The Grills We Set Up Across the Road
That first Friday, Gary came in from the field at four o’clock and loaded the flatbed.
It’s an old Ford with a steel bed and a headache rack Gary welded himself. He set the two kettle grills on the bed and ratchet-strapped them to the rack so they wouldn’t tip, and he put the folding table and two bags of charcoal behind the cab.
“You know you don’t have to do this,” I told him.
“I know,” he said. He tightened a strap. “I was there for the vote.”
Barb brought 120 hamburger patties in two coolers. She bought them with her own grocery money at the store in town and wouldn’t let any of us pay her back. Patty brought eight dozen buns and a pan of cinnamon rolls, because she said she couldn’t help herself.
Lori brought a cooler of milk, chocolate and white, in the little school cartons. Jan brought ketchup and mustard and napkins and a box of foil. Connie brought her coffee can.
It was a three-pound Folgers can, the old kind, with the red faded nearly to pink. We had kept the change in it at the stand for twenty-two years. Connie set it on the folding table without saying anything, out of pure habit, and none of us moved it.
We parked on Dale’s shoulder at a quarter to six. Across the road, inside the fence, the Prairie Smoke truck had its window up and its generator running. It was a nice truck. Black and silver, with a smoker on a trailer behind it. The young man running it waved at us, friendly, like he didn’t know who we were.
Gary got the coals going with a chimney starter, the way his dad did, so there’d be no lighter fluid taste. When they were gray he dumped them and spread them and set the grates. I put on my red school sweatshirt, the one with the hood, because the wind had come up.
People in the line at the gate looked over at us. They didn’t know what to make of it. Six women and a farmer and two grills smoking on a hayfield shoulder.
Mr. Pohlman came across the road with his hands in his jacket pockets. He stopped at the edge of the gravel like it was a property line.
“Deb,” he said, loud enough that people could hear. “You can’t sell out here.”
“We’re not selling a thing,” I said.
He looked at the grills. He looked at the can. He looked at my sweatshirt, which has our school’s name across the front. Then he nodded once and went back across without another word.
The stadium lights came on, all four poles, one after the other.
And then we saw the bus.
Whether Mr. Pohlman ever got word to anybody, I still don’t know. I think the smoke did it.
It came down the county road from the west, a yellow school bus with dust on its sides to the windows. It had been on the road two hours, gravel and blacktop and gravel again. Gary’s smoke was rolling right across the road and over its windshield.
It slowed.
I’ll never forget that. It slowed down on the blacktop, the way a car does when the driver sees something and isn’t sure. Then it pulled onto the shoulder behind our flatbed and stopped, and the door folded open.
Inside, the kids had their faces pressed to the windows. Big boys and little ones, in their warm-ups, with their helmets in their laps.