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Carnival workers wait out the rain last week at the Washington County Fair. Tracy Miller mans a booth at the Washington County Fair. (By Caitlin Sullivan)

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Fair friends

By CAITLIN SULLIVAN/Staff

Matthew Pape rubs the knot on his forefinger then opens his palm, out from under the awning.

“Yep,” he said. “Seems like it’s raining harder.”

Every now and then, Pape cranes his neck around the big tire on the red tractor. He’s checking to see if there’s any movement among the small group gathered over by the ticket booth. They’re the ones who will decide if the carnival will open in the rain that’s been coming down for a good two hours already. The straw scattered on the Washington County fairgrounds squish as workers walk past.

Pape adjusts his baseball cap and rests his elbows on his knees. He’s tired.

After the fair shut down the night before, a group of carnies took a trip to Glade Spring. There they spent the wee hours of the morning getting inked.

“Abingdon’s our tattoo spot,” Tracy Miller said.

She’s seated on the wide arm of the bench.

Her boyfriend, Rick Scott, lifts his shirt to reveal a new tattoo across his belly. Gargoyles break through a brick wall. The skin around it is still red from the needle.

“He came up with that in his head and the guy drew it,” Miller said.

Seven years ago, Miller walked up to Scott’s carnival game, one where you shoot at targets, in her hometown of Mineral, Va. She asked to play the game, then she asked him out. Today, she works that shooting game booth. He works in a booth beside her.

Later that night, when the rain’s gone, Miller will sit at the stool in her booth and watch the giggling fairgoers pass. She’ll stand and say, without moving her face or even really looking at the people, “You get a prize every time, even if you miss. Choose anything on that wall.”

Then a mom will lay down a $5 bill. Her son will take three shots, hitting two of them, and pick out a plastic gun as a prize.

“Thanks,” Miller will say. “Have a nice night.”

It’s a little different every place the carnival goes. For instance, the shooting game isn’t a big deal here. Up north, where she has to speak slower and make sure to articulate each word lest they won’t understand her, the parents get freaked out by her booth. It’s annoying, she said.

Up there, too, she said she acts a little differently.

“I don’t bark, shout at people like the old carnival people,” Miller said. “I sometimes do if people have money, like in the northern areas, but here people don’t have money.”

John “Crow” Robertson watches the rain from his spot leaning against the wall next to the bench. The fair committee is still meeting by the ticket booth.

Robertson grew up as a carnie. His dad painted signs for popcorn and candied apples before they all turned to vinyl.

“In the morning, while everyone else was sleeping, we’d paint signs,” he said.

He knows the old carnival ways, like that, “carnies used to sleep under their rides before there were fire codes.” And he knows the even older stories, the ones his dad told him of girl shows and wrestlers that used to travel with the carnival.

His father also taught him the old sayings, things like “did you get a nut,” which is another way to ask if you made enough that night to pay your bills, and “Hey Rube,” which was a way people in the wilder days told other workers they were in trouble.

“Now when I say that people just say, ‘Who’s Rube?’” he said. “Now they just say help.”

Robertson is a chef, he said. He runs the Polish dog concessions stand, using a wide-toothed grill fork, about the only thing he has left from the old days.

If the carnival is in some ways about the past to Robertson, to Jonathan Calloway, it’s the means to a new future.

When factories shut down in his hometown of Java, Va., Calloway said he couldn’t find a job, even with his business degree and air conditioning and heating certification.

He saw an ad in the newspaper that read ‘help wanted, travel, pay, bonus, free housing, a lot of fun.’

“Something like that,” he said. “So I decided to give it a try.”

He’s now in his third season.

“I never really been away from home,” he said. “We went to places I never thought existed, with crazy names.”

Calloway looks up smiling at the Ferris wheel. He knows every bolt and track of it. He said he can take it apart in a record two hours. Beyond it’s skeleton is a patch of gray sky.

“It’s going to be slow all day,” he said. “It’s going to be a groggy day altogether.”

His black-and-white high-topped sneakers are clean even in the mud. He sips an orange soda before crushing the empty can quietly in his hand.

The hardest thing, he said, is being away from his 2-year-old son, Jontavius.

“The last time I saw him was on the Fourth of July,” he said.

He’s hoping to be back in Java by Halloween, when Jontavius will don the Black Spidey suit.

“I only have seven or eight weeks left,” he said.

Until then, it’s payday Thursdays, laundry day Fridays and Wal-Mart whenever he can, eating from the George Foreman grill he keeps in the trailer he shares with three other men.

“(Carnival life is) an acquired taste,” Calloway said. “It’s kinda like a fraternity, a lifelong journey of friends.”

“You gotta have a gypsy spirit,” said “Bubba”, Calloway’s supervisor walking by.

Calloway is one of the newest arrivals to the carnival lifestyle. Pape said carnies are either in their 20s or 40s. He said the younger ones don’t usually last that long.

He said at the end of the night a lot of carnies drink or they watch movies or play poker. It usually takes him a few hours to wind down from work. The night before, Pape said he didn’t get to bed until three in the morning. He lights a Camel cigarette. He’ll turn 40 this year. His mom wants him to settle down.

“She thinks I’m crazy for doing this,” he said. “When I find someone to marry and have children that’s when I’ll probably quit, but for now, keep putting them up and taking them down.”

The rain day is called but the boss says they have to stay on the lot. That’s all right with Pape. All he really wants to do is sleep.

To contact Caitlin Sullivan e-mail or call (276) 628-7101.