county fair

The smells of the county fair bring it all back; it’s the oil burning in the air from the demolition derby and the grease puffing the elephant ears before they get puffed with sugar and the heat, the heat makes the animals less nervous about being there, on the block, ready to go to the highest bidder because who cares when every time you move sawdust sticks in your fur and the water has been sitting there all day you could boil an egg or at least coddle it in that water and so go ahead and stick your finger in the cage or buy me/hog-tie me and throw me in the back of the truck, mebbe there’s water where we’re goin’ and then again maybe you’ll just put me out of my misery and either way, I just don’t care.

Surprised to see her there, somehow, surprised she would be there with the baby in the stroller, surprised like when I ran into my doctor at the store and found out, almost cruelly, that he eats frozen lasagna, the good kind from Stouffer’s, but still, just out of character/as wrong as the rubber wheel catching on the stone in the dry dirt and twisting, as she twisted around to stare hard at me through flinty eyes, greeted me with “Hey, howya doin’?” and my throat closed up right then.

The garage door at the mill always starts slowly then bangs shut with a thump on the ground always right before you can get a see inside/that mill/like a ghost town except during the shift change and then you get a glimpse but not inside/just the deck chair and the casual flip of a hand, or two, as you slow to drive over the tracks. Her throat closes just like that last “whump,” when the door clicks just as it shuts down, and then she almost shuts down too but she takes a deep breath and says, “How are you?”

Smells of the fair bring back warm summer nights when we played ball in the park and Kevin kept hitting them out of reach so we’d have to stop, pile into the car and run to the store, grocery store open all night and bleary-eyed, beer in Styrofoam cups, cigarettes dangling we’d wander the aisles til we found the display at the end of the “outdoor/grill supplies” section and carefully choose the next plastic pink bat and ball, all the while ribbing him for losing yet another one, but laughing too as we made our way back to the car, back to the park and Kathy swung lazily from the swing set, laughing so hard it hurt/hurts still hurting/ begging for a chance to hit the ball before he lost it again/ smiling triumphantly, no grinning really he took position as we crouched in the outfield, close to the woods and away from the sleeping houses to look up at the stars and watch the ball arc quickly out of reach/ no one was anyone’s girlfriend it wasn’t like that it was just fun and I couldn’t stop laughing and fell down into the grass already misted with dew like a damp bath towel enough to jump up again quickly, cursing softly and then still laughing, yes I remember-

And remember when we used to go fishing behind the mill in the Big river and again laughing quietly but wildly, late at night and the river didn’t keep the beer cold at all but it was better than nothin’, in fact it was damn near to perfect and he parked his truck right at the bank and we turned around for something close to a minute and it was gone, swallowed by the river and they had to get someone to come and pull it out, drained it and cleaned it and it looked fine but he sold the truck he loved on the following Tuesday because no matter what they did, and everyone said it was fine, but no matter what they did he couldn’t shake the smell of that dirty old river/I wondered when it got hot would the new owner, a young woman, would she smell Budweiser in a can and fish that had to be thrown back because they can’t swim in the glove box, can’t feed on the dashboard, can only swim upstream through the seatbelts?

Everything comes flooding back/I am drowning in the memory of him and how every bristle on his face looked/and how his sister was afterwards, she was so, so sad and instead of congratulating me in the yearbook or scribbling the usual, party hard/Van Halen rocks/School Sucks, she wrote, “Be careful.” The loopy cursive handwriting scrawled across the inside of the first page, down at the bottom in the middle, where everyone would see it and years later at a party/drunk on homemade plum wine and maybe drunk with remembering, too we laughed over our high school photos and how we all looked back then and then Cheryl said, “Be careful?”