by Alex Flinn
But the wild midway music called me to stay. Stay.
I didn’t go to the livestock tent, though. I went the other way, past the circus tent where Karpe and I had gone the night before. I considered going in, but decided against it. I’d only gone to make Karpe happy. Besides, it wouldn’t be as real the second time. I walked past booths offering ID bracelets and massage-by-the-minute. I remembered the burger and took a bite. Then another, until I finished it and realized I was still hungry.
When I looked up, I was standing in front of the double Ferris wheel. I had no idea why. I recognized the guy, Cricket, who was working it. He beckoned me over.
“Hey, kid,” he said.
“My name is Michael.”
He didn’t introduce himself. “Want to make a buck, Michael?”
“How?”
“The guy who was supposed to take tickets got here totally baked. Can you help me out there while I operate the ride?”
“I don’t know. I’m supposed to be meeting Kirstie soon.”
He snorted. “How can I say this? I’ll pay you for the next hour, then you check with her. When she tells you she ain’t ready, you come back and work some more.”
Which sort of pissed me off, but I suspected he was right. Also, I liked the idea of working. I’d never been able to have an after-school job since Mom and Walker got married.
“What do I do?” I said.
“Take tickets, five apiece, and don’t rip ’em. Just throw them in.” He gestured toward a wooden box beside him.
I looked at my watch—seven twenty—and checked the beeper in my pocket again to make sure it was still on. But Cricket had walked away, and people were waiting. So I started taking tickets. At first I had to unfurl them and count them before I threw them into the box. Cricket was working the controls, making the seats come down so people could get on. And when the last seat came down, he hollered “Last one!” so I knew not to take any more.
After a few runs, I got so I knew what five tickets looked like, even if people handed them to me in a sweaty ball. I knew when the last person got on too, before the ride was set to run. And I started to stand like I’d always seen carnies stand, facing sideways and head down, not really looking at anyone.
That’s why I didn’t notice Cricket next to me at first.
“You get a rhythm going,” he said. “So you can just stay there and think and not think, if you know what I mean.”
I did. I looked at my watch. I’d been there almost an hour, and I hadn’t checked my beeper since I’d first gotten there. Cricket was right. I couldn’t tell you what I’d been thinking, but it felt good. Like when I was younger and I used to put up signs on trees and mow people’s lawns for extra money. It had been a while since I felt like I’d actually worked for something.
The wheel was running regular, and Cricket pointed up at the highest car. “Look.”
At first I didn’t see what he was talking about. Then I did. A couple at the top of the wheel. The girl was riding, black tank top shoved up, her head in her boyfriend’s lap.
“People think they’re invisible up there. Or maybe they just don’t care what we see.” The car came closer until I could see exactly what they were doing. The girl was really young, maybe twelve or thirteen tops. Probably there with her parents and talked them into letting her go out on her own. The guy seemed older, my age. I looked away.
“You wouldn’t believe the shit I see,” Cricket said.
I thought he meant the night before. I said, “Kirstie and me, we didn’t…”
“Yeah, I know you didn’t,” he said. “Kirstie ain’t like that. She likes her privacy a lot for a carny. We screw with her about it all the time.”
“Do you and she… I mean, do you…”
He laughed. “Yeah, she’d like to think so, huh? But no. I’m not crushing Her Kirstieness. But I love her, you know?”
I nodded.
Cricket looked at the wheel, and I followed his eyes to the couple from before. When I looked back at Cricket, he’d moved to the ride controls. He stopped it just as the couple reached bottom. They didn’t budge.
I knew what he wanted me to do. I walked toward them. “Okay! Ride’s over.”
The girl started pulling down her shirt, quick, not making eye contact. Real young. The boy opened his eyes.
“Let us off last,” he said.
“Sorry. You have to wait in line to ride again.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Cricket nodding toward a uniformed cop. He was standing about twenty yards away, collecting his free orangeade from a tired-looking orangeade wench. But before I had time to point him out, the girl climbed over her boyfriend. “Come on, Ian.” She still didn’t look at me.
I moved away.
When the ride loaded up, Cricket came back over.
“So you’re, like, the morals police?” I said, laughing.
“Hey, you let people do that, they mess up the seats.” He laughed too. Then he got serious. “The marks, the people in the real world, they think we carnies are, like … what do you call those dudes in India no one talks to?”
“Untouchables.” I was surprised he knew that.
“Right. We’re untouchables. But that’s because they don’t see what’s happening in their own clean little world. The stuff that’s going on in front of their own eyes.”
I thought of Walker and his Man-of-the-Year dinner, and I knew what he meant.
Cricket fished out a crumpled ten. “Why don’t you check with Kirstie, then come back when she tells you to bail?”
I did that. And when Kirstie told me to come back at ten when the carnival closed, I almost didn’t mind.
THIS YEAR
“Put the mole in the hole. Prize every time.” It’s five thirty Saturday. Only about forty hours until I see Mom. My guard is up, but I do my job. I focus on two girls in sorority jerseys and real short shorts. “I’m not talking pocket-sized junk either,” I tell them. “We’ve got really big junk here.”
One of the girls—the one chewing gum—giggles. “You’re cute.”
Her friend nudges her. “Lisette…”
“Hey, Lisette,” I say, “ever play this game?” I know how to get money from girls.
“How old are you?” Lisette asks me. She has dark hair and looks a bit like Kirstie, if you don’t look too close.
Her friend’s still nudging her. “Lisette, are you trippin’?”
“Yeah, better watch out for me, Lisette.” I grin, knowing how she’ll react. When her friend looks away, I say, “I’m Robert. I’m nineteen. Want to try?”
Lisette hesitates. “Can I have a freebie?”
I shake my head. “Wouldn’t be fair.”
Lisette’s smile tells me she’s not mad, that, in fact, I have a shot with her. There have been a lot of shots this year, a lot of opportunities, both with other carnies and with townies who like to feel wild by making it with one of us. Kirstie once told me carnies sleep around so much because they’re lonely … even though they’re never alone.
“Does it help?” I’d asked Kirstie. “I mean, does it make you feel less lonely?”
“Nope,” she said. “But you think it will, at first, so you try. Usually it makes it worse.”
She was right. In the beginning I took a few girls up on their offers. But lately I’ve sat back. I’ve held back. Maybe I’m waiting for someone I love.
But for some reason—maybe because she looks like Kirstie—I say to Lisette, “I’ve got a break in an hour. See you then?”
And she says, “Maybe you will.”
She walks away just as Cricket steps up. “Hold a sec,” I say, and I start the game. Around me, they’re all pounding. Cricket slips a copy of the Miami Herald in front of me.
“This guy looks like you, doesn’t he?”
I glance down, knowing before I do that it is me, recognizing the photo, me and Mom at one of my games. Someone at school, maybe even Tris, must have snapped it, then sold it to the pape
r when the price was right. I hear the pounding in my ears.
“Since when do you read the paper?” I say. My throat hurts to talk.
“Some guy left it on the ride.” He looks at it. “Is it you … Michael? His name’s the same as yours.”
“My name is Robert.”
“But it used to be … look, you know I’m on your side. But it says… I mean, people might be looking for you. For this guy.” He jabs the paper. “If it’s you, maybe you were right. Maybe you ought to bail. You could get in trouble.”
“It’s not me!” But I grab the paper from him.
“Hey!” A voice interrupts. “Hello? Anyone there? I won. Where’s my prize?”
“Sure.” I walk away, still holding the paper and barely able to see the prizes through the blur from the ride lights, and the haze of smoke from hamburgers burning.
Later, on my break, I go to the men’s room and stare at the photo for a long time. Then I tear the article into little pieces and flush it down the toilet.
I forget all about Lisette until I head back to my joint and see her walking away, mad. I wish I cared, but I don’t. There are only two people I care about in the world, and I can’t be with either of them.
LAST YEAR
I left the double Ferris wheel at ten with twenty-five dollars in my pocket.
“Aw, you don’t have to,” I said, when Cricket handed me the money. “I’d have been here anyway.” I tried to give the money back.
Cricket waved me off. “Fuggedaboutit. You work, you earn cash. That’s life.”
I pocketed it. It was mostly ones, and they felt heavy and good in my pocket. I raised a hand to Cricket and went back to find Kirstie. I was tired, I realized. Not sleepy but tired like I used to get after a football game.
Kirstie put me to more work, closing up her joint. While I pulled down the awnings, she finished counting her money and wrote the final figure on a slip for her money bag with a satisfied smile. I checked the beeper in my pocket. Still silent. But, of course, if Walker had my mother up against a wall, she wouldn’t be able to call.
“I can’t stay long,” I told Kirstie. “It’s late. I should get home.”
“Early bedtime?”
“No.”
“No,” she agreed. “You’re afraid something will happen if you aren’t there.” Not a question. She tossed the money bag to a guy who came around collecting them, then came outside the joint to help me close up.
“What’s your problem?” I said. “You tell me to come here tonight, then ignore me for hours. Now, when I have to go, you say stay. I just have school tomorrow. That’s all.”
She shrugged. “You want to go home, go home.” She started to walk away.
I don’t know if she walked really quickly or if I just sort of blacked out, but the next thing I knew, she was yards away, across the nearly empty fairgrounds, and I was listening to the thuds of my running shoes against the pavement, watching her hair, raven-colored, full of moonlight.
“Wait!” I said. “Wait for me. Please.”
When she heard my voice, she stopped for me.
She took me back to the circus tent. It was a lot different than when Karpe and I had been there. Then there’d been hardly any audience. Now it swarmed with people, most of whom would have qualified for the misfit table if they’d gone to my school. I inhaled heat, smoke. A guy with tattoos all over, including his face, had a shouted conversation with his friend, who was over seven feet tall.
“Is there a freak show at this fair?” I asked Kirstie. I hadn’t thought there was.
“They’re my friends.”
“I just meant … you don’t seem like them.”
“I am like them.”
I was stammering out I’m sorry when Cricket showed up.
“What’s the deal?” With Kirstie there, he ignored me. “We getting saved again?”
Kirstie laughed. “Not tonight.”
“Good,” Cricket said. “I been saved in Apopka and again in Savannah—and the season’s just beginning.”
Kirstie turned to me. “Every town or so you get do-gooders from some religious denominations who think it would be a new idea to try and convert the carnies.”
“I got so many Bibles, I could make table legs out of them,” Cricket added.
He laughed, but Kirstie said, “I hate them. They don’t know anything about me, but they assume I need saving just because I’m here. I came to get away from that stuff.”
“Hey, I came to get away from people beating the hell out of me,” Cricket said. “That, and for the parties.”
“Us against them,” Kirstie said.
“Sleeping late. Eating an unbalanced diet.”
“Not judging anyone, ever.”
“Wild sex, cool drugs, free rides on the Himalaya,” Cricket said. “That’s the best part.”
Kirstie glanced at me. “Michael thinks we’re trippin’.”
“No, I don’t.” I touched her fingertips. Us against them, she’d said. I used to be them. Now I wasn’t, but I wasn’t part of any us either. I was no one.
The guy with the tattoos came over and handed Kirstie and Cricket each a beer. He kissed Kirstie on the cheek. “A townie?” He gestured at me.
“’Fraid so,” Kirstie said. “Stan, meet Michael.”
“I’d make you happier.”
Kirstie laughed. “Oh, I don’t doubt it, Stan. I don’t doubt it.”
The guy walked away, and Cricket raised a beer to his back. “To irresponsibility!”
“To having nothing left to lose,” Kirstie said.
“What does that mean?” I asked her.
“At some point, when you give up everything, there’s nothing left to worry about.” She handed me her beer. “It’s freeing, in a way.”
I raised the bottle. “To having nothing to lose!”
I moved closer to her, farther from the tightness of the group of strangers. Her hair smelled like outside, and I inhaled deeply. The girl from the show the night before, the contortionist called Ni-Jin, stood outside the circus ring, eating a hot dog and smoking. Up close, I could tell she was my age, not ten like they’d said. Then the ringmaster showed up.
He was still in his ringmaster suit, which is how I knew him. When he reached the center of the ring, someone yelled, “Now Bill’s gonna talk.”
“And talk,” said another.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the ringmaster, Bill, announced. “Children of all ages.”
I looked around to see if there really were kids there. There were a few, which seemed strange, considering the beer and booze and the way some of the women were dressed. I smelled pot, too, and thought about what Cricket had said about drugs.
“In the center ring,” the guy continued, “Jack and Denise!”
A couple came in. The guy had on a suit that looked like he’d found it somewhere. The girl was dressed like a circus performer, in silver sequins and fishnets. She carried a bouquet of pink light-up roses they sold on the midway.
“What is this?” I asked Kirstie.
“A wedding,” she said.
And, sure enough, the ringmaster started reciting, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to join Jack and Denise.”
Denise did a little turn, displaying herself. She had a hot body, and some guys whooped.
“They’re really getting married?” I said.
“For the season,” Kirstie said. “Carny marriages go from, like, March to November, renewable after that. Some people have stayed together thirty years or more, season by season.”
The ringmaster was saying, “Do you promise to love, honor, and not come home too trashed at night?”
“I love you, honey,” Cricket joked by me, “but the season’s over.”
“Of course, if the guy beats the crap out of you,” Kirstie said, “it’s easier to clear out.”
I thought about that. From what I could tell, lots of guys beat on women. Maybe most. I tried to think back on girls I’d dated. I’
d never hit a girl. We’d mostly made out and, when we fought, it was about my not calling enough. This one girl, Ashley Cates, I’d dated in eighth grade, said I had a problem with intimacy. Where did girls come up with that stuff? I told her I didn’t know what she meant, and she said, “Exactly.”
Anyway, I’d never hit any girls.
“Does that shock you?” Kirstie asked.
“No,” I said. “No one stays together anyway. My parents split up, and now I wish my mom would ditch my stepdad.” I stopped. That was more than I’d meant to say. “What was your family like?”
“Let’s just say I’ll never get married, not even for a season.”
“Did your parents fight a lot?”
“No,” she said. “No, they didn’t do that.”
“What did they do?”
“Mostly didn’t talk at all. I’d rather be alone than with someone who treats me bad.”
“Yeah, me too.” It was amazing, how much we thought alike. “Do you ever get lonely?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I get lonely.”
I was going to ask something else, but she turned away. They were on the I dos.
“…in fine weather or when you get rained out, for better or worse, until the end of the season or death, whichever comes first?” the ringmaster was asking.
“I do,” said Denise.
“I now pronounce you man and wife.”
That was it. Jack and Denise didn’t wait to be told to kiss, just started sucking face right there. People whooped and cheered, then started heading outside.
“Where are we going now?” I said, glad to get out of the crowded tent.
“Double Ferris wheel,” Kirstie said. “Traditional carny wedding night’s spent at the top.”
I flashed back to being up there with Kirstie, making out. Then to the couple earlier. I looked at Cricket, and he was sort of grinning at me, like he knew what I was thinking.
“The whole night?” I said.
“That’s how you know you’re really married around here.”
