Free Joyland by Emily Schultz Page B

lay out on a picnic table. The loving owner had wandered off and left it for the afternoon, mid-surgery. Willow whips from the trees tangled Chris’s feet as he and J.P. climbed the bank, trekking away from the railroad tracks. They headed around front, where the numbers would help them determine which house held the thing they sought.
    It was no different than its neighbours: a two-storey farmhouse holding its ground in the middle of town. The entire facade was nailed over with Insulbrick. The step up to the porch was an unsteady mason block, the porch barely wide enough to accommodate Chris and J.P. A much larger verandah hugged the entire side of the house. Chris wondered if they should try around there, but J.P. had already rapped on the metal frame of the screen door.
    Chris turned to him. “Are you sure . . . ?”
    The door nearly broadsided Chris as it swung open. He fell backward off the porch and landed on his ass in the grass.
    The man in the open doorway slouched, shirtless. He looked to be about twenty-five. Or forty-five. Chris couldn’t tell. Looking down at Chris in the grass, the guy gave a high-pitched titter — a sound young enough to have come from a fourteen-year-old, though the face it snaked out of had hard, thin lips and harder thinner eyes above them. One hand grasped at the low waist of his jeans, as if he had just pulled them on before deciding to open the door. A trail of black stitches ran down the centre of his stomach toward his groin. The pink head twisted away as the guy jerked his fly up.
    Averting his eyes, Chris scrambled to his feet.
    “What do you want, man?” His gaze drifted from Chris to J.P. without seeming to focus on either one of them. The guy leaned against the door, and J.P. jumped backward off the porch as the screen swung open farther under the weight.
    J.P. shot Chris a quick glance. “Well, we heard . . .”
    The guy in the doorway — obviously Doyle — began to laugh.
    “Aw shit,” he said, pulling his hand through shoulder-length liver-brown hair. He buzzed his lips in an abrupt, juicy fart. “You crack me up, kid. What are you, like, twelve? Whad’you and your girl- friend come for?” Doyle shot out suggestions. The names dribbled down at Chris — tiny taboo nuggets of vocabulary.
    “Awwwww, come on,” Doyle groaned, “don’t look at me like that. You’re too young to be a narc.”
    J.P. answered, his voice dropping an octave, his chest instantly convex, bursting with authority. “Just booze, man.”
    Doyle offered them weed instead.
    Chris shook his head. The offer might have been more tempting had it come from someone capable of holding himself upright.
    “Fuck. Ing. Hell,” Doyle said, each syllable a sentence, his brown head doing a slow, annoyed dance. He leaned against the door, which forced it wide. “Gonna have to wait while I go get it. C’mon in.”
    J.P. went first and Chris followed, ducking past Doyle. He reeked of smoke.
    “I was just in the middle of something,” Doyle muttered holding up a finger. He lurched past them into the living room. J.P. and Chris stood politely in the hall, as if they were visiting a distant relative. Faded Mom-style yellow wallpaper with flowers plastered the musty hall. Overhead, a stained glass lampshade cast bright-coloured triangles into a spiderwebbed corner. Through the doorway, at the far end of the living room, Doyle’s back was to them. A white flannel sheet with wide pink stripes on one end flapped as he unfolded it. Chris looked carefully at his feet as Doyle twisted around.
    Suddenly Doyle seemed in less of a hurry. He began to offer advice on every kind of alcohol and how it would “make your frickin’ head spin . . . like a twelve-year-old girl chugging wine at a wedding.” Interwoven with his personal escapades, his expertise was wasted; the stories never reached conclusion, twice sidetracked by who had been present before he could tell the boys what had been consumed or what effects it