“Please?” the kid begs. He squeezes the safety bar so hard his eight-year-old fingers look bloodless. The Ferris wheel is stopped; two stories beneath them a teenage couple is being loaded onto the ride. The gondola is rocking back and forth because the teenagers on either side of the kid—his new brothers—want to scare him.
Below, the carnival is daylight bright. The kid is too scared to look down, but he hears the bustling: shouts and laughter, popping cap guns, and carnies yelling at every passerby.
His brothers swing their weight forward, shaking the gondola up and out like they are trying to make it fly into the night air. But each time, just as it feels like it might break off, it suddenly stops, hangs a sick feeling in the kid’s gut, and drops backward into the dark. The kid’s stomach flops. He’s seasick, airsick, about to throw up. He wishes he hadn’t chomped down fist after fist of cotton candy earlier, because now it’s coming back up, scalding his throat.
“Wheeeeee,” the oldest brother squeals, loud and long into the high dark. “Let’s go! Wheeeeee!”
The kid stares at the boat lights on the far side of the lake. Red and white orbs floating miles away. He knows that if he looks down at the boats bobbing right off the beach at the edge of the carnival, he’ll puke. He focuses on the farthest of the dots and imagines fireflies, glowing hummingbirds.
“Hello, Clear Lake!” the other brother shouts. He slaps the kid’s thigh. The kid looks down in the dark, sure the pain must be making it throb with light. “Are we having fun or what?”
“Don’t. Don’t. Don’t,” the kid pleads. “Come on, please?”
His new brothers howl. They swing and sloop in the bug-thick fringe of light.
The kid starts sniffling, says, “Please don’t,” and then is crying softly as the Ferris wheel jerks into movement and stops again to let another group on. “Please?”
He tries to swallow his sobs.
“You scared, Hemmy?” the oldest brother asks, nudging the kid with an elbow. It’s their nickname for him, short for Hemorrhoid. The kid knows they are poking fun at him when they use it, but usually doesn’t care because it makes him feel special. “Wow, we’re pretty high. You can see everything up here. I reeeeeeaaaaaallly hope we don’t fall!”
The kid closes his eyes. He wants to be back on solid ground, to leave Iowa, to go back to his mother’s house in Minnesota. The younger brother huffs, but stops swinging his legs. Finally the Ferris wheel rattles to life and rotates smoothly.
“Hey, hey, hey. We were just messing with you.” The older brother leans down and speaks softly. He puts an arm over his shoulder. “Didn’t mean anything by it. Come on, we’re sorry. You’re our brand-new little brother!”
The kid wants so badly for his new brothers to like him. He’s done everything they’ve tricked him into this weekend, shadowed them every second of the day, asked them thousands of questions, even sat on the toilet in silence while they took baths. But right now he wants his new brothers to die, for their dying to hurt so bad, to last longer than anything.
The Ferris wheel loops, machinery clacking with groans.
The kid refuses to speak or open his eyes. He is far away, alone in a field of glowing light. They ride the giant hoop in silence. Down into and then above the jubilance of Clear Lake’s Fourth of July Carnival.
The kid is still overwhelmed by everything that has happened these last two months. One morning, a week after he asked about his father, his dad showed up for the first time since the kid was a baby. They went to Hardee’s for burgers and milk shakes and followed it up with an afternoon of toy shopping. He had never had a day like that—was entranced by this new way of living—and asked if he could go home with his father for the weekend. This is the third such weekend since.
Yesterday, while his father and stepmother were at work, his brothers stripped him naked. One held down his writhing body while the other squirted two full bottles of mustard all over him. They shoved him out the front door, locked it, and waved from the picture window as the naked and soiled kid cried in the driveway.
Afterward he scrubbed and scrubbed his skin but it just turned sickly, a deeply flushed yellow. The smell of the mustard is inside him still, overpowering the sugary smells of the carnival, all the junk food his father happily gave him money for—a twenty—the most money he’s ever held in his hand. He bought and ate everything: bags of saltwater taffy; an elephant ear as wide as his chest, caked with powdered sugar; a sock-long sleeve of caramel corn.
His hands are sticky with sugar but all he smells is mustard.
The Ferris wheel orbits over and over, their gondola rising high above the other rides, and the kid imagines he is the Incredible Hulk, smashing each of his brothers’ heads in a fist with the same ease with which he can flatten a roly-poly. He will launch them off the gondola, far out into the lake, where they’ll sink to the muddy bottom and become food for catfish.
In the quiet he hazards a look down. Seats are filling in front of the band shell. On the other side of the street, the grassy shoreline is quilted with the blankets of people who, before the sun set, hunkered down in the best spots for viewing that night’s fireworks.
It will be a concussive barrage of an hour—and he will be scared and confused and some kind of happy he can’t understand. The fireworks will be shot off a barge anchored a few hundred yards from shore. The fireworks will streak cherry red and willow white across the sky. Laceworks of crackle and burst will reflect off the lake.
The kid will imagine the world is shattering, that all of it is on fire.
When their gondola stops at the bottom, a rail-thin carny with forearms like scabbed straws lifts the safety bar from their laps. As soon as he can squeeze out, the kid makes a break for it. He leaps down the ride’s steps and is sprinting before his shoes touch the ground. He runs away from his new brothers, away from the corner of the fair where the rides whirl and clank, where everyone smells like an electrical fire, like a car garage.
The kid hears his brothers yell and start after him, but the street he runs down is lined with midway games and food stands. It’s jam-packed with everyone who lives in northern Iowa. The kid squirrels and eels through the masses without slowing down. His new brothers have to stop running, say excuse me, pardon, pardon, to pass through the crowds, because tonight—the biggest night of the summer at the lake—all the assholes are out.
Too many people have crazy thoughts fizzing through their heads. Too many want to start a fight, trying to impress the boys or a girl, especially after failing to win the human-size panda bear, especially after slamming the gigantic hammer down on the scale and watching the game show mercury rise up to “Mini Man!,” the surrounding crowd slapping their knees with laughter.
The kid goes and goes. He flies past everything. Ring toss. Water gun horse races. Throw a dart, pop a balloon! A few seconds later—beside a stand hung with ziplock bags of goldfish—he passes the same game, but with BB guns.
He hooks around the side of a stand selling fresh lemonade and peeks out from its edge. Can’t see his brothers anywhere in the crowd. He catches his breath, and as he watches, everything slows down. The kid doesn’t know any of the thousands of people at the fair—including, he thinks, his brothers.
He feels like a spy, someone on the run, an outlaw. Bliss lightnings down his spine. From his pocket he pulls a twist of saltwater taffy and stuffs it in his mouth. He walks into the shadows and drops the wrapper. Never in his life has he eaten so many sweets. Later he will wake in the middle of the night and rush to the bathroom. He’ll turn himself inside out throwing up. But right now he untwists another piece of taffy. He feels electric. He might not sleep all weekend.
He disappears between two stands and comes out the other side. Suddenly he’s on an empty street, lined with the plastic back walls of the midway games. It’s dark except for a flickering streetlight. He’s amazed at how quiet it is—all the people and games and rides are just a street over, but they sound a thousand miles away.
Up and down the pavement, thick electric cables twist from the stands to the mobile home–size generators lined up in the lot one block over. The kid imagines they are snakes, enormous anacondas and pythons slipping through the slim darknesses of the midway.
Buzzed on sugar, the kid runs the dark streets that surround the fair until he’s back at his original point of exit. He stops to catch his breath and notices, far down one street, RVs pressed together like boxcars on a train.
He tiptoes down the pavement. Each smashed street-light dangles glass teeth. Closer, he hears people, and, stepping back, hides behind a tree. The RVs are ramshackle, with duct-taped mirrors and windows covered with cardboard. Standing on the steps of one of them, backlit by its insides, a man pisses into the street.
“Look, Ma,” he shouts. Hands on his hips, pants crumpled to his knees. “No hands!” The loud splattering goes on forever before, finally, slowing to a dribble. The man grabs his penis and shakes it. From the shadows comes a woman’s voice, ghostlike, saying to put that thing away. The kid can hardly breathe.
The man on the steps waggles his penis for his invisible audience until a full can of beer rockets off his chest.
“Fuckers!” he shouts, leaning down to reach his pants. A lake of foam grows around the can in the street. There’s laughter, hoots that turn into phlegm-webbed coughs, and someone spits against the side of the RV. The kid thinks he somehow crawled into another world. Like Narnia.
“I’m empty.” The man on the steps zips up and opens the door of the RV. “Who needs one?”
After he’s gone, a cigarette is lit, and the kid sees clearly that there are two other people standing in the street—a woman and a man. “That fool’s gonna get himself cut,” the man says. His face is tight but puffy, like the bags of goldfish on the midway, and his voice sounds like wrenching metal. “Better watch it.”
“Don’t be like that,” the woman says as she steps toward him. “Don’t.” In the half light of their smoking, the woman unbuttons her shirt, opens it wide, and presses her breast to the angry man. The kid feels as if he should look away but he can’t.
“Let’s go,” she says. The two hurry down the street, toward the lake, into the farther dark.
The kid feels all weird and tingly, outside himself. He’s played around with his friends secretly, touched the privates of all the girls and boys and let himself be touched in return. But he’s never seen a grown-up’s penis like that. Nor has he seen the real live breasts of a stranger. He also didn’t think someone could pee so much for so long.
He isn’t really sure what he saw, but he knows he wants to see it all again.
Just as he’s about to crawl out of his hiding spot, the RV door opens. The man steps onto the landing, hands filled with beer cans. He stops and looks slowly around the street.
“Shit,” the man says to the empty darkness. “Where the fuck did y’all go?” he shouts.
After reaching into the RV for an electric lantern, the man sits heavily on the bottom step. He sets the light in front of him and hunkers on the edge of its halo. He lines up four beers on the pavement, and from his hip pulls a knife as long as the kid’s forearm.
The kid is antsy and ready to go—he needs to use the bathroom, too—but now he’s scared. He is sure that the man will see him if he crawls out from behind the tree. He wishes he hadn’t been so stupid. Suddenly he doesn’t care if his brothers bully him some, if only they’d find him.
The man stabs the knife tip into the top of a beer can, then brings it to his mouth and tilts back his head. A second later he flattens the can in one fist, lets out a long burp, and throws it beyond the circle of light. There’s no clatter. The kid never hears the can land.
The man does the exact same thing two more times.
Just as he reaches for the last can, he looks up like he’s heard something out in the dark. He shouts—and then a mountain of a man, slumped deep in a wheelchair, appears in the too-bright lantern light. The man on the steps stands, hands the beer to the wheelchaired man, and then bends over and offers a hug. They speak quietly. The kid can’t make out any of it. And now he’s more confused than ever.
The man in the wheelchair looks exactly like Governor, a man the kid sees back home in Red Wing. Each day the kid and his friends ride bikes for miles, all over town, and they see Governor, in his wheelchair, everywhere. They think he must have some superpower that allows him to wheel around town at ever-higher speeds. The kids all know that something is wrong with the man—he’s a little slow, sometimes he says stuff that doesn’t make sense—but they also think it’s just his disguise. They love him. If they see his wheelchair rolling in the distance they’ll pedal as hard as they can to catch up. The kid has no clue why the man’s called Governor. And he doesn’t understand why Governor calls everyone—boy or girl, man or woman—Pretty. But he loves it. “Hey, Pretty, how’s it going?” “Be careful crossing the street, Pretty.”
He is lost in this coincidence, all of this strangeness. So he steps out of his hiding spot, without thinking, and shouts hello to the men. But they don’t smile as he expected them to. They are staring at him, hard. The one with the big knife steps toward him.
“Hi, Governor,” the kid hollers, waving, bewildered by the awesome power Governor must have to travel the hundreds of miles from Red Wing. But after taking a step closer, he sees a scarred and red-bumped face. The man is not Governor.
The bottom drops out of the kid’s guts. Fear freezes him in place before his body takes over, decides that it is time to run, and then he’s going as fast as he can. The men yell as he dashes down the block, sprinting until he finds a sliver of dark to slip through. He scrambles into the crevice, teary eyed, about to wet himself. A second later he’s back in the carnival’s cacophony. He stands upright, blinking at the brightness. Stunned.
Almost immediately he feels a hand grip his shoulder, and he’s about to scream—because the man has got him and the man has a knife and the man is going to pop the kid’s head open like a beer can.
But the hand relaxes and an arm drops over him and gently turns him around, pulling him into a hug. He feels like a spinning top. He’s delirious. So confused and scared. But his ambusher is his oldest brother. The kid knows he’s in deep trouble. His new brothers will probably never like him now. He looks at his feet and waits for them to call him names or swear at him.
“Where’d you go?” the oldest brother asks. “We’ve been looking all over for you. You OK?”
The kid looks up. The oldest brother is smiling. Around the three brothers games bling and carnies bark and people shout. Music blares from speakers on the rides. There are people crowding around them, everywhere eating and spitting and laughing.
“I’m fine.” After a pause he says he’s sorry he took off. He just hated the Ferris wheel so bad.
“We’re sorry,” the oldest brother says, looking at the other brother, who agrees—they were only trying to have some fun with their new little brother.
The kid grins at this. He did kind of have a little bit of fun. And then he says he needs a bathroom, but after he goes, could they try the Ferris wheel one more time?
“OK, Hemmy,” the oldest brother says. They all laugh together. Around them the carnival pinwheels with light, clamors with life. “Sure thing. One more time, then one more treat. Then we gotta go.”