Nightmare Carnival

He knew Dick, he knew Garret. They’d been there the night he was born, and they’d killed many a beer on our porch, and toasted the sun on its way up.

The first time or two, Tina’d scrambled us some eggs.

Turned out there weren’t enough eggs in the world, though.

There never is.

“What do you want to ride first?” Dick said, pushing away from his truck.

Josh looked up to him, then to me.

“Everything,” he said.

“That’s my man,” Garret said, and socked him soft on the shoulder.

“Everything,” I said.

It might have been what I’d said myself nearly thirty years ago, standing right here, caught between second and third grade, the lights washing across my face.

It was the last time I’d be so innocent.

The Tunnel of Brotherly Love.

That was what the sixth graders had been calling it that year.

Me and Garret and Rich didn’t understand.

Dick was still “Rich” then, a name that would fall away in eighth grade when it got too cruel, from his dad having to put them on food stamps.

Legend was that there was one particular second-rate carnival out there, maybe this one, maybe not, that its Tunnel of Love was jinxed, but in a special way. If you waited for the darkest part of the ride and then kissed whoever was sitting beside you, kissed that person like you meant it, not just a peck and gone, then the end of that tunnel would open onto a world that would look the exact same as you’d left, except it would be all different underneath.

Nobody was sure how it would be different, but the way we heard it, it would be like this new place would be stitched through with. with something like all your wishes come true. Like, you’d think you sure were thirsty, and then somebody’d give you a Coke. You’d think it sure is hot, and a cloud would drift over the sun. You’d think you sure hoped your mom didn’t tan your hide for being late, then she’d be on the phone all the way in the kitchen when you sneaked through the front door.

The only problem was the kissing part. We didn’t know any girls, or how to ask them to ride this ride with us.

But we had each other.

And of course, later, we all figured out it was a scam, that the carnival had probably started the legend itself to sell more tickets.

It didn’t keep us from cramming three into a two-seat car, though, and closing our eyes at what we figured was the darkest part, puckering up, one of us having to go twice.

It didn’t keep the sixth graders stationed behind us from telling everybody, either.

And it didn’t stop the dreams.

Garret was the first of us to halfway remember.

This was sophomore year, about. Freshman for Dick, as he was called by then. He’d failed out of ninth grade. But we were still us.

It had been years since anybody’d spelled out our names in the kissing tree song, too. But it had been good for us. We’d had to learn to scrap younger than most, we’d had to watch each other’s backs in a way other third graders hadn’t, and we carried that with us now. Even the seniors left us alone for the most part.

But Garret’s dream.

We were out at his dad’s barn when he got liquored up enough to tell it.

We’d spent nearly all of that Saturday slapping dark red paint over the barn, for his older cousin’s wedding. The wood was thirsty, drank it up.

Garret’s dream was of that Tunnel of Love car just clanking along on its chain, the chain pulling the three of us along those two steel rails like a hundred times before.

But there had been that part with the strobe lights, where all the Halloween leftovers were stood up on rods, and hung from the ceiling.

The idea was that a girl would shriek, throw a leg over her guy’s thigh, and he could wrap a protective arm around her. Tunnels of Love aren’t complicated.

In Garret’s dream, though, one of those silver flashes of light, it lit up this out-of-place clown. A clown that, next strobe, had turned its head, was looking right at me and Rich, kissing.

It was like we’d woken it up.

And that was it, the end of Garret’s dream, just looping for him night after night, and sometimes during history or math.

“What does it mean?” Dick asked, draining his beer.

“It means he’s a dumbass,” I said, cuffing the back of Garret’s neck and pushing him away.

There was hay dust floating all around us right then, I remember.

It felt like the world was never going to end.

Because Tina would hate hearing about it, I took Josh up into the Hammer first thing.

It’s important to get the Hammer behind you like that. If you do it after popcorn and Slushees and Milk Duds, the inside of that bullet-shaped gondola can get ugly.

I clamped my hat down and the attendant locked us in, nodded once to me like a bull rider, and up we went, to hell with gravity and logic.

If you don’t scream at least once on the Hammer, then you’re probably not alive.

Josh was laughing so hard when it was done that he was crying. Either that or he’d started out crying, and now it had turned the other way.

He was going to be all right, I figured.

Dick and Garret were waiting like sentries at the exit gate, their eyes everywhere at once.