Rides of the Midway Read online

  Further praise for Rides of the Midway

  “Comic though it is, Rides of the Midway engages serious concerns. . . . Durkee has given the coming-of-age novel enough twists to make his version seem something else entirely—a ghost story, perhaps, mixed with a sexual comedy and slice-of-working-class Southern life. . . . Much of the book’s strength, of course, derives simply from the likableness of its hero. . . . Dark and exhilarating.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Mississippi-raised author Lee Durkee portrays his hero’s feckless dissolution with considerable comic flair and a sharp eye for regional manners, good and bad. . . . Readers will finish the book feeling they’ve been treated to quite a ride.”

  —Time

  “This book gave me the heebie-jeebies, and almost nothing gives me the heebie-jeebies these days. It’s a damn good novel.”

  —Pinckney Benedict

  “Horrifically comic. . . . Masterly. . . . You’ve got to love a coming-of-age story in which Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane crash plays a pivotal role. . . . A vivid personification of that classic adolescent territory between responsibility and freedom, which, in this impressive debut, can often look like a prison.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Welcome to the hallucinatory world of first-time novelist Lee Durkee. It’s a world that contains both the youthful yearning of The Catcher in the Rye and the spectral oddity of The Sixth Sense. . . . [Durkee’s] gift is in conjuring the ghosts and shadows, bringing them to a convincing kind of life.”

  —Austin American-Statesman

  “A wonderful debut. . . . Lee Durkee is a marvelously inventive writer, both moving and comic in turn, who packs up surprises on every page and writes sentences that any other writer will envy. Rides of the Midway was a joy to read.”

  —Stephen Dobyns

  “Southern literature teems with healers, zealots, saints, and nonbelievers of all stripes. . . . Lee Durkee’s assured, richly imagined debut novel is a raucous tour through this scorched landscape of faith. . . . Durkee handles Noel’s odyssey with grace and style, crafting sentences so beautiful that you stop to read them twice.”

  —Time Out NY

  “Bracing. . . . Boy, does this make The Sixth Sense seem like Dick and Jane. . . . [A] stunning, startling tale. . . . [Noel] may be the most engaging literary antihero since Holden Caulfield. . . . From first electrifying page to last, Noel Weatherspoon lives in a surreality from which you may be loathe to emerge. This is dark poetry, dementia with a smile, and unbelievably good storytelling.”

  —Philadelphia Weekly

  “What an exciting new voice we have in Lee Durkee! Every sentence in Rides of the Midway bristles with joy and danger and surprise.”

  —Lewis Nordan

  “Rides of the Midway is filled with thrills and chills as it rockets toward its amazing and strangely graceful conclusion, in which we are reminded that only ‘the truly wretched’ can really sing ‘Amazing Grace.’ ”

  —New Orleans Times-Picayune

  “A work of manic brilliance that depicts a gorgeous inverse of America you haven’t seen in print before.”

  —George Saunders

  “Durkee renders both the anguished, absurd inner life of a hormone-addled pubescent boy and his creepy, nouveau Southern Gothic milieu in loving and ferocious detail. . . . Durkee’s dark bildungsroman reaches for the universal. In its grim, haunted, and often outrageously funny specificity, it becomes almost allegorical—a Pilgrim’s Progress through the valley of the shadow of the late twentieth century.”

  —Bookforum

  “Lee Durkee chronicles one young man’s hilariously knotty adolescence in mid- to late-70’s Mississippi. . . . Durkee creates a deeply specific, stifling southern town. It’s one where Billy Graham is on every television set, each passing thought is a possible sin, and the local underachiever dedicated to drugs and arena rock just may have more going on behind those mirrored sunglasses than you think.”

  —Spin

  “Durkee writes with the verve of a young Philip Roth or Thomas McGuane. . . . Deft and toothsome hilarity. . . . Durkee calls to mind the early Barry Hannah—rattling his lingual sabers, jitterbugging on the edge of absurdity, lobbing firecrackers at his startled audience. Rides of the Midway is a manic, sloshed, whiny, fizzy, horny, noisome and wondrous novel. . . . This coarsely graceful novel feels . . . vital and involuntary—as vital and involuntary, that is, as the truest art.”

  —Salon

  “A memorable first novel, its darkness lit by wisdom.”

  —Shelby Hearon

  “Compelling and accomplished. . . . The novel is so enthralling and its prose so streamlined that one might be tempted to devour it ravenously in one long sitting. But such is the book’s richness of detail and depth of character that it is equally tempting to take it in over several days, savoring its playful satire, evocative imagery, dense allusion, and hard-won humanity. . . . Beautifully exciting. . . . What Durkee has created in this remarkable debut is a lively, loving ode to Southern adolescence, its crude confusions, and its strange freedoms—in short, to its fierce deities.”

  —Memphis Commercial Appeal

  “Tremendously energetic. . . . Durkee combines haunting lyricism . . . with blatantly crude comedy that will have readers laughing out loud despite themselves. First-timer Durkee writes with a southern accent that doesn’t smother a unique voice, and his roller-coaster ride of a story leaves a reader breathless and waiting for more.”

  —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “A marvelously rich bookæthick with life, dark-humored as a night in the funhouse, smart as the guy who guesses your weight.”

  —Lee K. Abbott

  “Sharp and engaging. . . . Durkee’s darkly humorous debut sorrowfully and sincerely portrays a boy’s self-damnation. . . . In the tradition of Anne Tyler, this promising first-timer has taken great care to resurrect smalltown living in the ’70s and ’80s without a hint of sentimentality.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This is not your father’s coming-of-age tale. . . . A wild, unforgettable ride. . . . Wickedly disturbing. . . . Undeniably funny. . . . Rides of the Midway will have you howling, laughing, screaming and holding on tight.”

  —Winston-Salem Journal

  “This is one of those books that resonate in the mind long after the last page has been turned. . . . A classic coming-of-age tale. . . . The book’s great strength is that the reader never loses sight of the person inside—an extremely likable kid whose misfortune it is to be utterly helpless before the tempests of life. . . . Rides of the Midway is a headlong, apocalyptic, picaresque tale, as gut-wrenching and addictive as the Black Dragon, the fairground ride on which Noel last saw his father, and which gives the book its title. It is tragic, funny and, in the end, even optimistic. Noel is an unlikely hero, but his story of love, death, brotherhood, and hope rings true.”

  —Seven Days (Burlington, VT)

  “A beautiful whirlwind of a novel, one whose sentences make you want to uncork some wine and toast Lee Durkee. Good French stuff, I might add, for this debut is that impressive.”

  —Dale Ray Phillips

  RIDES OF

  THE MIDWAY

  A NOVEL

  Lee Durkee

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY · NEW YORK · LONDON

  Copyright © 2001 by Lee Durkee

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write
to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  The text of this book is composed in Sabon with the display set in Franklin Gothic.

  Composition by Thomas Ernst

  Manufacturing by Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

  Book design by BTDnyc

  Ebook conversion by Erin Campbell, TIPS Technical Publishing, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Durkee, Lee.

  Rides of the midway : a novel / by Lee Durkee.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-393-04971-X

  1. Teenage boys—Fiction. 2. Mississippi—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.U6865 R53 2001

  813’.6—dc2100-062219

  ISBN 0-393-32290-4 pbk.

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  1234567890

  To my dad,

  who was a bit of a cautionary tale himself

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A VERSION OF CHAPTER FIVE originally appeared in the New England Review under the title “Sacrilege.”

  Special thanks to Neil Giordano, Tabitha Griffin, Jay Mandel, and Margo Rabb.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  PROLOGUE

  HALF GHOST, HALF SKELETON, and tethered to his body like a dog in a yard, Ross wanted only to fly out the one window. But as it was, being neither quite dead nor quite alive, he could not soar through the hospital window except in the dream fits that overtook him without warning so that no event could be altogether trusted. He could float, sure, and sometimes he could pass through the walls into the neighboring rooms or into the bright hallway with its ice-tray lights and food carts, but, for instance, he could not change the TV channel nor could he unplug the city of machines that sustained his body nor could he taste the food he swiped off the carts. In fact, when he studied the cart, he would see that he had not stolen the food at all. There it was, both in his hand, dream food, and still on the plate, real food.

  On weekends his dad switched the TV to baseball. Those were the best times. Then Ross could forget about being a ghost and watch Johnny Bench.

  As to his own body, his real body, Ross had long ago grown bored with that, though for the first year he had been fascinated by its decay. This fascination gave way to a period of revulsion as the skin yellowed and caved in upon the flowering skeleton. But now Ross only noticed the body when it became the room’s focal point, such as when his family visited or when a nurse came in to rotate his limbs or when his older sister Amber talked to him on the Ouija board.

  The Ouija board proved another lesson in frustration. Not only had his spelling deteriorated into a type of dream spelling, but moving that plastic puck to where a single letter was centered inside its eye exhausted him. Meanwhile, Amber’s limp black hair spilled over the alphabet. With her thin bones and white skin and the blue map of veins on the undersides of her forearms, she seemed to Ross as fragile as his own body on whose lap she had propped the Ouija board. And they both knew Ouija boards to be mildly satanic, at least that’s what their parents had taught them. On some level Ross was still worried about getting into trouble.

  Then one day while Amber was manning the Ouija board and asking him for the hundredth time what it was like to be brain-dead, someone had entered the private room, and in a panic Amber had thrown herself under the bed. Ross froze, his fingers perched on the plastic puck. At the foot of the bed stood an older boy, a teenager maybe, clutching a black baseball cap that said CAT. He had long black hair, skull-shaped and dirty-looking where the cap had been set, and he had slightly Mongoloid eyes that made him appear suspect, maybe retarded, maybe stoned. The boy studied first the largest of the machines, a cabineted ventilator, and then lowered his eyes along Ross’s skeleton until they came to rest upon the Ouija board on its lap. He began tucking in the front of his white T-shirt. Finally, in a stunted whisper, he spoke. He said, “Look, I’m sorry I ran into you, all right? I guess I shoulda slid.” He beaked his lips. Speaking more deliberately, he added, “Thing is, I’d never had an in-the-park homer before. I’d never had any kind of homer.” Glancing out the window, he said, “Just stay outa my dreams, okay? Please. Leave me the hell alone.”

  He backed away from the bed, but before leaving the room he turned and regarded the TV a long moment, then he reached up and changed the channel all the way around the dial to Dark Shadows.

  As soon as he was gone, Amber crawled out from under the bed. She changed the channel back to Guiding Light and asked, “Who was that? He’s cute.”

  It took a painstaking fifteen minutes, but eventually Ross managed to dictate: “H-E-W-A-S-O-U-T.”

  CONTENTS

  Begin Reading

  Counterclockwise

  What but design of darkness to appall?—

  If design govern in a thing so small.

  —Robert Frost

  CHAPTER ONE

  NOEL’S FATHER, WHEN LAST SEEN, had boarded a ride called the Black Dragon on the final evening of the Great Mississippi Fair, which in a matter of hours and direction would transform itself into the Great Louisiana Fair or the Great Tennessee Fair or the Great Alabama Fair. Though Noel was never positive he could remember his father, he would always remember the Black Dragon because it kept coming back with the fair every year and it was rumored to have once killed a boy by decapitating him. At night, streamlined with hundreds of small clear bulbs, it resembled a polished black octopus, the spinning cockpits slingshotting toward earth, the tentacles engraved with a fierce red calligraphy. In later years it would return to town disguised under bright shades of metal-flake enamel and bearing various demonic aliases and blasting the latest heavy-metal soundtracks, but Noel always recognized the Black Dragon on sight and rode it dozens of times. As he got older he rode it drunk and stoned and once he rode it with a Polaroid of a naked woman in his back pocket.

  He was failing first grade when his father was declared MIA. This prompted his mother to explain, “That means he’s dead somewhere in Vietnam, but they don’t know where yet. His bones always were hard to find.”

  Noel stared into the lined pages of a Blue Horse notebook he had been drawing pictures in, while his mother, a tall attractive woman fond of props and postures, rolled a wineglass filled with grape juice against her bottom lip. Before leaving the room, she knelt to where he sat on the rug and inserted a black and white photograph into his notebook.

  It took Noel a moment to recognize her inside the photograph. Hiding a cigarette behind her back—the feathery smoke gave it away—his mother wore a white headband, a black dress, and stood wide-shouldered and thin-waisted and torpedo-breasted, listing into a man who, slim and tall, wore a baggy dark suit that seemed in wanting of a hat, a cigar, and a machine gun. Only his mother’s shocked expression accounted for the whereabouts of the man’s right hand. It was an old photograph with serrated edges, and someone had put out a cigarette on the man’s heart. Because of this, it was difficult to separate his expression—the half sneer, the sun-slitted eyes—from the ridged wound melted through his chest that Noel now held up to the light and fit his eye to, as if to a keyhole, as if to the future.

  At ten he played Little League for the Standard Oil Red Sox. One spring Sunday while trying to score off a triple, Noel shattered the collarbone of the opposing catcher. The catcher had to be carried off the field, the ball still clutched in his fist. Noel had been called out. He tried explaining this fact to h
is mother after the game while she paraded him past the grandstands. Her hair had been dyed blond the day before, actually more yellow, and she wore it in a short-banged fashion she called a butch. During the drive home Noel kept putting his red baseball cap on her, and she kept brushing it off and saying stop that. Suddenly she hit the brakes, and the white station wagon drifted into a familiar yard. For a moment they sat silent in the car while she adjusted the studious look on her face. Then, apologetically, she shrugged and suggested they have quick look inside. “Just hello and goodbye,” she promised over Noel’s protests.

  Aunt Carol, the family spinster and one of his mother’s five sisters, had a beagle name Archie that she pampered like an only child. Her front door had been left wide open that afternoon. They entered the house and called out hello and walked into the kitchen and there they found both Archie and Aunt Carol in a bad way. The beagle, its eyes sealed shut, was heaving away on a blue nylon blanket while Aunt Carol, wearing a pink bathrobe and no makeup, her hair bound in blue curlers, circumnavigated the blanket and remained frighteningly unaware of their presence, as if she were an apparition already passed into the spirit world awaiting the arrival of her dog.

  Still in cleats and the red and blue uniform, Noel guided his aunt outside to the Rambler and placed her in the front seat then got into the back. While they waited, a wave of rain hammered over the car and vanished down the length of hood. His mother, who had been on the phone, tied a clear plastic bonnet over her hair then started across the yard carrying Archie. She placed the dog, a wet corpse for all purposes, upon Noel’s lap in the back seat. Noel stiffened, shot out his limbs, and right at that moment a strange coincidence took place, one that would impress his born-again relatives far more than it would impress Noel himself. At the moment Archie touched Noel’s lap, the beagle roused itself and seemed indisputably cured. Within minutes Archie was caroming about the yard sniffing out tennis balls. Archie even chased their station wagon when they finally left.