Joyland South

The streetlights are shining white in the rain, one after another casting light through the windshield, the motion of the car bringing bright white then gray, the motion of the light seeming to twist the layers of smoke that hang, in circles, around us inside the car.

Carl is driving one-handed. Leaning down toward the gearshift. Taking a hit from his pipe. His face and eyes turning gray and black and white.

“Bark like a dog,” I say quietly, turning to watch him, smiling some at him, smiling wider and thinking I can cast my own little spell on Carl. “Bark.”

Carl is my good friend.

Carl turns to the road, resting the pipe in the ashtray.

The double agent slid down the side of a roof and launched, arms waving, across an alley to the next building, followed closely by his pursuers. The agent and villains remained visible at all times because they existed in a movie. We watched this movie on gigantic twin leather sofas in a towering hotel’s private lounge, an unmarked floor near the top floor. Three other people sat on my couch and a disinterested man, most likely a spy, intertwined his legs with mine.

We had plenty of room, but the other couch held eight people sitting in the television’s skyscape glow as scenes from the movie flecked their rapt faces. Maybe that couch attracted the stupid spies because the movie wasn’t that great, with corny pratfall gags and a juvenile sexual undercurrent that placed scantily-clad women fighting or tricking the agents or being tricked; the spies mingling around us made fun of it, and the room grew rowdier, lookout-loud.

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.  My son Zack was a junior counselor, not even sixteen till August.  The camp hired him at such a young age only because he had completed lifeguard training.  Learn to swim, we’d told him.  Learn to ride a bike!  Deliver things!  The wave pool is hiring.  We told him so many things.  Put your pennies in a piggy bank.  Save for a car!  All the little children, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight!  Leather craft, BB guns, nature walks in the arroyo, what could be so hard about that? 

“You should have forgotten their names by now,” Mike said.

He sat in the driver’s seat like it was a living room chair, his left leg jackknifed under his right.

“You mean I shouldn’t mention them,” Kat said.

“I mean they should be ghosts.”

Browning stalks of corn stood motionless awaiting harvest. Every now and then, a piece of farm equipment, a rusting red thresher against the plain blue sky, merited pulling over for a photograph. But they were doing eighty, and Kat could tell that the ease of the past few months they’d spent getting to know each other in Mexico was fading.

“My step-dad’s ex-wife always came for Thanksgiving,” Kat said. “Sometimes Christmas. It’s no big deal.”

“Nineties psychology,” Mike said. “You set ex-boyfriends into this place and time like they’re my contemporaries.”

“I haven’t had a serious relationship for three years.”

“It’s like this boyfriend mural.”