Joyland Read Online Free PDF Page B

kicked the mailbox three times hard. Chris raised himself up on one elbow, watched Johnny lurch all ninety-five pounds into it, the slim tendons in his forearms popping as he rocked the red metal off its legs. In slow-motion the box tipped, then landed on its back, the arrow-like Canadian Postal emblem pointing suddenly skyward. The sound thundered across the gas station parking lot and echoed on the empty highway. Chris could feel the vibrations jolt through him.
    The boys in the street sat up on their asses, stared. No one said a word.
    Johnny Davis plunged his hands deep into his pockets and walked away slowly, looking nothing like a guy who’d just lost it.
    David snorted, and Kenny lay back down, the rubber grip of his running shoe facing Chris. A red bull’s eye of rubber.
    Chris turned and watched Johnny Davis trek the entire length of St. Lawrence Street. From a distance, Chris knew they must look like they’d parachuted out of the dark and landed there — arms and legs thrust out haphazardly across the cement, sneakers pointing at the heavens. But Johnny Davis did not glance back. He walked the four blocks up, and when he reached the fork in the road where the downtown intersection began, veered left and passed from sight. It must have taken at least ten minutes. Still, not one set of headlights.
    Chris paused another minute, looking up at the sky, willing something to happen.
    Nothing did.
    When Chris got home, his father’s face was like a blank television.
    Mr. Lane hunched in front of the TV, staring at it as if he had only just turned it off. His grey head sunk into his shirt collar. A thirty-eight-year-old force field, emitted invisibly, sealed him inside, determined to make him ancient. Uncanny static crept into his silences, as if the radio broadcaster in his head had run out of things to say at exactly the point Chris passed out of range. Mr. Lane had a remarkable ability to sit for long stretches, doing nothing. When he did speak — as he did now — his voice was gruff.
    “Should’ve been home a goddamn hour ago.” What he said was “goddamn” but what Chris heard was Q*bert-ese: @#*!
    “They closed it down,” Chris said, the defence sounding weak as it hit the air.
    “Couldn’t use one of those quarters for the phone?” Mr. Lane got up and left the room.
    Chris had, of course, been spectator to the goings-on at his friends’ houses when they were getting it. He knew he had nothing to complain about. Had once, in fact, witnessed a whole house constrict with smoke as voices pitched — a result of J.P. having brought him home without asking after ball hockey — the argument hurtling into a chin-to-chin faceoff, hard-ribbed and tense as sexuality.
    Yet, Mr. Lane’s words were chosen with great deliberation. A well-placed piece of profanity — even one of the mild swears — carried enough force to knock a tooth out. The Lanes were a family of respect, pride, patience. A family of bullshitters. Chris yearned for a great bloody brawl. Even the kind of daytime television drama that began with innuendo and ended with sobbing. Anything that might breech the barriers.
    Any number of elements could, possibly, have shaped Chris’s parents. He had seen pictures of his mother as a seventeen-year-old — before her father died, before she had left the farm because she “didn’t get along” with her mother, repeating only that she “couldn’t stand to stay.” From a young age, Chris played a game of interview, and this was always Mrs. Lane’s answer to that particular line of questioning, no matter how Chris found new ways to phrase it.
    “Why did you move to South Wakefield?”
    “I couldn’t stand to stay out there. Coming to town was like moving to a city.”
    “Did you come here to meet Dad?”
    “I met him later.”
    “So you came here to go to school?”
    “No, I just came. Because.”
    “You came and you lived here all by yourself?”
    “Go play with your sister.”
    Chris had