Free Recapitulation by Wallace Stegner Page B

tightly around the silver dollar his mother makes him carry in case he should run into what he scornfully calls a Dire Emergency.
    His mother doesn’t like his working here. She says it is too much for a boy of fourteen, and not strong at that, to work ten hours a day, six days a week, at the news company, and then ride out fifteen miles on the train and work all Saturday and Sunday night. By the time he gets back to town and catches the Owl streetcar home it is way past midnight. It isn’t like Chet, who sleeps at Saltair, under the Pavilion. And Chet is older. Bruce will ruin his health. He will stunt his growth, which, though she refrains from saying so, seems to be stunted already.
    He did not win her over by argument. He simply threw such a tantrum, followed by sulking, that she gave in. This is his second weekend. Though he has been working since eight this morning, and has had for supper only the extra sandwich his mother put in his lunch sack, he is not tired. He is only furious with that stupid man and that fat girl and that Ed Mueller with his horse laugh.
    He will show Ed Mueller. Suppose the pavilion caught fire, and while everyone else ran around in panic, trampling each other, suppose here came the one they call Shrimp (unknown to them, he is an Eagle Scout), burrowing along the floor where the air is better, dragging people to safety, grabbing confused Ed Mueller and getting
him
out, plunging back in after others. He comes upon a body with the flames all but swallowing it, and as the fire sweeps up and away and the smoke clears for a moment he recognizes the flapper in the red dress and the shingle bob. Her slicker escort has run like a coward, leaving her to her fate. Fallen, she is wonderfully helpless; her white legs are exposed above the knees. He takes up her soft body (who would have thought he was so strong?) and carries her to safety. Under cover of the smoke he cops a feel.
    At the swinging doors to the kitchen he backs around, pulls the cart through, and unloads it onto the table behind which four pearl divers in their undershirts, their tattoos shining with sweat, stand armpit-deep in greasy suds. They are not men to befooled with—impatient, savage, dangerous. Though the most dangerous of all, according to Chet, are fry cooks. Fry cooks will take after you with a cleaver if you so much as look at them cross-eyed.
    Keeping his eyes open and his mouth shut, he finishes unloading and backs out through the swinging doors. The music comes loud in his face. His sullenness is already forgotten. Out past dancers and diners, above the bright midway, the scrolls and scrawls of the roller coaster lift out of the light into obscurity. A red car is crawling up the first long pitch. He hears the screams and then the thunder as it tips and falls.
    What a keen place! As the moon moves through the sky he moves through that dreamland. As swimmers float unsinkable on the brine of Great Salt Lake he floats on blended saxophones. The girl in red and her slicker friend are up again, still doing the Charleston. From time to time one of the band members stands up and sings through a megaphone.
    He assures: “It ain’t gonna rain no more, no more.” He exhorts: “Horsie, keep your tail up, keep the sun out of my eyes.” He warns: “You got to see your mama every night or you won’t see your mama at all.”
    Eventually it is eleven, the last table has been cleared, they hang around the kitchen waiting to be paid. When Mueller comes in, finally, Bruce accepts his dollar and a half and his train ticket back to town. The long day has come down on him like an avalanche of feathers. Rubber-legged, blind with yawning, he gropes out of the kitchen and staggers across the midway toward the gates beyond which the train waits on the causeway. Behind him the band is playing “Moonlight and Roses,” and the dance floor lights go dim. The nearly empty midway stares, too brightly lighted. Its concessions are closed, all except