Joyland(16)

"Why, thank you, Tom, that's lovely. It won't get you a discount on the rent, though."

We drank. I set my glass down feeling just the tiniest bit buzzy. "What is this about wearing the fur?" I asked.

Mrs. Shoplaw and Miss Ackerley looked at each other and smiled. It was the librarian who answered, although it wasn't really an answer at all. "You'll find out," she said.

"Don't stay up late, children," Mrs. Shoplaw advised. "You've got an early call. Your career in show business awaits."

?

The call was early: seven AM, two hours before the park opened its doors on another summer. The three of us walked down the beach together. Tom talked most of the way. He always talked.

It would have been wearisome if he hadn't been so amusing and relentlessly cheerful. I could see from the way Erin (walking in the surf with her sneakers dangling from the fingers of her left hand) looked at him that she was charmed and fascinated. I envied Tom his ability to do that. He was heavyset and at least three doors down from handsome, but he was energetic and possessed of the gift of gab I sadly lacked. Remember the old joke about the starlet who was so clueless she f*cked the writer?

" Man, how much do you think the people who own those





S T E P H E N K I N G


places are worth?" he asked, waving an arm at the houses on Beach Row. We were just passing the big green one that looked like a castle, but there was no sign of the woman and the boy in the wheelchair that day. Annie and Mike Ross came later.

"Millions, probably," Erin said. "It ain't the Hamptons, but as my dad would say, it ain't cheeseburgers."

"The amusement park probably brings the property values down a little," I said. I was looking at Joyland's three most distinctive landmarks, silhouetted against the blue morning sky: Thunderball, Delirium Shaker, Carolina Spin.

"Nah, you don't understand the rich-guy mindset," Tom said.

"It's like when they pass bums looking for handouts on the street. They just erase em from their field of vision. Bums?

What bums? And that park, same deal-what park? People who own these houses live, like, on another plane of existence." He stopped, shading his eyes and looking at the green Victorian that was going to play such a large part in my life that fall, after Erin Cook and Tom Kennedy, by then a couple, had gone back to school. "That one's gonna be mine. I'll be expecting to take possession on . . . mmm . . . June first, 1987."

''I'll bring the champagne," Erin said, and we all laughed .

?

I saw Joyland's entire crew of summer hires in one place for the first and last time that morning. We gathered in Surf Auditorium, the concert hall where all those B-list country acts and aging rockers performed. There were almost two hundred of us. Most, like Tom, Erin, and me, were college students willing to work for peanuts. Some of the full-timers were there, as well. I saw Rozzie Gold, today dressed for work in her gypsy joy land

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duds and dangly earrings. Lane Hardy was up on stage, placing a mike at the podium and then checking it with a series of thudding finger-taps. His derby was present and accounted for, cocked at its usual just-so angle . I don't know how he picked me out in all those milling kids, but he did, and sketched a little salute off the tilted brim of his lid. I sent him one right back.

He finished his work, nodded, jumped off the stage, and took the seat Rozzie had been saving for him. Fred Dean walked briskly out from the wings . "Be seated, please, all of you be seated. Before you get your team assignments, the owner of Joyland-and your employer-would like to say a few words.

Please give a hand to Mr. Bradley Easterbrook."

We did as we were told, and an old man emerged from the wings, walking with the careful, high-stepping strides of someone with bad hips, a bad back, or both. He was tall and amazingly thin, dressed in a black suit that made him look more like an undertaker than a man who owned an amusement park. His face was long, pale, covered with bumps and moles. Shaving must have been torture for him, but he had a clean one. Ebony hair that had surely come out of a bottle was swept back from his deeply lined brow. He stood beside the podium, his enormous hands-they seemed to be nothing but knuckles-clasped before him. His eyes were set deep in pouched sockets.

Age looked at youth, and youth's applause first weakened, then died.

I'm not sure what we expected; possibly a mournful foghorn voice telling us that the Red Death would soon hold sway over all. Then he smiled, and it lit him up like a jukebox. You could almost hear a sigh of relief rustle through the summer hires. I ss

STEPHEN KING

found out later that was the summer Bradley Easterbrook turned ninety-three.

"You guys," he said, "welcome to Joyland." And then, before stepping behind the podium, he actually bowed to us. He took several seconds adjusting the mike, which produced a series of amplified screeks and scronks. He never took his sunken eyes from us as he did it.

"I see many returning faces, a thing that always makes me happy. For you greenies, I hope this will be the best summer of your lives, the yardstick by which you judge all your future employment. That is no doubt an extravagant wish, but anyone who runs a place like this year in and year out must have a wide streak of extravagance. For certain you'll never have another job like it."

He surveyed us, giving the poor mike's articulated neck another twist as he did so.