Stephen King - Joyland

“I’m Jonesy.”

“Well, Jonesy, you’re going to spend an edifying hour in the Wiggle-Waggle. It’ll be edifying for the kiddies, anyhow. For you, maybe not so much.” He bared his yellow fangs in a trademark Pop Allen grin, the one that made him look like an elderly shark. “Enjoy that fur suit.”

The costume shop was also a madhouse, filled with women running every whichway. Dottie Lassen, a skinny lady who needed a girdle like I needed elevator shoes, fell on me the second I walked through the door. She hooked her long-nailed fingers into my armpit and dragged me past clown costumes, cowboy costumes, a huge Uncle Sam suit (with stilts leaning beside it against the wall), a couple of princess outfits, a rack of Hollywood Girl dresses, and a rack of old-fashioned Gay Nineties bathing suits… which, I found out, we were condemned to wear when on lifeguard duty. At the very back of her crowded little empire were a dozen deflated dogs. Howies, in fact, complete with the Happy Hound’s delighted stupid-and-loving-it grin, his big blue eyes, and his fuzzy cocked ears. Zippers ran down the backs of the suits from the neck to the base of the tail.

“Christ, you’re a big one,” Dottie said. “Thank God I got the extra-large mended last week. The last kid who wore it ripped it out under both arms. There was a hole under the tail, too. He must have been eating Mexican food.” She snatched the XL Howie off the rack and slammed it into my arms. The tail curled around my leg like a python. “You’re going to the Wiggle-Waggle, and I mean chop-fucking-chop. Butch Hadley was supposed to take care of that from Team Corgi—or so I thought—but he says his whole team’s out with a key to the midway.” I had no idea what that meant, and Dottie gave me no time to ask. She rolled her eyes in a way that indicated either good humor or the onset of madness, and continued. “You say ‘What’s the big deal?’ I’ll tell you what’s the big deal, greenie: Mr. Easterbrook usually eats his lunch there, he always eats it there on the first day we’re running full-out, and if there’s no Howie, he’ll be very disappointed.”

“Like as in someone will get fired?”

“No, as in very disappointed. Stick around awhile and you’ll know that’s plenty bad enough. No one wants to disappoint him, because he’s a great man. Which is nice, I suppose, but what’s more important is he’s a good guy. In this business, good guys are scarcer than hen’s teeth.” She looked at me and made a sound like a small animal with its paw caught in a trap. “Dear Christ, you’re a big one. And green as grass. But it can’t be helped.”

I had a billion questions, but my tongue was frozen. All I could do was stare at the deflated Howie. Who stared back at me. Do you know what I felt like just then? James Bond, in the movie where he’s tied to some kind of crazy exercise gadget. Do you expect me to talk? he asks Goldfinger, and Goldfinger replies, with chilling good humor, No, Mr. Bond! I expect you to die! I was tied to a happiness machine instead of an exercise machine, but hey, same idea. No matter how hard I worked to keep up on that first day, the damn thing just kept going faster.

“Take it down to the boneyard, kid. Please tell me you know where that is.”

“I do.” Thank God Lane had told me.

“Well, that’s one for the home team, anyway. When you get there, strip down to your undies. If you wear more than that while you’re wearing the fur, you’ll roast. And… anybody ever tell you the First Rule of Carny, kid?”

I thought so, but it seemed safer to keep my mouth shut.

“Always know where your wallet is. This park isn’t anywhere near as sleazy as some of the places I worked in the flower of my youth—thank God—but that’s still the First Rule. Give it to me, I’ll keep it for you.”

I handed over my wallet without protest.

“Now go. But even before you strip down, drink a lot of water. I mean until your belly feels swollen. And don’t eat anything, I don’t care how hungry you are. I’ve had kids get heatstroke and barf in Howie suits, and the results ain’t pretty. Suit almost always has to be thrown out. Drink, strip, put on the fur, get someone to zip you up, then hustle down the Boulevard to the Wiggle-Waggle. There’s a sign, you can’t miss it.”

I looked doubtfully at Howie’s big blue eyes.

“They’re screen mesh,” she said. “Don’t worry, you’ll see fine.”

“But what do I do?”

She looked at me, at first unsmiling. Then her face—not just her mouth and eyes but her whole face—broke into a grin. The laugh that accompanied it was this weird honk that seemed to come through her nose. “You’ll be fine,” she said. People kept telling me that. “It’s method acting, kiddo. Just find your inner dog.”

There were over a dozen new hires and a handful of old-timers having lunch in the boneyard when I arrived. Two of the greenies were Hollywood Girls, but I had no time to be modest. After gulping a bellyful from the drinking fountain, I shucked down to my Jockeys and sneakers. I shook out the Howie costume and stepped in, making sure to get my feet all the way down in the back paws.

“Fur!” one of the old-timers yelled, and slammed a fist down on the table. “Fur! Fur! Fur!”

The others took it up, and the boneyard rang with the chant as I stood there in my underwear with a deflated Howie puddled around my shins. It was like being in the middle of a prison messhall riot. Rarely have I felt so exquisitely stupid… or so oddly heroic. It was showbiz, after all, and I was stepping into the breach. For a moment it didn’t matter that I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.

“Fur! Fur! FUR! FUR!”

“Somebody zip me the hell up!” I shouted. “I have to get down to the Wiggle-Waggle posthaste!”

One of the girls did the honors, and I immediately saw why wearing the fur was such a big deal. The boneyard was air conditioned—all of Joyland Under was—but I was already popping hard sweat.

One of the old-timers came over and gave me a kindly pat on my Howie-head. “I’ll give you a ride, son,” he said. “Cart’s right there. Jump in.”

“Thanks.” My voice was muffled.

“Woof-woof, Bowser!” someone called, and they all cracked up.

We rolled down the Boulevard with its spooky, stuttering fluorescent lights, a grizzled old guy in janitor’s greens with a giant blue-eyed German Shepherd riding co-pilot. As he pulled up at the stairs marked with an arrow and the painted legend WIGWAG on the cinderblocks, he said: “Don’t talk. Howie never talks, just gives hugs and pats ’em on the head. Good luck, and if you start feelin all swimmy, get the hell out. The kids don’t want to see Howie flop over with heatstroke.”

“I have no idea what I’m supposed to do,” I said. “Nobody’s told me.”

I don’t know if that guy was carny-from-carny or not, but he knew something about Joyland. “It don’t matter. The kids all love Howie. They’ll know what to do.”

I clambered out of the cart, almost tripped over my tail, then grasped the string in the left front paw and gave it a yank to get the damn thing out of my way. I staggered up the stairs and fumbled with the lever of the door at the top. I could hear music, something vaguely remembered from my early childhood. I finally got the lever to go down. The door opened and bright Junelight flooded through Howie’s screen-mesh blue eyes, momentarily dazzling me.

The music was louder now, being piped from overhead speakers, and I could put a name to it: “The Hokey Pokey,” that all-time nursery school hit. I saw swings, slides, and teeter-totters, an elaborate jungle gym, and a roundy-round being pushed by a greenie wearing long fuzzy rabbit ears and a powder-puff tail stuck to the seat of his jeans. The Choo-Choo Wiggle, a toy train capable of dazzling speeds approaching four miles an hour, steamed by, loaded with little kids dutifully waving to their camera-toting parents. About a gazillion kids were boiling around, watched over by plenty of summer hires, plus a couple of full-time personnel who probably did have child-care licenses. These two, a man and a woman, were wearing sweatshirts that read WE LUV HAPPY KIDS. Dead ahead was the long daycare building called Howie’s Howdy House.