Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories

by Jean Shepherd

  “Aw, just for fun. I mean, what the hell.”

  “All right, you lovers, you saw cousin Caleb get all the way up there to AVERAGE. Let’s see how you can do. Ring the bell, ring the bell, who can ring the bell?”

  As Caleb snarled at the Greek chorus of hisses and boos from his corn-liquored buddies, the old man stepped into the clearing without a word, gave the guy a quarter, grabbed the hammer and swung. K-THWACK! He didn’t hit it with anywhere near the thump that Caleb got into her. But: ZZZIIIIIIIIP … BONG!

  The iron weight raced to the top and rang the bell so loud it could be heard a block away.

  “Y’see that, Caleb? That there guy’s got lead in his pencil!” The nasal bray of rustic wit opened up again.

  “The little man wins a box of genuwine Swiss-chocolate bonbons. All ya gotta do is have a good swing. Who’s gonna win the next big prize, all you lovers?”

  My father, stunned at his totally unprecedented success, grabbed the box of chocolates amid the applause of the rabble.

  The last we saw of Caleb was the hammer rising and falling at two bits a swing, being milked by that barker for every cent he owned.

  This moment was to become a sacred gem in the family archives. The more it was told, the greater the feat became. Caleb grew into Paul Bunyan, and the old man’s hammer swing rose to Olympic proportions. It wasn’t until I was 16 that I read an article in Popular Mechanics and discovered that the barker operated the thing with his foot. The old man, fortunately, never found out.

  As we moved from one marvel to the next, my brother and I began to list heavily to starboard; we hadn’t stopped eating since we stepped onto the fairgrounds: homemade popcorn balls, red, white and blue, made by the 4-H; girl-scout cookies; French fries; boiled corn on the cob dripping butter; Nehi orange and Hires root beer; peanuts; pumpkin pie; hot dogs; pickles; American Legion Auxiliary crullers; baked beans on paper plates; lemonade; Ladies of the Moose angel-food cake; taffy apples; and a thousand free samples, including Purina Chick Chow, which my brother and I both ate avidly. Added to this was the real specialty of any Indiana fair—homemade black-walnut chocolate fudge, displayed in thick, fly-crawling slabs at stands operated by beaming Kiwanians wearing funny hats and badges. We also scoffed down about five pounds each of peculiarly native candy called vanilla angel breath, an airy concoction so cloyingly sweet that a bite-sized portion could rot teeth at 50 paces. A fundamental ground rule of the county fair was that kids could have anything they wanted to eat, just this once. Steadily, we chewed our way toward Armageddon.

  Barkers on all sides hawked everything from horse collars to Mystic Mohegan Indian Squaw Korn Kure. We paused briefly while my old man hurled lumpy baseballs at battered wooden milk bottles, his blood rising visibly as the balls bounced off the canvas at the rear of the tent. Other athletes strained and grunted, their hard-earned cash winging into the canvas with dull thuds. A shelf held the possible booty: cerise Kewpie dolls with enormous red-feather fans, stuffed pandas, shiny china panthers with clocks in their stomachs, souvenir ashtrays in the shape of mother-of-pearl toilets—a veritable king’s ransom.

  The proprietor, a short, round man with a gray chin, played them like rainbow trout. “Y’got a nice arm, son. Let’s see you lay it in there. Show the little lady how the big-leaguers do it. Look at that arm, folks! He’s tossin’ a real knuckler. Three balls for a quarter. How ‘bout you, little lady? Try yer luck.”

  While my father was winding up, the man handed three baseballs to a skinny girl about 11 years old. She quickly bowled over three milk bottles and still had a ball left.

  “Pick any prize y want, little lady, any prize!”

  The sweating yahoos threw with renewed vigor, dollar bills cascading across the counter. The 11-year-old picked a Kewpie doll and left. It wasn’t until the next day that we found out she was the daughter of the guy who ran the joint We saw them in Joe’s Diner eating shredded wheat

  It was getting late. Our feet were coated with chewing gum and popcorn, and we were covered with a thick layer of finely powdered yellow clay. I knew that somewhere on the grounds Schwartz and Flick and Kissel were doing things that they would lie to me about the next day.

  Now we were deep in the heart of the thrill-ride section of the fair. The Ferris wheel reached high up into the dark sky, its spokes outlined in colored light bulbs, jerking upward and stopping and jerking and jerking upward again. It loomed over us like a huge illuminated snowflake.

  “I wanna go on the Ferris wheel!” Randy whined for the 317th time. This time, he was not to be denied.

  My father bought a ticket from the man in the little booth. Off my brother went through the turnstile and into a wobbly car the color of a grape. A minute later, he was laughing down at us and sticking his tongue out as he swept up ecstatically into the night Every few seconds, the wheel would stop and unload a car. We stood around and waved every time he went past.

  Finally, the grape car stopped at the bottom. We could see the attendant in blue coveralls swing the gate open. He seemed to be arguing with the occupant. The attendant finally hollered out to the guy in the box office:

  “HEY, JAKE! THIS KID WON’T GET OUT!”

  “Oh, fer Chrissake, what now?” the old man muttered.

  “NOW, YOU GET OUT. YOU HAD ENOUGH,” said the attendant.

  “WHAAAAAAAA!”

  The attendant reached in and wrenched him out, fighting and kicking every inch of the way. My father took over the battle, dragging him out into the midway.

  “I WANNA GO ON AGAIN!!” he screamed, but to no avail.

  The big wheel started up without him as we moved on to the next attraction, Randy struggling at every step.

  We tried to hurry past a merry-go-round swarming with little kids and mothers, but it was no use. Randy threatened to throw himself under it if he didn’t get to ride on it. I stood with my father as he whirled round and round beside my mother, sitting on a black swan with a yellow beak. He tried to do a headstand as The Man on the Flying Trapeze played over and over and over and over. After the sixth ride, we managed to pull him off. He emerged slightly pale but still game. We ate a red candy cane apiece, thus setting the stage for total disaster.

  My father never went on rides unless they were real gut busters. He had ventured unflinchingly onto roller coasters so violent as to turn away strong men, quaking in fear. He spotted one of his old favorites, an evil contraption known as the Whirligig Rocket Whip. We had been warned of its presence long before we arrived on the scene. Screams of horror and the flashing light of the emergency ambulance led us to the killer ride of them all.

  At every fair or amusement park, there is one ride that is the yokel equivalent of the main bull ring in Madrid. This is where callow-faced youths and gorilla-armed icemen prove their virility to their admiring women. The Rocket Whip was a classic of its kind. It consisted of two bullet-shaped cars, one yellow, one red, attached to the ends of rotating arms. It revolved simultaneously clockwise and up and down. At the same time, the individual cars rotated in their own orbits. The old man, spotting the Rocket Whip, strained forward like a fire horse smelling smoke.

  “Are you sure you should go on that?” My mother held back.

  “Aw, come on. It’ll do the kids good. Blow the stink off W She didn’t answer, just gazed up in fear at the mechanical devil that was now about to take on passengers. The yellow car rested near the ground, it’s wire-mesh door invitingly open.

  He bought three tickets from the operator, who sat near the turnstile in a rocking chair, the control lever at his side.

  “Let’s go, kids.”

  We piled into the car. It was simplicity itself; two hard metal seats and a bar that clamped down over the laps of the occupants, so that their bodies didn’t become actually dismembered. We sat stationary for a long moment. High above us, the occupants of the red car gazed down at us—upside down—waiting for Thor’s hammer to descend.

  The man yanked the lever and it began. Slowly
at first, we began to spin. The landscape outside our wire-mesh cage blurred as we gained speed. We leaped skyward, up, up; paused briefly at the top of the arc at what looked like thousands of feet above ground level, then plunged straight down. Just as we neared the earth, we were whipped upward again. By this time, the car, caught by enormous forces, had begun spinning centrifugally on its own. We were trapped in a giant cream separator.

  There were brief flashes of dark sky, flashing lights, gaping throngs, my old man’s rolling eyes, his straw hat sailing around the interior of the car.

  “Oh, no, fer Chrissake!” he yelled. A shower of loose change—quarters, nickels, dimes, pennies—sprayed out of his pockets, filled the car for an instant and was gone, spun out into the night.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ! No!” he yelled again, as his brown-and-white marbled Wearever fountain pen with his name on it, given to him by the bowling team, flew out of his pocket and disappeared into the night.

  Higher and higher we flew, swooping low to scream upward again. My kid brother, chalk white, whimpered piteously. I hung onto the iron bar, certain that my last hour had arrived. My head thumped the back of the car steadily as it spun.

  “Ain’t this fun, kids? Wow, what a ride!” shouted the old man, sweating profusely. He made a grab for his hat as it sailed past.

  “Wave to Ma, kids! There she is!”

  It was then that the operator turned the power on full. Everything that had gone before was only a warm-up. Our necks snapped back as the Rocket Whip accelerated. I was not touching the seat at any point. Jack-knifed over the bar, I saw that one of my shoes had been wrenched off my foot. At that moment, with no warning, my kid brother let it all go. His entire day’s accumulation of goodies, now marinated and pungent, gushed out in a geyser. The car spun crazily. The air was filled with atomized spray of everything he had ingested for the past 24 hours. Down we swooped.

  “My new pongee shirt!”

  Soaked from head to foot, the old man struggled frantically in his seat to get out of the line of fire. It was no use. I felt it coming, too. I closed my eyes and the vacuum forces of outer space just dragged it all out of me like a suction pump. From a million miles away, I heard my old man shouting something, but it didn’t matter. All I knew was that if I didn’t hold onto that bar, it would be all over.

  We gradually spun to a stop and finally the wire-mesh door opened. My feet touched the blessed earth. On rubbery legs, clinging weakly together, the three of us tottered past the turnstile as other victims were clamped into the torture chamber we had just left.

  “Great ride, eh, folks? I left you on a little longer, ‘cause I could see the kids was really enjoyin’ it,” said the operator, pocketing the last of my father’s change as we passed through the turnstile.

  “Thanks. It sure was great,” said the old man with a weak smile, a bent cigarette hanging from his lips. He always judged a ride by how sick it made him. The nausea quotient of the Rocket Whip was about as high as they come.

  We sat on a bench for a while to let the breeze dry off the old man’s shirt, and so that our eyes could get back into focus. From all around us we could hear the whoops and hollers of people going up and down and sideways on the other rides.

  There was one across from the Rocket Whip that my kid brother, who had great recuperative powers, had to go on. We didn’t have the strength to stop him. It was a big barrel made out of some kind of shiny metal and it spun around like a cocktail shaker on its side. The people were screaming and yelling; their skirts were flying up, their shoes falling off. Randy loved it. We hung around and waited until they threw him out.

  It was late now and getting a little chilly. It seemed like we had been at the fair for about a month. We sat on the bench while the crowd trudged past us, chewing hot dogs, lugging jars of succotash that they had bought at the exhibits, twirling sticks with little yellow birds on the ends of strings that we could hear whistling over the calliope on the merry-go-round, wearing souvenir Dr. Bodley’s Iron Nerve Tonic sun visors, carrying drunken cousins who had hit the applejack since early morning, wheeling reeking babies smeared with caked Pablum and chocolate. Long-legged, skinny, yellow dogs with their tongues hanging out kept running back and forth and barking. It had been an unforgettable day.

  “It sure feels good to just sit for a while,” said my mother as she took off one shoe and dumped out some popcorn. The old man didn’t say anything. The unlit cigarette still in his mouth, he just sat and watched the crowd move on, with his hat pushed back on his head. We sat like that for about 15 minutes, getting our wind back.

  “Did you feel a drop of rain?” My mother looked up at the black sky and held out her hand.

  The old man looked up. “Nah. You must be sweating.”

  “I felt a drop,” I said, sticking my hand out.

  The only one who didn’t stick his hand out was my kid brother, who didn’t care whether it rained or not He just squatted at the end of the bench and went back to whining, which he always did when there was nothing else to do.

  “Stop that! You’re getting on my nerves!” said my mother, poking him in the ribs to shut him up.

  “I’m tired.” He had that high-pitched, irritating sound that he was so good at

  “You know, I think it is raining.” The old man made it official.

  People started to hold newspapers over their heads and duck under awnings and into tents.

  “Well, we might as well call it a day,” announced the old man as he stood up and stuck his shirttail back into his pants.

  “Let’s head for the car.”

  We were a long way from the parking lot, which was over on the other side of the race track, about four miles away. We slogged doggedly through drifting mountains of candy wrappers, cigar butts, apple cores and cow flop; past tents full of canned lima beans and crocheted doilies, sweetheart pillows and gingerbread men, past shooting galleries and harvester machines and, finally, as the rain was really beginning to come down hard, we reached the car. We joined the procession of mud-splattered vehicles inching painfully, bumper to bumper, toward the distant highway.

  “Y’KNOW, I think the fair was even better than usual this year.” My father said the same thing every year.

  “Yes, the quilts were better this year,” my mother agreed. “I think Bernice should have won at least second prize, though. The quilt that won wasn’t that good.”

  “Oh, well, you know there’s a lot of politics in that quilt business.” The old man always figured there was politics in everything.

  “I’m hungry!” Randy was at it again. He’d had an empty stomach ever since the Rocket Whip.

  “We’ll all have meat-loaf sandwiches when we get home,” said my mother, wiping the steam off the inside of the windshield with her handkerchief, so that she could see out

  A Right Guard commercial featuring two French Foreign Legionnaires hiding behind a sand dune snapped me back to the real world. I glanced at my watch. My God! It was 20 after four. Another goddamn night shot in front of the television set

  The closing credits of the movie came on, superimposed over the never-never dreamworld of Dick Haymes’ state fair. I stood up, my knees cracking like twin castanets—an occupational hazard of late-late movie addiction. Hobbling over to the set, I reached down and snapped it off. The picture quickly shrank to a tiny dot in the middle of the gray screen. It lingered for a moment, glowing at me accusingly, as though I had killed it, and then disappeared.

  I was ready to hit the sack. Or was I? No, there was something I had to do. What was it? I felt a peculiar, unnamable yearning from deep within me, a gnawing emptiness. I smacked my lips, and suddenly I knew. Marching purposefully to the front closet, I threw on my coat and headed out the front door into the empty streets on a lonely quest. I had to have a taffy apple.

  “I’m going to throw this wagon out, George. You don’t play with it anymore, you’re a general now. It’s just gathering dust in the cellar. And if you don’t want that littl
e hatchet you got for your birthday, I’ll get rid of that, too. I don’t want it just banging around the house. It’s liable to cause more trouble.”

  I am hearing George Washington’s mother speaking in a quavery, old-timy voice, filtering through the hazy mists of past ages. There in the case right in front of my eyes was a stylish, archaic, hunched-up kind of cart with big spoked wheels. You could even see vestigial flecks of ancient red paint. The card read:

  TOY WAGON GENERALLY SUPPOSED TO HAVE BELONGED TO GEORGE WASHINGTON AS A CHILD. THIS PRICELESS RELIC HAS BEEN ALMOST CONCLUSIVELY AUTHENTICATED.

  George Washington’s little red wagon! My mind boggled at the thought of the Father of Our Country tugging his high-spoked wooden toy through the boondocks, his 18th Century overalls faintly damp, his 18th Century kidshoes trailing laces in the sand, on his way to becoming the most successful revolutionist in all history.

  I moved among the museum exhibits, now deep in a maelstrom of contemplation, mining a new vein of thought that had never occurred to me. In the next case, resting on a chaste velvet-covered podium, lay a chewed and worn wooden top of the type commonly known among the wooden-top set of my day as a spikesie. For the unfortunates unfamiliar with this maddening device, which over the centuries has separated the men from the boys among kids, a spikesie is a highly functional top-shaped wooden toy, beautifully, malevolently tapered down to a glittering steel spikelike spinning surface.

  I stopped dead in my tracks, unable to believe my eyes. I looked long and hard, peering intently into the shiny glass case at the squat toy that was displayed there. There was no doubt about it. This was no ordinary spikesie, but identical with a sinister breed of top that I myself had once encountered. Bending low over the exhibit, I examined the inscription:

  UNUSUAL HANDMADE TOP. ORIGIN UNKNOWN. SAID TO HAVE BEEN OWNED BY THE YOUNG THOMAS JEFFERSON.

  My God! Thomas Jefferson! The elegant, consummate product of the age of reason; architect, statesman, Utopian, man of letters. I wondered modestly whether I could have shown Tom a thing or two about top spinning. After all, a Declaration of Independence is one thing; a split top is another. The top rested quietly on its podium, mute and mysterious. It was a dark, rich, worn russet color. I wondered what its name was and what battles it had fought for the framer of the American way of life, what battles it had fought in the distant past and perhaps would fight again.