LITMIR.BIZ

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there was one thing that came back to me again and again. Consisting of two words, those words played over again and again in my head like a song on a playback loop. My heart thudded jackhammer-like against my breastbone, a prisoner pounding against his cage, as I dwelt on the thing in my mind.

      The fair.

      3.

      The first trucks began to arrive that Saturday, and Fat Bobby and I watched as the massive diesels pulled into the park at the center of town. I brought Bandit with us, as Dad had told me to and as I would have done anyway, and he lay at my feet while Fat Bobby and I straddled the log-post fence that surrounded the park like it was a huge corral.

      Large canvas tents and tarps billowed up and high, supported by their wire- and pole-frame skeletons, like the humps of ancient creatures. Game booths and food stands were constructed also, crews of shirtless and sweat-shiny big men pounding away with hammers and shouting out orders to each other. Glass-cased popcorn machines and the spinning skewers of hot dog vendors; Whomp-a-Mole machines and BB gun shooting ranges; a merry-go-round spinning slowly, hypnotically, on a test run; and the large, imposing monolith of the Ferris wheel, standing tall against the backdrop of the clear summer sky like the monument of some lost civilization—each, in turn, unveiled upon the land like an invocation.

      “It sure is something, isn’t it?” Fat Bobby asked, downing the last of the soda he’d filched from my house. One corner of a plastic bag stuck out of the breast pocket of his shirt like it was playing peek-a-boo, the sandwich that had been in it, of my mom’s making, long gone.

      “It sure is,” I said with genuine awe, the sounds and sights of the fair coming together like the sounds of a dream long lost slowly coming back.

      “This will be the first year I’ve got to go in a long time,” Fat Bobby said. “My mom used to take me. But it’s not really the kind of thing my dad likes to do.”

      Knowing full well this might be a road I didn’t want to go down, that such a topic could quickly dispel the glory of the day, I went ahead and asked the question that was on my mind anyway.

      “Used to? Where’s your mom now?”

      The momentary silence before Fat Bobby’s answer confirmed for me that we were about to turn down Depression Road, followed by a hard left down Misery Lane.

      “She died a couple years ago. Car accident. Dad was driving.”

      I didn’t know what to say to that, and so said nothing. Which may have been the best course of action because, in a few minutes, we were lost in the chorus of the fair’s construction again. It was a balm of sorts watching those men work their magic, the tents and rides going up, as if the landscape of a forlorn past were being patched over by something better.

      As afternoon stepped aside for evening, the sky going from blue to red to bruise purple, we turned away from the fairgrounds. The clanging and banging of its assembly, its growth, its becoming, had a rhythm almost a heartbeat, and there was a sadness to our stride as we moved along: a drag of the legs, a slump of shoulders.

      Along the highway, in the deepening night, we walked, and at some point on the long road, we waved to each other and parted; the unspoken desire for the fair between us and the wait for it almost unbearable. Ghost dog by my side, I watched my friend blend into the night and, on the dark road, I continued home.

      I was several yards from the turnoff on the highway to our street, when the sound of an engine coming closer rumbled behind me. Stepping further onto the shoulder just for safety, as I had for a half dozen cars before it, I waited for the vehicle to pass on by.

      It didn’t pass.

      Pulling up alongside me, a sleek black Mustang slowed to a crawl, almost like a shadow rolling, a part of the night detached, matching my stride. The electric hum of the windows rolling down was loud in the night. Inside, Mr. Smirk, Mr. Pudge, and Mr. Pimple Planet—Dillon, Max, and Stu—looked out. Clouds of smoke billowed out of the car, drifting up into the night like dragon’s breath.

      Bandit let out that monstrous growl he’d made back at the stream not so long ago. I knelt to clutch his collar and gave him a bit of a tug, letting him know to stay by me as we walked.

      Dillon was at the wheel, but he didn’t watch the road. He stared out at me.

      The other two were in the backseat, watching me as well.

      “Out past your bedtime?” Dillon asked. He had traded his suede jacket for a black leather one and, in the black car in the black night, the effect was disconcerting. He almost seemed like only a head and hands, pale and floating there in the shadow car. “It’s dangerous to be out alone this time of night.” He looked briefly away from me, out through the windshield at the moon above, like he was confirming the hour. “Bad things can happen at night.”

      I tried to remember the things I’d told Fat Bobby a few days ago at the stream in the woods. Not to be afraid. Not to take shit. But home, so near, had never seemed so far away.

      “Yeah,” I said, trying to control the tremor in my voice, “like getting your nuts bit off.”

      I looked at Dillon in the driver’s seat to gauge his reaction, and I felt I’d scored at least a point when I saw a tick of anxiety as he looked down at Bandit. Probably imagining his unmentionables being torn and chewed like a frankfurter and beans. But to his credit, and my growing unease, it was only the slightest of distractions, and then he was looking squarely at me again.

      “The brave little man with his dog,” he said, and I watched as one of his floating phantom hands left the steering wheel and reached into a pocket of his leather jacket. My first thought, the Southern Californian in me, cried out Gun! Gun! Run! Hit the ground! But even as these thoughts fired across my synapses, my muscles tensing to run or hit the ground, Dillon’s hand came back out and it wasn’t a gun he held.

      “I was thinking about your dog, after that stunt you pulled in the woods.” I watched him flick his wrist, a quick and simple motion like a magician would do, and a long and silver blade sprung like magic from his fist. “And I think I came up with a viable solution.”

      That blade, four inches and gleaming with moonlight, held my eyes as effectively as Tara had, though for different reasons. The thought of that knife punching into my dog, ripping into Bandit’s guts, tearing the life from him, made my stomach do a little queasy flip. I felt like a small boy, and I wanted my dad.

      Hell, I wouldn’t have turned away my mom either, had she at that moment come running down the highway to save the day.

      I pushed the images away, the momentary horror of what could be, of what I no doubt knew this guy in the leather jacket, driving the deep black Mustang, would do if given the chance. Instead, I tried to snatch the anger that hid behind the fear.

      “You ever touch my dog and I’ll use that knife to cut off your limp dick,” I said. Then, speaking before the thought was even fully formed, as if it were almost a revelation, something inferred from the mists of a crystal ball, I continued. I think it was something like how I’d known the kind of man Fat Bobby’s dad had to be, even as I said he couldn’t be that bad. “And I’ll mail your tiny noodle limp dick to your dad, so he’ll know what a fucking pansy ass his son really is.”

      The tires squealed with the braking of the black car. The Mustang lurched with the sudden friction, and stopped. The pungent smell of burnt rubber wafted up in the darkness.

      “I’ll fucking kill you,” Dillon said, and I looked at him square in the eyes, and his smirk, that lopsided grin like he didn’t give a shit about anything, like he was separate from it all, was gone.

      His hand held the switchblade with white-knuckle intensity, making his hands even whiter than they already were, contrasted with all the black.

      The blade quivered, and the moonlight twinkled upon it.

      The driver’s door opened, and he stepped out.

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