People Park

by Pasha Malla

  You too, candynuts, Starx grunted, we can’t be in uniform for when they ship us out tomorrow. Don’t look so forlorn, pal! Just a little break, a little holiday, till this all blows over. I need a different shirt though, maybe there’s a lost and found here or something . . .

  Starx wandered off and reappeared in a maroon Lady Y’s Back-2-Back Champs T-shirt, which fit him as a tubetop. Not ideal, he said, but better than —

  Olpert was gone.

  Bailie?

  Starx stuck his head out the door, looked left, right, up the hill: mist, mist, more mist.

  Bailie? Starx’s voice rang out over the common.

  And then, to the north, he saw movement — a figure flitting down the path from Street’s Milk & Things. Starx nearly called out, but it wasn’t Olpert.

  This person was small, a child, a tubby little guy in a red cap who descended with purpose at a light gallop. He reached the bottom of the hill, paused, transfixed by the cloudy bubble over Crocker Pond — waiting, maybe, for a sign.

  GRIGGS.

  Walters? said Griggs, chair-wheeling beside Noodles before the Orchard Parkway monitor.

  And Reed, he’s down in the truck. Cathedral Circus is cleared. Only business with anyone in it was Loopy’s — she was in there, crying, but we sent her to the pub. Reed gave her a fivespot, told her to get a cider on us. Everything’s ready.

  We see that. We’ve got cameras on the street and — he flicked channels — garden.

  I’m up on the roof. Of the Grand Saloon. With the chopper. It’s clearing down on the street but still foggy as shet up here.

  And you’re sure he hasn’t returned to his suite?

  Raven? No, no way. We’ve had men in there all day. I mean, he didn’t have any luggage or anything like that but —

  Fine. Is everything set?

  Yeah, pretty much. The chopper’s rigged and ready to go. Hitch looks good, should be a breeze.

  Good lookin out.

  So do we go ahead? With the um, demobilization?

  It’s going to land in that little parkette, correct? To the north of the Hotel?

  If Reed guns it, it should, yes. Provided the chains hold.

  They’d better hold!

  They’ll hold, they’ll hold.

  Griggs lowered the walkie-talkie. Noodles had wheeled away from the monitors to a corner of the control room. Feet up, he massaged his temples, a soothsayer conjuring a vision, eyes closed. Griggs hit TALK: You’re sure no one’s going to come through there?

  No chance.

  Okay, I guess we’re good to go then.

  We’re good to go?

  We’re watching, Walters, keep in mind.

  So should we go ahead?

  For fug’s sake, said Griggs, yes, go ahead.

  Good lookin out, said Walters. Talk in a bit.

  From the pickup’s trailerhitch a towline lifted and disappeared two storeys up the Grand Saloon Hotel into what was either sinking clouds or rising fog. A thumbs-up flashed out of the driverside window, the engine rattled to life, and for a moment nothing happened. Then Griggs’ walkie-talkie crackled. Okay, all set, said Walters, here we go.

  The pickup’s engine roared, the tailpipe belched exhaust in a sooty plume, the towline snapped taut, twanging.

  It’s moving, yelled Walters, the chopper’s moving, it’s dragging it to the edge!

  The pickup inched forward, the chain trembled.

  It’s about to go over, said Walters. Griggs, are you there?

  I’m here, said Griggs. Noodles and I are watching.

  The pickup strained, the towline flexed, Walters screamed, It’s going over!

  The chain went slack. The pickup, released, went tearing up the road. Griggs waited for the crash as the illustrationist’s helicopter fell groaning over the side, plummeted six storeys, humbled to earth as an elephant to its knees.

  Instead the towline came whipping out of the fog and thrashed in the Grand Saloon’s parkette. No chopper followed. Noodles opened his eyes. Blinked. Did not nod.

  Walters?

  Griggs, it’s done!

  No. Nothing came over.

  What?

  The towline came loose. Ask Reed, when he returns from his joyride.

  Wait — Griggs? No way, I saw it go over. What?

  IX

  HAT DO you mean he’s gone?

  He’s — Pearl began, but she felt emptied, incapable of words.

  In his free hand Kellogg held a tray of flats, the cardboard sagged and dripped grease. He handed this to Elsie-Anne. Around them the midway blared and jingled. What happened, Pearly? Where’s Gip?

  I got on the Thunder Wheel and he was beside me and —

  And?

  I look away for a moment, and then I look back, and we were moving, and Gip . . . I started yelling for them to stop the ride but it just kept going up and up.

  You checked lost and found?

  No. We should.

  And the bathrooms. Or some other ride? Or — whoops, Annie!

  The flats slid from the cardboard tray and landed in a soggy heap on the sawdusted path. I bought dinner, said Kellogg, pointing. I thought maybe Gip could use something to eat.

  A fly landed on the flats. Then another. And another.

  No problem, Annie, said Kellogg. We can get more. But first —

  Where’s Gip? said Elsie-Anne. Mustard streaked her dress.

  Kellogg wiped his hands on his pants, left greasy streaks, lifted his daughter into his arms. Mummy just lost track of him, Annie. We’ll go make an announcement. He can’t have left! Where would he go?

  Pearl followed her husband, the midway clattered and brayed. They passed beneath the Kicking Horse’s loop-de-loop, a trainful of riders hurtled around it screaming and yanked away, a hawker brandishing two ungodly stuffed bears, eyes thyroidal and bulging, two kids about Gip’s age lapping candyapples with sugared frenzy.

  Kellogg stopped a youngish couple walking arm in arm, opened his wallet, dug out Gip’s school photo, wagged it at them, they shook their heads. He moved to an elderly gentleman hobbling along with a fistful of balloons. About yay tall, Kellogg explained, red hat, healthy, um, girth? Raven’s co-star last night? The balloon man apologized, wished the Pooles luck.

  Pearl watched this hazily. As the Wheel had first begun to turn she’d gazed out over the island with melancholy. She tried to locate the view of the carnival below as the echo of some memory, but couldn’t. There was the story of her poor date throwing up, but though she remembered the details enough to tell it, the actual memory didn’t exist. She couldn’t recall the boy’s face, let alone his name, what the weather had been, how she’d felt before or after. All that remained was the disgusting, dramatic climax. She’d been happy to entertain her family with this, but now she wanted everything else: who was the boy, what had that night meant to her as a teen?

  It was then that Pearl realized the seat beside her was empty. The wheel kept climbing. Her stomach flipped. With panic rising into her throat, choking her, she scanned the fairgrounds. Maybe she’d find Gip flashing a cheeky grin and waving as the ride lifted her skyward: what an illustration, vanishing like that. But the crowd shuffled along, no one looked up, no one was anyone she knew — besides the ride’s ambivalent operator, face cupped in hands lighting a cigarette.

  Her cries of, Stop the ride, stop the ride, were lost amid the roar of the midway and the honks and shrieks of looped calliope. A metal bar pinned Pearl into the Thundercloud, though even if she could escape it was too high to jump, especially on her bad knee — she imagined it popping off like a bottlecap.

  The world shrunk away beneath her. At seventy feet it became impossible to pick out faces from the crowd. Another twenty feet up what filled the midway ceased to be people, more a hive teeming with bees. Past one hundre
d feet their movements resem­bled a sheet rumpling in a slight breeze. And another fifty feet higher Pearl passed into the clouds, and through the other side, and everything below disappeared.

  The wheel stopped with a shudder. She was alone up here — again. (Though that flying episode must have been a dream, surely . . .) This was real: the Thundercloud swayed and creaked. The night was speckled with stars. The moon was colourless and ghostly. She breathed the crisp, clean air. Dread drained from her body. Her shoulders loosened. Her whole body loosened, a tight icy coil within her loosened. Despite the sounds of the fair filtering muffled through the fog, Pearl felt beyond everything, giddy and light, yet serene. She wished, or longed, or pined, to never come down.

  What would she return to? A scenario began to play out in her thoughts: if Gip had run away or been kidnapped — hoping of course he would turn up, eventually, safe and sound — she imagined a scene, some months later, returning home from work to Kellogg and the kids standing grimly at the end of the driveway with boxes and luggage. She would be deemed negligent and unfit. A judge would award him custody of the children. She pictured herself in the living room, emptied of everything but her reading chair, sitting there in the dark, deserted and mercifully alone. Just like this.

  At this came relief — followed immediately by shame, but the initial response was undeniable. It was a terrible thing to wish for, to abandon your family, or have them abandon you. But she was tired, always tired, and tired of being tired. Conversely there was freedom: no medications, no slogging alongside Kellogg’s manically blazing happiness while inside her glinted something black and mean. Pearl imagined her family as a brick and her life a balloon, the brick squashing and squishing and contorting the balloon, the balloon curling up in little rubbery swells around the sides of the brick, always on the verge of popping.

  Pearly! cried Kellogg. Come on!

  He was lunging past the balloon man, Elsie-Anne in tow. Pearl caught up at Lost Property. The calliope died, the PA crackled to life, and the guy working the booth struck up a little handheld radio. While Kellogg whispered dictation, out rattled a monotone announcement: Gip Poole, your father is looking for you . . . Please come to Lost Property . . . Not that you’re property . . . Gibbles, Dad’s here . . . He loves you . . . Champ . . . Everything is going to be okay.

  OLPERT STOOD across the roundabout from Bay Junction, hiding in the shadows from the couple waiting at the Ferryport. They were that headscarfed woman and her husband, a burly creature of beard and fleece, who lived on the Islet’s southernmost point in a home built from trash scavenged from the beach. They existed without electricity or running water, grew all their food in a solar-powered greenhouse, hosted gatherings at which visitors orbited a bonfire tapping homemade drums. One night Olpert had watched in secret from among the reeds, found the rhythm soporific, fallen asleep, woken up cold and hungry, the bongos still tocking.

  This couple, toiling at land’s end with their compost bins and trellised veggies, were worrying: they seemed apocalyptic and crazed, harbingers of some social collapse to which no one else was yet privy. Even so Olpert usually braved a sidemouthed Hi when he bumped into them. But now he hung back, skulking within the shadows while the ferry came chugging into dock and the apron lowered. Only upon the foghorn warning, low and mournful and ghostly, did he race aboard, all the way to the bow.

  The engines roared and off they slid toward the Islet. At night the crossing seemed slower and lonelier than it did during the day, a sluggish grumble through the dark. Though tonight Olpert hardly noticed time passing or the lakebreeze batting his face. Starx’s huge domed head kept rearing into his thoughts. And with him came the boy, or not the boy, just that single glazed and horrible eye: You did this to me, Olpert Bailie, you.

  He felt gutted. All he wanted was sleep. Even the prospect of being pulled from bed, handcuffed, and escorted back to shore seemed worth it to collapse into his sheets, slip away, and, if only for a few hours, be nothing but not awake. But handcuffed by whom? His uniform precluded him from justice. Or the forces of justice had deemed him just — they’d even abetted his escape.

  The water slurped the sides of the boat. Olpert pictured himself in a limp, tired way tipping over the railing — the icy throttle of the water, sucked under, the peace of sinking to the Cove’s dank, cold bottom. He’d never been much of a swimmer, it wouldn’t take much to drown. The engines chugged, the water churned. And just as Olpert was gathering himself to mount the railing the Islet’s lights shone down, the woodsy couple sidled up, and the ferry bumped into port.

  OTHER THAN THE milky hump concentrated over Crocker Pond, the fog on the common had almost completely dissipated. The thinning clouds exposed a dull and flat and sparsely starred sky, not the big wet-seeming messy sort of night Gip was used to back home, which suggested other worlds and dreams. This was muddy, the low moon a halved apple afloat in a bucket of muck. It was in the light of this moon that Gip found his knapsack stashed sidestage.

  He opened it, riffled through all the junk his dad had packed — and, with a grin, pulled out the Grammar. Yes, he cried. Yes!

  Then he climbed into the gazebo. The illustrationist’s trunk sat front and centre where he’d left it, or it’d left him, the lid gaped, locks busted into useless tin crabclaws. Standing upon the ducktape X, Gip examined the trunk: its velvet lining was scuffed and threadbare in parts, but there was no sign of any trapdoor or hatch through which Raven might have slipped away. Such trickery wasn’t how illustrations worked anyway, Gip knew.

  Gip tilted the Grammar toward the moonlight and flipped through to the 10th Situation: Abduction. A succession of line drawings presented a figure beside the trunk, brandishing an image, and the second —

  The light extinguished. Someone had turned off the moon! No: a hulking figure had appeared stageleft, his torpedo-shaped head concealed a section of sky.

  Gip Goode? said a big, round voice. We’ve been looking for you.

  Gip Poole, said Gip.

  Whatever, said the man. He was dressed strangely — coveralls that sagged at his waist, a tiny shirt that struggled to contain his massive torso — and approached cautiously, saying something about people who had questions for Gip. The moon peeked over the top of the man’s head, illuminating a scrap of paper tucked into a corner of the trunk.

  My people just want to know what you know, said the man, plodding across the stage.

  Gip hopped into the trunk, took the paper in his hands. Faintly he could make out an image: a drawing of . . . furniture?

  No, hey, pal — the man’s voice was rushed and panicked — what are you doing?

  Gip grabbed the leather thong hanging from the lid and pulled it down. Darkness enclosed him. He could hear the big man charge across the stage, fists banged on the trunk, a voice hollered, Open up, you little knobdiddler! And then it all faded: the trunk’s bottom dropped out, the sides fall away, the lid lifted, and Gip hovered in space, and then through it he was falling.

  WITH HIS FACE pressed to the microwave, eyes inside each of the structures he’d puttied around the holes, ducktaped hand on the POWER dial, Sam waited. The kitchen was still. There were no machines, there was nothing. If Sam had ever trunked him, Raven was gone. Only nothing remained. All that was left was to join this nothing. Sam wasn’t frightened: this is just what it was. This was the work. The house was quiet. Upstairs the others were in their beds. But now there was a noise outside — footsteps. Someone was coming up the walk. He’d have to hurry. Okay Adine, said Sam, and sucking in his breath widened his eyes until they ached and cranked the dial as far as it would go and the microwave hummed, and all Sam could see was light.

  This is life brought to ruin —

  Street by dreaming street.

  — Kevin Connolly, Drift

  I

  N THE KITCHEN tiles lay the man in Olpert’s stolen khakis who’d said his name was Sam, though th
at was all he’d said. When Olpert had arrived home he’d discovered this Sam staring into the microwave, his face pressed to it, the oven hummed, a smell of burning plastic and something wet and hot filled the air. Olpert said, Hi? and Sam wheeled to face him. His eyes were strange. They seemed to be bubbling. With horror Olpert realized he’d been cooking them: they hissed and sizzled while the microwave whirred and light streamed from twin holes bored in its door.

  What are you doing, said Olpert, who are you, what are you doing?

  I’m Sam, said this man in a hoarse, sick-sounding whisper, and fell to the floor.

  Olpert unplugged the microwave, it died, and he knelt over Sam. His pupils were pinpricks, the irises glossed with a milky mucous, the whites raw. Olpert dampened a teatowel and pressed it to Sam’s eyes. Again he asked Sam what he’d been doing, and why. But Sam didn’t make a sound, even of pain.

  There’s no ferry till morning, said Olpert. I’ll take you to hospital then. Okay?

  He pulled the towel away. Sam’s eyes had the look of scorched jelly. You need to keep this on them, said Olpert, and he wrapped the towel around Sam’s head as a blindfold for a party game of bluff. He swept up the twists of plastic that littered the floor, sat in a chair at the kitchen table, and, with Sam sprawled at his feet, waited for the sun to come up.

  Hours passed, the tang of burnt flesh and molten plastic faded, Olpert nodded off, awoke to the rattle and scrape of Sam’s breathing, noticed one of Sam’s hands was wrapped in ducktape — had it always been? — and dozed again. Morning arrived: through the blinds light striped the kitchen gold and grey. Sam sat up, turned his face toward the window, said, I can see it, it’s daytime, I can see the light! Though the hitch in his voice suggested dismay.

  There’s a seven-o’clock ferry, said Olpert. We can walk out there now and wait for it.