Fintushel, Ghost Train 1

Ghost Train 4330 words

Mid-May, 1982, shortly before boarding the spaceship, Jack Zwirdling risked his life drilling a girl in
the Ghost Train at Sea Dream Park. She was his first. He was twenty then, a late bloomer. The girl was Sandi
Kress, nineteen. She ran the Ghost Train and sold fries. She was the girlfriend--but not the fiancée--of Gus
Barstow.
Gus was big; he'd placed one short of the Olympic wrestling team that year. He ran the Sky Twister.
Jack ran the Dutch Shoes, which was the next ride over. Jack was a midget beside Gus, and he should have been
afraid, but Sandi turned him to molten steel from his knees to his loins. One look from her diamond-shaped
brown eyes made him forget about consequences.
"She's not my fiancée," Gus had told Jack on Jack's first day working the Shoes. "Harriet is my fiancée.
You seen Harriet--the girl with the nice hair, brings me lunch in a bag." Gus had tried to move his thick hands
artistically over his shaved head to indicate an elegant coiffure. "She wears, you know, nice clothes. Sandi--I
just sleep with her and stuff."
Nobody was at Sea Dream except for a few geezers at the skee-ball machines on the other side of the
park. Sandi lounged outside the Ghost Train. She sat on the turnstile, as always, swinging her legs and whistling
"Pop Goes The Weasel."
The sea breeze blew her straight, shoulder-length black hair into her eyes, and she tossed her head to
shake it off. The movement made Jack twitch with desire. He sat on his turnstile across the wide walkway
separating the Ghost Train from the Dutch Shoes and watched her.
It was a brilliant day, sky iridescent blue with lonely, puffy clouds, billowing-clothesline-bleached-sheet
white, sailing over Lake Ontario. A high pressure day. The lake was dotted with whitecaps that you could see
forming and dissolving from way up on the hill where the serious rides were--the Cheetah, the Sky Twister, the
Rack, the Dutch Shoes, and the gigantic trademark Ferris wheel. When the rides weren't going, you could hear
the foam hiss down below.
Sandi had blue jean shorts on. So did Jack. She wore a tie-dyed tank top. He wore a red-and-white
striped tee-shirt, like a clown. Pas de deux. He ambled over; he was a heat-seeking missile locked in on her
heat, but he contrived to amble. She contrived not to look. It was a familiar maneuver for them both.
"Hi, Sandi." When he saw her up close he saw himself seeing her a decade before. He had looked in the
mirror that day, a little boy having the mirror experience. The image in the glass had detached itself, the
dreaminess of childhood violated, and he had been startled by his own reality: if real, then separate, then
vulnerable, then mortal. His blue eyes had been full of light, though half-covered with long, wild strands of hair
back then.
#
"Jackie, your sister needs to use the bathroom!"
"Huh? In a minute!"
#
He'd had the illusion that he could see through his pupils as through two tunnels; he couldn't say exactly
what had been there--but it had sort of glowed.
#
"Jackie, dammit, are you on your island again, Jack Island?"
"In a minute, pop!"
#
Even now, when things in his life glowed that way, he knew that they were for him.
"Hi." She watched her pretty little feet: left, right, left, right, swinging in their pretty, white sneakers.
"Slow day."
"Yup." Left, right, left, right . . .
"Boss fix your turnstile?"
"Nope."
Fintushel, Ghost Train 2

"Gee, he was working on it long enough. I thought Norton could fix anything." He smelled her perfume,
just a touch of it. He could take in, at his leisure, the slight down on her forearms and on the minute curve of her
earlobe; she wasn't looking at him.
"He can, mostly. Not this, though."
"It's always the little things."
At last, he stood against her, his thighs against her lovely, bare, dimpled knees. He laid his hands on the
turnstile on either side of her bottom, right where they belonged. "Want to sit inside with me awhile, in the
Ghost Train?"
She looked at him then. She smiled, and he thought he had never been so happy. She lowered her head
slightly. She let the breeze play peek-a-boo with strands of her hair between her eyes and Jack's. "Gus is very
jealous."
"Gus is across the street at Dreamer's Saloon."
"Who's watching the Sky Twister?"
"I am."
She laughed. He inched closer. She let her forehead fall against his chest and rest there for a moment,
sending currents of red-hot metal coursing down his chest and belly, forming ingots at the groin. "Is this what
Mr. Norton pays you for?"
"Mr. Norton's payroll isn't the important one."
"Oh yeah? Which payroll is the important one, then?" What laughter! Like a tree full of birds!
"The Big Payroll! The one everybody's on!"
"You are so crazy!" The top of her head was butted up against his chest. When she turned her head, it
was like an auger bit drilling into his heart, and his gonads went to DEFCON 2.
"I'm watching all Gus's stuff for him," he whispered in her ear through a veil of silky hair.
"Did you know that last Fourth of July when a customer winked at me, Gus picked him and his fat friend
up by the collar, both at once, and threw them both into the duck pond? When they tried to get out he kicked
them. He would have drowned them if Mr. Norton hadn't stepped in."
"Doesn't bother me a bit. I think my real job is to make love to you, Sandi." He hadn't been listening.
He'd already been pinned by a greater adversary than Gus--her.
"Your Big Payroll job, huh . . . ?" One breath. Two breaths. "Come on!" Laughing, she jumped down
and tugged him through the turnstile into the dark entry chamber of the Ghost Train. He hadn't realized how
bright it was outside until he hit that dark interior. Afterimages flashed before him: he nestled in among clouds,
the sun, and the GHOST TRAIN marquee, with Sandi on the hard bench of the first car. The car rattled and
shifted on the track. She wrapped her long arms around him. He kissed her hard. She wrapped a leg around one
of his legs too.
#
"Jackie, will you get off Jack Island and let your sister into the bathroom?"
It was the only room in his father's house that had a lock on it and a mirror in it. He watched his hair
grow there. He watched his bones lengthen. He peered through blue irises down the twin tunnels at the glow of
his destiny. His father knocked. His sister paced. Years passed. Schools changed. Governments changed. Mild
winters, hard winters. Saturn passed into another sign. In and out of the bathroom. Staring into the mirror,
everything that happened outside the locked room seemed peripheral.
"Jackie, are you doing something you shouldn't in there?"
#
He kissed her like a starved Eskimo eating fresh walrus kill. He groaned. She sighed and laughed, still
kissing. He pulled up her tank top and kissed her breasts. She grabbed between his legs. He kissed her below the
belly button, just at her belt. Then he undid it, and she pulled his pants down. With the deft accuracy of the
unconscious, like a sleeping man reaching for the alarm, he scooped a ring from the watch pocket of his shorts
and slipped it onto his pinky for safe keeping; then, with one foot, he nudged the pants the rest of the way off.
They wiggled and kicked off the rest--and began to couple.
Fintushel, Ghost Train 3

They were arching and heaving under the raised security bar when their car slammed into gear. The
sudden friction shoved Jack over his edge before the shock of it could slide him back under; he came at once,
and Sandi wasn't far behind.
They hurtled into a pitch dark tunnel. A last flash of sunlight reflecting off a chrome wall panel revealed
Sandi staring terrified into Jack's eyes. The racket of the car on the old tracks, the shaking and bouncing,
chopped the whole sensory world to pieces, the way a row of pines strobes sunlight as you speed by on the
highway. Jack lurched sideways: the car had turned unexpectedly--but everything was unexpected--and he
accidentally knocked the bar down, clamping Sandi on top of him, belly to belly.
"It's Gus! It's Gus! Gotta be Gus pulled the lever! Did you see him? Was it Gus?" She scrambled to get
her shorts back on, mangling Jack as she reached across his face, through his arms, and between his legs. The
car was gathering speed on the straight-away that led to the first gallery of welcoming, grabbing ghouls. "He's
gonna kill us both!"
"I only know," Jack said, and his head struck a series of styrofoam stalagtites, because Sandi, groping
for her shorts, had pushed him up like toothpaste from a tube. "I only know that I love you!"
He was still tingling from his first copulation. He felt like a Zildjian balanced on the stand of his slowly
retracting member. A throaty cackle ripped from a looming dayglo maw, and echoed. As they were swallowed
into deeper, tighter dark, he tried protectively to embrace her, but she fought him back: she knew the ride--she
didn't need this.
"I gotta get my pants up! If I can get out from under the bar, I'll jump off when we slow for the leaping
skulls." He heard her as if through fan blades. The shaking of the car was enough to knock the fillings out of
their teeth. "There's a platform there and a loose grate that connects to the back stairs. I'll climb up onto the
roof."
"No! Stay with me!" It was as if they were clamped together between the jaws of a bear trap.
"You don't know what a temper Gus has got! Lemme through! And make sure your own pants are up
when you come out."
She managed to buckle her belt at the expense of his poor, tender belly flesh. She sighed. Suddenly, the
car began to ratchet upward, and without shifting their mutual positions, she was on top of him, ankle to brow, a
meat blanket.
"Do you love me, Sandi?"
"What?"
"I said, do you love me?"
"No! Goddammit, no! It was just a little quickie, you dope! Shove aside! Here come the skulls! Don't
admit nothing to him. He's big, but he's stupid!"
#
"Jackie, will you come out of that room and talk to me?"
"There's nothing to talk about, pop. I'm not going to college. It's not for me."
"It's not for you! Life is not for you! College is not for him! Why can't you just be a normal person for a
change, go out on dates, monkey around a little? Why does everything have to be such a serious big deal with
you? You can't take your father's advice for a change?"
"Can't this wait till I'm out of the bathroom, pop?"
"You've been in there for half an hour!"
"Hey, there's a chip in the mirror!"
"There's a chip in a lot of things, kid. When are you gonna get off Jack Island and face reality?"
#
Skulls rained down around them, leapt and bounced. Thunder pealed. Subterranean lightning flashed.
More hideous laughter. She squeezed off him and climbed up over the bar. The friction aroused him again. She
jumped off the moving car onto a narrow walkway beside the track, pushing skulls aside like someone walking
through a bead curtain.
Jack followed.
Fintushel, Ghost Train 4

"No! Get back in quick!" she said. "We can't be together!" He pressed his body against hers, pinning her
between the studs of the rough wall that housed the track. The train left them. The leaping skulls retracted into
the ceiling. It was quiet. It was dark. His pants were still in the car.
She shook her head. He couldn't see her do it; he felt her, though. She took a deep breath and let it out in
a rush, slumping against him. "Jesus, how old are you?"
"Two!" He tried to kiss her on the mouth.
She turned away. "Well, you're not gonna make it to three."
She pushed him back. He saw lines of dust glittering in shafts from a metal grate behind her. She turned
and lifted it away easily, then laid it against the wall beside the opening. She crouched to step through, and he
followed her.
In the light of the stairwell, Sandi saw him and gasped. "Your pants!"
"I'll get them later." He turned the ring on his pinky.
"If you live."
They trotted up rickety stairs in light like bleach that poured through broken windows and made them
blink and stumble. At the top, across an empty room stinking of pigeon shit, there was a blue door. Sandi
opened it, and they walked out onto the roof, overlooking Sea Dream and Lake Ontario.
The bottom of his tee just covered his phallus, his new phallus, an organ that no longer bore any but a
logical relation to his old one, because this one had been inside her. The Zildjian of him was still slightly
shimmering. She sat on a railing at the edge of the roof. Behind her, tiny sailboats drifted, beads of foam
skipped on the blue water, a lone plane hummed.
Her head hung from her shoulders like a vulture's; she looked up at him through her eyebrows. "We'll
hang out for a while. Gus is probably gonna be scouring the Ghost Train. Jesus, I don't know what he's gonna
make of your pants in there. Probably get us both fired, too; Gus is tight with Mr. Norton. If we hear him
coming up the stairs, we go down the fire escape. Can you stretch that clown shirt any lower?"
"Doesn't it mean anything to you that we just made love?"
"'Made love?' Is that what you call it? I thought we were just having a good time."
"I never did it before, Sandi."
She raised her head slowly. Her frown melted. She seemed to become younger, simpler, before his eyes.
"Honest to God?"
"Honest to God."
"You crazy sonuvabitch! You're in love with me, aren't you?" She cocked her head at him and grinned.
"It's my job."
#
They sat together on the edge of the roof, looking across the hill, past the Ferris wheel, over the railroad
tracks and past the brown beach where a drunk in baggy pants sat by a campfire, at Lake Ontario, blue, blue,
and blue, seam-stitched white by the sea breeze. Side by side, they dangled their legs like happy children. They
counted sails. They told each other what they saw in the clouds.
He saw a winged horse, a dancing goblin, the Last Supper, a gorilla's foot, the Tree of Paradise, "and
us."
"Us?"
"Don't you see us? On our wedding day. See your long train? See the ring in the best man's hand? See
the preacher? Who do you want to marry us, Sandi?"
"Mother Teresa."
"Done!"
She saw an old guy with a raised stick. She saw a snake, a teeming anthill, Adolph Hitler, and a truck
tire.
"Why a truck tire, in particular?"
"Count the lugs, stupid!"
Then, in the east, a shifting, dark cloud, with shredding strands like a wet tissue, made her cock her
head. "Morey the Mole!"
Fintushel, Ghost Train 5

"Who?"
"You never heard of Morey the Mole? Guy who plays hide and seek with the cops?"
"No."
"I saw him in the Ghost Train once. I was picking up after some bozos who spilled popcorn all over the
tracks. He poked his head out of a ventilator duct. Scared the shit out of me. Looked like that cloud--well, it was
dark."
"What did you do?"
"I yelled bloody murder--what do you think I did? He just smiled; I saw his teeth. Then he started
whistling. I was so surprised, it shut me right up. I was hypnotized, like when Bimba the Elephant Boy sees that
cobra. The next thing I remember, he was gone, I was just standing there with a handful of cruddy popcorn,
whistling the same song Morey the Mole sang."
"How come nobody came when you screamed?"
"Are you kidding? What kind of jerk would come running because of a scream from the Ghost Train?"
"What was Morey the Mole whistling?"
Sandi whistled:
#
All around the cobbler's bench
The monkey chased the weasel.
The monkey thought 'twas all in fun . . .
#
She sighed. "Ever since then, I can't get that thing out of my head. It keeps me up nights sometimes.
Whenever I'm not thinking about something--pop!--there it is again. I get so sick and tired off it sometimes, I
could jump off a cliff."
Jack touched her lips with the tips of his fingers. "Let's make love again."
She took his hand and held it away. "What, on the tarpaper and pigeon doo? Forget it! That's not in my
job description." She picked up a chunk of cracked mortar, tossed it, and watched it fall. "Say, how come you
never got laid before this? You're not shy, that's for sure!"
He had to think. He knew the answer right away, but he mustn't say it. Mustn't say he'd been wending
his way toward her, only her, ever since he'd seen himself in the mirror one day. Mustn't say he'd picked his
friends like choosing passages in a labyrinth: to become accustomed to the way of thinking that would
eventually lead to her, and to the way of talking that would win her over. Mustn't say so many things! Mustn't
say that he had moved toward her, season by season, year by year, like grass in a cranny toward a sun unseen--
and changing. How many books closed before they were done, because they opened toward a heart that wasn't
hers? How many games put away, then jobs turned down, because they "hadn't felt quite right," which was to
say, she wasn't at the end of them? Mustn't mention the elation of turning his face in her direction years before
they had met--and he'd felt it, he'd known it always!--or of stepping the right way, or of choosing the right
word: the step, the word that led in her direction.
Mustn't talk that way. He must have let slip a word about the mirror to his mom one day about a week
ago, although he certainly didn't remember it, and the next morning it was gone! That was her response. She
didn't admit making off with the mirror, of course. She was sneaky about it, asking Jack over breakfast what
he'd done with it! As if it mattered. As if it had been about mirrors!
Mustn't talk that way, not yet--that was the lesson of it. The whole truth wouldn't do, and if he had to
choose a lie, then he must think which lie would be the most honest one, for Sandi. "Wasn't in my job
description."
"The Big Payroll, huh?"
"I was waiting for someone like you."
She gave him a shove. "Oh, come off it, Jack!" She smirked at him, waiting for the truth, but he kept
right on staring at her with that ingenuous face of his, long, high-browed, with luminous blue eyes. He'd chosen
well. 'Someone like!' It had been an answer close enough to the truth that he could make a sort of stand on it.
Fintushel, Ghost Train 6

Her smirk began to twitch and fade. She blushed. She threw another chunk of mortar to earth. She kept her eyes
away from him. "Bullshit."
At his back, Jack heard the blue door open. Sandi heard it too. She turned to look. They knew it wasn't
Gus Barstow, though. They would have heard him pounding up the stairs and crashing through the door.
It was Hudson Drake, the young carousel jock. It didn't surprise them. Hudson knew everything, and he
was harmless. He strolled out onto the roof smiling like an idiot, as always. "'Sokay. Gus gave up and went
home--with your shorts, Jack. I wouldn't bet on getting the wallet back, either."
"Jack's smart," said Sandi. Suddenly there was a feeling of complicity between them. Jack squeezed her
hand, and she let him, even smiled a little. Funny girl. Screwing was okay but hand-holding questionable.
"Bare naked from the waist down--that's what Jack is." Hudson had his own way of walking: he swung
his whole straight body from the hips like a sullen child, or as if his body were a heavy plank that he nudged
forward corner by corner, on end. "Mr. Norton's mad as hell. Nobody was minding the whole north end of the
park. He's not firing nobody though, not till the Fourth of July. Gotta have mechanics for the Hot Rods, see?"
Hudson loped over and sat himself down on the other side of Sandi.
It was okay. Hudson, everybody knew, was sexless.
"Mechanics for the Hot Rods?" Jack put his arm around Sandi and pulled her tightly to him. Life was
beautiful. With Hudson there to look at them both, Jack and Sandi felt like a genuine couple. And Gus was
history--she must know that.
Sandi nestled into him a little. "It's a code." She opened her hand on his bare thigh. "It's Norton's way of
talking. On the Fourth, the big opening, when the jerks from the city pour in, they make trouble all over the
park. If somebody needs help, they call up the office and somebody says on the loudspeaker, 'Mechanics to
wherever, please'--the Ghost Train or the Dutch Shoes or wherever the mob's spilling over. Last summer it was
the Hot Rods. 'Mechanics' means security guards or anybody with a free hand."
Hudson watched them swing their feet. He lowered his bushy head and studied. Then he swung his feet
too. He seemed to enjoy it, but then, Hudson seemed to enjoy everything. "Course, Gus might kill you both
before then."
The sun was inching down toward the lake. Clouds gathered at the horizon and began to spread toward
them as if someone were pulling up a bedsheet.
"I won't let him touch you, Sandi. It's not his job." Jack believed it, too. He felt as if he could take on a
carload of Guses.
Sandi pulled away and gave him the fish eye.
"Jack's smart," Hudson laughed. Then he pulled a wallet out of his hip pocket and handed it across Sandi
to Jack. Then Jack's keys. Then his shorts, which Hudson had folded and stuffed into his belt, out of sight, under
the back of his shirt. Hudson nearly drooled with pleasure at their astonishment. He pulled the things out
without looking at them. He watched Jack and Sandi instead, the way a child watches cartoons. "Don't worry
about Gus Barstow. I can fix that too."
Jack was holding the keys in one hand and his wallet in the other, with his shorts laid over them like a
headwaiter's towel. He couldn't think of a thing to say. Sandi merely squinted at Hudson, her little mouth wide
open.
Hudson looked up. "Better put your pants on, Jack. My ship's coming."
"Your what?" Then he saw that they hadn't been clouds at all, or dancing goblins, or the Last Supper, or
a truck tire, or Morey the Mole; they were something solid and cavernous that only appeared from most angles
to be puffy, mutable things. Those things he had mistaken for mere clouds--or that actually were clouds, only
clouds were not at all what anybody had thought them to be--revealed themselves at a new angle now. The duck
became a rabbit. A long shaft of late summer afternoon sunlight poured through a hole in the "clouds," only that
was something else too. It was a sort of gangplank.
"The pants," said Hudson. He was changing. An uncharacteristic intelligence sharpened the muscles
around his eyes. His smile, for the first time, seemed to mean something.
Jack and Sandi looked at each other, but there was only one thing they could imagine to do. With that
new face of his, Hudson was herding them onto the ship, closing gates behind them, gates in the mind. Jack
Fintushel, Ghost Train 7

pulled on his pants; without thinking, he slipped the ring off his pinky and back into the watch pocket, and the
three of them boarded the ship. Hudson led, Jack climbed after, and Sandi brought up the rear. She looked back
only once, and after that she kept her eyes closed. She pulled herself up hand over hand by the feel of the
knotted guide ropes and of Jack's heel. Sometimes he reached back to help her.
"They were right," she whimpered. "The sisters were right."
"What sisters?"
"Blessed Trinity!"
"You're a Blessed Trinity girl?" He was reaching the target area toward which his life had arrowed.
Everything glowed. The wind picked up as they ascended. It made him feel like a child, the way it tossed his
hair. Blowing past his ears and mouth and nostrils, it played him like a bottle. The Ferris wheel was a Tinker
Toy. Ontario was a finger bowl. "What year?"
But he couldn't get another word from Sandi, even if the power of speech had not deserted him at fifteen
hundred feet, because she was absorbed in recitation of the Holy Rosary, by voice and heart, and then by heart
alone, although her lips kept moving, the wind's calliope.
" . . . now and in the hour of our death. Amen," she said, and, "'Pop!' goes the weasel!"

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