Dark Maze

herself, remembering. “It scared me real good, every time.” Her eyes were wide, and as radiant as whitecaps out on the sunlit Atlantic.
    “I wish we’d been kids together,” I said.
    “You were one of those boys who just loved to get a girl all screaming and silly with a spider or a toad, weren’t you, Hock?”
    “I might have tried that on you.”
    “For you, I might have screamed.”
    Back in the city this could have been a lovely moment that could have had us hurrying back to my place to draw the curtains. I hate Brooklyn.
    We finished our coffee and rounded the back of Nathan’s to Bowery Avenue, which cuts through Astroland on the way to the boardwalk and the beach. We passed by the Eldorado Arcade, Sportland, Faber’s Fascination, the Silver Ski, and Treasure Island. And a few dozen booths where the red-nosed carnies challenged me to knock down milk bottles with beanbags, or toss rings around spindles or fire pellets at moving lines of tin ducks. "Hey, rubberneck! How’s about taking a chance to win a nice prize for tootsie? C’mon, show us you ’re a big guy.”
    By this enticement, I could only recollect those unpleasant times I have been plucked by Astroland sharpies hollering at me from booths, when I was a skinny young curly-headed Harp singing soprano in the boys’ choir at Holy Cross Church; times when these sharpies gave thanks to the heavenly saints as they saw me coming. Even today, now that I am a wised-up cop, I am sore about those times. So it was not difficult for me to blow off anybody calling me a rubberneck.
    I just turned my back on them and I turned Ruby around, too. I pointed west from Bowery Avenue while the sharpies hollered at somebody else and I said to Ruby, “Over there is the king of roller coasters, the Thunderbolt. It’s that half-broken-down thing you can see is dead now. Which is a crime since Coney Island is where they invented the roller coaster.”
    Ruby squeezed my arm. “Nobody should see it that way. There should be more respect for a king.”
    And right then and there is when I should have told Ruby for the first time that I loved her. Maybe we would have forgotten all about the Fire and Brimstone and gone back to Manhattan—or at least gone down to the beach, where maybe I could have scooped up some wriggling thing from the sand or the sea and made Ruby scream. Maybe.
    We heard a voice from somewhere.
    “Enjoying the sun and the salt air with your girly there, I are you, buddy?”
    I had to look down to see where the words were coming from. And there stood a dwarf, a baby-faced man about fifty and four feet high at the highest. He had a cigarette in his mouth and wore a white jumpsuit and white sailor cap and he had a newspaper carrier’s canvas bag slung over one shoulder.
    He laid the bag down and said, “So, you two live around here?”
    “No,” Ruby answered for us both. “We’re just out for the day, looking over memories.”
    The dwarf sniffed. “Memories ain’t what they used to be.”
    Then he reached into his bag and pulled out two hand- bills. He gave one to me and one to Ruby. They read:

    HOW SWEET IT WAS!
    WE CAN BRING IT ALL BACK!
    LEGALIZE CASINOS!
    IT’S OUR BOARDWALK!
    LET’S GET INVOLVED!

    Running beneath the exclamatories was small type that spelled out: Concerned Citizens for Coney Island, followed by a Manhattan postal box and a Manhattan telephone number.
    When I had finished reading, I looked at the dwarf and started to say something. But he interrupted with, “Pass the good word, okay, buddy?”
    “What’s the good word?” I asked.
    “Gambling,” he said.
    “I see.”
    I had for years heard of one ad hoc group after another formed to lobby the legislature up in Albany for a local-option gambling bill, on the order of what they did over in New Jersey to bring about the dubious salvation of Atlantic City. One by one, the efforts sputtered out in New York, largely due to oppositionists trotting out the abused citizens of Atlantic City for their sorry testimonies.
    “So, you’re from around here?” Ruby asked the dwarf. “Sure as hell I am, good-looking.”
    “Can you tell us where the Fire and Brimstone is? The spook house?”
    “Well, of course I can,” he said. “I worked every attraction in this place one time or the other. But hell, what’s a nice couple of folks like you want with a place like that on a nice bright day like it is?”
    Ruby smiled. “Just tell us, darling. Okay?”
    The dwarf