Kids These Days (34 page)

“Any of it. Do you think he meant all that?”

“I don't know.”

“How did he learn to fly one of those things?”

“I don't think it's that hard,” I said. “The sail does most of the work. You just hang on underneath, and whatever happens next is what happens.”

“My God, what if he did have it all planned?” she said.

I said, “Isn't it worse if he didn't?”

It was easy enough to find the carnival. As we came into Butler Beach, the police had a lane blocked fully off, were directing traffic into a parking lot at one of the public beach access points. As we got closer we could see it: a pirate ship, a Tilt-a-Whirl, a massive slingshot that launched people in a huge arc down along the ground and then thirty, forty, fifty feet up into the air. There were carts and trailers selling cotton candy, elephant ears, popcorn. “So there it is,” Alice said.

“Yeah,” I said, looking at it.

“Let's go. I want to ride the rides.”

I said, “No small children, no pregnant mothers.”

“We'll ride the kiddie rides,” she said. “We'll eat corn dogs.”

“Are you sure?”

“Come on,” she said. “I really want to go.”

It was five dollars to park, two dollars a ticket. Some rides cost one ticket, others two or three. They rang a bell, like a schoolhouse bell, right before they shot the slingshot each time. The bell would go off, and everybody would turn to look, and the cables would go tenser and tenser, and then they'd ring the bell again, and that was it: The highschool kid—invariably it was someone Delton's age, with her friends cheering her on from the ground—was let go along that tight curve, rushing down and then sailing back up toward the sky. Every time, I'd hold Alice's hand a little tighter, sure this would be the moment the ride would fail and the kid would just keep going, out over the parking lot and the cars and the road and into the Intracoastal. Maybe she'd tuck into a dive when she hit the water, and maybe she'd live. Or maybe—maybe she'd never hit the ground at all. Maybe she'd be the first among us to figure out how it worked, swoop in low over the cheering crowd and then fly off, away, never to be heard from again.

We rode a kiddie Ferris wheel that was barely taller than a house. We had our pictures taken in a replica Model T. We rode a roller coaster made to look like a pig. The whole thing was pink. Alice and I got our own car near the back, watched the kids in front of us, watched their parents watch them from behind the plastic gating. The metal of the cars was nearly too hot to touch. This was a one-hill ride, and that hill took us just high enough to see over the dunes and out onto the beach, the ocean. It lasted five laps, five times around, and then it was done. When we got off the ride, Alice wanted a sno-cone. We bought red and blue. She ate them both.

The sun crushed down on us. Inside the tents it was hotter than out, so we stayed away from the skeet ball and the guess-your-weight-and-age guys, played the games on the perimeter. Alice won the ring bottles on the first try. The girl running the booth said she could choose a prize, and she picked a stuffed yellow gorilla as big as a dog. It had an expression on its face like it wasn't sure what town it was in, like the carnival stopped in thirty towns in fifty days, and this must be one of them. “We can take him to Mid,” I said. “He could probably use somebody to talk to.”

“He's mine,” she said. “What if I want him for the baby's room?”

“We could loan him to Mid until she gets here,” I said.

“Let me think about it,” she said.

Alice had to go to the bathroom, so I found a piece of shade behind one of the bigger rides, waited. She left the gorilla with me. There were kids everywhere, knots and huddles of them, kids in bunches. Parents chased them, trying to make deals to keep them happy. One more hour. Two more rides. Either the funnel cake or the ice cream, but not both. We would have to have a second one, a second child. I knew that now. The bell rang, and they hoisted a shirtless boy into the air over at the slingshot. Because you had to give a kid an ally. It wouldn't be fair to leave Kitchenette on her own. Or—or maybe we could get Maggie to be her big sister. Maybe we had that part already wired in, and we'd be alright. Maybe we'd at least be able to wait until we knew if we could do it. That would be the one miracle we might be owed. The second bell went off, and they let the kid go. He flew with his arms out from his sides. The wind pushed his hair off his face. Alice came out of the bathroom, looked around. She didn't see me. I waited, just for a second, watching her stare out into the spinning crowd, before I lifted the gorilla up in the air, waved him back and forth until she saw. She smiled. The kid sailed back by again, turning a flip. He was a pro. Alice came right for me, right through all the people. Tomorrow we would go to the doctor, would go to the hospital to see Mid, then out to the castle to see Carolyn and the girls. After that, I did not know. After that, anything. Right now I still had paper tickets in my pocket. I got them out. I handed them to Alice. She had tears in her eyes. “What is it?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said. “I just really like the carnival. I'm glad we came.”

Behind her, a girl who couldn't have been more than five years old was getting ready to test her strength, to play the hammer game.
HY-STRYKER,
it said on the tower. She'd picked up a hammer bigger than she was and was lining things up. She had long reddish hair pulled back in a braid, was wearing a plain brown dress. “Watch out now,” the barker was saying. “Folks, we got a natural on our hands. Better stand back.” From our angle, I could see the guy doing something with his feet, probably rigging the game—but the girl had already swung the hammer through the air and brought it down square on the metal plate, and the needle took off up the tower, all the way up, rang the bell. Her parents cheered. The little crowd that had gathered to watch her cheered. The girl didn't even smile. She looked directly at Alice—I swear I saw her do this—and she put the hammer back down on the ground like it was nothing, like that was the result she'd expected all along.

Thanks so very much to Kathy Pories, who believed all along, who saw things I didn't, and who just kept being right. Thanks one more time to Peter Steinberg for working such magic. Thank you to everyone at Algonquin for every moment of your hard work in bringing this up off the page and into the world; thank you, all of you, for making me feel so utterly at home.

Thanks to the Sustainable Arts Foundation for its generous support.

Thanks to my parents, Tom and Judy, and to my brothers, Neil and Josh.

To AMR, and to all those beasts beneath our roof: I've never been more delighted to be so, so wrong.

TITA RAMIREZ

DREW PERRY
's first book,
This Is Just Exactly Like You,
was a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, a SIBA Okra pick, and an
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Best Book of 2010 pick. He has published fiction in
Black Warrior Review, Atlanta Magazine, Alaskan Quarterly Review,
and
New Stories from the South.
He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, and teaches at Elon University.

Published by

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

Post Office Box 2225

Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-­2225

a division of

WORKMAN PUBLISHING

225 Varick Street

New York, New York 10014

© 2014 by Drew Perry.

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

eISBN 978-1-61620-348-1