Someone Always Comes

Someone Always Comes



I’m sipping from an old battered flask and watching the sun start to dip below the line of tents in the distance when Jonas finally comes out of his trailer. He grimaces into the orange light and fumbles for his sunglasses for a minute before he spots me and comes to sit in the metal folding chair next to mine.

“Howdy,” he says, after easing himself down.

I’ve just finished my day shift, and I’m still wearing my old fedora, the sweat band soaked through, my long sleeved shirt buttoned at the cuffs as protection against the sun -- and that soaked through -- so I know I’m not much to look at. Even so, I’ve got to say he looks worse. “Damn,” I say, giving him the once-over, “You’re looking every single year over two hundred.”

“Feeling it, too, Pete,” he says grinning. I offer him the flask, and he takes a long, slow pull before sighing and settling back.

“How’s the gate looking?” he asks, both of us knowing he doesn’t mean the money.

“Okay,” I say, meaning it could be worse, but it could be a hell of a lot better, too.

He grunts, taking another pull on the flask before handing it back to me.

We sit there for a while, watching the lights and the people, and listening to the music. We’re tucked in back behind the ring toss and target shooting booths, so we can watch people pass by, without any of them having to notice the two old codgers sharing a drink.

Up front where the people are it’s all flashy and bouncing and jabbering, but by the time it gets back to us it’s more like the slow roll of the ocean; we can see the pattern, the steadiness of it all, the rhythm. The people see the lights, and the bright paint, but we can see the backs of the shelves loaded with cheap toys that we just busted out of cardboard boxes that morning, and the dirt-smeared trousers and scuffed shoes beneath the bright aprons of the booth attendants.

I see a young girl pass by with a couple of toddlers in tow, and she’s so young I can’t tell if she’s their mother or their sister. They’ve got money, though, by the looks of them, so she could even be the nanny. That makes me chuckle to remember that back in the day I used to make a good living knocking over fast-food restaurants, the ones with the big indoor play areas. I’d go in right in the middle of lunch hour when all those mommies and nannies were in there, just trying to get a breather while their kids climbed all over the play structures.

I’d walk in, dressed in polyester pants and whatever color dress shirt would make me look like a manager and just hop over the counter like nobody’s business. I’d walk right past the cashiers and find the manager, whispering in his ear that it was a holdup, showing him the handle of the revolver in my pants pocket and all that such and such. The beauty of the whole thing was, they would bend over backwards just to get me out of there without anybody noticing. Unless the manager was new, he wouldn’t even call the cops after I left. Most of those places are franchises, and the last thing they need is for any of those mommies to know the place was held up while their kids were inside. Next thing you know, the hamburger place isn’t so great, anymore, and then all those kiddies are playing down the street at the pizza place.

And it was a hoot, too. I’ve been standing there watching them dump fistfuls of tens and twenties into paper bags for me and had people come up to me complaining about their orders. “No cheese, ma’am?” I’d say. “I’m terribly sorry about that.” And I’d holler into the kitchen for the correct order and even throw in a free dessert. And people don’t think about how much cash goes through places like that, but I’ve got to tell you, just one of them would cover my nut for a whole month. Whatever, it was a good gig, and nobody ever gave me any hassles. Not once.

The girl is really pretty, and I figure her for the nanny. Probably in college or something. I can feel the old ache at the base of my canines, but she’s just a pretty little thing, and I can see that those kids love her, the way they’re smiling at one another, so I try to push all those thoughts out of my head.

“She shouldn’t be here this late,” is all I can say. “Needs to get those kids home to bed.” Jonas doesn’t say anything, but I can tell he’s smiling to himself.

Twenty years I’ve been with Jonas and the show. I met him when he was bringing them through upstate, and I went in to case the place. I’d seen all the crowds and done some quick math in my head, and I’d figured that I could cover the next six months if I did it right. After only a few minutes, though, I knew it was a no-go. It wasn’t just that it was too far back to the car, or that the carnies working the booths looked tougher and sharper than any carnies I’d ever seen; at the end of the day the whole place had just felt wrong.

I had been headed back to the gate when Jonas called out to me. To this day I can’t remember following him back to his trailer, but I did, and from then on everything was different.

“You gonna kiss that thing or take a drink?” he asks, and I realize that I’ve been holding onto the flask a little too long. Laughing I hand it over, but not before taking another quick sip. It’s my own private concoction, a mix of medium grade whiskey plus one other ingredient that leaves a coppery taste in my mouth as it slides down, taking a bit of the edge off but not quite satisfying.

Over at the ring toss I can see Walt working some teenager pretty hard, trying to get the kid to cough up another two bucks for a second chance to win something for his lady. The lady in question is another pretty little thing, maybe fifteen years old, in sneakers and a denim miniskirt, and I can tell she’s Walt’s unwitting accomplice, looking at the boy with her wide, adoring eyes.

I remember when Walt first came to us, driving up in a luxury SUV, some woman on his arm who was all covered in gold chains and bracelets. They were drinking white wine out of plastic cups and looking like they were having a blast slumming. He was there for maybe an hour before he got into a big fight with Reggie over at the dart toss.

“Look, numbnuts, I don’t care what you think, I hit the friggin’ star,” I remember him saying. If it had been a little kid, Reggie would have already tossed him a prize and given him a pat on the head, but Walt was just a big asshole with a lot of mouth. Reggie was shrugging his shoulders and saying in that deep, smooth voice of his something about it had to hit the white space, not just the line, and I remember Walt’s face getting redder and redder until finally he called Reggie the name that everybody knew he’d been thinking the whole time.

Never saw Reggie get mad before or since, but that night he was about to kill himself a white man. A couple of us had dragged Walt away before it could get any worse, but his mouth had kept moving and stuff kept coming out, and by the end of the night Jonas had called out to him, too. Now Walt and Reggie are the best of friends, and Walt works the ring toss.

I hear Jonas cough in that quiet way of his, and I look over in time to see a decent prospect. The guy looks like a workingman, dressed in old dungarees and a work shirt with a name patch sewn onto the breast. But it’s his eyes that interest me, shifting around in his head with a scared cunning look like he’s a fox outside a henhouse.

This might be the one, I think, tensing a little in my seat, the ache in my canines back, but suddenly someone calls out, and I see the man turn as a woman runs up to him and throws her arms around his neck. Wherever he had been he was back now, and I see his face all lit up with true happiness. I can tell that he loves her and that she will always be safe with him, and so I relax back into my chair.

“Don’t worry,” says Jonas beside me. “The gate will pick up. Someone will come.” And then I realize that he’s just as tense as I am.

Some folks don’t like carnivals like ours. We’re dirty, they say. Or we’re unsafe, or we’re a bunch of con artists. Me, I know that there’s something good in everything. Hurricanes move warm water toward cool places and away from warm places, keeping the fish alive and stuff like that. Forest fires clear out all the dead and dangerous wood, making room for the new growth. There’s a rhythm to everything, to all of us if you just take the time to hear it.

So as the sun disappears entirely, I can stretch out my legs and tip back my hat, finally rolling up my sleeves to enjoy the evening cool.

Because someone will come. They always do.