Courtesy Calls: The Midway (1)

Kurt had come for the weigh-off, and the weigh-off ran late.

They held it in the agriculture barn at the low end of the fairgrounds, under a row of caged work lights, with the big doors rolled open at both ends to let the cold through. The pumpkins sat on wooden pallets down the center aisle, eleven of them, each with an index card stapled to the pallet giving the grower's name and county. The heavy ones had gone flat on the bottom and sat slumped on their pallets, creased where the weight had settled. The biggest was the color of a manila folder and came higher than Kurt's belt.

A man in a seed-company cap ran the forklift. He slid the forks under a pallet, raised it a foot off the concrete, and crept it down the aisle to the platform scale at the end, and the crowd walked along beside it like people following a casket. He set it on the scale and backed off, and everybody looked up at the red numbers on the readout bolted to the post.

Kurt stood at the back with his hands in his jacket pockets. It was cold enough that the breath of the people in front of him hung over their heads in the work lights. Kids had drifted in from the midway to see what the crowd was for, and they stood at the front in capes and plastic masks, holding orange plastic buckets of candy against their chests. A girl dressed as a bumblebee rode her father's shoulders and drummed his collarbone with her heels every time the numbers changed.

The manila pumpkin went last. The numbers climbed and hung and settled at nine hundred and eighty-one, and the barn let out its breath. The grower was a woman in her seventies in a canvas barn coat. When they called her name she didn't go up to the scale. She stayed where she was beside the pallet with her hand flat on the side of the pumpkin and kept it there while a man from the paper took the picture.

Kurt waited until the flash went off. Then he went out the far end of the barn.

He had parked in the overflow field at dusk, out past the livestock barns, and come in through a service gate in the back fence rather than walking the long way around to the front. The shortest way back to the truck was the way he had come. He could eat on the road. He thought about the drive, forty minutes of two-lane with nothing open on it after ten, and turned toward the smell of the burger trailer.

He walked between the cattle barn and the poultry barn. The animal smell lay low and warm in the cold, and the big fans in the barn walls had been shut off for the night. Somebody had tied bundles of cornstalks to the light poles along the way, with a hay bale at the foot of each pole and a carved pumpkin on every bale, the 4-H's work, every face a little different. From somewhere on the main midway a recorded scream went up and ran its whole length. A minute later it came again, the same scream at the same length. It was the haunted house, which had been playing it since six.

He came out between two ticket stands onto the main midway, crossed under the strings of bulbs, and turned down beside the funnel cake stand into the spur.

It ran fifty yards and stopped. Chain-link closed off the end of it, with a strip of orange plastic woven through the top of the fence, and a generator truck sat against the fence and hummed. Beside the truck the service gate stood open. The fair crews were using it to carry ice in and trash out, and past them, out in the dark, lay the overflow field, rows of windshields catching a little of the midway light. Kurt's truck was out there at the end of the last row with its nose toward the farm road.

The spur held a booth selling glow sticks, a burger trailer with three people at the window, and a milk-bottle toss.

The man in the milk-bottle booth looked up when Kurt came off the midway. He held it a moment longer than a man looks at a stranger. Kurt had passed the booth at dusk on his way in, when the man was hanging his prizes, and the man had looked up then too.

Kurt got in line at the burger trailer behind two teenagers in rubber masks and read the menu board.

The operator wore a canvas apron with a fair program rolled tight and stuck in the front pocket, like a newspaper he meant to get to, and a carpenter's pencil behind one ear. He had a voice that carried without any effort. His shelf was a single plank of plywood painted red, hardly deeper than the foot of a bottle, with a sheet of plywood standing up behind it to stop the balls. Prizes hung from hooks along the roof of the booth, plush pumpkins with stitched grins and black felt bats with their wings spread. Higher up, past the reach of anything, a row of mirrors with beer names painted on them had gone pale in the sun of a lot of summers.

He was between customers. He set six bottles on the plank in a pyramid, stepped back, and flipped a ball at them underhand without looking. The pyramid came apart. The bottles rang off each other and off the plywood, a bright cheap clatter like a silverware drawer pulled out too far, and the masks in front of Kurt turned to look.

"Nothing to it," the operator told them. "Five dollars, three balls. Clear the shelf and pick your prize."

A man in a work jacket came down the spur with two children, a small firefighter in a plastic helmet and a girl with a wand. He had a grip on each of them. The girl pointed her wand at the pumpkins.

"Watch your daddy," the man said, and put a five on the counter.

The operator took it and crouched below the counter to restack. Kurt heard glass knock against glass down there, low and solid, a sound with no ring in it. When the operator came up he set the bottom three on the plank first, and they went down without a sound. The three he set on top of them chimed when they touched.

The father wound up and threw hard. The ball struck high, at the top of the pyramid. The top bottle went off the back of the plank. The two under it rocked and settled where they had been. The bottom row didn't move.

"Ooh," the operator said, and held out the next ball.

The father's second ball took off the second bottle on the left and left the rest. His third missed. He put down another five without looking at his children, and the operator set up the top again, and the father threw three more and cleared nothing below the top. He put down a third five. The firefighter began to pull on his jacket. The girl had stopped pointing her wand.

"Come on, Daddy."

The man stood a moment longer looking at the bottom row of bottles. Then he let them pull him up the spur.

"Next year, chief," the operator called after him.

The teenagers in front of Kurt reached the window. Kurt moved up one.

A girl in cat ears came down the spur with a boy whose face was painted like a skull. The skull paid. The girl took the ball and held it in both hands and looked at the operator for instructions.

"Just throw it at them, sweetheart," the operator said.

He didn't go under the counter. He picked the fallen bottles off the boards behind the plywood, two at a time, and stacked all six on the plank, and every one of them chimed when he set it down.

The girl threw like a person shooing a cat. The ball hit the middle of the pyramid. All six came apart and went over the back of the plank, ringing.

The operator came off his stool with both arms up. "We got a winner! Folks, we got a winner!" He took a hooked pole from the corner of the booth and lifted down the biggest plush pumpkin he had, nearly as big as the girl's chest, and handed it across the counter. People turned to look from the burger line and from the top of the spur. The girl carried the pumpkin up toward the main midway in both arms with her chin on top of it, and the skull walked behind her and kept touching the pumpkin as though to make sure it was there.

Kurt looked at the place below the counter where the operator had not gone.

He stopped reading the menu board.

Over the loudspeakers a woman's voice wished everybody a happy Halloween and thanked them for a wonderful week, and reminded them that the midway would close at eleven o'clock. At the far end of the fairgrounds, the Scrambler went dark.

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Courtesy Calls: The Midway (2) | ABCtales