Chapter 7 Founders’ Day
BIRDIE stood on Market Street watching Theo work through a corn dog in each hand, and let herself love Founders’ Day — completely, and from a safe distance, and with one eye always, always on the exits.
Halford does Founders’ Day right, meaning cheap and sincere.
They close Market Street. The Legion runs a brat stand, Fran from the diner does pie by the slice out of the back of her van, there’s a bouncy castle that has survived more than any bouncy castle should, a stage where the middle-school band commits crimes against Sousa, and, along the curb by the old bank, the vendor row with the kettle corn and the funnel cakes and the propane.
So much propane. Rows of little rigs hissing under warming pans and fryers and one guy’s whole roasted-corn operation, tanks and hoses and quick-connect fittings baking in an Ohio-in-August sun, run by good people who are experts at food and are not, and have no reason to be, experts at anything else.
Theo had a running commentary going about how the bouncy castle would fail structurally, while Ren grabbed a rare Saturday off and stood in the pie line like a woman on furlough.
Marcy was working the crowd for intel. Earl had a lawn chair and a scowl of deep contentment.
It was, for about an hour, the best kind of nothing, and I let myself have it, I let Birdie have it, kettle corn and a boy’s disaster facts and the sun.
I even saw him. The marshal, Wes Calder, off duty in a plain shirt, near the Legion stand with a paper plate, and I felt the specific animal alertness I’ve trained myself never to act on and told it to sit down.
He’d been strange at the store, taking my statement.
He’d written nothing down at exactly the wrong moment, which is a thing careful people do, and I’d clocked it and then buried it, in the drawer, with everything else.
I looked away from him and bought Theo a lemonade.
I want to be exact about how it started, because I was, for once, not looking for it.
It was a smell first. Of course it was a smell.
Under the kettle corn and the fryer oil, thin and sharp and wrong, that flat mercaptan stink they put in propane so your nose does the job your eyes can’t, and it was too strong, and it was steady, not a whiff and gone but a leak, and it was coming from the roasted-corn rig at the end of the row where a kid in an apron was leaning down toward a hissing regulator with a face that had just gone from confused to scared.
And I felt Birdie leave.
I don’t have a better word for it. She just steps aside.
The bright anxious river of narration in my head, the one that has an opinion about every doorknob, goes quiet, and what’s left is flat and clean and very far away, and it does not editorialize, it counts.
It counted now. Leak at the regulator. Volume climbing.
Ignition sources: forty feet of open flame under warming pans, a fryer, a smoker, a crowd of two hundred with cigarettes and phones and a corn dog every four feet.
Wind: light, out of the river, pushing the vapor low and back into the row.
Time: not much. The number of people between the leak and the nearest clear ground: too many.
I put my lemonade down on a table. I don’t remember deciding to.
“Theo.” My voice came out level in a way that made him look up fast, because he’d never heard it.
“Go to your mom. Pie line. Walk, don’t run, take these people with you.
” And to the family beside us, the same flat pleasant certainty, the tone that makes people move without knowing why they’re obeying, “Folks, let’s ease on back toward the stage, come on, this way, nice and easy.
” They went. People go, when you sound like that.
It’s the worst and most useful thing I know about human beings.
I moved up the vendor row against the flow, which is the direction nobody goes, saying the same low steady things, sir, let’s step back, ma’am, bring the little one this way, thank you, thank you, peeling the crowd off the row like skin off a fruit, and every word was calm and every word was a lie of omission, because what I was actually doing was clearing a blast radius, and not one of them knew it, which is exactly how you want it.