I’m standing in front of the Gravitron with Sylvia in my hand and I’m a sweating mess. The lights on it blink like clown eyes, if clowns were from outer-space and evil. The thing itself is spinning. Sylvia grips my hand and has my tickets, the ones I bought for us. It’s Mickey D’s Daze at the exchange club fair, the world’s at my feet, I got tons of tickets for rides, but here I am second guessing myself. What if I was with Cody?
“It’s going to be fine West, just hold my hand,” she says. I look around to find something to slice it off at the wrist with and all I can see close enough is a big turkey bone still wet with spit and sauce laying on the ground like a machete. The Judgment House tent’s nearby and Cody my ex is probably inside. I heard she was supposed to burn in hell, or be an impregnated child or something. “West, look at me. This is gonna rule. Best ride since the looping starship.” I could loop her starship, right out of orbit.
“Careful Sly, don’t ever compare this crappy thing to the looping starship,” I say. The Gravitron is playing Journey and I almost chuck my peanuts. They’re in my throat, I can feel them like important pieces of some of my best organs. “Why are you so excited? This music sucks.” The ride’s slowing fast and I can’t even look at Sylvia. She’s ready to be weightless or get her centripetal freak on. If she wanted to feel something like space, I could sling her by the hair as far as the guess your weight booth. It would say zero on the scale as she flew over it like so many evil clowns going back to planet bitch-face.
“Relax West, it’s just a ride. You’re all sweaty,” she says. I brush some beaded up moisture that’s on my forehead off with my finger, collect it in hand and smear it across her arm. “Gross, fucker,” she says, then smiles.
The door to the Gravity chamber opens and people get off dizzy. There’s a DJ in the center of the Tron with one headphone up to his ear and flashing lights are on him like he’s something. I laugh at the scene to make the ride dumb to Sylvia. She probably sees the DJ as one badass dude.
“This is awesome, look West,” she says.
“Imagine him Sylvia, in ten years, do that for me,” I say. He’s an outsider and that appeals to my girl.
“What are you talking about? I’ve been waiting to ride this all night,” she says.
In the line ahead of us people start rustling forward and I get itchy pits. I extract my hand and force myself to realize I’ve only been with Sylvia for two weeks. Up the plank we go.
“I can’t decide whether I should dump you and find a traveling circus girl and make her my bride,” I say.
“She’d smell,” says Sylvia.
“But we could caramel-up apples and swirl cotton candy around cardboard cones,” I say.
“I bet she’d have a beard,” she says.
“I could learn the ropes at the balloon game and find marks and make them feel stupid for not paying me ten bucks to win their gals a fine stuffed toad,” I say.
“West, if you found a carnie chick then you’d have to ride this kind of thing every night,” she says.
Inside, the DJ has relaxed and is leaning on his Tron bar, eyeing girls, boyfriendless and otherwise. He’s cool in a way that makes you wonder how you, too, can become a carnie. I can tell Sylvia sees the enigma in him because she’s checking out his gear. She digs electronic music. She thinks he’s cool. He eyes her and I take back her hand. His hair is spiky black perfection, flecked with purple and red tips. He holds the headphone up to one ear because his do could slice a finger off.
“This is the most ridiculous concept for fun. Believe me, it makes me think differently of you,” I say. Sylvia turns and gives me a peck on the cheek.
I lean up against one vertical bed and don’t even look at her. I’m looking around at the fools whooping it up around me. The DJ is talking to two girls that are Hello Kitty animals. One is the spokeswoman kitty and the other is some cute reptile. They stand there and laugh at DJ boy, I can only imagine what he’s saying. “Hey I’ll let you ride twice in a row if you don’t tell anyone, I’m just cool like that,” probably. I want to see the girls flying around knocking their heads with oversized eyes on metal things or on other Gravitron cadets. I hope the DJ booth dislodges and goes flying with the girls, and the DJ’s hair could chop the spokeswoman kitty up in little weightless pieces.
The rest of the stragglers take places in the chamber and we are all looking at each other, me with a fighting look, and them with their creamed shorts googly eyes. As the door closes, a fog machine makes it look like the movies.
“Like that door is really hydraulic! Who are you fooling exchange club fair? Not me. Not Weston K Burgess,” I say.
Sylvia reaches for my hand and she’s flat against her bed looking at me like ‘relax.’ She gets no hand for checking out DJ boy with those fucking OMG eyes, the ones that say ‘this is so cool, they have a DJ’. There’s a girl on my right who’s alone and of age.
* * * *
Imagine being abducted. The saucer comes over you and you’re in the woods or wherever, somewhere dark, and its light blinks on like one big clown eye and somehow it pulls you in. Sylvia is the abductor and here we are back at the mother ship with Captain DJ at the helm. It’s all just great and fine. This bed that I’m leaning against is an operating table, the lights are the advanced alien surgical tools and all the fuckers in here are the bizarro doctors.
The Gravitron starts to spin and the lights go out. Sweat clams up my hands and I grab at Sylvia. She lets out a whoop that startles me, a mindless dumb thing she is. I let go of her to tell her to shut it and she doesn’t. She whoops louder and once the DJ kicks in his remix of some foreign-techno-electro-bleep-bloop crap, she’s bubbling. To think a woman her age, three months older than myself, can get so damn excited over what, a ride?
I start to feel the spinning action pull me onto the padded bed and the lasers are flashing and circling me like I was boning a light-bright. I am suddenly paralyzed and I see Sylvia is upside down waving at me. Everyone is crawling around the walls like suction-cupped daredevils. I pull my arm off the bed a couple of inches and it slaps back in place. I choose not to move and imagine I’m a calm person, I think about riding in the car with Cody, her observing speed limits and blocking my advances like a good girl. Sylvia has her legs spread, one overlapping onto my leg and the other in the space of some dude to her left. I squirm to my right and touch the girl next to me. She squeaks, I grab at her waist. She screams. I see the upside down linebacker next to her and I move back to my bed. Sylvia is dancing with legs and arms out towards the DJ. I close my eyes and picture the whole room breaking apart and body parts flying everywhere. I wish it would happen. I could land safely in the Judgment House with Cody and she would be there burning in hell and I could save her. She would grab my hand and we would run out to the Ferris wheel and take it slow like normal humans.
DJ’s grabbed the mike because I hear his breath scratch up my spine, a groan pushed by something of a very large woofer. It’s getting easier to move. DJ makes a heartbeat with his throat signaling something only everyone else understands. The crazies around me take boring positions on their beds and await something. Mass suicide I suspect. Only thing missing was some hot wacky chicks and tons of black and white Nikes with throwback swooshes. I miss the days when dumbasses would just take themselves out with rat-poison flavored kool-aide. Sylvia looks to DJ like he’s the Hail Bop comet and she’s an interstellar moth about to catch his tail wind to planet bitch-face. What DJ’s using is hypnotic suggestion and it makes me sick to think Sylvia could be susceptible to it, but it also makes me angry. Where had she been and would she even know? Dudes could hypnotize her with techno and beatbox.
The lights thump with the heartbeat grunts from DJ. The Gravitron slows. Gas us DJ. Gas the shit out of us. Sylvia puts her face in my line of sight and she’s smiling like an alien just gave her multiple Os. Like that’s okay with me. I smile, but if she had an ounce of grey mud in her skull, she’d know the smile is fake.
Silvia’s only seventeen. I met her once when a bud brought her to work at the water gas and light as his girl. Cody is an angel I used to see until she turned on me suddenly. She’s also seventeen. I work at the water, gas, and light.
The doors open and I’m out first. The smell of the fair comes back; it’s caramel, collards, and hog waste. The Judgment house is glowing and has my attention. Red light peeks out from under one of the tent’s flaps and I wonder if Cody’s a goner. Sylvia steps in front of my face and grins. She’s wide-mouthed as any horse I’ve ever seen. I’ll grab some hooch and meet my boys in twenty minutes by Dinosaur Planet, the prehistory themed scare-ride.
“That wasn’t so bad now was it you big baby,” she says. Hello Kitty walks by me with the cute Reptile girl and I see my chance. It’s a thing to be so numb.
“That’s not so bad? Check this out,” I say. I move in behind the girls. They’re both wearing Keds and have skirts that I’m pissed I didn’t notice fly up on the Gravitron. I imagine them wearing Strawberry Shortcake panties, or even red-seamed gender-defying Spiderman undies. I put my arms around the two short girls and wait for them to make their moves. If Sylvia’s still back there, she ain’t happy. Hello looks smitten in my left arm and Reptile girl is pretty much a lump of warm butter in my right.
“I thought ya’ll was going to ride again,” I say. The creature girls stay quiet to show me that my charm is just too much and move teasingly out from under my arms. “I’ll catch up ladies. Dinosaur Planet, ten minutes.” They don’t look back because they read about playing hard to get and if they could check my pulse, they’d know it worked.
The lights of the fair get brighter because the sun is down completely. The pine trees back behind the rides look like a black wall. It’s November and warm, but here everyone’s got sweaters on. It never gets to be jacket weather in Georgia so none of us have jackets. Sylvia’s got a scarf. Case in point right? It’s multicolored as a roll of lifesavers and equally as distasteful. Cody’s got this thing about scarves, where if someone south of the fall-line wears one, you should immediately peg them as a Yankee and that means write them off completely. I tend to agree. Sylvia’s a born and bred South Georgian, but she wishes she were from Yonkers or Kalamazoo, she wishes she was Yon Yonson from Wisconsin.
“West, wait up,” I hear and turn around. It’s Sylvia and she’s still smiling. She saw me move in on the much younger, much cuter space girls from Hello Kitty Land and still she smiles.
“What do you want,” I say. She looks confused and then gets it. She smiles.
“That was some bullshit,” she says and smiles. She kisses me once.
“That ride was some bullshit too,” I say.
“Weston, you are so funny,” she says. “You don’t have to play hard to get.” Only chicks play hard to get. Sylvia should know this. I give her the thumbs up and a smirk that she should interpret as sarcasm. She just looks in my eyes like she wants to dance and smiles her everlasting smile. It’s Micky D’s Daze, I don’t have time.
“What’s with the youngins? You’re not turning weird on me are you?” she says.
I want to say that yes I am weird and that you Sylvia are so normal and so appreciated in the world that it makes me sick.
“Yes,” I say. She smiles and takes my hand. I pull it back away. “Hey Sly, I need some tickets. I’m gonna meet Donny at Dinosaur Planet,” I say. First she looks stunned. Then she gets out the roll of little tickets and hands me the whole thing. I did pay for them. “Do you want some?”
She looks up to see the crowd around us that’s growing. The lights spin and weird men shout at girls. There are tons of stuffed animals and mirrored pictures of classic rock bands. There’s also Michael Jackson in Thriller on t-shirts. They were stupid yeah, but who didn’t want a glass eight-by-ten of The Rolling Stones tongue?
“Well, I guess I’ll call Mariah to meet me,” she says. I look at my horde of tickets. Her hands are empty. Donny won’t have bought any tickets. Still, he’s been talking up Dinosaur Planet since last year.
“I’ll meet up with you later by you’re favorite ride here,” I say. I wink. She turns her face to me. It’s kind of nice in the light. Her mouth is closed. She has good lines, but nothing like Cody’s. Sylvia’s face is a reminder that what I had is gone. I imagine it morphing into Cody’s. If she could transform right here, her face would change pointier and down lower, the breasts would plump out to Cody’s size and behind, the butt would round off a little. The jeans would be cheaper. The hair bow would be in place. Scarf, gone. I can’t see any reason to stay. I snap to and she’s not even standing in front of me anymore. I arch my neck over the crowd and floating balloons are in my way. Glowsticks steal my attention, but she’s walking away crying, it’s Sylvia’s style to cry because she feels she’s got something worth fighting for in me. All I can see is her back, but she’s definitely crying, her shoulders are hunched just so. The Gravitron back there’s hissing at full blast and I lose my bead on her.
* * * *
On my way to Dino Planet I pass the Judgment House and there are screams from within. The light from underneath the tent is red. As I pass, someone moves the tent flap and exits. For a brief second I see a crowd inside huddled around a kneeling creature dressed in all black. People are circling the creature to kill it. Atop the tent is a glowing neon cross that flickers and snaps when bugs hit it. I wonder if the people know that it’s my girl under those black robes. If they lay a hand on her, I swear.
Kids are flying by me unattended towards a stilt-legged clown. It’s up there juggling aluminum bowling pins and wobbling. The kids don’t care they just run between the clown’s legs throwing popcorn at it and laughing. I grab one of the kids by his overall straps and pull him to a halt.
“Slow down,” I say. The kid looks at me and to his friends that are running around the stilt legs. The clown is teetering trying not to stomp the little bastards. “Slow down,” I say again. I release the kid and he runs three or four feet away and turns. I get the finger then he hocks a loogy and sends it onto my cheek. I make a move with a stomp like I’m gonna fucking kill him and go to the corndog stand to get napkins.
What a cruel rotten world we live in. You try to do a good thing and then what? I’ll tell you what. Spooge to the face. Girls are girls and wonderful. Kids are kids and the light, I’m sure, to many people’s lives. Friends are friends, but hell if it isn’t a cruel world out there.
I trek onward and I see a booth sideshow for The Dangers of Drugs. The attraction is clearly due for update because the smiling cartoon figure painted on the display looks like and is intentionally supposed to look like the Cheshire cat. The teeth on it are huge and perfect. Next to the figure’s offering hand is a painting of a guy around my age who’s rail thin and smoking. There are razor-blades circling his head, clay jugs of XXX booze, revolvers, pills, women, and powders. It’s strikingly detailed, but definitely bygone as Cody would say. I step right up. There’s a clean-cut young man collecting tickets and he looks bored as hell. He’s got on a Motley Crue Tee that sours my taste for the whole attraction. I give him two tickets and climb the stairs.
Up top it’s like I’m on an old gallows and now, that might be the intentional sensation, but I doubt it. There’s a hole that bygone painted arrows point me toward and I look down it. In the hole, under plexiglass, there’s a figure that’s shockingly close to my face lying on an operating bed. The body is obviously fake, some type of paper-maché, but the head is real and smoking. It’s a human head peeking through a cutout hole and the face of it bears a kin to the ticket boy only with painted blood and bruises. On the operating table there are the razors and the powders and a big fake syringe. There’s booze there too, only the color isn’t wild turkey amber, but more of a coke-cola brown. There’s nothing to the thing. No music, not even something telling me to beware of the shit they’re showing.
I ask the ticket boy for my money back and he says I didn’t pay money. This makes me hot. His T-shirt stares at me with a skull wearing a top hat with roses intertwined through its eye sockets. It makes me want to choke him.
“Hey, fuck you,” I say, inched right up to the little shit’s face. “Fuck you buddy.” The boy livens up and pushes me. I do the thing I always do, act like I’m walking away. When he sits back down I sock him once in the gut, right on that skull’s nose-hole and take his pile of tickets. People don’t even look at me as I fly away; they’re part of this thing I can’t explain that grabs at my nuts and squeezes. They’re happy and they know it.
As I run down the lanes of games and sideshows I look back and the boy is hurling while a man with blood and bruises painted on his face rubs his back and scans the crowd.
* * * *
Up ahead I see Dinosaur Planet. The front of it is tall like the darkened pines surrounding the fair. It has a huge fake stone wall and a massive flapping bird dinosaur coming out in 3-d. The bird’s eyes are glowing and steam comes out its mouth when it turns its head. There’s a ticket guy that makes me nervous already and people climb two at a time into mine cars that drag you through the ride.
Donny is out front having got my text message, but he’s not alone. There’s a girl on his arm that I don’t recognize who’s half a foot taller than him and all legs and hair. She’s feeding him that sweet candy coated popcorn from a clear bag. It looks like such a good idea. Cody isn’t that tall, but she likes popcorn.
“Tickets anyone,” I say holding out my loot. They look so impressed that they can’t help but go back to the popcorn.
“West, this is Amy. We met on the Ring of Fire,” he says. She waves at me and I’m standing right here. The wave’s fast like she’s clapping with one hand and I reach to shake it, to calm her nervousness. She leaves me hanging, poor thing.
“Ring of Fire huh?” I say. Donny gets it and holds back a big laugh. I raise my eyebrows and Amy is lost in the bag of popcorn. “Ring of Fire huh? I hope ya’ll didn’t meet in the Ring of Fire, I hear it’s contagious,” I make the obligatory STD joke. She misses the point and downs one big cluster of pink and yellow kernels. “So where’re the boys with the hooch?”
“They’re with their girlfriends at the bridge getting tanked. Marshall got a fifth,” he says.
“I thought they were coming here,” I say. He eats from Amy’s hand.
“Where’s what’s her face,” says Donny. Cody’s in the Judgment House.
“Sylvia went to meet some friends,” I say. Amy turns up from the bag and looks to Dino Planet hungrily.
“Who’s Sylvia,” asks Amy. I want to say nobody special. It knots in my throat. Cody’s a burning impregnated teen, ex user, cooker, smoker, drinker, shooter, rape victim, and murderer.
“My girl,” I say. Amy looks disappointed and pulls Donny’s shirtsleeve.
We get in mine-cars and I’m by myself. I have the misfortune of being behind Donny and Amy in line and I get to see them kissing like they really mean it. She lays into him good while lights flash by in the dark. There are strobes that don’t scare me and alarms and palm fronds and golden flying dino beetles and leaning raptors and I don’t care. Donny and Amy’s faces together in the strobes look like movie star red carpet fabulousness. It looks wet and fast. It’s all colors and stupid fucking particle board monsters.
When it comes time that the ride is over, I’m waiting to exit my mine-car, slumped with one arm and one foot hanging out. Hello and Reptile girl are in line and see me and turn away to giggle. I wink and shoot them with a revolver finger and thumb. Hello stirs a finger in her mouth like ‘vomit’ but I know she likes it. Reptile is too nervous to move and looks at her feet.
As the ride comes to an end, I lean forward and tap Donny on the back of the head.
“See those chicks,” I say. He immediately picks them out.
“Yeah, so,” he says.
“They want it bad,” I say. Amy turns and looks at me in a way she knows I’m dangerous. She raises a kernel to her lips and I know what she means by the action. I bet she’s one freak in bed. “They’ve been following me all night.”
“Dude,” Donny says, “they’re like twelve.” I get it, they look like premo grade A youngsters, teen-dreams.
“Yeah, finally,” I say. Amy stands up. So do I.
“What do you mean,” she says.
“I mean finally, like finally they’re twelve. Like a joke,” I say. She whispers something to Donny and he gives me a finger signaling me to come closer.
“Hey dude, we’re going to go find something fun to do, maybe go to the bridge,” he doesn’t smile and I don’t know why. Something fun, we’re at the exchange club fair. But I catch their drift, they mean naked fun. They wouldn’t go to the bridge without me. They leave me standing at the front of Dinosaur Planet and Amy’s walking tall, dropping lumps into Donny’s mouth. The bird steams up and lets out a prehistoric scream. I turn around it’s so loud. I scan the line waiting for the ride and the Hello Kitty girls are gone. They must be inside and the lights must be on them flashing so hot that they feel the Jungle of Earth’s past.
A cross in a field, in the distance, is glowing. It’s big, but dumbed down by the fair. I can see it because I have a keen sense of things around me. It makes me think of Cody. It’s not like the neon cross on the Judgment House, it’s actual wood or metal and it’s big and lit up like Christmas, only the light isn’t coming from within it, but is projected on it. I text Sylvia that I’m ready to go home.
* * * *
The wind picks up and blows dirty cups around on the ground. Pine’s have needles that come down like bullets so it’s nothing romantic like walking maple leaves on lonesome sidewalks. This is South Georgia, there are no sidewalks. There are dirty cups and lost tickets. I get a bag of cotton candy and eat it all. I grab at a flying ticket and it’s hole-punched already. There’s a boy going after another ticket and he’s unattended. As the thing is lifted up and dropped in front of me I put my toe down on top of it. The boy runs into my leg hard and I smile down at him. He waits for me to move my leg but I don’t. When he leaves I go for the ticket but it’s hole punched. I don’t have to pick it up to realize this.
The rain starts when I get the text message that Sylvia’s gone home with Mariah to spend the night. The Cross in the distance flicks off like something big is coming this way. For the first time, I notice that the wind is dislodging attraction signs. A big plastic sign that says Himalaya is on the ground; its wire’s are sparking. Branches are flying. People start leaving the exchange club fair in flocks. A tall man with painted bruises and blood on his face has his arm around the shoulder of a shorter version of himself in the Motley Crue Tee. The Gravitron is by me, but it’s vacant. DJ is gone back to DJ land. Be careful you don’t miss the whole point. That your job DJ means jack dick, that all it takes is a little storm to send your space age compadres alight. And there is Hello and Reptile girl and they are hand in hand and one set of their parents are holding umbrellas over their heads. Under the umbrellas they look smaller, their Keds whiter. A plastic sign bounces by me that says Win a Pretty for your Itty Bitty. The Judgment House is shaking.
Small specks of hail are coming down now, ticking off the Gravitron and the ground and the Judgment House cross. Their sound on the canvas tent is a soothing sound, like a grandfather’s tin-roofed porch on a rainy Sunday afternoon. This was a dream though, something not real at all. It’s a lonesome thing to be caught in a hail storm in Georgia, south of the fall-line when people wear scarves and it’s seventy out, where you can be a damn solid guy and have not a single friend to take it slow with and to be wanting of just one single ride on a Ferris wheel with a beautiful girl, and you have the tickets, and you’ve been hoarding the tickets, and the tickets are not what you need.
I push aside the tent flaps of the Judgment House and there are people crowded around a light. The light is red and hot and the sheer number of people have sucked out all the air. When I walk in they don’t look at me, but silently welcome the new air with deep breaths. They are smiling and hypnotized. Sylvia could be one of them, because she is as the hypnotists call her type, ‘highly suggestible’. Cody is the one who is doing the hypnotizing, I just know it. They are looking at something in front of the light. On the walls behind them, there are images like the rail thin boy and his vices from Dangers of Drugs only cruder and not of drugged boys but of dead aborted fetuses and fat girls or pregnant girls who are way too young.
The crowded people look like anyone at a fair. They are large and looming in bright clothes. They’ve got real problems because they’ve come to the Judgment House. They aren’t all members of First Baptist because I don’t recognize anyone right off. When I was with Cody, I met most of the congregation at different events and spaghetti dinners, sleep inns, and plain old church. I met some weirdoes, including Reggie the preacher. He would pat my back in a way that I felt he was trying to shove all the bad things out of me with pure force.
Truth be told, there are bad things inside of me, but if there is a door in my soul for them to leave through like when people like Reggie push me, then the bad things are jammed up in the cracks and hinges blocking any one of them from getting out.
Reggie had looked oddly at me when I would leave his church groping Cody and Cody would look to him like she would make it up to him and God.
The crowd is half-dry and half-wet, proving some people really enjoy seeing the animation of the Seven Deadly Sins by the robed members of First Baptist and that some just want out of the storm. Some, like me, might want a little more.
I ease myself through the wet and dry people and to the seven stages that are in front of them. We have seven booths like sitcom set pieces. A big red light’s on all of them and red means bad. We have seven cloaked figures in the booths. Painted signs are over each set, signifying which sin it is. Each colorfully designed anti-virtue is followed by “Deadly (painted with dripping blood)” and “Sin (with flames).”
I am closest to Lust. Down from me, I can see Gluttony de-robbing and to my surprise it’s Harry Conklin with air-brushed rings of black under his eyes. His set includes a bean-bag chair which he goes to sit on and a TV with painted-on static and a bong made from a Hunny Bear honey bottle. Bags of dope and coke are around the room as well as boxes of greasy pizza and boxes of Corn-Puddin’s Chinese take-out. Noodles from the Corn-Puddin’s drip on the shag floor.
The Lust booth starts up and a guy walks on stage. It’s Reggie the preacher and he’s grown a beard like Jesus. He’s got a bandana around his forehead tied tight so I can see his red-hot skin bubble with veins on his forehead. The black cloaked figure next to him disrobes and it’s Cody. When I see her, I feel like an inmate behind bars, or a father on finding out his lost daughter has been found but is being questioned by police and unavailable for catching up. A sock to the throat is how it hurts.
Cody looks like a plastic doll sweating in the sun, pink goop dabbed on her cheeks and glitter over the freckles on the bridge of her nose. Her hair is straightened like she never did it back when. She doesn’t care that she looks like an impregnated teen. She doesn’t care that Lust is just right for her. She turns sharply and kisses Reggie, on the mouth. Reggie turns to the crowd, I wonder if he sees me. I hope he sees me. At this action, Cody freezes like God hit pause.
Reggie announces he’s an older man and an ex-con, guitar hero, drug-dealer, and numbers man, whatever that means. I take my phone and text Sylvia: Where are You now? He’s got his arm around Cody’s waist and she’s turned facing him, up on her toes to match his height. He swings her around in a big circle and he grabs a handful of monopoly money from a Harley Davidson money clip, shoves it down the front of her shirt and laughs like a furious biker. I take my phone out and text Sylvia again: Where You are is where I want to be. I look back up and as quick as that, Reggie is on top of Cody and they are on the floor of the stage. This supposed to teach me something? Is this how Christians get off? This their porn? The crowd behind me hoos and haws. I take my phone out, I send: Please Sly. Fuck Please. Call me. His thick arms with fake tats wrap around her and her breasts stare up at him like his wife’s don’t. She leans into him and pulls at his lip with her tongue that looks as curly as the painted snake on the Wrath booth. Does she know I’m right here? This is the third night of the fair, did this happen twice before?
Reggie moves off of Cody and Cody looks up to me and I am standing here and I see now that two months makes somebody a stranger. It’s only been two months Cody. I’m standing over them and to Reggie, the devil must be in my eyes. I have jumped on stage and the light’s on me now.
“Brother Weston Burgess everyone,” he says. He’s lounging. One of his big fists is holding his head up while he lies on his side, like a post-sex cuddle monster. I don’t turn to the crowd. I pull my leg back so they can all see the sole of my Georgia Boot and the dark leather that has started pulling from the seams. I give them a good look at it cause it’s up there high. I swing it down once I hear some of their gasps, when I know it’s too late to turn back, and I take that smirk off Reggie’s face with my right steel toe. Now he’s blocking blood coming through his jungle of a beard. Now he’s scrambling for falling teeth. Now he’s inching off the stage. Now he’s singing my praises. Cody jumps up to his rescue and I pull her away from him. When Reggie looks at me in the eyes, I can see he understands that he knows himself to be a devil and that his blood coming from his nose and gums should only remind him of that. Before he’s off stage, Reggie turns to me and gives me a look like he can control my demons. He must be in the anger stage of Fear because he looks like he might get up and give the crowd a real show. I take two big strides to get to where he is and I stomp his hand into the wooden plank of the stage. When I pull my leg up and look at what I did, I see bone and purple skin. Reggie’s a ball when I leave him to catch Cody who’s climbing over the sets to Pride where her friend Rachel is polishing her nails. Back behind, I hear Reggie whining and I want to go and stomp him again, but I’m scared of his blood. I look ahead and see the crowd staring at me like I was TV. They look at me and I know them all. None of them are wearing scarves. They are sweating buckets and from above, the tent shakes with the wind.
Cody remembers me now. I am the one that used to hold her in church. She remembers how I would say that I liked her hair curly. I grab her warm skin above the knot of her elbow and sink my nails in. I grit my teeth because I know it hurts her.
“What are you doing?” she screams. I look at her like ‘help me, please God help me.’
“I love you,” I say.
She breaks free by yanking her arm hard. I shred her skin this way unintentionally. There isn’t any blood but when she’s gone behind the curtains of the stages and Rachel has her, I am left with skin caked under my nails and white fingers.
* * * *
Outside I’m all alone and the Gravitron is a spun top in a mud-puddle. All the lights of the fair are off. Everything looks like shiny machinery under the rain and a faint moon. The rain’s coming down like it did before the flood. It’s coming in a way that you can’t look up.
I walk to where Dinosaur Planet is. It’s off and the big bird isn’t flapping. I walk behind the ride to where the woods start. The woods are black. I sit at the base of a big sturdy pine and pull out my phone. I block it from the rain with my face and my arm. The light on the phone shows me how far back the woods go and I shiver. It says Temporarily out of Service.
I hide it back in my pocket and curse it. There are lights coming at me through the woods. They wind around trees and show me how wet the world really is. The lights are as bright as anything I’ve ever seen and for a minute I wonder if it’s God. Then I think of the Gravitron and clown eyes and aliens and Sylvia. As the lights get closer and make their way down a path in the woods, I hope it’s an alien ship, but I know deep down if it is, I wouldn’t have anything it could want.
