Joyland(15)

He put the handkerchief back in his pocket and gave me a 52

STEPHEN KING

grin, sunny and unforced. "Call me once in a while, and I will be. Also, don't let them put you to work climbing all over one of their damned roller coasters."

That actually sounded sort of exciting, but I told him I wouldn't.

"And-" But I never heard what he meant to say next, advice or admonition. He pointed. "Will you look at that!"

Fifty yards ahead of us, a doe had come out of the woods.

She stepped delicately over one rusty GS&WM track and onto the railbed, where the weeds and goldenrod were so high they brushed against her sides. She paused there, looking at us calmly, ears cocked forward. What I remember about that moment was the silence. No bird sang, no plane went droning overhead. If my mother had been with us, she'd have had her camera and would have been taking pictures like mad. Thinking of that made me miss her in a way I hadn't in years.

I gave my father a quick, fierce hug. "I love you, Dad."

"I know," he said. "I know."

When I looked back, the deer was gone. A day later, so was I.

?

When I got back to the big gray house at the end of Main Street in Heaven's Bay, the sign made of shells had been taken down and put in storage, because Mrs. Shoplaw had a full house for the summer. I blessed Lane Hardy for telling me to nail down a place to live. Joyland's summer troops had arrived, and every rooming house in town was full.

I shared the second floor with Tina Ackerley, the librarian.

Mrs. Shoplaw had rented the accommodations on the third floor to a willowy redheaded art major named Erin Cook and a stocky undergrad from Rutgers named Tom Kennedy. Erin, who had Joyland





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taken photography courses both in high school and at Bard, had been hired as a Hollywood Girl. As for Tom and me . . .

"Happy Helpers," he said. "General employment, in other words. That's what that guy Fred Dean checked on my application. You?"

"The same," I said. "I think it means we're janitors."

"I doubt it."

"Really? Why?"

"Because we're white," he said, and although we did our share of cleanup chores, he turned out to be largely correct.

The custodial crew-twenty men and over thirty women who dressed in coveralls with Howie the Happy Hound patches sewn on the breast pockets-were all Haitians and Dominicans, and almost surely undocumented. They lived in their own little village ten miles inland and were shuttled back and forth in a pair of retired school buses. Tom and I were making four dollars an hour; Erin a little more. God knows what the cleaners were making. They were exploited, of course, and saying that there were undocumented workers all over the south who had it far worse doesn't excuse it, nor does pointing out that it was forty years ago. Although there was this: they never had to put on the fur. Neither did Erin.

Tom and I did.

?

On the night before our first day at work, the three of us were sitting in the parlor of Maison Shoplaw, getting to know each other and speculating on the summer ahead. As we talked, the moon rose over the Atlantic, as calmly beautiful as the doe my father and I had seen standing on the old railroad tracks.





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"It's an amusement park, for God's ·sake," Erin said. "How tough can it be?"

"Easy for you to say," Tom told her. "No one's going to expect you to hose down the Whirly Cups after every brat in Cub Scout Pack 18 loses his lunch halfway through the ride."

'Til pitch in where I have to," she said. "If it includes mopping up vomit as well as snapping pictures, so be it. I need this job. I've got grad school staring me in the face next year, and I'm exactly two steps from broke."

"We all ought to try and get on the same team," Tom saidand, as it turned out, we did. All the work teams at Joyland had doggy names, and ours was Team Beagle.

Just then Emmalina Shoplaw entered the parlor, carrying a tray with five champagne flutes on it Miss Ackerley, a beanpole with huge bespectacled eyes that gave her a Joyce Carol Oatesian look, walked beside her, bottle in hand. Tom Kennedy brightened. "Do I spy French ginger ale? That looks just a leetle too elegant to be supermarket plank."

"Champagne it is," Mrs. Shop law said, "although if you're expecting Moet et Chandan, young Mr. Kennedy, you're in for a disappointment This isn't Cold Duck, but it's not the highpriced spread, either."

"I can't speak for my new co-workers," Tom said, "but as someone who educated his palate on Apple Zapple, I don't think I'll be disappointed."

Mrs. Shoplaw smiled. "I always mark the beginning of summer this way, for good luck. It seems to work. I haven't lost a seasonal hire yet. Each of you take a glass, please." We did as we were told. "Tina, will you pour?"

When the flutes were full, Mrs. Shoplaw raised hers and we raised ours.



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"Here is to Erin, Tom, and Devin," she said. "May they have a wonderful summer, and wear the fur only when the temperature is below eighty degrees."

We clinked glasses and drank. Maybe not the highpriced spread, but pretty damned good, and with enough left for us all to have another swallow. This time it was Tom who offered the toast. "Here's to Mrs. Shoplaw, who gives us shelter from the storm!"