Rolliecoaster Meadow

We would spend a lot of our time, such as child’s time is under the weather and light, in the meadow; and in the meadow Tom would conduct his tours.

Tom Tretton knew so many things about the meadow, namely what the meadow had been a long time ago, and he would tell those things to me.

‘Well right here, this was the burger booth,’ he would say as we stood in a six-by-six scud of earth scattered with ends of foxed lumber. ‘This was the burger booth. And it was only one tenth a dollar for SUCH a burger. You know. And they called the burger man the Burger Mister.’

We would walk over to the ridged iron pole that stuck four feet up from the ground at the edge of the meadow and which we tried to pull up as we talked and played. ‘This is a spoke of the horse ride, he would say. They had faces you could wipe off.’

‘What!’ I would say.

‘Yes, so you could paint on your own face just how you wanted before the ride started going.’

‘I’d paint it hairy or crazy like a Frankenstein.’

‘They wouldn’t let you.’

‘You said they let you paint it how you wanted.’

‘It has to be a horse.’

‘I’d make a Frankenstein’s horse.’

‘No.’

‘That’s not fair.’

We would be in the rushy weeds, picking them out of the ground, adrift in a place that could not be described any separately to the rest of the growth in the meadow.

‘You can tell, look.’

‘What?’

‘The color of the dirt means these can grow. It means this was the circle round the Sicky Spinner. People got sick on the Sicky Spinner. So they put a fence round it so people couldn’t get near and get sick on their burgers.’

I would laugh.

We would sit under a colorless clam of dulled metal, in out of the rain, playing fantasy cards on a couple of airbricks. In out of the sun on other kinds of day. It was a place and they were afternoons for napping but I did not because I could not sleep away from my own bed.

‘And once somebody said to him, I like your hat. And he climbed on top of the burger booth and threw burgers at everyone and said, Do you like THESE hats?’

We would be back before dark.

We would pass the time that was not managed by school and our parents.

‘You know.’

‘If you could tell the future or tell things,’ Tom said, ‘would you?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

‘Does it depend what it is?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Same. But that’s what the Guessing Man did.’

‘At the funfair.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where was he?’

‘I’ll show you. But he had a stand, and there were three things he could guess. If you wanted him to guess something you asked him, but you didn’t know what of, which of the three things he would guess.’

‘What were they?’

‘Um. Well one, he could point at anyone else standing around and go, THAT’S THE PERSON YOU HAVE A CRUSH ON. THANK YOU, AND THANK YOU FOR YOUR DOLLAR!’

‘What if you didn’t have a crush on someone?’

‘But he was always right. Second, he could point at anyone else and go, THAT’S THE PERSON YOU SECRETLY HATE! It was really funny. And the last one was, he could point and go, I was in a dream last night. And I saw you there.’

That was the sort of talk that swept the sound out of the woods, truly wished scampering and far shouts farther out of mind and everything.

‘And he would say, You were doing this. And he would say exactly your dream and just what happened in it. And you’d be really amazed and say that’s what happened, and everyone would be clapping.’

‘But when you went home you would be scared,’ I said.

‘I don’t think so,’ Tom said.

He was wrong. If you went home and got into bed, how would you slide down into the dream pool? If you knew someone else was there?

‘Here,’ Tom said, ‘his little box was here, that he stood on. He had a big magician’s hat. It had little curtains hanging down, so he could open it when he talked but closed them when he was thinking.’

Photographs of us and events and basketball and gym floor sheen and flash off pupils in annual school pictures were spread through our house, as I believed in many houses in the town: up by the stairs, and atop doilies on dresser surfaces, and on the mantelpiece and in the bedrooms. In other houses, their arrangements might at rare times change.

Jim Marin, a friend of Aaron’s, fought horribly with his father and his aunts, went away in a winter, did not return. His pictures, so Aaron told us, disappeared from their hooks, vacation magnets became unorbited by shining polaroids on the fridge. A friend of our parents died after illness; her husband left the sliding doors from the dining room to kitchen open and rearranged the pictures in the empty space. There was no image of the woman to be found after that time below the threshold of the house’s bottom stair; above though, upstairs, only her, paradise.

These were rare changes.

My mother moved around our ancestral memorabilia in the days preceding Aaron’s homecomings. This was not rare. Photographs and homemade souvenirs she put into new locations and orders. She changed focal points and the interior scenery, reframed one of our grandmothers as a main character of our lives or assured us that the young ones–us and cousins–were present in every room to silently judge the period till next we were moved.

This happened some ten to twenty times each year after Aaron had left. Each upheaval came at the weariness of my mother, who expected no answer but still would ask, These will look too funny over here won’t they? or, These have to be in here, it’s like a Christmas tree, the fancy side faces out, and my father would say, That’s going to be fine. Aaron, when home, and my mother, as we ate would become gradually quietly maddened until they were screaming, and Aaron would punch up the stairs to his room–still hosting his school things–my father gone out back to smoke, to return and run a hand through my hair and say, Always goes on, doesn’t it?

It was habitual and I did not expect otherwise. Sometimes my mother went out to smoke. I once saw her drop her cigarette in the streetlight dark and she tried to kick it as it fell.

Jem received no such treatment, walked into the house when he did and conversed with our parents as though he were a salesman. I would think about what he would sell. He brought trading cards and chocolate sometimes, so it would probably be those.

At Tom’s house, the photographs did not move. For over a year Tom’s dad remained slumped in a café in northern France in a glass-fronted cabinet. His mother lay through that same period and forever over the front wall rooms and the laps of smiling family. The denim jackets did not move. Baby Tom, back on a plush cushion for a studio portrait, gazed interestedly at some spot over the lens, above whoever looked at his picture on the TV cabinet, did not move.

‘Tom said you were in trouble at school?’ Tom’s dad said.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘About copying someone’s homework?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You know what you tell them,’ Tom’s dad said.

‘What?’

‘You tell them that’s a lot of bullshit.’

I laughed.

‘It’s true! Let me see if this is right. It’s nearly homework due day. You haven’t done it yet. You forgot because you didn’t have time, and you had to choose to do homework or play or watch TV or what you like to do. So you had to copy someone’s so you didn’t get in trouble. Is that right? Is it almost right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, there. You know, that’s it. You have to take time to find out what is interesting and what’s exciting for you, because that’s what the time is for. Because, you know, kids have to learn. That’s right and that’s important. But you also have to have your own time for finding your own things out and being curious and thinking about stuff. Right? And, kids also need to learn: doing anything wrong is okay. Really. I never did learn. I wasn’t allowed to learn it. My mom and dad didn’t let me. Then you never try anything. You’re scared to try anything. So you can get in trouble, you can do something wrong. That’s okay.’

‘We’re going now, Dad,’ Tom said.

‘Yes, time to let them go now,’ Tom’s mother said.

‘All right, now see you two later,’ Tom’s father said.

And they did not move their photographs, and I did not know if they would when Tom was older and moved away, but I did not think that they would.

‘No we won’t.’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘No.’

‘What do you think, Daddy?’

‘Could be! Nice handsome man, calling and courting.’

I stuck my tongue out at them and made a being sick noise.

Somewhere in the meadow was half a brazed tyre, bits of recent junk and chips and wrappers laid in it like it was used by people at night for vigils to the mundane. Tom said, ‘This was the exit from the ride for boys and girlfriends.’

‘Ew,’ I said.

‘I know. But they made the man who made the ghost house make it. And he didn’t want to so it made it really scary, with a lot of stuff. It was scarier than the ghost house and two people who were in love when they went in there were too scared when they got out and they didn’t like each other any more.’

I laughed lots. ‘What was its name?’

‘They changed its name a lot of different times.’

‘What about this?’ I asked, climbing up the hood and onto the top of a browning blackened car frame.

‘Didn’t you know?’ Tom said.

‘No, what is it?’

‘They had a dodgems, but with your own cars. There could only be three cars because there wasn’t room, but you were allowed to drive right into them, so people loved them.’

‘There’s not enough room. Did people get hurt?’

‘All the time. But it was allowed.’

There were unblackened beer cans rolled under the steering wheel, shaggy rough grass up through the pedals. I tore open a small length of my arm on the smashed base of a wing mirror as I jumped down. It bled quite dark.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Shall we go home?’

‘I think so.’

The meadow had a strong, but not whole, sense of being ours; at very rare times did we see anybody, though recent history was told by wet contraceptives and dropped papers, the smells of pot and porcupines, the pellets of the woodrats living in the PVC town. If an adult was browsing the grasses alone, we would leave. When that had happened it would take some hours to draw off my worry, walking back to Tom’s house and putting on the TV or sticking velcro-backed dinosaurs onto a laminated poster illustrating many millions of years. On occasion teenagers would flee the meadow in pairs like deer scattering after a rifle shot, generally laughing, sometimes shouting at us words that we knew in combinations we did not.

These sights, the relatively banal, became conjoined with fanciful flights and daydreamed nightmares. I longed very much to see the old carnival meadow at night. I knew things would happen. I knew it so well that truth could not improve on or correct my knowledge.

‘This was one I haven’t told you about, but I’ve been waiting,’ Tom said.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘From here, to there, he said, pointing first to the overturned walker I was balancing on, then out to the woods. It was the ghost house.’

I became nervous from the quiet, the wind allowed in over the woods on all sides to pool in the tucked secrets of the meadow. I became excited.

‘They had a slide that came out of the upstairs part and went out over there. It was for if you were too scared, because you might be.’

‘Was it a ride?’

‘The downstairs. Then the cart went up the stairs and let you off and you had to walk around the upstairs by yourself. You had to open doors by yourself and look into the rooms. There was an old radio and an old lady lying in bed. You could ask her questions but she would just look at you.’

‘Why would they ask questions?’

‘In case she answered. The downstairs part had lots of bats and vampires and stuff but lots of them were broken. Like the vampire fell down and made people scream and his mouth went open and closed but he didn’t say anything, sometimes the speaker made a broken noise. They asked the man at the booth why didn’t he fix the broken models. He said, Ask the old lady.’

I laughed and we kicked over to some raggy oaks good for climbing and sitting in. Cloud won all the sky, but secret sun sent strange beams through and made for a sleepy feeling.

‘How many rooms were upstairs?’ I asked.

‘Ten. And the hallway was one. One of the rooms was way smaller than it was meant to be. Inside there was a man painted red. He couldn’t stand up because of how small the room was so he crouched. There were some squares of meat on the floor in front of him. Oh, and he was wearing a metal mask on a strap with no face so you couldn’t see his face. And the pieces of meat had signs next to them of prices. Like two dollars and two fifty cents. They were cheap. And he slapped the slaps of meat. And you didn’t know if you were meant to buy one. And people got really scared in that room.’

‘Did they run out to the slide?’

‘Yeah.’

I was thinking, in the meadow, in the woods, that I would have run to the slide.

Greyed rain began to tap the meadow earth. We ambled over to the car husk, sat on the mangy back seats, closed our eyes in the unsourced sun’s warmth that lit in through the paneless windows.

Outside of my door was a small dry fox turd and flies with shining heads slept on it.

‘Do dreams about insects mean something?’ I asked.

‘Oh they could mean so many lots of things,’ Tom said.

I asked him because I would have a lot of dreams about insects. I had had a dream where there was a centipede on the floor in front of the TV. And I ran to get a glass from the cabinet and came back and put it over it. And I held the glass over the centipede as the glass got hotter and the centipede got redder. And it got so hot that it hurt and I had to let go of the glass. And the centipede was so red and hot and boiled from making itself so steaming hot that I would have to let go of the glass and it could escape. And the glass tipped over, and the centipede walked away, but it couldn’t, because it had boiled itself up, and was mostly bubbled and melted, still popping and steaming, and only the front part was walking away, and doing that slowly, and dying, and leaving cooked centipede cream along the floor in front of the television.

‘There were spiders in the ghost house,’ Tom said.

‘I would hate that room,’ I told him.

‘But plastic ones,’ he said.

There, though I could not sleep away from my own bed, I fell slowly to sleep. Fear, tiredness, warm contentedness, matted together in my young head; they were unaddressed, inconsistent, rode over one another.

I asked my parents, and they said there hadn’t ever been.

There was a doorless alcove under our stairs with a desk and a computer that my parents used. My father helped me look. The websites said there hadn’t ever been. They told us nothing.

My father said the meadow had been in the grounds of the ready door factory. The factory had been taken down years back, some foundational carcass of it still scorning decomposition in a field a mile farther into the woods. The ivy and knotweed and kids had pulled the fences down.

We did not as children have a conception that an adult would not enjoy a thing where a child enjoyed that thing, or that the lustre of lights and prizes and spinning around becomes unripened as the age of mind completes its complexity and finishes opening its webbed promenades to worry and strife.

‘Like at Disney?’ I asked.

He said, ‘Just like those. The Burger Mister shouted at people who ate a burger and went over to the cups. You’re just going to be sick all everywhere!’

‘They’d get sick on the spinner as well,’ I said.

‘He’d shout at them too.’

There were pretty enough flowers at the right time and season. It was a prettiness enough to be on show, for sale, but became in the meadow part of it, unsingular, of calmed and weedy vivacity. Gorse infested, but it colored and it flowered. It was difficult not to pick the tapered petals from the flowers that looked like starved orange dandelions, or to rub the fur on the windflowers where they cupped and were bulbous.

‘The Lightcoaster went around, so much,’ Tom told me.

‘I like rollercoasters,’ I said.

‘Everyone loved the Lightcoaster. Have you been on the Disney ones?’

‘My mom and dad wouldn’t let me on the space one.’

‘Me neither.’

These tellings were received from one another in the meadow sidelines, an afternoon flash of rain boxing the earth and wringing the trees, us among wrappers and bushes and under a forked maple tree, a place we had taken to sitting after a day of similar weather when a woman had come shirtless and shouting into the meadow, frightened like the very rain caused her this fright. She had been later that day, we were told, found, taken back to her hospital. We had hidden.

‘Do you know what was funny?’ Tom said.

‘What sort of funny?’

‘I don’t know. When I was really really little I heard the rides from my room.’

‘At night?’ I asked. I wanted the sweetness of the image, of the lights and music turning in the dark, of cotton candy vapors and output of smoke machines clouding into the dark, rising very sweet.

‘Yeah,’ Tom said. ‘Only at night. Outside the window in my room, I remember lying in bed and I heard it and I went to the window.’

‘Did you see it?’

‘Yeah. I saw the lights on the big wheel and the rollercoaster. The music went doooo, doo doo doo doooo, doo doo dee dooooooo. I can remember it.’

‘That’s funny.’

‘Yeah.’

Tom went off and I might hear him knocking tin or ceramic things.

‘I’ve really got to tell you about the corndog man, they called him Corndog Carl,’ he said to me.

‘Did he sell them or eat them?’ Half of my face was split with flu pain, and I dabbed with my forearm the delta of mucus clotting at my upper lip.

‘The second one. He ate them cause he really loved them. And he really just loved the place so much and all the rides. And he said if he ever dies they could bury him near the carnival, so when everyone’s gone, when it’s night, he can get up and go on the rides. And if they leave a corndog out for him he can eat it. And there was a lot of trouble because he loved the rides. Because sometimes old kids would come and say, That ride’s for pussies. And he’d be all white and shaking. Because he’d have to tell them, NO. Didn’t you know how nice these rides are? And if they made fun of him he had to fight them and he couldn’t stop shaking though. And everyone knew he was nice. But it was trouble.’

I sucked tight sinus breaths.

‘That bit you’re lying on?’

‘Yeah?’

‘That was for his bed. It was his special bed in the medicine tent for after his shaking.’

It had a couple of beetles on it. I was too sick to care. ‘How do you know all that about Corndog Carl?’ I asked.

‘I just remember.’

‘How come they didn’t call him Carnival Carl?’

My father said, All right.

My father went outside then came back in and we both went into the front room where he put on one of his surf rock CDs and did lots of silly dances and I jumped on all the armchairs. He did his stupid hula dance that made me laugh a lot. When I asked if we could put the TV on, we did, and we both sat and watched a nighttime sitcom with jokes that made neither of us laugh, though we made jokes about the characters’ hair which did make us laugh.

In my room alone I pushed the window up and kneeled lost before the night and pinned stars that may only twinkle, brush of woods and street trees quiet to the horizon, a slow flag of smoke up from a factory farther than that horizon. There were cricket calls, raccoon-spurred trash clangs, quiet windy soft noise blowing in. I looked over the treetops and listened very hard, wanted to, but did not see, a puddled rainbow glowing over very far fun and rides; perhaps heard on the long-travelled air that smelled of night, but more likely dreamed, a funfair organ fluting Dixie songs and big band standards dependent on the way the wind was blowing, closed the window again before I fell to sleep in thought of burger cheese and plastic eyeballs.

‘Okay.’

‘Did you want to hear about Libby Lup,’ Tom said.

‘Okay.’

‘There was a woman called Libby Lup who got into the ghost house. She wasn’t meant to be in the ghost house. But she always got in, and they didn’t know because she dressed up in different costumes. She dressed up as one of the vampires or someone, or someone who was someone who worked in there, so it was hard for them to know and get her out.’

‘Why did they have to get her out?’ I asked.

‘Because she was bad.’

‘What did Libby Lup do?’

‘She always did bad stuff. She tried to break the doors when you were in a room and you were scared because she liked it when you were scared. She tried to hide in the wall and watch you being scared. Every time they found her out they tried to get her, but she ran out of the house and out of the carnival.’

‘She was weird.’

‘Yeah.’

The trees blew.

‘Did you know where she lived?’ Tom asked.

‘No.’

‘She lived up on the trees.’

The trees blew.

‘Yeah.’

‘Everybody was on the carousel,’ he said. ‘Everybody went round on it.’

‘The one where you could put your own face on the horses.’

‘Yeah. There was a lady when they were going around who said, My horse is wobbling. The carousel man checked while it was still going round. He said, No it’s fine. The woman said, Is it broken? The man said, No, and he went back in his box. The woman wanted to get off but next she screamed. When she did everyone screamed. Because her horse was real. And it backed right up, like on its back legs, and it jumped around the carousel and got off and chased everyone and charged around. And the woman was holding on the whole time. Everybody ran away and dropped their chips. The horse got into the girlfriends-and-boyfriends ride and scared everyone. And the Burger Mister was hiding on top of the burgers stand. And the horse got into the ghost house and charged all through and everyone had to run away. And Corndog Carl was standing on the burgers stand and he shouted, That’s what I call a rode-go-round! And the Burger Mister said, Lie down it’ll get you. And someone shouted, Scary-go-round. And some people coming after the horse picked up some teddy dinosaur prizes from the games because there was a mess.’

‘How did they get the lady on the horse?’

‘Well all here, these holes in the ground, are its footprints. There was a man from a rodeo and people could pet his horse but when he was feeling ill he tied the horse to a pole on the merry-go-round. And he had to leave it. And that’s how it all happened.’

‘Was it at night,’ I asked.

‘It was just at half past seven,’ Tom said. ‘There was nighttime coming.’

Home from school one day I walked into a room of kind, broken faces. My mother and my father and my father’s sister, and the mother of a girl from school who I recognized, watched me enter and I did not know what I had done to effect from them heavy, kind sinking gravity.

‘My sweetheart,’ my mother said, ‘something very very sad has happened.’

And because I did not go to the home of the Trettons again, I was not permitted to see if the photographs were moved and gone or if they were all still there. It did not seem right that they would not be, though if they were not I could have pointed to the darkened rectangles on the walls and said Did you know about this? There was a boy called Tom, who talked about carnival rides and carnival people. He was there, in a photo.

Broken heart came another way, not through injury of love, but of reality, understanding.

A very long time after, it cost me twenty dollars in processing fees to receive eight pages of reports on the brokenness of DECEDENT: TRETTON, THOMAS LEE. The pages reported RUPTURE and TRAUMA. Where something was TORN another was ARRESTED. I had stomach and still heart, by the open window of my apartment share and soundtracked by the unbodied crashing of a neighbor’s toy xylophone, to read of my friend and of SKULL FRACTURE. GIRDLE FRACTURE. STERNAL FRACTURE.

The MODE (APPARENT) of Tom’s death AT SCENE: FALL. The coroner’s attribution of death: TRAUMATIC INJURY (FALL).

It came also at the cost of twenty years of bland forgetting and staid curiosity, wondering reopened by mention from my parents, and mention on the local news of a steam fair, the proliferation of true mysteries and investigation on the same channels, bluebirds drawn by high air and ant nests scattered when bicycle children pushed through the grass where thistle gained farther ground at the end of my parents’ street. The ivy now engulfed two unbought homes at the very end of a row, ruled them, began to tip their walls and spring doors.

The SYNOPSIS (CASE REPORT):

The astonishing severity of the trauma inflicted to chest of decedent is appropriate to an individual fallen from height.

Decedent positioned in ground also appropriate to individual fallen from height AT SITE.

Surrounding topography of site i.e. scrap and woodland do not provide height adequate for severity of apparent fall.

Conclusion not drawn.

The SYNOPSIS (AUTOPSY):

Astonishing severity of injuries and presented trauma suggestive of gravity and speed as though decedent fell from great height (300ft) at great speed.

From the anatomic findings and the pertinent history I ascribed the death to:

TRAUMATIC INJURY.

The SYNOPSIS (AUTOPSY) (ADDENDUM):

Investigation of matter and positioning at scene of death indicate that decedent was not relocated or rearranged postmortem.

Death was caused by systemic trauma experienced on collision with ground. Point of origin of fall cannot be reconciled with surrounding scene.

It is as though, excusing baseless conjecture, he was thrown and flew from a rolliecoaster or something.

If I had been a sibling, or a relative of Tom’s, it would have cost nothing.