Valknut: The Binding by Marie Loughin Page B

Junkyard kept his head down and stepped
onto the grass to let them pass.
    Lennie watched him uneasily. What was wrong
with him? Less than an hour ago, he had dismantled a punk carrying
a gun and a knife, but now he couldn’t handle a couple of sorority
girls.
    Jim bounded back to them with his duffle bag
half unzipped. “I gotta start getting ready,” he said. “We’re
almost there!”
    He plopped down on the sidewalk and dug
through his belongings. Junkyard slouched against a lamppost, chin
tucked under his jacket collar, hands deep in his pockets. He
looked like a vagrant who planned to loiter all day.
    He looked completely unreliable.
    The low thrumming of heavy machinery vibrated
the air. Lennie glanced around, but couldn’t find the source of the
noise. They had stopped in front of an enormous building with a
high, arching facade. It looked familiar. The sign out front said
Williams Arena.
    “Hey, isn’t that where the Gophers play
basketball?” she asked. “We must be at the University of
Minnesota.”
    Junkyard gave an indecipherable mutter. Jim
looked up from his duffle bag, a sock in one hand and a plastic
snake in the other.
    “That’s right, Missy. They hold the Festival
right over there, every year.” He pointed the snake at a large oval
building across the street. “That’s the Marr–ee–ooo–chee
Arena.”
    “Right.” Lennie had been here before, for an
invitational track meet at the end of her high school career. She
had done well, placing third in the 300-meter hurdles and first in
the 800-meter dash. But it wasn’t a happy memory. Her mother had
gotten sloppy drunk at a team dinner—
    “Hey, Dougie, which hat d’ya think I should
wear?”
    Happy for the distraction, Lennie looked at
the two hats in Jungle Jim’s hands. They were possibly the ugliest
she had ever seen: a red-and-green checkered tam with a yellow
pompom and an old bowler so dented it was more of a lopsided cone
than a bowl. Junkyard gave a furtive glance up and down the
sidewalk and pushed himself from the lamppost. He bent over the
hats.
    “Definitely the checkered one.” He grinned,
looking more like the man Lennie had met on the train. “The pompom
matches your shoes.”
    Oh, yeah—the pompom tipped the scales for me,
too, Lennie thought. She winced when Jim put the hat on. Of course,
she would have winced at either choice.
    Jim stuffed the bowler back in his bag and
jumped up. “C’mon! The tents oughta be up by now. Ashley’ll be with
her dad, I bet.”
    As they started toward the Mariucci Arena,
Junkyard resumed his unresponsive posture. Lennie walked beside him
in awkward silence, while Jim alternately ran ahead and jogged back
to hurry them along. The rumble of machinery grew louder as they
rounded the building’s curved side. A large parking lot lay before
them. They had reached the Festival.
    The noise came from carnival rides in varying
stages of assembly at the far end of the lot. The long, black arms
of the Whirling Octopus were already in place. That ride used to
make Lennie sick as a child. A kiddie roller coaster in the shape
of a snake biting its tail idled next to it. Behind them were the
usual pods, arms, cylinders, and tracks guaranteed to make
weak-stomached customers hurl. She had never been fond of carnival
rides.
    Closer to the road, tent canvases flapped in
the breeze as vendors and show-casers readied their displays.
Jungle Jim skirted the crowd control barriers, bobbing and leaning
to see into the tent village. Junkyard smiled and seemed to relax
as he watched Jim’s antics.
    “Is this the whole Festival?” Lennie asked.
“It seems small.”
    Junkyard shook his head. “Just the carnival
and vendors, out here.” He hooked a thumb back toward the arena.
“The bigger exhibits are inside.”
    Encouraged by this relative explosion in
conversation, Lennie asked another question. “I’ve been wondering,
what did that graffiti stand for, back there? The BRR, I mean.”
    She tried to