Dark Maze

I’ll bet it can wait until tomorrow.”
    That settled, I gave Ruby my fullest attention for the ; balance of an evening’s long, slow dance.

    Morning was bright-skied and cool.
    We made an early start of it, with eggs and bagels down at the spoon I see out my window—Pete Pitsikoulis’ All-Night
    Eats & World’s Best Coffee. Then a brisk walk over to the F train at Sixth Avenue and Forty-second. We both mostly dozed during the long trip out to the farthest reaches of Brooklyn.
    A curly-headed young woman was opening up the first shop you encounter when emerging from the Stillwell Avenue station of the IND subway—the Philips Salt Water Taffee and Ka-Ra-Me-La stand. Before the day was out, even though it was April and school was still in session, she would sell a few hundred pounds of licorice whips, pistachios, gumdrops, chocolate turtles with cashews, nonpareils, peanut-butter fudge, and cheese popcorn. Coney Islanders do not cut svelte figures on the beach.
    Across Stillwell Avenue was another familiar stand, where starting about mid-June there would be sweet com for sale. The stand was empty now, but in my mind there was the smell of dozens and dozens of bright yellow ears of cooked com, soaked in sugar and dripping with melted butter. I could hear summertime sounds—big-bellied men with thick arms and straw hats and red noses full of broken veins hawking their games of skill and their confections and all the newest kitchen gadgets; a million small boys chasing after a million small girls; my mother’s leather thongs making slapping sounds on the boardwalk as we walked hand in hand, surveying the beach for the best spot to pitch our blanket and umbrella for the day.
    I turned to where there once was a busy newsstand, where people would buy things to read on the beach, back before transistor radios, back when people still read. The newsstand was gone.
    I said to Ruby, “They used to sell the Brooklyn Eagle right about here. And the Daily Mirror. And all those movie magazines, and Boy’s Life and the comics and Popular Detective. That was all about a hundred years ago.”
    Ruby looked as if she felt sorry for me. Sorry for all the things lost from the present and sorry that anything remaining from the past was so badly worn.
    I looked up into the windows of the Seashore Hotel across from the subway station. When I was a kid, I had not seen old fellows sitting in those windows in their undershirts staring dumbly at television sets. Now I did.
    I held Ruby’s hand as we crossed Surf Avenue and walked toward the rambling green-and-yellow Nathan’s Famous for coffee. I was relieved to see that Nathan’s was still pretty much the same: still open all day and night, every day of the year, with the fragrant steam of frankfurters and French-fried potatoes still pouring into the street and out toward the boardwalk from the cookstoves.
    The long wooden open-air counters of Nathan’s were speckled with customers. We stood a few feet away from a man with tattoos on his arms busy with a big plate of oysters daubed with horseradish and hot sauce.
    “Look at his oysters,” I said to Ruby. She looked at the tattooed man’s plate. “See how they’re all gray? Mother Nature made oysters pink, which is how I remember eating them when I was a kid. The oil industry went and made them gray.”
    Ruby groaned. “We came all the way out here today so you could reminisce about the poor old pink oysters?”
    “Okay, forget oysters,” I said. Then I filled her in about ; the photograph that Picasso had sent to Dr. Reiser at Bellevue, the picture of his “masterpiece.” And how Reiser had explained that Picasso had painted the outside illustra- ; tions of a boardwalk attraction, how that was what we had come all the way out to Coney Island to find.
    “So exactly where will we find it?” Ruby asked.
    “Somewhere in Astroland.”
    “Astroland?”
    “It’s what they call the amusement park here at Coney Island, like the midway at a carnival. We’re looking for a dark maze attraction here; that’s carnival lingo for a spook house. Ours is called ‘Fire and Brimstone.’ ”
    “Oh, good. They had a spook house at City Park in New Orleans, when I was a kid. God, I used to love it! Big and dark inside and full of twisty little hallways, with mirrors to confuse you and creepy noises and sudden drafts. Skeletons and witches would be jumping out from everyplace.”
    Ruby clasped her elbows in her hands and rocked