by Reed Karaim
Anna and the baby, alone most of the day and much of the night, when her husband worked late and then drove into town with the men for a drink or two or three. (Again, another similarity: like me at the paper, he was underage, but no one carded a worker in the oil fields.) Anna and the baby, alone in the trailer, which was situated in a fingernail crease of a valley between a pair of buttes that rose to seal off most of the sky. A narrow stream gathered at the bottom of the valley. In the spring, when the land was flush with Indian paintbrush and wild blue flax, Anna cleared a plot to the east, so it caught the rising sun, and planted a garden. She tended carrots, onions, lettuce, snap peas, and a few miniature watermelons, while the baby lay happily on a blanket spread in the prairie grass.
Long days and just the two of them, and often at dusk the sound of the coyotes calling to each other from the ridges, a call so high and clear it felt like it could carry halfway around the world, and she sat on the metal steps, the baby in her arms, and knew she and her child were the only ones listening. Was she happy? I believe she was happy that summer.
• • •
WE STEPPED OUT onto the street together outside the Buffalo Bar and Christina was leaning slightly against Todd, who was trying to take it all in stride and not doing a very good job of it. Anna and I stood awkwardly off to the side. For the last half hour she had been worried about getting home to her kids and had fallen silent.
“Well,” I said, “the best thing about the Buffalo Bar is I live right across the street. Good night, ladies and gentlemen.”
The evening was unexpectedly warm. The first night of summer. I took a step and lingered. A car turned onto Main Street on the far side of the railroad tracks and headed the other direction, the taillights a pair of curious eyes slowly receding. Anna watched the car with the oddly attentive regret I had come to recognize. Her hands were held pensively beneath her chin and she was unconsciously holding her sleeves up again. The white circle, a scar of some kind, I had to believe, floated in my memory as clearly as a full moon.
“See you, college boy,” Christina said, still leaning against Todd. “Better practice your pool.”
My own footsteps echoed in my ears. “Eric,” Anna said, when I was halfway across the street. She had caught up to me by the time I turned, and stood a little too close, her eyes large in the dark. “It was just an accident,” she said very quietly. “I’ll tell you about it sometime.”
And, still holding her sleeve, Anna briefly pressed a hand against my chest, as if to seal a secret there.
Chapter 13
SUMMER IS THE SEASON OF REDEMPTION in North Dakota, repayment for the brutal winters. The endless sunlight slants across the last hours of the day in a benediction and it’s hard to feel too bad about anything. Riding this sunstruck wave of senseless optimism, the Sentinel barreled into the town’s anniversary celebration, so ceaselessly tooting the horn of civic self-promotion that the stories began to resemble a parade of drunken Shriners on Bourbon Street. Louise led the parade with a front-page weekly column that, at its best, had a kind of majestic, inebriated swagger, and, at its worst, a lot of typos.
Beneath the euphoria lay a ton of work for all of us, but especially for Edith Swenson, the woman who handled the social notes. She was inundated with notices of family and class reunions, pancake breakfasts, special church services, charity auctions, and even the schedule for an evening of cowboy poetry, hosted by a local resident who had written four hundred rhyming couplets celebrating the Glories of All God’s Creation, with a particular focus on livestock.
Edith stood very erect and had admirably broad shoulders. Her voice was as parched as a dust bowl wind and she was so unflappable that a tornado landing in the middle of an earthquake during an asteroid strike might just possibly have caused her to cock an eyebrow. Still, the demands of her good neighbors started to weigh on her. She was sixty-something years old and she took to joining us at the Buffalo Bar at the end of the working week, ordering a whiskey neat and drinking it down as if it were weak tea.
She was standing at the bar on a Friday when I slid in beside her to order another beer.
“Looking good, kid. Nobody’s even figured out you’re underage yet.”
This was mildly disconcerting, especially while waiting for Bernie, the owner, to serve me.
“I appreciate you keeping that quiet. Particularly now.”
Edith had the driest smile I had ever seen on a woman. Give her a fedora and she could have been Humphrey Bogart.
“Don’t worry. You’ve earned a drink or two.”
My Schmidt arrived unasked-for. It struck me that perhaps I had been spending a little too much time here.
“You, too.”
“Parties,” she said, with the tone of a medieval surgeon contemplating leprosy.
“You’ve lived here forever, right?”
Her eyes swiveled to contemplate me.
“Wait. I don’t mean—”
“Since the beginning of time.”
“Sorry, I just wondered, do you remember when Anna started at the paper?”
I saw her hesitation.
“She’s doing a great job,” I said. “Really good. I was just curious, really. How she got started.”
“It wasn’t that long ago.” Edith frowned. “Well, maybe it was. The years run together. She was just in the office one day, sitting at a desk, doing her work. I don’t remember Art or Louise hiring her.” She smiled. “Maybe she just showed up and sat down. I remember Louise started giving her everything to proofread. That’s what she was at first, a proofreader. We needed a proofreader . . . She’s a good speller,” Edith concluded with admiration.
Todd was playing pool with one of the old men. They finished and he glanced my way to see if I was up next. I shook my head. Anna had been coming to the bar a bit more often, usually when the office gathered, and I had looked when I first came in, hoping to see her, but she wasn’t here tonight.
“She is a good speller,” I said. “She’s a good photographer. She does a lot of things well.”
Edith considered me. “I imagine she’s glad you figured that out.”
“It just seems . . . odd. I don’t think she ever had a journalism class or anything like that. I just wondered what made her try the Sentinel.”
I wondered much more than that, actually. I wondered how she ended up in Shannon. I wondered what sent her this way and why she only came this far. I wondered about her second child, her daughter, after things had so clearly gone bad after the first. And I wondered why I wondered, why these questions had come to matter so much to me.
“Ask her. I think she’s got stories, that one.”
“Sure.”
“You’re doing a good job, kiddo.” Edith returned to her contemplation of the liquor bottles behind the bar. “You better be careful. That’s when you get trapped.”
• • •
THE LAST NIGHT of the anniversary celebration was the last night of the carnival, the night of the fireworks, the night we could see the end to a crazy week of work. Anna and I took all the photos we could during the day, more than we could use early in the night, and then we were really done. It was Saturday and the paper wouldn’t come out for six days, so we had plenty of time to write, plenty of time to get everything together. I interviewed a few of the people streaming through the midway, just to be sure we had more than enough color, and we were all free. Todd, Christina, and I wandered the streets like sailors on leave.
The carnival had been set up on Main Street, the midway running past the bank, the rides scattered all the way back to the railroad tracks, lighting up the sky with spinning circles and blinking towers of Christmas-colored lights, the noise echoing between the buildings, a wheezing and groaning calliope, the whistles and bangs of the game booths, the hoarse shouts of the barkers, and, somewhere on the edge of the celebration, a fire engine siren starting and stopping over and over in fits of either ecstasy or panic.
Anna showed up with her kids as
the sun set. Stephen was blond and pale, tall and slender for his age. He had feathery hair, oddly perfect oyster-shell ears, and the somber reserve of an oldest child pressed into early responsibility. His little sister, Samantha, called Sam by everyone, was the surprise: red curls, a mad archipelago of freckles across her cheeks, and electric-green eyes constantly searching the world for trouble. She held her mother’s hand reluctantly, leaning toward the midway.
“Nice hat,” Anna said.
Todd had attended the cowboy poetry reading, apparently of his own free will, and brought me back a straw cowboy hat with Reading, Riding, wRiting circling a white band around the crown. I tipped the brim. “Thank you kindly, ma’am.”
Stephen’s gaze locked on the Slingshot, a ride that looked like a big hammer and spun you completely upside down. He looked like he wished he could ride it right out of here into orbit.
“You wanna do it?” Todd asked. “I can’t get anybody to go with me.”
“That’s because you’re going to throw up,” Christina said. She had her own cowboy hat, a black felt model she wore tilted back.
“What do you think?” Todd said.
Stephen blinked hard a couple of times. “Let’s do it!”
They charged toward the line as if jumping off a cliff. Seated and strapped into place in the hammer’s head, they laughed as the ride began to swing back and forth, rising higher and higher with each arc, until it stood completely on end, and they hung upside down for a long, teetering moment—Todd screaming louder than Stephen—before swinging all the way around. They traced several rapid, complete circles, their shouts of joy and terror rising and falling in synchronicity.
“This is the part where you step back out of range,” Christina said.
“Todd has an iron stomach,” I said. “I’ve seen him eat five-day-old pizza.”
Christina’s eyes circled with the ride.
“Don’t want to think about that now.” She glanced at Anna. “How about Stephen?”
“Well. He’s never really liked heights.”
“Perfect.”
They went around a few more times and then the Slingshot rocked itself back to earth. Todd came out first and promptly sat, or perhaps fell, down. Stephen ran toward Anna with his skinny arms held high. “That was awesome! Let’s do it again! Mom, you want to come? It’s great! Come on!”
He charged across the street and pulled up just short of wrapping Anna in an excited hug, remembering he was twelve. He stood awkwardly in front of her, wanting to share his triumph and keep his cool at the same time, and Anna was suddenly a real mother to me, a mother knowing enough not to reach out and touch him.
“I could never do that, Stephen. But it looked like fun.”
Christina was bent over Todd.
“How you doing, cowboy?”
“Stop moving and I’ll tell you.”
“Come over here. Lay down on the bench.”
“Yes.”
Sam tugged harder at her mom’s hand.
“I want to go on a ride. I want to go on the Octopus!”
“I can take her,” said Stephen, grizzled carnival-ride veteran.
Anna smiled and handed him the tickets. His sister refused to take his hand but followed him in the direction of the whirling metal monster down the street. Anna’s eyes tracked them until they were safely in line.
“Well,” I said. “Your turn. The Ferris wheel? The funhouse?”
Anna was watching the Ferris wheel tumble to a stop at the far end of the carnival, a bright cyclops eye peering over the town. She was wearing a simple white blouse, unbuttoned at the collar, that seemed to glow against her skin, accenting the curve of her neck and the hollow where the material gapped at the swell of her breasts. She ran her fingers absently along the opening.
“It’s just a small-town carnival, really,” she said.
“Come on, it’s not so bad.”
“Yes, it’s the Seattle World’s Fair.”
“Okay. It’s pretty small.”
“Tiny.”
“Hardly there at all.”
Anna hugged herself, somehow managing to hold her sleeves in place. “When these things came to Bowman when I was a kid, they were such a big deal. We were excited for days before they arrived. You’d get one night you could go and your parents would give you a dollar for tickets.”
“A dollar! What did that buy? One ride?”
“It bought four rides. It bought a trip on the Ferris wheel, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Octopus, and then you had to decide. You had one more, and there probably weren’t more than three or four other rides, but you had to choose. You could go on one more ride, or you could go to one of the booths and try to win a prize.”
“What did you do?”
“I always took my shot at the prize. That was my weakness.”
“Ever win anything?”
“A rubber alligator. About this big.” She held her hands about six inches apart.
“That’s not so bad. They’re all rigged, you know.”
Stephen and Sam had arrived at the front of the line and they ran through the harsh light toward their car on the Octopus. Sam waved wildly as it rose into the air. Anna waved back.
“Are you telling me life’s not fair, Eric?”
“I am,” said the very young man who still believed that, in the end, it would all work out. “Or at least carnivals.”
The game booths were behind us and we turned to consider the people playing. Someone tossed something toward a blur of yellow and there was a collective groan.
“Life’s not fair,” Anna said. “The funny thing is, I still don’t want to believe it.”
“Come on. I’ll show you.”
I took her arm and pulled her to the nearest booth, where a group of small orange ducks floated in a tin tub painted blue to resemble a pond. The carny was older, tattoos along his arms faded like newsprint left out in the sun. He considered us as if we were a pair of dying fish at the bottom of an aquarium.
“Three tosses for a dollar. You ring a duck and you win a prize.”
“Just one duck? One dollar?”
“Yep.”
I fished in my pocket. “You know, you used to be able to get four rides for a dollar. The Ferris wheel, the Tilt-A-Whirl, even the Octopus.”
He shrugged shoulders so thin they could have served as surgical instruments. “There’s no justice in or out of court, boss. You want to play or not?”
“I want to play.”
The three rings were hard plastic. I held the first one in my hand.
“See, it looks easy, but they’re just a little too small, a little too hard, and the ducks are bobbing, so—”
Without looking, I tossed the ring toward the tub, where it settled perfectly around a duck’s neck.
“You were saying, Einstein?” The carny pulled a good-sized teddy bear off the shelf and handed it to Anna, who hesitated and then took it with a short, disbelieving laugh, considering me as if I had just landed from another planet.
“You’re wrong,” I said, “you clearly have incredibly good luck.”
Anna held the bear out, moving it from side to side so it seemed to be shaking its head. I couldn’t tell if it made her happy or sad.
“That’s your luck, Eric. Not mine.”
“I don’t think so. Anyway, it’s your bear.”
“Or Sam’s.” She managed a smile. “I think my teddy bear days have passed.”
“Or Sam’s, then.”
“Thank you.”
We walked back to a spot where we could see the rides. The Octopus had come to a stop. I felt our time together ticking away.
“You never told me what happened to your wrist,” I said.
“Both wrists, Eric.” She held up her left arm, the other arm, and let the sleeve fall. In the darkness I couldn’t really see anything, but she seemed to think it glowed. “And, no, I didn’t.”
“Okay. I just—”
“I know. Maybe someday. Is that o
kay?”
The kids arrived as a blur, Samantha tackling her mother’s waist and swinging as if still on the ride. “That was fun!”
Anna held on to her daughter as if she might spin off into orbit.
“Look. Mr. Valery won you a bear.”
Sam gave it a glance. “Can we go on the Ferris wheel, Mom? Can we, please? Please?”
“I think we can all ride in one car,” Stephen said. “Sam hardly counts as a person.”
“Maybe you hardly count!”
“You both count, but I bet we can squeeze in together.” Anna put one hand on her son’s shoulder, completing the connection between the three of them. In the darkness I couldn’t read her expression, but the faint sadness I had first seen as I handed her the bear hung in her voice, weighing down her effort to sound buoyant. She let go of Sam briefly to push her hair into place and I could see she was determined this would pass before her children noticed.
Anna turned to me and there was an odd cant to her body, as though she were balancing on something unsteady.
“Would you like to come with us?”
The children stared up at me in surprise. And I wanted to, more than made sense, but they were a family and Stephen and Sam were little kids and this was a carnival.
“That’s all right. I should find Todd.”
Her eyes seemed very wide and very dark in the carnival light. She fashioned a smile.
“You probably should. God knows what they’ve been up to.”
Anna and her kids walked down the crowded street holding hands, slowly turning into a set of cutout black paper dolls connected at the wrists. Half a block away Anna whispered to her daughter.
Sam turned and shouted, “Thank you, Mr. Eric!”—waving the flop-armed bear hard enough to dismember it. They disappeared around a corner and I stood in the middle of the cacophony and cartoon lights suddenly feeling very alone.