The Clown's Graveyard
Chapter Three: Embellishment

Childhood is funny if you think about it. You're just starting to figure out how the world works, who people are, what things feel like. Everything you encounter is so new, you haven't had a chance to reconsider any of your first impressions or base assumptions. You've never had the experience of something true that turns out to be false, or vice versa, or both. It gives you a lot of faith in reality. It's like living under a benevolent dictatorship.

In time you learn that things aren't always what they seem. You can only go so long without encountering an inconsistency—something that's there one moment and gone the next. Mutually contradictory evidence. Stuff that just doesn't make sense no matter how much you think about it. When that day comes it's hard not to be disillusioned with reality. It's like seeing your father taking the wrong side in an argument, drunk and close to tears. It's a humiliating betrayal and you want to look away in shame. But which way do you turn to look away from reality?

In sixth grade that day was still far off. The outlines of my world were as clear and distinct as comic strip frames. I'd gone from no friends to the coolest best friend in school. I was having the time of my life.

Our expedition to the Clown's Graveyard was better equipped with enthusiasm than knowledge. I hadn't the first clue where to pick up the trail, and Lou knew only what I told him. We brainstormed one afternoon over a one-sided game of chess and decided that the best place to learn about this graveyard would be another one. The Crown Hill cemetery seemed like the obvious choice, being not only the largest in town but also the highest point in the State of Indiana, as I informed Lou. I suggested we check it out the coming Saturday afternoon.

"Are you nuts?" Lou said. "There's only one time of day to visit a graveyard, and it's the night. Under a full moon so you can see the ghosts."

I chuckled. "Very funny. Who are you, Sammy Terry?"

"I love that show. But no, I'm serious—besides, we won't have to worry about running into any security guards or bereaved grievers. We'll have the place to ourselves. Hey, you're the one who's always talking up the explorer thing. You're the one who wants to discover the unknown and dig up the secrets and whatnot. What's the matter, professor, you afraid of the dark?"

I gritted my teeth and acquiesced against my better judgment.

The nights had gone from cool to cold and the smell of dead leaves mingled with rotting apples and wood smoke as I biked down Capitol toward the cemetery. The moon was hidden and I rode long stretches between streetlights completely in the dark, then suddenly silhouetted by passing headlights. I tried not to think about the cemetery to my right, the monuments and sepulchers and tombs of the vast necropolis stretching far into the darkness amid gnarled oaks and apple trees. As if on cue, a gray fog was gathering in the treetops and slithering onto the graves.

By the time I reached the gothic limestone gates, my hands were trembling too hard to manage my lock. I cursed under rasping breath.

"Need a hand there?" said Lou behind me and my heart exploded between my ears.

"Warn a guy next time you're going to sneak up on him," I said.

"I brought flashlights and Doritos," he said. "Let's get those ghosts a-hoppin'."

We passed through the chilled blackness of the nearest gate and into the graves. The inscriptions were surprisingly legible as they presented themselves to my flashlight—loving mothers, patriots, cherub-adorned children. Most of the dates numbered from the mid-nineteenth century. I wondered what the city had been like when they were alive, a generation removed from the wilderness and still surrounded by dense woodland.

"See any clues yet?" said Lou.

"Not really," I said. I wasn't sure what a clue would look like.

"I think we'd better check in the vaults. You know, the big ones with the columns. You never know what you're going to find in one of those things."

"Oh, I can think of a few things," I said, shivering.

"Do you want to find the Clown's Graveyard or not?"

"Sure, sure."

"Okay then," he said, leading me along a winding path up the side of a long, high hill on whose crest resided the Olympians. Our flashlights were good for lighting the patch of fog immediately before us but the resulting glare made it impossible to see further. When we turned them off, remnants of fogbound moonlight caught the faces of angels, politicians, and bankers atop weed-choked caryatids. Dead leaves rustled in the trees and the wind sounded through the gravestones like minor third organ pipes.

"Say, you know what this reminds me of?" said Lou.

"I can't wait."

"Great Expectations. Remember that movie? Man, that was something else. When Pip is in the graveyard, and it's all creepy, and then that convict pops out of nowhere?"

"Yeah, that's great. You know, I'm not sure this is really going to be all that useful. In finding the graveyard. The Clown's Graveyard, that is."

"Not with that attitude. Come on, keep up."

We pressed onward. I felt oddly detached, curious on one hand and completely terrified on the other. The air chilled me to the bone and I couldn't escape the notion that it smelled strangely sweet, almost sugary. Like caramel, perhaps, on the last peanut in the Cracker Jacks box. I stumbled along in a reverie, then jumped suddenly at a sound like a dozen shears clashing, and covered up instinctively as mob of birds rushed overhead and alit on the pediment of the monument to our right.

"I'd call that a clue," said Lou. There were at least twenty of them, lined up as tight as beads on a string, and they were huge, with long drooping necks like cartoon buzzards. They seemed to be looking right at us. Lou was poised for action.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Let's just sit here and consider this for a minute. Did you say you brought Doritos?"

I chewed endlessly as the dry chips adhered to my gums and the sides of my mouth and lodged in miniature versions of the original in my throat. The clouds parted overhead and the fog around us cleared so that we found ourselves in a pool of clear light that also encircled the tomb and its avian guard. Something glinted between the columns as if a brass plate were catching the moonlight, or a knob. Or a doorbell. I heard the empty chips bag land softly in the uncut grass and my legs carried me slowly toward the funerary pile. The wind rose around us, though without touching us, until we stood before a base reaching half our height, peering through the columns at knee level.

"What ... what do you think we should do?" said Lou.

"I ... hello?" I said into the tomb, then laughed nervously. "Is anyone here? I was hoping to speak with the man of the house."

"Yeah," said Lou. "We've got some swell encyclopedias we'd like to sell ya." We both laughed, now more freely. As I caught my breath I looked around and was struck by the serene beauty of the place, the noble and the vain resting side by side through the silent years. The moon was crisp in a circle of clear sky like the yolk of a poached egg. The incongruous image made me laugh again. Suddenly it felt like a glorious expedition after all, a worthwhile journey wherever it might lead, and as for that—who could say?

"What do you want? Who the hell is it?"

We both jumped and gripped the sill. The voice had come from inside the crypt. We watched in amazement as the massive stone door slowly opened. A wisp of vapor sighed from its interior and took its time rising through the bare limbs of the trees overhead. For a moment nothing happened, and then a shape appeared on the porch. A man with curly hair in tattered white clothes gone gray, grimacing at the moonlight in his eyes. Lou and I took a few steps back. I had the sensation of standing on a cliff high above the water, reeling with vertigo, liable to go over at any moment. I was impossibly far from the safety of my room, my books, my maps, foolishly so.

The troll, ogre, spook—whatever he was—leered at us from between the columns. "This is so cool," Lou murmured, and I recoiled. Only hysterical paralysis kept me there at all.

"What is it?" the thing croaked. "Jesus, Jesus, dammitdammitdammit." He shook his head as if to get water out of his ear. "You wanna, goddammit, you wanna, come over here, dammit, dammitdammitdammit." His body convulsed regularly, almost musically. There was a smell of ether about him and he seemed to be suspended in place, or jerking at the end of a string, rather than standing. His cursing didn't seem particularly directed at us; in fact, he acted as if he had expected us, and now expected something of us.

"We're looking for clues," said Lou.

"Clues?" the man shrieked. His voice echoed through the marbled hills. "Clues?"

"To the Clown's Graveyard," Lou explained.

The man repeated the head-shaking thing a few more times and launched into a still more profane line of language for several minutes. Finally he shook himself and looked directly at me. "You wanna see your mama, boy? You wanna see your mama?" Suddenly he seemed entirely straight, his palsy gone, and his manner direct. "Is that why you came?"

My blood went cold. It was the cruelest of threats, a statement of murderous intent masquerading as my fondest, most forlorn wish. Terror bolted my feet to the ground and my mouth hung open, air barely moving through it, as he came slowly nearer, nodding with a sadistic grin under steely eyes. My heart considered obliging him by stopping dead on its own, and then rallied at last with a surge of adrenaline that carried me thirty yards from the spot before I'd managed to breathe. The moment I stopped running I was tackled from behind. I fought for my life, surely inflicting harm but only delaying my inevitable demise.

"Get a grip, spaz, it's me," said Lou.

I fought on briefly before falling, spent.

"What's wrong with you? That was just getting good."

"He was going to kill me! What's good about that?"

"No, maybe he's a medium, you know? Maybe that's what he meant."

"Don't be ridiculous," I said, suddenly angry, and got to my feet. "The guy's a hobo serial killer and I have no intention of hanging around his hunting ground."

Lou hurried after me down the hill. "How do you think he knows about your mother? Did you think of that? What about that?"

"That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. I'm going home. This is a damn waste of time." I shone the flashlight to either side of the path. "Jesus, look at this place. What a dump. What were we thinking?" The ground was littered with broken glass, faded beer cans, here and there a dirty diaper tucked under a bouquet of spent flowers. "I'll call you tomorrow." I hastened from the dreary place to the warm comforts of home.

"Maybe it was a little ambitious," said Lou. "We overreached. We'll have to work up to it."

I nodded. "I'd been skeptical from the start. I mean, there's still so much more research to be done, so much planning, before we could even consider launching a proper expedition."

"Listen to you. Books—your answer for everything. If you want to discover something you've got to go out into the world and do it. You're not going to find anything new in your room."

"I'm chicken, is that what you're saying?"

"No, no," he hurried to say. "You could just use a little seasoning. A little field work. To build up your skills. Because then, oh boy, there'd be no stopping you."

I gave up being offended and pretending not to be. "All right then. Season away."

So it began. It was a long time before we saw the inside of another graveyard but we went just about everywhere else in the days that followed, all in the name of novelty and improvisation. Whether launched with a specific purpose or not, our outings invariably took on the contours of adventure. A trip to the bowling alley might lead us into ambush by Nora Security, and thence into a seamy noir underbelly of grudge-holding rental cops. The sidewalk in front of the notorious Shannon's provided an endless succession of fascinating characters to study, sometimes close-hand. I'd always held the belief that it's a lot harder to get out of trouble than to get into it, but Lou showed me that this wasn't necessarily true, as when Dr. Brookings so readily accepted our explanation for the damage to his gazebo. An unwitting swimming pool lifeguard proved highly susceptible to the Microbe Madness gag. And of course there was the Arthur Treacher Fish and Chips incident, when Lou and I learned the true meaning of Memorial Day.

Along the way, Lou kept me entertained with picaresque tales of practical jokes and petty larceny. As an exchange student in Austria, he'd conned a local constable into buying Hitler's moustache comb. He'd gone to Cincinnati to see the World Series and finagled his way into a bat boy job by the bottom of the second. While enrolled at Danforth Military Academy, he'd organized a raid on the Lilly family summer compound, only to be foiled by a loose-lipped bedwetter on the eve of the operation. He paid craftsmanlike attention to pacing and detail, a master of the surprise ending.

He may not have been as book-smart as I, but Lou possessed a wealth of practical knowledge, like how to convince his parents to let him stay out past curfew, how to charm free meals out of waitresses, how to bring home straight A's but never a schoolbook. He knew how to win friends and influence people, a skill in which he undertook to instruct me soon after we met. It was all a matter of seeing it from the other person's point of view, he said. If you can understand what they want, you're more likely to get what you want. And then everybody wins. Once he had explained this to me, I saw it in everything he did. He made Mrs. Lumpenhauser feel like a gifted educator and she let us have class outside. He made Stephanie von Helferin feel pretty and clever and she let him feel her up in the apple orchard after reserve soccer practice.

As much as he profited from his flattery, it seemed to me that Lou's motives weren't entirely cynical. He took an almost voyeuristic pleasure in seeing someone's fantasy fulfilled, however mundane or pathetic it might be. What Lou's own dreams were I never discovered.

I learned my lesson well. I realized that I had brought much of my historic ostracization upon myself. I'd wielded my unorthodox beliefs as an implicit condemnation of the unenlightened. It made people uncomfortable, and people avoid discomfort when they can. I couldn't blame them. So I endeavored to meet them halfway by showing a little more interest in the standard version of reality and presenting my own views in a spirit of entertainment rather than proselytization. It worked like a charm. Before I knew it I could approach a group of people and not silence their conversation—even be welcomed into their midst, and engage in discussions that didn't involve the exchange of goods and services under threat of violence.

As my classmates became more comfortable with me, I became more tolerant of them. Nobody asks to be born. The teasing of past years had been no more than an expression of angst at the arbitrary tedium of their lives, like the barking of a family dog chained to a peg in the back yard. With the mercy granted by enlightenment, I did what I could to ease their suffering. I laughed at their jokes, admired their possessions, complimented their perceptiveness. Never toadying, I nevertheless tried to make each kid feel like a slightly better version of himself, and tried to make their limited worlds seem as marvelous and infinite as my own truly was.

As time passed, my credibility with my peers rose and kids began in increasing numbers to seek out my advice. Not just homework help, though there was plenty of that, but opinions about music, political insight, moral guidance. By the start of high school, the traditional season for re-invention, I could plausibly assume the identity of a popular kid in my own right, not just Lou Black's best friend.

Together we made a formidable team. Years of collaboration had built an extensive repertory and we held court at keg parties, school dance parking lots, and illicit bonfires by the banks of Fall Creek with tales of our exploits: The Journey to the Center of Greenwood. Operation Skim Milk. The audacious and surprising Deputy Lieutenant Governor Ploy. We were a regular Martin and Lewis, the toast of the town.

I enjoyed the fruits of our success without taking my new stature too seriously. It hadn't been so long ago that these same people had looked down their noses at me, if they'd looked at all. Hanging out with Lou was still the main thing.

Now and then we would stroll down to the old canal that ran near my house. The canal was to have been part of a great system of waterways intersecting the Ohio, Mississippi, Wabash, and White rivers, but the rise of the railroad rendered it obsolete just short of completion. It ran about six to ten feet deep depending on the season and its steep-pitched banks were thick with weeds, fallen branches, and rocks. Apathetic waterfowl drifted in circles on the murky green surface waiting for bread crumbs from off-duty grandfathers. Elms, sycamores, and slack power lines hung over a gravel tow path meant for mules but used instead by down-at-the-heels fishermen on rusty lawn chairs, their coolers full of Schlitz and their hooks set for catfish. On the other side of the path the ground fell away through woods and dense underbrush to the rocky flood plain of the White River. On the opposite banks, the backsides of white mansions gone mossy and gray peered through peeling river birches, pale and evanescent as the ghosts who inhabited them.

My parents took me down the tow path for a walk one sunny morning when I was young. I remember sitting on a fallen log and eating sandwiches out of baggies. My father was laughing for some reason and my mother was wearing a red wool sweater. The memory is detached, unconnected with anything else, and scattered with light in a way that makes me wonder if I didn't dream it or wish it. The apple trees rained pink and white petals on the water.

There was a thick tree fallen across the tow path just north of my house, so Lou and I would walk south. Half a mile down the twin-track gravel path, the canal took a forty-five degree turn to the right, and another turn three-quarters of a mile beyond that. The trees overhead formed a steep canyon boxed by the turns ahead and behind, no bridge visible anywhere. An old abutment, crumbling into the canal below, stood at the midpoint of the interval, and it was here that Lou and I practiced drinking when we were freshmen, learned to smoke cigarettes as sophomores, and scorched our throats and lungs on poorly rolled joints soon thereafter. We sat at opposite ends of the abutment on mosquito-slapping summer evenings and told stories into the night. By unspoken agreement neither of us ever brought a girl to the place. I never did, anyway.

Lou and I arrived one afternoon the summer before senior year to discover that the fallen tree had been cleared from the tow path. Jarred loose from our routine, we followed the tow path north from the 38th Street bridge all the way to the canal's terminus five miles away, at which point it intersected with the abandoned railbed of the Monon Line, which we followed in turn. The railbed had long ago been stripped of its tracks, and weeds poked through its coarse gravel. The surrounding woods were luxuriant with undergrowth under a translucent green canopy. We descended every hundred yards or so to explore the forest floor, searching out artifacts the salvagers and scavengers had missed—rusted iron railroad hardware, hooks and spikes and bolts and such. With the collapsed trestle bridge across the White River coming into view ahead, we scrambled down the side of the railbed once more and took a breather on a pile of discarded ties and sleepers.

Lou straightened up after a moment and I could see him coming to a realization. "Hey, give me a hand here," he said, pointing to the top sleeper. I helped him carry it to the bank of the railbed and prop it in place up the slope from another sleeper. "What does that look like to you?"

"Couple of pieces of lumber?" I suggested.

"It looks like seats to me," he said. He dragged another sleeper into position on the opposite side of what began to look like an aisle. We sat on it and looked across the clearing. The project was taking on its own momentum. Seats imply a stage, so we paced off a few yards and stopped, surveying the ground around us.

"This could take a while," said Lou.

It took most of July and the beginning of August. We cleared the area of underbrush, assembled three banks of seats on the side of the railbed, and built a raised platform from railroad lumber gathered from a long acre of dense woodland along the length of the Monon Line. We decorated the front of the stage with the corroded iron hardware we'd collected, spikes, hooks, and lazy J's, and set large rocks in the aisles as steps. A piece of blue-green insulator glass half-buried in the gravel marked the entrance to the theater, which was otherwise invisible from the railbed. By the time we were done we'd settled on a name for our little establishment: the Explorer's Club.

It emerged that Lou and I had different notions about the nature of the Club. I'd seen the construction of the place as an end in itself, like a craft project. I'd imagined it would become our primary location for planning expeditions, telling stories, perhaps drinking a little beer, but nothing beyond that. The theater motif was strictly allegorical. Lou had grander ambitions and he unveiled them over cocktails and hors d'oeuvres at our ribbon-cutting reception.

"A stage cries out for an audience like a hot dog for a bun," Lou said, spearing a Vienna sausage with a cellophaned toothpick. The light had faded and the cicadas buzzed like motorboats. A stray dog was sniffing around a small boulder at the top of the berm.

I popped the tabs on two more beers. "What did you have in mind?"

"The time has come, Andy, for us to give something back to the community." Lou hopped up on to the stage and stared into the wilderness beyond, a dark silhouette against the fading eastern sky. "Our fellow Hoosiers suffer mightily for the lack of quality entertainment. Three and a half TV stations, plus that Christian one. Prefab movie theaters in the parking lots of by-the-numbers shopping malls. Cornball civic events keyed to radio station promotions. Can you really say these people are living life to the fullest?"

"And we can do better?" I asked, bemused.

"You know we can, and I'll tell you how," said Lou. "By giving them something that comes from the heart. Not some warmed-over corporate approximation of a good time, but live entertainment. Hell, we're two interesting guys—just you and me talking would be enough to fill the house. Throw in some music, a few special guests ...." The tree frogs had awakened and their percussive eructation punctuated the drone of the cicadas. A lost crow cawed overhead. "Andy, my boy, this could be the start of something." He was right, as usual.

Social activity intensified during the waning days of summer vacation. Kids were back in town from France or golf camp or wherever they'd gone and were gearing up for senior year, their last best chance to be the kids they'd striven to become since that first awkward day of ninth grade. As Lou and I made the rounds of backyard keggers and end-of-season quarters tournaments, we spread the word that there was something big in the works.

Then school began in a flurry of locker combinations and handouts and hopeful new outfits. The kids who'd shown up with the Mead Trapper Keeper were rewarded with having made the correct choice while the rest flocked desperately to picked-over stationers and drug stores. There was a lot of glancing around to see what decisions had been made about a whole summer's worth of clothes, pop music, slang. News of breakups and hookups traced serpentine trails through the population, each kid's station defined by the sequence in which he heard about them. And on at least one kid's lips at any given moment, The Explorer's Club.

Lou and I rehearsed the talent we'd recruited as the days counted down to the last Saturday in September. When opening night came we surveyed the audience from the wings, squinting in the coffee can footlights, and saw that we'd packed the house.

Half the senior class was there along with a handful of precocious underclassmen, about forty kids in all, Lou reckoned. They'd started to trickle in shortly before sunset in groups of two or three or four, projecting an air of worldly indifference while they casually surveyed the sylvan amphitheater. So early in the year, they were freshly exercised at the many injustices of academic life, and their chatter made the crowd seem three times as large. Kelly Brown worked the crowd with a tray of assorted candies and cigarettes hung from her neck. Near the entrance four cute friend-type girls—Monica Steele and her ducklings—stood in line to buy beer from Cliff Jimsonweed, who held the beverage concession. Backstage, the players paced and rehearsed sotto voce. As the last of the light filtered out of the forest, the audience gradually hushed and turned expectantly to the stage.

"All right buddy," Lou murmured to me, "time to give them what they came for."

I smiled, though the palms of my hands were slick with opening night jitters. "Here goes nothing," I said. Then we made our entrance from opposite wings and welcomed the crowd.

"Good evening folks," Lou began. "As you can see in your programs, we've got a solid evening of entertainment lined up for you. What's that? No programs, you say? I guess you'll just have to be surprised." It was a beautiful evening, just humid enough to hold the heat, low clouds ideal for a broad orange sunset.

"Can you believe this?" I said, gesturing at the seats, at the stage, at the boughs encircling us, at the upcoming acts waiting in full view backstage. "What a perfect night. Years from now we're going to remember this night as proof that our high school years really were as perfect as we'll remember them. You can bet nobody at North Central or L.C. has anything like this going on."

"You heard him," said Lou. "You can all congratulate yourselves just for being here." As he went on about the history and construction of the Explorer's Club, I looked over the crowd. For a kid who'd grown up hiding in corners I got a tremendous rush from being on stage. I looked into their eager eyes glowing in the reflected light of the stage and I smiled. Here at last my years of solitary research would be vindicated. I thumbed through my index cards, the corners already worn soft. Tonight's audience would discover just how compelling a lecture on the puzzling case of Kokomo Man—myth, or missing link?—could be.

As the light began to fade, Lou and I warmed up the crowd with a riveting account of the Strip Mall Tease Gambit, which had taken most of a summer to enact but paid off handsomely in the end. This was all-new material and they ate it up hungrily. They were in the palm of our hand before we'd even roped the mark, and by the time we got to the shocking denouement we knew we were onto something. Amanda Claiborne followed us, having made the Explorer's Club the exclusive venue for her top secret, most sensational gossip. A musical number followed, and then a geek act: the Three Daves, one tall and quiet, another short and fat, the third loud and unpredictable, all of them willing to do anything for a laugh or a dare. The set closed with an appearance by Billy McCrae, an old man we'd found behind a strip mall drugstore on the East Side who treated the crowd to a stirring and highly graphic tale of true love gone wrong.

By intermission it was clear we had a hit on our hands and the mood backstage was relaxed and upbeat. Lou stepped around to the front of the house, joking and playing host with our guests. I took it all in from a short distance away, the faces of the audience flickering in the firelight, the glowing embers of cigarettes and joints passing lazy as fireflies around the amphitheater. I was euphoric with the evening's success, as yet unaware that this perfect moment was to be the pinnacle of my contentment, that the inevitable decline would come all too soon.

My turn in the spotlight began promisingly enough. The audience was warmed up and ready for anything and they greeted my appearance onstage with raucous cheers. "Thank you, thank you," I said as the applause died down. "Ladies and gentlemen, tonight I'm going to tell you a story that's sure to amaze you. It's the tale of a man who lived not far from here, not too long ago. His neighbors knew him as Lincoln Jones. Link for short. They had no idea how appropriate a name it was." With this, I launched into the strange case of Kokomo Man: his mysterious origins in an orphanage since lost to fire, his thick brow and hirsute body, his frequent dreams of woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, his sudden disappearance following a 1947 roller coaster derailment. I discussed the theoretical possibility of reviving an infant long frozen in ice. I examined the anthropological, existential, and ethical issues faced by a caveman living in our midst. I pondered the likelihood that Link Jones may have fathered a number of illegitimate children who lived this very day just a few miles up U.S. 31.

I bombed. I could tell from the start that I was losing them. I saw polite smiles, blank stares, and worst of all, sympathetic grimaces. Cold sweat prickled my forehead as I rambled through my material in an increasingly frantic search for something that would spark their imaginations. It wasn't a matter of believing me or not. There was no skepticism on their faces. They just didn't care.

When the end came at last I concluded up with a half-hearted flourish and a pro forma bow. Their relieved applause was barely audible over the sound of crickets, cicadas, and tree frogs going indifferently about their business. A rank pocket of gas from some unseen pool of stagnant water drifted through the theater, arousing a lively debate over who had smelt it, dealt it, denied it, and supplied it, and I was forgotten before I reached the edge of the stage.

As I brooded backstage, hardly aware of Sam Klum's pyrotechnic display on the stage behind me, I pictured the locker bay come Monday morning. The ease I'd enjoyed with my classmates would be gone. They'd be afraid I'd ask them what they thought of my performance so they'd keep their distance. They'd have no problem with Lou, naturally. He'd aced it.

The evening offered a last opportunity for redemption. For the final act of the show, we threw a fresh load of wood on the fire, gathered the audience in close, and told them the Legend of Avon Bridge, my narration accompanied by Lou's voices and sound effects. Coming after the raucous climax of the Carbs' acoustic funk stylings, the haunting and macabre tale was the perfect grace note. The night was dark and cool now, the leaves whispered overhead, and girls lay their heads on the tumescent laps of their new boyfriends.

When everyone was gone and the last footlight blown out, Lou and I sat on the edge of the stage and opened a couple of beers by the light of a battered green Coleman lantern. I reflected bitterly on the optimism with which we'd placed them on ice only a few hours ago. We toasted silently and drank. The moon had set and the woods were dark beneath thousands of stars of varying intensity.

Finally Lou spoke up. "You know what might help?"

"If I stayed home?" I suggested morosely.

"Hey now," he said, "don't say that. The potential is there. You're dynamite in a small group. But the stage has its own needs. You don't talk in a normal voice, right? You project. Because you've got to get across to a whole lot of people at once. It's the same with your material. You've got to give it that extra oomph to make sure they get the message."

"Such as?"

"Like props for example."

"Props. Jesus Christ, what do you want me to do? Where am I going to come up with a Bigfoot pelt, or a flying saucer, or a poltergeist?"

"You don't have to," Lou said with exaggerated patience. "They just have to think you do. They're here to be entertained, Andy. Give them something to go on. They won't be looking for wires or mirrors."

The air had grown cold. I was tired of being outdoors, and I was determined to avoid becoming second banana. I agreed to take a few liberties for the greater good.

The next show was slated for the middle of October. Tickets had sold out the morning they went on sale. The crowd that night was half again as big as opening night. The first set went over like gangbusters, but I could sense their nervous anticipation when I took the stage following intermission. I started my lecture with a vivid description of the stone ruins and kivas that littered Arizona and New Mexico, and the Anasazi civilization that had inhabited them many centuries ago before disappearing without a trace. I spoke of their accomplishments in astronomy, engineering, and medicine. I speculated on their contacts with other contemporary cultures, the ancient Egyptians, the Chinese, the Atlanteans. The audience heaved a collective sigh and settled in for a repeat of last month's agony. But tonight it would be different. It was time to take the low road.

"All of this would make the Anasazi a fascinating tribe in and of itself, but it pales in comparison with the Anasazi's greatest accomplishment, one which has never been duplicated by another culture—including our own." A couple of eyebrows may have raised, but every chin remained firmly in the palm of a hand. I pulled over an old leather valise and unbuckled the straps. A cup of dry ice inside poured vapor over the surrounding candles and they guttered fitfully. I lifted a small carved object into the flickering light, fought back a final qualm, and pressed a small switch on its side to ignite a burst of flash powder.

That got their attention. "Sorcery," I said. At my signal, Lou fired up the spotlight to illuminate the intricately carved mask. Grotesquely beautiful black feathers trailed off its edges and its eyeholes smoldered faintly. "The discharge you've just seen was not caused by me. It's the mask itself. A thousand years ago, the greatest Anasazi sorcerer of his time wore this mask, and even now traces of his powers remain." I cringed, hoping the crimson in my cheeks wasn't visible to the audience. I braced myself for jeers of derision. I cursed myself for throwing away all that I'd worked so hard to gain.

Hearing no sound I looked at the audience. Their mouths were still and their brows furrowed. Monica Steele had leaned forward, her ducklings close in behind her. Bucky and Cliff wore expressions of concern. I pressed the switch again and every single one of them jumped. "Jesus, is that thing safe?" Bucky barked.

I faltered, about to reassure them that the ferrous powder was no more dangerous than a flashbulb, when Alexandra Claiborne laughed. "Don't be scared, Bucky, he knows what he's doing. What can it do, Andy?"

Everyone's eyes swung from her back to me. "Well, unfortunately, the mask itself can't do much of anything beyond what it just did. The rest of the powers died with Poblano, the sorcerer. But according to my research, during his lifetime, which lasted nearly two hundred years, Poblano developed the ability to shoot jets of flame with his hands, restore the strength of an exhausted warrior, bring fertility to a dying crop or take it away again, and read the hearts of anyone in his presence. The record doesn't mention any rabbits out of hats, though." I laughed nervously.

"God damn," Cliff murmured. "That is intense. So if these guys had all these powers, like, what happened to them? Why aren't they, you know, ruling the Earth by now?" A few other kids seconded the inquiry.

"That's a good question. A lot of people have asked it but so far no one's come up with a verifiable explanation," I said truthfully. "Some people think they developed powers they couldn't control and destroyed themselves. Other say they went to the heavens. My own personal theory is that—"

There was a loud hiss and the mask grew incredibly hot in my hand. I threw it into the space between the foot of the stage and the front row. The mask began to shake, then exploded into a flame so bright that it seared my eyes before I could turn away. The forest was lit as brightly as an Ansel Adams photo, the shadows of the audience flickering madly into the distance. After a minute or so the mask finally dimmed from blue-white to yellow to orange to an angry red, intact save for its feathers. When the shocked silence wore off, people shouted a hundred questions that I did my best to answer.

"Did you see that? Bucky hollered. "That eagle shape in the flames?"

"Not an eagle," Monica Steele said. "It was a ring."

"What about that sound it made?" said Greg Hulman. "Was that this Poblano guy's voice?"

It was nearly an hour before we could bring on the Three Daves. I apologized to them profusely after the show but they shrugged it off, still dazed themselves.

"What the hell did you make that thing out of?" Lou asked me later.

"Cardboard," I said. "And tempera paint and feathers."

"I wonder if the cardboard was insulated or something," he said uncertainly.

"Well it was a lucky break, that's for sure," I said. "I'll take a freak accident like that any day."

"Yeah, a freak accident," said Lou, and he laughed. But he had a strange look on his face.

Chapter Four: Tragedy Strikes