JULY 28
Nick
It turns out that my failed turn as the mermaid wasn’t so failed after all—apparently the kids thought it was so uproariously funny that Mr. Wilcox decides to make physical comedy, and specifically my face-plant, a permanent part of the act. Since we can’t count on a real dog to reliably chomp down on Heather’s tail feathers, Wilcox invests in a big, floppy-eared dog puppet, and Heather works both identities at the same time—strutting in her costume while wearing the puppet on her right hand and miming a contest of wills until the culminating moment, when the dog gets hold of her butt.
Unfortunately I’m stuck in the role of the mermaid for the foreseeable future. No one else can fit into the tail, and Crystal never comes back to work. Rumor is that she got busted for something really bad—Maude even claims the police are involved.
“Her parents caught her posing for some porn website,” Maude says, gesturing with a french fry for emphasis. “She was getting paid to send naked pics.”
“No way.” Douglas, who is thin and sharp-beaked, like a bird of prey, shakes his head. “She doesn’t even have boobs.”
“So? Some guys like that.”
“I heard she was dating some old guy,” a girl named Ida says. “Her parents flipped when they found out. Now she’s on lockdown.”
“She was always bragging about money,” Alice says thoughtfully. “And she always had really nice stuff. Remember that watch? The one with all the little diamonds?”
“It was a website,” Maude insists. “My cousin’s girlfriend’s brother’s a cop. There are, like, hundreds of girls on there. High school girls.”
“Didn’t Donovan get busted for the same thing?” says Douglas.
“For posing?” Ida squeaks.
“For having access.” Douglas rolls his eyes. “A perv’s dream.”
“Exactly.” At last Maude pops the fry in her mouth. Then she drags her finger through a thick glob of ketchup on her plate. That’s how she eats fries, in stages: potato, then ketchup.
“I don’t believe it,” Alice says.
Maude looks at her pityingly. “You don’t have to,” she says. “It’ll all come out soon enough. You’ll see.”
The worst part about being the mermaid is the costume itself, which requires special cleaning and so can’t be washed more than once a week. After three days, the tail reeks, and whenever I’m suited up, I make it a point to stay as far away from Parker as possible.
But after a few performances, I find I don’t mind being onstage so much. Rogers even shows me how to cushion my fall safely—he was a thespian in college, he tells me, with no hint of irony and embarrassment—and after one show, a little cluster of kids even crowds me behind the potted palms and asks for my autograph. I sign: Stay cool! Love, Melinda the Mermaid. No idea where Melinda comes from, but it feels right. And suiting up as Melinda keeps me from having to skim the Piss Pool, or scrub puke out of the Whirling Dervish.
Slowly I’m getting the hang of FanLand. I no longer get lost on my way around the park. I know the shortcuts—cutting behind the Haunted Ship brings me straight to the wave pool. Walking through the darkness of the Tunnel lops a full five minutes from the walk between the Lagoon and the dry lands. I know the secrets, too: that Rogers drinks on the job, that Shirley never locks up her pavilion properly because she can’t be bothered with the faulty lock on the back door, and that some of the older employees swipe the occasional beer from the cooler as a result, that Harlan and Eva have been screwing around for three summers running and use the pump house as their own personal sex den.
Every day we do more and more prep for the anniversary party: blowing up mountains of balloons and tying them in thick clusters to every available surface; scrubbing and re-varnishing the game stalls; stringing up banners advertising special promotions and events; performing vigilant, military-style maneuvers to keep bands of marauding raccoons (the source of Mr. Wilcox’s greatest anxiety) from decimating the frozen corn dogs and sugar cones we’ve stored in all the pavilions.
Mr. Wilcox grows increasingly excited, as if he’s popping larger and larger rations of caffeine pills. Finally, the day before the party, he’s practically vibrating with enthusiasm. He doesn’t even speak in full sentences anymore, just walks around repeating random sentence fragments like: “Twenty thousand people! Seventy-five years! Oldest independent park in the state! Cotton candy free for the under-sevens!”
But his enthusiasm is infectious. The whole park is buzzing with it; a sound perceived but not exactly heard, a sense of anticipation like the moment just before all the crickets start singing at night. Even Maude’s permanent scowl has flattened out into something close to a normal expression.
Four of us are assigned to the graveyard shift the night before the party: Gary, a sour-faced man who runs one of the stalls and who has worked at FanLand through three changes of admin—a fact he repeats loudly whenever Mr. Wilcox is around; Caroline, a grad student who has spent four summers working at the park and who’s struggling through a thesis paper about the role of spectacle in American carnival entertainment; me; and Parker.
Things have become easy between us again; we eat lunch together most days, and time our breaks together, too. In only six weeks, Parker has become a never-ending source of FanLand trivia, much of it related to the park’s design and engineering.
“Do you study this stuff at night when you go home?” I ask him one day, after he’s been going on and on about the difference between potential and kinetic energy and its application to roller coasters.
“Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “I’m far too busy playing Ancient Civ. Besides, everyone knows the best time to study is first thing in the morning.”
When it’s superhot, we take our shoes off and dunk our feet in the wave pool or take turns with a hose, passing the stream of cold water over our hair and emerging from the back of the pump house sopping wet and happy. He introduces me to the “Parker lunch classic”: pizza covered with the squeezy cheese we use for the nachos.
“You’re disgusting,” I say, watching him fold a slice expertly into his mouth.
“I’m a culinary explorer,” he says, grinning so I can see the mashed-up food in his mouth. “We’re very misunderstood.”
The graveyard shift is the hardest and most labor-intensive. As soon as the park gate is shut behind the last family, the other employees rush to shed their T-shirts and duck out through a side exit—a long stream of them, miraculously morphed from identical red skins like a molting snake—before they can be roped into helping the nightly park shutdown.
This includes emptying all 104 trash cans and loading up fresh bags; double-checking every bathroom stall to make sure no terrified children have been left behind by frazzled parents; sweeping up the debris in the pavilions; checking to make sure all entrances and exits are locked and secured; skimming every pool for floating debris and ramping up the chlorine levels overnight, to combat the daily influx of sunscreen-coated children and their inevitable pee; locking up the food carts against the intrusion of raccoons, and making sure no trash has been left behind to tempt them.
Gary delivers our instructions to us with the intensity of a general giving marching orders to an invading army. I’m stuck on Zone B trash duty, which will bring me from the Ship Breaker’s Pavilion all the way down past the Gateway.
“Good luck,” Parker whispers, leaning in so close I can feel his breath on my neck, as Gary distributes plastic gloves and industrial garbage bags the size and weight of plastic tarps. “Remember to breathe through your mouth.”
He isn’t kidding: the park trash bins contain a disgusting jumble of half-rotting food, baby diapers, and worse. It’s hard work, and after an hour my arms ache from the effort of hauling full bags to the parking lot, where Gary will load them into the Dumpsters. The park looks strange, lit up falsely in the bright electric glow of the floodlights. The paths are striped with deep tongues of shadow, and the rides shimmer in the moonlight, seeming almost insubstantial, like fairy structures that might disappear at any moment. Every so often a voice carries to me across the distance—Caroline or Parker, shouting to each other—but other than the occasional whisper of wind through the trees, it’s quiet.
I’m moving underneath the shadow of the Gateway when I hear it: a quiet humming, a singsong whisper.
I freeze. The Gateway rises above me, steel and shadow, a tower made of silver cobweb. I remember what Alice told me. They say she still cries out at night.
Nothing. Nothing but the crickets hidden in the underbrush, the faint hiss of wind. It’s almost eleven and I’m tired. That’s all.
But as soon as I start moving again, the sound returns, like the faintest cry or a whisper of a song. I whirl around. Behind me is a solid wall of growth, an intricate geometric pattern of woods that divides the Gateway from the Ship Breaker’s Pavilion. My stomach is a hard, high knot and my palms are sweating. Even before I hear it again, all the hair on my arms stands up, as if something invisible has just brushed against me. This time the noise is changed, anguished, like a distant sob heard from behind three locked doors.
“Hello?” I choke out. Instantly the sound stops. Is it my imagination, or does something move in the shadows, a bare ghost-impression in the deeper dark? “Hello?” I call out again, a little louder.