She wore a navy blue button-up shirt, tight blue slacks, and for a second, I thought she was a cop. She’d pulled her red hair back so tightly that the wrinkles in her forehead seemed to be splitting open. As I stared, gargling, trying to sort whether I was terrified or relieved, she banged my door with her hand, rattling the clown on its stilts. Beside me, I felt Randy settle into the driver’s seat. Then his hand crossed my chest and pushed me gently back against the peeling vinyl.
“M’am. Something I can get you?” Randy asked.
“How about a brain?” the woman hissed. “How about a conscience?”
“Now, ma’am, I’m sure you have both those things.”
The woman nearly spit in our faces, and my legs started shaking. Abruptly, my head jerked sideways, checking for Randy’s other hand. It was on the steering wheel, not feeling around under his seat. And on his face was a smile gentler than any I’d seen all day.
“That’s your natural colour, isn’t it?” He didn’t even turn the key in the ignition. “Beautiful. Almost maroon.”
“Ever seen someone die, Mr Smarty-Arty Ice Cream Man? I have. When I was nine years old. Janitor at my school. Want to know why he died? Because some service asshole like you was parked in the fire lane and the ambulance couldn’t get up the driveway.”
Randy made a pop with his cheeks. “Right,” he said. “Absolutely right. I’m sorry, and it won’t happen again.”
The woman blinked, hand half-raised as though she might slap the van again. Instead, she shook her head and stalked off.
“Never understand it,” Randy murmured, starting the van. “Why are moral people always so angry?” Pulling out of the lot, he glanced my way, saw me ramrod straight against the seat back with my legs still trembling together. “Know many people like that, Big Screen?”
My tongue felt impossibly dry, as though it had been wrung. “Um.” I put my hands on my legs, held them until they quieted. “I think I thought I was one.”
“You?” Randy grinned. Then without warning he reached out and patted me on the head. “Not you, Big Screen. You don’t have it in you. And you don’t treat people that way. Trust your buddy Big Randy.”
We stayed out four more hours. Around six, Randy began cruising family pizza restaurants, the multiplex lot just before the 7:30 p.m. shows, a twenty-four hour workout gym where he sold only ice cream (no ice cream) to exhausted soccer parents and desk-drones desperately stretching their bodies. Most of these people knew Randy’s name, too.
Finally, a little after 9:00, on a residential street overlooking Moonlight Beach, Randy shut off the van, then turned to me. Out on the water, even the moon seemed to be burrowing a straight, white trail to his door.
“You haven’t eaten a single goddamn thing, have you, Big Screen? I’m sorry about that.” Almost as an afterthought, his hands slipped under the seat between his legs and came up with the rifle.
My breath caught, but by this point I was too tired to hold it. “You either,” I murmured, watching his hands.
“Yeah, but . . . You’ll see. Tomorrow. There’s this charge people give off when you’re not judging them, just giving them what they want and letting them be. It’s a physical thing, man. It’s in their skin, and it’s more filling than any food. I’m so charged, most days, I barely even sleep. Not to mention richer.”
It was true. I’d watched it happen all day. I wasn’t sure anyone in my entire life had ever been as pleased to see me as Randy’s customers were to see him. And he felt the same way.
The rifle slid into his lap, muzzle aimed just over my legs at the centre of the door. “You’ll be back?” His voice bore no apparent threat.
Eventually, when I’d said nothing for long enough, Randy nodded. “You’ll be back. You’re the thoughtful sort. Like I said.”
“Does it ever bother you?” I asked.
Randy stared at me, and the moon lit him. “Does what?”
Dropping the rifle back in its place, he drove us straight to the freeway and back downtown. He didn’t turn on the radio or say another word. White and red reflections from the dashboard and passing cars flared in his skin like sparks.
In the lot, we found all the other vans not just parked but empty, clowns locked into cockroach position at their sides. A single low light burned in Jaybo’s trailer. I wondered if he lived there, then why he would. He had to have plenty of money.
“Go home, Big Screen,” Randy told me as soon as he’d backed the van into its space at the head of the right-hand row. “I’ve got to wipe out the bins and finish up. You get some food and sleep.”
I didn’t argue. My head hurt, and a loneliness less specific – and therefore all the more suffocating – than any I’d experienced before crept into my chest and filled my lungs. And yet I found myself turning to Randy, who flashed me his blinding, affect-less smile. I thought he might burst into one last chorus. We’ll all have chicken and dumplings when she comes. But he just smiled.
The only thing I could think to say was, “Looks like we’re last ones back.”
“Always. Going to give me a run, Big Screen?”
Slipping from my seat, I stood blinking on the pavement while the fast-cooling air pushed my grinding teeth apart and drove some of the deadness out. My fingertips began tingling, then stinging, as though I’d just come in from sledding. I was trying to remember where I’d parked my car – could it really have been earlier today? – when the door of Jaybo’s Airstream opened and his goldfish eyes peered toward me. I froze.
“Max?” Out he came. His shorts had flowers on them. Maybe all Safety Clown employees slept here. In their vans. In the freezer bins, which doubled as coffins.
“You have a good time, son? Learn a lot?”
“Tired,” I managed, watching him, listening for any sign of Randy stepping out to trap me between them.
“Randy’s a madman.” Jaybo smiled. “No one expects you to work like that. But I thought you’d enjoy learning from the best. Like my clowns?”
I resisted the urge to look at one and shook my head.
Jaybo’s smile got wider. “Got to admit they’re memorable, though. Knew they’d be our logo, our signature, as soon as I saw them.”
“Loubob’s. Right?”
“You know Loubob’s? See, I knew it, Max. No one comes to us by accident. I went there looking for belts and hoses for these babies.” He waved his stump at the vans. “And there were the clowns just lying in a heap. I asked what they were, and he says, ‘Project. Didn’t work.’ Ever heard Loubob speak?”
I shook my head again, checked Randy’s van but saw no sign of him, just the passenger door hanging ajar. Jaybo took another step closer. “Not many have. I got the whole lot for $50.00.”
To his left, at the very end of the row, one of the clowns had come open, or been left that way. In the shadows, at this distance, I couldn’t see its face, but it was shivering like a scarecrow in the salty ocean breeze.
“See ya,” I heard myself say.
“Tomorrow. Right?”
Without answering, I turned, waiting for the rush of footsteps or flick of a rifle safety-catch, and started for the street. Just as I reached the gate I heard a thud from Randy’s van, couldn’t help turning, and found Randy’s face filling the windshield. When he saw me looking, he pressed one gorilla-sized hand to the glass, fingers open. Waving. I got in my car and drove home.
I’d tiptoed halfway up the entry stairs before remembering it would take more than that to wake my mother. I made myself a tuna sandwich and ate a third of it, seeing Randy’s last wave, his wide-open grin. The condo felt even emptier than it had for the past month, even the ghost of my father’s smell drained from the walls. My mother had left no smell, ghostly or otherwise. I crawled off to bed and miraculously slept until after 4:00 a.m. before bolting awake, hyperventilating.
Flipping onto my stomach, I curled into myself like a caterpillar and managed, after ten minutes of total panic, to get myself calmed enough to start to think.<
br />
As far as I could tell, I had three choices. I could get up and join Jaybo and Randy and the gang spreading joy, ice cream, and ice cream throughout San Diego County, have a hundred or more people of all ages and types rush out to greet me by name whenever they saw me, and make more money in a couple months than my mom had in any one decade of her life. I could call the police, pray they found and arrested all Sunshine Safety Clown employees, and then spend the rest of my days hoping none of them got out, ever. Or I could do neither, hide here in the fog with the horses and hope Jaybo understood the absence of both me and the police as the don’t-ask-don’t-tell bargain I was offering.
Instead of choosing, I got sick.
For the first few hours, I figured I was faking it, or manufacturing it, anyway. Then, when the chills started, I dug around in my mother’s bathroom, found a thermometer in the otherwise empty cosmetic drawer, and checked myself. I got a reading of 102, climbed back into bed, and stayed there two days.
No one called. No one knocked at the door. No one parked by the complex’s sauna and played a blast of “Classical Gas”. Around midnight of the second night, the phone rang, and I dragged myself out of bed. Passing my mother’s doorway, I half-believed I could see her tucked into her usual corner in the king-size bed she’d once shared with my father, not moving or breathing, as though she’d snuck out of her grave to get warm.
The fever, I realized, had gone. Beneath my feet, the hardwood floor felt cool on my feet, the air gentle against my itching legs. This was just the world, after all. Big, thoroughly mapped place to sell joy or buy it, hunt company or flee it, trust yourself or your friends or your instincts, stretch the hours as much as you could, and one day vanish.
Pulling my mother’s door shut, I padded into the living room and picked up the receiver just before the sixth ring, beating the answering machine. But on the other end I found only electrical hum and a distant clacking sound.
The next morning, I got up, broke eggs into a pan, and flipped on the pocket television on the counter for company. Then I stood, staring, wet yolk dripping from the end of my wooden spoon onto my mother’s once-spotless hardwood floor.
Under a flashing banner that read LIVE – BREAKING NEWS, a camera scanned a downtown parking lot. Red and blue lights flashed and reflected in the windows of ten white vans, illuminating what looked like spatters of mud all over their metal sides and grills.
“Once again, a scene of incredible, despicable violence downtown this morning as police discover the apparent massacre and dismemberment of as many as fifteen employees of the Sunshine Safety Clown ice cream truck company. Police have long targeted the company as the key element in a major Southland drug trafficking ring, and department spokesmen confirm that this vicious mass slaying appears to be drug related. No additional specifics either about the trafficking ring or the nature and timing of the murders has been released as yet.”
I put my hand down almost inside the frying pan, jerked back, and knocked egg everywhere. My eyes never left the screen.
“We’ve had our eyes on these people for months,” a police department spokesman was saying, as the camera prowled jerkily, restlessly behind him, capturing lights, an open van door, a helicopter overhead, body bags. More lights. “Arrests were forthcoming. Imminent, in fact. We’re disappointed and also, obviously, horrified. An attack of this ferocity is unprecedented in this county. These people are savages, and they must be rooted out of our city.”
“Randy,” I whispered, surprised that I did.
Suddenly, I was bent forward, so close to the tiny screen that it seemed I could climb into it. I waited until the camera pulled back to scan the lot again.
Then I was out the door, not even buckling my sandals until I’d driven the Geo screeching out of the condo lot to the bottom of the hill to wait for the endless, stupid light at the lip of the freeway onramp. Traffic clogged the interstate, and I was nearly an hour getting downtown, but I don’t remember thinking a single thing during all that time except that I was wrong. It was ridiculous. Juvenile. Wrong.
What I should have done was go to the police. Instead, I parked as close as I could to the temporary barriers the cops had erected, edged through the block-long crowd of gawkers, got the single glimpse I needed to confirm what the cameras had already shown me, then very nearly shoved people to the ground as I forced my way back out. My breath was a barbed thing, catching in the lining of my throat and tearing it. An older Hispanic woman in a yellow shawl threw her arm around me and made comforting shush-ing sounds. I shook her off.
What I’d seen was blood, all right, splashed all over the vans, coating the wheel wells and even some of the windows. I’d seen doors flung open, some wrenched half off their hinges. What I hadn’t seen were clowns. Not a single one, anywhere. Just the wooden frames where they’d hung like bats to sleep off the daylight.
I drove around and around downtown in a sort of crazy circle, Hillcrest, India Street, Laurel, Broadway, South Street, the harbour, the Gaslamp, back again. They’d been taken off, obviously. Ripped free in the fray, or pried away by police for easier van access. This was just another deflection, like my two-day fever, from having to deal with my own culpability. Then I thought of muffler men peering around trees. And I remembered the midnight phone call I’d received last night. Sometime in the late afternoon, I stopped the car, wobbled into a payphone booth, dialled information, paid the extra fifty cents and let the computer connect me.
The phone in Loubobland’s junkyard rang and rang. I let it, leaning my forehead against the sun-warmed glass, sensing the ocean scant blocks away, beating quietly underneath the boats and pilings.
Several seconds passed before I realized my call had been answered, that I was listening to silence. No one had spoken, but someone was there.
“The clowns,” I croaked.
The person on the other end grunted. “I have nothing to say.”
“Just one question.” I was blurting the words, trying to fit them in before he hung up. “The project.”
“What?”
“You told Jaybo the clowns were a failed project. I just want to know what it was.”
Silence. But no dial tone. I heard fumbling, for a match, maybe. Then a long, hitching breath. “Neighbourhood watch,” Loubob said, and hung up.
That was five hours ago. Since then, I’ve been holed up in my mother’s condo – it will never, could never be mine – thinking mostly about Randy. About his “Coming ’Round the Mountain” whistle and his electric shock of joy-giving, his hand against the windshield as he waved goodbye. I hadn’t been considering joining them, I thought. Not really. Not quite.
But I hadn’t called the cops, either. Because I was scared, maybe. But mostly because I hadn’t wanted to, wasn’t so sure who was doing good, being useful, making lives easier. And I’d liked the way they were together, the Safety Clown family. And Randy . . . I think Randy took me for his friend. Maybe I could have been.
So I’d let them be. And the clowns had come.
I’ve got the blinds thrown wide, but I can’t see a blessed thing out there through the fog and dark. I kept the TV off, listening instead to the air-conditioning, wondering for the thousandth time if I was supposed to have called the police, and whether that would have saved anyone. Or me.
Tomorrow, maybe the next day, if no one comes, I’m going to have to get up. Maybe I’ll go to the cops, and let them laugh. I’ve got to find another job if I’m going to go to school, have a life. But for now I’m staying right here, in what’s left of the place I grew up in, holding my knees, while my ears strain for the clacking I heard on the phone two nights ago, the clatter of footless wooden legs on stairs that will tell me once and for all if what I do matters, and whether there’s really such a thing as a line, and whether I crossed it.
POPPY Z. BRITE
The Devil of Delery Street
POPPY Z. BRITE’S FIRST NOVEL, Lost Souls, was a punk Goth vampire fable that introduced a number of recurr
ing characters and themes in her fiction. Winner of the British Fantasy Society’s Best Newcomer Award in 1994, she followed her debut with the novels Drawing Blood, Exquisite Corpse and The Lazarus Heart.
Her short fiction has been collected in Wormwood (aka Swamp Foetus), Are You Loathsome Tonight? (a.k.a. Self-Made Man), The Devil You Know, Wrong Things (with Caitlín R. Kiernan) and Triads (with Christa Faust), while His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood and Other Stories was a compilation of four stories published as part of the “Penguin 60s” series. Guilty But Insane is a collection of non-fiction, and she also edited two volumes of the erotic vampire anthology Love in Vein.
In recent years she has moved away from horror, drawing on her extensive knowledge of the New Orleans restaurant scene (she has been married to a chef for fifteen years) for a series of novels and short stories about Rickey and G-man, two young New Orleans cooks who make a name for themselves by opening a restaurant whose menu is based entirely on liquor. Brite’s restaurant tales include the novels Liquor, Prime and The Value of X, and she is currently working on another book in the series.
“ ‘The Devil of Delery Street’ is a blend of my old and new subject matter,” the author explains, “since it is a ghost story but also a Stubbs family story (G-man, who appears as the baby Gary in this tale, is the youngest Stubbs child).
“It features my favourite New Orleans tradition, the St. Joseph’s altars that are set up every March 19th by the Sicilian Catholic community as a gesture of thanks to the saint for saving Sicily from famine.”
MARY LOUISE STUBBS WAS THIRTEEN the year the family troubles began. She was called Melly because four of her younger siblings could not say her full name, or hadn’t been able to when they were younger. Her fifth sibling, Gary, was only a baby and couldn’t say much of anything yet. Once that strange and dreadful year was over, her mother, Mary Rose, would not allow its events to be referred to in any more specific way than “our family troubles”. That was how Melly always remembered them.
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