Nightmare Carnival

The motor starts, the metal bed vibrating beneath Jalena’s feet. Her colleagues have already settled in their spots, so quickly that Jalena wonders if they’ve actually done this before.

“Better sit,” Frazee says, grabs Jalena’s wrist, and tugs her down.

Then the truck judders out of the lot, off campus onto West Main. The wind — feeling much less warm, downright freezing once they’re in motion — roars over the top of the cab and through them. All at once, Jalena breaks into a laugh. A real laugh, one she hasn’t intended or considered first.

“I haven’t done this since I was. ” she starts. Then she grins. “I’ve never done this.”

She expects Frazee to grin back. But Frazee, seated to Jalena’s right, only shivers and nods. Parrott, on Jalena’s left, actually pats her gloved hand like a grandmother or a nurse.

As they hit the center of town, Bemis slows. The truck crawls past the Beast of Burden Pub, which serves the town’s only microbrew, and the Prairie Dawg, which is just a flat-out, get-drunk bar. Then the Double Ice sundae stand by the train station. During Jalena’s first Halloweens here, every one of those places was packed from twilight on with screaming, costumed revelers fresh from haunted houses or gearing up for the darker, scarier late-night haunted houses. Everyone telling stories. Shouting and laughing. And there are still people out tonight. Some. The church crews have strung themselves out on either side of Highbottom Road like a picket line, passing fliers to drunk college kids, waving signs. As Bemis’s truck rumbles past, one sweet-faced, wrinkled old man holds his picket high so Jalena can read it.

“And you will know what Fear is. ” There’s a verse number, too, though Jalena doesn’t catch it, and she doesn’t recognize the quotation.

North of the church crowd, she sees the usual clusters of drunken college kids, though if anything, they seem more subdued than on ordinary football Saturday nights, clumped around streetlamps, holding out hands or tongues for the snow as it evaporates around or on them. There are very few families. The oversized CLARKSTON CENTER PEDESTRIAN DISTRICT: 25 mph STRICTLY ENFORCED sign outside the Prairie Dawg has been shot full of holes. Red ribbons dribble from the holes, as though the sign is bleeding, or licking the air.

“Okay, that’s cute,” Jalena says. “I guess.”

Then she catches sight of Leo Hutchinson under a streetlight. Leo is her favorite current grad student. Even tonight, he’s wearing the white shirt and tie he dons for every single day of class, like no other boy from the Montana Hi-Line. It makes complete sense to Jalena. Somehow, Leo survived growing up black and small and scholarly and not gay — it would have been easier for everyone, more comprehensible, if he were—and escaped the Hi-Line. Of course he would want to remind himself, every day, that he was no longer there.

But now, Leo gapes, stares, as his entire doctoral advisory team judders past, shivering together in the bed of a pickup. The moment is mad, magical.

“You know,” Jalena blurts, “I kind of love this.” She feels a burst of gratitude as startling and cold as the wind whipping by. And it isn’t just gratitude; she’s also amazed. I’m here, she thinks. I’m tenured, and I’m staying. And I’m on an adventure.

“God, David loved this,” Parrott murmurs, gesturing at the street or the air.

The truck turns, and just like that, Highbottom is gone, and everything and everyone left that makes Clarkston a unique place disappears along with it. They rumble down the frontage road that parallels the freeway, past the brand-new Walmart and the Costco and the used-truck lots toward the edge of town.

“David Roemer,” Frazee says.

“That fucking moron,” says Rogan, but not the way she would have uttered those words about Green. Or to Green, for that matter.

Almost like she misses the guy?

“We can still stop, you know,” Frazee says, and Jalena turns to find her looking at her hands, pushing rings up and down her long, thin fingers, which still twitch, sometimes, years after Frazee claims she last had an actual drink. “I can make Bill stop and let you out. He’ll listen to me. There’s no reason for this, except his need to. ”

Her voice trails away. Jalena shudders as the wind whistles down the throat of her jacket and through her suddenly insufficient sweater. She glances at Parrott, who just looks entranced by the moon, and shakes her head. “It’s okay. I’m. excited, right? Or, I should know about this, anyway? Shouldn’t I, if I’m staying here? Since I am, I mean? You all seem to—”

“He came many years ago,” Parrott murmurs, in her classroom voice. “David Roemer. When we were, all of us, young, or younger.”