At dusk on the seventh of July one of the cars derailed inside the mine. From the main gate I first heard the dull banging sound, and five minutes later one of the other cashiers came rushing back from her break to tell me. “The Lost Mine!” she gasped. I took my break right then, emptied the drawer into the box, locked the register, and lugged my money box, went up there, along the Jack and Jill path, arriving in time to see a flashing ambulance in front of the entrance to the ride, long streaks of blood being hosed out of the wrecked train by the grounds crew, and the owner — the legendary Frank Morenton himself — standing there in his white hair and white shoes, his presence startling in the deepening dusk. He was quietly writing someone a check.
The small crowd that had gathered was being asked by some of the cowboys (the ones who staged the bank robbery every noon, the romance of theft and sun, how I knew it!) to disperse, please. Everything was fine, they said firmly, bowlegged in their chaps, their hats pushed to the very back of their heads. Everything was under control. One of the cowboys was Markie Russo, the one who’d had a crush on Sils last year.
Since I had five minutes left to my break, I went and lay on the grassy hill near the Shoot-Out Corral, where there were pony rides for the children. Cashiers were not supposed to sprawl about on the grounds like that, wander into sections where they were out of context, out of character, but once in a while you could get away with it. You could saunter aimlessly into the wrong story — a situation that, in real life, I thought, actually happened all the time. There was Randi, as Little Bo Peep, constantly going over to Jungle Safari to talk to a boy there she liked. There was Sils, who one day had to flee the palace grounds to mooch a cigarette from Alice in Wonderland. And there was me: I got to take this money box wherever I went; I got to hang out with Sils, and change in the ladies’ locker room; I briefly got to feel that all that mattered was here and now in Horsehearts, though I was a worrier, a candy eater, a getter of canker sores.
I turned my head to read the fake western gravestones that had been placed on this side of the hill at angles calculated for a look of decrepitude. I could make out only one of the inscriptions: Leadfoot Fred. Danced too slow and now he’s dead. Over the lake, days late, fireworks began — no doubt, as a distraction. (Pay no attention to that catastrophe in Frontier Village!) I watched as they exploded in the navy blue sky: a star, a heart, electric sea creatures, glittery bell skirts, garnet tarantulas — the delayed boom of each like something witty, and the whistling, zigzag ones so much like the surface of war that they scared me. Perhaps someone had really died. I grabbed up the money box, and headed back to my register.
The next day there was no word of the bloody Lost Mine crash in the local Horsehearts paper, and not the next day, either, though the rumor among the ride operators was that a boy had lost his legs. “Morenton wrote the parents a check for a million dollars,” Randi whispered to me at lunch, and I began to understand — again, anew — the cleansing power of money. By the end of a week the Lost Mine was functioning again, and the accident existed only as a persistent rumor, and then by the end of the month a less persistent one, and then a story, as if from long ago.
On my day off, in the afternoon, I went to Sils’s house, the place athrob with her brothers’ band in the basement, the drums and electric guitars vibrating the windows and screens. Just back from Canada, her brother Kevin, tall with bristly, ochre hair, came up from the basement, to look at the kitchen clock and take a pill. (“He times his drugs,” Sils had said. “Maybe that’s good.”) He saw me at the screen door and sauntered over. He was wearing blue-tinted wire rims and a paisley vest with no shirt underneath. He was potbellied, and his skin was white, amphibious, strange with swirls of hair.
“Is Sils here?” I asked through the screen.
“Little Sils?” he repeated, mockingly, lightly, as if both she and I were small, amusing mammals. “Sure,” he said, and without opening the door himself, he simply turned and bellowed, “Sils! Your friend’s at the door for you!” and went back down into the cellar, from which came the steady, whining rock of a guitar solo, then the deep beat of the electric bass, vibrating the windows, frame and sash, straining the glass. It was good the Chaussées lived next door to a cemetery.
Sils came down the wide, gray-painted stairs of their house. “Hi!” she said, and out of the blue gave me a hug. “Are you hungry? I’m starved,” she said.
“Sure,” I said, determined, always, to be helpful. We went into the kitchen and hunted around. Her mother hadn’t gone grocery shopping in weeks and there was nothing to make a salad or a sandwich with, and so we did as we often did: contented ourselves with raw potatoes, oleo, and salt — the potatoes cut in quarters and peeled, a meal of sororal resourcefulness. We sprinkled them with salt and spread difficult gobs of margarine along the edges. It was, in fact, a snack I loved: the cold bright fat of the Parkay, the apple-cool of the potato; our teeth gliding silently in, then noisily executing the bite through the potato. The damp crunch held a kind of comfort for me, the salt rubbing grainily against my gums. We ate raw potatoes a lot at her house — both in her room upstairs and at the beat-up aluminum dinette set in the kitchen.
This time we took them upstairs. We sat around a whole plate of them, on her rug, and felt mildly, mockingly bored by our own self-sufficiency. The afternoon was sunny and the light was angled already, spilling through the lattice outside her window, forming diamonds on the wall.
“Diamonds,” I said. “Not my best suit.”
“Hearts. I like hearts.” She looked a little tired.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
Sils lit up a cigarette. “Not so bad. I had cramps, but they’re over.”
“That’s good. Can I bum a smoke?”
Sils handed over a cigarette. A look of anguish passed over her face. “You’ll never guess what I found.”
“What?” I filled my lungs with smoke, but felt it best, most comfortingly around my tongue and teeth.
Sils gulped a little and winced. “A piece of purple skin in my underwear,” she said.
The confused and stricken girl’s face that had spilled forth this phrase, her eyes grappling with mine in a panicked way, made me moan and turn aside.
“Oh, god,” I said. And then, not knowing what else to say, I said, “When?”
“This morning,” she said. She blew smoke out through her nostrils, then stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray, took up a chunk of raw potato, and bit into it.
“Well, at least it’s all over,” I said. Joni Mitchell was keening “Little Green” on Sils’s record player. Sils listened to that song all the time now, like some woeful soundtrack. The soprano slides and oos of the the song always made us both sing along, when I was there. “Little green, be a gypsy dancer.” Twenty years later at a cocktail party, I would watch an entire roomful of women, one by one and in bunches, begin to sing this song when it came on over the sound system. They quit conversations, touched people’s arms, turned toward the corner stereo speakers and sang in a show of memory and surprise. All the women knew the words, every last one of them, and it shocked the men.
“Now, where were we?” everyone said when the song was over.
“You don’t really like Mike, do you?” Sils asked now.
I felt caught. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Come on,” she said. “You can tell me.”
“It’s just that … I don’t know. He has no texture.”