The Clown's Graveyard
Chapter Twenty: Dying Embers

The Hall of Justice rose luminous through the violet fog. Every one of its bells, sirens, and lights was ringing, blaring, and flashing and cops dashed in and out of its doors as if churned by a paddle wheel, desperate to control the riots erupting in every direction ... or were they hot on the trail of Andy Hunter, the man who touched it off? But he was America's last line of defense against the enemy above, wasn't he? Or were the Fabulous Ontarians the saviors of mankind? Confusion ran like blood in the streets. Yet my mind was calm. There was only one thing to do: get Lou out of the slammer.

I scanned the deep-set windows of the limestone promontory until I came to one with a familiar silhouette in its bars. On the ground nearby lay a coiled rope. Taking from my pocket a thighbone flute I improvised a fractured Eastern melody, swaying back and forth as I played. The rope began to twitch then, slowly, to rise. I played and played as it unwound higher and higher. When it reached Lou's window I pocketed the flute and scrambled up, fighting vertigo by keeping my eyes fixed on the wall before me. When I got there Lou was waiting behind thick black bars. He flicked one with his fingernail. It rang dully.

"Hang on," I said. I pulled an oversized gum eraser from another pocket and erased the bars from the window.

"I sure wish you would make up your mind," he said.

"I thought I had," I said. "I thought I had it all figured out."

"The mark of a true patsy."

"Yep," I said. "Let's go."

Lou pulled himself up into the window frame. "Slide down, hurry up," he said.

"I don't want to slide," I said, climbing down hand over hand as quickly as I could.

"Come on," he hissed. He grabbed the rope and spiraled down until he collided with me and sent us both falling onto the cracked pavement below. As I felt for broken bones, Lou got to his feet and came at me menacingly, snarling, "Why you I oughta ... you said you were taking a powder. You didn't say anything about kicking my ass on the way out."

"Hey, easy, I sprung you didn't I?" I said, backing away.

"Yeah, you did do that," he said, halting his advance. We crouched in the shadow of a large piece of art next to the hoosegow, a big, tubular sculpture reminiscent of handcuffs and lead pipes. Lou patted his pockets, then rescued a half-smoked cigarette from the gutter. A helicopter whup-whup-whupped overhead, underlit by searchlights and flames. Lou took a deep drag, squinted at me as he held it, then emitted a fine jet of smoke. He had an ugly scrape on his chin and a shiner coming under his left eye. His bare arms were pale and tracked, a couple of fresh scabs on one. "I knew something was going on when the guards started speaking in tongues."

"You know me," I said. "Full of surprises." I ducked as something with wings swooped past, nearly colliding with a big orange thing in black high-tops running in the opposite direction.

Lou stared up Seventh Street toward the erupting skyline. "I just wish I could've done a better job with the Fabulous Ontarians."

"What happened?" I asked him.

"Just couldn't make it work. The whole business started to feel like some kind of two-bit prank. I couldn't shake the feeling there was nobody at the other end of the line. I felt like our luck was going to run out any minute." A series of explosions boomed nearby, each louder than the last, followed by a deafening cymbal crash.

"You're never going to get anywhere with that attitude," I said.

"Look who's talking." He took a last pull on the second-hand cigarette and returned it to the gutter.

I checked my pockets and took out two tall-boys beading with condensation. We toasted silently, crouching on the close-cut lawn bordering the Hall of Justice. The calliope of alarms, shouts, blasts, and squealing tires kept cranking out its tortuous melody. "So what happens now?" Lou asked. "What's our next move?"

I took a look around at the riot, sighed, and zipped up my windbreaker. "Exit stage left," I said. "Leave 'em laughing."

"A puff of smoke and we're gone?" He nodded. "I like it."

A four-horse chariot came careening down Bryant Street, tipping perilously on one wheel and then the other. Lou finished off his beer. "So what do you think's going to happen tomorrow? Who wins?"

"Beats me," I said. "Maybe everyone turns out to greet the Fabulous Ontarians and they don't show up. Maybe everyone stays home watching TV and they do. That's show business. But we sure gave them something to think about."

The streets were full of the remnants of earlier demonstrations, some welcoming the Fabulous Ontarians, others rallying behind Integrated Consciousness, still others heralding the coming of the Lord, a few anarchists calling for the imposition of martial law, all now intermingled and degenerated into arguments, fistfights, singalongs, and looting. The asphalt was littered with confetti and broken glass and the sound of sirens echoed around every corner. A homeless person in a tinfoil space suit pushed a white-hot shopping cart through the crowd, wisps of ether trailing behind him.

"So what do you feel like doing?" Lou asked.

"I feel like playing some pinball," I said.

"That's the best idea you've had all week."

The Sunset District was characteristically calm. Block after block of semi-detached houses stretched for miles to the ocean, undistinguishable save for the numbers of their avenues, slumbering atop their garages like well-fed hens. The few cars we saw rolled slowly from stop sign to stop sign, crowding the centerline for good measure, turn signals winking as they passed into the distance. Our borrowed cruiser whispered down the street like a black and white rumor, lights off, sirens silent.

I hadn't been to The Embers for years and hoped it hadn't been saddled with quotation marks like so many other rathole dives in the age of the concept bar. I could draw no conclusions from the eternally sputtering neon sign that greeted us as we pulled up but the inside put my concerns to rest. Hanging fixtures resembling French fry warming lamps cast a dim light on the bar. Mismatched tables were strewn haphazardly across the room. The walls were hung with paintings of clowns. There was a traditional white-face clown, doleful in his flowing robes and stately makeup, ennobled by the misery of brush-offs past and future. Next to the bathroom hung an auguste, his grotesque features and rosy complexion suggesting the dumbest of luck. There were tramps, policemen, and Emmett Kelly hobos. Behind the bar, above the tarnished brass register, a small spotlight shone on the legendary Pierrot, the Leonardo da Vinci of the commedia del'arte.

There was no sign of a bartender. Lou went around behind the bar and pulled a couple of glasses off the rack. "Taps still work," he said, then peered through a small window in the back bar to the grill beyond. "But the kitchen would appear to be closed. Not that hungry anyway." He drew two pints of Pabst Blue Ribbon and hoisted himself back across the bar. "Pinball?"

The machine was a Comet. I dropped a couple of quarters into the slot. They fell through to the coin return. The other slot yielded a similar result. "Can I pick a bar or what?" I said to Lou.

We drank our beers. A ventilator fan rattled to life overhead, then gave it up after a few minutes. It was a well-stocked bar in spite of its nondescript appearance, from the rainbow of colored liqueurs and schnappses at one end of the mirrored case to the stand of amber whiskeys at the other. No jukebox but I didn't mind that too much.

"Well old friend, that was some adventure we had," Lou said.

I smiled. "It sure was. Was it worth coming all the way from Indy for?"

"I'd say so," he said. "It had everything. Action, suspense, dazzling special effects. Ironic reversals. Human interest. It was a regular pageant of human venality."

"It's kind of appalling how quickly my customers ditched me for a better offer, isn't it?"

"You can't blame yourself for that," Lou said. "Keeping up with all that programming seems like a real grind. No wonder they'd play hooky to see the circus."

"Good point," I said, walking a series of rings across the bar with my glass. We didn't talk much for a while. I slouched on my bar stool, close to satisfied.

The clock's minute hand snagged its hour hand when it reached midnight and stuck there twitching with a grinding sound. I drained the last of my beer and motioned to Lou for another. Before he could respond I lurched forward, pushed from behind by someone brushing past. "Excuse me," I said over my shoulder.

"Why, did you fart?" the guy said. I tried to turn around but the press of people standing behind me made it difficult. The bar had filled appreciably while our backs were turned. Somehow they'd all got drinks without our noticing—but that was the least of it. It took a moment for my eyes to take in to what they were seeing and explain it to my brain. The place was incomprehensibly vast. Beyond the crowd pressed around the bar I glimpsed travel-scarred trunks and packing cases piled to the clear blue sky—the ceiling and the dark night beyond were nowhere to be seen. It was hard to distinguish individual shapes within the brightly colored, ever-moving tapestry. As I squinted to make sense of it, calliope music swelled around me, euphonious and rich, each bleat, whistle, and crash telling the story of a lifetime. The room seemed to be moving in time with the music and I saw that it was full of clowns.

I tapped Lou on the shoulder. "I think you should see this."

He turned, did a double-take, sat motionless for a beat, and then nodded. "It figures," he said. We stepped off our barstools, which promptly spun away on a giant turntable, pumping up and down like wooden horses, and we made our way into the thick of it. Juggling balls and clubs filled the air, thrown between the rungs of passing ladders on their way to second-story pasteboard fires, followed by confetti-dusted clowns with dressed-up toy poodles nipping at their heels. A conga line of somersaulting harlequins rolled wildly past, weaving between a pair of hoofers gamely scuffing out the old soft shoe. I heard a bark at my feet and saw that I'd almost stepped on a little man no more than a foot and a half tall holding the leash to a great Dane the size of a horse. The little man glowered a moment, then relaxed. "My fault," he said in a basso profundo. "You must be new."

"I—yes," I said.

He smiled. "I didn't mean to be short with you."

"Is it all right if we look around a little—that is, for a while?"

"Of course. Why wouldn't it be?" The little man turned and snickered for the dog to lower its head. When it did, he wrapped his arms around its whiskered snout. The dog then raised its head, sending the little man tumbling into a wee saddle on its back. He straightened his hat and rode off under the bright mid-day sun.

"Andy Hunter," I heard someone say. A clown pushed his way up to me and I recognized him as Subject 17. "Boy are you a sight for sore eyes."

I introduced him to Lou, fumbling for a name to use. "Call me Droopy," said the clown.

"You look great, Droopy," I said. He was garbed as a cop who had trouble keeping his trousers up. His makeup explained that he was usually the one to take it on the chin.

"I know. I know. Well, gotta run. I'm due at the Fryer's Club." He passed away into the crowd tipping his oversized cap, heading straight for a collision with a masked bank robber holding cloth sacks with big dollar signs on them.

"So," Lou said slowly, "I don't want to split hairs, but if this is a graveyard, how come none of these people are, you know, dead?"

"I guess that's clowns for you," I said. "Always play by their own rules."

Lou and I pushed our way deeper into the place. My mind reeled at the thought of the explorations to come. From the looks of things it would take us weeks if not months to accomplish even the most rudimentary survey.

The streets were paved with plywood scattered with sawdust and lined with the facades of ersatz banks, saloons, doctor's offices, and schoolhouses interspersed with animal pens and railroad cars and tents, and there were rings set up everywhere we turned. As we walked we witnessed an amazing variety of routines performed by solo clowns and duos, ensembles, and entire battalions of buffoons sharing the stage with magic acts, contortionists, jugglers, animal trainers, acrobats, puppeteers, slack-rope walkers, mimes, and ballad singers all performing without regard for an audience or its lack.

Lou was slack-jawed in wonder, his eyes the size of dinner plates. He got a heaping bag of crackerjack from a red-painted pushcart and fed it piece by piece into his mouth. Several times I had to take his arm to keep him from walking into lampposts and phone booths as he gaped at yet another astonishing spectacle.

The performers were only a fraction of the populace. In every direction on park benches and café chairs, steamer trunks and washtubs conversed a thousand street-clothed loafers, clowns in mufti perhaps or else former emcees, barkers, talk-show hosts, tenured professors, inventors failed and successful alike. As we were drawn through the crowd, pulled along from one person to the next by their questions and propositions, we met many who had never felt the cool touch of greasepaint on their cheeks, though there was no question that they belonged—the absent-minded toll collector, the dyslexic ophthalmologist, the city planner with a penchant for impractical parks. There was the lion tamer with the odd sense of humor, and the theologian with powdered wine in his shirt cuffs. A trio of disgraced tumblers engaged us in a debate on the relative merits of a cool drink on a hot day and a hot one on a cold one. An inept conjurer and his lovely administrative assistant joined us for a two-out-of-three of Euchre, which led inevitably to a stimulating discussion of the Aurora Borealis. I felt like I could spend the rest of my life here.

The afternoon seemed to stretch for hours without nearing dusk. If not for the position of the sun, still high in the sky, I would have guessed we had been there for at least twelve hours when we finally got around to eating. Lou suggested a lunch wagon he'd noticed earlier in the day. "I wouldn't mind getting another look at the vendor, either," he said with a wink. He led me through the crowd to a stainless steel Airstream trailer with a red and white awning flying over the order window. I studied a menu chalked on a blackboard while Lou struck up a conversation with the woman at the counter.

"Most folks can't tell much difference to tell you the truth," she said in response to his query. "It's a little cheaper than Coke and we get double redemption on the empties."

Lou leaned over the counter and peered into the trailer's dim interior. "Nice place you've got here. It's a lot bigger than it looks."

"It suits me," she said. "I can pick up and move around as the mood strikes me, business and all."

"Do you ever get lonely on the road?" Lou purred.

"I'm flattered," she said, "but I'm old enough to be you mother. Although you do strike me as a little old for your years."

I decided on a hot link with relish and came forward to get a look at the object of Lou's aspirations.

I recognized her even in the shadows, even after so many years.

"Hi, mom," I said.

"Andy," she said.

She hadn't changed at all. Her black hair was still done in a Mary Tyler Moore flip, not a gray strand in sight. We stared dumbstruck at each other for a moment and then joy spread across her face. "I wondered when you would get here." She came out of the trailer and took me in her arms. It felt the same way it did when I was six years old.

"I should have known this was where you went," I said, still stunned. I wondered if that was what she had been whispering to me in the dream where she drowned.

"Should have known?" she said, her hand going to her chest in alarm. "Didn't you get my note? I tucked it into the pocket of your swim trunks so you'd read it at camp."

"But I never went swimming at camp," I said. "I ... I didn't like taking my shirt off in front of the other kids. And then after you drowned—I mean, when I thought you had drowned, I never wanted to go swimming again."

"Drowning ... your father must have thought that would make things easier for you. I'm sure he only wanted what was best. It wasn't an easy time for him, either."

"What did the note say?"

"That my time had come," she said, and took my hand in both of hers. "Sooner than I had hoped, though I'd tried to fit as much as I could into our time together. The curtain falls earlier on some than others." A cloud passed over her gray eyes and for a moment I felt the pain of separation in a new way. But it cleared and she smiled firmly. "And the note said that we would see each other again. I always knew that." She held me at arm's length and looked me over. "But you're here so soon!" She shook her head.

"Soon? It took me my whole life to get here," I said.

"Of course, of course," she said. "And now here you are, and that's all that matters. Give me a minute to close down the cart and I'll join you."

I turned to Lou, who looked as shocked as I was. His mouth moved wordlessly for a few syllables. "I told you there had to be a reasonable explanation," he said finally and we both burst out laughing.

Mom fell into step with Lou and me and the three of us strolled on down the boardwalk, joking with the vendors and goofing at the games of skill as naturally as if we'd all grown up together. Lou told her embarrassing stories from my school days, and she described how cute I'd been as a baby. I told them they were both lucky to have known such an entertaining guy. The afternoon finally deepened into evening. We bought lemonade from a pushcart and sat on a wrought-iron bench to rest our feet.

It seemed like the entire population was out for a stroll. They walked hand in hand down the promenade, talking about the day's performances, surprising each other with new jokes, laughing over old ones. I realized with a shock that none of the clowns were wearing makeup—even those I was sure had been earlier in the day. At least I thought I was sure. It didn't seem to matter so I let it go. I was more interested in their expressions, the faces they turned to each other. There were wise-looking children, mischievous old men, grande dames taken aback with mock offense. I saw Subject 17 pass hand-in-hand with a vampish woman of twenty-three inches or so. A posse of affable cowboys tumbled along, led on a string by a tough-talking broad with a twinkle in her eye. One particularly beautiful young woman walked unaccompanied and she slowed as she passed, her gaze lingering longer on me than on Lou—at least that's what my mom thought. "It's better that way," Lou said. "I've got Angela to think about."

Lou's straw made a loud slurping sound. He pulled the top off the cup and shook shaved ice into his mouth. "Well," he said, crunching noisily, "it's getting late and I expect you two have a lot to catch up on, so I think this is where I take my leave."

"What do you mean?" I said.

"That second beer is waiting for me back at The Embers. And I think I might be able to convince that Comet machine to let me play a game or two."

"You don't want to stick around a while?" I asked him, amazed. "We've barely scratched the surface here."

He shook his head. "I've already seen enough to last me a lifetime." He smiled, a little wistfully, I thought. "With a story like this to tell I'll make that guy in the fish poem look tight-lipped."

Mom put a hand on Lou's shoulder. "I'm sorry we won't have a chance to get to know each other," she said. "But I'm sure I'll hear all about you from Andy."

"I'll look you up when I get back," I said to Lou.

He laughed. "You do that, Andy. You do that. Well ..." He turned his palms up wordlessly. We shook hands. "See you later," he said. He gave my mom a brief wave, then walked off down the boardwalk. We watched him go for a minute or two and then suddenly he was gone, not just out of view but gone, as if he'd dropped through a hole right out of the place.

It's funny—since the first time I mentioned it, I don't think Lou had ever stopped thinking about the Clown's Graveyard, even while I tried to put it out of my mind and replace it with more pragmatic pursuits. I was glad he'd finally seen it, glad we'd got here together after all, even if he hadn't stayed long.

It appeared increasingly unlikely as the years passed that I'd ever get back to Indianapolis. I wondered now and then if Lou would ever find his way back here. But I never did see him again.