‘What do you mean, grunts?’
‘Kids just studying to make grades, with no interest in the system except that it provides them with a ten-thousand-dollar a year job when they get out. A grunt is a student who gives a shit about nothing except his sheep skin. That’s over. Most of them are awake.
There are going to be some big changes.’
‘Is that important to you? Even though you’re out?’
He drew himself up. ‘Madam, I am an alumnus. Smith, class of ’70. Fill the stems to dear old Maine.’
She smiled. ‘Come on, let’s go. I want a ride on the whip before they shut it down for the night.’
‘Very good,’ he said, taking her arm. ‘I just happen to have your car parked around the corner.’
‘And eight dollars. The evening fairly glitters before us.
The night was overcast but not rainy, mild for late October. Overhead, a quarter moon was struggling to make it through the cloud cover. Johnny slipped an arm around her and she moved closer to him.
‘You know, I think an awful lot of you, Sarah.’ His tone was almost offhand, but only almost. Her heart slowed a little and then made speed for a dozen beats or so.
‘Really?’
‘I guess this Dan guy, he hurt you, didn’t he?’
‘I don’t know what he did to me,’ she said truthfully.
The yellow blinker, a block behind them now, made their shadows appear and disappear on the concrete in front of them.
Johnny appeared to think this over. ‘I wouldn’t want to do that,’ he said finally.
‘No, I know that. But Johnny… give it time.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Time. We’ve got that, I guess.’ And that would come back to her, awake and even more strongly in her dreams, in tones of inexpressible bitterness and loss.
They went around the corner and Johnny opened the passenger door for her. He went around and got in behind the wheel. ‘You cold?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s a great night for it.’
‘It is,’ he agreed, and pulled away from the curb. Her -thoughts went back to that ridiculous mask. Half Jekyll with Johnny’s blue eye visible behind the widened-O
eyesocket of the surprised doctor – Say, that’s some cocktail I invented last night) but l don’t think they’ll be able to move it in the bars – and that side was all right because you could see a bit of Johnny inside. It was the Hyde part that had scared her silly, because that eye was closed down to a slit. It could have been anybody. Anybody at all. Dan, for instance.
But by the time they reached the Esty fairgrounds, where the naked bulbs of the midway twinkled in the darkness and the long spokes of the Ferris wheel neon revolved up and down, she had forgotten the mask. She was with her guy, and they were going to have a good time.
3.
They walked up the midway hand in hand, not talking much, and Sarah found herself reliving the county fairs of her youth. She had grown up in South Paris, a paper town in western Maine, and the big fair had been the one in Fryeburg. For Johnny, a Pownal boy, it probably would have been Topsham. But they were all the same, really, and they hadn’t changed much over the years.
You parked your car in a dirt parking lot and paid your two bucks at the gate, and when you were barely inside the fairgrounds you could smell hot dogs, frying peppers and onions, bacon, cotton candy, sawdust, and sweet, aromatic horseshit. You heard the heavy, chain-driven rumble of the baby roller coaster, the one they called The Wild Mouse. You heard the popping of in the shooting galleries, the tinny blare of the Bingo caller from the PA system strung around the big tent filled with long tables and folding chairs from the local mortuary. Rock ‘n’ roll music vied with the calliope for supremacy.
You heard the steady cry of the barkers – two shots for two bits, win one of these stuffed doggies for your baby, hey-hey-yer-here, pitch till you win. It didn’t change. It turned you into a kid again, willing and eager to be suckered.