calculating the time it would take to get her home and himself to the business. Penny reminded him that they were going to the Natural History Museum next. The what? The place with the alligators. He’d promised.
Christ. Joe hated it: waiting on the corner, squeezing in with all those people, rocking up and down the hills while the Jersey deal might be going down. They were stuck in a jam for fifteen minutes, and the siren of an ambulance announced the reason for the delay. Penny opened the bus window and stuck her head out as the attendants hustled with the stretcher, and Joe scolded her for snooping. Her eyes and mouth were open with wonder. Penny, you get back in your seat this minute, he hissed, and her face colored as she obeyed.
It was a mild summer afternoon in the city, fresh with strands of fog drifting among the buildings and the sunny eucalyptus and Monterey pines of the park. Joe and his daughter walked through the grove of pollarded sycamores to the museum and found the building closed. Penny suggested they walk to the beach and Playland.
Walk? Joe asked. On purpose?
It’s only a mile or so, I think.
Christ, Penny, only a goddamned idiot would walk clear from here to the beach. Excuse my French.
Then I must be a goddamned idiot, the girl said. She wore a summery dress and saddle shoes, and a new alpaca sweater was draped over her shoulders to ward off the pockets of fog and sea breeze. Joe figured that more loot had been spent on this one outfit than his entire wardrobe from age one to nineteen, and she kept growing out of things. Already her legs were nearly as long as his, her stride brisk and determined. They passed the lake with the pedal boats, crossed a polo field big as a goddamned aircraft carrier, muddied Joe’s best shoes near a creek. He saw a booth and told her to wait a minute while he got on the horn again. Narciso answered.
Ciso, what’s up? Did the guys from Jersey call?
They’re here, Joe. They’re real nice guys.
Oh, Christ. Joe’s stomach turned, and he asked to talk with his other brother, Ludovico. Penny was feeding French bread to a group of noisy ducks right next to the booth.
Joe, Narciso said after a bit, Lu says it’s all taken care of. It’s fine, Joe. These are great guys. How’s little Penny?
Jesus Christ, Ciso, of course they’re nice guys, they’re about to ask us to drop our pants and spread our legs. Get Lu.
There was a long pause. The ducks snapped at Penny’s legs, and she shrieked happily. Joe could hear voices, laughter, maybe a radio broadcast of a ballgame, a man saying the word southpaw. Then Sammy, the bookkeeper from the Philippines: Hello? Is somebody on the line?
Get me Lu, Sam, right now.
Oh, hey, Mr. Verbicaro! Hey, I’m sorry. He and Ciso just took off with these guys for lunch.
Son of a goddamned bitch. Joe slammed the receiver so hard the ducks bolted.
As they neared the shore the fog assaulted them. It rolled through the cypress and over the grass, tumbling against itself like an avalanche. The amusement park glowed and squawked somewhere in those snowy depths, its tacky music and Christmas lights beckoning like a buried city of sin which God had failed to destroy. Every foolish pleasure from the ’20s and the turn of the century, gartered legs, beer foaming the underside of handlebar mustaches, flapper dresses, wheels of fortune, and penny arcades, was depicted in garish colors which, though blasted by years of weather and generations of children, beamed at Joe through the fog as he approached.
Penny wanted to go to the Funhouse first, and they stood in line before the mechanical hag, the laughing, wild-haired, freckle-faced old woman in the booth. Joe fumed about his brothers, his father, and, to some degree, his willful daughter, who had dragged him to this spot, in bitter fog, before this ugly, guffawing woman. Her head rocked back when she let loose with the biggest laughs, and her arms in the wild striped sleeves jerked like a spastic’s. It made Joe wonder about laughter itself for the first time in his life; it made it suspect in his mind. What a miserable thing it was, really, a desperate and mindless noise. What an ugly animal sound, imbued with nothing nobler than retching or ejaculating.
Daddy, where are you? Penny shrieked and laughed, lost somewhere before him in the house of mirrors. Joe’s anger was like his father’s, slow-building, deadly, filled with resentment and purpose. His brother Lu would explode at the slightest provocation and laugh a moment later, and Narciso’s fuse was so long it might circle the earth twice before a wisp of smoke could be seen on the horizon, but Joe banked his logs in silence toward a coming forest fire. He stepped slowly through the house of mirrors while children squeezed past him, shrieking black and brown and yellow and white kids giggling and yelling, and felt the familiar blood of injustice beat in his throat. He came to the junctures in the maze of reflections and locked eyes with the man in front of him, this idiot with the crew cut and monkey suit, and wanted to punch his own lights out. Which way? He asked the many images of himself. I don’t have time to screw around. Kids were swirling past him in each direction.
Daddy, are you still in there? He could hear Penny’s voice above the din of laughter and yelling. I’ll meet you at the base of the slide, she yelled. Jesus Christ on a goddamned pogo stick, Joe muttered when he came to another dead end. A boy behind him laughed and said, You hear that guy?
He had no inkling what the hell people found amusing about getting lost. Penny was probably ten yards from him, and he had to navigate through a maze five times that length. If the monster in the myth, the guy with the bull’s head, were waiting for him around the next bend, Joe would be ready to break his nose.
Penny called to him again, and he was so mad he didn’t answer. By now Joe had his pen out and was making tabulations on the palm of his hand, five panels, left turn, three panels, right turn. Children zoomed past him. He was surrounded by facets of himself, the angry boy, the embarrassed boy, the lost boy; the little mathematician so poor he lacked a piece of paper, the little Italian kid in his sister’s saddle shoes. He stood in sight of the entrance, the fog, the laughing hag’s booth, back at the goddamned beginning, and swore. He turned and saw himself in a panel, mouth open in confusion, pen poised above his palm. Somebody yanked his coat.
You lost, mister? a boy with black, curly hair, younger than Penny, asked him in Italian. Follow me.
Joe followed the boy and was through the mirrors and in the center of the Funhouse in two minutes. He gave the kid four bits. The kid stuffed the quarters into his baggy dungarees and raced off.
The open center of the Funhouse smelled like an old gymnasium, like dirty socks and stinky shoes and the pine-scented wax and cleansers used on the hardwood floor. Penny was flying down the enormous wooden slide on a potato sack, her black hair and her petticoat sweeping back, her mouth open in a huge smile. When she got to the bottom she grabbed a girl by the wrist and dragged her over to Joe.
Dad, she yelled, her face flushed and damp, guess who this is!
The girl was nearly a young woman, and although Joe was a straight shooter and teetotaler compared to his brothers, he knew enough about the blue-light district to guess this girl had been around. She was beautiful and dark, to be sure, but there was something tawdry about her, something in her eyes, which had street corners in them, some odor of desperation, of drugs or booze. I don’t know who this is, Joe said. And I don’t want you to hang around somebody like this, he said to himself.
His daughter laughed. Dad, this is Maria!
Who?
Your stepmom!
The young woman shook his hand, then gestured for them to wait before she darted off. Penny ran once through an obstacle course of rolling barrels and tipping boards while Joe pictured his old man in the labyrinth of mirrors, a lusty, snorting, white-haired monster with booze on his breath and goat horns sprouting out of his skull. He imagined how he might scare the children, and how some boy like the little guy who’d just guided Joe through the mirrors might trip the old man into a glass panel or jump on his back and strangle him. Maria and Penny were talking, as much with hands as with words, near the giant barrel while Joe mused about Giuseppe. Penny ran to