Overtime

Fair season and we’re tent pitching on holy grounds in central Illinois, busting through pavement with jack hammers, driving home a stake that will be pulled two months from now. One of us holds, the other presses down, grease shooting between cracks in the old hammer’s worn shell to our hands and faces—one slip and we’ve lost our toes. I’m from the warehouse, not the tent crew. I haven’t ridden around in tent haulers across the nation popping tents here and there, but for this, the state fair, the warehousers are let out to feel important. Around us a silvered city has risen, white vinyl tents at full mast and clean for the first time in a year. It’s August. It’s the summer’s dogged days when humidity doesn’t break until midnight, an hour after the fair’s closed down. We’re piled on back of a flatbed with our tools, our tiredness. We’re a monster understood best by Midwesterners, devouring parking lots and fields, our teeth stained by cigarette and chew, some of us not old enough, some too old. All of us here for the overtime.