The Funhouse Read online

  “I put a rubber worm in Amy's cold cream, and I thought it was her coming to get even with me,” Joey said, urgently explaining himself.

  “When are you going to outgrow this kind of stupid thing?” Ellen demanded, her heart still beating rapidly.

  “I didn't know it was you! I didn't know!”

  “This kind of prank is sick,” she said angrily. Her pleasant vodka haze had evaporated. Her dreamy laziness was gone, replaced by nightmare tension. She was still drunk, but the quality of her high had changed from bright to somber, from happy to grim. “Sick,” she said again, looking at the Halloween mask in her hand. “Sick and twisted.”

  Joey cowered back against the headboard, gripping the covers with both hands, as if he might throw them aside and leap out of bed and run for all he was worth.

  Still quivering from the shock of seeing that grinning, fanged, luminous face leap out of the darkness, Ellen looked around at the other weird items in the boy's room. Spooky posters hung on the walls: Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster, Bela Lugosi as Dracula, and another horror-movie creature that she couldn't identify. On the dresser, the desk, and the bookshelves there were monster models—three-dimensional plastic figures that Joey had glued together from kits.

  Paul permitted the boy to pursue this macabre hobby, and he insisted it was a common interest among kids Joey's age. Ellen had never strenuously objected. Although the boy's fascination with horror and blood worried her, it had seemed like a relatively minor matter, the sort of thing she always conceded to Paul, so that he would feel comfortable about conceding the larger and far more important issues to her.

  Now, infuriated by the scare that Joey had given her, upset by the unwanted memories that the prank had resurrected for her, her judgment still distorted by vodka, Ellen threw the mask into the wastebasket. “It's time I put an end to this nonsense. It's time you stopped playing around with this creepy junk and started behaving like a normal, healthy boy.” She plucked a couple of monster models from the dresser and dropped them into the wastebasket. She swept up the miniature ghouls and goblins from his desk and put them with the rest of the trash. “In the morning, before you go to school, take down those awful posters and get rid of them. Be careful not to chip the plaster when you pull the staples out of the wall. I'll get some good, no-nonsense prints to hang in here. You understand?”

  He nodded. Fat tears rolled down his cheeks, but he didn't make a sound.

  “And no more of these practical jokes of yours,” Ellen said harshly. “No more rubber spiders. No more phony snakes. No more rubber worms in cold cream jars. Do you hear me?”

  He nodded again. He was rigid, sickly white. He appeared to be overreacting to her admonitions. He didn't look like a boy who was facing his stern mother, he looked more like a boy facing certain death. He looked as if he were convinced that she was going to take him by the throat and kill him.

  The terror in Joey's face jolted Ellen.

  I'm just like Gina.

  No! That was unfair.

  She was only doing what must be done. The child needed to be disciplined and given guidance. She was merely fulfilling her duty as a parent.

  Just like Gina.

  She pushed that thought aside.

  “Lie down,” she said.

  Joey obediently slid under the covers once more.

  She went to the nightstand and put her hand on the lamp switch. “Did you say your prayers?”

  “Yeah,” he said weakly.

  “All of them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tomorrow night you'll say more prayers than usual.”

  “Okay.”

  “I'll say them with you to make sure you don't miss a word of them.”

  “Okay, Mama She switched off the light.

  In a small, uncertain voice, he said, “I didn't know it was you, Mama.”

  “Go to sleep.”

  “I thought it was Amy.”

  Suddenly she wanted to reach down and lift him from the bed and clasp him to her bosom. She wanted to hug him tight and kiss him and tell him everything was all right.

  But as she began to lean down toward him, she remembered the Halloween mask. When she had seen that fearsome countenance, she had thought that the demon in Joey had surfaced at last. She had been sure—just for a second or two, but long enough to have her complaisance blasted to bits—that the long-expected transformation had occurred. Now she was afraid that she would lean down and hug him and encounter another sneering troll's face—except that this time it would be no mask.

  Maybe this time he would grab her and pull her close, the better to tear out her stomach with his sharp and gleaming claws.

  The torrent of love washed through her and out of her, leaving a barren wasteland composed of uncertainty and fear. She was afraid of her own child.

  Seesaw.

  Seesaw.

  Abruptly she was aware, once more, of how drunk she was. Rubber-jointed. Unsteady. Dizzy and vulnerable.

  Beyond the vague glow of the night-light, the darkness pulsed and shifted and edged nearer, as if it were a living creature.

  Ellen turned away from the bed and quickly left the room, weaving through the shadows. She closed Joey's door behind her and stood for a moment in the upstairs hallway. Her heart was slamming like a loose, windblown shutter in a storm.

  Am I mad? she asked herself. Am I just like my own mother—seeing the work of the Devil in everyone, in everything, in places where it doesn't really exist? Am I worse than Gina?

  No, she told herself adamantly. I'm not crazy, and I'm not like Gina. I've got good reason. And at the moment . . . well . . . maybe I've had too much to drink, and I'm not thinking straight.

  Her mouth was dry and sour from the booze, but she wanted another drink. She longed to recapture that feeling of floating, that bright, pleasant mood she had enjoyed before Joey had scared her with his Halloween mask.

  She already felt the omens of a hangover: a faintly queasy stomach that would gradually succumb to a growing, roiling nausea, a dull throbbing in her temples that would become a splitting headache. What she needed, before she felt any worse, was some hair of the dog that had bit her. A whole lot of hair. Several glassfuls of hair from that funny old dog, the dog that came in a clear bottle, the dog that was distilled from potatoes. Wasn't vodka made from potatoes? Potato juice—that was what would make her feel right again. Lubricated by some potato juice, she would be able to slip back into that comfortable mood just as easily as slipping into a soft, fluffy old robe.

  She knew she was a sinner. Pouring down the booze like she did was unquestionably sinful, and when she was sober she could see the spiritual stain that alcohol had left on her.

  God help me, she thought. God help me because I just can't seem to help myself.

  She went downstairs to get another drink.

  * * *

  Joey stayed in bed for ten minutes after his mother left the room. Then, when he felt it was safe to move, he snapped on the lamp and got up.

  He went to the wastebasket by the dresser and stared down at the pile of monster models. They overflowed the can, a tangle of snarling, reaching plastic creatures. Dracula's head had been knocked off. A couple of the others also appeared to be damaged.

  I won't cry, Joey told himself firmly. I won't start bawling like a baby. She would enjoy that. I'm not going to do anything she would enjoy.

  Tears continued to slide down his cheeks, but he didn't call that crying. Crying was when you wailed your head off and got a runny nose and blubbered and got red in the face and just totally lost control of yourself.

  He turned away from the wastebasket and went to his desk, from which Mama had removed all of the miniature monsters he had collected. The only thing left was his bank. He picked that up and carried it to the bed.

  He saved his money in a one-gallon Mason jar. Most of it was in coins, squeezed bit by bit from his small weekly allowance, which he earned by keeping his room neat and by helpi
ng around the house. He also earned quarters by running to the 7-Eleven for Mrs. Jannison, the old lady who lived next door. There were several dollar bills in the jar, too, most of those were birthday gifts from his Grandma Harper, his Uncle John Harper, and his Aunt Emma Williams, who was Daddy's sister.

  Joey emptied the contents of the jar onto the bed and counted it. Twenty-nine dollars. And a nickel. He was old enough to know that it wasn't a fortune, but it still seemed like a lot of money to him.

  You could go a long way on twenty-nine dollars. He wasn't sure exactly how far you could go, but he figured at least two hundred miles.

  He was going to pack up and run away from home. He had to run away. If he stayed around much longer, Mama was going to come into his room one night, really drunk, really pissed, and she was going to kill him.

  Just like she had killed Victor.

  Whoever Victor was.

  He thought about what it would be like, going off on his own to some strange town, far away. It would be lonely, for one thing. He wouldn't , miss Mama. He wouldn't even miss his father very much. But he sure would miss Amy. When he thought of leaving Amy and never seeing her again, he felt his throat tighten, and he thought he was going to bawl.

  Stop it! Be tough!

  He bit his tongue until the urge to cry subsided and he was sure he was in control of himself.

  Running away from home didn't mean he would never see Amy for the rest of his life. She would be leaving home, too, in a couple of years, going away to live on her own, and he could join up with her then.

  They could live together in an apartment in New York City or someplace great like that, and Amy would become a famous painter, and he would finish growing up. If he showed up on Amy's doorstep a couple of years from now, she wouldn't turn him in to Mama, not Amy.

  He felt better already.

  He put his money back in the big Mason jar and screwed the lid on tight. He returned the jar to his desk.

  He would have to get coin wrappers from the bank and package his nickels, dimes, and quarters into rolls, then trade them in for folding money. He couldn't run away from home with his pockets stuffed full of loose, jangling change, that would be childish.

  He slipped into bed again and turned off the light.

  The only thing bad about running away was that he would miss the county fair in July. He had been looking forward to it for nearly a year.

  Mama didn't approve of going to the fair and mixing with those carnival people. She said they were dirty and dangerous, a bunch of crooks.

  Joey didn't put much faith in what Mama said , about anyone. So far as Mama was concerned, there was hardly a person in the whole world who was free of sin.

  Some years his father took him to the carnival on Saturday, the last day of the fair. But other years there was too much work at the law office, and Daddy couldn't get away.

  This year Joey had intended to sneak off to the carnival on his own. The fairgrounds were less than two miles away from the Harper house, and he had to travel only two streets to get there. It was an easy place to find, high up on the hill. Joey had planned to tell his mother that he was going to the library for the day, which he occasionally did, but then he was going to take his bicycle out to the fairgrounds and have himself a real ball all morning and afternoon, getting home just in time for supper, without Mama being any the wiser.

  He especially hated to miss the fair this year because it was going to be bigger and better than ever. The midway would be run by a different outfit from the one that had always come to Royal City in the past. This carnival was supposed to be humongous, the second largest in the world, two or three times bigger than the rinky-dink carnival that usually came to town. There would be a lot more rides than there had been in other years, a great many new things to see and do.

  But he wouldn't see or do any of them if he was two hundred miles away, starting a new life in a strange city.

  For almost a full minute Joey lay in the darkness, feeling sorry for himself-and then he sat bolt upright, electrified by a brilliant idea. He could leave home and still get to see the fair. He could do both. It was simple. Perfect. He would run away with the carnival!

  8

  WEDNESDAY MORNING the test results came back from the lab. Amy was officially pregnant.

  Wednesday afternoon she and Mama went to the bank and withdrew enough money from Amy's savings account to pay cash for the abortion.

  Saturday morning they told Amy's father that they were going shopping for a few hours. Instead, they went to Dr. Spangler's clinic.

  At the admissions desk Amy felt like a criminal. Neither Dr. Spangler nor his associates, Dr. West and Dr. Lewis, nor any of his nurses was Catholic, they performed abortions every week, month in and month out, without attaching any moral judgment to the act. Nevertheless, after so many years of intense religious instruction, Amy felt almost as if she were about to become an accomplice to a murder, and she knew that at least a residue of guilt would remain with her for a long, long time, staining any happiness she I might be able to achieve.

  She still found it difficult to believe that Mama had agreed to let her abort the fetus. She wondered about the fear in her mother's eyes.

  The operation was done on an outpatient basis, and a nurse took Amy to a room where she could undress and put her clothes in a locker. Mama remained in the waiting room.

  In the prep room, after a nurse had taken a - blood sample, Dr. Spangler came in to chat with s her for a moment. He tried to put her at ease. He was a jovial, chubby man with a bald head and . bushy gray sideburns.

  “You're not very far gone,” he said. “This will be a simple procedure. No serious chance of complications. Don't worry about it, okay? It'll be over before you realize it's begun.”

  In the small operating room, Amy was given a mild anesthetic. She began to drift out of her body as if she were a balloon rising into a high, blue sky.

  In the distance, beyond a haze of light and a curtain of whispering air, Amy heard a nurse talking softly. The woman said, “She's a very pretty girl, isn't she?”

  “Yes, very pretty,” Dr. Spangler said, his voice fading syllable by syllable, almost inaudible. “And a nice girl, too. I've been her doctor since she was a little tot. She's always been so polite, selfeffacing . . .”

  Soaring up and away from them, Amy tried to tell the doctor that he was wrong. She wasn't a nice girl. She was a very bad girl. He should ask Mama. Mama would tell him the truth. Amy Harper was a bad girl, evil inside, loose, wild, untrustworthy, just no damned good. She tried to tell Dr. Spangler how worthless she was, but her lips and tongue wouldn't respond to her urging. She couldn't make a sound—

  —until she said, “Uh,” and opened her eyes in the recovery room. She was on a wheeled cart with railed sides, flat on her back, staring at an acoustic-tiled ceiling. For a moment she couldn't figure out where she was.

  Then she remembered everything, and she was amazed that the abortion had been such a quick and easy procedure.

  They kept her in the recovery room for an hour, just to be sure she wasn't going to hemorrhage.

  By three-thirty she was in the Pontiac with her mother, on the way home. During the first half of the short drive, neither of them spoke. Mama's face looked like a stone carving.

  Finally Amy said, “Mama, I know you'll want me to keep a curfew for a couple of months, but I hope you'll let me work evenings down at The Dive, if that's the shift Mr. Donnatelli gives me.”

  “You can work whenever you want to work,” her mother said coldly.

  “I'll come home straight from work.”

  “You don't have to,” Mama said. “I don't care what you do. I just don't care anymore. You won't listen to me anyway. You won't behave yourself. You've loosened the reins on that thing inside of you, and now there's no holding it back. There's not a thing I can do. I wash my hands of you. I wash my hands.”

  “Mama, please. Please. Don't hate me.”

  “I don't hate yo
u. I just feel numb, blank. I don't feel much of anything for you right now.”

  “Don't give up on me.”

  “There's only one road to Heaven,” Mama said. But if you want to go to Hell, you'll find a thousand roads that'll take you there. I can't block all of them.”

  “I don't want to go to Hell,” Amy said.

  “It's your own choice,” Mama said. “From here on it's your own doing. Do whatever you want. You'll never listen to me anyway, so I wash my hands.” As she spoke she pulled the car into the driveway of the house on Maple Lane. “I'm not coming in with you. I've got to do some grocery shopping. If your father's back from the office, tell him the reason you look so pale is because you ate a hamburger for lunch, while we were shopping at the mall, and it didn't agree with you. Go to your room and stay out of his way. The less he sees of you, the less likely he is to get suspicious.”

  All right, Mama.”

  When Amy went in the house she found that her father hadn't returned from the office yet. Joey was still playing at Tommy Culp's house. She was alone.

  She changed into pajamas and a bathrobe, then called Liz Duncan. “It's over.”

  “Really?” Liz asked.

  “I just got home.”

  “You're all scraped out?”

  “Do you have to put it so crudely?” Amy asked.

  “That's what they do,” Liz said blithely. “They scrape you out. How do you feel?”

  “Scraped out,” Amy admitted miserably.

  “Sick in the tummy?”

  “A little. And I ache . . . down there.”

  “You mean you've got a sore cunt?” Liz asked.

  “Do you have to talk that way?”

  “What way?”

  “Gross.”

  “That's one of my most charming qualities—my complete lack of inhibitions. Listen, other than your tummy and your cunt, how are you feeling?”

  “Very, very tired.”

  “That's all?”

  “Yes. It was easier than I thought it would be.”

  “Gee, I'm relieved. I was worried about you, kid. I was really, really worried.”