The Other Side of the Lights

Taking the Stars Apart

Four in the morning, and I'm thirty feet up the Ferris wheel with a wrench in my teeth, taking the stars apart.

That's not how the marks would say it. To them the wheel is the wheel — a hundred and forty feet of painted steel and three thousand bulbs, a thing that turns and sparkles and gives the little ones something to cry about at the top. They never see it built. They never see it come down. By the time they wake up in their Dunmore beds with their corn-dog stomachs and their cheap ribbons, we'll be gone, the fairground will be just grass again, and they'll half believe they dreamed us. That's the trick of it. That's the whole trick of everything we do.

But somebody has to take the stars apart, and tonight, like most nights, that somebody is me.

I work the spoke from the outside in, hooking my heels in the truss, leaning back into the harness until the webbing bites my hips. Bulb, twist, drop it in the padded sack on my belt. Bulb, twist, drop. The string lights run in series, which means one dead bulb kills the whole strand, which means the man who designed this wheel in 1958 hated joy and hated electricians, and I love him for it, because untangling what he tangled is the closest thing I have to church. My hands know the rhythm better than my head does. I could do this asleep. Some nights I think I am.

Below me the midway is coming undone in the dark. You can hear it before you can see it — the music of a carnival eating itself. The crank-and-groan of the Scrambler folding its arms in like something praying. The slam of the funhouse panels stacking flat. Reuben killing the fryers in the grab joint, the oil ticking as it cools, and Reuben himself swearing at the propane lines in three languages, none of which he speaks sober. Bear's voice, low and easy, gentling the Tilt-a-Whirl down off its trailer ramps the way you'd talk a horse out of a barn. Generators. Ratchet straps. The particular shriek of a tent stake pulled wrong.

Constellations being un-named, one bulb at a time. I told that to Esther Bell once, the librarian back in Greenly, and she got quiet and wrote it down on the back of her hand like she does, and I felt like I'd given away something I should've kept. I do that with her. I give things away.

"Frankie." Uncle Laz, down at the base, his face a pale smear under the work light. "How's the count?"

I take the wrench out of my teeth. "Two strands left on the rim. Then the hub."

"Make it twenty minutes. Gate said weather's coming up the valley."

"Gate said that yesterday and it was clear blue."

"Gate's wrong till it's right." He's already moving, clipboard against his thigh, doing the math nobody wants to do out loud. Laz is the show's middle — too young to remember when it was easy, too old to pretend it still is. He counts trucks the way Pop counts seasons and the way I count bulbs, which is to say, like a man making sure none have gone missing.

Two have, by the way. Bulbs, I mean. Burned out tonight, both on the same strand, which is why the northwest quarter of the wheel went dark during the eight-o'clock turn and a kid started bawling because the magic glitched in front of him. I climbed up mid-run to swap them while the wheel still moved, which Pop says will kill me one day and which I do anyway, because a dark wheel is a wheel nobody rides, and a wheel nobody rides is money we don't make, and money we don't make is — well. That's a whole other strand, and it's dark too, and nobody's climbing up to fix it.

I drop the last bulb of the rim strand into the sack and let myself look. Just for a second. You earn a second, up here.

The fairground spreads out flat and black, edged in the orange of the sodium lamps along the parking lot, and past that the town of Dunmore, asleep, a few porch lights, a water tower with the high school's name on it that I will never attend. Beyond the town, fields. Beyond the fields, the sky, and the sky is doing the thing it only does this far from anywhere — going deep, going crowded, more stars than dark between them.

There's one low on the eastern edge, just over the tree line. Faint. Reddish, maybe, or maybe I'm wanting it to be. It pulses, the way a star does when it's burning through a lot of air to reach you, and I don't know its name. I know most of them — Pop taught me the bright ones and the books taught me the rest, the math of them, the parallax and the spectra, the way you can weigh a thing a thousand light-years off by the color of its light. But that one I can't place, and it bothers me the way a rattle in an engine bothers me, a small wrongness I can't leave alone.

I want to know its name. That's all. That's the whole crime.

And there it is, right on schedule — the feeling that comes whenever I want something that isn't a tool or a fix or a turn well run. A kind of seasick lurch, like the truss shifted under me when it didn't. Wanting, for a Varga, is a thing you do quietly and then apologize for. We don't want. We work. We don't reach for the far star. We string the near ones up every night and take them down every dawn and we do it together and we do it forever, and that, Pop says, is the only kind of forever a person actually gets.

I look away from the star. I always do.

Down below, off to the left, my toolbox sits open on the tailgate of the wheel truck where I left it. Red, scabbed with rust at the corners, my name scratched into the lid with an awl when I was nine — FRANKIE, all caps, the K backwards because I was nine. Top tray's felt-lined, the felt gone shiny and black with forty years of grease, half of it Pop's father's grease, because the box was his before it was Pop's before it was mine. Wrenches in size order. Feeler gauges. The good multimeter.

Under the felt tray there's a thing I keep not looking at.

From here I can't see it. I couldn't see it from a foot away. That's the point of under. But I know the exact give of that tray when you lift it, the soft suck of old felt off old metal, and I know what's flat against the bottom, folded into thirds, the creases already going soft from how many times I've unfolded it and folded it back. I haven't opened the box since Dunmore. I won't, not down there with everybody's eyes. I just want to know it's still where I put it. That's a separate hunger from the star and it's worse, because the star is only a name and the thing under the tray is a door, and I have done a terrible thing, which is open it a crack.

I go back to the bulbs.

—

Pop's set up his throne, I see, when I come down the spoke and drop into the truss to start the hub strand. By throne I mean the folding chair, the green-and-white one with the busted weave he's patched with safety wire, planted dead center of the midway where he can see all of it at once. He's got the wool coat on even though it's June and warm, and the cane he calls a "walking stick" so it sounds like a choice. He's bossing. That's the job he's left himself. Marek runs the show day to day, my dad, but Pop runs the idea of the show, and the idea of the show is that nothing happens on this lot that Emil Varga doesn't see.

"Bear," he calls, not loud, never loud, and Bear's head comes up across the lot like a dog hearing its name. "Strap the Tilt low side first. She lists."

"Yes, sir."

"Reuben. You're leaking."

"It's condensation," Reuben yells back.

"It's propane and you'll blow us to Iowa."

I'm watching him while I twist bulbs, the way I've learned to watch him, sideways, so he doesn't catch me at it. And here's the thing I'm not going to say to anybody: his color's wrong. Under the work light he's gone the gray of a dirty rag, a no-color, the lamp finding the hollows in his face and parking there. His chest works a little too hard between sentences. When he reached for the thermos a minute ago his hand did a thing — a small tremor, quick, swallowed — and he set the thermos down again without drinking, like he'd only meant to check it was there.

Seventy-four. Sixty seasons. A man who has never once, in my whole life, sat in that chair before midnight unless somebody made him.

Nobody made him tonight.

"Mira-girl," he calls up, and I startle so bad I nearly fumble a bulb. He's the only one who calls me that — my middle name, my mother's gift, the one I'd cut off with tin snips if it didn't bleed. He says it like an endearment. I hear it like an accusation, and I've never once told him so. "You're high enough."

"I'm fine, Pop."

"I didn't ask your opinion of your altitude. Come down when the hub's clear."

"That's where I'm working."

A pause. Then the dry crack of his laugh, which turns into a cough he flattens against his sleeve. "Good girl," he says, when he can. "Don't leave a one of them up there."

We don't leave. Not bulbs, not towns owed money, not each other. It's painted on the lead truck in letters two feet high, gold edged in black, repainted every spring by Pop's own hand even now when his hand shakes: WE DON'T LEAVE. Varga & Sons Amusements, est. 1947, and under the year, the creed. I've read it ten thousand times. I'll read it again at dawn when the truck noses out. It's the first thing I learned to read, before cat, before my own backwards name. It is the truest thing I know and tonight, with the thing folded under the felt tray, it sits on me like a hand on the back of the neck.

—

Here's where the night gives me a gift, because it knows I need one.

A townie wanders up to the wheel base. Drunk — not mean-drunk, just loose, that swaying civilian goodwill, ball cap on backward, a girl somewhere behind him filming on her phone for reasons God will have to explain. He gets a look at Laz wrestling the hub coupling and decides, in the way of his people, to help.

"I gotchu, man," he announces. "I gotchu." And he reaches both bare hands toward the drive chain — the live one, the one I have not finished disengaging, forty pounds of greased steel under tension that will take a finger off the way you'd snap a carrot and not even slow down doing it.

"HEY." That's me, from thirty feet up, in the voice. The call. The one I use to turn a crowd, pitched to carry over a running midway, and it stops him with his hands six inches from the chain. "Civilian. Step back from the machine."

He looks up, blinking, trying to find the sky-voice. "I'm tryna help."

"I know. It's the kindest thing anyone's done all week. Step back."

"I'm real strong, though—"

"I believe you. I believe you could lift a Buick. Step. Back."

Laz has him by the collar now, gentle, walking him off toward the gate the way Bear walks the Tilt off its ramps, and the townie goes, beaming, telling Laz he's "got mad respect for you carnival guys," and the girl with the phone says babe you almost died, and he says no way, and he's right, he had no idea, they never do. That's a civilian for you. Walks into a working machine smiling, walks out smiling, never once in between understands that the smiling was the dangerous part.

I love them, honestly. The marks. From up here, all of them, the way you love weather. You just have to remember they don't know the rules and the rules don't care.

"He gone?" Bear calls.

"He's gone," I say. "Took two fingers with him on a souvenir lanyard, but he's gone."

"Frankie."

"Kidding. All ten. We run a clean midway."

A scatter of laughter down the lot, tired and real, the kind you only get at four a.m. when everybody's hands hurt the same. Gem, over at the alibi joint folding the wall of stuffed unicorns into bales, flips me off without looking up, which is how she says good one and I love you and get back to work, all three. Gem's eighteen and she'll be with this show till they bury her under it and she wants nothing else, not one single other thing, and standing next to her I feel like a person with a counterfeit bill in her pocket, smiling so nobody asks to see it.

—

It's getting on toward five and the sky's going from black to that bruised dishwater gray when I bring the last hub strand down and coil it and the wheel is just bones — a dark wheel, a nobody-rides wheel, ready to fold flat onto its trailer and become a thing on a highway again.

Dad's by the lead truck. Phone to his ear, back to the lot, which is how I know. He's got a voice he saves for bad numbers — low, careful, the words spaced out and weighed before he spends them, like he's counting change he doesn't have. I can't hear what he's saying. I don't have to. I've heard the shape of it before, more this season than last, and last more than the one before that, the way you hear a bearing start to go: not the failure yet, just the first faint song of it coming.

He hangs up. Stands a second with his hand flat on the truck door, right under the painted creed, like he's holding the words up or they're holding him. Then he turns around and he's my dad again, normal face screwed on, and he says, "Lot's clear. Load the box, Frank. We roll at five."

I cross to the tailgate. My toolbox is open, the wrenches in size order, the felt tray shut.

I lay my palm flat on the lid. FRANKIE, all caps, the K backwards. The metal's cold and damp with dew. Underneath the tray, three folds deep, the thing I keep not looking at keeps not being looked at, and I leave it that way. I just press my hand down once, the way you press a hand to a door to feel if there's fire on the other side.

Then I close the box, and snap both latches, and swing it up into the truck with the rest of my life.

—

We roll at five-oh-eight, which for us is on time.

The lot's empty. You'd never know. Flattened grass, a few wrappers the wind owns now, two ruts where the wheel truck sat. By noon the dew'll lift the grass back up and Dunmore will be exactly what it was before we came, plus a hundred photographs and one drunk boy with a story about almost dying. We leave nothing. We take nothing that isn't ours. That's the deal. That's the only deal that lets you do this and stay clean.

The convoy strings out toward the highway, taillights, the generators silent now, everybody driving the way you drive after a tear-down, half-asleep with your hands knowing the road. I'm in the cab of the wheel truck, Pop riding the next one up where Marek can watch him. Through my windshield I can see the lead truck swing its nose toward the on-ramp, and its headlights wash back along its own flank for a second as it turns, and the words come up out of the dark, gold edged in black, bright and then gone:

WE DON'T LEAVE.

I read them. First thing I ever read. I climb my eyes up to the sky out the side window to find that one faint star again, the reddish one, the one I can't name, and it's there, low, pulsing, still wanting to be known.

And I think the one thought I will never, ever say out loud, the thought folded three deep under the felt where nobody can see it, the thought that makes me a liar every single time I read those gold letters and mean them:

Not yet.

The Jump

The convoy strung out along the two-lane at noon like beads someone hadn't finished threading, and in my side mirror the lead truck shrank and shrank until the painted words on its flank went from a sentence to a smudge to nothing. WE DON'T LEAVE. You can watch a creed disappear from a moving truck if you have the angle for it. I had the angle for it. I had it every jump of my life.

Beside me, with one boot up on the dash and his window cracked so the wind could find the gap in his teeth and whistle through it, Pop said, "You know why we never leave, Mira-girl?"

He'd asked it ten thousand times. He'd answer it himself if I let the silence run, so I let the silence run, because that was the deal between us. The road did its tire hum. A grain elevator slid by, gray and patient. Somewhere up ahead Bear was driving the Tilt truck at a steady fifty-two because Bear believed fifty-three was reckless and fifty-one was an insult to the engine.

"Because a Varga," Pop said, settling into it, "doesn't run when the work gets hard. My father — your great-grandfather, God keep him — he came back from one war and built the whole show out of two trucks and a borrowed generator, and you know what he painted on the first truck before he painted the name?"

"We don't leave," I said.

"We don't leave." He smacked the dash like the dash had argued. "Before the name, Frankie. Before Varga. The promise came first." He looked over at me, and his eyes did the thing where they got younger than the rest of his face. "You remember that when you're old and I'm gone and some slick fella in a clean shirt offers you money to walk away from your own blood."

I kept my eyes on the road. In my toolbox behind the seat, under the felt tray where the little sockets lived, there was a folded letter that I could feel the weight of even at sixty miles an hour, which is impossible, paper weighs nothing, and I felt it anyway. Lindholm Academy is pleased to inform you. I drove. I am good at driving and not saying things. It's the family trade.

---

A jump has an order to it, the way a body has bones. The lead truck first, Marek — my dad — at the wheel because the lead sets the pace and Dad's pace is don't scare the locals. Then the ride trucks, biggest to smallest, because that's how the lot fills when we land. Then the Wonder in the music truck, then the grab joints with Reuben's fryers lashed down and still smelling of last night's oil, then the bunk trailers, then Laz at the back riding drag so nobody got left at a gas station, which had happened exactly once, to me, when I was nine, and which Laz had never once let himself forget.

The CB kept us stitched together. It crackled the whole way like the trucks were gossiping.

"Bridge coming up, low clearance, Wonder truck mind your antenna."

"Copy."

"Reuben you awake up there or we steering by prayer."

"Eat glass, Bell." That was Reuben to Gem, who was riding shotgun in the grab truck and had nothing better to do than bait him.

"Diner at the ninety-one split," Dad's voice, flat and final. "Twenty minutes, that's twenty, not Reuben-twenty."

You learn a country this way. Not as states, not as cities. As exits. As the diner at the ninety-one split with the pie that's only good if it's Tuesday. As the rest stop past Carlow where the vending machine eats quarters but the bathroom's clean. As the long sad stretch outside Petrie where the radio dies and you drive forty minutes inside your own head. I have never once memorized a town's downtown. I have memorized the off-ramps the way other kids memorize their street. My whole geography is the space between places. Ask me where I'm from and I'll tell you I'm from the part right before you get there.

We pulled in at the ninety-one split and the convoy folded itself into the gravel lot like it does, big rigs nose to tail, a traveling town parking itself for pie. Pop wanted the booth by the window. Pop always wanted the booth by the window so he could watch the trucks, count them, make sure the show was all still there. I brought him his coffee the way he likes it, which is to say ruined, three sugars, and I watched him wrap both hands around the mug like the mug was the thing keeping him warm and not the other way around.

His hands shook. Just a little. Just at the start, before the coffee, before he caught me catching it and made them stop by force of will.

"Quit looking at me like a gauge," he said.

"I look at everything like a gauge."

"That's your mother in you," he said, and then his whole face did a small terrible flinch, like he'd reached for a tool and grabbed the hot end, and he covered it by drinking coffee that was much too hot to drink. I let it go. You learn what to let go. It's most of the job.

---

We were maybe forty minutes back on the road, the sun starting its long slide off true noon, when the Wonder started to die.

Nobody else heard it. That's not me bragging, it's just the truth of frequencies — the band organ rides in its own truck three vehicles ahead, sealed up, and it isn't even playing, it's lashed down and silent, and you cannot hear a silent organ over four diesel engines. But I heard it anyway, the way you hear a name you love in a crowded room. There was a wrongness in the air. A pressure. The CB had been quiet and then Gem keyed up, uncertain.

"Uh — somebody's organ's making a noise? The Wonder truck. There's like a — wheeze?"

Pop sat up so fast his boot came off the dash. "Pull it over," he said. "Pull the whole show over. Frankie—"

"I hear it," I said, because now I did, faint through the window when Gem keyed the mic again and held it up — that sound, that long failing haaahh, an exhale that didn't have a body behind it anymore.

A collapsed bellows. I knew it before we stopped. You don't need to see the Wonder to know the Wonder; I'd had my hands inside her since I was small enough to fit. She breathes through two big bellows, leather and wood, a hundred years of patches on patches, and when one of them gives — splits a seam, loses its spring — the air goes thin and reedy and then it goes nowhere at all, and the music she makes turns into a dying man trying to whistle. Pop heard that sound the way other men hear their own child crying in another room.

We got the convoy onto the gravel apron of a rest stop, all of us, the whole traveling town pulled over for one old organ, and that's the thing about us that the townies never understand. They'd have left her. Fix it at the lot. We don't fix it at the lot. We bleed for the Wonder by the side of the road because Pop's father bought her in 1951 with money he didn't have, and she has played every single night the Varga lights have been on, and a show that lets its own heart wheeze is already half sold.

I climbed up into the music truck with my belt on. The good belt. Pop's father's wrench riding in the loop on my hip where it always rides, worn smooth as a creek stone by three generations of hands, the steel gone the color of a winter sky. I put my palm flat on the Wonder's case and I felt her working too hard, that flutter, and I popped the access panel and there it was — the rear bellows, the bottom seam split a good four inches, the leather dry-rotted and finally let go on a hard bump somewhere past the split.

"Talk to me," Pop said from the truck's open door. He couldn't climb up fast anymore. He stood in the road light with his hands hanging like he didn't know what to do with hands that couldn't fix things, and I understood that hands like that were the worst thing in the world to him, and I talked fast so he wouldn't have to stand inside that feeling.

"Rear bellows, bottom seam. Dry rot, finally gave. It's not the spring, the spring's fine, it's just the leather." I was already pulling the bellows board, already reaching for the kit — I keep a roll in the truck, contact cement and a square of bookbinder's leather and clamps and the curved needle, because the Wonder splits about twice a season and I am the only person alive who knows her seams. "Forty minutes. Maybe thirty. She'll sing in Greenly, Pop. I promise you she'll sing in Greenly."

He didn't say anything for a second. And when I looked down he was watching my hands the way you watch water in a drought, and his face had come all the way open — no creed in it, no scripture, just an old man who needed the one thing his granddaughter could do and couldn't do himself anymore. Naked, for a second. Then he closed it.

"My father picked you," he said gruffly. "Out of all of us. He'd have picked you."

I clamped the new leather and didn't trust my voice, so I used my hands, which never lie, and got her breathing again by the time the sun was orange.

---

While I worked, the family did what families do, which is talk where they think you can't hear.

Dad and Laz were on the far side of the music truck, in the engine shadow, voices pitched low under the idle. I had my head inside the Wonder and my ears are good and they forgot, the way people forget the mechanic the second she's busy.

"—not enough, even if every stand sells out," Laz was saying. "You've seen the book. I've seen the book."

"Keep your voice down."

"She called again. Coraline." A pause. The name meant nothing to me and something to them; I could hear it in the weight Laz gave it. "The offer's still on the table, Marek. The buyout. It's real money. It's enough to—"

"Pop hears the word buyout it'll finish what his heart's already starting." Dad's voice dropped under the diesel and I lost the rest, just the shape of it, low and tired, the voice he uses when he's choosing between two bad things and knows it.

Coraline. Buyout. I filed them in the same drawer where I keep the letter, the drawer of things that weigh nothing and weigh everything. I tightened a clamp I'd already tightened.

And then, when I climbed down, I saw Pop do a thing he meant for nobody.

He'd walked off a little way, toward the field, his back to the trucks, and he had a small brown bottle in his hand, and he shook one pill into his palm and looked at it like it had insulted him and then knocked it back dry, fast, the way you do a thing you don't want to admit you do. Then he slid the bottle into his shirt pocket, deep, under the flap, and buttoned it. Buttoned it. You don't button a pocket over aspirin. He turned around and caught me twenty feet off and his whole body said you saw nothing, and so I gave him nothing, I gave him a thumbs-up and "She's good, Pop, she's breathing," and he gave me back the gruffest nod a man can give, and we both put it in the drawer.

The drawer was getting full. The whole family ran on that drawer.

---

Back in the cab, the light going gold and long, Pop got quiet the way he does at the end of a jump, when the stories run out and it's just the road and the next town coming. He looked over at me once, soft, and said, "You did good, Mira-girl," and there it was again, the name, landing on me like a hand on a bruise.

Mira. My middle name. Francesca Mira Varga.

The only thing she ever gave me that I couldn't give back. She left when I was five — took her bag, took the car as far as the bus, left me the name like a splinter she worked in too deep to dig out. Everybody in the show says it like it's sweet. Mira-girl. Pop says it like it's love. And I hear it and what I feel is her, the shape of a woman I can't remember handing me a word and walking into the dark, and I hate it the way you hate a scar you didn't choose — not the wound, the wound's old, but the daily proof of it, the thing in the mirror that means someone did this to you and didn't stay to see how it healed. I never correct him. You don't correct Pop. You just flinch where he can't see, on the inside, where I keep most of myself.

"It's Frankie," I said, like always, light, like a joke.

"It's a beautiful name," he said, like always, not a joke at all.

---

The land started to remember itself around six. I felt it before the signs said it. The road bent the way I knew it would bend; the corn gave over to that low green river-bottom country; the first billboard for the Greenly County Fair came up faded and cheerful, ten days, the same dates as last year and the year before, predictable as a holiday, and my stomach did the thing.

The thing it does. Once a year. Only here.

A tightening, low, a flutter that had nothing to do with the Wonder's bellows and everything to do with a town I had no right to feel anything about. I am from the space before you get there. I don't get butterflies about an off-ramp. I told myself it was the diner pie. I told myself it was the heat. I told myself it was anything with a name that wasn't his name, and I am very, very good at not saying things, so I called it nausea and I almost believed me.

Then we crested the last hill at dusk and there it was, all of it at once, the way it always comes — the Greenly water tower catching the last of the sun, GREENLY in letters I could read from a mile out; the fairgrounds laid flat and waiting in the river bend, the grass we'd build our city on by tomorrow noon; the whole familiar valley folding open under a sky going purple at the edges. Lights coming on in the little houses. Somewhere down there, a nursery with the closing-up lights on. Somewhere down there, a boy who'd loved me one week a year since we were twelve, watering things that stayed where he put them.

Greenly. Theo's town.

The one place on the whole circuit that almost feels like it could be mine.