What Hearts Read Free Page B

he was up amid the noise, Asa could tell it was silent down there.
    On top of the pier, there were six or ten or fifty different rides, with big metal spheres and cabinets and cars spinning and jerking in space, all run by chugging machinery. Peoplewere being spun and jerked in the brightly painted cars and spheres; their eyes rolled, their hands waved, their throat muscles convulsed and their mouths stretched open as if to take bites of something just out of reach in the night air, but Asa could hear nothing from them. Only the machinery had a voice.
    They entered the area by stepping through an arch made of pocked tin sheeting painted white, with a couple of hundred small round red light bulbs standing out along its outer edge like hair on end. “Here we go,” said Dave. Now he stayed closer, even sliding an arm around Asa’s shoulders and pulling him along. They wound between the veering armatures and cars of many rides, bearing out toward the end of the pier, where it grew darker, and much quieter. Finally, they arrived at a small platform where a man leaned against a rail, chewing on a piece of pencil as if it were a toothpick, his arms crossed, showing a purple tattoo on each that said FIGHT above a monochrome stars and stripes. There were steps. Dave pushed Asa up them.
    â€œGot a boy here,” said Dave, reaching intohis back pocket and pulling out his wallet. The man did not say anything. Dave pulled out a bill and handed it to him. The man took it and dropped it into a cigar box from which the lid had been torn, sitting on a greasy flat surface among the cogged wheels and oily struts. Without turning toward Asa, he gave a small backhanded wave that Asa knew was meant for him: he had been admitted, he could ride.
    But what was he to ride? He took a look. Up against the edge of the platform stood a train of four cars with thick leather seats inside. They were open on the top, and their sides were cut away in sweeping curves edged with nickel. They looked like the bodies of extremely heavy sleighs, without runners, without winter. Asa looked ahead of the front car. Two rails stretched a short distance, then banked sharply to the right and dipped out of sight. Beyond, where they would have gone had they not fallen away, was the ocean, looking like tar.
    He turned back toward Dave and his mother and the man. Dave smiled and gestured at the cars. “Go ahead,” he said. “Have yourselfa ball.” He smiled and gestured, once, twice, three times. Asa did not get in. Dave looked at him straight, took a step toward him, and said in a softer voice, man to man: “Don’t worry. Go on. It’s just for you.” He paused. “You deserve it.”
    Asa got in the third car. Immediately the tattooed man sprang up the steps. He leaned into Asa’s car to lower a chrome bar in front of Asa’s ribs, then he snap-locked a flimsy chain across the flashy curve of the side’s cutaway.
    He hopped off the platform and reached his hand into the darkness of the machinery. Asa saw something move, something upright, surprisingly tall, and his car moved forward six inches with a jolt as something latched onto it just below Asa’s tailbone. The man had hold of a huge wooden lever, perhaps seven feet tall. It looked like a giant oar with its fat end wedged somewhere deep in the cogged wheels. The man held the lever solemnly, looked briefly at Asa, and pulled it, with a precise, decisive yank. Asa’s car bolted forward.
    He could not keep up with any sort of sequence after that. He was flying at the oceanone second, then he was pinned beneath the chrome bar and a thousand pounds of air the next, then he was hurled upward and outward to the left, his thighs straining against the bar, then something as large as the ocean but invisible and dry was pulling him down and to the right, squeezing his face sideways into the leather and nickel. Nothing lasted for more than an instant, and nothing