Courtesy Calls: The Midway (3)

He came up and built the pyramid slowly, so everybody could watch, the three silent ones first. He wiped his palms down the front of his apron and then down the back, and stepped away from the plank.

"There she is," he said. "Last night, last throw. Double or nothing, champ. You put one more down, I put eighty dollars up against it. One throw for the whole pot."

The boy had his hand in his front pocket. He had been into that pocket all evening. This time it took him longer to come out, and the bill that came out was folded smaller than the others had been, into quarters, square at the edges, folded by somebody who wanted it to come home.

He didn't put it on the counter. He held it.

"Fair's done in twenty minutes, champ," the operator said. "Go home and tell your mama you got it all back, plus."

Kurt took his hand out of his pocket with his wallet in it. He kept the wallet down by his leg, below the edge of the counter, where the line couldn't see. He took out two twenties, folded them once, and laid them against the back of the boy's free hand.

"Take that and go home," he said.

The boy looked down at the money. He didn't move his hand to take it, and he didn't move it away. Kurt held the bills there.

"I didn't win that," the boy said.

Kurt held them there a while longer. Then he put them back in the wallet and the wallet back in his pocket.

The boy looked at the bottles. Then he looked at Kurt again, as he had been looking at him on and off since Kurt stopped reading the menu board and started reading the shelf. Kurt knew that look. He had seen it on nineteen-year-olds at the end of a long day on a range, after something had gone wrong at the far end of the line, waiting for somebody older to tell them whether what they had just watched was how it was supposed to go.

Up close the boy smelled like fryer grease and the inside of a school bus, and he looked younger than twelve. He was shivering in small hard bursts he seemed to know nothing about. The name of a middle school ran across the back of his shirt, the letters cracked from the dryer.

Kurt put his hand over the boy's hand, the one with the five in it, and closed the fingers down over the bill. The hand was cold all the way through. He had the words lined up. The bottles are loaded, son. Put that away and walk with me. He could have them said and the two of them halfway up the spur before the operator was done smiling.

Under his hand, the boy turned his own hand over and opened it. The five sat on his palm between them.

"You throw it," he said.

The operator raised his eyebrows at the line, inviting them in on it.

Kurt looked down the spur, past the booth, to the open gate, where the fair man stood drinking his water, and past him to the dark field and the end of the last row. The other way out ran back through the line behind him, toward the lights. He looked at the five.

He took it.

---

The bill was still warm from the boy's palm. Kurt unfolded it and flattened it on the counter with the side of his hand.

"Grandpa wants a turn," the operator told the line. He took the five and laid three balls in a row on the counter. "Eighty dollars on the young man's pot says he can't."

Kurt picked up the first ball. It was lighter than it looked, canvas over cork. He turned it once in his fingers and looked at the pyramid, six bottles on a plank not much wider than their feet. The bottom three had gone down without a sound.

He didn't wind up. He stepped in on his left foot and let the ball go from low beside his hip, and it went flat across the counter and struck the bottom row where two bottles met. The sound was wrong for a carnival. The bottom row skidded back off the plank in one piece and took the top three with it, and the noise of them landing on the boards behind the plywood carried up and down the spur.

Somebody in the line said, "Oh." The boy didn't say anything. He had both hands flat on the edge of the counter.

The operator looked at the empty plank longer than he needed to. Then he looked at Kurt and kept looking. His eyes went over the haircut and the boots and stayed a while on Kurt's hands, which were out of his pockets now, loose and empty at his sides. Then they went past him, down the lane, to the service gate Kurt had come in by at dusk, and stayed there.

"You've done that before," the operator said.

"No," Kurt said.

"No." The operator nodded slowly. "I don't guess you have."

He took the coffee can down off its board and tipped it out on the counter. Three fives came out, and a few ones balled up together. The boy looked from the little pile to the can and back, and his lips moved. The operator counted the rest out of his apron a ten at a time, slowly, waiting for somebody to lose track. Kurt didn't. The boy didn't either. When the last bill came down, the boy said, "Eighty," before the operator could.

Kurt tipped his head at the boy. The operator squared the stack and put it in the boy's hand instead of his.

"Some arm," the operator said. "Last night of the fair. Run it back, I'll give you triple." He looked at the boy. "But it's champ's pot. Champ throws."

He crouched below the counter. Kurt heard glass touch glass under there, a heavier sound than the bottles that had fallen.

The boy was looking at the money in his hand. Then he was looking at the plank. His foot moved toward the bare place in the dirt.

Kurt picked up the second ball and set it on the counter. He rolled it the length of the counter with two fingers, and it stopped against the operator's knuckles as he came up.

"You show them," Kurt said.

The operator rose slowly with a bottle in each hand. He looked at the ball. Then he looked past Kurt at the people who had stopped to see what the noise had been: the werewolf, the hockey mask, a woman with a stroller, the burger woman leaning out of her window with the scraper in her hand. The fair man had left the gate and was walking back up the spur toward the midway, the water bottle hanging empty from two fingers. He glanced at the booth as he passed and kept walking. The operator watched him all the way out.

He set the bottles down on the counter side by side and left the ball where it was.

"Booth's closing," he said.

For a moment nobody moved. Then the woman at the front turned her stroller around, and the people behind her turned with it.

---

Kurt walked the boy up the spur toward the main midway. Half the bulbs out there were already dark, and the rest were going a string at a time from the far end, so that the light seemed to be backing toward them. Fathers came past carrying children asleep on their shoulders, plastic buckets hooked over their wrists. The boy carried the money in front of him in both hands, like it might get away from him.

Somewhere ahead of them the haunted house scream went up and stopped halfway, and didn't come again.

Halfway to the Ferris wheel the boy said, "How'd you know to throw it like that?"

"Low," Kurt said.

They walked. A crew had started on the funnel cake stand, and one of them was rolling up the awning with the fryer lights still burning inside.

"He said they go to Lexington from here," the boy said. "He said I could come find him."

Kurt didn't answer.

At the top of the spur he stopped to let a line of kids go by, a row of small ghosts holding a rope, and looked back.

The operator had come out from behind his counter and was standing in the middle of the lane in his apron, between the booth and the open gate, his hands at his sides. He was watching which way they went. When they didn't move, he took the fair program out of his apron pocket and let it unroll against his leg, and took the pencil from behind his ear. Then he turned his head and looked out through the gate at the dark field.

Kurt turned the boy left, toward the front gate and the long way around.

 

~End~