Joyland

were lacy with dead skin, the backs of his hands red beneath a thick layer of some sort of white cream. There were no tattoos.
    Just psoriasis.

    As soon as he was loaded up and the ambulance was heading back to the tiny Heaven’s Bay hospital, I went into the nearest donniker and rinsed my mouth again and again. It was a long time before I got rid of the taste of those damn jalapeno peppers, and I have never touched one since.
    When I came out, Lane Hardy was standing by the door. “That was something,” he said. “You brought him back.”
    “He won’t be out of the woods for a while, and there might be brain damage.”
    “Maybe yes, maybe no, but if you hadn’t been there, he’d have been in the woods permanently. First the little girl, now the dirty old man. I may start calling you Jesus instead of Jonesy, because you sure are the savior.”
    “You do that, and I’m DS.” That was Talk for down south , which in turn meant turning in your time-card for good.
    “Okay, but you did all right, Jonesy. In fact, I gotta say you rocked the house.”
    “The taste of him,” I said. “God!”
    “Yeah, I bet, but look on the bright side. With him gone, you’re free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, you’re free at last. I think you’ll like it better that way, don’t you?”
    I certainly did.
    From his back pocket, Lane drew out a pair of rawhide gloves. Eddie’s gloves. “Found these laying on the ground. Why’d you take ’em off him?”
    “Uh . . . I wanted to let his hands breathe.” That sounded primo stupid, but the truth would have sounded even stupider. I couldn’t believe I’d entertained the notion of Eddie Parks being Linda Gray’s killer for even a moment. “When I took my life-saving course, they told us that heart attack victims need all the free skin they can get. It helps, somehow.” I shrugged. “It’s supposed to, at least.”
    “Huh. You learn a new thing every day.” He flapped the gloves. “I don’t think Eddie’s gonna be back for a long time—if at all—so you might as well stick these in his doghouse, yeah?”
    “Okay,” I said, and that’s what I did. But later that day I went and got them again. Something else, too.

    I didn’t like him, we’re straight on that, right? He’d given me no reason to like him. He had, so far as I knew, given not one single Joyland employee a reason to like him. Even old-timers like Rozzie Gold and Pop Allen gave him a wide berth. Nevertheless, I found myself entering the Heaven’s Bay Community Hospital that afternoon at four o’clock, and asking if Edward Parks could have a visitor. I had his gloves in one hand, along with the something else.
    The blue-haired volunteer receptionist went through her paperwork twice, shaking her head, and I was starting to think Eddie had died after all when she said, “Ah! It’s Edwin, not Edward. He’s in Room 315. That’s ICU, so you’ll have to check at the nurse’s station first.”
    I thanked her and went to the elevator—one of those huge ones big enough to admit a gurney. It was slower than old cold death, which gave me plenty of time to wonder what I was doing here. If Eddie needed a visit from a park employee, it should have been Fred Dean, not me, because Fred was the guy in charge that fall. Yet here I was. They probably wouldn’t let me see him, anyway.
    But after checking his chart, the head nurse gave me the okay. “He maybe sleeping, though.”
    “Any idea about his—?” I tapped my head.
    “Mental function? Well . . . he was able to give us his name.”
    That sounded hopeful.
    He was indeed asleep. With his eyes shut and that day’s late-arriving sun shining on his face, the idea that he might have been Linda Gray’s date a mere four years ago was even more ludicrous. He looked at least a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty. I saw I needn’t have brought his gloves, either. Someone had bandaged his hands, probably after treating the psoriasis with something a little more powerful than whatever OTC cream he’d been using on them. Looking at those bulky white mittens made me feel a queer, reluctant pity.
    I crossed the room as quietly as I could, and put the gloves in the closet with the clothes he’d been wearing when he was brought in. That left me with the other thing—a photograph that had been pinned to the wall of his cluttered, tobacco-smelling little shack next to a yellowing calendar that was two years out of date. The photo showed Eddie