Second-String

Stoat had worked for the carnival back then, doing a little bit of everything. Pulled levers, greased howling gears, evened legs with swiped shims, barked for the Free Shot and Whack-a-Cow, glowered in the Haunted Mill, fixed what broke. Something always broke. Hauled dripping bags of garbage to the dump, swung them over the fence. Once nearly toppled the Ferris Wheel (never set up on an incline). Once banged the bars in his cage and screamed: The Freak (pay your quarter! see the show!). And once, when the regular guy busted his arm, became the substitute human cannonball. “‘Make yourself small,’ he told me. ‘Don’t touch anything.’”

Summertime in South Carolina, and Stoat and I work together in the factory. I pack spark-plug shells, stacking good ones in cardboard boxes and spraying them with kerosene from a hissing silver can: a stay against rust. Bad parts, with ragged threads or blurred stamps, go in the red bin. There’s something I like about the job. Being able to measure a good day’s work by counting the number of wrapped boxes. The ache in my calves: standing eight hours, you earn your rest. The stink that clings to me (sweat, scorched machine oil, grease). People turn and stare in the grocery checkout. Stoat, a chip slinger though he knows arcane principles of electronics, shovels leftover steel from drop pans with a pitchfork when he has to. Given the chance, he’d rather talk. July heat rolls through the open shop door. It’s broiling by nine in the morning; we start work at six. Outside, kudzu shimmers with green light, vines twining up telephone poles and choking pine trees, blanketing the old railroad tracks with leaves that shudder in the faint wind.

“Yeah, well, I never believed that cannonball guy,” Stoat says, rubbing his stubbly jaw. “They were always playing tricks on me, thought I was stupid. I figured he was putting me on.” Spindly, underfed, he wouldn’t take up much room: probably why they’d chosen him. He’d crawled inside the cannon, smelled gunpowder, yes, and stale cloth, heat. “Braced myself,” he says. “I just wanted to hold on.”

The thing threw him, as it was meant to, over the staring crowd, bareback riders in snagged satin, goats with crumpled horns, skinny girls shaking tambourines. And the audience, like flowers tracking the sun, forgot their own faces to follow his. Looking down, he saw a boy in a jacket worn hard, leaking fill. A pleading woman clutched a man by the elbow. A family of four, each with the same broken-thumb nose. That was the first time.

In the days after that, Stoat did his routine again and again, keeping tabs on his other work after the show. In the tired, small hours: spliced wires, replaced sockets, lit his work with an old Coleman lantern. Millers fluttered to the ragged mantle, leaving their poor dust on the glass. Flattened cans on the midway picked up shine from his lamp and, further out, headlights. In the dirt parking lot, kids revved engines, shrieked onto the highway. Stoat taped wires, snipped copper. Mufflers faded to a smear, silence. And always the crickets throbbed.

“Put a cape on my neck and a helmet on my head,” he says, “but that was just for show. So is the gunpowder, an effect, it’s a spring on a platform that shoots you. Smacks you right in the butt. That first time gave me bruises all over. But once I got good, I pointed my arms in the air and flew,” he says. “Just like a swan.”

That’s years ago. Here, in the factory, Stoat pulls a pocketknife to dig in his palm after curls of brass and steel, works metal from his hand, sucks blood. Then the floor boss walks by, and Stoat, now an old man, picks up his pitchfork and heads for the next machine.

I can guess the rest:

Night after night, the hollow drumroll, a glaze of light—later, twists of wire, racing lights flashing on the deserted strip in what would be, by Monday, just another empty field between towns, passionflower clawing hard dirt, marquee listing past dates. Gone the goats and the popcorn machine, stubs ragged as yanked teeth, sawdust damp with drink. Milk buckets and softballs shoved in a truck bed. And Stoat himself arcing over another crowd, eyes watering from the wind, hoping to land in the net. The big tent poles swaying and pulling. Below, someone watching. Someone walking away.