Life is a Carnival

"Did any of the other guys?"

"I don't know," Barry said, and I got the impression that Barry may have known more than he was saying. "What difference does it make? It sounds like with you and her, it wasn't that kind of relationship, was it?"

"No," I said. "Still, I wonder whether or not to go to a doctor. To checked out for - stuff?"

"You wore protection, didn't you?"

"At first," I explained. "After a couple of days though, she told me that I didn't have to."

"Interesting," Barry mused.

"What do you mean?"

"Just interesting," Barry said.

***

Chapter Twenty One: Next year.

I didn't forget about Kim, but had managed to get over her, just as was predicted by Barry and even Kim herself. I was anxiously waiting for the carnival when it came back the next summer, because I had a girlfriend to take with me. Lois Randall - THE Lois Randall, who I had become confident enough to ask out that fall after the Kim episode, and with whom I had managed to begin a steady relationship with.

When the carnival arrived, I waited as long as I could before wandering casually up to the grounds. The thought of Kim coming up to the house would be awkward, especially if Lois and I were there as we often were.

The field was a bit soggy from the rain the night before, so business was slow. I went to look for the general manager to apologize for not coming to work that next day last year, but he was nowhere to be found, so I headed for The Scrambler, where the now totally toothless operator was leaning on the control panel.

"Kim?" he said with a quizzical expression, sort of remembering me. "She didn't come north with us this year. Think she quit. Somebody said she got knocked up or something. Might want to ask at the cotton candy booth. She was friends with the lady that runs it."

"Too bad," the guy called out after I headed back across the field. "She was the only one who could get this fucker to work."

Almost sprinting by the time I got to the cotton candy stand, I asked the young woman at the counter if she was the one that was friends with Kim, but she shook her head no.

"Maybe my Mom knows," she said, and then called out to a heavy set woman who was wrestling with a big sack of sugar.

"Are you the woman who knows Kim?" I asked.

"Who wants to know?"

"I do, I mean, the Scrambler guy said that you might know about her. Where she is and all."

"I mean who are you?"

"Billy. Billy Morton."

A little smile appeared in the corners of the mouth of the woman's weathered face, and after looking me up and down she told the girl she would be right back.

"Follow me," the woman said, and as she strode across the field to a trailer parked along the woods, I peppered her with questions about Kim.

Was it true what the guy had said? Where is she? How is she? How can I contact her?"

"You sure have a lot of questions," the woman said with a laugh as she disappeared inside the trailer for a moment, emerging with something rectangular in a brown paper bag.

"Kim said she figured you might come around looking for her," the woman explained to me as she gave me the package. "She told me to give you this."

There was a book inside of the bag. A dictionary.

"But what about..."

"Kim told me to tell you that she's doing fine," the woman said, holding up her hand to ward off my questioning. "Last time I saw her, well, I can tell you that she's never been happier."

"And that's all you're getting out of me," she concluded.

"This isn't fair," I protested.

"Maybe not," the woman admitted. "Neither is life sometimes, but that's the way it is. Kim's fine, and it looks like you're well too, so I'll tell her that when I see her over the winter."

"You can ask all day," the woman finally said as she put an end to my attempted interrogation of her. "And that's still all you get from me. Sorry."

I went back home, my head spinning with all of the pieces of information and rumors I had gotten from my visit to the carnival site. A dictionary wasn't what I was looking for, but as I opened the book I noticed that Kim had written something inside of it.

She had nice handwriting, which for some reason surprised me, and I had to smile at the beginning of the personal note which was addressed to me, not Sport. It was short and to the point.

Billy,

Something you might be able to use. Not much of a gift, I know, especially compared to the gift you gave to me, but there's a lot of interesting stuff in here so read it when you have time. When you do look at it, think of me. Okay? I will never forget you.

Love, Kim

p.s. Who knows? Maybe we'll meet again.

So there it was. A note that didn't answer any more questions than it raised, and left me just as confused as ever, if not more so. It told me next to nothing, but that was the way Kim wanted it, and that was the way it was going to be.

***

Chapter Twenty two: Since then.

When the carnival arrived next year, and the year after, I visited it, not sure if I wanted to see Kim there or not. Seeing her would have been fun for me, but it would have also meant that she was stuck back in a place she didn't want to be.

After a few years, the carnival stopped coming, and the field became the site of a new big box store that we couldn't live without. After that went belly-up, the place became one of those gigantic home handyman stores where it takes you an hour to find a box of nails.

That went under too, and when I last saw it the deserted and decaying building was collapsing under its own weight, another monument to our disposable construction these days.

"This building is not empty - It's FULL of opportunity!" the faded real estate company's sign out by the road claims, but all it is now is an eyesore.

A lot of water has gone over the dam in the 30 or so years since that special week that summer, but there were a couple of things related to those magical days that will always stay with me.

One was back several years ago, and took place in the backyard of that house on Exchange Street. My folks were just about to move down to Florida, and it was sort of a farewell to that little house where I had spent my first 20 years.

In revisiting that tiny bungalow for the final time as a man in his 30's, I was stunned at how small the place really was. Everything, especially the bedroom where my life changed so dramatically, was in miniature. Mickey was still on the wall, yellowing and curling but still The Mick.

Sitting on the patio enjoying a beer with my father, I watched him watching my 2 daughters trying to elude being captured by their mother, the former Lois Randall.

"That must be why you're going south," I suggested. "I don't think you would be able to catch them much longer when we stuck you with babysitting."

"Ah, I could corner them and call for reinforcements," he said. "Your mother still has some quickness left in her."

"I see the land up the road is still for sale," I said. "They should tear that thing down and bring the carnival back in."

"Ah, the carnival," Dad said. "You used to practically live over there for that week."

"You know, there was something I wanted to ask you about," I said tentatively, bringing up a subject that I had avoided all of those years. "Do you remember one summer..."

"The bee girl!" Dad said, his eyes twinkling as he looked around for Mom's presence.

"I can't believe you remember that," I said, amazed at how sharp the old man still was.

"Hard to forget something like that," he added. "She was something."

"To this day I can't believe you didn't blow up over that," I said, finally saying what I had been dying to say for years. "It seemed like everything I ever did that was wrong, you would find out about and rip me a new one over it."

"Probably seemed like that to you," Dad said. "Maybe I was a hard-ass at times, but I tried my best."

"But then she - Kim," I continued. "I mean - there was a half-naked girl walking around the house drinking your beer and you didn't say a word."

"Guess I didn't think it was such a bad thing," Dad said. "You were always so shy and never seemed to have many girlfriends. It wasn't like you had women marching through the house all the time."

"Kim was the first," I told Dad, motioning out to my wife who was giving our littlest one Sandy a bear hug. "And Lois was the second, and I suspect will be the last."

"You beat me by one then," Dad said, nodding up at the woman passing behind us on the way to join her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren in the yard. "Guess by today's standards we're pretty square."

"I guess," I replied.

***

Epilogue.

Like I mentioned earlier, there was a time in the fair land when carnivals traveled up and down the east coast during the summer months, but they don't come around here anymore, at least not like they used to.

These days I've noticed that they set up these little fairs in the far corners of the parking lots of shopping malls that aren't doing so well. A few rides and games of no-chance, run by people that look a little more like business people than they used to, but walking around a little patch of concrete just isn't the same as wading through mud in the middle of a field.

When I come across one of these little traveling road shows, I invariably stop to have a look around. This used to bring squeals of joy from our girls, but when My Little Pony got replaced by the Jonas Brothers in their lives, the visits now draw only dramatic groans and rolling eyes.

Invariably I look over the people running the games and rides, not really sure what I'm hoping to see. Do I want to see a middle aged woman with a tattoo of an anchor on her arm, or am I hoping not to see her? Probably the latter. Do I want to know what happened to her? Yes. Not knowing has always haunted me, and probably always will.

In the end I think I want Kim to live in my mind exactly the way I remember her during that one incredible week in the summer of 1978. Every time I hear "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" on the car radio I sing along, and in my mind, Kim is harmonizing right along with me. My allergies must be responsible for the watery eyes that follow.

Thankfully I'm not as incredibly naive as I used to be. I think I've managed to learn a few things over the years; for example, the Giant Rat was actually something called a Coypu, or Nutria. It's not a thing you'll see on display much these days at your local fair, I suspect. My vocabulary has increased quite a bit since then as well, and many of those words came from that dictionary I still have to this day.

You can learn a lot of words from a dictionary, I've found, but there's no way to measure how much you can learn from another person. There's also no way to know how much your life can be changed as a result of knowing somebody either.

I know how much Kim meant to me, and how much she changed my life for the better. As for what Kim would say about our brief time together, I have no way of knowing and likely never will. All I can do is hope - hope with all my heart that she's happy and life worked out for her too.

*******

Thank you for reading. Comments are always welcomed. I hope you enjoyed the story.