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Ferris wheel turned in the sunlight, the bumper cars honked and
sparked the roof and walls of Spunky's Dodge 'Em, the carousel
spun wildly to the rise and fall of horses and lions, and the steady
beat of its repeating tune echoed throughout the park. A man
balancing his screaming son in one hand, ice cream cones in the
other, little kids with cotton candy racing to see who's first to get
on Sandee's Spinning Sombrero, and in the midst of all the
peaceful confusion, Randy Stayner performing a one-time solo
swan dive 100 feet into the solid steel tracks of the SkyCoaster.
For a while, I wasn't all too sure the people around me weren't
thinking it was just an act - a Saturday afternoon performance by a
skilled diver. When blood and bone hit, however, it was clear the
act was over. And then, as if to clear the whole thing up with a
final attempt to achieve his original goal, he rolled lazily over the
bottom rails of the SkyCoaster into the brown murky water of
Skybar Pond, swirls of red and grey following him.
The SkyCoaster was shut down the day of Randy's dive, and
despite weeks of dragging the pond's bottom, his body was never
found. Authorities concluded that his remains had drifted under a
sandbar or some unmarked passageway, and all search ceased after
four weeks.
Skybar lost a lot of customers after that. Most people were afraid
to go there, and other businesses in the town began to boom
because of it. In fact, Starboard Cinema, which showed horror
movies to an audience of four or five during the parks better days
now showed repeats of "I was a Teen Age Werewolf" to sell-out
crowds. More and more, people drifted away from Skybar until it
was shut down for good.
It was during those last few weeks that the worst accidents started
happening. A morning worker, reaching under a car on the Whip
for a paper cup, caught his arm on the supporting bar between two
clamps just as a faulty circuit started the machine. He was crushed
between two cars. Another worker was fixing a bottom rail on the
Ferris wheel when a 500 pound car dropped off the top and
smeared him onto the asphalt below. These and several other rides
were shut down, and when the only thing left open was Pop
Dupree's .22 gallery and the Adults Only freak tent, the spark ran
out of Skybar's amusement, and it was forced to shut down after its
third year in operation.
It had only been closed for two months when Brant Callahan came
up with his plan that night. We were in a group of five camping in
back of John Wilkenson's dad's workshop, in a single five-man
Sportsman pup tent illuminated by four flashlights shining on back
issues of Famous Detective Stories, when he stood up (or rather
scufffled on his knees, due to the height of the tent) and proposed
we all do something to separate the pussies from the men.
I tossed aside my Mystery of the Haunted Hearse, leaned teach in
the glow of Dewey Howardson's light, and squinted halfway at the
hulking shadow crouching by the double-flap zipper door. No one
else appeared to pay any attention to him.
"Come on, lard-asses!" he shouted. "Are ya all just going to sit
around playing Dick-fucking-Tracy all night?"
Kirby slapped at the bugs attacking his glowing arm and looked
from Brant, to me, to the rest of the guys still gazing with mild
interest at their Alfred Hitchcock tales of suspense, unaware of any
other activities going on in their presence. I gazed at my watch. It
was 11:30.
"What the hell are you raving about, Brant?" His face came to life
now that he was being noticed, and he looked at me with great
excitement, like some dumb little kid who was about to tell some
terrible secret and was getting the great flood of details together to
form a top-confidential plan.
"The SkyCoaster."
Dewey looked over the top of his magazine and shot Brant a look
of mild interest.
"Skybar's SkyCoaster?"
"'Course, ya damn idiot. What other roller coaster ya gonna find in
Starboard? Now the way I figger it, we could make it over the
barbed wire and inside to the SkyCoaster easy enough."
"What the fuck for?" I asked. Brant was always pulling stunts like
this, and it was no telling what the crazy bastard was up to this
time. I remember one year when we were out smashing coins on
the BY&W tracks by Harrow's Point, Brant got tired of watching
trains run over his pennies and dimes and dared us to take on a real
challenge. Whenever Brant came up with a real challenge, you
could almost always count on calling up the You Asked For It or
Ripleys Believe It or Not crews for live coverage. Not that the
challenge was anything like that man from Brazil who swallowed
strips of razor blades, or that fat lady from Ohio who balanced fire
sticks on her forehead - Brant's dares were far more challenging
than those. And, as young volunteers from his reluctant audience,
we were obligated to take part in them or kiss our reputation for
bravery goodbye.
Brant reached into his pants pocket that day and pulled out a small
cardboard box wrapped tightly with a red rubber band.
Unwrapping it, he revealed four or five shiny copper bullets, the
kind I used to see on reruns of Mannix when Mike Conners would
stop blasting away at crime rings long enough to load up his
revolver again. They were different from T.V., though. On the tube
they appeared to be no more than tiny pieces of dull plastic
jammed into a Whamco Cap Pistol. In front of me then, they sat
mystically in Brant's hand, the shells glittering bright rays of light
in the late afternoon sun, the tip of greyish lead heavily refusing to
reflect any light at all.
Then Brant clapped them all together in a fist and headed up the
bank toward the tracks. I started after him, half expecting him to
wheel out a gun for them at any minute, hoping he was just going
to relieve himself rather than starting to open fire on something, or
trying some other dangerous stunt. It was dangerous, as it turned
out, but I didn'tsay anything. I just stood there by the rails, taking a
plug off the chewingtobacco Dewey brought along, my mind
watching from some faraway place as he set them up single file on
the left rail.
"The train wheels should set 'em off the second they hit," he smiled
smugly, eagerly forming his plan. "All we have to do is stand here
by the rails until they do. How's that for a challenge, huh? Oh, and
the first one to jump is pussy of the year."
I didn't say anything. but I thought a lot about it. About how stupid
it was, how dangerous it was, and how weird a persons brain had
to be to think things like that up. I thought about how I should bug
out right then, just yell "Screw you, Brant!" and take off for home.
But that would have made me green. And if it was one thing we all
had to show each other back then, it was that we were no cowards.
So there we were, Brant, John, Dewey, me, and Kirby, although
Kirby wouldn't set foot near the tracks, bullets or no bullets, with a
train coming (he began to conveniently get sick on the tobacco and
had to lie down). We lined up next to the rails, determination in
our eyes as the bullets gleamed in front of us. John was the first
one to hear the train, and as we stepped closer to Brant's orders, I
could hear him softly muttering a short prayer over and over to
himself. Dewey stood on the far right side of me, the last person in
our Fearless Freddy Fan Club
Then the first heavy rumbling of the cars came, John reeled as it
got louder, and I thought surely he was going to collapse over the
tracks, but he didn't, and we all stood still as the train came on. The
churning squeak of the wheels hit our ears, and I stared blankly at
the bullets in front of us, thinking how small they seemed under
the wheels of the 4:40. But the more I looked, the larger they
began to appear, until it seemed they were almost the size of
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