Dreamland Social Club(4)

CHAPTER two


GO GET SPIFFED UP A BIT,” Jane’s father said when they all had woken up and reconvened in the kitchen. “We’ll go for a walk up to the boardwalk and then we’ll have dinner someplace nice. As a treat. A celebration.”

“Of what?” Marcus asked with a stifled snort. “Our year of slumming it?”

Jane looked at her father, to see if he’d take offense, but he didn’t. He just said, “If you want to think of it as ‘slumming it,’ sure!”

“It’s only for a year” had become her father’s mantra in the previous few weeks, and now Jane sensed that her father, at least, hadn’t been surprised by the state of their new home. She got the distinct impression that he’d known it was going to be sort of a dump. Still, it was probably a better home than he himself could provide for them right now. He’d had a bunch of small structural engineering jobs in Europe and Asia for the last ten years—they’d even done time in Michigan and California—but nothing that amounted to the career he used to have, designing world-class roller coasters. His job in London had recently ended and he had no other prospects.

Another mantra: “We’ll just move in, clear it out, clean it up, sell it, and move on.”

And: “It’s just until I get back on my feet.”

They changed clothes and went out on foot as the setting sun cast long shadows on their street. They walked toward the beach—their block appeared to dead-end into sky—and past a series of abandoned lots, one of which was decorated with banners that said THE FUTURE OF CONEY ISLAND HAS ARRIVED.

“What do you think that means?” she asked.

“Just some snazzy builder talk,” her father said.

He laced his fingers through the fence around the lot, and Jane and her brother exchanged a look. A look that said, He used to be the one talking the snazzy builder talk. Before Mom died and everything fell apart. But Jane looked away. She was afraid to hope that things could be different this time, that something about being here, where her mother was born, could change the way things were and get her father’s career back on track.

When they reached the boardwalk and she saw the ocean’s dark blue blanket stretching to the horizon, she felt a lump in her throat—some combination of hope and sadness and fear caught up in a sticky ball.

And the crowds.

The crowds!

They were the sorts of people Jane had expected to see in Brooklyn: black, white, everything, loud, laughing, terrifying. She just hadn’t expected—and this was silly, she now knew—quite so many of them to be right there on the beach and on the boardwalk all at once.

Hundreds upon hundreds.

Thousands, even.

Then she saw that the Parachute Jump was lit by thousands of tiny lights, and their twinkle made her giddy. Giddy, and something else, too. She pushed the lump back down and looked out at the beach and promised herself she’d go down onto the sand one day and build a small Coney in her mother’s memory. She would wait and watch and watch and wait until the tide came in and washed it all away.

What had she even meant, It’s gone?

It’s right here.

There was a rowdy crowd outside an open-front bar, where some white plastic furniture sat wobbly on the uneven planks of the boardwalk. The sign on the front spelled out The Anchor in dirty pink fluorescent script, and a long bar on the left stretched way back into darkness, high stools lined up all the way. Everyone outside was watching a guy do one-handed push-ups. He counted them off in a thick Brooklyn accent—“. . . faw, five”—and when he got to ten, he got up and wiped his hands together and said, “Yeah, baby, told you so.” Jane wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a stranger scene, a dumpier bar.

Then she saw him.

A tattooed boy.

A beautiful tattooed boy.

He was standing on the boardwalk in front of the bar, pointing out elaborate tattoos on his forearms. A particularly terrifying crowd—in part because they looked to be around Jane’s age, her peers—surrounded him. One of the boys must have been seven feet tall; one girl was a dwarf who also looked like a goth; another girl, a brunette, had a faint mustache and beard; and Jane would have sworn the brown-skinned girl with curly hair bent her knee the wrong way to scratch her calf. Through a parting between their bodies, Jane saw serpents on Tattoo Boy’s skin, and mermaids and a seahorse and the same clown face she’d seen in those dreams about burning Ferris wheels, drowning roller coasters, and her mother still alive. His hair was black and soft-looking, and his eyes were marbles of blue. She’d never seen a more beautiful boy in her life.

“I like it,” the giant said, and the dwarf in black said, “Bend down, let’s see what you’ve had done to yourself now.”

“I wouldn’t mind a beer,” Jane’s father said, and Marcus said, “I’m starving, Dad.”

“Well, then I’ll get it to go.” He ducked into the bar, and Marcus shrugged and followed. Jane turned to follow him but not before taking one more look at Tattoo Boy. The crowd had dispersed, but he was still there, looking at her looking at him, and his tattoos felt familiar in a way that filled Jane with a sort of excited dread. He was rolling down the sleeves of his night-black shirt and he was still staring at her and smiling, too. “Whatsa matter?” he said. “Never seen tattoos like these?”