Touch of the Clown

by Glen Huser

  Livvy and I walk to the playground after we’ve stuffed ourselves with hot dogs. I take the survival bag with me, and when Livvy gets tired of playing on the equipment, we sit leaning against a big tire. Livvy draws a picture of a tiger roasting a marshmallow while I try to read. She talks nonstop, though, as she colors, and I give up on Jane Eyre and pull out the word-search book. There is one puzzle left. I work at it slowly to make it last as long as possible.

  “Can we come here tomorrow?” Livvy asks. “I want to come here every day.”

  “What about art school? Don’t you want to go anymore? Besides, we can’t come tomorrow. This is a one-time thing.”

  “Oh, baa,” Livvy scowls as she colors her tiger chartreuse with magenta stripes.

  “Tigers are orange and black,” I say.

  “Not this one.” Livvy looks at me defiantly.

  I am searching for the word pomegranate in the puzzle book. It’s a tricky puzzle filled with words that have a lot of p’s in them: hippopotamus, proposition, pepper.

  It is late in the afternoon when Livvy and I walk back around the little lake to the picnic site. Before we can get to the shelter and picnic tables, we can hear Crispy Dan whooping with laughter.

  “O-oh,” he says when we get there, “betta not tell ya the enda that ’un. Little pitchers got bigyears.” His words are even fuzzier, and Grandma and Mrs. Perth in their lawn chairs laugh at the way he staggers back and forth in front of the camp stove and makes funny faces at them. The vodka bottle hidden behind the picnic bag is nearly empty.

  “Uncle Crispy’s walking funny!” Livvy claps her hands. “I want to walk funny, too.”

  “Now see what you’ve done, Myron,” Mrs. Perth cackles. “There’ll be no stopping her now.”

  But Livvy does wind down. “Me want hot dogs,” she says when it’s past suppertime and Crispy Dan has brought out a few more bags of potato chips.

  “There are no more. We ate them all at lunch.”

  “Pooh.” Livvy makes a little hill of ripplechip crumbs and starts dropping them into her grape Kool-aid.

  “Smarten up.” I grab the bag of chips away from her but she lets out one of her full-force shrieks.

  “Barbara, you quit teasing the baby,” Grandma hollers.

  I give Livvy back her bag of chips but she bats it onto the ground.

  “Be a brat. I don’t care.”

  I go for a little walk around the campsite and expect she’ll be tagging along in a minute or two. She doesn’t, though, and when I get back, I see she has draped herself across the picnic table. I wish we were at home so I could get her to bed.

  “Are you having a nap?” I ask her, but she just makes a cranky mmm sound for an answer. She doesn’t want to hear Winnie-the-Pooh or draw pictures in the scrapbook or play catch with Bingo. The back of Crispy Dan’s panel is open and I can see the end of the foam mattress.

  “Let’s play Pocahontas,” I say. “In the tent of Pocahontas, her bed of soft buffalo-skins waits, ready for Pocahontas to lie down, to sleep and dream…”

  “I’m not tired,” Livvy grumbles. “I want to go in a canoe.”

  “Dream of the sky people who will come and get her so she can go hunting with them, hunting through the stars, shooting arrows at the moon…”

  “That’s not in Pocahontas.”

  The vodka bottle is empty now and the grown-ups are drinking beer out of their Koolaid glasses.

  “What I wanna know…” Crispy Dan is waving his glass, flinging out splashes of beer and foam, “is why the guvment don’t do nothin’ for us. I mean, I should be legible…eligible…illegible for disability…”

  “Don’t be hollering.” Mrs. Perth looks like she’s trying to get out of her lawn chair but can’t quite do it. “Keep your voice down, Myron, or the cops’ll be over here like a duck on a June bug.”

  A family at the next picnic site is quickly packing up their supper. They look over at us and the mother shakes her head back and forth with a sad look on her face.

  “What’s she staring at?” Daddy mutters and then says in a loud voice, “This is a public place…”

  “Yes, it is a public place,” the woman says, herding a couple of wide-eyed children Livvy’s age into the back of the car.

  Finally, after a trip to the washrooms in the shelter, I lure Livvy into the back of the panel and get her to lie down on the mattress. She curls herself into a ball and falls asleep almost at once. I turn on the flashlight and aim the beam at the page where I’ve left off in Jane Eyre.

  Crispy Dan and Daddy are having an argument.

  “Yeah, Edwin, tell someone who cares…” Crispy Dan chants over and over again. “The guvment don’t care…”

  I switch off the light and curl against Livvy. I can feel the tangle of her hair against my cheek. She makes little stirring sounds like a sleeping puppy. I fall asleep, too, until I feel the back of the panel shuddering as Daddy tries to climb in. It is totally dark now and he trips, falling into the trays of potato chips. The whole back part of the truck is filled with the sound of crashing trays and broken bags of chips being crunched by Daddy’s flailing body. There is swearing and Livvy is suddenly wide awake and crying.

  “What in tunnation goin’ on?” Crispy Dan yells from the parking gravel below us. “Careful them trays. That’s produce, y’know.”

  I can see Daddy lying on the floor of the truck when I finally find the flashlight. He is moaning. Crispy Dan slams the door shut and locks it.

  “I don’t like it in here,” Livvy is screaming. “I want out.” I try to wrap my arms around her. “No,” she wails. “Let me go. I want out of here.”

  “Shhh,” I say. “Everything’s okay.” When Livvy quits crying long enough to catch her breath, I realize that Daddy isn’t making any sound at all. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he hit his head as he fell. The thought feels like ice when you hold it and it gets to be more than your skin can bear. I shine the flashlight back over him. He does look dead, a dead man with potato chips caught in his hair. And then I see his chest rise, and before Livvy can start into her crying again, I hear a snore against the sound of the truck motor.

  The truck seems to go back and forth a lot on the road. More than once we can hear the sound of someone honking his horn loudly at Crispy Dan. Livvy’s crying has settled into a quiet shuddering. Finally the truck gears down and, climbing up onto a curb, stops. I have kept the light on all the time and the beam finds Crispy Dan’s face as he unbolts the door. He opens his mouth in horror at what has happened to the back of the truck and his trays of potato chips. “Awww…” It sounds like he’s going to cry, and in the big circle of his mouth, I can see he has lost his teeth. “Get outta there you sumbitch,” he hollers at Daddy and tries to climb up into the truck, but he slips and falls back, and lies gasping on the boulevard.

  “Daddy.” I let go of Livvy for a minute and shake his arm, but I know I won’t be able to wake him. “C’mon, Livvy, we’d better get Grandma.”

  Livvy doesn’t say anything. She is shuddering so that it seems she will never stop. I get her into the house and tell her to lie on the sofa while I get Grandma’s walker back out to the truck. Mrs. Perth is fast asleep in the truck cab. For a minute, as she struggles to get down, it seems like Grandma is going to collapse, too. If she does, it will look like something has come and killed everyone in their tracks, a terrible plague with instant, deadly power–like the green smog that drifted through the palaces of the Egyptians in that movie about Moses that Grandma and Daddy often watch.

  But Grandma’s hands curl around the piping of her walker, and I am able to get her slowly into the house. I help her into her chair. Livvy is asleep now on the sofa. I get a blanket off Daddy’s bed and take it out to the truck, brush the potato chips out of his hair and put it over him. Somehow Crispy Dan and Mrs. Perth have managed to get across the road to Mrs. Perth’s house.

  When I look out my bedroom window, I can see the panel truck sitting at its odd angle, half on the road,
half on the boulevard. Maybe sometime I’ll be able to tell Cosmo about this day. We’ll sit in a coffee shop with cups of cocoa and cappuccino in front of us, and laugh at Daddy with his crown of potato chips. But for now, I want to push it out of sight, forget it.

  “Tomorrow,” the beautiful girl in Gone With the Wind is always saying. “Tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow I will be back in the workshop again.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Each day we seem to be getting faster at walking the fifteen blocks downtown. Today we are a quarter of an hour early. Livvy has been grumpy ever since she woke up, close to noon.

  “Do you want me to go in with you?” I ask her when we get to the art gallery.

  “No. I can go in by myself.” She’s already pulling the heavy outer door open.

  “See you at break.”

  Nathan is sitting at a picnic table in the park, smoking a cigarette.

  He waves at me.

  “H-Hey, we missed you yesterday. C-Cosmo said you went on an ou-t-ting with your family.”

  I nod.

  “A good t-time?”

  I shake my head. “Mayfair Park with Crispy Dan the Potato Chip Man.”

  “You’re k-kidding.”

  “It was okay to start with, but it went on forever, and everyone got plastered except Livvy and me.”

  “Everybody’s idea of a p-picnic ain’t the same, I guess.” Nathan chuckles softly.

  “You get home okay when we left you at the bus stop?”

  “Oh, yes.” Nathan does a little dance with his eyebrows. “B-But it didn’t make any difference. No one else showed up. It was k-kinda nice having the house all to myself. Except I didn’t know where anyone was, and when everyone d-did come crashing in, it was three o’clock in the morning, and my cousin passed out on my bed, leaving approximately thirty centimeters for me.”

  “Were you able to get back to sleep?”

  “T-Took awhile. I ended up reading for about an hour.”

  “No kidding,” I say. “I read to put myself to sleep, too. Jane Eyre, this book Cosmo gave me–it’s good for that.”

  The noon sun finds touches of redness in Nathan’s hair and face. He holds his nicotine-stained fingers over his chin to cover a new pimple that has a redness all its own.

  “Wonder what Mr. Cosmo Clown has lined up for us t-today?” He draws in smoke, hanging onto it inside for so long I think it must have seeped into all the corners of his body.

  “You should try to quit smoking,” I say, feeling my own face turn red. I hear Grandma’s voice, thick with sarcasm. “Barbara, I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

  “Just one of my bad h-habits,” Nathan smiles.

  “Tell us about the other ones.” Cloud drops her backpack on the picnic table. She pantomimes lighting a cigarette and gestures at Nathan’s pack. Nathan pushes it over to her.

  “You wouldn’t want to know.”

  Cloud launches into a replay of her morning with her mother. “I finally told her that if she signed me up for anything more this summer I’d run away and live with Daddy and spend the rest of the holidays lying in the sun getting sun-burnt, eating junk food and getting fat. That nearly gave her cardiac arrest. Don’t you hate it when parents try to just totally run your life?”

  Nathan and I share a look.

  I try to imagine Cloud and her mother in the morning, arguing over orange juice in crystal glasses on a table with a checkered tablecloth in one of those kitchens with islands of appliances and copper pots and jelly molds on the wall, like in the housekeeping magazines at school.

  “It’s my life, after all,” Cloud continues as we head over to the theater. “I told her she should check to see if they were offering any summer courses on how to parent.”’

  We are inside for only a few minutes today as Cosmo tells us about our assignment before leading us out onto the street. We are supposed to create characters that will be out of place in different spots downtown.

  In a grungy alley, we are high society people; by an exercise gym, we are couch potatoes barely able to move; in a posh shopping district, we are street people.

  “Don’t need to pretend for this,” Nathan whispers to me.

  Cosmo is having a great time. He seems to bound with energy, gathering us to him wherever there’s a parking lot or a small park. “Your greatest source of material,” he tells us, “is the world around you. Did you notice the little boy, determined not to go a step farther with his mother on their shopping expedition? The little old lady in her Sunday hat, passing out leaflets? Or the tattooed biker with the parking ticket on his motorcycle?” Suddenly Cosmo looks at his watch. “Oops,” he says, “we’d better be getting back or Miss Olivia will be wondering what’s happened to us.”

  It is five minutes until her class lets out.

  “We’ll go ahead.” Nathan grabs my hand and we jog along the sidewalk back to the theater.

  “Livvy,” I call as we head back inside, “we’re back.” There is no answer. I have a feeling inside of me that something has gone wrong, a kind of empty feeling except for my heart pounding. A car screeches and slams on its brakes as I race across the street to the art gallery workshop. Everyone is gone from Livvy’s class except for a strange woman rolling up papers.

  “Livvy!” I call.

  “I think everyone’s gone,” the lady says, snapping a rubber band around the papers.

  “But Livvy waits with me.”

  “Oh. The little girl with a…bathroom problem. She said she had to go and see you about half an hour ago. She said her sister’s across the road.”

  “Where’s Bella?”

  “She was sick. Couldn’t make it in today. Didn’t your sister find you? I thought she knew just where to go.”

  “Oh, God.” I hear my voice coming out, a little moan, the sound finding its way past the dryness in my mouth, my throat.

  “Isn’t she h-here?” says Nathan.

  “I think she’s gone home.”

  I’m out on the street again, running, Nathan just behind me. “Livvy,” I cry. It seems to help to call her name as my feet fly over the cement. At the red lights I hop up and down.

  “We’ll catch up,” Nathan says, his own breath coming in huffs and puffs. But we don’t. She is nowhere along the fifteen blocks home. And then I am outside the house. The front door is open, like a rectangular scream, and the windows on either side seem to stare at me.

  “Livvy,” I shout, “are you home?”

  It is Grandma who appears at the door, pushing her walker in front of her.

  “Barbara Kobleimer,” she shrieks, “you get in here. This instant!”

  “Is Livvy…”

  “She’s inside,” Grandma hollers. “And you better hightail it in here this instant.” I see she is giving Nathan the once-over.

  “You want me to w-wait?”

  “No, you’d better get back to the class. Cosmo will be wondering what happened to us.”

  “Missy…” Grandma is still shrieking.

  “Can I call you later?” Nathan positions him-self in front of me, his back to Grandma.

  “We don’t have a phone.”

  “Well, let me give you my number. Maybe you can call me from a pay phone.”

  “Barbara!” Grandma is beside herself. I can hear her actually lifting her walker and slamming it down. Nathan searches for a slip of paper, pulls the flap off his cigarette box, finds the stub of a pencil in a pocket.

  “Your father will hear about this!”

  Nathan squeezes my hand, leaving the slip of paper. “I’ll look after your bag,” he says. “Call me.” I watch him retreating down the block.

  I tuck the paper in my pocket and head for the door. I have to squeeze past Grandma’s walker.

  “You deceitful girl.” Her words seem to be hurled at me. “You can thank your lucky stars that Livvy got home by herself. Lord only knows what might have happened to her…”

  “Where is she?”

  “Her
daddy is attending to her upstairs.”

  As I make my way up the stairs, I can hear Livvy’s muffled sobs. The door to her room is open and she spies me as Daddy pulls a clean T-shirt over her head. She stares at me for a second.

  “I couldn’t find you.” She is really crying now. “Where were you?” The words will hardly come out.

  Daddy whirls around.

  “The class was just out for a little while downtown. I didn’t mean–” I’m not sure what I’m going to say, but I don’t have a chance to say any more.

  In three giant steps, Daddy has made it from Livvy’s room and across the hall to the top of the stairway. He grabs my arm, pulling me away from the stairs. With his free hand, he slaps me across the face. I can hear the smacking sound and the pain bursts a second later. I think my head is going to fly away. He lets go of my arm and then the freed hand explodes against the other side of my face.

  “Don’t, Daddy!” My voice becomes a cry mixed with Livvy’s shrieks.

  With both hands, he grabs my shoulders and shakes me. I am screaming one big scream and the sound rattles around me. He lets go and I feel another slap against my cheek. There is a pause and then the other cheek, a horrible smashing into my eye.

  “You think you can defy me.” He is yelling at the top of his voice. I roll onto the floor and hold my hands over my head. The slaps stop but the voice rages on. “You think you can just go ahead and do what you damn well please when-ever you damn well please. Well, not just yet, Miss Uppity. You’re not of age, and until you are, you will do what I say. You hear? You hear? Answer me.”

  “I hear.” I cry softly, not wanting to cry, my tears dampening the rag rug on the landing.

  “I think you better apologize to your sister.”

  “I’m sorry, Livvy.”

  “Edwin.” I can hear Grandma’s quavery voice from the bottom of the stairs. “Son?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “You come down and rest yourself before you have an attack.”

  “Rest! When do I ever get any rest with one child handicapped and the other a delinquent!”