A Fear of Clowns (The Greasepaint Chronicals)

by P. S. Power

  There had been a time when three hundred dollars was only two day's wages. Now it was about what he made in a good week. That would work now, if he was careful. He was slowly collecting funds up, twenty to a hundred dollars at a time. When he had three thousand, he could leave. It was enough to start over. Not to get a great new place, but for something. A home of his own, with a shower. Possibly a stove, or at least a hot plate. As long as he had a job to go along with it. Otherwise it was sort of asking for another quick trip to the roadside.

  It didn't have to be some great career move. Just something a bit steadier than clowning around.

  Scrubbing, after a while, became hypnotic. Blinking he realized that he was probably done, and that his skin was sore in several places. It was a sign that things had gone well, anymore. It meant that he'd gotten work, and probably been paid.

  Jay looked around the place, which was nice inside, but not rich. Carlos was a stage magician in Las Vegas, currently. He and his wife, Wendy, had a regular gig there that kept them busy for sixteen shows a week. Headlining as the Great Mantooth. The big draw was that Carlos was a dwarf. Wendy wasn't, being a well put together redhead that was pushing his own height. Five-ten to his six foot.

  Mantooth. That was a joke. The story went that his first agent didn't think that "Laron" was a good enough last name. That part had been a gag too, being the kind of dwarf that Carlos was often assumed to be, but wasn't. So as a laugh Carlos had gone with the dumbest sounding thing he could imagine. It had worked pretty well, for the last fourteen years.

  Technically Jay could have stayed in the house, where they had television and a fridge that worked, stocked with white wine and orange juice. It still left him feeling a bit uncomfortable just using their bathroom, most days. It was enough that they'd taken him in. Eating all their food or sitting on their sofa like a lump, was just pushing things too far.

  So was staying for nine months. He had to get out soon. His friends were great and hadn't even mentioned it, but no one needed a spare clown in a shed out back. The same was true for extra history professors. He was making them leave the lawn care gear outside, if nothing else. Under a blue tarp that was starting to show a bit of wear. That in mind he cleaned up after himself, making sure that Wendy wouldn't come in to find any sort of a mess. She wouldn't complain about it, if he did. It would just be fixed, without comment. Not even the odd look, or subtle glare when he turned away. That couldn't be allowed.

  Smiling, if a bit dismally, he headed out to the shed, which was a nice thing, as far as it went. Small, being ten by ten inside. There was power, that came from a heavy orange cord that ran from the house for him to use. A window too. Inside there was a pad on the ground, to sleep on, as well as a tiny heater, and a lamp. He also had a small laptop that Wendy hadn't wanted, which was still good enough to use the wi-fi from their residence. That meant he could keep searching for work. He put in everywhere, but seldom heard anything back.

  At first he'd figured that it was simply him. That somehow everyone in the world knew he was a loser. An ex-drunk that had given up everything, after finding out that he'd never had what he thought. A person too weak to bother with. That wasn't the honest truth.

  Oh, he was a loser, no doubt about that. It was also true that work was scarce and competition fierce at the moment. So, doing what he was. Being the best clown he could be. In the spring he'd have to branch out, and try something else. Get in at a casino as a dealer. Join the circus. Slash his wrists.

  Not that he wanted to die, anymore. Now he just wanted out. That was all. A chance to stand on his own feet, without shackling himself to someone that was going to abuse his good will and trust at that kind of level. Taking him for a ride that no one would ever have even seen coming, like Lynn had.

  Whining about the past didn't get the work done, so he hit the web, applying for everything he could find. He even put in for a job on a cruise ship. As a clown, of all things. That meant doing more than that, he knew, having been on one before. Back in the days when going on a cruise was a luxury, but one that could be planned for. No one did only a single thing on a boat. That was fine. Good tips and steady work. He could do worse.

  The rest of the day was spent on similar things. Going out, even to the corner store, just put temptation in his way. It made him consider getting something to drink, or spending money on junk that he didn't need. He could go on a walk, later, but other than that, he kept himself to his search. No one was going to just come and magically give him a chance. He had to find his own good fortune.

  That was true for everyone, and always had been. It didn't seem like a lot, but his life, as ruined and poor as it was, was better than most. In a world of seven billion people, Jason wasn't doing all that bad. He had enough food, and a place to stay. Friends that hadn't kicked him out yet, and even some savings. In the morning he'd walk down to the bank, and make a deposit. Keeping his life savings under his mattress was just asking for it all to be stolen. That, or eaten by a mouse or lizard.

  There were little things that made a difference in life. Things that being an educated and even middle class person had taught him that most of his friends from his street days hadn't known at all. Like how having a checking account saved you money, as long as you had any at all to start with. Things were more expensive if you had to get money orders and use check cashing places. They took a percentage that was large enough to hurt.

  He'd also learned some things from the street as well. One of them was that you didn't buy on credit. Fools did that, and ended up with broken fingers or selling their asses for a pimp. That had been in Vegas. The rules were different there. On the surface it was pretty, as long as you only ever looked up. The lights were bright and kept you from noticing the rest of it. The dirt was always by your feet. So were the invisible people. The pariahs and untouchables. The lowest class of person.

  So he'd learned. Neither a borrower, nor a lender be.

  It had shocked him when Carlos and Wendy had first approached him. He'd literally been standing behind a casino, not having any place to go, and wondering when the guards were going to come and get him to move along. That happened every few hours in most places. Faster if you tried to sit. It wasn't that they cared about some bum drunkenly lurking, they were just worried about their guests being harassed. Beggars and thieves drove away business. If you tried either of those things out front, you wouldn't last ten minutes. If you tried it twice, then you'd probably find yourself lying in the gutter, with something broken.

  Looking over at the light colored house, he remembered that day. It had been almost a year before, if just shy of that by a few days. Wendy and Carlos had just walked up to him, and started talking, like he wasn't a homeless man. As if, by some strange chance, he'd simply been a real person, just standing around, for some unknown reason.

  At first he figured they were going to try and score drugs, but they'd just wanted help moving some large equipment, and offered a free meal and twenty bucks for the work. It wasn't like he'd been doing anything else, so he decided to give it a try. It was more than he'd figured, since some of the larger gimmicks were pretty bulky. He'd done well enough, and took care to pay attention, asking questions about what needed to go where and how to preserve the edges against bumps, so they'd offered to let him sleep in their van for the night, if he'd help out in the morning.

  It was interesting. As a historian, Jason could sometimes look back at the clues of the past and work out some of how things had happened, but not always why. Almost never that, in fact. Rome had fallen due to an insane imbalance of power. That was clear, to him, at least. Other opinions varied. They were wrong. The haves virtually cut off the have-nots, and made certain they could never change the game. Eventually that led to ruin. People now spoke of lack of expansion, or the impossibility of sustaining a large city at that time, but those were symptoms, not reasons why.

  Was it the lead all the rich people ate off of? Simple greed and corruption getting out of hand? That
kind of thing was much harder to guess at. In the end, that was something most of his fellows hadn't been able to come to terms with. They didn't know the real reason, so just made guesses. He was too, but could see the answer more clearly now, having been both on the bottom and near the top himself.

  That day, when Carlos had waved him over and offered him a job, had been a turning point in his own story. That was so clear he could feel it. It hung around him like a cloud, every day of the week. It marked the difference, within seconds, between the lowest point in his miserable life, and the bounce upward. A stone shed with a power cord to it wasn't just a step up for him, it marked about six moves.

  It was the point where he decided to finally stop drinking. Not that he did it right then, it had taken months for him to really find the courage to throw his crutch away, and he was still close enough to it that having a drink seemed like a good idea all too often. If he let himself dwell on the idea, it would get to be too much, so he just didn't. Just like with the past. It didn't help him at all to sink into a miasma of despair. Now all he had was his climb out of the pit he'd dropped himself into, all those years ago. He couldn't even blame Lynn for that one. Carl Morse either.

  They were both scum. He didn't try to defend them at all. Carl had wanted his mistress to have a good life, so farmed out the hard parts to him. It was done so coldly and callously that even his ex hadn't denied it had always been the plan. He was just the shlub they'd decided to use. It hurt and had stripped away all sense of self-worth when he'd found out. He'd been invested in three things. His wife, his daughter, and his work.

  When the first two went sour, he ended up throwing the third away, not able to trust that it was real either. Now, as the pain eased over time, he could see that part was all on him. The college would have put up with him being the lonely and wacky professor, as long as he'd done his job. Crawling into a bottle had come after that. He'd imbibed before, on a pretty regular basis. After leaving his life though, he just threw everything away, and drank.

  It wasn't a medication for him. A lot of the people on the street had claimed that, but for Jay it was different. He didn't forget when he got drunk. He remembered. Alcohol wasn't his savior, it was the scourge he used to flog his own back, for being a fool. Jason had felt that he deserved the pain, because he just wasn't worth anything more.

  Not that his life now was perfect, as far as that went. There was no sense of real worth yet. Not inside. He played at being a clown, because Carlos had told him to. If the man had suggested something else, Jay would have probably just done that. Gone on tour as a band roady, or learn magic. In a way, he even understood why his friend had picked being a clown. Not because it was low skilled and so worthless no one else did it anymore. That wasn't the case. It was simply that clowns had to take their makeup off, over and over. Each time he made money, got a reward for doing his job well enough, he came home and removed the mask that he'd hidden behind.

  That was the part that he'd only started to understand recently. His little friend had set him up not to learn to hide, but to practice becoming himself again. It wasn't perfect yet, since he didn't know who he was, but it was getting closer each time. Someday, possibly soon, he'd take the mask off for the last time and find himself looking back in the mirror.

  Which he was smart enough to know he always had been. It just didn't feel like that at the point he'd gotten to. He lived in a raw state still, stunted by his years of self-excoriation. Jason had let other people decide what he was worth, and had been paying for it for a long time now. The easy answer was that it was time to stop doing that. The harder one was that at some point he needed to let himself actually believe that what bad people did or thought wasn't the sum total of his personal value. A man was more than his job. More than a husband and father.

  That was the tough part. After everything that Lynn had put him through, he didn't feel like a man anymore. It was more like he hadn't even been real. Just a tool for Lynn and her real love to use in paying the bills. A thing that didn't even count.

  Darkness was falling, and his single lamp was still off. Going to bed early seemed like a great idea, but eight o'clock was pushing it a bit too far. He wouldn't go for a walk in the dark either. Not in Brickston. The cops around there were too likely to use that as an excuse to arrest him for something made up. Claim that any crime that happened might be his fault, or even that he was a vagrant. On the street people knew the places to avoid. The areas where people just vanished from. For him the whole town was like that. The whole area around it, for a long way. The one saving grace was that there was a lot of county, and very few deputies. They still managed to find him a lot, but that was probably about some trick or observation technique that he just didn't know about. A tracker under his car, or something.

  It was one of those wacky thoughts that drunks, and clearly ex-drunks, or recovering ones if that was the lingo used, came up with. It couldn't be simple happenstance, that would be stretching things too far. So of course it was some new technology that bordered on magic. Like anyone would bother doing that with him. He was either there, out on a job, or walking in the neighborhood. It really wasn't worth the expense.

  It wasn't a great idea to go and do yard work at night, since the neighbors might complain. Instead he went in and started cleaning the house. It was something productive, and would keep him busy. All he had to do was avoid the fridge.

  The cold box of temptation. It was a strange habit, since neither Carlos or Wendy drank all that much, but they liked to make certain they had a lot of white wine on hand. For cooking, he guessed. Except that it was always chilled and ready to drink. You didn't chill wine you were going to add to food. He'd asked about it once, but Carlos had only shrugged and muttered about a family tradition. It was always exactly seven bottles, too. Not five one day and eight after the weekly shopping trip. Seven.

  The labels changed, so it wasn't that it was never used. If so, they ate in secret, since they never offered him any food that tasted of it. They also weren't big on entertaining, on their three days off each week. So no one was simply drinking it, and not telling him just to be kind to the ex-drunk. It was a mystery.

  Once, when he'd been a younger man, before losing his life to study, and later Lynn, Jason had been really big into mysteries. Not novels or stories so much, but real ones. It had nearly had him going into archeology as a profession. It was what his minor had been in. He'd switched over to history for teaching after Lynn had suggested that she'd like him to be around more than going off on digs would allow. They'd been dating for a long time then, but it had been about the time she'd gotten pregnant with Alex.

  That shook him. The realization actually dipped all the way into his soul and whipped him around like a dog with a toy. She'd gotten him to change career paths, just so he'd be available for her as a babysitter. So that she could have her three times a week girls' night out. How had he never worked that out before?

  It was, when he thought about it, probably just like the rest of the whole thing. No one was supposed to do things like that to anyone else. That meant sane people didn't suspect it. A good and trusting husband didn't question his wife having friends, did he? Now it seemed gullible and weak.

  Jay decided to scrub the floors. All of them. It took hours, since the house had a lot of hardwood, but when he finished... it looked almost exactly the same. Just getting them a bit cleaner hadn't made any visible difference. There had been some dust, since the area bred it. The sweeping had probably been enough. Except that now the place smelled faintly of lemons from the cleaner.

  It was one of those things that nagged at him, from time to time. Like the wine, and his old love of mysteries. No matter what he did to make things better for the people around him, it never amounted to much. Really, it never had. The house was clean, and was going to stay that way, unless he made a mess. Even the shed was tidy and scrubbed.

  The refrigerator called to him then. More to the point, the alluring wine did. What
with its strange mystery and supposed family tradition. That could have been said to mislead him. Jason found himself going over, and opening the door slowly. It wasn't the only time that he'd done something like that, but this time he wasn't actually interested in the booze inside. He just wanted to figure the whole thing out.

  For the first time he actually moved in and really stared at the green glass. Each had a cork in the top, which seemed wrong, once he considered it. The labels were of different types, but he didn't recognize any of the brands. That wasn't all that likely. Even before he'd taken to drinking as a full time occupation, he'd known wine, even down to the level of private vineyards. There were three brands visible. The labels were all similar, but not the same. Shining gold and red for one, silver and black for another and one that was a more tasteful matte colored label in mustard and peach. That one might have had a cork in it, but not the other two. They were gaudy, and meant to catch the eye. Expensive wines almost never were.

  They were all laying side by side in a nice wooden box. That, he thought, but couldn't prove, was also a thing that changed each week. This one was a bit lighter in color, and less beaten up looking than the other one. There was a thick layer of straw in the bottom too. Maybe it was shipped that way. If so, and it were his fridge, he would have just stood them up on end when it was delivered. It would save space, if nothing else.

  He certainly wasn't going to think less of them if they drank on occasion after all. For him it was a bad idea, but a lot of people could more or less handle it. If they using it in cooking, or had a glass with meals, then what was the problem?

  Staring at it he nearly just gave up on the idea. They had some bottles, and he didn't touch them. It really wasn't his business. That was the rule, in most things. On the streets, and the classroom too. You weren't supposed to question things without permission. It was a hard piece of life for most to realize. They lived by it anyway, just without being cognizant of the fact. Nature demanded it. People that wanted a good life didn't stick their nose into other people's business.