Dark Maze

playing “It’s a Small World After All.”
    I tried to be reassuring, but if I were Ruby I am not sure I would have bought the performance. “Well, that’s the whole idea,” I said. “Besides, I thought you liked being scared. This ought to be fun for you today.”
    She took a breath. “No, it’s not. I guess it’s hitting me all of a sudden why we’re here, and how this is not your average Coney Island date. We’re out here looking at an artist’s so-called masterpiece because the other day he walked up to you in a park and talked about killing people, then he told you about a painting at a bar and you went to take a look at it and met his wife, then the next thing you know, she winds up with a bullet in her neck. And now this... this painting, this diseased thing!”
    I swept my eyes over Picasso’s masterpiece again and this time it took me back to all the times I had been to Astroland! as a kid and had seen just this kind of horrific carny artwork—well, maybe not this horrific—and how I was so strangely drawn to it; how everybody else was, too, the kids and grown-ups alike. But we never looked close, as I recall. A glimpse of someone else’s nightmare, and then a round of brave laughs—that was all we needed to slip into the proper spook-house mood. What reason had we to wonder about an artist’s mind?
    Here and there in the immense mural, paint was chipped and dulled from the winter. Panels were missing. Then I noticed the little fenced compound off to the side of Fire and Brimstone, where the weather-damaged panels were stacked and covered in gray-white primer paint, ready to be retouched for the upcoming summer season of thrills and chills. Two German shepherds guarded the art inside the fence, which was topped out in razor wire. A masterpiece deserved protection. Picasso must have been pleased.
    Ruby was still jumpy. “I really do wonder what troubled old Charlie when he painted this one,” she said.
    “So, you think there’s a message here?”
    “If there is, I guess it’s that we’re poor dumb creatures! feeding on the waste of our cruelties.”
    I nodded.
    Ruby’s eyes remained fixed on the mural. But soon she stepped away, to where she could see through the carnival booths and buildings out to the blue sea and the beach dotted with April’s early sunbathers. I walked over to her.
    “We spend way too much time ignoring warnings that people like Charlie Furman are always giving us,” she said, f “until it’s too late. I know that’s not very original, Hock.“
    “The world is unoriginal, which is why we mostly ignore each other. Forget what you might have heard—there’s I never been an age of reason. Life in the human race is pretty
    much spent in a dark maze, where we keep getting surprised by the same old things.”
    “Where did you learn that pretty lesson?”
    “The street.”
    “Somebody should put it in a book.”
    “That would only keep people off the streets.”
    Ruby kissed me.
    “Had enough?” she asked.
    “Of this, yes,” I said. And as we made our way toward the pleasant ocean vista, I told Ruby how Picasso had asked of his invisible friend and myself, “Ho, ho, and how come I painted what I painted?”
    It was not yet noon. But here again was a day when I wanted to start drinking early. Besides which, now that I had beheld Picasso’s masterpiece, was I not also at Coney Island for the purpose of visiting a certain boardwalk dive? The Neptune it was the place Celia Furman had spent the last afternoon of her life ringing up on the public telephone.
    And as we walked, Ruby said, “You want to know what I sometimes think about New York, especially right now? If New York City was a movie, nobody under eighteen would be allowed in.”

    The Neptune did not have its actual establishment name on the sign over the door. The sign just said BAR. Being that it was the only bar left on Coney Island’s boardwalk, which was crammed full of gin mills and beer gardens when I was a kid, I assumed that BAR meant Neptune.
    A big rectangular place, it had a long bar with a railing along one wall. Tables and chairs were strewn around, all of them unoccupied when we walked in. The toilets were in the hack, with one door marked Gents and the other Ladies and cardboard signs hung over the doorknobs that read No Changing—This Means You.
    At the bar was an assortment of matted-down middle, aged men whose lives had in one way or another been twisted and pounded into