LAST NIGHT AT THE FAIR

M. RICKERT

The fair still comes to this town; that might give you some idea. The rides haven’t changed much, either. The Ferris wheel still spins its circular course, lit at night with colored bulbs. From up there you can see the tent where the 4-H exhibits sport award-winning ribbons, and the building where the baked goods and canning entries are judged. It only lasts four days, four wondrous days if you are young and, for that first day, it is all a person can do not to steal chocolate chip cookies from the display or dip a hand into the case that contains the blueberry pie and pumpkin loaf, though once the flies descend all temptation is lost.

Old now, my favorite time to attend is early in the morning before the fair officially opens. I meander down the midway without the barkers or masses of people, not yet sticky and unsteady with littered popcorn cartons and other garbage, well before the drinking begins and the demolition cars rev their engines. Early in the morning, I walk through time, all the way back to my childhood and, in this way, return to that last summer when I was young.

When we were young, and the grownups told us we would never have more freedom. We thought they were wrong. Look at them, driving wherever they want to go, eating whatever they desire, dictating what words we can say, telling us when to come home and when to go to bed. It seemed impossible that they were right, but as I walk the early morning midway back in time, I see us running wild with an abandon since lost, not just to the trajectory of age, but to a reality arisen from fetid ground that forever replaced the innocence of childhood with fears we never imagined, shootings, and kidnappings, molestations and the like.

We scared each other with stories of ghosts seen only in mirrors in the dark, zombie hitchhikers, and the lion either escaped or released from some misguided adult’s fantasy of exotic pet ownership into the Wisconsin landscape. There were reports of sightings all summer as it made its way across the state, and I remember many a long night turning restlessly in the dark, the mechanical whir of the fan blowing hot air over my skin, itchy with mosquito bites, thinking I might have heard a roar or a cry through my open window, only to pad across the thick shag of carpet and observe the quiet street below, so still it was hard to believe anything exciting could ever happen there as I craned my neck to look up at the sky where the Big Dipper hung.

“See that?” my father told me earlier that summer. “See how it’s right above our house? You’re lucky to live beneath the Big Dipper. While you sleep it pours all the magic out. Onto you, especially.”

“Me?” I asked.

“No matter what happens,” he said, “you gotta believe this, Anne Marie. Your life is going to be special.”

I did believe him. Why wouldn’t I? It had been good for so long. Only now do I understand what I did not know then, that he had already gotten the diagnosis; the cry that sometimes woke me probably came from my mother, and the roar from him, or maybe it was the other way around.

That night, I looked up at the Big Dipper dripping all the magic over our little house, leaning my ear close to the screen, then walked across the room to unplug the fan which emitted a faint blue spark I didn’t have the sense to find alarming. And, in that silence, I heard it again. I returned to the window, and listened, not to a lion’s roar, or the rumbling engine of the hitchhiker’s ride, certainly not the whispers of a mirror-trapped ghost, but the fair music still playing hours after I’d watched from our screen porch beside my father, fallen asleep on that hot night wrapped in a blanket, the drunken passage of the last revelers passing our house until my mother found me and said, “What are you doing still up? Go to bed now, Anne Marie. The fair is over.”

But it wasn’t! I heard the music through the distant dark and wondered what the fair was like after everyone went home. Did the Tall Man pluck stars from the sky? Did the Ferris wheel unleash itself from the brackets it resided in? Did the woman who made funnel cakes keep dipping them in powdered sugar to pass out to anyone who dared explore the midway? Did the man who ran the ringtoss win at his own game and pick out the giant stuffed bear for his prize, and did the horses turn their heads as they pranced free from their carousel as they had in Mary Poppins?

I had to find out and, as soon as I decided I would, the music grew louder. Not so loud as to wake the snoring grownups but loud enough that any minuscule residue of doubt was dispelled. I changed and tiptoed down the stairs past the blue glow of stovetop light and out the back door, pausing for a moment to inhale the perfume of August night air, sweet with the scent of early apples mingled with cut grass and something else, something just on the edge of going sour, fall’s approach, I suppose. I wasn’t even surprised to discover my husband standing in the front yard, staring at the house. Of course, I didn’t know he would be my husband then. His name was Stanko, given to him for obscure reasons by an eccentric grandfather, but we all called him Stinko and, as evidence of his good nature, he never seemed to mind.

“Hey, Stinko,” I whispered. “What’re you looking at?” He turned in surprise, his eyes wide. “Anne Marie,” he said, as if it were the most ordinary thing, as if it were the middle of the day. “Did you ever notice how the Big Dipper hangs right over your house?”

“What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?”

“Why, I don’t know exactly,” he said. “I heard music. What are you doing?”

“What do you think? Come on!” I took off running, and he followed. If you are wondering how things worked out between us, I can tell you we were married fifty-six years before he died, and he never stopped following me wherever I went.

So we ran through the night streets of Oakdale, past all the houses closed up tight, past massive hydrangea borders, and lilies with blossoms hanging shut from drooping stems. We ran through the silver halos of streetlights right back into the dark again, and when I see us there, from all this distance, I think we look like little ghosts.

We ran all the way without stopping until we stood across the street from the fair, enchanted by the lights, the bright sounds, the scent of popcorn and burnt sugar.

“What now?” Stinko asked.

I shrugged as if I knew better. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know, Anne Marie. Doesn’t it seem strange? Maybe we should go back.”

I looked at him with his brow furrowed beneath his yellow hair, cut so short it stuck out a bit, and shook my head, acting braver than I felt as I proceeded through the gate.

“Welcome! Welcome! So glad you decided to come,” the Tall Man greeted us, smiling down from his great height, surrounded by stars.

“Thanks,” Stinko said, then turned to me and whispered, “Anne Marie, I just realized. I don’t got any money.”

“What’s that? What’s that you’re saying?” the Tall Man asked. “Speak up so I can hear you, pardon the pun.”

“We don’t have any money,” I shouted. No money and no way to get any, either. I’d spent my allowance and all I’d saved of it throughout that summer in the first three days of the fair, which left me broke on the last when I had glumly pretended interest in the cows and sad rabbits.

“Money? Money? Who said anything about money?”

“I did.”

“You don’t need money on this night,” the Tall Man said. “Don’t they teach you anything these days? Welcome! Welcome!”

I turned around, stunned to discover kids lining up behind us. It was unusual to see children I didn’t know in Oakdale, and I wondered where they’d come from, but then Stinko took my hand in his and I was confused by how that felt. His skin was warm, his grasp neither too tight, nor too loose.

“Come on, Anne Marie! What are you waiting for?”

We rode all the rides and got dizzy but never sick. We spun in circles until the floor fell out, and we were held up only by air. We rode carousel horses that maintained their stance but did whinny and breathe beneath us. We rode the Ferris wheel and saw, from its highest point, the small dots of joy careening about, the 4-H tent, the baking hall, and the empty buildings where the farm animals had been kept.

“It makes sense when you think about it,” I said. “I mean, they belong to people who took them home.”

“Yea,” Stinko said, “but Anne Marie, what is this, anyway?”

Rather than admit my own ignorance, I laughed. “Come on,” I said. “Aren’t you hungry?”

We ate funnel cakes and hot dogs, drank all the soda we wanted, dipped French fries into ketchup and licked the salt from our fingertips. We played ringtoss and darts, winning at both, and more than once almost forgot our stuffed bears on a bench when we went on a ride. We did everything, and we did it again, over and over, until we returned to the Ferris wheel. When it stopped for a while, leaving us at the top, we were too tired to feel alarm.

“Anne Marie, look.” Stinko pointed straight ahead at the sky striped with dawn.

“I think it’s time to go home,” I said. “Before they wake up, and worry.”

“But look,” Stinko said. “Do you see it?”

“See what?”

“Look.”

I squinted and leaned forward, far enough that the cab rocked, and Stinko rested his hand over mine, initiating that feeling again, the one I was too young to identify.

“Do you see it now?”

“It’s all so tiny,” I said. “Like it could disappear.”

“There,” he pointed, thrusting his skinny arm out. “Right down the middle of the road. Look.”

In spite of the fantastical night we’d just spent together, my mind could not accept what I saw. Initially, I sorted it out as an enormous house cat, but of course no domestic creature would be so large.

“The lion.”

Together we watched it make its passage right through the center of town, even as the occasional light appeared in a window, signaling the homes of early risers. I held my breath and, years later, my husband told me he did, too, as we watched the majestic creature first pass his house, and then mine. Just as the Ferris wheel creaked forward, the lion leapt from the road into the Maylers’ cornfield, so thoroughly disappeared it was easy to wonder if it had ever been there at all. We arrived back on Earth to the sound of the engine shutting down with a clunk. The music stopped, too, and, like candles blown out, the lights blinked off.

I can guess what you are thinking. If it hadn’t happened to me, I probably would think it, too. I have no proof to offer. Even the stuffed animals we’d won that night were forgotten and left behind. We were halfway home before we realized we’d abandoned them on the bench by the Ferris wheel. We couldn’t go back, we agreed. It was already morning, and we worried that our parents might discover us missing. We couldn’t imagine how terrible our punishment might be.

Even though I pretended it didn’t matter, and made fun of Stinko for doing so, he walked right past his house to make sure I made it safely to mine and, when we got there, leaned over and kissed my cheek, then took off, running back down the street as though he was worried the lion would return. I thought for sure I would be in trouble, especially when I opened the door and smelled the coffee. My mom was in the kitchen, standing by the stove, but she didn’t even turn to look at me. “My goodness, Anne Marie. What got you up so early?”

I opened my mouth to answer but, for some reason, let it close without a word. I guess you might say that was the morning I left the entanglements of a child and stepped into a separate world all my own. I walked across the kitchen and surprised my mother with a hug, wrapping my arms tight around her waist, as if afraid she might disappear.

“Oh, Anne Marie,” she said. “Who told you?”

“Dad told me,” I said.

“He did? When did he? I thought we agreed to tell you together.”

“I’ll never forget it, either,” I said.

“What’s that, dear?” she asked as she rubbed my back.

I pulled away to look up at her. “You know,” I said. “About the Big Dipper hanging right over our house, dripping all that magic on us.”

“Oh. Is that what he said?”

I nodded with a smile I recall as beatific, wiser than anyone was how I felt when I left my mother standing in the kitchen in her old bathrobe, staring at me, her secrets intact. I walked upstairs to my little bedroom where I plugged the fan in, kicked off my shoes, and fell into bed. You might say you have found evidence that this memory is of a dream, but you would be wrong.

Everything that has happened since then is the dream. That’s how it feels, sitting on this bench, watching the lion meander in my tracks down the midway toward me. The closer it gets, the more my heart burns, and breath falters. I close my eyes against the inevitable suffering. It was such an ordinary life, but it was so wonderful! I wait, and wait, but nothing happens. When I open my eyes, the lion is gone; the boy I once knew standing in its place. “Anne Marie,” he says. “I have been looking for you.” He reaches for my hand, his fingers clasp around mine, and we are running together with the lights and the music and everything good dripping over us as though there has been no time at all between the first and last night at the fair.