Ivyland

by Miles Klee

  He’s mastered theory on the page but finds himself hopelessly lacking onstage—there’s this one total bastard instructor who picks on him incessantly, says he’s got no talent, no inner clown to speak of, is going nowhere in the cutthroat world of professional clowning. But our boy is not so easily dissuaded. He grits his teeth and endures all this bastard’s snide insults and shitty sneering, works his ass off really, stitching each convoluted clown gesture into the fabric he used to call himself, and finally it becomes clear to the boy that this prof is trying to motivate him, trying to unlock some latent glimpsed potential, which he finally does, if you can believe it, achieving a naturalism awesome for this day and age, and the boy goes on to graduate top of his class, for whatever that’s worth in clown college.

  At last he is unquestionably prepared to confront the old clown. He has spite in his sweat and cunning to match. He is ready. Now it’s merely a matter of tracking down, footprint by absurdly huge footprint, his only, ever and unwitting foe.

  The circus could be anywhere by now, years after the fact, but the young man’s desire to punish the clown seems to overcome all logistical snags, and after driving around the country for two months and countless interrogations of squinty locals, he finds the circus setting up just outside a Northwestern hamlet, among towering pines. He smells victory. Our boy buys every ticket to the show that night, using virtually his whole life savings.

  As he sits, immaculately dressed in his only suit, alone in a tent smaller and more squalid than he remembers, he reflects on the simple brilliance of his plan. With no one else at the show, the clown will be forced use him for the horse’s ass bit—a delicious setup for humiliating ruin. Okay, so the show begins, business as usual, all the other animals and performers showcasing their respective talents, slightly confused by the empty house but professional about it, the young man watching in a distant fog, biding his time, tensing and un-tensing muscles, starting to fidget in psychotic excitement.

  Finally, the aging, near-retirement clown, sad face locked in rictus, makes his fateful entrance, does some half-hearted solo shtick, meanders over to the young man, not recognizing his victim, and sets the trap in motion.

  “Excuse me, sir!”

  No response.

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  The young man can barely keep a straight face.

  “Yes,” he answers, too coolly for his own good.

  “Are you the horse’s head?”

  Déjà vu. The young man is smiling too hard.

  Through a sadistic smirk: “No. I’m not.”

  “Well then,” says the clown (who would like to get this over with; doing private shows isn’t really what he got into the business for, and he’s about ready to have a drink with the lion tamer out back) as he whirls about to an imaginary audience, maybe even winking at an imaginary pigtailed girl in the front row, “you must be the horse’s ass!”

  There is a fleeting breath of uncertainty with that diseased logic frozen between them. The young man draws himself up to stand at an intimidating height, but if you were there, you wouldn’t have noticed. The clown turns back, finds himself looking quizzically up at the tall young man, unable to see the angle, the trajectory, of what’s next.

  Suddenly our boy snaps his arm upward as if unholstering a gun. The clown is staring down the barrel of a knobby index finger that trembles a millimeter away from his red foam nose.

  Moment of truth. Heart beginning to wormify, stomach contracting before the backsprings. Licking cracked lips, the grown and tortured boy speaks with undying hate and frothy venom, unbridled disgust and final superiority.

  “Fuck you, Clown!”

  End of Henri’s Favorite Joke

  Right—what I say to Henri is: “Fuck you, Clown.” Can’t tell if he loves the joke because he thinks the boy chokes on his moment of triumph or because he believes the revenge is somehow perfectly executed. He’d probably say for both reasons, if only to confuse the issue.

  Henri continues, unfazed by the comment, which has lost its impact since we started using it to mean anything at all.

  “I can’t find paper towels,” he finally interrupts himself to say.

  “Behind you,” I mutter.

  He rips off a few squares and asks do I remember Larry M. from high school.

  “He dated that girl with the hot star tattoo but hairy arms for like a day maybe?”

  “Sure, Laura-who-came-out-afterwards. Plus wasn’t he legally blind, I mean as far as getting to drive.”

  “No.”

  “Whatever, okay.” His sentence cracks: o-gnay.

  “And Laura was friends with the pregnant twins.”

  “Weren’t both pregnant. One was pregnant twice.”

  “This is about Larry, anyway.”

  “Yeah. What’d you need paper towels for?” He’s just holding a wad of them.

  “Nothing. Listen. Remember when Larry was out for like a week of school and never said why?” Not really. “He was having surgery on his dick.”

  I want to find out who told him this and violently mute that mouth forever.

  “Like enlargement,” is all I can think to say.

  “That’s the thing: emergency room. He had to get stitches cause he cut it in an accident or some shit.”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “Seriously!” I can’t believe he’s bought this story, and probably off some deep-in-shit acquaintance from high school. “I ran into DH at Sipwell’s a while back”—yep—”and he swears it’s true, he’s seen the scar.”

  “You in Sipwell’s? I didn’t think you’d been there since your open mic.”

  “So you have to at least acknowledge the scar.”

  “Must I.”

  “He gets the stitches. And afterward, guess what the doctor says.”

  “Never reproduce.”

  “He says, ‘As long as you have these stitches in, you can’t get an erection.’ “

  In the ensuing weird silence, I can divine the steady murmurs of a few collected voices outside.

  “Can’t as in … physically unable to get aroused.”

  “Aidan, brace yourself: Can’t as in the imperative. I am ordering you to not get turned on.”

  “Lunacy. Never happened.” Henri nods with sympathetically arched eyebrows and a sad-but-true face that nearly conceals his perverse amusement.

  “He couldn’t, or the stitches would pop.”

  “Have you called that tree guy yet?”

  “For real.” This clearly applies to his anecdote, not my question.

  “Doctor can’t expect that.”

  “I dunno, but it’s not like they can just prescribe you pills, okay, there’s not a huge market for chemicals that make your dick flaccid.”

  “Are you going to clean up whatever you spilled in there?”

  “Dog could get it.”

  “We don’t have a dog.”

  “I’m saying we should. You’re not letting me finish.”

  After lengthy and falsely superior sighing meant to indicate I’m ready to hear the big finish, I prop my head up on my elbow, bored, and take a sip of orange juice, failing to recall I’d just brushed my teeth.

  “So the reason he was out of school is pffffhaha, O, God, this is too good, okay, so he, he, the first day after the emergency room he’s in math with Ms. Delacroix, right?”

  I wish I weren’t laughing at this, but now I can’t stop. Henri nods, already falling apart.

  “That tight blue sweater we loved …”

  “No,” I groan.

  “He popped every stitch!” Henri exclaims. “Only Larry, man.” Nostalgic head-shaking. “Heh, Larry.”

  “And the moral is … ?”

  Henri disappears into the living room with his balled-up paper towels as I put dishes away.

  “Sure are a lotta people staring at it,” I hear.

  The maple in our front yard got struck by lightning last night. I didn’t see the bolt itself, but I can picture it carv
ing the storm-tossed treetop and stabbing at what’s now a charred and leafless ten-foot trunk. I did hear the crack of doom that accompanies a lightning strike too close to home, the kind of thunder that rattles bones in their sockets and would’ve had our theoretical dog cowering under the dining room table. Just grateful it didn’t kick off more blackouts.

  “They’re taking pictures.”

  “Of a dead tree?”

  “Check it out.”

  I walk in to see, and he’s right. Several flashes go off in less than a minute.

  “Doesn’t it remind you of––”

  I’m out the door in ratty sandals before Henri can make the trademark non sequitur. I let the screen door slam behind me, cursing when I hear one of the hinges break off and clatter on the porch.

  “Don’t any of you come suing me when that falls on you,” I yell.

  Only puzzled looks. Yeah, we all have total faith in this dead maple’s structural integrity. A couple is poring over the blown-off twigs and boughs lying around. Across the street, open-mouthed and wary of the other onlookers, stands Grady, a mangled blue kite in hand. His dirty ferret is on the loose, exploring the drawers of a bureau left on the curb when our neighbors moved to Philly. I smile at him but stop short of anything more. The smile he sends back is cautious, meant for a stranger. He’s trying to look past me.

  “This your tree?” a pale woman asks.

  “Until they tear it down later today,” I snap.

  This fortysomething man, one of the Guatemalans who plays soccer down at Floods Hill on the weekends, takes a step forward and soberly corrects me.

  “We cannot let you destroy this miracle.”

  “Excuse me?”

  A stringy-haired character who must’ve been home-schooled in the worst way, wearing a seasonal sweater knitted by herself or an equally creepy sibling, moves one deliberate step closer to Soccer Guy.

  “God has spoken through your tree.”

  Soccer Guy explains, in no inelegant fashion:

  “Your tree, it embraces the Virgin.” He ushers me into the street, indicating a side of the maple’s black skeleton I haven’t seen.

  “Uh.”

  “You see?”

  “Am I missing something? You did say virgin.”

  “Look.” He steps forward and traces the outline of an overcooked vertical rift in the bark. “See?” I touch the ridges of the gash, darkening my fingers, soft black crumbs trickling off. Then I notice the split isn’t just bark-deep—it cuts into the trunk itself.

  “She is inside.”

  The rest of the peanut gallery, up till now content to let this guy do the talking, produces a knowing chuckle. Really knew how to blow a first impression.

  “She is in there,” the man says, as though he’d just made up his mind. I peer inside at the mangled tree guts, then step back off the curb.

  “When you say …”

  “The Virgin Mary is born of your tree.”

  The whole picture, top-down now. I move forward again, staring through the crack, know what to look for and finally see it. The narrow chin with rough-hewn mouth. Shoulders smoothly sloping back. Supple arms meeting around a perfect oval abdomen with fingers meshed … like, linking, and she’s pulling on that link—if it unclasped, the arms would snap gently off her pregnant belly. The trunk, blasted open at the top, allows the sun’s designs to trickle down inside: dappled shadows thrown by the leaves of other trees, shapes that jump in slow electric flashes. The convincing effect of hair ruffled by wind. I blink with dust in my eye and whisper something into to my chest. Their spokesman introduces himself.

  “I am Anastasio,” he says.

  I mumble, unsure, that my name is Aidan. Anastasio sticks out his hand.

  “I will not let you tear down this tree,” he says.

  A glance at the rest of the crowd leads me to believe they pretty much agree.

  OFFICER R. DANKE ///

  IVYLAND, NEW JERSEY /// LAST WINTER

  Let’s be assholes, says Jack. So we are professional assholes. We prowl down the block collecting Christmas trees from the gutter and pile them in front of Tara Cable’s front door because she refused to give Ed a freezejob. He cited hygienic advantages. She said it was perverted. Now Jack won’t stop calling her “Ice Queen.”

  She and her housemates are the only ones with decorations still up, some with last month’s eggs still crusted on. I spit into the circuitry of the Holiday FX module that makes it so it’s always snowing lightly in a soft gaslight kind of glow, snowing only on their house. Melts fast in 72° January, but even so. When spit fails, I stomp the box till it sparks and smokes, then run. Jack says to hold up. He zips back and kicks over a plastic reindeer. Okay, he says.

  We pull out of the dead-end, I ask where to go, and he says: Straight, who cares, be a man here. I hear him but ask again out of habit. Just straight on Estronale Ave, he yells, straight as a clitoris, if you’ve seen one.

  It’s like that.

  *

  Most of what comes out of Ed’s mouth, you can tell he’s whacked and body-ringing on Belltruvin anti-anxies. (Best line yet: Watch out for that lake—oh! it’s just water.) When we pick him up, his opening gem is, really, “Do you think volcanoes are the places where Hell is spilling over?” He leaves his car out on the turnpike shoulder, traffic patrol dummy propped up in the passenger seat. Why not behind the wheel, I wonder aloud. Don’t trust him, Ed says.

  We detail the action at Tara Cable’s place—he’s pissed we didn’t wait. I swerve to miss a cat, and Jack slaps me harder than he has to. I don’t do that, I say. No, retard, he goes, that was Coach Syd you just passed.

  In the side mirror Coach is taking the scenic route to nowhere, drunker than when he crashed our Fourth of July party last year, before Jack pulled up all the No Parking signs for a bonfire but after Bert tore his leg open on the Slip-n-Slide. I don’t go in for those blowouts anymore.

  I back up and roll down the window. Coach ambles over, smoothing his, like, eight hairs back.

  “What’s up, psychos?” He grins good-naturedly, recognizing no one.

  Jack leans over me and pegs him in the moustache with an egg, point-blank.

  “Fagmaster,” yells Coach Syd, spitting shell, “I’ll shove a whole carton up your dick.” But we’re gone, and odds are this little memory won’t quite stick. Here’s a guy who’d guess that AC/DC invented batteries and Braveheart wrote the Bill of Rights, who never reassembles the previous night. Even if tomorrow we were back in his joke of a health class, he wouldn’t add things up. He’d just pause for a sec, studying us with a hint of attempted thought, before repeating that you can’t always see visible blood with the naked eye.

  We find Bertrand at the outdoor shooting range, and he hands me his target: planet-sized tits Photoshopped onto my sister, bullet-hole beauty mark and all. Starts laughing. I crumple it up and shove the sooty ball in his gaping mouth.

  Guy thinks he’s going to be a comedian. His “impression” of Teddy Roosevelt, he explains, he beats a teddy bear with a dildo. How long does this go on, Ed asks. Till they laugh, Bertrand tells him. Your life is laughable enough, Jack says, polishing his nametag with a sleeve. We pass the sign with our town motto. Ivyland: The Gateway to New York. Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Gatekeep.

  We stop for Atomic Motherclucker Wings from MexiLickin’SurfHog, but it’s only 0130h and Sipwell’s—I mean, the speakeasy that replaced it—is still going with some gay open mic thing, so we troop in and sit in the dark and drink the beer they serve in Adderade bottles as a joke. Ed, rung out, asks the bartender for a piece of ice and sits down with it. Jack says: Not here, freak. And in your pants? is what Bertrand asks, disappointed. So Ed gets up, testily rattling his Belltruvin bottle, and heads to the can, where he can get off by icing the back of his neck in peace, but on the way he spills his beer all over this twat in the next booth who is unwisely impolite in lecturing us on breaches of the social contract until Jack grabs him by the chin and makes a thre
at I truly can’t hear on account of the noisy drunks and music.

  Then out of nowhere it’s last call. Blink later, lights out. At the door, we’re getting shoved and jostled by these cologned-up frat boys from Iv College, real Grove Avenue jizzrags, some in the Collars, no doubt—matching chains, pastel polos, a snuffbox of rufies each. Mad rude.

  Bertrand says, “Drunk and disorderly?”

  Jack says, “Let’s play this one by the book.”

  So we let them start walking up the street toward campus. We get the car and circle around the block three times, egging them worse and worse each pass till they’re red and screaming that we’re pussy Endless rent-a-goons and one chucks a bottle that shatters on the windshield.

  “Is there a code for egging?” Ed asks as we screech off, and I say, “The hell do I know, look it up.” He bends forward to scroll though the console for a while before announcing the closest he can find is malicious mischief. “Good ol’ 594,” Jack says, knowing the book down to the comma. How was that solo freezejob in a public bathroom, Ed? “Can’t believe everyone doesn’t masturbate that way,” Ed says. “It doesn’t work for everyone,” I remind him. Possible side effect. Of Belltruvin abuse. “It’s so much better when you don’t have to touch it,” Ed goes, “even if you gotta ice yourself.”

  “There’s nothing to do,” Bertrand whines, and I could just punch him in the throat, because aren’t we doing things at this very moment? You miss high school, Bert? Miss ripping on me for being a crap-out, pass-out rich kid? Or the summer when you, you total waste, were with that busted skank from industry row in South Woodbane, and Jack, DH and I were driving around in Ed’s mom’s minivan with an Aqua Artillery 3000 and happened to pull up next to her as she was idling at a red light with the window open? Because I fondly recall the automatic van door sliding silently at the push of a button and the gun slung in a belt looped over the dry cleaning hook, a Blackhawk’s deathbringer. I remember thinking Loki, god of mischief, had graced us, and purposely keeping that thought to myself. Two fingers curling around the giant trigger.