Joyland

magic place, my dear. For instance.” He showed her his empty hands, then put them behind his back. “Which hand?”
    “Left,” Annie said, playing along.
    Fred brought out his left hand, empty.
    She rolled her eyes, smiling. “Okay, right.”
    This time he brought out a dozen roses. Real ones. Annie and Mike gasped. Me too. All these years later, I have no idea how he did it.
    “Joyland is for children, my dear, and since today Mike is the only child here, the park belongs to him. These, however, are for you.”
    She took them like a woman in a dream, burying her face in the blooms, smelling their sweet red dust.
    “I’ll put them in the van for you,” I said.
    She held them a moment longer, then passed them to me.
    “Mike,” Fred said, “do you know what we sell here?”
    He looked uncertain. “Rides? Rides and games?”
    “We sell fun. So what do you say we have some?”

    I remember Mike’s day at the park—Annie’s day, too—as if it happened last week, but it would take a correspondent much more talented than I am to tell you how it felt, or to explain how it could have ended the last hold Wendy Keegan still held over my heart and my emotions. All I can say is what you already know: some days are treasure. Not many, but I think in almost every life there are a few. That was one of mine, and when I’m blue—when life comes down on me and everything looks tawdry and cheap, the way Joyland Avenue did on a rainy day—I go back to it, if only to remind myself that life isn’t always a butcher’s game. Sometimes the prizes are real. Sometimes they’re precious.
    Of course not all the rides were running, and that was okay, because there were a lot of them Mike couldn’t handle. But more than half of the park was operational that morning—the lights, the music, even some of the shys, where half a dozen gazoonies were on duty selling popcorn, fries, sodas, cotton candy, and Pup-A-Licious dogs. I have no idea how Fred and Lane pulled it off in a single afternoon, but they did.
    We started in the Village, where Lane was waiting beside the engine of the Choo-Choo Wiggle. He was wearing a pillowtick engineer’s cap instead of his derby, but it was cocked at the same insouciant angle. Of course it was. “All aboard! This is the ride that makes kids happy, so get on board and make it snappy. Dogs ride free, moms ride free, kids ride up in the engine with me.”
    He pointed at Mike, then to the passenger seat in the engine. Mike got out of his chair, set his crutches, then tottered on them. Annie started for him.
    “No, Mom. I’m okay. I can do it.”
    He got his balance and clanked to where Lane was standing—a real boy with robot legs—and allowed Lane to boost him into the passenger seat. “Is that the cord that blows the whistle? Can I pull it?”
    “That’s what it’s there for,” Lane said, “but watch out for pigs on the tracks. There’s a wolf in the area, and they’re scared to death of him.”
    Annie and I sat in one of the cars. Her eyes were bright. Roses all her own burned in her cheeks. Her lips, though tightly pressed together, were trembling.
    “You okay?” I asked her.
    “Yes.” She took my hand, laced her fingers through mine, and squeezed almost tight enough to hurt. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”
    “Controls green across the board!” Lane cried. “Check me on that, Michael!”
    “Check!”
    “Watch out for what on the tracks?”
    “Pigs!”
    “Kid, you got style that makes me smile. Give that yell-rope a yank and we’re off!”
    Mike yanked the cord. The whistle howled. Milo barked. The airbrakes chuffed, and the train began to move.
    Choo-Choo Wiggle was strictly a zamp ride, okay? All the rides in the Village were zamps, meant mostly for boys and girls between the ages of three and seven. But you have to remember how seldom Mike Ross had gotten out, especially since his pneumonia the year before, and how many days he had sat with his mother at the end of that boardwalk, listening to the rumble of the rides and the happy screams coming from down the beach, knowing that stuff wasn’t for him. What was for him was more gasping for air as his lungs failed, more coughing, a gradual inability to walk even with the aid of crutches and braces, and finally the bed where he would die, wearing diapers under his PJs and an oxygen mask over his face.
    Wiggle-Waggle Village was sort of depopulated with no greenies to play the fairy-tale parts, but Fred and Lane had reactivated