her what had happened, and she said that halfway down the mountain she’d been thrown from her sled. She thought she’d hit something. I nodded, though I couldn’t think what she might have hit. Her face was oozing the tiniest pricks of blood, as if from a cheese grater, and it made me nervous so I took her hand. “Don’t worry,” I said. “It usually disappears.” But when we reached the EMT shack the EMT took one look and called an ambulance.

  Jacques held a meeting. Most likely, he said, the accident had been caused by a rock in the track. This was an unforeseeable and bizarre circumstance. He was doing everything in his power to help the woman, he said. She was in the best hospital. She was comfortable. In a day she’d be able to go back to her job. There was no problem. However, to prevent future bizarre events, we would now wipe the track down twice in the morning, instead of once, and twice again in the afternoon.

  Jacques said all this, but he didn’t sound sure of it. He looked as though he hadn’t slept.

  He cleared his throat. The potential complication, he said, was a lawsuit. But he had visited the woman in the hospital, he had promised to pay for the surgery she’d need once her face healed, and she had said that she wouldn’t sue. And he believed her. Did we know why?

  Someone suggested that it was his charm.

  “Come on,” Jacques said. “I’m not that charming. Look at my face. See this face?” He gestured. His face was sweaty and red. “It’s an ugly face,” he said.

  Someone said, “It’s not like she was a movie star.”

  The guy who’d said it was a tall, sarcastic redhead who’d once, as a joke, asked me when I was going to go out with him. I’d treasured the question even though he’d walked off before I could answer. Now Jacques stared at him. The guy stared back. “I don’t care,” Jacques said. “And I don’t want to hear anyone say that again.”

  “It’s no one’s fault,” someone said. “It was an act of God.”

  Jacques spat on the floor. “It wasn’t an act of God.”

  “Why not?”

  He stared at us incredulously. “Because it was a rock. In the track.”

  No one said anything else.

  He sighed. Then he put on his baseball cap. “This woman works at the Kmart,” he said. “She lives in a trailer, she doesn’t have a washer and dryer, and she’s not going to sue because she’s from New Hampshire. She’s a local.” He wiped his forehead. “Locals don’t sue,” he said. “It’s those bastards from Massachusetts that sue.”

  TWO NIGHTS LATER, the woman was on TV. Except for holes for her eyes and mouth, her face was a swath of white cloth. She was sitting on a brown couch with her hands in her lap. The deflated folds of her stomach slumped over her jeans. She told the interviewer that her life would never be the same. The interviewer asked her if she was planning to sue. At first, she didn’t answer. She just sniffed a lot. Then she said, “What do you think?” Then she said some things about how her children would look at her, then she started bawling and they cut the tape.

  My father shook his head. He said that it was a shame. He said that he’d always been impressed with Jacques’s initiative, he’d always liked the park, and it was a shame that a woman would destroy a good business with a lawsuit.

  As soon as my parents were asleep that night, I climbed out my window. I wanted to warn Jacques Michaud. The woman was suing, and I thought if he knew he could do something, like pay her off. I felt sure that he’d want to do that. I put on sneakers, a turquoise-blue tank top that I thought I looked pretty in, and shorts for maneuverability. I swung from my window onto the sunroof, crawled down its steep shingles, and dropped ten feet onto the grass. Then I walked in the heavy dark over the pass. There were a few houses along the way, the houses of old people, but their lights had long since gone off. The moon was nearly full and the tops of the trees swayed blackly in the t
ar-blue sky. First warped pavement, then oiled dirt rose up under my feet. I stumbled every few minutes. As the road narrowed and became a path, mosquitoes whined by my ear and pines left pitch on my arms. My heart was beating fast. In my head I was already there. The whole basement was lit. Music was playing and people were laughing and drinking, looking lovely, all while forming a plan to save the park. When I arrived, they would welcome me and I’d come up with the solution, and while they would have been attracted to me before, now they would love me. By the time I started down the hill, tripping down the ghostly white slide, I had forgotten that I had no solution. Below, in the clearing, the lodge looked dark. There were only two cars in the lot. Little black things were swooping through the inky sky above the chalets.

  When I tried the door, it was locked. I knocked. I could see a faint light through the keyhole. I knocked again. I called Jacques’s name. The black bushes swayed by the basement windows. I walked along the perimeter until I reached the one with the light. I squatted down to peer through. In the room, Jacques’s room, were two people on a mattress. They were wrapped around each other in a million ways. The man’s hair was white, his body dark and thick. The woman’s mouth opened in an expression of sorrow, her eyes narrowed, her hands grasped his hair, and she kissed him. It was Amy Goldman. Her blond hair was a gold light that filled the foot of space between her head and the pillow. I felt as if an army were marching through my heart, singing a terrible and joyous song. Jacques placed his hand behind her head and whispered something into her ear. I walked home.

  WHEN I REPORTED to work the next morning, no one was there.

  My parents made gestures at pity, and my older sister offered to get me a job at the motel where she worked as a chambermaid.

  The next day, Jacques was on the front page of the local paper. Jacques Michaud, park operator, had skipped town, the article said, owing thousands in electric bills and evading the pending lawsuit of one Charlotte Blanc. In fact, he was not Jacques Michaud. He was Mike Vost, from Chicago, where he was wanted for tax fraud and for operating a bar without a license. As a side note, he had been running the park without insurance. The last person to have seen him was Harry, who owned Harry’s Garage in town, and who’d bought his Mark VII Jaguar for four thousand dollars, at two thousand under book. The park was closed until further notice.