Coasters. Gerald Duff

of rides on the coaster had taught him how to experience the event most completely, and he had learned that on the way up the first incline the true rider looked first to the left to watch the trees shrink away and the ship canal come into view.

      Immediately on glimpsing the water, the rider then must look back and to the right for a view of the midway and the Ferris Wheel at its heart, a scene best taken when the lights were coming on and the customers who came to the park after having their evening meal somewhere else were hurrying from the parking lots toward the sounds of merry-go-round music and the clatter of wheels from the games of chance and the calls of the barkers.

      About then, the other riders in the coaster car would begin to scream as the top of the first incline came near and they realized there was nothing in view ahead but empty air. The true rider did not cry out or show alarm, but, as Waylon had learned in his long and faithful apprenticeship, looked instead at the hand rails to the left and right of the incline so as to see them tremble as the heavy car reached the top.

      There, at the high point, the drive chain carrying the load disengaged beneath, and the car seemed to stop for a moment before continuing its roll forward into the beginning of the descent. It was then the deepest, most panicky breaths were taken and the loudest screams of the entire circuit began, and it was then that the true rider removed his hands from the bar across his thighs holding him in the seat, and threw both arms above his head.

      The long fall forward began with a force that pulled him out of his seat and held him suspended against the bar, only the pressure on his legs keeping him inside the car, modulating steadily until at the bottom of the incline, the true rider was crushed into the seat until he weighed more than ever before in life.

      The next incline, necessarily shorter than the first, with a sudden hard right turn at the top, was the best for the true rider of all the circuits past and all those to come. For it was here at the top, as the car crested the incline, that true weightlessness came to the one loyal enough to let go of all support and stays and to allow the attending forces to have complete dominion and control.

      He floated, the true rider, touching nothing, for a count of two, all that pushed him up and all that held him back equalized and kept at bay in balance, and he drifted in air, having nothing and wanting nothing. At soundless peace, in a still point with the screams of the others about him, neither bound by earth nor taken by sky.

      That moment past, the rest of the ride around the loops and beneath the overhanging supports and down the long slide back to the beginning was a steady increase in gravity, so that as the safety bars flipped up for leaving the car, Waylon ended each journey feeling heavier than ever before, climbing from the car with a conscious effort to walk down the exit ramp with his shoes scuffing hard against the pavement.

      In his four summers on Pleasure Island, he had ridden the other rides many times—they were free, after all—the Ferris Wheel, the Whip, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Ride-E-O, the Avalanche, the Bumper Cars, but it was only the coaster that spoke to him at the weightless top of the second crest something he could never quite make out and understand, a message to which he wanted to attend again and again in that moment of canceled forces at peace with each other.

      “Ride the coaster,” Waylon said out loud, the sound of his words covered by the deep drone of the boat engine, “thrill of a lifetime.”

      “What was that?’

      Teddy had stood up from his seat on the engine housing and was leaning toward Waylon’s plastic lawn chair, keeping himself balanced by holding on to one of the two-by-four uprights to the sunroof. The vibration of the Gulf Princess plowing through the water was causing his chin to quiver as though he had a slight case of palsy, and his next statement seemed to be forced loose from his mouth one word at the time.

      “What’d you say?” he asked.

      “Nothing,” Waylon said. “Just trying to remember the words to a song.”

      “You like music, huh?”

      “Some songs I do,” Waylon said. “Not all of it.”

      “How much longer do you think he’ll keep on going like this?”

      “The captain?” Waylon said, wishing Teddy would return to his seat by the woman perched on the engine housing. He was not enjoying having to yell into the face of the man just three feet from his own, and he was particularly ready to stop having to look into the man’s mouth as he answered back. “Not much further. They go out for about two hours usually. Charters do. But this one’s only a half-day.”

      Teddy nodded, not speaking this time, to Waylon’s relief, and headed back for the front of the boat, pausing to say something to the woman in passing. She laughed and pulled her feet back from out of the sun and was leaning forward to squirt some lotion from a tube onto the tops of her toes when the roar of the engine suddenly subsided and the boat immediately slowed its speed to a wallow, as the captain pulled back on the throttle and looked back and forth from the control panel to a composition notebook he held in his hand.

      The sudden quiet seemed louder than the engine had been. Teddy straightened up from the ice chest for which he had been headed when Captain Metcalf slowed things down and held up a can of beer toward Waylon.

      “You didn’t get a chance to bring any with you,” he said. “Want one of mine?”

      “Later,” Waylon said. “After I’ve caught my first fish.”

      “What’s this mine stuff?” the woman said. “Share and share alike on the open seas. That’s the law of the deep, right?”

      She was directing her question toward Waylon in the stern while she felt around for her shoes with her feet without looking down. She found one, then the other and stood up to stretch, her gaze still on him. He wondered if her tan line had been altered yet on her feet.

      “That’s the way I always heard it,” he said, grinning and then nodding toward Metcalf who had killed the engine and was beginning to rig some rods he had pulled from an overhead rack. “On a boat, the captain is the only law. The judge and the jury.”

      “Is that right, Captain?” Marsue asked. “What the man just said?”

      “Only boat I know about is a fishing boat,” Metcalf said, reaching for one of the boxes of frozen squid stowed in a floor compartment. “On a charter boat the captain is the one gets to do all the work.”

      “At least he gets to put the bait on the hook,” Marsue said, watching Metcalf rip into the cardboard and begin prising individual squid apart from the frozen mass inside. “Bait comes first.”

      “Bait,” Metcalf said, holding up a palm-sized squid and reaching for one of the rigs, “is what makes it all happen. Here’s one ready for somebody.”

      He held the rod out toward the woman and reached for another one. “But you know I have seen fish hit a bare hook, and I ain’t talking about a plug made to look like something. I mean just the plain old steel hook with the barb on it.”

      “It takes a hungry one to do that,” Waylon said, taking the next prepared rod from the captain.

      “Starving,” Marsue said. “Just famished.” She held up the hooked squid on her line for examination, poking at it with the tip of a fingernail.

      “A fish couldn’t starve, could it?” Leo asked, his hand out ready for the next rod being worked on by Captain Metcalf. “Out here in the Gulf with all these other ones to eat.”

      “Naw,” the captain said and handed Leo the rod. “Way before he starved to death, he’d get eat up by something hungrier than he was.”

      “A fish gets hungry enough, he loses all caution, I imagine,” Marsue said. “He forgets to keep his head down.” She walked to the bow of the boat and dropped her line over the side toward the water, but it was too short to take the hooked squid and the lead sinker below the surface. “How does this reel work?” she said.

      “Sir,” Captain Metcalf said, looking