Joyland(81)

We were back at the top. The wind and rain pelted us. I was shivering. My clothes were soaked; Lane's cheeks were dark with hair-dye. It ran down his skin in tendrils. His mind is like that, I thought. On the inside, where he never smiles.

"No. I was cured. I have to do you, Jonesy, but only because you stuck your nose in where it doesn't belong. It's too bad, because I liked you. I really did."

I thought he was telling the truth, which made what was happening even more horrible.

We were going back down. The world below was windy and rain-soaked. There had been no car with its headlights out, only a blowing piece of canvas that for a moment looked like





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that to my yearning mind. The cavalry wasn't coming. Thinking it was would only get me killed. I had to do this myself, and the only chance I had was to make him mad. Really mad.

"You get off on risk, but you don't get off on rape, do you? If you did, you would have taken them to some isolated place.

I think what your secret girlfriends have between their legs scares you limp. What do you do later? Lie in bed and jack off thinking about how brave you are, killing defenseless girls?"

"Shut up."

"You can fascinate them, but you can't f*ck them ." The wind shouted; the car rocked. I was going to die and at that moment I didn't give shit one. I didn't know how angry I was making him, but I was angry enough for both of us. "What happened to make you this way? Did your mother put a clothespin on your peepee when you went weewee in the corner? Did Uncle Stan make you give him a blowjob? Or was it-"

"Shut up!" He rose into a crouch, gripping the safety bar in one hand and pointing the gun at me with the other. A stroke of lightning lit him up: staring eyes, lank hair, working mouth.

And the gun. "Shut your dirty mou-"

"DEVIN, DUCK!"

I didn't think about it, I just did it. There was a whipcrack report, an almost liquid sound in the blowing night. The bullet must have gone right past me, but I didn't hear it or feel it, the way characters do in books. The car we were in swept past the loading point and I saw Annie Ross standing on the ramp with a rifle in her hands. The van was behind her. Her hair was blowing around her bone-white face.

We started up again. I looked at Lane. He was frozen in his crouch, his mouth ajar. Black dye ran down his cheeks. His eyes z68





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were rolled up so only the bottom half of the irises showed.

Most of his nose was gone. One nostril hung down by his upper lip, but the rest of it was just a red ruin surrounding a black hole the size of a dime.

He sat down on the seat, hard. Several of his front teeth rattled out of his mouth when he did. I plucked the gun from his hand and tossed it over the side. What I was feeling right then was . . . nothing. Except in some very deep part of me, where I had begun to realize this might not be my night to die, after all.

"Oh," he said. Then he said "Ah." Then he slumped forward, chin on chest. He looked like a man considering his options, and very carefully.

There was more lightning as the car reached the top. It illuminated my seatmate in a stutter of blue fire. The wind blew and the Spin moaned in protest. We were coming down again.

From below, almost lost in the storm: "Dev, how do I stop it?"

I first thought of telling her to look for the remote control gadget, but in the storm she could hunt for half an hour and still not find it. Even if she did, it might be broken or lying shorted out in a puddle. Besides, there was a better way.

"Go to the motor!" I shouted. "Look for the red button! RED

B UTTON, ANNIE! It's the emergency stop!"

I swept past her, registering the same jeans and sweater she'd worn earlier, both now soaked and plastered to her. No jacket, no hat. She had come in a hurry, and I knew who had sent her.

How much simpler it would have been if Mike had focused on Lane at the start. But Rozzie never had, even though she'd known him for years, and I was to find out later that Mike never focused on Lane Hardy at all.

I was going back up again. Beside me, Lane's soaking hair Joy land

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was dripping black rain into his lap. "Wait until I come back down!"

"What?"

I didn't bother trying again; the wind would have drowned it out. I could only hope she wouldn't hammer on the red button while I was at the top of the ride. As the car rose into the worst of the storm the lightning flashed again, and this time there was an accompanying crack of thunder. As if it had roused him-perhaps it had-Lane lifted his head and looked at me.

Tried to look at me; his eyes had come back level in their sockets, but were now pointing in opposite directions. That terrible image has never left my mind, and still comes to me at the oddest times: going through turnpike tollbooths, drinking a cup of coffee in the morning with the CNN anchors baying bad news, getting up to piss at three AM, which some poet or other has rightly dubbed the Hour of the Wolf.

He opened his mouth and blood poured out. He made a: grinding insectile sound, like a cicada burrowing into a tree. A spasm shook him. His feet tap-danced briefly on the steel floor of the car. They stilled, and his head dropped forward again.

Be dead, I thought. Please be dead this time.

As the Spin started down again, a bolt of lightning struck the Thunderball; I saw the tracks light up briefly. I thought, That could have been me. The hardest gust of wind yet struck the car. I held on for dear life. Lane flopped like a big doll.