Chapter 8 Founders’ Day — Ii
The kid at the corn rig had frozen, hand out toward the tank like he might pat it. “Hey,” I said, and he looked at me. “You’re okay. Step back from it, hands off, come stand by me.” He came. Good kid. I got to the rig.
And here is where the content of what I did stops, because the content is not the point and never was.
I knelt by that hissing rig in my Founders’ Day sundress and my whole self went to the place it goes, the flat far place, and my hands did what they have done a thousand times in worse heat than an Ohio August, without shaking, without hurry, the specific unhurried economy of hands that learned their trade where hurry gets people killed.
I found the problem. I made it stop. I isolated the thing, I killed the hazard at its source, I confirmed it with my ears and not my hopes, and the hiss died, and the flat sharp stink began to thin and lift off the river breeze, and the corn rig was just a corn rig again, cooling, harmless, a thing that sold lunch.
It took about forty seconds. Nobody died. Nobody was ever going to know how close nobody-dying had been, which is the whole job, the entire lonely job, that the best thing you ever do looks, from the outside, like nothing happened.
Then Birdie came back into my body like air into a room.
She came back all at once and she came back loud, and I stood up too fast and put a hand to my chest and heard myself say, in the dithery register, a full octave up, “Oh my gosh, oh my — is it — did I — I think it was leaking? I got so scared, I just started grabbing the little valve thing, I don’t even know what I did, I probably made it worse, oh my gosh, somebody who knows should look at it—” and I gave a wobbly laugh and pressed my hand harder to my sternum and let it shake, let all of me shake, because now was exactly the time to shake, now that it was safe, and the corn kid was staring at me and I said, “you should tell your boss, honey, get a real person to check it,” and I patted his arm, and I turned to find the crowd and be one of them again.
“Ma’am, you did great, that was—” a man in a Bengals jersey started, the one I’d sent back first, and I flapped a hand at him, no no no, I got lucky, I panicked in a useful direction, and I laughed the practiced laugh, and I found Ren and Theo at the pie line with Ren already three shades of pale, and I let Ren grab my arm and say Birdie, my God, what happened, are you okay, and I said I’m fine, I’m fine, I think a tank was leaking, I did something dumb, and I let my hands keep shaking in hers, which was not acting, the shaking, the shaking was real, it just came late, it always comes late, and I have never once let anyone see that it comes late.
I made a joke. I don’t remember which one.
Something about how at least I’d die where the pie was.
Ren laughed, wet-eyed, and Marcy arrived at a dead run with the news of what had happened, having missed it entirely, and started telling me about it, which was so perfectly Marcy that I laughed for real, and I used the laugh to fold myself back into the crowd and be small, and I got out.
I told Ren I needed air, which was rich, and I walked off Market Street toward the river and stood by the water and shook properly, alone, where I’m allowed.
I did not look back. That was the mistake, or maybe the mercy, I still can’t decide.
I did not look back at the Legion stand, where a man in a plain shirt had put down his paper plate a full minute before anyone else understood there was anything to put a plate down about, and had watched the jumpiest woman in Halford County walk the wrong way up a vendor row and make a leaking propane rig go quiet with her bare hands, and had not, for one second of it, believed the octave-up voice that came after.