The Clown's Graveyard
Chapter Two: The Adventure Begins

Lou Black used to say there were two kinds of people in the world: the ones who put on the show and the ones who line up to see it. There was no question which category he fell into. His first words weren't Mama and Papa but Ladies and Gentlemen, and he fed hungrily on the response of those beyond the proscenium arch. What he was like when he was alone I couldn't have said.

I first laid eyes on Lou on the first day of sixth grade. As the new kid, he had been positioned by Mrs. Lumpenhauser at the front of the classroom for inspection by his peers. As we looked him over he scanned our ranks in turn, reading our eyes, his own predatory and bright under a shock of unruly brown hair. He was of average height and build and bore few distinguishing marks, but an air of suspense hung around him as if he had something unexpected up his sleeve, or in his hat if he'd been wearing one. I realized I was holding my breath.

Mrs. Lumpenhauser explained that Lou was the son of a prominent banker, that he'd transferred to Cornsilk Academy from a military school up near the Michigan border. Mrs. Lumpenhauser seemed to have taken a shine to Lou right from the start, but hers wasn't the opinion that mattered. For that matter, Lumpy herself would have had little chance of making the cut among the students in her class, the scions and sub-debutantes of the finest families in Indianapolis. There were two kinds of money at Cornsilk: moldy old money and showy new money. Three kinds if you count not having any, this last category comprising the handful of scholarship kids like me who'd been thrown in to teach the rest about class distinctions. As I'd attended the school since kindergarten, my humble origins were old news, and I was as taken for granted as old Mr. Jenkins, who appeared periodically in worn green coveralls to adjust the thermostat or repair the intercom, or Jeff, the colored groundskeeper.

"I'm glad to be here, ma'am," said Lou to Lumpy. "I'm sure I'll enjoy being in your class." He managed to say it without seeming to brown-nose; his apparent sincerity and good humor were contagious. A broad smile spread across Lumpy's pinched old-lady face and I could see my classmates warming to him as well. Although his clothes were logo-free, their cut and quality spoke to their cost, as opposed to my own, whose only imprint was the scarlet letter of the no-name brand. His impetuous smile made you want him to like you; he was already putting it to use with Alexandra Claiborne, the prettiest girl in the class, even prettier this year than last. Lou wouldn't have any trouble here. He'd fit right in. As if the world needed another popular kid.

I slumped in my seat and shook my head. Why did I bother to hope that a new kid would be any different from the rest? It was like wishing the twenty-five cent gumball machine would deliver a mood ring or a troll doll instead of the usual rubber worms. I stared out the window, cranked open a few inches to admit the dying breaths of summer. The dense woods that encircled the campus, strictly off-limits on pain of dismissal, rustled laughingly.

I had little in common with my classmates. They were born to central Indiana like tadpoles to a creek and they found its pre-fab lives and unambitious realities perfectly to their liking. They felt no need to look beyond official versions and obvious answers. Their idea of a stimulating inquiry was a debate on the relative merits of competing college sports programs.

I, on the other hand, was convinced that there was more going on than met the eye. Surely hidden wonders abided just below the surface of this featureless terrain, or around the next corner. I heard their echoes in the tall tales told at the Children's Museum Storytime Theatre, saw their shadows in the windows of abandoned gothic mansions in the Near North Side, found tantalizing hints and unexpected connections in the corners of my own intuition. To my neighbors, such legends, myths, and superstitions were no more relevant than a box of last year's crepe paper Halloween decorations. Their world was landscaped instead with strip mall commerce, hand-me-down fads already out of favor on the coasts, mindless gossip about celebrities who'd never set foot in the state.

I was convinced that our house had an attic in spite of my father's assurances to the contrary, and I searched our upstairs closets for the trapdoor that would lead me to the mad inventor's laboratory or the pirate's hidden plunder. My mind roamed far and wide visiting remote jungles populated by unknown tribes, ancient civilizations lost to memory, mountainous regions ruled by dinosaurs. I spent long summer afternoons in the local library, a squat brick building with a faded fallout shelter sign by the door, reading and rereading books from the third shelf in the far right corner, books with titles like Crystal Skulls: Voices of Lost Atlantis, Monsters, Beasts, and Little Green Men, Bigfoot and Me, Tall Tales of the Western Territories. The only name on the charge slips was my own.

None of this interested my fellow Hoosiers, whose explorations extended to turning over the occasional log for catfish bait. We had nothing to talk about.

Following a wretched lunch a few days later, I came across Lou outside the Commons. The still, clear morning sky had become turbulent with the arrival of a cold front and my ears ached with the falling barometric pressure. Beyond the low limestone wall at the far corner of the courtyard the customary kickball game was underway, oblivious to the threat of rain. Lou was leaning over the wall and talking to the players standing around second base, a stunted apple tree, while the outfielders chased a runaway ball down the bluegrass slope into the orchard. I wondered why he wasn't in the game. Given his aura of supreme competence and innate leadership, it seemed inevitable that he would be inducted into the jock elite. While I recognized the inherent pointlessness of athletic competition, I couldn't help but fantasize about possessing the skills and coordination to transform gym class from a humiliating ordeal into an opportunity for greatness, a series of bright, shining moments as I carried the ball across the line, or kicked it into a goal, or knocked it deep into the clear blue sky, on some hallowed green field of play. I assumed Lou was merely biding his time before claming his All-American birthright. It wouldn't be the last time I misjudged him.

"It's a true fact," Lou said as I listened unnoticed behind him. "All that Bigfoot stuff is just a cover story."

"I don't get it," Sharon Green said, stepping off base and looking uncertainly at the first baseman and the shortstop. "Why would the government want an army of ape-men?"

Lou shot the two boys a "dames" look. "Covert operations. Assassinations. Gorilla stuff," he explained condescendingly.

"O-o-oh," the three of them nodded in unison.

"So anyway, the experiment went wrong and the subjects escaped. They turned out to be so violent and vicious they couldn't be controlled."

"So they ran away to the woods, huh," Brian Manson considered. "Where did they come from, anyway? Did like, you know, some chick have to, heh, do it with an ape or something?"

"Don't you know anything about science?" Lou rebuked him. He shook his head, amazed at the kid's intellectual deficiency. "It's a chemical process. They started with these hillbillies from West Virginia and Tennessee. That's why you always see them in the hills now, see—they're trying to find their way home." He went on and on. It hadn't taken him long to pick up on the intellectual limitations of his new classmates.

The class bell echoed through the wooded campus. The last few lower school kids straggled out of the Commons as a shift of upper school kids arrived, sniffing the air hopefully. I had Art class now, but Monsieur Bleckman was notorious for lateness so I was in no rush. I watched Lou watch Sharon and Brian and the rest amble uphill over the close-cropped lawn toward the lower school building. He looked pleased with himself. Then saw me. "Interesting, isn't it?" he said.

"You're so full of it," I said. "You may be able to fool these hicks, but you can't expect me to believe that government ape-man story."

He glanced over his shoulder, then beamed. "This is the best school yet," he said. "These kids will believe anything!"

"It sounded good," I allowed. "Except for one thing. Maybe you can make a man as hairy and strong as an ape—maybe—but how are you going to make him grow two feet?" I shook my head. "Everyone knows even the shortest adult sasquatch is at least seven and a half feet tall."

"Yeah, right," he began, then stopped, eyeing me. "What do you know about it?"

"It's been one of my main areas of research," I said. A gust of wind riffled the shrubbery along the rough-cut limestone wall. "The sasquatch, the yeti—that's what they call the abominable snowman in Tibet. I always thought the abominable label was unfair. From all accounts, they're actually very gentle, and probably more intelligent than their North American cousins. I figure that's because it's so cold where they live, so they have to spend more time together in their dens, and that makes them more social."

"Yeah, I could see that," Lou said. He stroked his chin. I was encouraged that he hadn't yet shown the scorn with which my theories were usually received. Instead his face registered curiosity, though whether about the yeti or me I couldn't have said. I might have enlightened him further about our proto-humanoid cousins, but at that moment I spied Boyd Simmons, Greg Butz, and a third equally menacing eighth grader out of the corner of my eye. They were smiling like snakes and they were coming our way. They had grown over the summer. I hated for Lou to see what was about to happen.

Boyd and his minions wordlessly assumed the textbook two-and-one bully formation, the instigator standing front and center with the others boxing me in on either side. Boyd had cleverly satisfied the school's dress code by wearing a faded denim button-down while flouting its spirit with the black Molly Hatchet shirt it was unbuttoned to reveal. One of his boys wore a Confederate soldier's hat of the kind advertised in comic books. The other kid's clothes were incongruously preppy, a poorly thought-out makeover from the Star Trek crew shirts I remembered him wearing in earlier grades, his baby fat pot belly puckering at the navel. These were the worst type of persecutors, whose unpopularity among their peers gave them extra time for me. I felt the familiar lightheaded feeling, the sun so bright in my eyes and the concrete so hard behind me. Like the first locker-jamming incident, the first time last-picked, the first missing birthday party invitation, this was another of the cherished rituals that made September my favorite month of the year.

Boyd was chewing the usual flayed drinking straw in his crooked teeth. "Hunter," he sneered. I could see the slow gears grinding behind his eyeballs as he evaluated my shoelaces for knotting, my pencils for breaking, my soft, fluttering stomach for punching. The other two were salivating like jackals. I hoped they wouldn't start up about my mother again. Crying in the middle of the day made my eyes itch all afternoon.

I thought I might be able to distract them from the business at hand with casual conversation. "Hello, Boyd," I said, "have a good lunch in there? Gotta love pork fritters. Did you ever wonder what the difference is between those and the tenderloin patty?" He knotted his thick brow. "I mean, they're both pretty much the same color and shape. I figure it's a marketing thing, you know what I mean? Like, pork fritter sounds kinda down-homey, like you'd have for a casual lunch with your foster family." He raised an eyebrow. "But tenderloin, now that's got a fancy ring to it, like you'd order in a restaurant for a celebration, like if your Dad ever gets out of the Pendleton pen. See, by calling it two different things, they can make the same dish into two completely distinct luncheon experiences." He cocked his head, then scowled. I realized my faux pas and hastened to correct my error. "That is, when he gets out."

Lou snorted, recovering quickly as my nemeses turned their attention to him. "The things this kid says," he said.

Boyd shook the lunchmeat out of his head. "Who the hell are you?"

"He's Hunter's girlfriend," Butz sneered.

"Yeah, right, me and this kid," Lou laughed, gesturing dismissively. The other three laughed with him and returned their attention to me.

"Yeah," Boyd said tauntingly. "Hunter's a real smart kid all right. Real regular smart aleck aren't you, Hunter. You know everything there is to know, don't you?" I took it as a rhetorical question and waited for him to continue. Boyd walked slowly around me, stopping directly behind me. "I bet you even know the real reason why Forrester Hall's always locked up."

"Oh, sure," I said. I was glad I had an answer. I always had a hard time improvising under pressure. "It's on account of the ghost." Most kids blindly accepted the leaky-pipe story spread by the administration but I knew better.

"We're listening," said Boyd, leering with anticipation at his buddies, cracking his knuckles and loosening up his shoulders. "And it better be good." I hoped it wasn't too good; somehow the most fascinating stories seemed to bring the most vicious beatings. Before I met Lou, Boyd had been my chief tutor in the ways of the world.

I took a couple of breaths to even out my voice. A pair of crows were already circling overhead. "See, way back at the turn of the century, Forrester Hall was the original school building. The headmaster lived in a room in the basement, and there was this servant boy who lived there with him. All the servant boy ever wanted to do was sing, but the headmaster would never let him because of his common origins. Because he was so poor, that is. So what the kid did was, whenever the schoolboys had choir practice, he would sneak up behind the organ pipes and sing along with them so his voice would blend with theirs. That way he could sing all he wanted. The trouble was, he sang so fine that the headmaster knew something was up. The choir sounded too good. He listened to the boys sing one by one until he was sure each was as bad as he'd remembered. Then he had them all sing together again, and then stopped them abruptly with a clap of his hands. The servant boy sang only one note more but it was enough. The headmaster ran behind the organ, and he grabbed the servant boy, and he wrenched the tongue clean out of his mouth." I showed them how, my face a furious grimace, their jaws hanging low.

"That was the last time anyone ever saw the servant boy, but it wasn't the last time they heard from him," I went on. "The headmaster was certain he could still hear the servant's voice, now a wordless moan, echoing through Forrester Hall from time to time. One day he followed the sound up to the attic. He pushed open the trapdoor and climbed up, and he saw the servant boy sitting in a chair by the window. The headmaster ran over and grabbed him around the neck. The head fell clean off the body. It had been rotting away for weeks, ever since the kid slashed his wrists with a rusty protractor. They found the headmaster there the next day, still on his feet, dead of fright.

"And to this day, on certain days, at certain times, you can still hear the boy singing. So you could hardly have school there, see. That's why they built the new building and stopped using Forrester Hall."

The five of us stood motionless, the air heavy in advance of the Indian Summer-breaking cloudburst. As the silence thawed Boyd drew himself up, and I could see him winding up for a nice hard shove. I could already feel the pavement smacking the back of my head. Lou guffawed suddenly. "Sounds like bunk to me, how about you guys?" he said.

"Little baby Hunter with his ghost story," Butz spoke up. "Maybe the little baby wants to be a ghost too." Good one, I thought.

"Yeah," the third kid snarled, stepping up to the plate.

"Yeah," Lou said. "I say we make him prove it. Right now!" The bullies looked at each other, puzzled. "I'm new here—which way is Forrester Hall?"

Boyd pointed to the flagstone manor house rising behind ivy-choked pine trees atop Dead Man's Hill.

"Well, let's go!" Boyd pushed me ahead of him and the other three fell in, marching single-file down through the faculty parking lot to the crumbling brick steps up to Forrester Hall. I was so dismayed at Lou's abrupt betrayal it took me half the journey to realize that it was now four-on-one. I'd never been taken this far off-limits before. The intervention of a kindly food service worker or gallant high school girl was highly unlikely. Murmurs and chuckles resounded behind me. Forrester Hall would be a lonely place to die.

We found a broken window around the back. Inside was close and dusty, dimly lit through grease-streaked leaded windows. On the floor before us lay a dead cardinal. Butz picked up a violin bow from the window seat and gave the bird the customary poke. We went deeper into Forrester Hall, Lou in the lead. "Wait!" he said suddenly, holding out an arm.

"What?" said Butz.

"Nothing ... nothing, I just thought I heard ..." Lou laughed uneasily, "nothing. Come on." The next room was dark and deep with shadows, the ceiling too high to discern. The too-new soles of our school shoes squeaked like mice.

"Say, does it seem—did you guys feel a chill?" Lou asked.

"A chill?" Boyd repeated.

"Yeah, like the temperature dropped as soon as we came into this room? You know, they say that's a sign that—nah, that's ridiculous."

Lou led the way. Little light penetrated to the interior room we now entered. Butz emitted a high-pitched squeal. "Sorry about that," Lou said. "Dark, you know." The others were clustered closely together. We caught up with Lou near a large pipe organ thick with cobwebs, his figure barely visibly in the dense blackness. "It was here," he said softly, half to himself, "here that the loveless servant lad would have offered his sweet song ..."

The air was still. No one breathed. Then all five of us jumped in unison, registering a moment later the low tone just at the threshold of hearing. The sound rose and fell slowly, then faded away. It was coming from behind the organ. "I," Boyd choked. The sound came again, this time longer, modulating in a plaintive, primitive melody, then trailing off in a blood-curdling wail.

No one spoke. The blood pounded in my ears but my feet were rooted to the cold floor. Then came the sound of sniffing, from my own nose as well as the others. A rank, sulfurous smell overcame me.

"Oh my God," Lou cried, "the foul stench of death!" He scrambled past the rest of us, a flurry of frantic limbs, and we clambered over each other in a mad rush for the window. Butz facilitated our exit by taking out several panes with a headlong dive. The other three were clear down the hill by the time I'd got to my feet but Lou pulled me back to earth, shaking fiercely where he lay.

"Easy there, buddy," I said, forgiving all in light of our shared ordeal. "We're safe out here!"

"I'll say," he said, gasping for air. "Those guys are long gone. Man, that was beautiful teamwork." Composing himself, he sat up with a serious expression and began singing the very same wordless melody we'd heard inside, then collapsed in paroxysms of laughter.

"But ... the ... it was behind the organ!" I protested.

"Sure it was, sure it was," he said. "Right where you said it would be. That was a stroke of genius, setting it up like that. With the acoustics in that room ... what, did you check it out before?" He looked me in the eye, noticed for the first time the white panic on my face. "You didn't really ... oh man, Andy, you are too much. The best liar I've ever heard and you're not even lying, are you?"

I didn't know what to say. Things had taken an unexpected turn. I had no thoughts of going to Art class. We sat on the grass outside Forrester Hall for a while watching the thunderheads set up overhead. "The little servant boy," Lou said, shaking his head. "You've got a real gift."

"It could still be true," I said. "He doesn't haunt it every day, you know."

Lou rocked over and lifted his cheek by way of response. "Oh my God," he sang in falsetto, "the foul stench of death!"

One's life has a way of seeming inevitable in retrospect. Mine did, anyway. Who I had been and who I was to become, for good or ill, made sense only if Lou had a part in the story. Even that first afternoon, before the first raindrop fell, I had the uncanny sense that things couldn't have happened any other way. It was the same feeling I'd had the day I got home from camp and Dad told me Mom was dead. The news had the ring of truth to it, it was meant to be, anyone would have seen it coming.

It was the summer I was eight. I was to go to sleep-over camp for the first time. The idea seemed to have come out of nowhere. My parents just sat me down one afternoon and told me I was going. Four weeks, practically a month, and I'd never before spent even a single night away. It was a sudden and brutal exile. I wondered in a daze what I had done to deserve such a fate. But the house was strange then, full of silences.

We'd always been a tightly knit and self-contained little family. Dad governed the household with a strong sense of responsibility tempered by a sentimental streak a mile wide, as if it would be both foolish and foolhardy for his attention to stray far from his wife and son. His mission in life was to care for the two of us; his position in the sociology department of a small private college was strictly a means to that end.

Dad's good-hearted seriousness was balanced by Mom's impulsiveness and her impetuous sense of humor. She was always the one to propose family outings and adventures, like a raspberry-picking expedition on a neglected estate in the rich part of town or a trip to the State Fair to marvel at the swollen testicles of the world's largest boar. Mom loved nothing better than to shock Dad with outrageous statements and absurd practical jokes, and in spite of his protestations I sensed that he loved her for them. At such moments, as the Jell-O ambrosia slowly dripped from his clothes and I lay doubled over with laughter at his feet, he seemed nearly overwhelmed by his good fortune in finding such a rare and wonderful woman, his eyes brimming, his heart full.

Stories were her specialty. Better than coloring books, better than matchbox cars, better even than Lego sets with motors. I'd curl up on her lap or sit on the floor at her side, close my eyes, and be transported a thousand miles away, or to the moon, or deep underground for a tale of lost empires, mysterious occurrences, supernatural forces. Some stories she told over and over, others only once and never again. Toward the end she hardly told any at all. She seemed remote then, perpetually distracted as if by a sound in the other room.

Mom stood about half a head shorter than Dad. Her hair was black. When I found a photograph of Sofia Loren in a magazine a few years later I showed it to Dad and said she looked like Mom, but he didn't think so. Too angular, he said. Mom had been more of a classic beauty. I didn't know what that meant. It became conflated in my mind with Sleeping Beauty, and from then on that's how I pictured Mom, lying in that glass coffin in the middle of the forest, blessedly oblivious to the crows that kept the songbirds at bay.

She was gone by the time I got back from camp. There wasn't a trace of her left in the house. It was as if she'd packed all her possessions for the trip to the next world. They'd gone to Brown Lake, Dad explained, and there had been an accident, and she was gone. He told me the whole story from beginning to end in one sitting, speaking in a monotone, his eyes dull. There was nothing anyone could do. He told me that she'd been the happiest she'd ever been that day, and that she'd specifically mentioned how much she loved me. In the long ache that followed I felt lucky at least for that.

Dad still went to work every day so I kept going to school. Now and then we went joylessly bowling or to a movie with Walter Matthau or Elliott Gould in it, and the leaves dropped from the calendar one after the other, the remaining pages never lessening.

In my dreams I saw her from high above, swimming across the still sunset lake. She paused halfway across and looked around at the trees ringing the shore and the ducks overhead. I knew she had to keep going, that she had barely enough energy to make it across, but there she was, treading water, her arms weak and the cold water drawing the strength from her legs. I wanted to help her but I couldn't speak, couldn't get nearer, could only float there in the cooling air and watch as she began to go under.

They say that if you dream your own death, you'll actually die in your sleep. That's why, when you have a falling dream, you always wake up right before you hit bottom. I always woke up just before my mother died. It was almost a nightmare, almost the worst dream possible, except that the vision of her death was accompanied by the sound of her voice whispering something so wonderful that I knew everything would be all right in the end. In the morning I lay in bed and tried to remember what it was before daylight banished it entirely.

I couldn't believe the size of Lou's house. It dwarfed even the boxy limestone fortresses of my snootiest classmates. The garage alone was twice the size of my house. The place was so big it had two front doors, and four pairs of chimneys poking out of its steep slate roof. I peered into the surrounding trees, so thick in places you couldn't even make out the wall that ringed the estate.

"Not bad," Dad commented as we pulled the rust-spotted Falcon into the horseshoe driveway. I was a little nervous; I didn't get out much. I spent most weekends reading, working on my History of the Sub-Aquatic Peoples, designing clever inventions to send to the patent office, that kind of thing. I hoped I hadn't given away my social ineptness when Lou invited me to sleep over.

"At your house?" I'd asked him, taken by surprise.

"No, you'd sleep in the yard," he'd said. "I'd sleep in the house, though. Wait—I'm kidding about that." What did he take me for?

"Jeez, what a spread," my father murmured, running his hands back and forth across the top of the steering wheel. "What's this guy do?"

"He's a sixth-grader, same as me," I told him. He shook his head. "Oh, I think his dad's a banker or something," I said.

Dad nodded. "I always wondered who lived in this place. I used to drive by it now and then when we were in this part of town, your mother and I. She'd make up stories about if we lived in it, what our lives would be like." He ran his eyes absently over the façade.

"You guys had a nice life," I said.

He stirred himself and looked at me. "Of course. Of course we did, Andy. All three of us." He put his hand on my shoulder and shook it gently. "Well, enjoy yourself," he said with a game smile. I waved goodbye as he drove away, then took a breath and headed up the front walk.

It was safe to assume that most of the kids at Cornsilk inhabited cavernous chambers filled to the rafters with toys, games, and gadgets, all bright and colorful and flashing like a genie's cave. They were a materialistic breed, my classmates, and they were to the manor born. On their sixteenth birthdays their parents would give them cars more expensive than I was ever likely to ride in. But even the richest kids genuflected before the Black Family estate. Lou arrived each morning in a Bentley, and I was given to understand that this was as impressive as a Rolls or better. Yet Lou's room, off a back staircase on the third floor of the labyrinthine house, was modest, even Spartan. Its furnishings consisted of a wooden writing table, a telegraph operator's chair, and a bookcase half-filled with magazines, newspapers, and baseball cards. A mattress lay on the floor in a windowless alcove. A chart illustrating sailor's knots was tacked to the wall.

On top of the bookcase were arrayed several small objects. There was a pair of strap-on metal roller skates, a dog collar, a concertina with dust in the bellows, a old-looking wooden leg with the foot missing, a glass eye, a worn girdle, a flute, all neatly arranged in a row. "What's all this?" I asked Lou.

Lou took a glass figurine of the Virgin Mary from the shelf and hefted it thoughtfully. "I don't know," he said, smiling, "it's stuff people have given me, I guess." He re-centered the Virgin within her dust footprint.

"Don't you have any games or toys or anything?"

"Not really. People are more fun anyway. Like that Forrester Hall thing the other day—you know, just playing around. The other stuff just gets boring." As the afternoon progressed, I discerned that being boring was the cardinal sin in Lou's credo.

Aside from a slow-moving maid named Doris who appeared periodically with snacks, Lou and I had the house to ourselves. I tried in vain to seem nonchalant as we wandered galleries and corridors whose opulence more than compensated for the austere décor of Lou's room. Perhaps anticipating my shyness, Lou went out of his way to point out antique weapons, towering urns, game trophies, marble busts, enigmatic mechanisms, lingering before each until I had no choice but to ask the many questions that sprang to mind. Our explorations led eventually to a greenhouse that overlooked a manicured green edged with dense trees. A beautiful ebony and brass telescope sat amid a cluster of potted palms, its elegant barrel aimed toward the eastern sky. I walked reverently toward it, my eyes wide. "You must look through this every night," I said.

"Not really," Lou replied with a note of embarrassment. "I'm not sure if it works."

"Figures," I said.

"What would you want to look at with it?"

I gestured helplessly at the broadness of the question. "Well, Mars, for starters. I've got a few theories about Martian civilization that I'm dying to check out."

"You mean the canals and stuff?"

"The canals have been pretty much discredited," I explained tactfully. "Imperfections in early astronomical instruments. Besides, there's not nearly enough water on the surface for navigation. I tend to favor Bradbury's conjecture of wind-driven sand ships."

"I see," Lou said, his brow furrowed. "Still, it's ... do you think it's odd that Viking didn't find any sign of them? Martians, I mean?"

"Viking," I scoffed. "Those grainy photos? That doesn't prove anything. Maybe it just landed in the wrong place. There are plenty of places on Earth that look just as barren. Or they didn't know what to look for."

"Yeah, sure," he agreed quickly. "What do those NASA geeks know, anyway?"

"I just don't understand why some people have to go around disproving everything," I went on bitterly. "Once everything's all black and white, what's left to hope for? Until you open that last birthday present, you still might get what you really want."

Lou began to respond, then paused as Doris emerged from the surrounding foliage with a tray of nachos. "I never really thought of life as a birthday party," he said after a moment. "More like a game, or a contest. No, a carnival. There's all this stuff going on all the time, freak shows, games of chance, spectaculars. And everyone in the world shows up and they're all looking for something different. They want to feel lucky or smart, or to hear a good story. And if you're the guy running the show, it's your job to make sure that everyone goes home happy. Happy and broke."

I imagined what it would be like to run the game, to be the barker for a change, instead of a rube. Only later did it dawn on me that each had reason to envy the other.

Lou and I picked idly at the nachos as we exchanged information on comic books, Bill Cosby records, and the problem with the girls in our class. As the hour drew late and the gray skies disappeared into the reflected images of dwarf trees and orchids, our conversation turned to increasingly esoteric matters. When I mentioned the Clown's Graveyard Lou raised an eyebrow and leaned forward in his chair. "What do you know about it?" he asked. "I mean, I've heard of it, but not much."

"I know a little about it," I said, as if I'd learned of it by more arcane means than sitting in my mother's lap. It was here that old clowns, their makeup cracked and flaking, their arms weary from a lifetime of juggling, their harlequin rags faded, met their reward. From all corners of the earth they came, this eternal succession of geriatric jesters, to a remote precinct far from the cities and towns of the audience. Here in this sun-dappled clearing strewn with tiny unicycles and floppy shoes and ahooga horns, the dying clown would take his last bow and remove, at last, his makeup.

No one had ever found the Clown's Graveyard, though many had tried. Ponce de Leon had led an expedition, as had the ill-fated Steve of Aranjuez. They were inspired by rumors and legends about the magical properties of the place, that it might grant the ability to withstand the most awesome of blows without injury, or bestow the gift of endless joy, or perfect timing, or a flawless sense of irony. "I don't know about any of that, but I'd still like to find the place," I said. A light rain was falling, each drop hitting the glass with a discrete spat. "It was my mother's favorite story," I added, reddening immediately.

"I don't blame you," Lou said, mercifully disregarding my awkward non sequitur. "It sounds fantastic. I've been around, but I've never been anywhere like that before."

It occurred to me that Lou might be teasing me. "Of course not," I said. "It's impossible to find by anyone but a clown."

"Who says?" Lou protested.

"Everyone," I said.

"Well, maybe everyone's wrong." Lou had risen from his chair and was pacing the terra-cotta tiles of the greenhouse. "I think it makes perfect sense. Sure, the Clown's Graveyard—why not? It's just like you say. And wouldn't it be something to see, Andy?"

Lou's sudden intensity startled me. "Of course it would."

"Then let's get going," said Lou. "The only way to find the place is to look for it, and that's just what we'll do. What do you say?"

Lou's eyes, burning with as much darkness as light, frightened me. As he waited for my answer I was seized with a sense of inevitability. The decision was not mine to make; our course had been scripted long before we took the stage. Of course we would work together, just like Lewis and Clark, or Barnum and Bailey. Together we would find the Clown's Graveyard.

We went through the necessary formalities—the pledge, the spit handshake, the paper signed in blood to be buried beneath the appropriate tree. I felt as though I had stepped into a new world, one where the stuff of dreams might finally be made reality. I had the uncanny feeling it was what my mother would have wanted.

"So it begins," Lou said to himself, staring through the greenhouse glass at the night sky. He stood there so long I began to think he'd forgotten I was there. For all his occasional gregariousness it struck me that Lou was by nature a solitary kid. The first week of school he'd sat in on the orientation rites of the various cliques without becoming part of any of them. The other kids accepted him readily enough, just as each previous year's new kids had quickly surpassed me in popularity. But Lou stood apart, an emissary from a foreign land with a population of one, happy to embrace local customs but never to be assimilated. In his way, for his own reasons, Lou was as alone as I was.

That was all over now, of course. Having transcended our respective isolation to pool our abundant and complementary talents, surely we were bound for greatness. The world would be ours.

I was eleven. What did I know?

Chapter Three: Embellishment