Chapter 2 - Part 2

As I got closer, I saw that she had the old cone from a wad of cotton candy and was drawing pictures with it in the dirt. She didn’t look up at me when I got closer, but she spoke.

“Dad didn’t want to go home. He still doesn’t. We’ll stay here, I guess, until he does.”

I frowned. “Don’t you like carnivals?” I asked.

Then she did look up at me. She was dirty and it looked like she had been here for a long time. “We tried the rides when we first got here. Dad didn’t like them, though. Neither did Mom. Still, they keep going on them over and over.”

She looked hard at me sadly for a minute, then she shook her head and went back to drawing in the dirt. “You can try the rides,” she said. “They sure didn’t help us.”

Suddenly Tommy was by my side. I nearly jumped as he demanded, “What does she mean ‘the rides didn’t help us?’ Rides aren’t supposed to help you. They’re just for fun.” He shook his head and scowled at us.

Tommy is nearly always angry. I remember when he wasn’t, but I don’t think he does.

I stood up from where I had crouched to talk to the girl and shrugged my shoulders. I really didn’t know what she meant, but I didn’t like how she was all alone and how sad she was and how she seemed to blame the carnival for making her sad – or blame her parents for not taking her out of the carnival or something! Either way, I had about decided that I’d like to see as little of this carnival as possible and get back to familiar things – like even the broken-down car.
Tommy seemed to feel that way too. He shivered. Then he turned around. “Let’s go find Dad and get out of here!”

I hurried to Mom’s side and took her hand again. We walked past the prize booths and once we were around the corner, we saw Dad walking toward a group of people waiting near a covered pavilion.

“Sam!” My mom called out and we started hurrying toward him. Just then we got nearly run over by a crowd of people coming from behind us and heading for the ride in the covered pavilion. This was weird, too, because, as I mentioned before, we hadn’t seen anyone at all before this except for the little girl and now there was a mob of people all heading for the same ride?

I didn’t have time to think about it, though. I was too busy trying to keep up with Mom and not get my feet knocked out from underneath me. “Holy Cow!” I thought as someone plowed past me, bumping my shoulder and nearly knocking me to my feet. “Don’t these people care about how their actions hurt anyone else?’

We were carried along by the crowd up to the covered pavilion and inside. I had completely lost track of Dad and Tommy, although I was still holding tightly to Mom’s hand. As we got inside, I saw a smooth oval floor that stretched from one side of the pavilion to the other. Around the edges were small, individual-sized cars with rubber rings fashioned securely around them. “Bumper Cars!” I whispered and paused just a moment to look.

As I paused, an insistent stranger pushed his way forward and Mom’s hand was ripped from mine. I scrambled after her, pushing my way in between people and found myself in the arena. I looked around frantically. I could see Dad and Mom and Tommy were all in different cars. I wanted to get closer to them, but the lights started to flash. I knew that meant the ride would start soon. I jumped into the car closest to me and quickly fastened the toy seatbelt. I guess we were going to try the rides afterall.

I squeezed my eyes tightly shut as a loud, clanging bell rang overhead and power suddenly surged into my car and all the cars around me. I pressed on the gas and jerked forward. It always took forever to get used to bumper cars! They always moved too fast and steered too slow. A car pounded me to the right. I veered to the left and pounded another car I hadn’t seen over there. I really wanted to get back by my family, but I wasn’t sure how I was ever going to get there with all these cars banging back and forth in front of me, behind me, and into me!

I gasped as another car hit me from the rear. I cranked the wheel of my car as far to the left as possible and jerked forward as I hit the gas again. I made about four feet before I pounded into another car in front of me. I would have put my head down on the steering wheel in resignation if I hadn’t been afraid of being banged by the steering wheel when I got hit by another car – which was bound to happen, even if I stayed perfectly still.

Just then the lights flashed again and the bell clanged it’s noisy signal and all the cars slid to a stop. I hadn’t realized it until then, but I had been holding my breath. I let it out gratefully. I rested my eyes shut for just a minute in relief. I opened them to see everyone – that whole mob of pushy strangers – leaving just as quickly as they had come. Within minutes the pavilion was deserted. I looked around to see my mom and dad and Tommy following the retreating crowd with their eyes, as well. I got out of my car and went over to where their cars were clustered together. I had thought we were alone, but as I looked out of the arena, next to the turnstiles of the pavilion, I saw a man.

He was walking slowly toward us. His hair was grey, but he was big and seemed strong. I worried that he would be dirty and sad like the little girl we had seen, or worse, maybe he would seem to not see us at all like the crowd of people who had come to the ride and just left. He was neither. He was smiling as he came toward us in a white shirt and a tie and his eyes seemed to twinkle especially when they settled on me. I liked him immediately. He was the first thing that seemed human in this creepy, weird, weird carnival. I knew he could make sense of things for us. He would help us find a way out.

“Bumper cars are interesting things, aren’t they?” he said as he reached the place where we were standing.

My dad ignored his question. Which he would never let me do, but which he does all the time. “Look, do you know where I can find a car mechanic to come take a look at my car? I’d pay him well, but I need him to come look at it now. I don’t have time for all this . . . ” at which point Dad waved his hand vaguely around the room at the bumper cars, and I imagine he meant it to be a wave that would take in the rest of the carnival.

“I’m sorry, Sam. There are no car mechanics here – only life mechanics. But we do our job fairly well.”

Sam? How did he know Dad’s name?

He was still smiling. Tom was not. “What is this place? How do we get out of here? I’ve seen enough!” Tom was climbing out of his bumper car as he made this declaration.

“Oh, young man! I am afraid you have not nearly seen enough.”

Seen enough? What was it that little girl had said? Something about the rides being able to help us? Sometimes, at school, our teacher would let us ask questions before a test. She would always limit the questions to three. So, if someone forgot and asked if they could use the bathroom or sharpen their pencil, then our questions got wasted. She said it taught us to focus.

Somehow, I thought the same thing was going on here. My mind scrambled back, trying to remember the first thing he had said to us. My mom was in the middle of trying to describe to the man how our car had broken down, when I turned to him and said as loud as I dared, which turned out to be pretty loud “Why are bumper cars interesting things?”

My mom broke off in the middle of her sentence and the whole family looked at me in shock. I do not usually interrupt or really do anything very forcefully. This was important, though.

The man, whose smile had been fading, brightened right back up now and turned to face me. “Would you like to talk about bumper cars?” he asked.

I nodded vigorously. My voice failing me now, being scared of its own self probably.

“How about you?” the man asked as he looked at Dad.

Dad stared back at him in amazement. Then he threw his hands in the air in exasperation and said, “Sure! Why not? Let’s talk about bumper cars!

“I don’t want to go home, anyway,” he mumbled to himself.

“What do you think of bumper cars?” the man asked Tommy.

Tom shrugged. “They’re fun,” he said.

“Are they very good at getting you where you want to go?” the man asked again.

“No!” Tom said in disgust. “There’s always someone in your way or someone banging into you from the side. You can’t ever go in a straight line.”

“What would you need to move in a straight line?” This time the man turned to face Dad.

“Well, if you wanted to get from one place to another, you don’t get in a bumper car arena, you would go on a road where there are rules everyone should follow and the rules keep one car out of the way of another car and the cars stay within the lines and they follow the lights. You are driving for a different reason.” Dad said this really frustrated -- like he was talking to a little kid.

The man only continued to smile, though and nodded.

“So, would you agree then, Sonya,” he said, turning to my mother, “that in order to get from one place to another, we all need to obey the same rules?”

“Y-yes,” my mom faltered. I think she was worried the man was tricking her, but she also tries very carefully to not say anything that will make Dad mad. She says I’m sensitive to people’s emotions, and I say it takes one to know one.

“But,” she continued looking nervously at Dad, “the rules have to make sense and be rules that benefit everyone.”

“Wonderful!” boomed the man. “I agree!”

Dad continued to scowl. “What’s your point, mister?”

Instead of answering, the man turned to me, “Brittney, if someone is nice, does that mean that they are also good?”

I looked at him in surprise. “No fair!” I said.

“What’s no fair?” he asked. My whole family turned to look at me with interest.

“I got the hard question!” I complained. This made my family, if not exactly laugh, snicker a little bit. In any case, they stopped looking quite so nervous and mad. That was good, even though, what I said was true. He did give me a hard question.

“You know the answer, though. Don’t you Brittney?” the man asked as he winked at me.

Sure I did. Anyone who went to school did. Last year, I met a really nice girl in my class. She always shared the treats her mom packed in her lunchbox and liked me best at recess and when we had to pick partners in class. It wasn’t long, though, before I realized that she was cheating on all her tests – including looking off of my paper if I was the closest. I told her not to and she said she wouldn’t and then I caught her doing it again! Also, sometimes when we were together, she would say mean things about other people or about our teachers or her parents and then act all sweet to them later. I didn’t like how she made me feel. Eventually I made new friends and so did she.

I looked at the man again, “No,” I said. “Nice is not the same as good.”

“Excellent! So what is going on –“ the man said pointedly to Tommy, “is that we must discover the rules, or the principles as I like to call them, that when we follow them will get us to where we want to be going. That will tell us,” he said turning toward me now, “how to recognize who is good and how to be good ourselves. And then,” he said turning toward mom and dad now, “you will find not only how to get home, but you will find the desire to go home, as well.”

He smiled warmly at us again, looking at us each in turn and then he turned and started walking away.

“Wait!” I shouted, jumping up from the car where I had sat down.

He stopped and looked back at me.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

He smiled and said, “Ken.”