“OK,” she said, “close up this register. We’re shutting down this entrance.” Then she came to the side of my booth, unlocked the door, and pulled it open. With a sweep of her arm, she ushered me out. I pushed the register drawer shut and did as I was told. My chest was pounding. I was in trouble. That family, I thought. They were spies, plants, part of some in-house detective scheme. The nausea of all the rides — the spinning teacups, the whirling Black Widow — entered me, and I turned momentarily away in a sweat. My heart beat in a loud panic, and I struggled to breathe normally.
“We’ve been examining the numbers on the stubs from this register.” Isabelle was a fierce statue of righteousness, her arm was still hanging in the air, pointing out toward the park. In my quick, flooding fright, I felt puny and liquid, the only remedy for which was disbelief. I filled my head with so much disbelief I became dizzy and mad with it. Stan the security guard stepped impassively into the entranceway — from where? from nowhere — and lit up a cigarette in a sly and fraught way. Stan: it had been him!
For a crazed moment, with Isabelle locking up the register and Herb putting up the This Entrance Closed sign, I tried to make a break for it. I stuffed the note to Sils in my pinafore pocket, and brushing quickly past Herb and Stan in the now crowded little entrance, I dashed out the turnstile and sprinted toward the far fence near the gift shop, its Storyland thermoses and T-shirts shining in the window. I headed for those, my afternoon shadow beneath me like a puddle, like some strange pair of dark snowshoes fitted backward. I would run through the store, then out Memory Lane into the parking lot. I’d hide behind cars, then hitch a ride. “Hey!” shouted the county cop and Herb. My straw hat flew off me. I ran faster, then something locked in my knee, my ankle twisted, and I fell, the ground flying up in my face. I lay there for a second. What was I thinking of? That I could escape? Become a fugitive? Isabelle and the men were running toward me. I sat up, and faced them, wiping grass and dirt from my elbows and legs. “I’m sorry,” I said. I lifted my hands in surrender, and then in a shrug. Herb and Isabelle yanked me up by the arms and I stood and went with them. People had stopped and were looking, the whole surreal world in a hot, bright leer like an Italian movie. I’d seen an Italian movie once with Sils.
“Hold her tight,” said Stan to Herb, not unmusically, turning to go back to his post and putting his hat back on. He had, apparently, taken it off in the heat and hubbub. “Don’t ever let her go.”
On Isabelle’s desk was a picture of her little girl, Gloria Deb. Isabelle had been divorced for years and she had had to work hard. Rumor had it that Frank Morenton gave her a shiny convertible every Christmas as a bonus, plus a trip to Florida.
Now Isabelle glared at me. So many things were on the line for her. “What did you think would happen?” she shouted.
“I don’t know,” I said.
The phone rang, and she picked it up. “Hello?” She listened for a moment. “Elle a mangé la grenouille,” she said, and then hung up. She has eaten the frog; she has nibbled the cash box. She looked at me, sighed, and scowled. She was momentarily wordless, as if due to a small, cerebral hemorrhage. I felt sorry for her. I decided, with a child’s madness, to help her out. I forced a comical smile. “Well,” I said, with manufactured lightness, “I suppose this is going to go on my permanent record.”
She glared at me. “We’re going to have to make an example out of you. I’ll have to check with Mr. Morenton as to whether we’ll prosecute. But certainly we will ask for reimbursement. How much have you taken altogether? A hundred? Two hundred? A thousand?” Her voice had acquired the fury of the betrayed, the divorced, the tired and working too hard.
Multiple choice. I always favored A. “A hundred,” I said.
Herb glowered at me, but one could see he was having an exciting day.
Isabelle began to straighten the papers on her desk. “Deputy Kerry here, from the Sheriff’s Department, will take you home in his police car. We’ll phone your parents to let them know.”
I started to cry. I broke and sobbed.
“Put the handcuffs on her,” said Isabelle to the deputy.
The deputy gave us all a pitiful look. “I’m sure that’s really not necessary, ma’am.”
“Put them on her and march her right out the front door. We need this as an example to the others.”
“All right, I guess,” he said, shrugging. He turned toward me. “You are under arrest. Put your hands behind your back.”
I was still crying, wiping my nose with the heels of my hands. I had no Kleenex, and no one would offer me one.
“Wait a minute,” I mumbled, and made some final attempt to clear my face of snot, then stood, turned, and thrust my hands back toward the deputy, who had unfastened his handcuffs from his belt. They were cold and stiff, adjusted tight for my thin wrists. These are the hands that had taken money, the cuffs seemed to say, and we are going to seize them, take them out of commission, chop them off. “Oh, no,” I moaned.
I was marched down the stairs and out through the front entrance, the deputy leading the way, grasping my elbow, and carrying my fallen straw hat, though it was Park Property. I was still wearing my cashier’s uniform — Hello My Name Is Benoîte-Marie — and I was trying to hold back my tears by breathing them into my sinuses. It was four in the afternoon, and the heat of the day had gathered itself thickly, even as the sun — a hot blister of bone — had begun its descent.
“Oh, my god!” I heard Sheryl, at the left front register, gasp behind me.
“What happened?” asked Debbie.
“What’s going on?” queried several Visitors to the Park, as we passed them standing in line. The loudspeakers played the Storyland theme song — now a bunch of oom-pah-pahs gone grim, like the end of La Traviata. Deputy Kerry marched me out in front of him, a light grip on my upper arm, and steered me straight across Storyland’s bright, sunny parking lot, to the back, where his car was parked. In the side of my vision I could see Sils in her stainless-steel tiara and sateen dress, pressed to the wrought-iron fence next to where her Pumpkin Coach toured. She called my name, then kept calling it, but I refused to turn. I was ugly and embarrassed; there was snot dripping down into my mouth and I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t want anyone else to see me. I didn’t want her to see. I twisted my neck and tried to wipe my nose on my shoulder, but I couldn’t do it.
The entire way back to Horsehearts — me in the back, Deputy Kerry in the front — Deputy Kerry said scarcely a word. He drove steadily down the lake road, past the tee-pee-shaped gift shops selling their fake Indian trinkets, past the turquoise motels all clutched to the lakeshore as if they were contemplating hurling themselves in. What would it matter? Especially in the long winter when the world abandoned them anyway. My head was full of carcasses and ghosts.
Deputy Kerry received a call over his radio, and he picked up the mouthpiece and spoke into it. It reminded me of riding with Humphrey in his cab; only this was the sarcastic, perverted version. How much more complicated it was for me, just me, to get a guy to drive me home from the lake. See what great lengths I had to go to! See how much ingenuity and nerve! Ho-ho! Sils had it easy. All she had to do was smile. I had to steal and weep and take on the law.