back in his pocket and extending a hand toward Waylon. “The name’s Leo Butler, and Marsue’s got two or three extra caps with her, I know.”
Ten minutes later, with everybody aboard and with Waylon wearing a hot-pink cap that said Live the Dream just above the bill, Captain Metcalf pointed the bow of the Gulf Princess toward the channel markers leading to the mouth of Sabine Pass Bay and the open water beyond.
Near its zenith, the sun hammered the Gulf and everything moving on it, and by the time the captain had taken the boat a few miles from shore everybody in the fishing party had stopped trying to talk over the roar of the inboard engine and had found places to sit and wait for some stopping point to be reached.
Leo Butler was perched in front on the seat next to the captain’s, his long-billed cap pushed back on his head so he could lean forward to observe the dials on the control panel, and Teddy and Marsue sat side by side on an upholstered pad on the engine housing facing the rear of the boat. Marsue had taken her shoes off, and from where he sat in a plastic lawn chair, Waylon could finally see where the tan ended on her body.
It stopped with an oval on the top of each foot, fading into white just before the bones of her toes began to show their articulation. Evidently, the woman didn’t wear sandals often, but in Waylon’s opinion that fact hadn’t held her back much. He could imagine himself leaving his plastic chair, crawling across the four or five feet of deck space between them, and leaning forward to kiss each toe there toasting in the sun.
Instead he closed his eyes against the glare and listened to the rhythmic throb of the engine and the regular pattern of the bow of the boat pounding over the line of waves it met in its progress. His body moved in cadence with the motion, and the steady up and down, the to and fro, the backwards and forwards, put him in mind of the roller coaster at Pleasure Island, the amusement park in Port Arthur where he had spent four summers of his teenage years.
The entrance to the ride stood across from the Round Stand where he had sold hot dogs and soft drinks and ice cream in the employ of his mother’s brother, the only relation of his family on both sides who was ever in a position to make any money. All of his kin considered Uncle Runky rich, especially the East Texas branch, and Waylon never had any reason to doubt the truth of the belief.
Certainly, his famous Uncle Runky was tyrant enough to convince anybody of his wealth, working the employees of his food concessions at the park long enough hours at low enough wages to prove his business savvy to any potential doubter of his financial success. His workers all hated and feared him and stole food from both the snack stand and the restaurant every chance they got.
Between waiting on customers at the Round Stand, the hot dog stuffers and the Coke guzzlers and ice cream crammers over from the mainland, Waylon would lift his eyes to read the great sign above the entrance to the ride across the way. “Ride the Coaster,” it proclaimed in large red letters against a white background, “Thrill of a Lifetime,” the word Thrill the largest of the command and the others trailing off, each smaller than the one before until time, the smallest of all, vanished with the final tiny letter e.
And Waylon did, each chance he got, when the crowd in the park was small or when he was on a lunch or supper break or when the maintenance crew was testing the track those few hours each summer week Pleasure Island was closed to customers. The ride was free for him, one of the few fringe benefits to park employees, and Waylon took full advantage of every opportunity to slip into a seat of one of the cars and feel the drive chain engage beneath and begin to tow him up the long first incline to the top of the highest point of the wooden structure.
Scores of rides on the coaster had taught him how to experience the event most completely, and he had learned that on the way up the first incline the true rider looked first to the left to watch the trees shrink away and the ship canal come into view.
Immediately on glimpsing the water, the rider then must look back and to the right for a view of the midway and the Ferris Wheel at its heart, a scene best taken when the lights were coming on and the customers who came to the park after having their evening meal somewhere else were hurrying from the parking lots toward the sounds of merry-go-round music and the clatter of wheels from the games of chance and the calls of the barkers.
About then, the other riders in the coaster car would begin to scream as the top of the first incline came near and they realized there was nothing in view ahead but empty air. The true rider did not cry out or show alarm, but, as Waylon had learned in his long and faithful apprenticeship, looked instead at the hand rails to the left and right of the incline so as to see them tremble as the heavy car reached the top.
There, at the high point, the drive chain carrying the load disengaged beneath, and the car seemed to stop for a moment before continuing its roll forward into the beginning of the descent. It was then the deepest, most panicky breaths were taken and the loudest screams of the entire circuit began, and it was then that the true rider removed his hands from the bar across his thighs holding him in the seat, and threw both arms above his head.
The long fall forward began with a force that pulled him out of his seat and held him suspended against the bar, only the pressure on his legs keeping him inside the car, modulating steadily until at the bottom of the incline, the true rider was crushed into the seat until he weighed more than ever before in life.
The next incline, necessarily shorter than the first, with a sudden hard right turn at the top, was the best for the true rider of all the circuits past and all those to come. For it was here at the top, as the car crested the incline, that true weightlessness came to the one loyal enough to let go of all support and stays and to allow the attending forces to have complete dominion and control.
He floated, the true rider, touching nothing, for a count of two, all that pushed him up and all that held him back equalized and kept at bay in balance, and he drifted in air, having nothing and wanting nothing. At soundless peace, in a still point with the screams of the others about him, neither bound by earth nor taken by sky.
That moment past, the rest of the ride around the loops and beneath the overhanging supports and down the long slide back to the beginning was a steady increase in gravity, so that as the safety bars flipped up for leaving the car, Waylon ended each journey feeling heavier than ever before, climbing from the car with a conscious effort to walk down the exit ramp with his shoes scuffing hard against the pavement.
In his four summers on Pleasure Island, he had ridden the other rides many times—they were free, after all—the Ferris Wheel, the Whip, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Ride-E-O, the Avalanche, the Bumper Cars, but it was only the coaster that spoke to him at the weightless top of the second crest something he could never quite make out and understand, a message to which he wanted to attend again and again in that moment of canceled forces at peace with each other.
“Ride the coaster,” Waylon said out loud, the sound of his words covered by the deep drone of the boat engine, “thrill of a lifetime.”
“What was that?’
Teddy had stood up from his seat on the engine housing and was leaning toward Waylon’s plastic lawn chair, keeping himself balanced by holding on to one of the two-by-four uprights to the sunroof. The vibration of the Gulf Princess plowing through the water was causing his chin to quiver as though he had a slight case of palsy, and his next statement seemed to be forced loose from his mouth one word at the time.
“What’d you say?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Waylon said. “Just trying to remember the words to a song.”
“You like music, huh?”
“Some songs I do,” Waylon said.
