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With 50 minutes left on earth, Eddie took his last walk along Ruby Pier.

After all these years he could hear trouble, he said, in the spits and stutters and thrumming of the equipment. Sometimes he would stop, his eyes glazing over, and people walking past thought something was wrong. He looked for broken boards, loose bolts, worn-out steel. Every afternoon, he walked the park, checking on each attraction, from the Tilt-A-Whirl to the Pipeline Plunge. His pale brown uniform suggested a workingman, and a workingman he was.Įddie’s job was “maintaining” the rides, which really meant keeping them safe. He kept a cigarette behind his left ear and a ring of keys hooked to his belt. His face was broad and craggy from the sun, with salty whiskers and a lower jaw that protruded slightly, making him look prouder than he felt. His legs were thin and veined now, and his left knee, wounded in the war, was ruined by arthritis. It also had a big new ride called Freddy’s Free Fall, and this would be where Eddie would be killed, in an accident that would make newspapers around the state.Īt the time of his death, Eddie was a squat, white-haired old man, with a short neck, a barrel chest, thick forearms, and a faded army tattoo on his right shoulder. The park had the usual attractions, a boardwalk, a Ferris wheel, roller coasters, bumper cars, a taffy stand, and an arcade where you could shoot streams of water into a clown’s mouth. The last hour of Eddie’s life was spent, like most of the others, at Ruby Pier, an amusement park by a great gray ocean. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun.