Whirl Away (4 page)

“Is s'pposed to,” Mr. Reinhoudt said, pulling hard on his small white beard. “S'pposed to get yer attention from the highway, and getcha in the lot wit' the kids.” He said “kids” as if it had a
z
in it.

Reinhoudt was a small, round, compact Dutchman who'd spent twenty years building the amusement park he'd named McNally's Fair, because, he said, McNally was a more acceptable name than his own. The Zipper first, then bumper cars; a small, brightly lit merry-go-round, and a Ferris wheel that picked awkward times to slip out of gear. Reinhoudt bought them one at a time, with careful, calculating precision. He'd
bought The Zipper from a travelling fair when its semi-hauler broke down on the highway on the way to Swift Current and it looked to its old owners as if a new rig would cost more than the whole ride was worth all together.

Reinhoudt's park was twenty minutes west of Calgary, and The Thunder was the main attraction, a short, steep roller coaster that got riders high enough to give them a clear view, on the right day, of the foothills below the Rocky Mountains. Dennis was the only full-time employee outside the Reinhoudt family, and he thought that explained just what kind of jobs he ended up doing—the worst of them. Even Michaela, Reinhoudt's daughter, had a better job than he did—Michaela Reinhoudt, in her twenties now and distant, no longer the same teenager playing at talking rough, hanging out with Dennis and cadging smokes.

Up on the shaky scaffolding next to The Thunder, Dennis could see the mountains too. All the years he'd been in Alberta, he never thought for a moment that he'd ever get tired of looking at the mountains. All around him, the plastic sheeting rattled in the gusty spring wind. He sat on the scaffold platform with his back to the plastic, absently counting the rusting and broken bolts and globbing the paint on thick. He figured that if he put it on heavily enough, it would take that much longer for the rust to bleed through. He'd been painting for days already, and figured he had at least another week's work ahead of him.

“Fresh paint can cover a multitude of zins,” Mr. Reinhoudt told Dennis, his face serious, one pudgy forefinger pointed upwards. Remembering the words made Dennis
smile; not all the words, he thought, only one. It was listening to the way Reinhoudt slowed right down and pronounced every single syllable of “mul-ti-tude,” as if he was making three careful words out of one.

Dennis knew Reinhoudt was right—paint certainly could cover sins, at least as far as the provincial inspectors were concerned. Reinhoudt had told him that, and after a few years Dennis knew it was true. The rides really only had to look like everything was safe. Painting The Thunder meant that no one but him would even climb up and see if the supporting spans were still bolted firmly in place. There would be check marks in every single box on the ride's inspection sheet. The inspectors could have done their job just as well sitting in the front seats of their government pickups.

After The Thunder was painted, Dennis would be stripping the electrical circuits and brushes on the bumper cars and making sure all the loudspeaker wiring was okay. He had been at the park for twelve years now, and those were always the last few things to be done before the opening. The last few things, including replacing any of the hundreds of light bulbs that might have burned out or broken over the winter.

After that, it was just regular maintenance and lubing with the big grease gun, and a steady watch on anything that looked as if it might be wearing out. He was the eyes and ears of McNally's Fair. If the screech of metal on metal in a ride sounded wrong, it would bring him up solid in his tracks. He knew every inch of the park, every hint of springs and cogs that had reached their point of protest, with only
days to go before total failure. He knew it, Dennis thought, like an ulcer patient knows the protesting sounds of his own stomach.

Last, of course, was cleaning up. Cleaning up. Dennis got a sour look on his face, even though he was high above the park grounds. His was a narrow, brown, sharp face but with piercing blue eyes like a husky dog's. Too spare to be handsome, his face always carried an expression of having something else in mind, some other plan. He looked faintly desiccated, as if his skin had dried out too much on some occasion and never properly recovered. Thirty-nine years old, with the bowling-ball beginnings of a beer gut, Dennis wasn't the sort of person even Reinhoudt would think of hiring now. But he was a steady, hard worker, and Reinhoudt had no trouble with the idea of leaving the whole park in Dennis's care for the six months or so when it was closed down, when Dennis lived there all alone.

Dennis had appeared at McNally's Fair in his truck, alone, the passenger seat piled high with full duffle bags and empty takeout coffee cups, the sides of the truck filthy with highway dirt. There was a flat spare tire lying on its rim in the box behind the cab, and Dennis's left arm was burnt bright red from the sun. While Dennis was talking to Reinhoudt, the truck ticked along gently as it cooled, standing high on its tires as if expecting to be told it was time to leave.

It was good timing for Dennis: Reinhoudt had just lost his handyman. Instead of two weeks' notice, the previous occupant of the job had simply driven away, giving the Dutchman the finger out the open driver's window.

“Don't expect your last week's pay,” Reinhoudt had shouted as the man's truck started to pull away. The answer was short and sharp and started with “Fuck,” Reinhoudt said.

Dennis told the Dutchman that he had experience with small engine repair and auto body work, that he had his own tools, and that he could start right away. Reinhoudt gave Dennis a quick up-and-down glance, his eyes staying on Dennis's battered hands and cracked nails for a moment, and then told him he could have a job. His first duties would be grubbing out the trailer where the last handyman had lived, and after that, Reinhoudt said, Dennis could set up in there as well—although it would be forty dollars a week off his cheque for rent.

For the next four weeks, Dennis barely spoke a word. Reinhoudt told him what needed to be done, and Dennis listened carefully, intently, as if he were listening to more than the other man's words. It was as if he were learning to listen to the entire place, trying to find out just what language the machines and people spoke when they weren't talking. Not speaking, Dennis knew, also gave him a kind of invisibility; he knew about that before heading out to Alberta, had known it for years. If you're careful and spend a month or two lurking on the edges of everyone's vision, he realized, one day they look at you and think you've always been there.

One thing Dennis didn't know was that it was a kind of silence often taken for disdain—and that it had coloured both his layoffs and firings in the past, marking him as the easiest one to let go when changes had to be made. The one who wouldn't complain, the one whose leaving the other
employees would accept, the mood of the place brightening up as soon as Dennis and his tool box were gone. Dennis never said anything to anyone after the inevitable dismissal, even when he felt he had been singled out unfairly.

He had left the east coast when there wasn't any more work, when it felt like he had used up every possible job in the small Newfoundland town of Renews, a town where he had spent his entire life, in among a cluster of stubborn square houses around the horseshoe foot of a bay. He left behind a small bungalow on the black-rocked and often raucous ocean, and a quiet wife who was always in motion, always moving to another room.

His wife's name was Heather. They were the last ones in their high school class to pair up, and when they did, it had seemed to be because they both looked around at the same time and realized there weren't any other reasonable choices left. Besides Heather, Dennis could have picked Leanne Meadus, who lived with her grandparents and spoke so little that half the graduating class thought she was mute. Or Mary Wherry, perpetually the butt of jokes about her name until finally she tried, and failed, to get everyone to call her by her middle name instead. Heather could have chosen either one of the Power brothers, but she would have had to pick a time when one of them wasn't in jail for bootlegging or its intimate companions, high-speed drunk driving and fleeing from the police.

Dennis and Heather had simply waited too long to pick. It had worked for a while. They had managed an uneasy
familiarity that felt a little bit like love, as long as neither of them looked backwards very hard at what their original expectations might have been.

They had managed to hold on to that pretence even after he moved away. For the first few years in Alberta, he would make his way back for the winters, once the park closed down, after his boss filled out the end-of-season paperwork and the unemployment cheques started. When Dennis was home, he and Heather managed to tolerate each other. But they moved in separate circles and only happened to intersect at their edges—usually the sharper ones. It seemed as if time apart allowed them to spend more time inside their own fortifications, walled into personal worlds where they felt safe and unexposed. Both of them might have said that the weeks they spent together felt strangely like surrender, as if they had let down the gates to an invading army.

At first, the cheques went one way and occasional letters came back. Four years in, a letter came that said he just shouldn't bother anymore. Dennis wasn't even sure that he minded. He thought he should mind, thought it should be obvious, thought he was meant to be broken-hearted, like the country music warbling out of the radio speaker while he was working or driving aimlessly on empty back roads.

Sometimes, he would turn around and be absolutely convinced that something was missing, as if he had lost his wallet or misplaced a false front tooth, but he couldn't put his finger on what it was that was gone. It didn't have a shape or a colour; it wasn't like a sweater missing from a closet,
or an important tool left out in the snow overnight and buried.

Dennis couldn't imagine that it was as simple as loneliness, because he didn't think he was lonely. Nights alone at the fair when the snow was battering down had their own sort of magic, especially when he could come out of the trailer into the bitter sharp cold and feel the ice crystals finger his face. He woke up most mornings knowing exactly where he was, the rough grey blanket up around his chin and the sheets pilled with constant use, his eyes traversing the same water-stained ceiling without ever wishing that he was somewhere else, a feeling that he took as meaning he was close to that thing called home.

In the middle of the winter, Dennis would head out into the night and turn on all the lights in the park, forcing open the big guillotine switches with both hands, turning on the floodlights, and then, when the air was clear and cold and dry, he'd start The Thunder and take a few circuits all by himself. The grease would be stiff under the wheels of the cars then, and the wind would be like ice against his skin. He would hold on and make the circuits fast, wondering if the ride would shake apart from the unexpected winter travel, and at the end his hands would be as cold as wax. Then, when the ride stopped, he'd climb out and start it on its circuit again, leaping into the cars at the back as the front of the short train started up the track. It rode harder in the winter than at any other time of year: every corner struck harder, the springs on the cars yielded far less than they should, more punishment than pleasure. Everything was pushed to
extremes, so the sounds he heard meant nothing. He would enjoy the rush and plunge of it, ignoring the angry sounds of the metal.

The lights looked best in snow, he thought, especially when the snow was fine icy shards and as thin as fog, and sometimes he would flick all the lights on in the park just for a moment, a blink of an eye, to see the brake lights flick on behind cars on the highway, the snowy spume lighting up red as each driver slowed for the multicoloured wonder of McNally's Fair, fading into an afterimage against the black of night. Times like that, he thought, it would be marvellous to have someone next to him in the front of the roller coaster, even if neither of them said anything, so that the sense of it could exist with someone else.

It was, he thought, a very small universe: the machines, covered and hunkered down in the snow, the boarded-up concession stands, the empty parking lot. But it was his universe, and he batted around through it in whatever order he liked, barely making his way outside the park's winter-draped fencing once or twice a week. For each one of those winter months, it was as if he owned the fair and every scrap of land it sat on, as if Reinhoudt barely existed.

He might not see anyone for as long as a month, except when he made short trips out of the park for gas or groceries. With groceries, he used to make small talk with the clerk at the FastFood, whose name tag said she was April. She had jet-black shiny hair and a curious way of holding her mouth when she wasn't talking that was almost like a self-conscious and constant sneer.

One night, he even made an awkward try at talking to her—at least, he was pretty sure it was awkward.

“Pretty girl like you gotta have a boyfriend,” he said. She stared at him impassively as she bagged the groceries, never letting her eyes fall from his face, while he reddened and wished the bags would fill more quickly.

A week or so later, she accepted an offer to go to a movie with him, smiling slightly and looking off to his left as she gave him directions. He wondered if she was the kind of girl who would smile goofily and feel her breath slip away on the roller coaster, or whether her lip would just stay curled the way it was in the store, as if her mouth had been formed and left to harden awkwardly.

But when the snow came and boxed him in again on the night they were supposed to go in to Calgary, Dennis didn't mind. Instead, he spent the night circling the park and leaving trenched trails behind him in the shin-deep snow, carefully tying down every loose and flapping piece of tarpaulin.