Black and Blue (22 page)

I was less fearful, but not foolhardy. I still scanned every crowd—at the mall, at the ball games—as careful as a snitch looking for a hit man. Not just for Bobby, for his dark head, his hawkish profile, but for his uncle Gerald, or some cop now retired
who’d once shared a squad car with him, or a woman who knew us both from St. Stannie’s. America turns out to be a very small country if you’re trying to get lost in it. Mention you’re from Omaha and it’s a cinch: any stranger you meet will say he has a cousin there. It’s why I had been able to come to Lake Plata and be absorbed by the town as completely as a stone falling into deep water: because there was no town, really, just a collection of strangers ranged around a commercial strip. No families who had lived on one block for three generations, or even the remnants of that sort of life, a son or a daughter living in a house a block or two away from where their parents had raised them.

One Saturday we went to a carnival outside town to celebrate the first win of the peewee basketball team. Every carnival is the same carnival. Literally. If you read the name on the tickets they make you buy in vast quanties for the rides, or look at the gaudy logos painted on trucks parked around the outskirts of the glittering circle, you might see the same name in an empty field in Florida as you see in a high-school parking area in Westchester or outside a mall in Oak Park, Illinois. Westhammer Amusements, Jensen Amusements, Richter Amusements. They just hook it all up to trailers or throw it all on flatbeds, the haunted house, the midway games with their bad odds and cheap toy prizes, the Tilt-a-Whirl and Cyclone. Three days later they pack it all up and haul it to the next town. Bobby would never let Robert go on any rides at a carnival. “Look at these dirtbags,” he’d whisper if Buddy or Jimmy or one of the other guys managed to drag us to one instead of just barbecuing in their backyards. “How tight do you think they made the screws on those things? Those look to you like the kinds of guys that take a lot of trouble with a wrench?” Not even
the little boats that traveled in a tiny circle in a track of fetid water two feet deep, or the cars that were lower to the ground than Robert’s tricycle. Someone else’s children would be screaming from the Dragon Wagon, waving at us as the cars thundered up and down the track, and Robert would be standing, big-eyed, next to Bobby, a hand in his, as though my failure to recognize the clear and undeniable danger of this place removed me from them both. Crackerjack he could have, and cotton candy. But no hot dogs, or sausage and peppers cooked on a big griddle by women with tattoos. “What are you, nuts, Frances?” Bobby would say.

“You want a hot dog?” I said to Robert while I was taking food orders and we were trying to settle the boys on some splintered picnic benches. He nodded, then smiled. It felt like something to me, maybe a moving on, a moving over to some other place, where we made new rules and traditions. Hot dogs were no longer dangerous. We were living a different life. Every once in a while, at moments like this, it felt like mine. “Mrs. Bernsen asked us in school to talk about an adventure,” Robert had said one night over leftover lasagna. “I talked about it being an adventure to move to a new place where you’ve never been before and where you don’t know anyone.” I’m not sure what showed in my face, but he’d added quickly, “I didn’t talk about before. Just now. Like meeting Bennie and everything.”

“You are the best boy in the world,” I’d said.

Mr. Castro was working nights as a janitor at the paper products plant and had agreed to come along to the carnival to help Mike and me keep the boys in order. He brought Bennie’s little sister Sandy, who had just turned five, as a special treat for her birthday; he held tight to her hand as she danced and smiled and
cried, “Popcorn, Papa! Popcorn, please?” Jason Illing’s father was there, with his video camera, just as he was at every game, filming Jason slumped on the bench, the boy’s shoulders bowing to his belly like an old man, filming the two minutes or so that Mike, who played everyone, cut no one, gave Jason to play. “Hold up your burger,” Mr. Illing called, but Jason ignored him and hunched over his Dutch Fries and his root beer. Cindy came with us, too, after one of the other boy’s mothers backed out. She had Chad in the stroller, and I’d managed to coax Chelsea from the little niche between Cindy’s torso and the stroller handle onto a picnic bench, where she ate a hot dog slowly and thoughtfully.

“I don’t like rides,” Chelsea said.

“Can I tell you a secret?” I said. “Neither do I. They always make me feel like I’m going to throw up.”

Chelsea nodded.

“Eleven, twelve,” I heard Mike muttering to himself, and I laughed. “They’re all here,” I said.

“It’s hard to keep track of sixteen of them in a place like this,” he said.

“I know. But you don’t really need to keep track of sixteen. Jason is under constant electronic surveillance, I never let Robert out of my sight, and Robert never makes a move without Bennie. Mr. Castro is keeping an eye on Jonathan, who always gives Bennie a hard time. That leaves twelve. And Cindy and I divided the twelve up on the bus. So all you really have to do is hand out tickets.”

Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that once the leavings of their lunch were bundled into waxed paper and tinfoil and chucked—underhand, overhand, Jonathan Green from behind his brawny
back, and why was I so happy when he missed by a foot?—into the metal drums used for trash. “Tilt-a-Whirl!” Mike yelled, and as of one accord most of the group would move toward the ride and some would scatter, to knock down weighted milk bottles with a hardball, to buy junky jewelry or sugar-coated nuts, to look at the Army Reserve tank.

“Can I put you in charge of stragglers?” I asked Cindy, who was trying to get mustard out of her shirt with a paper napkin and a cup of water she’d wangled out of the homemade lemonade stand.

“Not with herself hanging onto my midsection,” she said, looking down at Chelsea. “I’m straggling myself.”

“Chelse,” I said, bending down, “will you come with me and we’ll make sure the guys are okay on the rides?”

“I don’t want to go on.”

“Me neither. That’s why I need your help.”

Her hand in mine was sweaty, but sweetly curved. Cindy had put her hair into a French braid and she was wearing pink shorts and a matching shirt with ruffles of lace around the legs and sleeves. “You look so pretty today,” I said.

“So do you,” Chelsea said. “You look nice in a dress.”

“It’s a T-shirt dress, not a real dress. Your mom bought this for me for Christmas.”

“I know. She likes to buy people clothes.”

“They’re making me go on,” Mike shouted from a car on the Tilt-a-Whirl, wedged in between two of the smaller boys, his arms around each one.

When he came off he was rolling his eyes. “The only way you keep from throwing up is by fixing on one stationary point and staring at it,” he said.

“Really?”

“That’s my theory.”

“Did it work?”

“So far,” he said. “I just stared straight at you.”

I could feel the color come up in my face, see it in his. “What next?” I said.

“How about dinner and a movie?” We both looked down. “Never mind. I can’t believe I said that. Jesus, Riordan.”

“Beth, I have to go to the bathroom really bad,” Chelsea said.

“We’ll be at the House of Horrors,” Mike said.

When we got back they were all still in line. Jason’s father was panning the row of boys, calling “And your name is …” to each. A group of retarded children and their teachers were ahead of them. The children were wearing name tags and smiling, dancing in the sunshine, rolling their eyes at the demons and ghouls painted on the outside of the House of Horrors. “Are you sure?” one of the teachers kept asking, and they all nodded. But once inside we could hear shrieks and wails, and the ticket-taker flicked his cigarette into the grass and swore. “Keep your people back,” he barked at Mike, who threw out his arms as though to restrain a regiment of unruly soldiers.

“Bring them back out,” he yelled into the House of Horrors, and a moment later the teachers and the children hurried through the black door and down the up ramp, the adults rosy with embarrassment, the children drenched in sweat as though in an instant every bad thing they had ever imagined had come at them by the light of the cheap strobe, ready to rip their hearts out.

“Wow,” said Chelsea.

“Go ahead,” the ticket-taker yelled at Mike.

“Are you guys still up for this,” Mike said, turning around.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” said the ticket-taker.

After that there was the Viper, and then the bumper cars. Chelsea thought about the bumper cars, but then she saw sparks fly from the tether to the ceiling when one of them hit the wall. “Are you gonna go on anything at all?” said Cindy. “Anything? They have pony rides.”

“Maybe in a little while,” she said.

“Pretty girl,” said Mr. Castro.

“Thank you. Say thank you, hon,” Cindy said, a little too loudly. Then Christopher Menendez threw up, and Mr. Castro took him to the men’s room.

“Oh, my Lord, please don’t put him in my car on the way home,” Cindy said.

“This was a bad idea,” Mike said.

“No it wasn’t,” I said. “This is just one of those things that sounds a lot better before and after than when you’re actually doing it.”

“That’s what I like about her,” he said, turning to Cindy. “Most women would say, yeah, it was a bad idea, let’s get out of here. Or they’d say, no, it was a great idea, we’re having a great time, and you’d know it was bull. Instead she said what she just said, which happens to be true and accurate.”

“That’s what I like about her, too,” Cindy said, in a voice that sounded as though she was playing the ingénue in the school play.

“Ferris wheel and then call it a day?” Mike said.

“Sure,” I replied.

Cindy looked at her manicure and then at Mike’s back as he plowed through the crowds to the place by the bumper cars where
he’d told the boys to assemble after their fifth go-round. She rubbed the nail on her index finger with a frown as though she’d found a flaw in the finish. Chad was splayed in the stroller fast asleep. “I’m not going to say anything,” she finally said.

“Good,” I said.

Both of us lapsed into the tired silence of adults who have been with children from morning to night. It seemed to me heroic that someone like Mike Riordan or Mrs. Bernsen did this every day, and with good humor. Even now, as he stood at the back of the group waiting for the Ferris wheel to empty, I could see that he was bantering with the boys, keeping them in line without hectoring them as I would have done. The Ferris wheel filled with children just before our group made it to the head of the line, and it began to spin slowly, a blur of smiles and antic waves to the parents and friends below. It was only late afternoon but the lights were already on around each rim, two circles of blue lights in the lengthening, darkening day, heavy clouds settling over the fields so flat around us.

I looked down. Chelsea’s face was tipped back, her mouth a little open, watching the other children go up and around, and I thought I saw in her eyes the kind of sadness you sometimes see, as a nurse, when a child in a wheelchair watches other children run. And then there was something else, wonder and shock, too, and a tearing noise I thought at first was the sound of one of the rides, until I looked up and saw that one of the cars of the Ferris wheel was half hanging in the air, and dangling from it was a child, making a high-pitched noise, something like a cry, something like heavy breathing,
ah-ah-ah-ah-ah
.

I ran forward, dragging Chelsea with me, and saw that another child had already fallen to the packed dirt at the side of the Ferris wheel, a boy in blue shorts and one of those buzz cuts Robert kept begging for. “He’s dead,” Chelsea whispered as I knelt next to him, adults and children surging around to see. There was a terrible scream, and I heard the noise as the second child’s body hit something and then she fell, remarkably, only a few yards from the other.

“All right,” I cried, half turning, and in that instant I was myself again, Frances F. Benedetto, RN, taking no shit in the emergency room. “Here’s the deal. This child can go under, big time, or I can help him. But to help him I need all of you to move back.”

“Oh my God,” a woman started to shriek, in a familiar timbre. “Oh my God!” Mike came up behind me, and I said, “Tell Cindy to get ahold of Mom or Grandma or whoever the hell that is and take her someplace and calm her down. Tell Cindy to lie to her. Tell her I’m a doctor. Tell her the kids are fine. Do you know CPR?”

“Yeah.”

“No, I mean really know CPR. Not one class at the Y.”

“I really know CPR.”

“Then come right back.” I looked up and raised my voice. “I need a tie or a scarf,” I called. Then, looking around at the women in T-shirts and frayed shorts, the men in jeans and singlets, I added, “Or a belt. A belt would do it.”

CPR, done by someone who knows how to do it, is like a calisthenic, like push-ups or leg lifts, a series of quick, synchronized, monotonous movements. Mike did it just right. The boy, who was
probably concussed, began to wheeze and moan. The little girl had a compound fracture of the left leg, the bone poking jagged and white from just above her knobby, scabby little knee. But the tourniquet kept down the bleeding. She was in shock, staring straight up at the sky, whispering to herself, “Mommy, Mommy.”

“You’re okay, sweetie,” I whispered back. “You broke your leg.”

“I tried to hold on,” she said.

“I know.” Two ambulance attendants wheeled a gurney over in a cloud of dust. “I’d figure on a couple of busted ribs,” I said. “Luckily the car they were in wasn’t that far up. If they’d been at the top—” I shrugged.

“Nice work,” one of them said. There was blood on my dress and my hands.

In the hospital I’d learned that there are really two kinds of people in the world, people who go hard and efficient in times of terrible trouble, and the ones like, it turned out, Grandma, who scream, shriek, go limp, sink to the floor, become patients themselves. PITAs, we called them in the ER, short for Pain In The Ass. All of the adults with me had fallen into the take-charge group. Cindy had managed to convince the grandmother that the children would be fine and to get her to breathe into a bag and drink an orange soda. Mr. Castro had rounded up all the boys and taken them to a tent filled with video games at the back of the fairgrounds.