Aldo didn't grab him.
He'd stood in front of three thousand teenagers in thirty-eight years. He knew that when a kid was panicking, the worst thing you could do was panic louder. You had to give them something else to do with their hands.
So he leaned back in his seat, folded his arms, and said, in his calmest band-room voice, "Leo. Do you know how far away that lightning is?"
The boy kept yanking the door. "What?"
"The lightning. How far away it is." Aldo pointed out the rain-streaked window at the black sky. "I can tell you exactly. Do you want to know how?"
Leo stopped pulling. He was breathing hard. He looked at Aldo over his shoulder, wild-eyed, with his face wet.
"How?" he said.
"Sit down and I'll show you."
The boy hesitated. The gondola swung. Then he let go of the door handle and dropped back onto his seat across from Aldo, hugging himself.
"Next time you see a flash," Aldo said, "you start counting. Slow. Like this. One Mississippi, two Mississippi. And when you hear the thunder, you stop. Every five seconds is one mile. If you count to ten, the lightning was two miles away."
Lightning lit up the whole sky.
"One Mississippi," Aldo said. Leo's lips moved with him. "Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four."
The thunder came, long and rolling.
"Four," Aldo said. "Less than a mile. It's right on top of us. Next one."
A flash. They counted together. They got to six.
"Six. A little more than a mile. It's moving off," Aldo said. "It's going east, toward Wisconsin. Next one."
They got to eight.
"See?" Aldo said. "The storm's walking away from us, Leo. It's leaving. You can hear it go."
Leo was watching the window now instead of the door. His breathing had slowed a little.
"Now here's the fun part," Aldo said. "I was a band director for thirty-eight years. You know what a band director does?"
"Waves a stick?"
Aldo laughed out loud. "That's exactly right. He waves a stick. He's called a conductor. And the band watches the stick, and plays when he tells them." He held up his right hand, palm open, like he was holding a baton. "Next flash, we're going to conduct the thunder. You count. When you get to the end, you bring it in. Like this."
He raised his hand high and brought it down in a sharp, sweeping arc, the way he used to bring in the brass section for the big finish.
Lightning flashed.
"One Mississippi," they counted together. "Two Mississippi. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven."
Leo raised his skinny arm over his head. And brought it down hard.
The thunder rolled, right on cue.
Leo stared at his own hand. Then a strange sound came out of him.
It took Aldo a second to recognize it. The boy was laughing.
"Again," Leo said. "Do it again."
They conducted the storm for half an hour.
They did it in four-four time, the way Aldo had conducted the Cedar Lake marching band, down, in, out, up. They did it in waltz time, one-two-three, one-two-three, with the gondola rocking along.
They gave the thunder a crescendo and a fermata. When the counts got to twelve and fifteen and the thunder went soft and far away, they conducted it pianissimo, with their pinkie fingers.
Then Aldo taught him the Cedar Lake fight song.
He sang it loud, in his creaky old baritone, the way he'd sung it at a thousand football games. On, Cedar Lake, on, Cedar Lake, march on to victory. Leo didn't know the words.
He made up his own. They were mostly about lemonade.
Down on the ground, through the rain, Aldo could see the firefighters standing by their truck, looking up. One of them was pointing at their gondola. Aldo realized they must be able to see the two of them in there, waving their arms over their heads like lunatics.
He waved back.
At 9:14, the lights came on.
They came back all at once, every ride and booth and string of bulbs across the fairgrounds, and a huge cheer went up from the crowd below. A motor hummed somewhere deep in the wheel. With a small jolt, the gondola began to move.
Down, slowly, through the last of the rain.
Leo pressed his face to the window. "There," he said. "There's my mom. There she is."
A woman was standing at the bottom of the wheel by the exit gate, soaked to the skin, holding two cups of lemonade. She was jumping up and down, waving both arms over her head.
Leo waved back. And Aldo, without thinking, waved too, the way you'd bring in the whole band for the last chord.
They came down that way, the old man and the boy, both of them waving their arms like conductors.
The gondola door opened. Leo shot out of it like a cannonball into his mother's arms. She dropped both lemonades.
"I told you to wait," she was saying, crying, holding on to him. "I told you to wait right there, Leo."
"I did wait," Leo said into her shoulder. "And then I went on the Ferris wheel with Aldo, and we conducted the thunder, and it went to Wisconsin."
His mother looked up over his head.
She was about forty, with wet dark hair plastered to her face. She stared at the old man climbing slowly out of the gondola behind her son. Then her face changed.
"Mr. Ferrante?" she said.
Aldo looked at her.
"Danielle Brandt," she said. "Second flute. Cedar Lake, class of 2003. You made me play the flute solo at the spring concert, and I cried in the band room for an hour beforehand, and you said, Danielle, you are going to stand up and play it anyway." She was laughing and crying at the same time. "I played it."
"You played it beautifully," Aldo said. His voice had gone rough. "I remember."
Danielle looked down at her son, and back at her old band director, soaked to the skin in the lights of the Midway.
"You just did it again," she said. "Didn't you. Talked a scared kid through it."
Aldo shrugged. "He's got good rhythm."
He walked home to his car through the wet fairgrounds afterward. On the way, he stopped at the edge of the Midway and looked back up at the wheel turning slowly against the clearing sky.
"Angela," he said quietly. "You'd have liked him."