The Further Adventures of The Joker (12 page)

“No clowns,” he said. “I’m the only clown.”

“You are McCoy?”

“The real McCoy,” he said wearily.

“I work for meals and I eat little,” I said.

This interested McCoy who opened the metal door with a creak and examined me with one hand held up to shield him from the sun. He wore a wine-red and food-stained woolen robe. His feet were bare with little tufts of red growing on the knuckles of his toes.

“You don’t look funny,” he said.

“That is my beauty,” I said putting down my purple bag. “I fascinate children. They don’t know whether to like me or to be afraid. This has been true of clowns since they were first conceived. There is a cadaverous aspect to the best of us, a challenge. We are forbidden and each laugh is a laugh of guilt.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” he said, scratching his plum belly. “You funny?”

“People have been known to die laughing from my jokes,” I said.

“I don’t know,” McCoy said. “You look . . .”

“I am Gwynplaine,” I said. “I can see you are a man of letters.”

“I don’t know,” said McCoy again.

“You are familiar with Victor Hugo’s classic tale of the man who laughs,” I said. Something stirred behind him inside the van and another head emerged, the head of a beautiful, dark-haired girl of about twenty, who wiped sleep from her large eyes and looked at me with what I like to assume was admiration.

“I know it,” said the girl.

“My daughter, Diedre,” McCoy said. “Her mother’s been dead some . . .”

“The man who laughs,” said the girl. “They took this little boy and cut him so he grinned all his life, even when he was sad, and they showed him off like a freak.”

“I know him well,” I said. “I am him and he is me.”

“Give him a job, Pa,” she said, tugging at McCoy’s sleeve.

“We can’t afford . . .” McCoy began.

“I work for meals, the satisfaction of making children weep with laughter, and the occasional smile of a pretty girl,” I said, looking up at Diedre’s wide black eyes.

Ah, thought I, what magnificent evil could I play with this girl. Be still my bleeding heart.

“No pay?” McCoy asked cautiously.

“Not a
sou,”
I said. “I have my own limited means and resources and my wants are few.” I want, I thought, the world within my closing white-gloved fist.

“Bunk up with Hector,” said McCoy. “He runs the wheel, rousts the show, rigs, drives. You’ll have to do a little of that. And you don’t have to wear makeup during the day.”

“I must,” I said sadly, picking up my purple bag. “I have a skin condition that is not pleasing to the eye.”

“Suit yourself,” said McCoy. “Just so it doesn’t stop you working.”

The girl smiled and the door closed.

Life, with one notable exception, went swimmingly for two weeks and a day. The tent was a leaking sieve in the Florida summer. The rotting wooden bleachers were seldom full. The circus consisted of an overworked family of Brazilians who were all the acts, the award-winning Flying O’Haras, the internationally known Malanati Brothers, and Samson Grieff and his killer tiger. The tiger was lazy and the Brazilians stupid. I tried to prod the tiger at night into a frenzy in the hope that he would develop a taste for humans and rid the earth of a Brazilian in front of the rain-drenched evening crowd.

McCoy was a pitiful clown, a grouch, a grumbler who went through his act with Diedre in a cloud of discontent. Diedre was quite lovely, especially as a clown, and I was careful to keep her from seeing my interaction with the children. I snuck up on the little rats, frightening them, letting blood capsules ooze down my chin when I caught a few of them alone after the show. And I was a hit. I knew I would be. The kids told other kids about the frightening clown. The crowds grew, the parents complained, but the children sought me out.

“You love children, don’t you,” Diedre said one night, while she took off her makeup.

“I do,” I acknowledged, wondering what one of the scruffy little things would taste like.

She looked at me in the cracked mirror of the caravan and smiled.

I have only one wonderfully communicative expression. I beamed it at her and imagined her falling from the top car of the Ferris wheel when it was at its peak, whirling around at a breakneck pace, perhaps the pair of silent raccoons from the creek bank, masked observers applauding my creative moment.

“You look at me strangely,” she said.

“A line worthy of the poor girl in
Phantom of the Opera
or
Beauty and the Beast,”
I said, leaning against the wall, holding my purple bag to my chest.

“You’re funny,” she said. “What do you keep in that bag? It’s none of my business really, but you keep rinsing the same clothes and . . .”

I put my finger to my lips and said softly, “Secret things live in this bag. It crawls with clacking minute monsters that slither. Listen.”

I held the bag to her ear. She hesitated and then put her delicate head next to the canvas, listening as if to the sea in a slime-covered shell.

“Hear it,” I said.

The urge at that moment was irresistible. As her head rested, listening, I began to open the bag. I had a surprise for her indeed.

Remember, I said there was an exception to my happiness with the Orsini Traveling Circus. It was at the moment I began to reach a gloved hand into my bag, as I smelled the greasepaint still on Diedre’s cheeks, that the exception came through the door. Hector knocked and entered without waiting for an invitation. He looked at me with suspicion. It was the only look he had for me. We had exchanged little about each other. I told him great lies of tragedy and he grunted. He told me no lies. His life story came in a short monologue on the first night, after which we spoke hardly a word.

“I had a family once,” he had said. “Greensboro. Was a lawyer. The bottle got me. Lost the family. Lost my license. Wandered for maybe six years, killing myself, and then latched onto this circus. Been with it two years. Haven’t had a drop since. This is as close to family as it gets for me.”

“I appreciate your sharing confidences with me,” I had said.

“No confidences,” he had answered, sitting on his bunk across from me in a trailer not cooled by the open windows. “Warning.”

“Warning? Me? I’m the most innocent . . .”

He didn’t answer. Just looked me in the eye.

Since that night, I had left out a bottle on the rusted space that served as a shelf above my bed. The bottle was half full of bourbon. It had been willed to me by Gideon along with his hat and a few other uninspired objects. Hector had not touched the bottle. Neither had he mentioned it.

And now he walked into the caravan unannounced.

“Father’s looking for you,” he said to Diedre as I snapped my bag closed.

Diedre gave me a shrug.

“Later,” she said, patting my hand, pulling her robe around her, and hurrying out of the caravan.

I looked at Hector and he looked at me.

“Her father is not looking for her,” I said.

“I lied,” Hector admitted, his eyes unblinking.

“I mean her no harm,” I said innocently, showing my upturned hands.

“I think
you’re
lying now. I’ve seen enough liars in court,” he said.

“That was long ago,” I reminded him.

“Yes,” he admitted. “But liars haven’t changed.”

“Perhaps,” I said, moving past him to the door, “your judgement has changed. Drinking does that. Do you have nightmares? I’m concerned about my bunkmate.”

“I can live with my nightmares,” he said, our faces inches from each other.

“Some nightmares are real,” I said softly, holding onto each tasty word like Bela Lugosi.

“I keep something hard under my pillow and I sleep real light,” he said aloud.

I left him standing there and went about my merry mischief. I know. I know. I should have contained myself, waited till I was sure I was not pursued, lived an exemplary existence, but there is so much fun to be had and missing a day, nay even an hour of it, is offensive to me.

The Brazilians were named Sotto. Though I had to put in long extra hours to do it, I managed to get the young brothers fighting over which was the superior flyer, to get the daughter to think she was pregnant, to get the father to take more than an occasional drink, and to get the mother to determine that McCoy was practically using them as slave labor. McCoy, himself, was easy. I told him Hector was back on the bottle and showed him the bourbon. I told him the Sottos were plotting with someone to ruin the circus and take it over. Diedre I managed to convince that she was letting life pass her by. I told her of the bloody show of the
Grand Guignol
in Paris, the cockfights in Mexico, the pit-bull battles in Texas, the cobra kissers of India. I made her long for the outer world, but it was long and hard because Hector was ever present, ever likely to come through the door or around a corner. In frustration, I poisoned the tiger with the digitalis I carried in my purple bag.

The Sotto brother who helped Grieff handle the cat took it hard. We all wept for him and the mangy creature. I helped to bury it not far from where I had left the car.

All this was hard work. At night I was exhausted. I even slept. I never saw Hector sleep, at least never when I was sure he slept. At night I would sit up quietly, ever so quietly. And Hector would have his head turned toward me, his eyes open. I would offer him the bottle, take an imaginary drink from it, and lie down again.

When your life is committed to, dedicated to a principle, a task, it is very difficult to suffer uninformed intrusion. I determined to renew my efforts to destroy this piece of traveling trash, especially Hector.

The next day went well. Pamphlets had to be changed removing the “Wild Tiger” act. I volunteered to distribute the pamphlets in town, headed down the road, threw them in a ditch, and spent a few hours in the woods stalking and frightening a pair of overweight, nearsighted hunters.

The crowd came that night to see me. I took tickets, told three or four early comers that the tiger was really mean tonight. It went perfectly. The Sottos glared at each other and McCoy. Papa Sotto missed a catch and one of the boys, the one who lost the tiger, almost tumbled out of the safety net. McCoy tripped on a prop bucket and couldn’t finish his act. The crowd began to call for the tiger.

And Hector. Hector held the rigging and his fixed melancholy stare. If he had to have only one look, why couldn’t it be a smile? He was beginning to really annoy me.

And then it happened. It happened on the night of a full moon. Hector was not to be seen. He had been sent by McCoy, at my suggestion, to town to pick up a few bottles of fine bourbon for which I gladly would pay.

The Sottos were brooding in their van. McCoy was curled up with a nice bottle, and Diedre was free to accompany me to the Ferris wheel with the promise that I would finally show her the mysteries of my purple valise.

“Too hot around here,” she said.

“Not as hot as Calcutta,” I said. “You sit in one of the million marketplaces and you can watch the old people dying of the heat with no place to go for shelter.”

“That’s awful,” she said as we paused near the base of the wheel.

“Awful,” I said dreamily remembering that wonderful torrid day I spent in the marketplace. I had daydreamed of that marketplace over the years knowing I’d have to return just once more before I died.

“You like the wheel?” I asked.

“Haven’t been on it in years,” she said with a little laugh. “I thought you were going to show me what you’ve got in that bag.”

“I can run it,” I said. “I’ve watched Hector.”

“We can’t afford to run it when we’ve got no customers,” she said.

“I’ll pay for it,” I said, reaching into my pocket, pulling out a handful of bills, and handing them to her. She took them, looked around for someplace to put them and stuffed them into the pocket of her dress.

“It’s too much,” she said, and pulled some of the money out.

I covered her hand with mine and said, “I have much money and there isn’t enough fun in the world. Get in.”

She smiled and climbed into the waiting gondola. I smiled as I have always done and threw the switch. I even turned on the lights and music. I threw the switch full power and as the wheel ground into action I leaped onto the gondola with Diedre.

“You’re crazy,” she said, laughing. “Who’s going to turn it off?”

The wheel picked up speed. I felt the wind blowing through my green hair and watched her.

“Wouldn’t it be fun,” I said, “to leap off into the night like a bird when we get to the top?”

“We’re not birds,” she said, smiling.

“More’s the pity,” I said into the wind, which took away heat, time, space, and night, leaving only the shift from star-filled sky to darkened circus grounds surrounded by the recorded calliope music of the “Colonel Boogie March.”

“But how do we know we can’t fly unless we try?”

“You are funny,” she said, holding tightly to the bar in front of her.

“I know,” I said with a sigh. “You want to see what’s in my bag now?”

“Sure,” she said.

And I opened it.

When I pulled out the red scorpion in the clear plastic vial and held it before her, she pulled back only slightly. This was a girl who had seen much.

“Beautiful, isn’t she,” I said. “I picked her up after she had killed a gas station attendant in Waco.”

“I am not partial to crawling creatures,” Diedre said.

“I know,” I said. “Let’s let her go for a little walk.”

I opened the top of the vial and shook the scorpion onto the floor of the gondola. Diedre lifted her feet.

“This isn’t so funny, Gwyn,” she said. “I mean. I know you wouldn’t let a really poisonous scorpion . . . but it’s not funny.”

I looked deeply into her eyes. They were alert, bright with the exhilaration of the spinning wheel in which we rode, tinged with just the first blush of fear.

“But wait,” I shouted. “There’s more.”

I pulled out the fer-de-lance in a plastic Tupperware box with air holes punched by the Joker personally using the ice pick that killed three lonely widows in Northern Wisconsin just two years ago.