Jackie and Me(82)

Formerly the property of slave owners, it had transformed

itself first into a picnic ground, then a gambling venue. It was, I recall, the only place outside of Nevada where you could legally play the slots. The proprietors must have concluded that if a man was prepared to gamble away his family’s milk money, his family should be distracted while it was happening, so there rose up Potemkin-faced storefronts

dressed in the accents of backlot Westerns. There was a cotton candy depot, a haunted house called Laff in the Dark, a whirligig named The Scrambler, and a roller coaster, traveling no higher than a hundred and fifty feet, billed as the “Thrill of a Lifetime.”

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LOUIS BAYARD


Jackie was as enthusiastic about the idea as I was, and so

we drove down 210 with light hearts. I spoke of Mother and

her dying dogwood, which could not be saved even by nightly infusions of gin, and Jackie spoke in no particular order of her horse and her tennis game and her future motherin-law, whose speech patterns she had already uncannily mastered.

The heat came for us as soon as we got out of the car.

To anyone who’s grown up north of Mason-Dixon in air—

conditioned wombs, it can be hard to explain how our generation answered summer’s challenge—the great pains we

took both to retain and surrender dignity. A man like me,

for example, didn’t put on a hat and a jacket and tie in the trough of August because he was an ass but because, with the world’s blessing, he was concealing the disturbance below— the riot in steerage. You walked with the heat in those days, you swam in it, it claimed you from toe to crown, and you consoled yourself in knowing that everyone around you was

perpetuating the same lie. If a gentleman tipped his hat to a lady, he clapped it back on his sodden head in the same motion. If a lady drew a fan from her reticule, she took the greatest possible care not to show her primal urgency. Even so, there was something about Marshall Hall Park in late July that was unusually exposed to the elements. Within

an hour of walking its half dozen saloon streets, Jackie

and I were gasping for relief, and the only drink on hand

was Pepsi, which, after the third cup, came streaming back

through our pores in a phosphoric mist.

Jackie, at least, had put on the sleeveless top from her

Life spread and—in an amusing repudiation of her current



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coutured self—a pair of dungaree shorts that might have

been swiped from an Appalachian maiden. Her example must

have liberated me because, before another hour had passed, I stripped off my white jacket and bow tie and tossed them into the car. We did another tour of the haunted house just to get into the shade, then the carousel, then the bingo parlor (shade).

We made a shared dinner of licorice sticks and cotton candy (or, rather, I ate them and Jackie looked as if she might). It was well past seven before we climbed onto the Ferris wheel. We’d saved it for last because she’d never been on one and, though she professed to be bored by them, the truth was she was a little scared. It’s funny to think that a girl who rode horses at breakneck speed, scorning every hurdle and water jump, would pale before this particular test, but to distract her, I bought a box of Cracker Jack. “Every time you get nervous,”

I said, “you just bite into one.” The first time we sailed over the apogee, she grabbed my arm with one hand and the cara-mel corn with the other. After half a dozen circuits, she began chomping down as though both our lives depended on it. On our final revolution, the wheel took a sudden lunge toward

earth, then rebounded toward heaven, then resolved at last

into an unstable rocking, like a caravel in a storm-harrowed ocean. In the next instant, Jackie tossed me the box and put the back of her hand to her mouth. Not, as I first assumed, to contain her nausea but to stop the cry that was budding forth.

We waited for some time, our digits entwined, before a

courtly voice called up. “Ladies and gentlemen, we appear

to have lost power. We will let you know when the situation alters.”

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LOUIS BAYARD


“Yes,” I called down. “Let us know.”

How instantly the space around us expanded. Sky to

earth, east to west.

“Well,” I said, “you can’t die in a Ferris wheel, your

mother wouldn’t allow it.”

“It’s true, she’d kill me.”

And still the rocking wouldn’t quite resolve, and I

wasn’t sure how exactly I was going to brazen this out until there came the most unexpected of offerings. A clear and pure stream sluicing down to my right. Soda-pop was my

first thought before the metallic notes blossomed forth.

Somebody—and we never did establish if it was male or

female, young or old—was relieving just above us. The wages of Pepsi. Jackie, bless her, began to laugh, which gave me the same license.

“Talk about something,” I said. “Anything.”

She cast her eyes across the river. “It’s my birthday on

Tuesday.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Why?”

“I should have remembered.”