Joyland(31)

''I'll be perfectly blunt. You gave this show twenty thousand dollars' worth of good publicity yesterday afternoon, and I still can't afford to give you a bonus. If you knew .. . but never mind."

He leaned forward. "What I can do is owe you a favor. If you need one, ask. I'll grant it if it's in my power. Will that do?"

"Sure."

"Good. And would you be willing to make one more appear-Joyland

105

ance-as Howie-with the little girl? Her parents want to thank you in private, but a public appearance would be an excellent thing for Joyland. Entirely your call, of course."

"When?"

"Saturday, after the noon parade. We'd put up a platform at the intersection of Joyland and Hound Dog Way. Invite the press."

"Happy to," I said. I liked the idea of being in the newspapers again, I will admit. It had been a tough summer on my ego and self-image, and I'd take all the turnaround I could get.

He rose to his feet in his glassy, unsure way, and offered me his hand. "Thank you again. On behalf of that little girl, but also on behalf of J oyland. The accountants who run my damn life will be very happy about this."

?

When I stepped out of the office building, which was located with the other administrative buildings in what we called the backyard, my entire team was there. Even Pop Allen had come.

Erin, dressed for success in Hollywood Girl green, stepped forward with a shiny metal crown of laurels made from Campbell's Soup cans. She dropped to one knee. "For you, my hero."

I would have guessed I was too sunburned to flush, but that turned out not to be true. "Oh Jesus, get up."

"Savior of little girls," Tom Kennedy said. "Not to mention savior of our place of employment getting its ass sued off and possibly having to shut its doors."

Erin bounced to her feet, stuck the ludicrous soup-can crown on my head, then gave me a big old smackaroonie. Everyone on Team Beagle cheered.



106

STEPHEN K I N G

"Okay," Pop said when it died down. "We can all agree that you're a knight in shining ah-mah, Jonesy. You are also not the first guy to save a rube from popping off on the midway. Could we maybe all get back to work?"

I was good with that. Being famous was fun, but the don'tget-a-swelled-head message of the tin laurels wasn't lost on me .

?

I was wearing the fur that Saturday, on the makeshift platform at the center of our midway. I was happy to take Hallie in my arms, and she was clearly happy to be there. I'd guess there were roughly nine miles of film burned as she proclaimed her love for her favorite doggy and kissed him again and again for the cameras.

Erin was in the front row with her camera for a while, but the news photogs were bigger and all male. Soon they shunted her away to a less favorable position, and what did they all want? What Erin had already gotten, a picture of me with my Howie-head off. That was one thing I wouldn't do, although I'm sure none of Fred, Lane, or Mr. Easterbrook himself would have penalized me for it. I wouldn't do it because it would have flown in the face of park tradition: Howie never took off the fur in public; to do so would have been like outing the Tooth Fairy.

I'd done it when Hallie Stansfield was choking, but that was the necessary exception. I would not deliberately break the rule.

So I guess I was carny after all (although not carny-from-carny, never that).

Later, dressed in my own duds again, I met with Hallie and her parents in the Joyland Customer Service Center. Close-up, I could see that Mom was pregnant with number two, although Joy land

107

she probably had three or four months of eating pickles and ice cream still ahead of her. She hugged me and wept some more.

Hallie didn't seem overly concerned. She sat in one of the plastic chairs, swinging her feet and looking at old copies of Screen Time, speaking the names of the various celebrities in the declamatory voice of a court page announcing visiting royalty. I patted Mom's back and said there-there. Dad didn't cry, but the tears were standing in his eyes as he approached me and held out a check in the amount of five hundred dollars, made out to me. When I asked what he did for a living, he said he had started his own contracting firm the year before-just now little, but gettin on our feet pretty good, he told me. I considered that, factored in one kid here plus another on the way, and tore up the check. I told him I couldn't take money for something that was just part of the job.

You have to remember I was only twenty-one .

?

There were no weekends per se for Joyland summer help; we got a day and a half every nine, which meant they were never the same days. There was a sign-up sheet, so Tom, Erin, and I almost always managed to get the same downtime. That was why we were together on a Wednesday night in early August, sitting around a campfire on the beach and having the sort of meal that can only nourish the very young: beer, burgers, barbecue-flavored potato chips, and coleslaw. For dessert we had s'mores that Erin cooked over the fire, using a grill she borrowed from Pirate Pete's Ice Cream Waffle joint. It worked pretty well.

We could see other fires-great leaping bonfires as well as 108

STEPHEN K I N G

cooking fires-all the way down the beach to the twinkling metropolis of J oyland. They made a lovely chain of burning jewelry. Such fires are probably illegal in the twenty-first century; the powers that be have a way of outlawing many beautiful things made by ordinary people. I don't know why that should be, I only know it is.