City of Boys (34 page)

The children look around anxiously, trying to choose, and
finally settle on the petting zoo. Anne buys them little cups of brown pellets to feed the animals, and they hop quickly from cage to cage, holding out handfuls of feed, then withdrawing their hands as the animals bring their heavy noses toward them.

Anne leans against a post and watches the sky and the street for rain; a light brown station wagon, just like Nancy’s, passes by slowly. It circles around, then passes again, and though the car is a fairly common color and make, Anne is sure it’s Nancy. She looks closely for the dent she noticed earlier, but by the time she’s spotted a shadow on the right bumper, the car is too far away to identify for certain. There was a woman driving, accompanied by a man, but Anne was so intent on finding the dent, she didn’t look closely at the people inside. She is watching the street, waiting for the car to return, when rain begins at last to fall.

Men who have been standing around, leaning against poles and tossing their cigarette butts in the dirt, now jerk into motion, coiling ropes, winding up awnings. The few customers move toward their cars, and Nancy’s children look up, alarmed, then come reluctantly to stand beside Anne.

—Well, she says, —it’s raining. They look forlornly around at the cheap rides, then up at her, and she can see by their faces that they have forgiven her before it’s even occurred to them to hold her responsible: it’s not her fault the carnival is cheap and small and ugly, and it’s not her fault it’s raining. The ease with which they absorb this disappointment makes her walk to the nearest carnival worker, who is jerking down a tent; she stands beside him a moment, then touches him on the arm. He is like all the men she has ever seen work such carnivals: young and stringy-looking, with longish dirty hair under his cap. “Terry” is written in yellow thread across his pocket. He looks up, not interested.

—We just got here, she says. —Can they ride just one ride?

—Lady, he begins, and she says, —Please? It’s really important. Just one. He looks around. Soon it will rain hard, and the dust will turn to mud, making the machinery difficult to handle, spooking the animals.

—Lady, he says, —we’re folding up now.

The children come out from under the petting-zoo awning and form a little huddle around Anne; as they realize she is bargaining for them, they look at the rides, picking one out in case she wins.

—Just one? she says again, and he looks at her. His eyes are light green and mean-looking. —We came a long way for this carnival, she says. —All the way from Cincinnati. No one could believe this, she knows, but perhaps he is not from around here, or doesn’t have a good sense of geography. He looks at the rides dubiously, then twists the rope he’s holding once around his hand.

—It’s my daughter’s birthday, she adds, and puts her hand on Jenny’s head. It occurs to her that she ought to bribe him; she wonders how to do this discreetly, how much it would take, and if she has enough money, but as she calculates, he looks down at the kids and says, —Well, if it’s her birthday.

He looks around at the rides. —I guess they could go around once on the cars, he says, and gestures toward the nearest ride, a set of tiny cars that goes over a mildly bumpy circular track; even Anne can tell that it is the least exciting of the rides here, but the children move automatically toward it. As Terry drops his rope and moves forward, rain splatters in the dust in front of him.

—Hey, he says, —it’s getting worse.

—Please, she says, taking his arm. Machine oil coats the stiff cloth of his shirt and she can feel the hard knobby bone of his elbow. He looks at her and she almost expects him to smile and say, Hey, I have kids at home, or, Yeah, I remember
what it’s like to be a kid, but he looks quickly down her body, then up to her face and grins at her; then again he looks down, more slowly this time, bolder, realizing she has given him permission to do this in exchange for the ride.

—Okay, he says to the kids, —but hurry, and they run to the ride, and stand in front of it, choosing their cars. Each is modeled after a real car; they are all convertibles, but one or two have Cadillac fins, another is round and humped like a Volkswagen bug, and there are several racy sports cars.

—Hey, he says, —hurry, and each child goes to the nearest car, climbs in, and ties the seat belt. —Okay, he says, and the children look at him as they wait, holding tight to the wheels of their cars, wondering how long he will let them ride.

When he pulls the lever and the cars jerk to a start, they stare straight ahead expectantly. The rain picks up, and Anne moves back, under the awning of the petting zoo, where men are beginning to dismantle the pens. Terry turns to say something to her, then looks around; when he spots her under the awning, he looks annoyed a moment, then grins. She smiles unwillingly, and thinks of the drive home, of the life ahead of her. She wonders if David will want to stop at all the rest stops again, and if he will notice anything different when they pass through Cincinnati. She wonders how old he will be when he finally goes bald, where he will be living, with whom. She wonders what his life will be like without her, if he will be lonely, if he will wonder where she is and what she is doing.

A sudden pull at her elbow startles her, and she looks down to see a goat nibbling on the sleeve of her shirt. She pulls her arm away, and the goat looks mildly up at her, then turns and shuffles back across to the corner of its cage. As she watches it nose through the sawdust for any dropped pellets of food, she realizes suddenly that David’s life will
be just as it is now, only without her: a peaceful series of mild joys and mild disappointments, an equanimous acceptance of blows that—like the one she herself is about to deal him—will never come close enough to do much damage. Leaving him, she understands, will not matter to him in the way she had thought; he will not take it personally, and he will let her go without rancor. The thought of it leaves her unsettled, somehow slighted, and even though it is she who is leaving, she feels suddenly abandoned.

She inhales sharply, breathing in the oil and dust and rain, and knows that when she remembers this trip, it is this moment–not anything that happened in Cleveland or Columbus or Cincinnati–but this moment that she will remember: the touch of Terry’s stiff oily shirt between her fingers, the animals snorting uneasily as their pens come down around them, and the children going slowly around the track while rain streams down on their small heads, their faces set in grim determined joy but their hearts already gone numb.

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