ClownFellas (35 page)

Bingo searched the perimeter of the island until he found Isabella loading all her loot onto a small motorboat hidden behind a group of rocks on the south side of the island. Among the loot, Bingo saw his darling Melinda as the woman packed it into a waterproof case.

Isabella hit the gas on the motor and took off at top speed for about twenty feet. Then she wasn't moving anymore. She looked back to see Bingo holding the rope that was used to tie her to the shore.

“Bingo?” she cried as he pulled her back in.

She drew a knife and attempted to cut through the rope, but she wasn't able to cut faster than Bingo could reel her in. When the boat was close enough, Bingo hopped inside.

“Leaving without me?” Bingo asked.

As he sat down on the bench across from her, she tried to stab him with the knife, but the clown grabbed her wrist and bent it back until the blade fell into the water. Then she went for his violin—probably to threaten to toss it in the water if he didn't let her go—but he just put his feet on top of the waterproof box like an ottoman, preventing her from getting inside. Then the clown leaned back and took a deep breath of the cool twilight air.

“You were far better looking as a clown,” Bingo said. “You should have stayed that way.”

Then he saw a shift in her eyes. It was an odd thing to witness, like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. He could see her transforming, changing from Charlotte back to Isabella. Although she was still covered in the Carnie woman's tattoos, her insides had completely converted into the clown girl Bingo had fallen in love with.

“What if I could be Isabella again?” she asked.

Bingo laughed so loud the knife in his neck jiggled. “I might not be the smartest clown, but you can't fool me a second time.”

She reached into her bag and pulled out a syringe, then injected it into her neck. Within seconds, the pinkish tan color disappeared from her skin, dissolving all of her Carnie tattoos, leaving only bleached white flesh. Then she pulled out a little round clown nose made of some kind of plastic that had a realistic-feeling flesh texture. When she placed it on her nose, it suctioned itself into place.

“I really loved being Isabella,” she said. “I think it was my favorite character I've ever played.”

She placed contacts in each of her eyes, changing the color from hazel to a bright bubblegum blue.

“Being a clown was so wild, so magical. It's why I stayed with you for six months instead of two or three as I normally do.”

She removed her black hair—the most realistic wig Bingo had ever seen—and revealed a bald head with tiny hooks along the sides. Then she pulled out her clown persona's long sunshine-yellow curly locks and put them on. The hooks closed into the wig, making it impossible for anyone to remove but herself.

“Part of me wanted to stay with you forever,” she said. “I never wanted to give up being Isabella.”

With three electronic pens, she colored in her eyes and mouth, mimicking clown makeup. The pens weren't painting her skin, but somehow altering its color. She was so used to doing it, she didn't even need a mirror. Only once did she make an error, and to correct it she pulled out an electronic eraser and removed the color from that section of skin so that she could start over.

“The only reason I didn't stay with you was because I knew that eventually someday you'd find out I wasn't a real clown. Then you'd probably get so mad that you would've hurt me. So I figured I had no choice but to go through with my original plan.”

Bingo couldn't believe his eyes. She was able to transform herself so quickly. He wondered how many times a week, or even per day, she had to go through that transformation.

When she was finished, it was like Isabella Funshine was back, sitting next to him. He couldn't see any of the Carnie girl in her anymore. He couldn't tell that she wasn't a real clown. She was as perfect as she was the day they first met.

“I wouldn't have hurt you,” Bingo said. “I don't hurt girls.”

When he said that, a smile crossed Isabella's lips.

“I was wondering if now that you know I'm not really a clown, maybe you can accept me for who I am.” She rubbed her white fingers down his cheek. “Maybe if you can find a way to forgive me, we can go back to what we were. Then I can stay Isabella forever.”

She leaned in and kissed his cheek. He let her do it. He thought it was nice to pretend that Isabella was with him one last time. But when she moved his face so that she could kiss him on the mouth, Bingo pushed her away.

“That's enough,” Bingo said. “I'm sorry, but I'm not interested.”

“Why not?” Isabella cried, sitting back with a pouty look on her face, the same one she always used to give him when he refused to come to bed. “You can have your violin back. We can keep all this money I stole from those disgusting Carnies. We could be happy together.”

Bingo thought about it for a second and then said, “Nah, I don't think so.”

“Why not? Didn't you love me? If you loved me then, you can still love me now.”

“Yeah, but things change,” Bingo said. “Even if you're telling the truth, and I highly doubt you are, I still wouldn't be interested. You see, after what you've done to me, it got me thinking…”

The clown pulled the waterproof box closer.

“I never needed you, even before I found out you were a fraud,” Bingo said, then he tapped his knuckles on the box. “The only woman I'll ever need is right here.”

Bingo retrieved his violin from the box.

“You were a good fling, but Melinda's the true love of my life.”

A look of rage crossed Isabella's clown-face. At first, Bingo thought it was because he hadn't fallen for her lie, but then he realized it was something else. She was jealous. Genuinely jealous. Just as she always was whenever Bingo chose his violin over her. Vinnie Blue Nose was right…Poison Strawberry really did lose herself in her roles.

“That bitch is mine!” the clown girl screamed.

Then she lunged for the violin. But she wasn't trying to take the instrument from him; she wanted to destroy it. She wanted to smash it to pieces for stealing Bingo away from her.

But as Bingo stood up, the boat began to rock. Isabella lost her balance and fell overboard.

“I've missed you so much, baby,” Bingo said to his violin, and then kissed it with all the love in his heart.

“Bingo, help me!” Isabella cried.

She thrashed her arms in the water, trying to stay afloat. Bingo just ignored her and stepped off the boat onto the rocks, carrying his violin like a bride over the threshold.

“I can't swim!” she cried, her eyes filled with panic. “Help me!”

He turned his back to her. He knew Isabella didn't know how to swim, but he didn't know if that was part of her act or not. He wondered if the woman who played Isabella knew how to swim. And if she did, he wondered if the woman was so dedicated to the roles she played that she'd even allow herself to drown rather than break character.

“Please! Bingo! I love you!”

He just shrugged and walked on. Whatever happened to her, he was sure that she deserved it.

As Bingo walked through the fires that swallowed Carnival Island, he emptied his soul into his violin. The music he created was both cheerful and sad, expressing the unbearable pain he felt apart from his darling Melinda and then the joyous time of their reunion.

Fantasio, his fancy outfit coated in ashes, ran to Bingo. “Did you find that fucking bitch?”

Bingo nodded—the knife in his throat tapping against the neck of the violin—but he didn't stop playing.

“Back there,” Bingo said, pointing over the hill where he encountered her. “But she's probably drowned by now.”

“What?” Fantasio yelled, pissed if he didn't get a piece of her before she bought it.

Then he took off running over the hill.

Bingo continued to make loving music with his darling Melinda as he went through the burning carnival, passing Bozos and Carnies alike, both groups working together to try to put out the fire. He passed Clyde and Caesar, who now appeared trapped behind a wall of flames, having difficulty getting themselves to freedom.

“If I get out of this, I swear I'm retiring from this business,” Clyde said.

Then Caesar said, “If
I
get out of this, I'm locking myself in my apartment and never coming out again.”

Bingo was almost waltzing by the time he made it back to Vinnie Blue Nose. His capo was arguing with Gustav the Knife Thrower, trying to come up with a plan for fighting the fire.

“You see, this is why you don't make it so cops and firemen are too scared of you to enter your territory,” Vinnie told the knife thrower. “When you need their help, they're not going to come help you. It's better to just pay them off, make them work for you instead of against you.”

The knife thrower didn't appear to speak much English.

Bingo continued past his capo, flowing in whichever direction his heart pulled him. He emptied everything out of his soul, all of his anguish, sadness, fear, and pent-up aggression, and let his little wooden lover transform it into pure beauty. Bingo didn't care about anything that was going on around him at that moment, even when he was surrounded by the mounting flames. He just played his violin without a single care in the world, because he was madly in love, and it was the sweetest music that any clown had ever heard.

There was no son of a bitch in all Little Bigtop who deserved to be whacked more than Joey “Uncle Jojo” Bozo. The clown was a pig, a womanizer, a backstabber, and a cheat. But the fat conniving weasel reached a whole new level of scumbag the day he sold out his own nephew to the French clown gang, Le Mystère.

“Jimmy Bozo has to die.”

That was all those French bastards kept saying throughout the meeting. Jojo was getting sick of hearing it.

Two days ago, he got word that Le Mystère was planning to hit the Bozos on the day of his daughter's wedding. This he could not stand for. There were few things Jojo loved in this world more than money and power, but one of those things was his daughter, Taffy. She meant the world to him. She was his pride and joy and there was absolutely nothing he wouldn't do for her. So Jojo set up a sit-down between himself and the heads of Le Mystère, hoping he could come to some kind of arrangement to ensure that his beloved clown princess of a daughter didn't have the best day of her life turned into a bloodbath.

“There's got to be something else we can do for you,” Jojo said, getting annoyed at their inflexibility. “Money, territory, you name it. But I can't hand over my own nephew.”

Mortimer LaCroix leaned back in his seat and put his tiny purple legs on the table. For being the boss of the French clown mafia, LaCroix wasn't a very big man. In fact, the clown barely broke four feet tall and was technically considered a
little person.
Jojo was careful not to call the French boss a
midget
on account of his reputation for skinning alive anyone who used that word in his presence, no matter who it was.

“Why not?” Mortimer asked. “André here lost his nephew, so you should lose yours.” He gestured to the Frenchman at his side. “It's a fair trade.”

Jojo eyeballed André Dupont, the notorious chef capitaine of Le Mystère. André was physically the complete opposite of his boss. The clown was so tall that his knees were higher than his shoulders as he sat. He went by the nickname Daddy Longlegs, because he'd had stilts surgically attached in order to stretch his legs twice their natural height. Sitting next to him were his two sons, Jean and François, better known as the Juggler Brothers. None of the three was prepared to rest until they avenged their cousin and nephew, Pierre Beaumont.

“Not exactly,” Jojo said. “Jimmy's a capo, not to mention the boss's son. And Pierre, with all due respect, wasn't even connected with you guys. He was blood, sure, but just a regular guy. If this were a game of chess, Jimmy would be a rook or a bishop and Pierre wouldn't even be a pawn. He'd just be some speck of dust that somehow blew onto the board. It's not a fair trade at all.”

Judging by the looks in the eyes of all the French clowns at the table, Uncle Jojo had just said the wrong thing.

Daddy Longlegs leaned his head between his ear-high knees and raised a finger at the underboss. “I don't care if Jimmy's a rook, a bishop, or the goddamn king. He killed my sister's kid. The little shit has to pay for that.”

The French clown's voice was deep and his breath was foul. Jojo couldn't even make contact with his beaming eyes—one red and one green—as he spoke.

“And he will, trust me,” Jojo said. “But he doesn't have to die for it. There's got to be another way we can make good on this.”

The group went silent as a clown waitress wearing a plastic pink apron entered and served them each strawberry sundaes. They were in the back room of an ice cream shop, the usual place the clown families met when settling disputes. There wasn't a clown in Little Bigtop who didn't like ice cream.

When the waitress left, Daddy Longlegs shook his polka-dot-patterned head. “There's no other way to make this fair. Pierre was my family. I held him in my arms when he was just a baby. He didn't deserve what happened to him. He was good kid, a straight-A student who was studying to be a lawyer. He was worth twenty of Jimmy. And not only that, because of him I also almost lost both of my sons in The Sideshow.”

Jojo waved his spoon in disagreement. “You can't blame what happened to your sons on Jimmy. He almost died there, too.” Then he scooped the cherry off his sundae and tossed it aside.

“It's too bad he didn't,” said Longlegs. “Had he not made it out of The Sideshow, we wouldn't be needing to have this conversation in the first place.”

Jojo realized he wasn't going to get anywhere with them. It was clear that blood was the only thing that would satisfy them.

“Look, I'm going to level with you,” Jojo said. “Jimmy's a worthless piece of shit who's been a pain in the ass since day one. In all honesty, you'd be doing everyone in the Bozo Family, even his own father, a huge favor by wiping him off the face of the planet. But could you at least do it on another day besides my daughter's wedding? It's unnecessary. Hit him on the way out of a strip club or something.”

LaCroix shook his head. “It's not good enough. If you want to save your daughter's wedding you're going to have to bring us Jimmy Bozo yourself.”

“What's with you French bastards?” Jojo asked with a spoonful of rocky road in his mouth—he was just the kind of asshole who ate rocky road in his strawberry sundae. “This isn't the way things used to be done. Back in the day, you just didn't hit weddings, no matter what the grievance. We used to be more civilized than that. What the hell's wrong with you?”

Jojo wasn't the type to keep his mouth shut, even when he was at a table of rivals who were strong enough to take him out in seconds. The only clown he had to back him up was Beano Moretti, one of the few capos who was loyal to Jojo over his brother, but the big-eared bastard just sat there with his mouth shut, shaking in his baggy checkered pants. A lot of good he did him.

“I'm growing tired of this,” LaCroix said. “Are you going to give us Jimmy Bozo or not?”

Jojo looked at Beano, but just one glance at the big-eared clown's face and it was obvious he had no advice to give him. If Jojo ever made boss the last thing he was going to do was make Beano consigliere. He'd make a terrible adviser.

Jojo sighed. “I can't bring him to you. The blue-nosed prick who follows him around everywhere is too smart for that. He'd know something was up. But what I can do is help you set up the hit.”

“How?” LaCroix asked.

“Not sure yet. I need time to figure out the details.”

The French clowns pushed their untouched sundaes away.

“You've got one week.” LaCroix dropped down from his chair as Daddy Longlegs stood, grazing the ceiling.

When the Frenchmen were gone, it was just Beano and Jojo left in the room. Jojo pulled his sundae closer and took another bite. Then he let out a sigh.

“That could've gone better,” Jojo said, swirling his spoon in the ice cream.

“What are you going to do?” Beano asked, his Frisbee-sized ears wiggling with worry. “You're not really going to set up Jimmy for a hit, are ya?”

Jojo took a few more bites of ice cream before answering. “Yeah, what choice do I have?”

“But what if your brother finds out?”

“He's not going to find out.” Jojo took a bunch of large bites until his sundae was finished. “You know what your problem is, Beano? You worry too much. If you didn't worry so much you wouldn't make so many stupid mistakes.” Jojo scraped the bottom of his bowl for the remaining strawberry syrup. “That's why you almost got my future son-in-law whacked last May. Don't think I didn't forget about that, either.”

“I told you, I thought he was a rat. Both you and the boss approved it.”

“Yeah, well you were wrong.” Jojo stood up. “And in this business, being wrong can get you killed.”

Then Jojo bent over and cried out in agony, grabbing his balding white forehead as an ice cream headache sent stabbing pains through his brain.