Six Hundred Corn Dogs on Opening Day

My Cousin

Trent is three years younger than me. When we were kids, he followed me around the barns at this same fair, carrying my show halter and asking if he could hold the lead rope on my heifer.

He was a sweet kid. He is not a bad man now. He has worked on the county grounds crew for four years, mowing, fixing fence, running water lines and handling the power poles during fair week.

That last part matters. The grounds crew is who plugs the vendors in. They walk the midway the day before opening and check every power pole, and if something trips during the week, they are who you call.

Three weeks before the fair, Trent started seeing Kayla Mott. I had met her once, at my aunt’s house on a Sunday afternoon. She seemed nice enough. She had a taco stand she ran on the weekend circuit, and she was trying to get into the bigger county fairs.

The fair board had given her a spot at the far end of the midway, down past the pig races, where the foot traffic thins out to almost nothing. I knew that spot. Everybody starts there.

I figured out later what had happened. Kayla was unhappy about the far spot. Trent wanted to be the man who fixed it for her. He had known her three weeks, and I think he wanted her to look at him like he could make things happen.

So that morning, he moved her stand into the gap across from me, ran her cords across the midway to my power pole, and pulled my plug.

Standing There

“Trent,” I said again, quieter. “I paid for this spot six summers running. Grandpa had it before that.”

“Things change,” he said. “Kayla needs the foot traffic. You’ve got a following. People will find you wherever you go.”

“Wherever I go,” I said. “Where is that, exactly?”

He shrugged. “There’s room down by the pig races.”

I looked at the line already forming in front of my window. Kids in green 4-H shirts. Moms with strollers. An older couple holding hands. They were waiting for corn dogs, and my fryers were going cold behind me.

I want to tell you what I thought about in that moment, because people always ask me why I did not just go straight to the office and raise the roof.

I thought about the 4-H kids. Show day is a long day. Those kids had been in the barns since five in the morning, washing and blowing out their animals, and lunch was coming, and a lot of them had a five-dollar bill from their mom for exactly this.

There was a line of 4-H kids hungry at lunch, and there was no time for a fight.

If I walked to the office, it would be an hour of talking before anything got fixed. If I argued with Trent, it would be a scene in front of a dozen children. Neither one would put a corn dog in anybody’s hand.

So I did not argue. I turned around and climbed back into the trailer.