Courtesy Calls: The Midway (2)

There had been a boy standing at the top of the spur, by the funnel cake stand, while the girl won. Kurt had seen him without looking at him. The boy came down the spur now with his hand already in his front pocket.

He wore no costume and carried no bucket. He had no jacket either, only a school shirt with short sleeves, on a Saturday night in the cold, and the skin of his forearms had gone to gooseflesh. He wore sneakers with the laces tucked in instead of tied. Kids in capes and masks went past him the other way, up toward the lights, swinging their buckets, and he went down between them toward the booth.

The operator saw him coming and lit up.

"There he is. Champ. Knew you'd be back."

The boy put a five on the counter. The operator took it and crouched, and Kurt heard it again, glass on glass under the counter, low and solid. The bottom three went onto the plank without a sound. The top three chimed.

The boy took the first ball and wiped it on the front of his shirt. Then he stepped back and set his left foot on a place in front of the counter where there was no grass at all, a patch of packed dirt about the size of a boy's two shoes. He set it there as if it were marked. His lips were moving.

He wound up and threw overhand, as hard as he had in him. The ball struck high, at the top of the pyramid, where every kid's ball strikes. The top bottle went off the back of the plank. The two under it rocked and settled. The bottom row didn't move.

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

The boy wiped it on his shirt. He threw underhand this time, the way kids do once they've stopped trusting their arm, and the ball sailed into the canvas behind the plywood and dropped.

"She knocked them all down," the boy said. "With one."

"Half your size, too," the operator said. "You saw her. One throw, and she walked off with the biggest thing I got. It's in there, champ. You're due." He said it to the burger line as much as to the boy, and one of the masks laughed. He handed over the third ball without being asked.

The boy wiped it on his shirt and threw again. The ball clipped the top bottle and set it rocking, and it settled back exactly where it had stood. He looked at it. Then he turned his head to see what the man by the burger trailer was looking at, found it was the same shelf, and looked up at the man.

He was twelve, maybe, and thin through the neck, in a school shirt gone soft at the collar from washing. An envelope stuck up out of his back pocket, folded in half, with a list written down the outside in pencil in a grown woman's slanting hand. Kurt could read the first word from where he stood. Bread.

The masks got their order and left. Kurt stepped up to the window, put his money on the ledge, and turned his shoulder to the booth.

The gate was behind the booth from where he stood, twenty steps past it, standing open at the end of the spur. He could be through it and into the dark in under a minute and in the truck in three. The other way was up the spur to the main midway and the gap between two ticket stands where a man could be gone in four steps. He had marked them both on the way in. The gate was the shorter of the two. It went past the boy.

When he looked back, the boy was still watching him. He had left the bottles alone and was watching him.

The operator said something about second chances, and the line laughed. The boy didn't laugh. He was waiting to see which way Kurt went.

Kurt stayed at the window.

---

The woman in the burger trailer slid his order across the ledge in a paper boat and took his money without looking at it. She was looking where he was looking. Behind her the grill was already off, and she had a flat scraper in her other hand, and when she had made his change she went back to scraping. The grease came off the steel in gray curls and smoked in the cold coming through the window.

"That one's been here every night," she said. "Since Tuesday."

Kurt waited.

"Wednesday he came by here with nothing in him. You could tell. I give him one." She scraped. "Thursday he came back and put two dollars and fifty cents on that ledge in quarters, and walked off without saying anything."

At the booth the boy put down another five. He had to dig for it. It came out of his front pocket rolled thin as a straw, and he unrolled it on the counter and flattened it with his palm. He wiped the ball on his shirt and threw from the bare place. The top bottle went off the plank and the two under it stood. The operator made a long falling sound along with the people in line and slapped the counter. When the three balls were gone he picked the five up off the counter and dropped it into a coffee can on the shelf behind him. There was a strip of masking tape across the can, and somebody had written CHAMP on the tape in marker.

"That's your pot," the operator said. "Still yours. Just sitting there waiting on you."

"How much is in it?" the boy said.

The operator took the can down and shook it beside his ear, grinning at the line. It made a soft sound. Paper. "Enough to make it worth your while."

"It's forty," the boy said. "With that one."

"Then it's forty. You're the one keeping count." The operator put the can back on the shelf, one board higher than before.

Kurt took his burger off the ledge. "Anybody ever say anything?"

The woman wiped the ledge with a rag that left it wetter than before. "To who?"

He waited. She folded the rag over and wiped the same place.

"Somebody did, year before last," she said. "He had the basketball then. The rim. So this year he's got bottles."

---

A man in a green fair polo came down the spur from the main midway with a radio clipped to his belt. He walked loose in the shoulders, a man on the last night of a job, looking at nothing in particular. When he came even with the booth, the operator reached under the counter into a cooler and came up with a bottle of water, beaded and cold, and held it out without a word. The fair man took it on the way by. He went on down to the service gate and stood just inside it with his back to the lane, talking to somebody out in the dark that Kurt couldn't see.

Kurt picked up his burger in its paper boat and walked down the spur after him.

He went past the booth on the far side of the lane. The boy was standing at the counter with nothing in his hands, looking at the can on its higher board, and he didn't turn. The corner post of the booth was plywood painted red a long time ago. Down low, where nobody would look unless he was looking, there were inspection stickers from the fair board, one for each year, each stuck over a corner of the last. The oldest had gone white. Kurt counted nine before they disappeared under the grease.

The fair man heard him coming and turned. He was younger than Kurt had taken him for from behind.

"Fair office still open?" Kurt said.

"Closed at nine." The fair man twisted the cap off his water. "Something I can help you with?"

He looked at the wristband on Kurt's wrist, and then he looked at Kurt's face, and he took his time about it.

"No," Kurt said.

The fair man waited to see if there was more. Then he drank and turned back to the dark.

Kurt stood in the gate. The cold came off the field and through the chain-link with nothing to stop it. Out in the rows a truck door slammed and an engine turned over and somebody's headlights swung across the windshields and went away down the farm road. His own truck was out there at the end of the last row, pointed the right way. Forty minutes of two-lane. He could be on it before the Ferris wheel stopped.

Behind him, under the hum of the generator, glass knocked against glass, low and solid.

He turned around.

---

The boy was walking away from the booth.

He came up the lane with his hands at his sides and his head down, past the glow-stick booth and past the burger trailer, toward the top of the spur and the lights.

"Champ," the operator called. "Hey, champ."

The boy kept walking.

"Pot don't keep past tonight, champ. Trucks roll at six."

The boy got as far as the funnel cake stand. He stopped there under the bulbs. Kids in costumes went around him on both sides, a mummy unwinding at the wrist and a little girl in a cardboard box painted to look like a robot, and he stood in the middle of them with his hand in his front pocket. He stood there long enough for the haunted house scream to go up and run out.

Then he came back down the spur. He passed Kurt on the way without looking at him, and went to the counter, and stood on the bare place in the dirt.

Kurt carried his burger to the trash barrel at the corner of the booth, which put him an arm's length from the boy and a little behind him. He didn't look at the operator. He said, low, "You eat yet?"

The boy shook his head without turning around.

"Come up front with me. I'll buy you one of these."

The boy looked at the can. "I can't leave it."

"Hey, now." The operator's voice came down over both of them and out to the line, easy and loud. "Grandpa. You trying to steal my best customer?"

The line laughed. Up and down the spur, faces turned, and half of them weren't faces. A rubber werewolf looked at Kurt from the burger window. A pair of eyes looked at him through the holes in a hockey mask. There was no telling what the faces under them were doing.

The operator leaned on the counter on his elbows, smiling at the boy. "Champ's not a quitter. Quitters go home with nothing in their pockets. Champ's going home with the pot. Aren't you, champ?"

The boy stepped back up to the counter.

Kurt set the burger down on the lid of the trash barrel. He put his hands back in his jacket pockets. The werewolf and the hockey mask went on looking at him a while and then turned back to the window.

Out on the main midway the swing ride went dark, and the music that had been coming from it stopped in the middle of a song.

The operator swept the last fallen bottle off the plank with his forearm and caught it against his hip. "Hang on, champ," he said. "Don't you go anywhere. I got something special for you."

He crouched below the counter.

 

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