I aimed to stay home that Friday night, May Day, 1970,
and not traipse down the hill to the carnival. Flipping sullenly through stale
magazines, I sat in my bedroom—the lights and sounds of the show bouncing into
my window, and Ma sprawled on the couch in the sitting room, snoring again in
front of the snowy TV.
Me, Annabelle Cory, nineteen-years young and looking mighty fine, and where was I? Clandel, West-by-God-Virginia.
To get shut of my mood, if only for a few hours, out the door I flew in a burnt hurry down the stairs, down the steep street, down the hillside our apartment clung to. Fetching up at the sidewalk along US-52, the main blacktop snaking through Clandel, I leaned over the rusty pipe-rail and took in the carnival below.
On the bottoms by the train yard, colored lights danced in the night’s chill. The heap of folks on the midway kicked up a flickery dust cloud, with whiffs of fried food, hot sugar, and diesel exhaust floating in the familiar taint of coal—all swoggled full-tilt by the iron arms of monstrous rides, roaring and whirling through laughs and screams, through bells, bangs, buzzers, and barkers—all amid one golly-whopper ruckus of full-blast 8-track rock-and-roll.
With no money for the front gate, I ducked under the rail and into the bushes—my feet finding and remembering the stony rut carved in bygone times of us kids scrambling down to the weedy lot between the railroad tracks and the wide bend in Black Creek. There we would play our games, and there the carnival would set up each spring. Then we would play their games. Skidding down between the bushes, grabbing at the budding leaves, I recalled other times with no money—my sister and me, sneaking into the show together, giggling till our sides ached.
I clambered out of the brush, and up and over the bed of slack and cinders, the oily wooden ties, the gleaming steel rails. Ahead, between the lonesome tracks and blaring midway, the carny camp lay huddled in trembly shadows. Several cars and pickups and a pair of beat-up two-ton trucks crouched nearby a jumble of house trailers, a few curtained windows glowing like foxfire.
I put on like I wasn’t sneaking in, smiling and strolling into the camp as if I knew where I was going. But in a blink, fear stole my breath, my heart leapt, my lips tightened. I spied a bright gap behind the line-up of booths surrounding the midway, and tiptoed toward it.
Just before I got there, a bowlegged Chihuahua charged out from beneath a nearby house trailer, snarling and snapping at my ankles. I kicked at it and fled to the gap, but it jumped at my leg and chomped down on the cuff of my bell-bottom jeans. Hopping on one foot, I swung my leg and the dog around and around, trying to spin it off, its pointy ears and bulgy eyes darting to-and-fro—the puny bastard in a fright about where I had it right then.
I soon spun myself dizzy, and when I tottered and slowed and grabbed the corner of a tent, the dog let loose, rolled off—no doubt dizzy too—and it wobbled back under the shabby green trailer. As I stood there, getting back my breath and my bearings—one eye on the dog, and the other eye on the crowd shifting by in the bright hullabaloo a few steps beyond the gap in the tents—the battered door of the trailer squawked open, and an old gypsy woman leaned out from the flutter of candlelight within. For a spooky stretched-out moment, she eyed me up and down—gold hoops dangling from her earlobes, red kerchief tied atop her long gray hair, a black shawl over a colory and billowy dress.
Then her squinty gaze softened, as if she’d easily figured me out. I turned tail and stumbled out onto the midway.
Me, Annabelle Cory, nineteen-years young and looking mighty fine, and where was I? Clandel, West-by-God-Virginia.
To get shut of my mood, if only for a few hours, out the door I flew in a burnt hurry down the stairs, down the steep street, down the hillside our apartment clung to. Fetching up at the sidewalk along US-52, the main blacktop snaking through Clandel, I leaned over the rusty pipe-rail and took in the carnival below.
On the bottoms by the train yard, colored lights danced in the night’s chill. The heap of folks on the midway kicked up a flickery dust cloud, with whiffs of fried food, hot sugar, and diesel exhaust floating in the familiar taint of coal—all swoggled full-tilt by the iron arms of monstrous rides, roaring and whirling through laughs and screams, through bells, bangs, buzzers, and barkers—all amid one golly-whopper ruckus of full-blast 8-track rock-and-roll.
With no money for the front gate, I ducked under the rail and into the bushes—my feet finding and remembering the stony rut carved in bygone times of us kids scrambling down to the weedy lot between the railroad tracks and the wide bend in Black Creek. There we would play our games, and there the carnival would set up each spring. Then we would play their games. Skidding down between the bushes, grabbing at the budding leaves, I recalled other times with no money—my sister and me, sneaking into the show together, giggling till our sides ached.
I clambered out of the brush, and up and over the bed of slack and cinders, the oily wooden ties, the gleaming steel rails. Ahead, between the lonesome tracks and blaring midway, the carny camp lay huddled in trembly shadows. Several cars and pickups and a pair of beat-up two-ton trucks crouched nearby a jumble of house trailers, a few curtained windows glowing like foxfire.
I put on like I wasn’t sneaking in, smiling and strolling into the camp as if I knew where I was going. But in a blink, fear stole my breath, my heart leapt, my lips tightened. I spied a bright gap behind the line-up of booths surrounding the midway, and tiptoed toward it.
Just before I got there, a bowlegged Chihuahua charged out from beneath a nearby house trailer, snarling and snapping at my ankles. I kicked at it and fled to the gap, but it jumped at my leg and chomped down on the cuff of my bell-bottom jeans. Hopping on one foot, I swung my leg and the dog around and around, trying to spin it off, its pointy ears and bulgy eyes darting to-and-fro—the puny bastard in a fright about where I had it right then.
I soon spun myself dizzy, and when I tottered and slowed and grabbed the corner of a tent, the dog let loose, rolled off—no doubt dizzy too—and it wobbled back under the shabby green trailer. As I stood there, getting back my breath and my bearings—one eye on the dog, and the other eye on the crowd shifting by in the bright hullabaloo a few steps beyond the gap in the tents—the battered door of the trailer squawked open, and an old gypsy woman leaned out from the flutter of candlelight within. For a spooky stretched-out moment, she eyed me up and down—gold hoops dangling from her earlobes, red kerchief tied atop her long gray hair, a black shawl over a colory and billowy dress.
Then her squinty gaze softened, as if she’d easily figured me out. I turned tail and stumbled out onto the midway.