Joyland Read Online Free Page B

unhook the bells. In one hand she grasped the chip carousel from the counter, yellow plastic pouches still hanging from it. The other fist fumbled with the string of chimes, which warbled through the dusk with ecclesiastical melancholy, until Mr. Rankin appeared, a thick ring of keys hanging from his thumb. He reached up — the woman’s stubby white fingers still groping — and unjangled the bells with a click into his silent hand, the other closing the door and poking the lock.
    They waddled to their truck to stash their things. She got in, sat staring out the windshield at the boys across St. Lawrence Street. She had trout-coloured eyes, visible even from that distance. Mr. Rankin returned to the door and fastened a heavy chain across its handle.
    The boys sat with the final snap of the padlock clamping down on them. Mr. Rankin turned his back to the blotted black building and walked slowly to the vehicle, opened the door, and got in — no sudden movements — as if he could feel bullets in the boys’ gaze. The potato chip rack, shoved between them in the front seat, waved little cellophane wings, rotating when the truck reversed. A scatter of gravel. But before the headlights had disappeared down the highway, the boys had begun a eulogy, recounting their greatest Joyland moments.
    Upon entering, there had always been a moment of disorientation. Although the arcade was at street level, it had small, raised windows like a basement, which gave it a watery underground aura. Walking out of daylight into the dim hull, the eyes always needed time to adjust. This second was a pure assault of sound. The noise of bells and bombs as they dropped. Of hearts beating and alien life forms detonated. Slowly, sight returned. A pulsing room came clear, streaking and glittering in the dark. Chris would begin scanning the place for the first available game.
    Rows of machines lined up to meet him. Passing through the door, he was greeted by Pac-Man, Pitfall II, Centipede, Tempest, Tron, Dragon’s Lair, Gorf, Pengo, Defender, Mr. Do!, Mario Bros., Frogger, and beyond these two rows more — all of them humming, singing, shrieking, bleeping, burping, and whistling. Staring into their plastic faces, Chris perceived whirled light plotted into some decipherable map. He plunged inside that space and became a swivelling, pivoting hero, with a simple twist of his hand and the ability to remain focused. In Donkey Kong, he climbed up ladders, he climbed out of himself and became the person he had always wanted to be: the kind other kids grouped around to watch play. To admire.
    For two years, Chris had paid his dues, leaning carefully over shoulders, trying to see the patterns. He learned from the masters of South Wakefield: Johnny Davis, Mickey Newton, Pinky Goodlowe, among others. Joyland was full of competition, good-natured fuck-yous, two-for-flinchings, and the occasional well-placed jab. A scrawny, intellectual, preteen boy will receive his fair share of pounding, so it was not without fear that Chris had entered Joyland each day. A ten-year-old pipsqueak when the arcade opened, it was there that he had first been dubbed Short Fry. He had learned by observation. Behind the gangs of twelve-year-olds, Chris had clutched his quarters in a sweaty fist, waiting for a machine to come open, the coins heating in his hand. Older guys — fourteen or fifteen — swaggered about the place with the confidence they would not have to wait long for a machine. The true video game gurus held a rank all their own. As if they had absorbed luminosity from the screens, they emanated it from their very hands. In the unspoken pecking order, those first two years, Chris had always been last in line.
    Pulling rank more than once, Pinky, the twice-held-back kid from Chris’s class, had given him the chance to play. Two years older than Chris but miles taller and wider, Pinky walked a very thin good-guy/bad-guy line. Pinky was the fifth of five brothers, each of whom