Northern Borders (11 page)

Mrs. Twist ran up to my grandfather. “You really going to buy Han, mister? You promise you won't let nobody shoot him?”

“Nobody's going to shoot him,” my grandfather said. “Best get going now.”

Mrs. Twist gave Hannibal's trunk one last hug, then got in the truck with Show, who leaned out the window and called to my grandfather, “Hey, you, pops. You're such a free spender. You got a loose five-spot on you? Gas tank on empty, and I wouldn't want to run out on the road in this forsaken state. Probably get lynched.”

My grandfather thrust a few bills in through the window and Show grabbed them and without a word of thanks drove off across the infield toward the nearest exit. Halfway to the gate Sheriff White passed him and flicked on his blue light to lead the way.

“That'll take care of him for an hour,” my grandfather murmured.

“Show?” I said, surprised.

“No. Mason White.”

My grandfather looked at me and shook his head slightly as if all the furor over Hannibal was nothing more than a momentary nuisance. “You and I have some unfinished business, Austen. Come on.”

My grandfather started toward the cattle barn with me at his heels. Inside the barn, in the dim light of the few bare overhead bulbs, I spotted a shadowy group of men near the far entranceway. These men were not loud and fast-moving and half-drunk like the raucous gang of townies who'd come rushing like sharks to a kill to see Mr. Hill shoot Hannibal. They were standing quietly in the weak light, dressed in checked shirts and wool pants or overalls. Most of them were tall and lean and wore slouch hats or caps embossed with the names of feed brands and tractors. Some carried log peaveys and pulp hooks. Others carried shotguns nearly as tall as I was.

As we approached, I recognized half a dozen of the men from the hollow farms my grandfather and I had visited that afternoon.
Neighbors, he had called them then. That is what he called them again now, tilting his head toward them and saying to me quietly, “Neighbors, Austen. Being good neighbors.”

There could not have been fewer than thirty armed neighbors in the entranceway of the barn.

“All right, gentlemen,” my grandfather said, “if you'll just follow along about ten paces behind me and my grandson here, and only step forward should I give the word.”

My grandfather looked soberly at his neighbors: men from the far mountain hollows, the last full-time hunters and trappers and six-cow farmers in Kingdom County. They looked soberly back at him. No doubt some of these men had been on the big river drives with him long ago. They were men he'd helped in haying and sugaring time, as they'd helped him. They had helped each other milk in times of sickness. Some of them had eaten and slept in his deer camp.

“Just one thing more,” my grandfather said to his neighbors. “Earlier I told you this would take about five minutes. I miscalculated. I've got a friend who's in bad trouble. I've got to bail him out and that will take closer to an hour.”

One or two of the men nodded. The rest just waited silently. No one objected.

My grandfather had not often taken my hand that summer, except maybe to cross fast water in the river when we went trout fishing. Now he took my hand and led me up to the midway. Our neighbors drifted along some distance behind us, shadowy in the night. The dew-soaked grass under our feet smelled fresh as morning and the scent of fried food was pungent and mouthwatering on the damp night air. The strings of Christmas lights adorning the rides and booths, the hurdy-gurdy music and snapping cracks from the shooting gallery and crescendoing shrieks of kids on the fair rides were a thousand times more exciting tonight.

My grandfather made a beeline to the baseball throw booth. There was the Snake Man, right where he'd been that morning. “Step on up, give her a whirl, win a prize for your pretty little girl.”

My grandfather shouldered his way to the front of the crowd. “We're back,” he said.

The Snake Man glanced at my grandfather. He gave a short laugh of recognition. “Hey!” he exclaimed. “It's Old Gramps. Old Gramps and Babe Root, the kid who can't throw and can't count change. Sic 'em, Satan.”

The blue-and-yellow snake-arm with the frightful green head struck at me. I jumped back and the crowd laughed. But my grandfather calmly took a dollar bill out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. “Play the game, Austen.”

I gave the bill to the barker, who held it up in Satan's mouth and shouted, “See, folks. It's a one. Not a ten or a twenty or a hundred. A one.”

He tossed me the punky, lopsided baseball and this time I threw quickly, with no windup. The ball grazed the rim of the top bottle. It teetered momentarily but didn't fall. I was disappointed. More than anything I still wanted to win that stuffed pink crocodile for my grandmother. It, or one identical to it, was still hanging above the booth with the other stuffed prizes.

“Got to hit 'em to knock 'em down, kid. Play again?”

“Give the boy his change,” my grandfather said.

“Sure, Gramps. Whatever you say. Make change, Satan.” The green snake-head spit the change out into my hand. In a loud, hissing, mocking voice, the Snake Man said, “Twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five, eighty-five, ninety-five, one dollar, rube.”

Satan reared up his head and hissed at me in derision, and as fast as chain lightning my grandfather reached out and seized the barker's wrist just behind the tattooed snake-head, as he might grab a real snake that was threatening to strike me.

“Hold it,” my grandfather said. “The boy gave you a ten.”

“Like hell he did!” the Snake Man yelped. “He give me a one.”

“He tendered you a ten-dollar bill,” my grandfather said, not loudly. “You owe him nine dollars.”

“Where are your witnesses, old man? I'll blow one long, two short, one long and yell, ‘Hey, rube!' In thirty seconds flat you'll be—Hey! Hey!”

The Snake Man yelled hey, all right. But he did not yell ‘Hey, rube.' My grandfather had yanked the whistle out of his mouth and tossed it high over his shoulder into the swirling confusion of the
midway. Just the way my grandmother might deadhead a rusty blossom on her moss rose in the dooryard at home—with no more thought than that.

“Boys,” my grandfather called over his shoulder. Out of the shadows along the edge of the midway came our neighbors, the one-horse loggers, the eighty-acre hill farmers, the poachers and moonshiners and mountain men from the wild northern hollows along the Canadian frontier.

“How much did I give this fella, boys?”

“I see you hand him a ten-spot, Austen,” Henry Coville from Lord Hollow said. “I'll swear to it in any court in the land.”

“You handed him a ten outen your shirt pocket.”

“You give him ten dollars, Austen Kittredge.”

“It would have been that, all right. Ten.”

The Snake Man's eyes were furious as an angry serpent's. But he said nothing. My grandfather released his grip.

“You want to yell ‘Hey, rube!' go ahead. Yell away.”

The Snake Man looked at the armed men crowded around his booth. Then he shrugged and shook his head. “Okay, Gramps,” he said. “You win.” He counted nine dollars out into my grandfather's hand, a five and four ones.

My grandfather gave it to me. “This belongs to you, Austen. Keep better track of it this time.”

But he wasn't through with the Snake Man yet. He got a dime out of his pocket. “I want to play your game,” he said. “Toss that ball here.”

To my surprise, my grandfather stepped off to the side and threw low and hard, knocking one of the two weighted lower bottles sideways into the other and upsetting all three.

“Remember what I told you about working for a fair one summer?” he said to me. “I learned a thing or two. Pick your prize.”

“I want that crocodile,” I shouted. “Lyle the Pink Crocodile!”

The Snake Man wordlessly took down the stuffed pink crocodile and shoved it at me with Satan, who no longer frightened me in the least.

“Now, gentlemen,” my grandfather told the men behind him, “we'll bail out my friend.”

I clutched Lyle tightly to my chest as we moved a short distance
down the midway to the coin toss glassware booth, diagonally across from the baseball throw. The red, green, and blue ice-cream plates, the decorated tea sets and cut glass pitchers and matched dinnerware sparkled beautifully under the overhead lights.

The barker with the eye patch was busy handing out change and prizes, though most of the coins people threw just bounced off the glassware onto a dirty sheet spread out on the ground below them. Again my grandfather handed me a dollar and told me to play.

The eye-patch man took my dollar and handed me back a dime to toss. I flipped it out toward the glittering array of glass and china, and it landed on the far edge of a turkey platter and slid off onto a plain white crockery tea saucer.

“Winner here,” the barker rasped out as he handed me the saucer. “We got a winner. Play again?”

I looked at my grandfather, who shook his head. “Give the boy his change,” he told the barker.

The eye-patch man spilled the remaining ninety cents he'd hoped to con me into spending into my hand, and started along the counter toward an old woman throwing dimes the way some people play a slot machine, one after another after another.

“Carnival man!” my grandfather called out.

Patch squinted at him with his one eye. “This young fella here gave you a ten,” my grandfather said. “You owe him nine more dollars.”

“Bull!” Patch growled. “He gave me a one.”

“Boys,” my grandfather said, and on cue, his neighbors materialized again.

“I won't stand for this,” Patch shouted. “I'm going for the sheriff, by Jesus.”

“The sheriff's tied up just now,” my grandfather said. “He's escorting a man out of town.”

“Look,” Patch said. “Whatever trouble you had earlier with Snake, it don't have nothing to do with me and my booth.”

“Why'd you come rushing to his defense with a billy, then?” my grandfather said.

“He yelled ‘Hey, rube!' damn it. We got to come a-running when a carny hollers ‘Hey, rube!'”

“No, you don't,” my grandfather said. “You've got to fork over
the correct change or I'll invite this man to take target practice on your wares.”

My grandfather jerked his head toward Cousin WJ Kittredge, who was squinting down the barrels of his shotgun to be sure they were clear.

“I'm real scart,” Patch said defiantly.

My grandfather shrugged. WJ inserted two large red shells in the barrels of his gun and snapped it shut. He looked up, just two coal-black eyes between his tangled black beard and slouch hat. Patch's face turned pale. WJ lifted his shotgun and pulled back one of the hammers and Patch hollered, “All right. All right.”

He gave my grandfather nine dollars, and Cousin Whiskeyjack lowered the shotgun and vanished into the crowd.

My grandfather passed the adjacent booth, the Kewpie doll throw, without stopping. The barker there was a girl I didn't recognize.

As we approached the hammer-and-bell, near the Ferris wheel, I saw Patch run up to confer with the shirtless man with the black vest. This looked like trouble.

“What the hell do you want?” the big-bellied man growled at my grandfather. He was already tapping a blackjack against his bare stomach. It made a hard smack each time it sprang forward and hit.

“The boy wants to play,” my grandfather said, and handed him a dollar.

The hammer-and-bell man held out the change, which my grandfather ignored. “Try it, Austen.”

I picked up the sledgehammer, then put it down. I couldn't even lift it to my waist.

“Let me give you a hand,” my grandfather said, and took the hammer and with an easy-looking swing rang the bell.

“Okay,” the man with the blackjack said. “Here's your cigar and here's your change.”

“I gave you a ten,” my grandfather said.

“Did you now, rube?” Before I had any idea that he intended to do it, the blackjack man was yelling, “H
EY, RUBE!
H
EY, RUBE!
” at the top of his lungs.

From up and down the midway, for the second time that day,
the carnies came swarming with their billy clubs and blackjacks and iron bars. One man was holding a broken bottle. Another palmed a knife. This time my grandfather didn't need to speak to his neighbors. Instantly they appeared from the shadows, forming a loose phalanx around him, their peaveys and long pick poles and guns at the ready, waiting for the onrushing carnival men, who stopped in their tracks as a shotgun blast rang out over the midway, accompanied by a clangorous gong from the top of the hammer-and-bell.

Beside my grandfather, Cousin WJ Kittredge was drawing another bead on the bell, which now resembled a badly dented hubcap. This time when he fired it flew completely off the post.

“Jesus Christ Almighty, the rubes got guns!” a carny in a dirty white sailor's hat yelled.

The mountain men stood silently around my grandfather, who was watching the hammer-and-bell man carefully. “You owe me nine dollars,” he said in his harsh voice, not loud. “I want it.”

Without a word the man handed him the money. My grandfather put it in his billfold and moved off with me in tow. The carnies gave way before us.

On down the midway we went, in a euphoric cloud of hazy colored light. We stopped at the rifle shoot, the basketball throw, the booth where you covered a red circle with three silver disks—all places where the barker had responded to the Snake Man's “Hey, rube!” that morning. At each game my grandfather handed the barker a one and extracted change for a ten. At most of the booths my grandfather played the game after me and won a prize, which he let me pick out. Soon my arms were overflowing with stuffed animals, painted china figurines, framed pictures of baseball players and movie stars, and afterward, while my grandfather went up to the infield to purchase Hannibal, I rode on the big Ferris wheel, wedged into the swinging seat laden with my spoils from the midway. Up and up and up it went, and then stopped, swinging like a cradle, high above the midway in the cool night air.