Cage

The moon was striding up the distant trees branch by branch, its full belly receding to the high ball of light that turns on Night. But not many noticed. That foreign gold could not compete with the raucous bells and whirrs and neon pinks and human shrieks contained in the small plot on earth.

Lola and Carrie clutched melting snow cones as they bumped and bumbled through messes of people, giddy people, laughing people, but there were sure to be brawling people soon: fights over a foam- stuffed animal, a girl, or, much later, race-infused turf, the kind of ugly that had led to knife blades more than once. Booze was smuggled in easily at Fireball Park, the hot night a chaser. Families with small children, faces sunburned and shell-shocked, were pushing through to the exit, while for the throngs of new hormones, the real party was starting.

“Lance looks so much like Andy Gibb, don’t you think,” Carrie said.  

“A little maybe,” Lola mused, “but Lance is a dork. You just like him because he plays sax. I bet you wanna have sax with him, don’t ya?”

“Shut up!” Carrie bumped her hip against Lola’s. “You, who’s all like ‘Oh, Jeff said I have a cute butt,’ you’re one to talk. Oh my god, do not look over towards the bumper cars.”

Lola looked over towards the bumper cars. The girls both squeaked and Lola arched her back hard. Carrie stared ahead and blew into her lips to make them pouty. She felt her wings still shellacked against her head despite the heat, and felt her usual whiff of jealousy at Lola’s even, straight hair, chocolate dark that swung like a TV ad when she sashayed like she was doing now.

“They’re not even looking!” Lola hissed. “Should we just go over there?”

A small posse of boys passed around a cigarette, half-grinning to a joke maybe someone made, eyes darting over passersby like shorebirds seeking fish. The tallest one of the four flicked an ash the girls’ way and caught Carrie’s eye. He wagged four fingers towards himself. Good soldiers they were, the girls sauntered over.

“Hey, jail baits,” a boy named Corey said. “You havin’ fun?” The tall boy called Trip said, “Meet us after you’re done with the rides. Doobie Central. Red Datsun. Think you can find it?”

Carrie widened her eyes. Lola rolled hers.

“Sure, we’re down. Parking lot pot. No cops here or anything.” Lola shifted her hip. “You guys look bored. Come on some rides with us first. I wanna go on the Scrambler again.”

Carrie stared at her friend with both dismay and thrill. She was talking trash with seniors, guys they knew from parties but were way out of their sophomore league. Carrie darted out of herself for a devastating moment, and saw future Lola, a Lola that could take down a room, command respect, walk every floor with intention while Carrie, Carrie would be the person pulled, falling without protest when the pulley broke.

A cool gust of wind, and Carrie stepped back, a pull at Lola’s purse. Lola was still talking shit with Trip, who was apparently pushing her to meet them in 30 minutes at his old car.

“Are we gonna ride the big one? Carrie looked at Lola, while the 99 percent rest of her pulsed with the presence of the boys. She was about to be left on the curb again, the end of their night together, if Lola kept yammering. Greg was the only one sort of checking out Carrie, but his eyes were on her boobs and she knew his hands would be there next, if she followed their plans.

“Oh man, you guys should do that. It’s a trip,” said Trip, a bit of enthusiasm percolating over his lazy drawl.

“Yeah,” agreed Greg, his eyes now on Lola’s boobs. “Just don’t poop yourself. It’s high as shit.”

“Speaking of high,” chimed in Corey. Apparently that sentence fragment contained all the planning, organization, and execution required of a night at the Park, as the silent Brad waved a bye at the girls and muttered to his companions and Trip reminded Lola of the parking lot date, if she was cool enough.

Carrie and Lola watched the four blur into the masses until they were gone.

Carrie pushed out a blue tongue. “Ready for it?” she yelled. Lola sucked the last juice from the soggy paper cone. “Let’s do this thing.”

 “Yeah, okay, just to be as brave as you,”

They pulled around lines for the rides the girls had taken many times already. Aerosmith blasted in falsetto wails then smashed with Van Halen on the Cyclone Loop.  But it was the new attraction that sucked the crowds into queues like the park had never seen since its opening a couple of months ago. It was feared, revered, honored more than knees to Jesus if you dared to take its offer and bragged about surviving.

The Cage.

Carrie had to pee by the time they got to the front. She didn’t tell, and she also didn’t tell Lola that she was scared out of her wits, that she was not brave, that she just wanted to go home and talk on the phone to Lance whom she might love and cuddle with her miniature poodle.  She looked over at Lola, but Lola was gazing at the stilled ride. They watched as people struggled to the exit gates, some looking thrilled and giving high fives. But some had faces that were not so happy. One younger girl was crying up at her mother. Carrie couldn’t hear what she was saying.

“Come on, next, next!,” the kid was yelling.

The girls waited until the thing cranked slowly towards them. It was literally a cage, a behemoth lobster trap, a children’s jail. All steel rails, two seats, grab bars and lap strap when you got inside.

The kid barked again and the girls got in. He pulled on the fat belts around them and latched the door. The clang meaning no backsies, protests, mind-changing. They were in for the ride.

Their car bumped up as others boarded. Lola looked at Carrie in feigned anguish then laughed. Carrie’s heart was ba-bumping and her blood felt cold inside her.

And the action began.

At first, Carrie was surprisingly exhilarated. Their cage rose smoothly in the air with the other cages, in a night that cooled in the sky-rise. She saw the park large, then smaller, then a mouse size of lights and tiny figures and she saw also, very far away, her neighborhood, where lived her parents and her poodle and a hundred comforting things.  

Lola, Lola was strangely quiet and she gripped a bar and stared straight ahead.

As the terrible ascension peaked, the cages began to spin. The tower spun. Joints of long metal arms held them to the tower, as it rotated and the cages plunged up and down, a million miles an hour. Carrie was screaming in terror and joy. Everything was spinning lights, piercing her skin with blues and purples and greens.

Lola held on. Her soldered mouth wasn’t making a sound.

Something went wrong.

Seventy feet in air. A terrible crack.

The great machine stopped with a mechanical screech and a neck-whipping lurch. Lola and Carrie’s car swung far up then back, then again until it settled, shaking in the breeze. They looked down.

A cage some feet below them dangled from a black cable, its fused joint to the metal severed, white stars popping into the air. It hung at an angle. The girls could see the tops of two heads, one pony-tailed and the other in curls. The enclosure was swaying slowly, horribly. Silence. Thousands of hours or maybe five minutes paused as Carrie waited for their car to pop next. Watching the two heads, those two still heads of people. A breeze ruffled the curly hair.

The arm jolted down again.

People were running on the ground, people had bullhorns. But all Carrie heard was the sickening sounds of their own cage, squeak, scritch  squeak scritch. She begged god god god god make it stop let us down.

An ambulance squealed below the broken cage just as it snapped off.

Lola’s urine dripped down from her shorts’ leg, through the bars and onto the crumpled coffin on the ground.

Rescue came. It was not easy.

The sirens, the mayhem, the panicked people running out of the park. The gawkers watching men trying to open the collapsed bars. The cars left in air. The people left in air.

Lola and Carrie entwined hands and remained still as stones. Their cage rocked a bit in the wind. Carrie again saw her poodle and the face of her mother, her mother with a side smile and smart brown eyes. For a splinter, she felt grief so deep it erased her panic.

Silence then- a grinding jerk. It came from their cage.

The ride wasn’t moving, but people were moving up to help them. There was a helicopter, but it couldn’t get too close to the ride because of its wind. Carrie unstraddled herself and shrieked something inaudible to the air.

The enclosure jolted again, and now the horrible hot stars were falling on them. Carrie’s buckle lunged and hit her eye with force. Now there was blood.

Lola looked down and saw red lights. She looked up and saw nothing higher than them, only the blank black of sky and a little moon. Carrie was moaning and holding her face.

Two men helped them down, told them to be very brave, and put strange gear on with straps attached to them. They descended. It was a long way.

Then it was black, even blacker than the mindless sky. Carrie turned to her friend but Lola had closed her eyes. Sirens wailed around them and crackles spit over walkie talkies.

A lady with a large purse hovered over Carrie. She was dipping something in a cup of water.

She laid a single teabag over the girl’s eye. The cold liquid, the new red moon. The distant sound of a metal carcass crashing to the ground.