There was nothing he could say. The first thing they saw was the crumpled fender. They all lit into him and Aunt Hartmann yelled the loudest and old Vogel was purple in the face and they all talked German at him and Hedwig yanked at his coat and slapped his face and they all said Jim’d have to give him a licking. Charley got sore and said nobody was going to give him a licking and then Jim said he reckoned he’d better go back to Fargo anyway, and Charley went up and packed his suitcase and went off without saying goodby to any of them that evening with his suitcase in one hand and five back numbers of The Argosy under his arm. He had just enough jack saved up to get a ticket to Barnesville. After that he had to play hide and seek with the conductor until he dropped off the train at Moorhead. His mother was glad to see him and said he was a good boy to get back in time to visit with her a little before highschool opened and talked about his being confirmed. Charley didn’t say anything about the Ford truck and decided in his mind he wouldn’t be confirmed in any damned church. He ate a big breakfast that Lizzie fixed for him and went into his room and lay down on the bed. He wondered if not wanting to be confirmed was the sin against the holy ghost but the thought didn’t scare him as much as it used to. He was sleepy from sitting up on the train all night and fell asleep right away.
Charley dragged through a couple of years of highschool, making a little money helping round the Moorhead Garage evenings, but he didn’t like it home any more after he got back from his trip to the Twin Cities. His mother wouldn’t let him work Sundays and nagged him about being confirmed and his sister Esther nagged him about everything and Lizzie treated him as if he was still a little kid, calling him “Pet” before the boarders and he was sick of schooling, so the spring when he was seventeen, after commencement, he went down to Minneapolis again looking for a job on his own this time. As he had money to keep him for a few days the first thing he did was to go down to Big Island Park. He wanted to ride on the rollercoasters and shoot in the shootinggalleries and go swimming and pick up girls. He was through with hick towns like Fargo and Moorhead where nothing ever happened.
It was almost dark when he got to the lake. As the little steamboat drew up to the wharf he could hear the jazzband through the trees, and the rasp and rattle of the rollercoaster and yells as a car took a dip. There were a dancing pavilion and colored lights among the trees and a smell of girls’ perfumery and popcorn and molasses candy and powder from the shooting gallery and the barkers were at it in front of their booths. As it was Monday evening there weren’t very many people. Charley went round the rollercoaster a couple of times and got to talking with the young guy who ran it about what the chances were of getting a job round there.
The guy said to stick around, Svenson the manager would be there when they closed up at eleven, and he thought he might be looking for a guy. The guy’s name was Ed Walters; he said it wasn’t much of a graft but that Svenson was pretty straight; he let Charley take a couple of free rides to see how the rollercoaster worked and handed him out a bottle of cream soda and told him to keep his shirt on. This was his second year in the amusement game and he had a sharp foxface and a wise manner.
Charley’s heart was thumping when a big hollowfaced man with coarse sandy hair came round to collect the receipts at the ticket booth. That was Svenson. He looked Charley up and down and said he’d try him out for a week and to remember that this was a quiet family amusement park and that he wouldn’t stand for any rough stuff and told him to come round at ten the next morning. Charley said “So long” to Ed Walters and caught the last boat and car back to town. When he got out of the car it was too late to take his bag out of the station parcelroom; he didn’t want to spend money on a room or to go out to Jim’s place so he slept on a bench in front of the City Hall. It was a warm night and it made him feel good to be sleeping on a bench like a regular hobo. The arclights kept getting in his eyes, though, and he was nervous about the cop; it’d be a hell of a note to get pinched for a vag and lose the job out at the park. His teeth were chattering when he woke up in the gray early morning. The arclights spluttered pink against a pale lemonyellow sky; the big business blocks with all their empty windows looked funny and gray and deserted. He had to walk fast pounding the pavement with his heels to get the blood going through his veins again.
He found a stand where he could get a cup of coffee and a doughnut for five cents and went out to Lake Minnetonka on the first car. It was a bright summer day with a little north in the wind. The lake was very blue and the birchtrunks looked very white and the little leaves danced in the wind greenyellow against the dark evergreens and the dark blue of the sky. Charley thought it was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen. He waited a long time drowsing in the sun on the end of the wharf for the boat to start over to the island. When he got there the park was all locked up, there were shutters on all the booths and the motionless red and blue cars of the rollercoaster looked forlorn in the morning light. Charley roamed round for a while but his eyes smarted and his legs ached and his suitcase was too heavy, so he found a place sheltered by the wall of a shack from the wind and lay down in the warm sun on the pineneedles and went to sleep with his suitcase beside him.
He woke up with a start. His Ingersoll said eleven. He had a cold sinking feeling. It’d be lousy to lose the job by being late. Svenson was there sitting in the ticket booth at the rollercoaster with a straw hat on the back of his head. He didn’t say anything about the time. He just told Charley to take his coat off and help MacDonald the engineer oil up the motor.
Charley worked on that rollercoaster all summer until the park closed in September. He lived in a little camp over at Excelsior with Ed Walters and a wop named Spagnolo who had a candy concession.
In the next camp Svenson lived with his six daughters. His wife was dead. Anna the eldest was about thirty and was cashier at the amusement park, two of them were waitresses at the Tonka Bay Hotel and the others were in highschool and didn’t work. They were all tall and blond and had nice complexions. Charley fell for the youngest, Emiscah, who was just about his age. They had a float and a springboard and they all went in swimming together. Charley wore a bathingsuit upper and a pair of khaki pants all summer and got very sunburned. Ed’s girl was Zona and all four of them used to go out canoeing after the amusement park closed, particularly warm nights when there was a moon. They didn’t drink but they smoked cigarettes and played the phonograph and kissed and cuddled up together in the bottom of the canoe. When they’d got back to the boys’ camp, Spagnolo would be in bed and they’d haze him a little and put junebugs under his blankets and he’d curse and swear and toss around. Emiscah was a great hand for making fudge, and Charley was crazy about her and she seemed to like him. She taught him how to frenchkiss and would stroke his hair and rub herself up against him like a cat but she never let him go too far and he wouldn’t have thought it was right anyway. One night all four of them went out and built a fire under a pine in a patch of big woods up the hill back of the camps. They toasted marshmallows and sat round the fire telling ghoststories. They had blankets and Ed knew how to make a bed with hemlock twigs stuck in the ground and they all four of them slept in the same blankets and tickled each other and roughhoused around and it took them a long time to get to sleep. Part of the time Charley lay between the two girls and they cuddled up close to him, but he got a hard on and couldn’t sleep and was worried for fear the girls would notice.
He learned to dance and to play poker and when laborday came he hadn’t saved any money but he felt he’d had a wonderful summer.