She nodded.
“You do remember that we’re a Sunday schooler this evening, right?”
“Oh, God, I’d forgotten.”
“You might want to narrow the side spills a little and add more prize chips, okay?”
“Okay.”
Sundays in the South were usually big-dollar days, and today would be no exception, especially since the Fall Festival Committee had decreed that tonight would be church night. This meant everything had to be squeaky clean so that Sunday school classes and youth groups, their parents and chaperons, could come out to the carnival, enjoy the lights and the rides, buy fried candy bars and chili dogs, and play for charity without being led into temptation. They would have money in their pockets, too, because many of the groups would come to “play for Christ” and to donate their prizes to toy drives for underprivileged children.
All evening, gospel and Christian rock would blare from the speakers strung through the lot, totally indistinguishable from soul and secular rock unless you listened carefully to the words.
For hanky-panks, it would be just another evening, but the gaffed games would have to be played fairly straight, which meant stashing the expensive plush and electronics that no one was ever allowed to win and scrambling to restock their stores with “slum,” cheap prizes that wholesaled at less than it cost to play the game. The alibi agents and flatties always griped when required to turn the midway into a Sunday schooler, but it was good public relations. Made the town fathers look On you a little kinder.
The patch smiled at her. “And you’ll remind Val no tricks with the Spot?”
Against her will, Tally had to smile back. “Now, Dennis, what are you suggesting?”
“Just be sure he loses the gaffed set tonight, okay?”
“Okay.”
If the flat metal disks were less than a certain proportion to the red spot, it would become impossible to cover every bit of the red. If a sharpie stepped up too confidently to the counter and Val was getting close to having thrown twenty-five percent of his plush already, he would palm the regulation-sized disks and slip the mark a set of microscopically smaller ones.
All in a day’s work.
As Dennis moved on, Tally finished her coffee and looked around, seeing what Braz would have seen on Friday night.
Arnie had laid out the midway. Since this was their first time playing Dobbs, they didn’t really know how big the crowd would be—festival committees were notorious for lying about average attendance—and he’d deliberately kept it on the narrow side so that people would have to brush up against the stores. Nothing was worse than a wide midway and sparse crowds. When that happened, the marks hewed to the middle of the walkways and resisted the impulse to lay their money down.
Across the midway on the south side was Polly’s Plate Pitch, with the Rope Climb on the left and the Balloon Race on the right. On the north side was Windy Raines’s Bowler Roller, a shooting gallery, and the Bottle Setup. All six stores were easily visible. Skee Matusik’s Lucky Ducky was next door to the west and the ears-and-floss wagon was on the east, but the tent walls would have blocked Braz’s view of them.
Normally she or Arnie would have been checking around every hour or so to make sure everybody was in the flow, but one of their ride jockeys had quit and one of their cooks was stoned in the bunkhouse about to get his ass fired. There had hardly been time to let anybody even go to the donniker till after the marks with young kids had started to clear out. So it wasn’t surprising that neither Polly nor Windy had noticed what was going on over here at the Dozer. But why hadn’t one of the marks?
CHAPTER 9
STEVIE KNOTT
EARLY SUNDAY AFTERNOON
“Deborah left a message for you on the answering machine,” Isabel said as her son got up from the table and headed for the dishwasher with his empty plate. “Wants you and Eric to go swimming this afternoon.”
“Yeah, I heard it,” said Stevie. “Thing is, I’ve got some stuff to look up in the library for my history class tomorrow, and Eric said he wanted to get back to Shaw early, too.”
“Well, give her a call so she’ll know not to expect you,” Isabel said.
“Yes, Mama.” He spoke in exaggerated resignation and his teenage sister giggled.
“Mom’s still not sure you know enough to wipe your own—”
“Here now, that’ll be enough of that kind of talk,” said Haywood. When it came to proper language for a daughter, Haywood was his father’s son.
“—nose,” Jane Ann finished. She looked at her father in all innocence. “What’s wrong with nose?”
“Never you mind.”
“What did you think I was going to say?” she persisted, laughter dancing in her blue eyes.
“Bel?”
“Jane Ann, help Stevie clear the table and stop picking at your daddy,” Isabel scolded.
Obediently, the girl rose and lifted the meat platter. “All the same, Mom, I still think Dad has a dirty mind.”
