Stephen King - Joyland

“I don’t suppose either of you know anything about Annie and Mike Ross, do you?” I asked during a break in the action (both women seemed to feel a need to study the board a looong time before laying down so much as a single tile). “They live on Beach Row in the big green Victorian?”

Miss Ackerley paused with her hand still inside the little brown bag of letters. Her eyes were big, and her thick lenses made them even bigger. “Have you met them?”

“Uh-huh. They were trying to fly a kite… well, she was… and I helped out a little. They’re very nice. I just wondered… the two of them all alone in that big house, and him pretty sick.

The look they exchanged was pure incredulity, and I started to wish I hadn’t raised the subject.

“She talks to you?” Mrs. Shoplaw asked. “The Ice Queen actually talks to you?”

Not only talked to me, but gave me a fruit smoothie. Thanked, me. Even apologized to me. But I said none of that. Not because Annie really had iced up when I presumed too much, but because to do so would have seemed disloyal, somehow.

“Well, a little. I got the kite up for them, that’s all.” I turned the board. It was Tina’s, the pro kind with its own little built-in spindle. “Come on, Mrs. S. Your turn. Maybe you’ll even make a word that’s in my puny vocabulary.”

“Given the correct positioning, puny can be worth seventy points,” Tina Ackerley said. “Even more, if a y -word is connected to pun.”

Mrs. Shoplaw ignored both the board and the advice. “You know who her father is, of course.”

“Can’t say I do.” Although I did know she was on the outs with him, and big-time.

“Buddy Ross? As in The Buddy Ross Hour of Power ? Ring any bells?”

It did, vaguely. I thought I might have heard some preacher named Ross on the radio in the costume shop. It kind of made sense. During one of my quick-change transformations into Howie, Dottie Lassen had asked me—pretty much out of a clear blue sky—if I had found Jesus. My first impulse had been to tell her that I didn’t know He was lost, but I restrained it.

“One of those Bible-shouters, right?”

“Next to Oral Roberts and that Jimmy Swaggart fellow, he’s just about the biggest of them,” Mrs. S. said. “He broadcasts from this gigantic church—God’s Citadel, he calls it—in Atlanta. His radio show goes out all over the country, and now he’s getting more and more into TV. I don’t know if the stations give him the time free, or if he has to buy it. I’m sure he can afford it, especially late at night. That’s when the old folks are up with their aches and pains. His shows are half miracle healings and half pleas for more love-offerings.”

“Guess he didn’t have any luck healing his grandson,” I said.

Tina withdrew her hand from the letter-bag with nothing in it. She had forgotten about Scrabble for the time being, which was a good thing for her hapless victims. Her eyes were sparkling. “You don’t know any of this story, do you? Ordinarily I don’t believe in gossip, but…” She dropped her voice to a confidential tone pitched just above a whisper. “… but since you’ve met them, I could tell you.”

“Yes, please,” I said. I thought one of my questions—how Annie and Mike came to be living in a huge house on one of North Carolina’s ritziest beaches—had already been answered. It was Grampa Buddy’s summer retreat, bought and paid for with love-offerings.

“He’s got two sons,” Tina said. “They’re both high in his church—deacons or assistant pastors, I don’t know what they call them exactly, because I don’t go for that holy rolling stuff. The daughter, though, she was different. A sporty type. Horseback riding, tennis, archery, deer hunting with her father, quite a bit of competition shooting. All that got in the papers after her trouble started.”

Now the CAMP PERRY shirt made sense.

“Around the time she turned eighteen, it all went to hell—quite literally, as he saw it. She went to what they call ‘a secular-humanist college,’ and by all accounts she was quite the wild child. Giving up the shooting competitions and tennis tournaments was one thing; giving up the church-going for parties and liquor and men was quite another. Also…” Tina lowered her voice. “ Pot-smoking .”

“Gosh,” I said, “not that!”

Mrs. Shoplaw gave me a look, but Tina didn’t notice. “Yes! That! She got into the newspapers, too, those tabloids, because she was pretty and rich, but mostly because of her father. And being fallen-away. That’s what they call it. She was a scandal to that church of his, wearing mini-skirts and going braless and all. Well, you know what those fundamentalists preach is straight out of the Old Testament, all that about the righteous being rewarded and sinners being punished even unto the seventh generation. And she did more than hit the party circuit down there in Green Witch Village.” Tina’s eyes were now so huge they looked on the verge of tumbling from their sockets and rolling down her cheeks. “She quit the NRA and joined the American Atheist Society !”

“Ah. And did that get in the papers?”

“Did it ever! Then she got pregnant, no surprise there, and when the baby turned out to have some sort of problem… cerebral palsy, I think—”

“Muscular dystrophy.”

“Whatever it is, her father was asked about it on one of his crusade things, and do you know what he said?”

I shook my head, but thought I could make a pretty good guess.

“He said that God punishes the unbeliever and the sinner. He said his daughter was no different, and maybe her son’s affliction would bring her back to God.”

“I don’t think it’s happened yet,” I said. I was thinking of the Jesus-kite.

“I can’t understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there’s already so much pain in the world,” Mrs. Shoplaw said. “Religion is supposed to comfort.”

“He’s just a self-righteous old prig,” Tina said. “No matter how many men she might have been with or how many joints of pot she might have smoked, she’s still his daughter. And the child is still his grandson. I’ve seen that boy in town once or twice, either in a wheelchair or tottering along in those cruel braces he has to wear if he wants to walk. He seems like a perfectly nice boy, and she was sober. Also wearing a bra.” She paused for further recollection. “I think.”

“Her father might change,” Mrs. Shoplaw said, “but I doubt it. Young women and young men grow up, but old women and old men just grow older and surer they’ve got the right on their side. Especially if they know scripture.”

I remembered something my mother used to say. “The devil can quote scripture.”

“And in a pleasing voice,” Mrs. Shoplaw agreed moodily. Then she brightened. “Still, if the Reverend Ross is letting them use his place on Beach Row, maybe he’s willing to let bygones be bygones. It might have crossed his mind by now that she was only a young girl, maybe not even old enough to vote. Dev, isn’t it your turn?”

It was. I made tear. It netted me four points.

My drubbing wasn’t merciful, but once Tina Ackerley really got rocking, it was relatively quick. I returned to my room, sat in my chair by the window, and tried to rejoin Frodo and Sam on the road to Mount Doom. I couldn’t do it. I closed the book and stared out through the rain-wavery glass at the empty beach and the gray ocean beyond. It was a lonely prospect, and at times like that, my thoughts had a way of turning back to Wendy—wondering where she was, what she was doing, and who she was with. Thinking about her smile, the way her hair fell against her cheek, the soft rise of her breasts in one of her seemingly endless supply of cardigan sweaters.