Fifth Row from the Front (3)

The concession stand was cinder block painted white with a shed roof over the window, and the line was already out past the corner of the building. It smelled like scorched butter and bleach. Inside, three women and a boy worked the counter with their sleeves pushed up, and one of the women had a cigarette going in a foil ashtray on the ledge behind her and took a pull off it between orders.

"Two hot dogs," Dennis said. "And whatever he wants."

Bobby looked up at the board a long time. The board had letters missing.

"Is a Icee a drink or a candy," he said.

"It's a drink."

"Then I want a Icee and a Sugar Daddy."

"That's a drink and a candy."

"You said whatever he wants."

"Your mama'd have my hide."

"She ain't here," Bobby said, and then looked at his shoes, because he knew better.

The woman with the cigarette laughed at that with smoke coming out of it. "Give him the Sugar Daddy," she said. "It's the last night."

---

They carried it back in a cardboard tray.

It had gotten cold in earnest while they were in the line, cold enough that the breath showed, and out at the edges of the field people had started their engines to run the heaters. There were little clouds standing behind the cars.

They passed a truck with a card table set up in the bed and four grown men playing spades on it under a trouble light.

They passed the third row, where a car had gone into the mud hole up to the hubcap and five or six people were standing around the back of it not helping.

They passed a woman in a folding chair with a boy asleep across her lap, a boy of maybe four, still in most of a costume, a plastic mask pushed up on his head and the elastic under his chin. She had a blanket up over him to the neck.

"Y'all made it," she said to Dennis.

He stopped. He looked at her for longer than was polite.

"Faye," he said.

"Faye Auman now. Faye Kearns then." She shifted the boy a little to get an arm free. "I heard you were up in Virginia."

"Maryland."

"Maryland." She said it the way you say a word you're not going to need again. "Ruthie said you'd come down for this."

"I ought to have called her."

"You ought to have." She looked at Bobby. "Whose is this one?"

"Mine."

"Well he's got Margaret's chin on him," she said, and Dennis did not have anything to say to that, and she let it go and looked back down at her own boy. "This one's about done. We'll get one more in and then I'm taking him home."

"A lot of folks leaving?"

"Everybody with a little one." She got the blanket up over the boy's shoulder. "It don't stop, you know. It goes till daylight. There's people out here fixing to sit in this field till the sun comes up, and I have got to have him at church at nine."

---

She was right about the leaving.

It started before the clock got down to five and it went on for twenty minutes. Headlights came on all over the back half of the field, one and then another and then a dozen, and the cars came up the aisles slow with people walking alongside them, and out on the highway you could hear them turning and the sound of them going both ways.

Dennis stood by his open door and watched it happen. It was like water going out of a tub.

What was left, when it was done, was thinner and older and further forward. Almost nobody past the eighth row. Half the lawn chairs were folded up and gone, and the ones left had people in them under blankets with their heads back, looking up. The men playing spades had not moved. The truck with the two people sitting in the bed had not moved. The station wagon with the tailgate down had not moved, but the kids were off it now and standing around a trash barrel somebody had put a fire in, which was not allowed and which nobody was doing anything about.

Down at the front, the playground still had fifteen or twenty on it. The older ones. The ones whose people had decided to make a night of it.

---

The speakers popped and there was a sound like somebody knocking on a microphone with a knuckle.

"Evening," the voice said.

The field went down a little.

"This is Hollis. Y'all know me." He stopped for a while. You could hear him breathing on it. "I want to say we're going to run four tonight like the sign says and we're going to run them all the way to daylight. Ain't nobody getting run off. If you go to sleep out here that's all right too."

Somebody down front hollered something and there was some laughing.

"Now before the next one," Hollis said, "we've got a little something. There's a young fella from right here, Gentry's boy, B.J., some of y'all taught him in school. He's been making pictures with a camera out of his own pocket for about three years now and he made one here in Sink Creek this summer, and I told him we'd run it tonight."

Applause came up across the field, thin and scattered and real. Somebody two rows over said Burl's boy, and somebody answered him, and out in the dark near the fence one long horn blew.

"So that's what that is," Hollis said. "That's all I got to say."

The speaker popped and hummed.

---

Bobby was standing on the floorboard with his top half out the window.

"Can I go back down."

"It's cold."

"I got my coat."

Dennis looked down the aisle. He could see the playground from where he sat. He had picked the spot for that. The bigger kids were on the merry-go-round and two of them were pushing it with one foot each and the rest were hanging off it, and somebody down there was screaming the way a kid screams when nothing is wrong.

He thought about the boy in Faye's lap with his mask pushed up, going home at nine o'clock.

"Zip it," he said.

"It is zipped."

"All the way up."

Bobby zipped it up under his chin.

"Fifth row."

"From the front."

"Go on."

He went. Dennis watched him down the aisle, past the spades game, past the barrel with the fire in it, and the boy slowed up going by the fire and then kept on, and he went in among the others at the bottom and Dennis found him and lost him and found him again with his hand on the rail of the merry-go-round, waiting for a place on it.

Dennis got in and pulled the door to and rolled the window up to the speaker cord and put his hands down in his coat pockets.

---

The screen went black. There was no countdown on it.

Then there was a street.

It came up all at once with no title on it, in color that had gone thin and orange the way old film goes, and it was the square. Not the square as it was. The square with the drugstore still on the corner and the awnings out and the parking laid in at an angle instead of straight.

The field came apart.

Somebody was leaning on a horn before the first ten seconds were up. Then everybody was. People hollering out of windows, hollering at the screen, hollering at each other across the aisles. A man three cars down stood up out of his sunroof with both arms up.

The camera went along the sidewalk past the front of the hardware and there were women looking into it as it went by, women with their hair set, one of them putting her hand up in front of her face and laughing, and the field hollered at every one of them like they had come out on a stage.

That's Ann Blake. That's Ann.

That's my daddy's truck.

Hollis, that's your truck.

The music came on about then, and it was not anything anybody knew.

It came through the speakers with no bottom to it, thin, the way a record sounds through a box hung on a car window, and it was strings, and it went along under the pictures without any particular hurry. It did not go with the pictures and it did not go against them. It was just there, the whole way, and it did not stop where a song stops.

Nobody paid it any mind. The pictures were too good.

The camera came around the corner by the bank and there was a line of children on the curb with flags, and behind them the road, and coming up the road a fire truck with a man on it throwing candy, and the whole field went up at once.

Dennis put his hand on the door handle.

He was going to go down and get the boy. That was the thing to do. Bring him up here and put him on the hood in the blanket and let him see it, because this was the town, this was the whole town before any of it, and the boy had asked him this afternoon how come he'd been told about a drugstore that wasn't there, and Dennis had not had an answer for him, and here was the answer running sixty feet high on the last night there was ever going to be a screen in Sink Creek to run it on.

He got the door open and stood up out of the car and looked down the aisle at the playground to find him.

The merry-go-round had four kids on it and one of them was dragging a foot to keep it going.

He looked at the swings. He looked at the slide, and at the top of the slide, and at the dark behind it.

He went up on his toes.

The music kept on out of every speaker in the field at once, four hundred of them, and it was the only thing making any noise now, because down at the front of the lot the horns had begun to quit.

 

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