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It’s Inventory Week at Baumgartner Plumbing Supply. Their parents are gone and, for five nights, won’t be home until morning. At nearly sixteen, Heidi has been told she is no longer a child and is therefore old enough to be responsible. She needs to stay home to make sure her older brother, Richie, doesn’t go off the rails, as they all fear he might. After two years in Vietnam, he’s returned home three inches taller. None of his clothes fit anymore. 

---

Night one.

There’s only so much room for complaining in a single-story ranch. Heidi feels petty about wanting a new haircut when one member of the family can no longer sleep in the dark. She stands outside Richie’s bedroom, staring at the strip of light at the bottom of his door. He’s in there, sleeping under a canopy of sixty-watt bulbs. The silence elbows Heidi in the ribs, making it hard to breathe. 

Tonight, she runs. 

On the far side of Willis Street are several acres of undeveloped land that have become a catchall for local events. Heidi hasn’t visited these fields since she was a small child. Then, she was happy to simply be in the presence of her big brother, the boy who knew all the state capitals and didn’t mind when she tagged along because what they had most in common was that neither had any friends their own age.

Richie showed her how to hold a football. With the expertise of a twelve-year-old boy, he examined her grip. “Your hands are still too small, but they won’t always be,” he said. Physical conditioning was important. He made her run sprints, pretending to be a drill sergeant. “From this pop can to that bush, soldier! On your mark…get set…go!” She ran as fast as she could, laughing and trying to keep her knee socks from falling down.

This week, the carnival has come to town. The plastic banner stretched high above the makeshift grounds reads, “Cornfest Days 1971!” On this night, her first night alone at the fair, the air is buzzing with the hum of neon lights, and Heidi can almost match the pitch, harmonize with its overtones. She can’t stay long, but tonight she’d like to be someone who talks to strangers at the fair and doesn’t need permission to get her hair cut. 

She spots the young man almost immediately.

He is slouching under the garish lighting of bare bulbs that have been strung in front of his carnival booth. Three sandwich boards with painted targets and holes cut out in the middle of each are evenly spaced on the sawdust behind him. 

At first, Heidi doesn’t think he’s talking to her. She’s still about twenty feet away from him and there are other people around. Older girls with feathered hair and tight tank tops. The young man shakes the hair from his eyes with a quick flick of his head. “How long you gonna stand there?” he calls out. He holds up two fingers and waggles them. “Only two tickets, every game’s a winner!” His voice is singsong, teasing her. 

Heidi takes a step or two toward the arcade game, but carefully, scraping her feet through the spartan grass of the midway. She trails whirling dust clouds behind her heels. The young man tosses a beanbag high into the air. Catching it on its descent, he turns and casually throws it at the center target in one easy motion. 

Bullseye.

The carousel starts up. A loud bell rings out, and a young child who’s been waiting for her turn to throw is pulled away by her exasperated mother. Heidi worries her parents might call. She leaves the carnival, fearing that the phone may wake Richie and she won’t be there to answer. 

---

Night two. 

Heidi is dappled in greens and reds and blues, a stained-glass figurine, motionless amidst the lights of the midway. She wears the pink top with the embroidered strawberry picked out specially for that night. Her hair is parted down the middle, pinned back with matching pink barrettes. 

She’s watching the young man again, closer this time. Behind him, rows of stuffed animals of various sizes are arranged in tiers, spectators to the main event. The largest toys hang above his head: a giant teddy bear as big as a five-year-old, a purple T-Rex, a green alien.

“You got tickets?” he calls out to her. Heidi nods. “Well, whatcha waiting for, then? Come on, Pinky!” She’s never been called by a nickname before, not even by Richie.

A step, then hesitation. There have been warnings about people who work the traveling fairs. Rough trade, she’s heard. When the RVs and campers show up, her dad locks the store so they don’t get robbed. “Bar the doors, Katie, the circus is in town!” he would say. A line from a famous movie maybe, though Heidi doesn’t know for sure.

The young man pivots to face her, making no move to take the tickets she holds in her hand. “You from around here?”

“Just a little ways that way,” she gestures toward her block.

“Chippewa Falls?”

Chippewa Falls is at least ninety miles to the north. “No, like just a few blocks over there, just past St. James. The big school on Rose?”

“Right. Is that your school?”

She nods, then falls back quickly as the young man suddenly leans out past the plywood wall separating the two of them. Their shoulders are nearly touching as he props his hands on the low wall. She smells spearmint gum, feels the fabric of his shirt brush against her bare arm. 

“Rita!” he calls out to an older red-faced woman in the next booth. Rita is expansive and has on bright orange lipstick that matches the giant bow in her hair. She holds a cigarette between her fingers and, with the other hand, she fans herself with a newspaper. “You got any soda?” the young man asks, then turns his gaze back to Heidi. “You want a soda?” She’s too surprised to respond.

The woman laughs. “Do I look like a waitress?” She plucks a ticket from the kid standing in front of her and hands him a ping-pong ball. Rita takes a long drag of her cigarette and looks out to the lights of the midway. “Get it yourself, lover boy,” she says. 

Heidi is close enough now to see the fading blue bruise on the young man’s neck. The cradle of his elbow is almost as tanned as his forearm. His hair is dark brown, the same shade as Richie’s, though not as straight. The heat and sweat of an unseasonably warm September have caused it to curl around his ears.

“Where are you from?” she dares to ask. “Nobody says ‘soda’ around here.” She tries to adopt the young man’s breezy tone, shifts her weight to one hip.

There’s a boyishness in the way he brushes the hair from his eyes that makes him look as though he’s closer to her age than she first thought. “Man, who knows?” He laughs and she laughs with him, brushing her hair back over one shoulder. The moment is thrilling. This is what it’s like, she thinks. People do things and say things, and it’s important that she does them, too. 

The boy turns and easily throws another beanbag through the center of the target. It’s clear he’s done this thousands of times. Heidi has never been good at the kinds of things that require coordination: ball games, drawing, dancing. She’s clumsy. The young man’s effortless skill is amazing to her, how relaxed he seems in his own body, the synergy between mind and limb. Yet each time the beanbag hits its mark, his face remains unchanged, as though the outcome were inevitable so there can be no joy taken in its accomplishment.

“You’re really good,” she says to him.

He makes a sound like air being let out of a tire. “It’s not that hard.” An underhanded snap of the wrist, the beanbag once again sails home. Crack; a rifle shot. “You wanna try? You can keep your tickets, I don’t care.” 

She is suddenly shy. Heidi opens her mouth to tell him no, that she’s changed her mind. The boy doesn’t wait for her to answer. He hands her two beanbags, and then they are facing each other, so close. “There’s a trick to it, you know,” he says, “I can show you.” She hears a sound to her left and sees that Rita is watching them with a smirk on her face, shaking her head. 

Heidi’s face grows hot. The boy lowers his voice and leans into her. “Okay, so here’s the deal. The bag’s too big for the hole, okay? If you throw it like normal, it’ll never go through.” 

“Ah,” she says.

“Ahhh,” he echoes with his teasing voice again. She feels a warmth in her chest, just beneath the embroidered strawberry. 

“Here’s what you wanna do.” He covers her hand with his own and gently crimps the beanbag she’s holding until it is nearly folded in half on itself. “Now for you, Pinky, your hands are kinda small. You’re gonna need to throw hard, okay? You want enough speed so the bag doesn’t open up before it gets to the target. Nice and quick.” 

She hears the laughter of carnival riders, the tumbling ice of the sno-cone machine being emptied. “Give it a shot. But don’t tell anyone Rory let you throw for free.” He lets go of her hand with a light squeeze, so subtle she might have missed it. 

Rory. She silently rolls the name across her tongue. It is unfamiliar. The syllables feel wrong, unwieldy in her mouth. Like she’s taken the biggest bite of an apple and can’t figure out how to chew it. 

Rory calls out over her shoulder to a couple walking by: “Only two tickets, every game’s a winner!” The man ignores him, and the wife gives a dismissive wave as they move on. “Assholes,” Rory says. Heidi puts the beanbags on the plywood wall and tells Rory she has to go. She’s forgotten to take the hamburger out of the freezer.

---

Night three. 

Heidi listens as Richie tunes his guitar in the darkness of his bedroom. He adjusts the pegs, unwinding and warping the pitches until she wants to bang on the door to make him stop. A chord is built at last, note by note, but after several minutes, no song materializes. The bedroom door opens. There is the furtive scuffle of footsteps on carpet, the flick of a light switch, the clink of silverware. Each sound is magnified in the stillness of the small home. 

Heidi finds the plate she’s prepared for him lying on the bathroom rug. The mashed potatoes are still untouched. Richie, when he does eat, has taken to carrying his meals into the bathroom.

She waits another hour, counts the second hand of the kitchen clock that is outpacing her own heartbeat two to one. Flick. The light comes on at the bottom of Richie’s bedroom door, and Heidi makes her escape. 

The bright lights and raucous laughter of the carnival are already beginning to dim by the time she arrives. Some of the carnival workers are starting to pack it up for the night. Rory retrieves a black garbage bag from behind the plywood wall and begins to load a few of the smaller toys into it. Heidi doesn’t want to go home. “Who decides what goes where?” she asks, stalling.

“The games? They’re always in the same lineup.”

“No, like why do you put the smallest prizes in baskets like that?” She points. “No one can see what’s what.”

“These?” Rory picks up a pair of fuzzy dice and shakes them. “’Cause people don’t really care what they get as long as they get something.”

“But even if something’s free, you still want what you want.” Heidi feels silly, like she’s getting it all wrong. This is not what she wants to say. What she wants to say is: How did you get that scar on your chin? Where do you sleep at night? Where will you be next week, do you know? Instead she asks, “What’s the farthest you’ve ever been?”

He considers the question, lets the garbage bag drift to his side. “I guess…Washington? Some town, I don’t remember the name. We had a two-week stint up there a couple summers ago.” A hint of a smile. “I saw a moose there once. He wandered right into town like he owned the place.” 

She decides that Rory doesn’t seem like rough trade at all. In a collared shirt with clean hands, he’d look like someone her parents wouldn’t bother to lock the door for. He’d look like Richie did before the jungle took the softest parts of him. 

“How big was it?” she asks. 

Rory reaches above his head to touch the top of the makeshift canopy. “Up to here. What about you?”

“I’ve never seen a moose.”

“No,” he laughs, “what’s the farthest you’ve been?”

Her parents are busy with the store all the time now. Picking up the slack, her dad says with his mouth tight. “Last summer we took a drive trip to South Dakota to see the Mitchell Corn Palace,” Heidi says.

“I know that place!” Rory grins. “Wild, man, all that corn and shit. But South Dakota’s pretty cool, isn’t it?”

She shrugs. “We only saw the Corn Palace.” 

“You drove all that way and didn’t even see Rushmore?” 

They’d just learned that Richie had voluntarily re-upped to serve a second tour in Long Binh; he won’t be home in time for Father’s Day. She remembered the car radio playing in lieu of conversation, her mother’s face turned to the window. Mile after mile, the empty seat next to Heidi in the back of the Olds. “I don’t know, it’s not like I was the one planning it or anything.” She feels an inexplicable tightening in her throat, like she might cry.

Rory softens. “Hey. I didn’t—man, I get it. You can only do what you can do, right?” He goes back to packing up the toys. “No shame in that,” he says, so quietly his words are barely audible. Heidi swallows hard. The beanbags feel heavy in her hands.

---

Night four.

Richie is in his room. The lights are off so Heidi knows he’s still awake. She waits until 10 p.m. and when it becomes apparent he will not be emerging, she taps lightly at his bedroom door. There’s no answer. “Richie,” she calls quietly, “I made mac and cheese.” She hears the rustle of bedsheets, the muted pluck of a single guitar string before it’s quickly dampened. Then he is there, brushing the hair from his eyes and blinking into the light of the hallway. He’s lost weight in the rounded places that once held his youth. He isn’t a boy anymore. She smells the funk of him, dirty hair and unwashed clothes. The sulfur of spent matches. “You should eat something,” she says.

His eyes fall to the blue ceramic bowl of macaroni and cheese she holds out to him. Their old dog, Mitzi, had once eaten her entire litter of puppies, and since then the Baumgartners sometimes served meals out of her dog dish in a kind of macabre tribute to her better days. 

“Sicko,” he says. 

“You should know.” 

“What’s with the getup?” He nods to the pink scarf she’s tied around her neck. “Are you going out?”

She’d looked for her pink barrettes and couldn’t find them anywhere. The scarf suddenly feels childish, like a kid playing dress up. She removes it. “I don’t have to.”

“It’s late, isn’t it?”

“Not too late.” She lingers at his door. “Anyway, I can stay if you want. We could watch TV or something. There’s Jell-O.” 

Richie looks like Rory does when he’s throwing a bullseye; no recognition, no light. “Did you know eyeballs turn to candle wax when they get too hot? It’s the weirdest thing…like runny eggs.” Heidi freezes, sickened at the idea. Richie drifts back into the shadows of his room. “Just be careful, is all.” 

“But I made all this food—”

“Then you eat it.” He closes his door, and she sees the strip of light reappear at the bottom. She waits there a moment, hoping he might change his mind about the Jell-O at least, and knowing he won’t. 

By the time she arrives at the fairgrounds, the rides have all been shut down for the night. It’s dark that far from the streetlights. She spots Rory emerging from around the corner of his arcade game. He doesn’t seem surprised to see her there this late. He counts tickets while she leans against his booth, watching him in silence. He doesn’t tell her to go away. There is a tension in Rory’s shoulders that has replaced his usual easiness of movement. He fumbles the zippered bag he’s holding, catches it before it hits the sawdust.

“Rory!” Heidi is startled by Rita’s rough voice and she jumps. “Time,” Rita says, pointing to her wrist, though she wears no watch. A look passes between Rita and Rory. “The generator needs gas.” Rory nods, but makes no move to leave.

A stuffed bunny with mismatched eyes is watching them—one eye directed straight ahead at Heidi, the other, pointed to the alien still hanging above Rory’s head. Heidi thinks of runny eggs and looks away. “I used to come here when I was a kid,” she tells him. 

Rory doesn’t respond.

“There didn’t used to be anything.” Her words hang there, unanswered. Heidi feels compelled to fill the silence. She begins speaking to Rory as though the two of them have been talking forever, like they’re the best of friends. Equals. 

“When I was a kid,” she says, “like really little, there was this drive-in theater out by West Salem. I guess you’ve been there, too, huh?” He nods again, not interrupting. “Anyway, sometimes on the weekends we’d go to the movies, but I was too small to see over the dashboard. So my brother’d boost me up on one of those huge phone books that we kept in the back of the car.” She pantomimes holding a book, nine inches thick. “I must’ve been at least six I guess, because I can remember it, you know?”

“Yeah, when you’re too young, you can’t remember shit, except stuff people tell you happened.” Rory sighs. “Even then, you never really know what’s true and what’s not.”

Heidi agrees, frowning. There are all kinds of things she doesn’t know to be true, even though her parents have told her it’s so. “So I must’ve been at least six,” she goes on. “Anyway, this one night we’re watching a movie. Mom and Dad are in the back, me and Rory are up front and I’m really into it, right—”

“Rory?” he interrupts her.

“Huh?” 

“You said Rory.”

“N-no, I meant me and Richie, my brother,” she stammers, embarrassed. Heidi struggles to remember the thread of her story. She is rambling, unable to stop herself. “Anyway…there’s this scientist and a mutant and some woman gets kidnapped.” She hasn’t spoken this much to anyone in months. She mimics Rory’s language, trying it out “I believe that shit is real, man. I am glued to the screen.” 

Rory smiles at that and shakes his head. “Was it any good?” 

“The movie?”

“The movie.”

“I guess so, sure. But then everyone dies, you know, ’cause of the radioactive fallout—” She’d forgotten that part, the screaming. Heidi goes quiet and can’t seem to unstick her tongue from where it rests against her teeth.

Rory puts his hands in his pockets and stares out at the darkened midway for several seconds. Then he unclips a pink teddy bear wearing a purple-sequined bow tie and hands it to Heidi. “Must be some arm you got there, Pinky. A regular Nolan Ryan.” Something in his smile reminds her of a fledgling that has fallen from its nest: soft and sad. “Listen—and don’t take this the wrong way, but how come you’re not running around with your friends?” He gestures to the emptied fairgrounds. “Don’t you have any friends?” he asks, not unkindly. 

Her hands suddenly feel too large. She doesn’t know what to do with them. Heidi pretends to brush an imaginary bit of debris off the stuffed bear’s fur, pats its head with an unconcerned attitude. Like she could be anywhere in the world, yet she’s chosen to be here, standing in the early September heat with this stranger who calls her Pinky and doesn’t tell her to go away.

---

Night five.

Richie isn’t at home and hasn’t been seen since she’s returned from school. No one is answering at Baumgartner Plumbing Supply. She is alone. Heidi sits in the living room for hours, watching the daylight fade, trying to suppress her rising dread. Richie’s army jacket is on the back of his chair. There are loose threads where his name patch used to be. His room is surprisingly neat, like it’s been tidied. The bed has been made. It’s 2 a.m., and there is still no sign of him.

She goes room to room, checking and rechecking for clues as to his whereabouts. In the kitchen, she surveys the countertops and table again, certain she’s missing something. In a rush, it hits her. She hadn’t thought to check the garage. Her heart rate quickens.

Heidi opens the door. She turns on the light. At first, it’s the usual jumble: her father’s tools, gas cans, lawn equipment. Then, in the middle of the garage floor, a large pile of debris takes her a moment to process. She sees comic books, clothing, a guitar. These are Richie’s things, carefully arranged, then abandoned, as though he’s just stepped away to check the mail. There is something else, too—something sweet and pungent. Familiar. Like a carnival generator.

Because she doesn’t know what to do and no one will answer, she runs.

Campers and RVs ring the perimeter of the fairgrounds. To Heidi, they look like prey animals forming a protective circle around their young. The vehicles are mostly dark. She picks her way through the carnival workers’ camp, tripping over cables and wincing at the noise of her footsteps on gravel, too loud. She doesn’t know which RV may be Rory’s, if he’s even here at all. She is past fear. She can’t feel her fingers. She hears a siren in the distance, someone else’s emergency. 

There is a man, a carnival worker older than her father, who wears overalls and a long-sleeved shirt despite the heat. He stares at Heidi as she nears, but doesn’t say anything. It occurs to her that this stranger could drag her off to some empty corner of the fields and no one would hear her cries for help. This recognition of her aloneness is strangely freeing. She—well not she, but Pinky—is now a girl who talks to strangers at the fair. She can be a girl who plays it cool, too. She hurries past the man and doesn’t look back. 

Stumbling through the dark again. Ahead, she sees the glow of a cigarette. It’s Rita; watchful, even at this hour. Heidi is so thankful to see the woman, she nearly cries out in relief. 

Rita peers up at Heidi from her lawn chair. She’s curious, but unfazed.

“Is he around?” Heidi asks. Her voice is dry and ragged in her throat.

“Sweetheart, that bird has flown the coop.” Rita scratches at a bug bite on her knee. “Probably halfway to Canada by now,” she exhales. “Lotta that going around.”

Heidi can’t breathe. The sirens are getting closer. There are at least two of them. Halfway to Canada. Rory is gone. The gunfire crack of his beanbag hitting its mark, the easy synergy of mind and limb, the hand that had briefly covered hers; all gone. Missing in action, like her pink barrettes.

Rita rises from her chair and looks out past the campers toward the direction of Willis Street. Toward Heidi’s home. “Fire,” Rita mutters, her gaze fixed on the distant glow that is gradually getting larger. 

And then Heidi is running, so fast the dust is flying behind her as she cuts a path through the midway. The taste of sawdust is in her mouth. The sickening stench of fried dough mixed with gasoline is in her hair, her nostrils. There’s no escape. Richie is out here somewhere, she thinks, panicked. He’s yards ahead of her, calling over his shoulder as she tries to keep up. “Come on, come on!” he’s yelling, laughing. “Pick it up, soldier!” If only he’d slow down. Her lungs are burning, there are tears in her eyes. She’s losing him in the smoke and ash. She screams Richie’s name in the night air, so loud her voice shatters the listless torpor of the carnival camp.

Past Willis Street, in the direction of Chippewa Falls, but much, much closer, she runs toward the hard strip of light that leaks from under her brother’s bedroom door. It’s getting brighter now, blanketing the whole street in a canopy of yellow and orange.

For a moment, Heidi thinks she hears Rory’s voice cutting through the pounding in her ears: Only two tickets, Pinky, every game’s a winner! 

Pinky. The name is as thin and worthless as a spent raffle ticket. A carnival joke, small and stupid. It means nothing to her now. How can it, when Richie’s war is so big it has eclipsed everything else? He has set the sky on fire with his grief, turning night into day with the flick of a light switch. Some things will never come back, she thinks—family movie nights, football practices. Even the girl she was on Monday has pulled up stakes and left for good. 

Another fire truck arrives. She watches the bustle of activity all around her, people moving hurriedly. Neighbors with hands pressed to their mouths. Such a fuss over a thousand square feet, she thinks. Heidi watches the embers rise, higher and higher until they disappear into the night sky. A million tiny stars, unleashed. She’s guided into the backseat of a police car. A well-meaning hand rests on her shoulder. Her parents should be here soon, someone tells her; it’s nearly morning. She stares at her reflection in the rearview mirror, unblinking, and waits for them to arrive.

 

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KAREN MULTER is a Chicago-based writer, though she’s never been able to shake her Wisconsin roots growing up on the back waters of the Mississippi River. Something about ice fishing in a onesie changes a person. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Cutleaf, Fahmidan Journal, Open Minds Quarterly, Black Fork Review, Great Lakes Review, and River and South Review, among others. She’s been a featured writer at the Writers Read live podcast recordings in New York City. A former Dramatists Guild Fellow, her work has twice been featured at the Kennedy Center Page-to-Stage Festival. She’s also an accomplished composer who licenses her original music for TV and film including HBO, Netflix, and Amazon Originals. Find her on Instagram @karenmulter and on Bluesky @karenmulter.bsky.social.

Featured image by Ethan Hoover, courtesy of Unsplash.