The second-to-last night, his hopes of an invitation fast fading, he confessed his hopes and dreams and begged for an apprenticeship. The clowns had indulged him, patted him on the back, told stories of their own glory days, but none of them had encouraged him. It was a hell of a life, they’d said, something they would never wish on anybody. It was brutal on family and worse on love. Circus life set them apart from the rest of the world, created a distance that could never be bridged. Once you were in, you were in. They were trying to scare him off, but Benny had persisted.
Two hours after their final performance, as they were packing to move on, Zerbo—the boss clown—had given him the word. They’d take him on for the rest of the season, no pay, just food and a place to lay his head. If he was good enough to take part in the act by the season’s end, and could get some laughs of his own, the circus manager—Mr. Appleby—would hire him on. If not, he’d be sent home.
Benny had given it his all, pulled out every gag, every funny face, every silly walk he had ever learned. He had studied the troupe, could stand-in for almost any of them if someone fell ill. At the end of the season, on the fairgrounds in Briarwood, Connecticut, they were as good as their word—a spotlight of his own, a chance to prove himself.
The laughs had been thin and the applause half-hearted, but Zerbo had given him the thumbs up. Tiny had told him later that it had been a near thing, but he’d worked so hard they had wanted to give him a second chance.
Now, four years of second chances later, he still felt like an apprentice.
That Friday night, Rose moved on. She’d mentioned a carnival somewhere, and a little league baseball tournament later in the week, but Benny hadn’t really been listening. Kind as she’d been to him, a woman as attractive as Rose wasn’t interested in doing more than selling him a book, and she’d done that already.
He stayed up all through that cool night, reading Tovolo’s words over and over until the battery of his flashlight began to give out, the light to dim. By then, the horizon had begun to glow with the promise of dawn, but Benny read the final chapter of the book over a few more times. At first, he’d thought the whole thing was some kind of joke, Tovolo trying to pull one over on the reader, or attempting some tongue-in-cheek social commentary about circus life that didn’t quite translate in his imperfect English. The book had been broken down into thirds—part one a memoir of his life, part two a kind of compendium of what he considered the funniest gags, and part three a reminiscence about his lifelong interest in the darker aspects of the history of clowns, everything from suicides and murders to haunted circuses and black magic.
The final chapter concerned Tovolo’s lifelong struggle with his own talent, and his belief that he had never been funny enough. Two small circuses had merged, forcing him to perform alongside his longtime rival, Vincenzo Mellace, and every time the audience laughed for Mellace, Tovolo had wanted to set himself on fire. The reference to self-immolation made Benny shiver every time he read it, and he wondered if it had been written before or after the tragic blaze that had led to the Italian’s retirement.
Tovolo had befriended a Belgian fire-eater who had come over from the other circus and who shared his hatred of Vincenzo Mellace. The fire-eater’s mother travelled with her son, and sometimes told fortunes on the show grounds after the audience had gone home and the circus folk had drunk too much wine.
She had been the one to instruct him as to the ingredients for the elixir, and to explain to him precisely how to summon the spirit of Polichinelle, the patron of clowns, the demon known to children as the jester puppet Punch.
As the circus folk began to rise that Saturday morning, the day arriving overcast and bleak, Benny read Tovolo’s final chapter over and over. Each time, he held his breath as he read the last few lines.
Mellace’s routine was a disaster, he had written. He has performed Busy Bee thousands of times, and yet it seemed like his first. Laughter was sporadic at best, and mostly sympathetic at that. There were boos. For myself . . . I could do no wrong. They laughed at a simple chase on the Hippodrome Track. They howled when Rostoni and I performed the Shoot-Out. And when I went out to do the Cooking Class gag on my own, it felt like a dream of how smoothly I have always wished for a performance to unfold.
God, how they laughed.
I cannot say for certain that Polichinelle was in my corner tonight, but he was certainly no friend to Mellace. If offering the demon a little of my blood and a handful of days at the end of my life is all that is required for me to become the greatest clown in the world, it is a small price to pay.
When Benny heard Oscar and Tiny calling for him, he closed the book, yet as he went about his morning, he could think of nothing but the elixir and the summoning spell that the fire-eater’s mother had given to Tovolo. One line kept repeating itself in his head.
God, how they laughed.
The blood seeping out of the midget car was Benny’s first clue that something had gone awry. The audience kept laughing—either they hadn’t seen it yet or they thought it was part of the show—so Benny didn’t slow down. He waddled on his big shoes, storming with exaggerated frustration toward Clancy the Cop, and slapped the other clown in the face with a rubber chicken.
It looked like it hurt.
The audience roared.
He’d asked the demon Polichinelle for his heart’s desire—to be the funniest clown in the circus. As blood flew from Clancy the Cop’s split lip, Benny began to have second thoughts. He staggered backward, tripped over his own big clown feet, and let himself roll with the fall. His whole life had been spent performing such antics, so if there was anything he knew how to do, it was fall. He rolled on his curving spine, then flipped back up onto his feet and executed a fluid bow.
Clancy, snorting like a bull, eyes bulging with his fury, barrelled toward him running on an engine of vengeance. Benny saw him coming just in time, spun in a circle to avoid his outstretched hands, and whacked Clancy in the back of the head with the plucked, frozen chicken—it wasn’t made of rubber anymore. The impact dropped Clancy to the ground, where he began to spasm and seize.
Benny lifted the chicken by its legs, examining it in full view of the audience. From their seats, they couldn’t have seen the blood on the chicken, would presume his horror just a part of the act. He turned and looked at them, a wide-eyed clown mugging for the paying customers, and they ate it up. The stands were shaking with laughter.
Stunned, a dead, frozen chicken dangling from one clenched fist, Benny remembered the midget car. He turned, saw the blood dripping from the door seam, and started to run toward it. A scream filled the air and Benny spun to see Tiny standing in the window of the Hotshots building façade, his striped dress and blond wig both in flames that spread quickly to his arms and the baby doll bundled in his arms.
But from the way Tiny stared at the swaddled infant—and from the high, shrieking noise that could really be nothing else—Benny had the terrible idea that maybe it wasn’t a doll in Tiny’s arms. Not anymore. Not thanks to Polichinelle.
Burning alive, screaming baby in his arms, Tiny jumped from the façade, which was now engulfed in flames, and plummeted toward Oscar, who stood knee-deep in the water barrel below. Too late, Oscar realized his situation. He tried to climb out of the barrel, but tripped on the rim and fell half-in, half-out of the water, where he lay when Tiny and his baby struck Earth in a comet-like blaze. The trap-door opened and all three of them crashed through, water barrel and all. Steam and smoke rose with a hiss and the stink of burning hair and flesh began to fill the big top.
The applause was deafening. The laughter rolled through the tent like a hurricane.
Bobo shot Zerbo through the head during the Shoot-Out. The guns were supposed to be made of rubber. When Zerbo’s only bullet went astray and killed a young father, passing through his popcorn tub on the way and spraying butter and popcorn onto a dozen people, the laughter turned to breat
hless, teary-eyed hysteria that reminded Benny of his mother.
Numb with shock, Benny staggered over to the midget car—what the public called a clown car—and vomited across the hood. Crimson leaked from every crevice in the miniature vehicle, pooling on the floor and running across the ground. The stink of blood and offal wafted off the midget car, and he felt as if he stood in an abattoir.
The driver’s door popped open. A colourfully clad leg slipped out, and then Polichinelle climbed from the car. He wore a red and black jester costume, complete with ruffles at the shirt cuffs and bells atop his pronged hat and at the toes of his shoes. His alabaster skin did not appear to be makeup, nor did the bright red circles like burn scars on his cheeks.
Benny caught a glimpse of the carnage inside the midget car. The trap-door meant to be beneath it no longer existed. Eight clowns had been broken and twisted and jammed together to make sure they could all fit in a space that would’ve been cramped for two, and somehow Polichinelle had fit into the driver’s seat.
Bobo stood in shock above the corpse of Zerbo, shaking and weeping. As Polichinelle pirouetted toward him, Bobo could only stare, but as he looked into the demon’s eyes, he screamed.
Polichinelle plucked a trick flower from Zerbo’s corpse and held it as if offering it to Bobo for a sniff. When he squeezed the rubber bulb dangling from the flower, an acrid-smelling liquid jetted out of it, coating Bobo’s head. His scream rose to a shriek as his face began to melt and his eyes sank into his skull. When he crumpled to his knees and then toppled sideways to land beside Zerbo, his scream died.
Benny had never heard laughter so uproarious. The audience cheered. Some stood and others doubled-over, clutching their bellies. Some slapped hands across their chests as their hearts burst and they slid into the aisles, gasping into cardiac arrest. Throats went hoarse, faces turned red, hands blistered from applause, but they couldn’t stop. Their faces were stretched into grins that split the corners of their mouths and they wept tears of terror and pain and amusement, but they simply could not stop. It was, after all, the funniest thing they had ever seen.
God, how they laughed, Benny thought, and then, at last, he began to laugh as well.
Polichinelle performed a mad, capering little dance, part ballet and part mincing, mocking swagger, and then mimed a curtsy to the audience.
Through his laughter and his tears, Benny managed to choke out a single word.
“Why?”
Polichinelle gave him an apologetic shrug, an angelic look on the demon’s face.
“You wanted to be the funniest clown in the circus.”
Trying to catch his breath, Benny forced out the words. “All . . . all the others . . . are dead.”
Polichinelle giggled. “Don’t blame me, Benny. Blame your mother for all those years of lies.”
Benny stared, eyes widening in horror. “My . . . my . . .” he gasped, but he couldn’t get the word out.
“Sorry, pal,” Polichinelle said. “But you’re just not that funny.”
The giant mallet seemed to appear from nowhere. Polichinelle gripped it in both hands as he swung, and Benny knew it wouldn’t be made of hollow plastic or rubber. The crowd roared, laughing themselves to death.
God, how they laughed.
BREATHE MY NAME
There came a time when Tommy Betts thought they’d all have been better off if the mine had collapsed on top of them, crushing them under tons of stone and earth and coal. Better that, by far, than dying a little bit with every breath of poison air. Better that than seeing the fear in the faces of men he’d looked up to all his life, and desperation in his own father’s eyes.
As a boy, Tommy had told his dad to be careful, worried that if they dug too deep, the miners might break through into Hell. His mother had still been making him go to church in Wheeling every Sunday back then, and Hell presented a special terror for him. His father and the other miners would come back with their clothes caked with black dust, faces painted with the same crap that filled their saliva when they’d spit, and Tommy worried they might one day encounter demons down there.
At eighteen, Tommy had gone into the mine for the first time and discovered that the church had a pretty simple vision of Hell, and what waited in Shaft 39 was a different sort of damnation altogether. In the seven years since, he’d learned that even the bravest man discovered claustrophobia in the deep underground, with the walls pressing in and the weight of a mountain hanging above him. The slightest tremor might be the end of days. Two miles into the heart of a mountain, they might as well have been floating in space. That first trip down, Tommy had understood that no matter how many precautions might be taken, the miners were on their own.
Rick Nilsson, one of his father’s drinking buddies, had said the life of a miner was like playing Russian roulette every day for the rest of your life. You could find the chamber with the bullet any time, without warning. For Tommy and his dad, Al, and for Nilsson and Jerry Tolland and Rob McIlveen and Randy Wisialowski and a dozen other guys, it happened on the tenth of April.
It was raining, but no one complained about the black storm clouds or the soaking they got on the walk up from the parking lot. Underground it didn’t matter what the weather was like outside. In fact, as far as Tommy was concerned, the shittier the day the better. It was the beautiful days when he wished he could be at home with Melissa, tossing a ball in the backyard with their boy, Jake, doing a little barbecue. Jakey was only five, but sometimes Tommy let him flip the burgers.
Stormy days, though, he didn’t mind the mine so much. At least it was dry down there.
At the entrance to the mine, they waited for Wisialowski to show up. The guy was always fucking late and almost always hung over when he did show up. But Hanson, the shift supervisor, wouldn’t let them go down until the whole shift had arrived. They were supposed to be there by 7:30. At a quarter to eight, just when Hanson was about to let them go down and dock Wisialowski for the whole day whether he showed up or not, the guy pulled into the lot.
“Standing out here in the rain waiting on this asshole,” Tommy’s dad muttered, standing next to him.
“I’m in no hurry to get down there,” Tommy replied.
His father grunted. “Ain’t the point.”
Tommy didn’t say anything to that. There was never any arguing with the old man. Even his eyes seemed chiselled out of stone, made of the same stuff they were digging into. He had a scar on his left temple from a fight years back when one of his crew had gone stir crazy down in the mine. Al Betts had been the one to finally subdue the head case, but not before the guy tried bashing his skull in. The rest of the crew looked up to Al. He wasn’t the kind of man who started shit, but he’d be the one to put an end to it.
Hanson walked into their midst, hands up to get their attention. “All right, listen up! Wisialowksi, you paying attention?”
With the rain streaming down his slicker and spotting his glasses, the supervisor looked like an alien species standing amongst the miners. Wisialowski nodded, red-rimmed eyes anxious.
“This is the last time you’re late, Randy,” Hanson told him. “I’m saying this in front of everyone, so nobody can complain you weren’t warned. Every time you’re late, you cost us money. You’re all going down twenty-five minutes later than scheduled. Multiply that by eighteen, and you’re looking at seven and a half hours of accumulated time. So the next time you’re late, I’m docking you—and only you—for the total accumulated time you’ve delayed the entire crew. And if there’s a time after that, you’ll be fired.”
Nobody said a word. They stood in the rain and waited until Hanson sent them on their way. The whole crew climbed aboard the mantrip—the cable car that lowered the men into the mine and drew them back up again later. Only when they were on their way down into the ground with the lights flickering around them and the mantrip’s wheels squeaking on the metal rails did the miners start to grumbl
e. They cussed out Hanson, now that the supervisor wasn’t there to hear them. Tommy said nothing. Every member of the crew had said much worse about Wisialowski themselves, but now that management had singled him out, the wagons would be circled. The guy was a drunk and a slacker even when he made it to the job on time, but he’d been down there in the tunnels with them and Hanson had probably never had coal dust under his manicured fingernails. At least, that was the way they looked at it.
Tommy thought the warning to Wisialowski had been more than fair, but he wouldn’t dare say so.
Jerry Tolland sat next to him in the mantrip. He scowled and looked at Tommy. “Fucking Hanson.”
Tommy just nodded, rolling his eyes.
“What’d you guys do this weekend?” Jerry asked.
That brought a smile to his face. “I’m building a tree fort for Jake. Ain’t much of a carpenter, but it’s coming out all right. Took Melissa out to dinner Saturday night to that new place, Evergreen. No place to go for beers, but you want to make the wife happy, bring her there.”
“Expensive?”
“Not like you’d think. Shit, they know nobody around here can afford expensive.”
They fell silent after that. Something about the mine had that effect. The deeper they went, the quieter the miners became. It often lasted well into the first hour after work began, until they became acclimated again. Some people might have thought it was fear that made them quiet, but Tommy thought of it as respect. You worked down there in the ground, you had to give the mountain its due.
The mantrip squealed as it slowed, then rocked them a little as it came to a stop.
The crew stepped out of the contraption, cables swaying. There were burned out lights along the length of the shaft, but down here, they were all working perfectly. Not so much as a flicker. When it came to the workspace, they didn’t fuck around. The dim yellow light washed over the stone.
Tell My Sorrows to the Stones Page 7