His Good Side

I have always drawn the things I wanted instead of asking for them. It's how I ended up on a bench at the Gloaming Fair at midnight, sketching a stone gargoyle with a very good mouth.

At five to eight on a Wednesday night in October I was eating a peanut butter granola bar over the reference desk of the Hobart County Public Library, getting crumbs in the keyboard, with a pencil stuck through my bun like a chopstick through a dumpling.

That was dinner. Lunch had been the other half of the box.

I want to set the scene properly, because nobody in Lantry, Kentucky, had seen me do anything more interesting than renew a library card in three months, and I need you to understand where I was starting from. I was thirty-two years old. I was the new reference librarian, hired in July after the county cut my old branch back home in Lansing down to a book drop and a vending machine. I rented a little yellow shotgun house four blocks off Main with a porch and a fenced yard and no dog to put in it. I ate lunch at my desk every single day, alone, like a lighthouse keeper with a microfiche reader.

"Night, Shannon!" Monique Gaines swung her purse onto her shoulder at the circulation desk and pointed at me with her car keys. "We should get lunch sometime."

"We should," I said. "Definitely."

She smiled. I smiled. Neither one of us said Tuesday. She went out the front doors into the dark, and the little bell over them jingled like it was laughing at me.

Monique is twenty-nine and Lantry-born and knows the name of every person who walks into that building, plus their mother's name, plus what they checked out in 2014. She had said "we should get lunch sometime" to me eleven times since July. (I wrote them down. I am a librarian. We keep records.) Every time, I said "definitely," and every time, the word sat there between us like a casserole dish nobody wanted to be the one to take home.

Phyllis was already locking her office, a pumpkin-colored cardigan buttoned to the throat because it was October and Phyllis has a cardigan for every month of the year. "You heading to the fair, hon?"

"Maybe," I said.

I was absolutely heading to the fair. I had been heading to the fair since Monday, when I came out onto my porch with my coffee and found a Ferris wheel standing up over the roofs where there had been nothing but river and sky on Sunday.

I'll tell you what I was wearing, because I had chosen it at seven that morning with the full knowledge that I would be walking into a carnival in it, and that counts for something.

An emerald wrap dress, the kind that ties at the hip and crosses over in front and does a great deal of work on a woman my size. I am five feet tall in my socks. I am also, and there is no polite librarian way to put this, built like somebody packed a whole lot of woman into a carry-on. Big chest, a waist you could circle with two hands if the hands were generous, then round hips and a round butt, so that every dress I own is either a wrap or a disaster. Black tights. Oxblood Mary Janes with a heel that gave me two inches of dignity. My good camel peacoat over all of it, belted tight, because Kentucky in late October drops into the forties the minute the sun goes down and does not care who you are trying to impress.

I was trying to impress nobody. That was the whole problem with my life.

I shut down the public computers, checked the bathrooms for sleeping teenagers, killed the lights and locked the front doors behind me. Main Street was empty except for the courthouse clock, lit up white on its tower like a full moon somebody had nailed there. I had drawn that courthouse nine times. I had drawn the coal barges sliding down the Ohio, low in the water and long as a city block. I had drawn the man at the hardware store, the one with the forearms, from the bench across the street, three different afternoons, with my heart going like a paint shaker.

I had never once said a word to him that wasn't "Do you have wood screws."

That's how I do it. If I want something and I'm too shy to talk to it, I draw it. Drawing it means I get to look as long as I like, from across the street, from behind a fence, and nobody ever has to say no.

I had my sketchbook in the tote on my shoulder. It goes everywhere I go. It is spiral-bound and black and fat as a phone book, and that night it had eleven blank pages left.

The fairground is at the river end of town, a twenty-five-minute walk from the library if you are five feet tall in heels. I could see the Ferris wheel the whole way. Neon pink and tangerine, turning so slowly over the dark roofs of Lantry that you only knew it was moving if you looked away and back. It was the most exciting thing that had happened to that skyline since the Civil War.

I could hear the fair before I could see the gate. A thud of generators. A hollering voice. A calliope somewhere inside it all, playing a tune that sounded old and a little drunk.

Then there was the gate, and the gate had a man at it.

He was sixty-something, in a red-and-cream striped waistcoat that would have stopped traffic, with garters on his shirtsleeves and a straw boater pushed back on his head, and he was talking to the whole parking lot at once without a microphone.

"First night, folks, first night in Lantry! Come on in, come see what your mother warned you about!" He turned around and saw me, and his eyebrows went up. "Madam. You are a vision in green. One?"

"One," I said, and handed him my ticket.

He took it in two fingers and lifted it to the string of bulbs over the gate, squinting at it like he was checking a twenty at a gas station. Then he tore it neatly across the middle and pressed the stub back into my glove.

"Ludo Pickett," he said, and touched the brim of his boater. "I'm the talker. I talk." His eyes went to the black spiral binding sticking up out of my tote. "And you brought a sketchbook to a carnival."

"I draw things," I said. It is the stupidest sentence I have ever said to a stranger, and I've worked a reference desk.

"Well, draw us kindly, madam. We've all been drawn before, and some of the staff are sensitive." He swept his arm at the midway like he was opening a curtain. "In you go. Don't feed anything you meet."

Reader, I went in.

I grew up in Michigan. I've been to the Ingham County Fair every summer of my life. I know what a midway is.

This was a midway the way the Grand Canyon is a ditch.

String bulbs zigzagging overhead from pole to pole, thousands of them. Ride signs buzzing in highlighter yellow and candy-apple red and a blue so electric it made my fillings hurt. A ring toss, a duck pond, a man selling cotton candy in clouds the size of bed pillows, a fry stand pouring out smoke that smelled like every county fair in America put through a blender. Funnel cake and diesel and hot sugar and cold mud and, under everything, something mineral and damp, like the inside of a church in February.

And the whole town of Lantry was there, in UK Wildcats hoodies and barn coats, holding hands.

Couples everywhere. Couples sharing a funnel cake. Couples walking with their hands in each other's back pockets. Families steering three little kids apiece through the crowd like shopping carts with a bad wheel. Teenagers in packs of six. A grandma and grandpa splitting a lemonade with two straws. That one nearly made me sit down on the curb and cry.

I knew some of them. That was the worst part. There was the woman I'd spent forty-five minutes helping with her great-grandfather's draft card in August, laughing at something her husband said. There was the retired guy who comes in every Thursday for the Louisville paper and the large-print westerns. He looked right at me, the way you'd look at a parking meter. Nothing. No flicker. Out from behind the reference desk, I was just a short redhead in a peacoat.

Out by the purple tent, something very tall moved behind the canvas, and a shadow went up the wall with what were absolutely wings. A man in a camo cap said "good costumes" to his wife, loud. She said "real good costumes," louder. They went and bought a corn dog.

Past the strongman stage I bought a hot apple cider in a paper cup and walked the whole midway once, end to end, holding it with both hands like a ticket I didn't know where to spend.

Then I saw the carousel.

It stood off to one side of the midway under its own round pavilion, striped canvas, red and cream, scalloped all around the edge and lit with a hundred bulbs. Inside, the horses went round and up and down. Real carved wooden horses, painted in candy colors with gold manes and glass eyes, and mirrors around the center post throwing the light back out in pieces. The calliope I'd heard from the parking lot lived right there, wheezing out an old waltz like an accordion with a head cold.

On the very top of the pavilion, at the point of the canvas, there was a gargoyle.

He was crouched up there on a little iron platform at the peak, the way they crouch on old buildings, and he was enormous. Even sitting, he was bigger than my refrigerator. Granite-gray all over, a little mottled, like real weathered stone. A pair of curled horns, darker than the rest of him, spiraling back from his temples like two cinnamon rolls carved out of slate. Wings folded down tight along his back, the tips crossing behind his legs. A long tail wrapped once around the iron finial and hanging off the edge of the roof, thick at the base and narrowing down to a point.

And his face.

I stopped walking. Somebody behind me said "excuse me" in the tone that means the opposite.

It was a handsome face. That was not what I had expected from a gargoyle. Gargoyles in my experience have tongues out and eyes popping and look like they ate a lemon in 1340 and never got over it. This one had a heavy brow and a straight nose and a wide mouth with the corner turned up, like somebody had just told him something he wasn't going to admit was funny. Short hair combed straight back between the horns. Big careful hands resting on his knees, every claw in place.

He was looking out over the midway like he owned it and was thinking about selling.

There was a sign on the pavilion post, hand-lettered on a board:

PLEASE DO NOT CLIMB THE PAVILION.

I had not been going to climb the pavilion. But I read that sign twice, slowly, with my lips moving.

There was a green wooden bench right across from the carousel, under a light pole, with a good view of the whole roof. I sat down on it. I put my cider down by my foot. I got out my sketchbook and pulled the pencil out of my bun, and my hair came half down around my shoulders in a big copper heap, and I didn't even fix it.

I started with the horns.

I drew him for three and a half hours.

I want to tell you I got up and walked around, and rode the Tilt-A-Whirl, and won a stuffed banana, and met people. I did not. My cider went cold by my foot and then got a skin on it. Couples came and sat at the other end of my bench and went away again. A little boy asked me if I was drawing the horse and I said no, honey, the man on the roof, and he looked up and said "that's not a man," and his mother pulled him away by the hood.

I filled a page with horns. I filled a page with his hands. I did his wings three times because I couldn't get the place where they met his shoulders, all that heavy muscle under the stone, and the way the folds overlapped like the pleats in a theater curtain. I did his tail from the root to the tip. I did his face from the left and then moved down the bench and did it from the right, and the right was better. The right side had the grin.

To draw a person you have to look at them a lot longer than is socially allowed. That is the whole appeal. With a statue you can look all night.

And here is the part that got under my coat.

Every single time I went round to the face, I thought I'd gotten something wrong. I'd draw the corner of his mouth, look up, and it seemed different. Not moved. I'm not saying moved. Just more. Like when you stare at a word too long and it stops being a word. I put it down to the light. The carousel bulbs went round under him, and the shadows went round on his face, and I'd been awake since seven.

Around half past eleven I did want to ride the carousel. I'll admit it.

I stood up and went over to the little gate and the ticket man in the red vest and I watched it come round. A dad and a daughter on two horses side by side. Two teenage girls screaming on the outside row. A couple riding one horse together, her in front and him behind, his arms around her waist. All the horses going up and down like pistons in a candy-colored engine, and the calliope wheezing away.

I had the tickets in my coat pocket. I had my hand on them.

You cannot ride a carousel alone at thirty-two in a wrap dress. I mean you can. It's legal. It's not even expensive. But I stood there and pictured myself going round, all by myself, past every couple in Lantry, every three seconds, like a lit-up advertisement for nobody, and I couldn't make my feet go through the gate.

I went back to my bench and sat down and drew his feet instead.

They were clawed. Of course they were.

By half past twelve the crowd had thinned out to teenagers and diehards. Down at the far end, the Ferris wheel was still going, pink and tangerine, but slower, and half the game booths had pulled down their shutters. The man at the cotton candy stand was scraping out his drum. The cider was a lost cause. My fingers were so cold that I was holding the pencil like a toddler with a crayon, and my hair was all the way down my back, and the side of my right hand was gray to the wrist with graphite.

I had one blank page left in the sketchbook.

Then none.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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