The Midway

Castellanos did the briefing at five o’clock, at the kitchen table, on the back of a feed-store bag.

He had flattened the bag out on the oilcloth and drawn the fairgrounds on it in pencil, with a ruler, which he had borrowed from Marcus’s drawing things: the long white fence with the arch over the gate; the exhibit hall; the five barns in a row; the show barn; the rodeo arena with its grandstand; the food stalls; and at the far end, in a ragged oblong, the midway, with the rides marked on it as small squares with their names written beside them in his square careful capitals. SWINGS. OCTOPUS. CAROUSEL. SLIDE. FUN HOUSE. GAMES (12). And across the whole of it, from the gate to the midway, a line of small crosses, in red biro.

The four of them sat round the table and looked at it. Kimura stood by the refrigerator with her arms folded, under the list.

“The crosses are where I’ll be,” said Castellanos. “Or Sergeant Kimura. One of us, at every one of those, in turn, as you move. You will not see us all the time. We will see you all the time.” He put the pencil down. “There are four rules.”

“Like Kaylee,” said Felix.

Castellanos looked at him.

“Like the lifeguard,” he agreed, after a moment, without any expression at all. “One. You stay together. All four of you. If one of you goes to the bathroom, the other three wait outside it. If one of you wants a corn dog, the other three want a corn dog.” He looked at each of them. “Two. If you are separated from each other, or from us, for any reason, you do not look for us. You go to the carousel.” He touched the small square on the bag that said CAROUSEL. “You stand by the ticket booth, on the side by the generator, where the light is. You stand there and you wait. We will come to you. Every time. Within two minutes.”

“What if the carousel’s on fire?” said Theo.

Castellanos looked at him for a long time.

“Then you go to the show barn,” he said. “Three. The fireworks are at ten, from the field behind the arena. You watch them from the grass in front of the grandstand, in the place I show you, and you do not move from it until they are over.” He touched the place on the bag. It had a cross beside it in red. “Four. We leave at a quarter past ten. All of us. In the car. Nobody argues.”

“What if there’s a tornado?” said Theo.

“Then the law,” said Castellanos.

“What if there’s a tornado and the carousel’s on fire?”

“Then, Mr Hartigan,” said Castellanos, folding the feed-store bag in half, and in half again, along its creases, very precisely, “I will pick you up, personally, and carry you to the show barn under my arm, and you will not like it.”

Kimura, by the refrigerator, under the list, did not move at all, and her shoulders went up and down, once.

---

They went in the car at six, and there was a television van in the car park.

It was white, with a dish on the roof, folded down, and the name of a Tulsa station down its side in red and blue, and a number, large, 6; and it was parked by the gate under the arch that said NO ADMISSION CHARGE. NEVER HAS BEEN. NEVER WILL BE., and beside it, on the gravel, there was a young woman in a blue blazer, in the heat, with a microphone, talking to a man with a camera on his shoulder.

Castellanos stopped the car.

He did not say anything. He sat with his hands on the wheel and looked at the van through the windscreen, and at the young woman, and at the camera; and in the passenger seat Kimura had already taken her telephone out and was saying something into it, very low, that Frederick could not hear.

“It’s the last night,” said Theo, from the back, after a while. “They come every year, probably. The last night of the oldest free fair in the State. Fireworks. It’s a story.” He looked at the van. “It’s not us. They don’t know.”

“They don’t know yet,” said Castellanos.

The young woman in the blue blazer turned round, and looked at the car park, at all the cars and pickups parked in rows in the gravel in the evening sun, and at their car, which was grey, with tinted windows, and Tulsa plates; and looked away again, and went on talking to the man with the camera.

Kimura put her telephone away.

“Sheriff’s office says they’ve been here since four,” she said. “Feature on the last night. The rodeo, the fireworks, the grand champion. Two minutes on the ten o’clock news.” She paused. “Officer Hummingbird says the fair board knows. Mr Baggett knows.” Another pause. “She says the county knows.”

“Knows what?” said Marcus.

Kimura looked at him over the back of the seat.

“That there’s a camera,” she said.

---

The rodeo was at seven, in the arena behind the show barn, and it was not a rodeo like any he had seen in pictures.

He had seen rodeos in pictures. Men on bulls, with one hand in the air, being thrown. Clowns in barrels. This was not that. This was a ranch rodeo, the board at the gate said, and the announcer said it too, from a box at the top of the grandstand, over the loudspeakers, in a voice like gravel being poured slowly out of a bucket: ranch rodeo, folks, the real thing, the work, the way it’s done on the ranch, by the men and women who do it every day, and some of these teams have been riding together since before some of you was born. Teams of four, in work shirts and chaps and battered hats, from the ranches of the county, with names painted on boards: DOUBLE C. BIG CABIN CREEK. THE HANEY OUTFIT. LAZY SIX. And the events were not tricks. They were jobs. Sorting cattle into a pen by the numbers on their sides, against the clock. Roping a calf and holding it and putting a mark on it with a stick of chalk, which was branding, the announcer said, the way it was done, except with chalk, for the fair, on account of the children. Loading a steer into a trailer that did not want to go into a trailer, with four people and a rope and a great deal of shouting.

He sat on the grandstand in the evening sun, on the hot boards, with Theo on one side and Felix on the other and Marcus beyond Felix, and a corn dog in his hand that he had bought with his own money from a stall behind the grandstand, two pounds fifty, counted into the woman’s hand, two fifty, three, five; and watched four men from Big Cabin Creek try to put a steer into a trailer, and the steer go round the trailer, and round it again, and the men go round after it, and the whole grandstand shout advice, and the announcer say now, boys, the trailer’s the big thing with the door; and he laughed until the corn dog fell off its stick.

“This is the best thing I have ever seen,” said Felix, beside him, with total conviction.

“You said that about the hogs.”

“The hogs were the best thing I’d ever seen then.”

Then the announcer said that it was time for the wild cow milking, and the whole grandstand made a noise that Frederick had never heard a crowd make before, a sort of delighted groan, and stood up.

---

He did not understand wild cow milking until it was happening, and then he understood it completely.

There was a cow. She came out of a chute at one end of the arena at a dead run, and she was not a milking cow, not a cow that had ever been milked in her life, or wanted to be; she was a range cow, rangy and wild-eyed and brindled, with horns, and she came out of the chute the way a cork comes out of a bottle and went straight down the arena with her tail up. And after her, on a horse, a man with a rope, who roped her; and then three men on foot, who ran at her, the cow, at the end of the rope, and caught hold of her, one at the head and one at the hip and one with a bottle. A small glass bottle, like a medicine bottle. And while two of them held the cow, or tried to, the cow going round and round and dragging them across the arena on their heels in a cloud of dust, the third crouched at her side with the bottle and tried to milk her into it. By hand. While she kicked.

And when there was milk in the bottle, any milk, a drop, the third man got up and ran, with the bottle held up in the air, across the whole arena, to a judge on a horse in the middle, and the judge turned the bottle upside down; and if a drop came out, it counted.

The grandstand went mad.

It went mad for every team. It went mad for the Double C, whose milker got a drop and ran and fell flat on his face a yard from the judge and held the bottle up from the ground. It went mad for the Lazy Six, whose cow sat down, and would not get up, and was milked sitting. It went mad for the Haney Outfit, whose milker was a woman of sixty in a pink shirt who got the milk and ran the whole width of the arena faster than any man there and held up the bottle to the judge, and the judge turned it over, and one drop fell out, white, in the evening sun, and the announcer said ladies and gentlemen, that is Wanda Haney, Colt’s grandmama, and she is sixty-two years old, and the whole grandstand stood on the benches.

“Rodeo,” said a man in a feed cap in the row behind them, to nobody, wiping his eyes, “is not a sport. It’s a trade.”

Frederick stood on the bench with the others and shouted for Wanda Haney until his voice cracked.

---

The announcer welcomed the visitors at half past eight, between the wild cow milking and the saddle bronc.

He did it every year, the man in the feed cap behind them said; it was a thing he did, a tradition, at the last night of the fair. He leaned into his microphone in his box at the top of the grandstand, and the gravel voice came out of the loudspeakers over the whole arena, and the whole grandstand went quiet to listen.

“Now, folks,” said the announcer, “we like to say hello to our visitors, on the last night. We’ve got some folks here tonight from a long way off. So I want to say a big Craig County welcome, first, to our friends from Tulsa.”

A cheer, from the cabin people, in a block, near the front.

“And from Joplin.”

A smaller cheer.

“And from Kansas City. And from Fort Smith. And from Wichita.” A pause. The gravel voice dropped, very slightly, the way Hal Buckner’s had not been able to. “And I believe,” said the announcer, “we’ve got some folks with us tonight all the way from Alaska.”

Nothing happened for a moment.

Then the grandstand laughed.

It was not the cabin people. The cabin people did not laugh; they looked round, puzzled, for the people from Alaska. It was everybody else. It was the whole of the rest of the grandstand, the whole county, five hundred people, more, the ranch families and the farmers and the people from the town, Darlene somewhere, and Royce Pettit, and Bonnie Tackett, and the man in the feed cap behind; it was all of them, all at once, a great warm roar of laughter that went from one end of the grandstand to the other and back, and did not stop, and rolled down over the arena and the dust and the horses and the judge on his horse in the middle, who took off his hat; and nobody looked at the top row. Nobody turned round. Five hundred people laughed together at a joke that was about him, and was told to him, and was for him, and did not one of them look at him while they did it.

He sat on the bench with his face burning and laughed with them. He could not help it.

“Bears,” said Theo, beside him, helplessly, into his hands.

At the top of the grandstand, in his box, the announcer waited for the laughter to stop, and when it had stopped, said, perfectly gravely, and we hope you’re enjoying the fair, folks, and we hope you’re keeping cool, and the grandstand laughed again, and he said saddle bronc, and the chute opened, and a horse came out of it sideways with a man on it, and everybody forgot.

---

The television crew was at the rail.

He saw them at a quarter to nine, in the last of the light, when the saddle bronc was over and the grandstand was emptying towards the midway: the young woman in the blue blazer at the rail of the arena with her microphone, and the man with the camera on his shoulder beside her, turning, slowly, panning along the grandstand as the people came down it, filming the crowd. The last night of the oldest free fair in the State. The camera came along the rows, steadily, at the height of a man’s head, from the left.

Frederick saw it coming.

He saw it the way you see a wave coming along a beach. It came along the grandstand at the speed of a walking man, and it was going to reach the top row where they were standing, at the back, against the wall, in about ten seconds; and he did not know what to do. He did not move. He stood on the bench and watched it come.

Then a man stood up in front of it.

He was a very large man, in a work shirt, with a belly that went in front of him and a hat with a sweat stain round the band, and he stood up in the row below them, directly in front of the camera, at the exact moment the camera reached him, and stretched. He stretched enormously, both arms up over his head, yawning, so that his whole great width filled the camera’s view from one side to the other; and stayed there, stretching, for a very long time.

The camera stopped. The man with the camera on his shoulder lowered it an inch and looked over the top of it.

The large man finished stretching. He sat down. The camera went up again, and came on, along the row.

And a woman stood up in front of it. A woman in a sun hat, with a very large handbag, who stood up, directly in front of the lens, and began to look through the handbag for something, holding it up, open, at the height of her face, rummaging, so that the camera was looking straight into the inside of a handbag.

Then she found it, and sat down, and a boy of fourteen stood up and put on his jacket, slowly, one arm at a time. Then an old man stood up and took off his hat and looked into it, for a long time, as though there were something written in it. Then two girls stood up together to take a photograph of themselves with their telephones held out at arm’s length, exactly in front of the camera, and took a long time about it, and took another.

The man with the camera lowered it again. He looked at the grandstand. He looked at the young woman in the blue blazer. The young woman in the blue blazer looked at the grandstand, at all of it, at five hundred people coming down it towards the midway, every one of whom was looking at something else.

“Where’s Mr Baggett?” she said, to the man with the camera, loudly enough to carry. “He said he’d do us the steer.”

“He’s here,” said a voice.

And Mr Baggett was there. He was at the rail beside her, in his white straw hat and his white shirt with the pearl snaps, as if he had come up out of the ground; and he had his hat in his hand, and he was smiling, and he put his other hand, very gently, on the young woman’s blue sleeve.

“Ma’am,” said Mr Baggett, “the grand champion’s in the show barn. Colt’s with him. And his grandmama, who milked that cow.” He turned her, very gently, by the sleeve, so that she was facing away from the grandstand, towards the show barn, and the man with the camera turned with her, because the camera was attached to him and he was attached to her. “And the light’s going. You’ll want him before the light goes. He’s a black steer. He won’t show up after dark.”

The young woman in the blue blazer looked at the show barn, and at the sky, which was orange going to blue, and at her watch.

“Right,” she said. “Right. Yes. Thank you. Come on, Dan.”

They went away across the gravel towards the show barn with Mr Baggett between them, talking about the steer.

Behind Frederick, on the top row, somebody let out a breath, and he realised it had been Castellanos, who was standing at the end of the row in his blue T-shirt, and had been standing there the whole time, and had not moved once, and was now looking at the large man in the row below them, who had sat down again and was eating a bag of popcorn, with an expression that Frederick had never seen on Castellanos’s face and thought might be love.

---

He bought the ride tickets with his own money.

They were in strips, at a booth at the edge of the midway, red paper tickets on a roll, and a strip of twenty-five cost twenty pounds, and he bought one, and took out the brown wallet, and unzipped it, and took out a twenty, and gave it to the woman in the booth, who was not from the county and had never seen him before in her life and did not look at him at all, which was its own kind of wonderful; and she tore off the strip and gave it to him, and he stood at the edge of the midway with twenty-five red tickets in his hand.

It was dark now. Properly dark. The sky over the fairgrounds was a deep clear blue going to black, with stars in it, and the midway was all lights.

He had seen it from the show barn step the night before. It was different inside it. Inside it, it was everywhere. The lights were all round him and over him, strings of bulbs swooping from pole to pole, white and gold and red, and the rides lit up in every colour at once, turning, and the booths with their rows of bulbs and their prizes hanging, and the noise, the music from every ride at once, all different, and the bells, and the screaming, and the man on a loudspeaker somewhere calling three throws for a pound, three throws, everybody wins; and the smell, of fried things and sugar and diesel from the generators and trampled grass; and the people, hundreds of them, in the lights, moving, children on shoulders and couples holding hands and gangs of teenagers in a hurry, and the cabin people and the county, all together, in the noise and the dark.

Go out at night, he thought. To something with lights.

He stood in it. He had been out at night before, a great many times, to a great many things with lights. State dinners, and the opera, and the Charter Day fireworks from the balcony at Columbia Palace with the whole of the Axis lit below him and a hundred thousand people looking up. He had never been out at night in it. He had always been at the edge of it, above it, on a balcony or behind a window or in a car, looking down at the lights from somewhere that was not the lights. He had never stood in the middle of a midway in the dark with twenty-five red tickets in his hand and no idea what to do first.

“The swings,” said Theo, beside him.

---

The swings were a tall pole with a top like a parasol, lit with lights, and hanging from the edge of the parasol on long chains, forty seats, single ones, like the seats of children’s swings, each with a bar across the front; and when it went, it went round, and the parasol tilted, and the seats went out, on their chains, further and further, until they were flying almost level, round and round, high, over the heads of the crowd.

He gave the man two red tickets. He sat in a seat. Theo was in the one in front, and Felix behind, and Marcus behind Felix. The man came along and pulled down the bar across each of them, and pushed it, to see that it held. Below, at the edge of the crowd, Castellanos stood with his arms folded, looking up.

The swings began to turn.

They went slowly at first, and then faster, and he felt the chain take him, and lift him, and swing him out, away from the pole, so that his feet were hanging over nothing and the wind was in his face; and then faster, and higher, until he was flying. Out over the heads of the crowd. Out over the lights of the midway, and the booths, and the rides, which were below him now, turning, in their colours; and beyond them, as the swings went round, the dark fairgrounds, the barns, the show barn with its lit door, the arena, the grandstand, the long white fence; and beyond the fence, as he came round again, the whole of the dark country, flat, going away in every direction, black, to the edge of the sky, with here and there in it, very far apart, a single light, a farmhouse, and another, and the road going away with a pair of headlights on it; and over all of it, the stars.

He shouted. He could not help it. He shouted into the wind going round, with his arms out, holding the chains, and in the seat in front Theo shouted too, and behind him Felix, and Marcus, all of them, shouting nothing at all, flying round and round over the lights in the dark.

When it stopped, and the seats came down, and the man came along and lifted the bar, he could not stand up for a moment. He sat in the seat with his hands on the chains and his heart going, and looked up at the parasol of lights, still turning slowly, stopping.

“Again,” said Theo, from the seat in front, without turning round.

---

They went on everything.

They went on the octopus, which went up and down and round at once, and Marcus said, at the bottom, that he had left his stomach somewhere in its third arm and would collect it on the way out. They went down the giant slide on sacks, a long yellow slide in humps like a frozen wave, lit gold, and Felix went down it backwards, by accident, and arrived at the bottom upside down on the grass in a heap, laughing so hard he could not get up. They went into the fun house, which was dark, and had a floor that moved, and a room of mirrors, where Frederick stood in front of a mirror that made him enormously tall and thin, and another that made him short and very wide, and another that made him wave, like something seen through water; and he stood and looked at himself in that one for a long time, waving, and did not know why it made him want to laugh and cry at once.

They went on the carousel.

He chose a horse on the outside. It was white, or had been, with a gold mane and a red saddle and a pole through its middle, and its face had been painted so many times, over so many years, that it had gone soft, the eyes and the nostrils and the open mouth all blurred under the layers, so that it looked gentle, and a little surprised; and he sat on it, and the carousel turned, and the horse went up, and down, slowly, to the waltz, tinny and sweet, and the lights of the midway went past, round and round, and Theo was on the horse beside him, going down as he went up.

“You’re too old for this,” said Theo, going down.

“So are you,” said Frederick, going up.

“I know,” said Theo, coming up. “That’s why it’s good.”

---

Theo won the goldfish at ten to ten.

It was at a booth where you threw ping-pong balls at a table covered in small glass bowls, each with water in it, coloured, and if the ball went in a bowl, you won a goldfish. Three throws for a pound. Theo paid his own pound. The first ball bounced off the rim of a bowl and away into the dark. The second bounced off the table. The third went in.

It went in so cleanly, with such a small neat plop, into a bowl of blue water at the very back of the table, that the man in the booth, a thin man with a moustache and a tattoo of an anchor, who had plainly seen ten thousand ping-pong balls bounce off ten thousand rims and had not expected this one to do anything else, stared at it for a moment before he said winner, without any enthusiasm at all, and fished a goldfish out of a tank behind him with a little net and put it in a plastic bag of water and tied the top of the bag in a knot and handed it over the counter.

Theo held it up. The goldfish turned round in the bag, small and orange and bewildered, in the lights.

“I’ve never won anything,” said Theo. “In my whole life.” He looked at the goldfish. “Today I won a blue ribbon and a fish.”

“What are you going to call it?” said Marcus.

Theo looked at the goldfish for a long time, turning slowly in its bag of water in the light of the booth.

“Earl,” he said.

---

At five to ten they went to the grass in front of the grandstand, to the place on the feed-store bag that had a red cross beside it, and sat down.

The whole county was there. It was sitting on the grass in the dark in front of the grandstand, and in the grandstand, and along the rail of the arena, on blankets and on folding chairs and on the bare grass, families, with children asleep in their laps and children not asleep at all, and teenagers in groups, and old people on chairs they had brought; and all of them were looking the same way, up, over the arena, at the black field behind it where the fireworks would be, and talking, in low voices, in the dark, the way people talk in church before it starts.

He sat on the grass between Theo and Felix, with Marcus beyond Felix, and the goldfish called Earl in its bag on Theo’s knee. Behind them, ten yards back, he knew without looking, Castellanos was standing. Somewhere to the left, Kimura. He did not look for either of them. He sat on the grass in the dark with his knees up and his arms round them and looked up at the sky.

Number six, he thought.

He had done it. He was out at night, at something with lights, and he had paid for it himself, and he had flown over the dark country on a chain, and sat on a horse with a soft face, and watched Wanda Haney run the width of the arena with a drop of milk in a bottle, and laughed with five hundred people at a joke about bears; and nobody had looked at him, all night, not once, except the man with the camera, and the county had got in the way of that.

He thought that he would remember tonight for the rest of his life, and then thought that he did not know that, and that it did not matter, because it was happening now.

The first rocket went up.

---

It went up with a thump that he felt in his chest through the ground, and a hiss, and a long thin line of gold going up into the black, higher, higher, slowing, and then a moment, nothing, the line gone, the whole of the county on the grass holding its breath; and then it broke. It broke into a great slow flower of gold, enormous, filling the whole of the sky over the arena, and hung there, and fell, in long trails, drooping, like a willow, fizzing, and the sound of it came, a moment after, a deep round boom that rolled across the fairgrounds and the barns and the dark country beyond and came back, faintly, off something a long way away.

The whole county said ohhh.

He said it too. He could not help it. He sat on the grass and said ohhh with all of them, and the next one went up, and broke, red, and the next, green and white at once, and the next, which went up in a spiral and broke into a hundred small bright stars that each broke again, crackling, into a hundred more; and the county said ohhh to every one, and the children in the laps woke up and pointed, and the light from each one came down over all of them, the whole county on the grass, all their faces turned up, lit red and gold and green, and went out, and came again.

He had watched fireworks from a balcony every year of his life. He had never watched them from the grass, in the dark, among people, with their faces lit up all round him by the same light as his. He had never heard a crowd say ohhh from inside it.

He looked at Theo. Theo’s face was turned up, lit gold, with the goldfish on his knee, and his mouth open.

He looked at the sky.

---

The last burst was at a quarter past ten.

He knew it was the last, because everybody knew. The rockets came faster and faster, two at once, and three, and five, until the whole sky over the arena was full, gold and red and green and white and silver, breaking on top of each other, crackling and booming and fizzing, so bright that he could see every face on the grass as if it were noon and the boom of them all together was one long roll of thunder that went on and on; and the whole county was on its feet, shouting, cheering, clapping, and he was on his feet with them, and Theo with the goldfish held up over his head in its bag, shouting; and it went on, and on, and then one last great rocket went up, higher than all the rest, alone, and broke into a single enormous slow flower of white, the biggest of all of them, that filled the whole sky from one side to the other and hung there, falling, in absolute silence, while the county held its breath.

And in the silence, before the boom came, from the dark behind them, from the far end of the fairgrounds, from the long low barn at the end of the row, came a girl’s voice, high and furious and carrying, across the whole of the grass.

“MABEL!”