The Clown Chronicles (Stories From The Bayou)

by Lon Frank

  “Howdy there, Tonto. You, uh, you wouldn’t by any chance have an extra Happy Meal on you?”

  At the sound of his flat and strangely unmelodious voice, Stalking Bird hastily took two steps back. But Running Rabbit, fascinated by the green eyes and pale skin, shyly held out a tiny pottery bowl filled with slightly cloudy water. Around the sides of the little vessel flew geometric patterns of red desert birds.

  “It only makes gibberish. It knows not the language of people,” Stalking Bird said, “and its skin is like that of dead fish.”

  Running Rabbit fixed his gaze. “But Grandfather, it has eyes the color of the south wind, the bringer of life.”

  Stalking Bird came close enough to suddenly poke Tsarthor in the side with the throwing stick he carried. He wrinkled his nose. “It smells strange, like a dead bird among the blue flowers. Still, the Great Spirit has put it in our path; we’ll give it food and perhaps teach it to speak as people.”

  With that, the entire band turned away and began to walk towards their camp; only Running Rabbit looked back and motioned for Tsarthor to follow. As he struggled to rise upon wobbly legs, he reached into the machine and retrieved a small pouch.

  “Might need this ...here in Eden.”

  * * *

  On a grubby back street in Washington, there sits a group of perpetually filthy and dented garbage cans next to an industrial, overhead garage door. The door is spray-painted with three colors of graffiti and is as shabby and sturdy as the windowless brick walls of the building itself. Somewhere in the recesses of soundproofed and debugged offices behind the door, a phone began to ring.

  “Agent Maggart? This is Doris Haggarty. Yes, well, thank you dear; I hope I am able to conduct the agency with little disruption since the disappearance of Director Lamaire. In fact, that’s why I’m calling. As you know, all that our analysts have had to work with are the descriptions of the little medallions and the photos you supplied of the Eden records. Well, we have just received an interesting report regarding something which may be related. Could you possibly take a little trip for us? Good, dear, and be sure to invite your partner along ...if you wish, of course.”

  * * *

  State Trooper Travis Burtram was not feeling particularly pleased with the way things were turning out. After all, he only joined the Texas Highway Patrol so he could get a shot at becoming a Texas Ranger after a few years of paying his dues as a ‘road roach’. But it was four years now and his life had settled into a daily rut of misdemeanor mediocrity. Regardless of the glamorous television shows where highway cops spent their days stopping drug shipments and collaring desperate felons after prolonged high-speed chases, the real grind was little more than traffic tickets and accident reports.

  He shared the offices of the local Sheriff’s Department, and even though he earned more money than the deputies, he knew their jokes about how little ‘real’ police work he did were only partly in jest. Some days lately, even he realized that the Highway Patrol had become little more than a tax on the traveling public. The bulk of his crime fighting effort was simply writing speeding tickets to old ladies and salesmen who left their cruise controls set at 70 when they crossed into the city limits—and the 55 mile per hour limit—of Lamesa. Travis knew that the folks he ticketed weren’t criminals. They were just ranchers or truckers or families on vacation. Consequently, he realized that he didn’t make a whole lot of difference in the overall world of criminal justice.

  He was even thinking of quitting the department. His wife made the daily 50-mile drive into Big Spring to teach her sixth-grade class, and Travis knew the manager of the Walmart store there, who once offered him an assistant position. He was still thinking about the endless aisles of toilet paper and cheap tires when he pulled up behind the darkened pickup truck which was stopped by the bridge over Monument Draw, just south of the forgotten ranch town of Seminole.

  “Unit two to Central. I’m 10-50 at the old bridge on 385 South, and it looks like I got an abandoned vehicle, Texas license, number TR2, G14.”

  He took his black, four-cell Maglite out of its holder and started walking toward the old Ford truck. It was covered with dust and empty but for a few old tools and a tow chain in the bed. Trooper Burtram started back to his patrol car when his eyes caught a slight movement in the dark of the ravine. Shining his flashlight on the area, he was confronted with a young white male, wearing dirty jeans, an old Metallica t-shirt, and a grimy baseball hat featuring a cartoon image of two pigs ‘makin’ bacon’. He was also holding a small bale of loosely packed dried leaves in each hand.

  Travis immediately braced the Maglite on his left shoulder and reached down to rest his right hand on the butt of his revolver.

  “Whoa, boy. Now what the hell do we have he...”

  The bullet hit him from below on his left, just caught the edge of his kevlar vest, and knocked absolutely all the air out of his lungs. His flashlight and his jaw both shattered on the rocks as Travis fell unconscious thirty feet into the dry ravine. The two unwashed young men hastily threw their illegal cargo into the truck and speed away without once looking to see where the trooper’s body had landed.

  Other eyes witnessed the entire little drama in the desert night. A man was hidden by the bridge and was just about to come up and ask for a ride from the two boys in the old truck when the Highway Patrol car pulled up with its blue and red lights. Slinking back into the rocks, he saw the trooper and watched as his light found the man holding the weed bales. He knew something was bound to happen. Then he started to drift farther into the night, when the sound of the gunshot startled him like a clap of dry thunder. He watched the truck speed off and then heard soft moans coming from the floor of the draw, and he knew that if he helped the stricken trooper, he would give up his own freedom.

  The pain in his jaw began to bring Travis back to consciousness. As he opened his eyes he looked into a round, brown Mexican face, and instinctively reached for his missing service revolver. Luca Sanchez placed his hand gently on the trooper’s right arm.

  “Ees so-kay señor. Mi amigo.”

  * * *

  Tsarthor had desert sand in his crotch. He had sand in his ears, his armpits, between his toes and in the creases of his neck. He was wiggling on his stomach through the little opening under the cliff where the small band of desert scavengers had disappeared ahead of him. He shook his head violently as a fly landed in the moist corner of his right eye and for the effort, gathered a mouthful of more sand.

  “If I ever get my hands on that clown again—”

  He looked up slightly and saw Running Rabbit crouched down at the other end of the passage and motioning for him to come on.

  “Yeah, yeah, Pocahontas, I’m coming. Sheesh, what are we, late for the opera or something?”

  When he finally emerged into the light again, he stood up, spitting and brushing sand from his belly. After a moment he became aware of the others in the group. They were absolutely still and staring at him with expectation. Only the girl moved, as she pointed to the rock wall above him. Tsarthor looked up and turned around slowly in a circle moving towards the center of the enclosure.

  There, painted on, or lightly chipped into the rock faces was the legacy of a long-past people. Small hunting-men figures crept across the cliffs after four-legged animals that leaped in flight at their eternal approach. There were camp scenes of lodges and fires and medicine men. Finally, set apart like holy icons in a side recess, were the figures of tall men with strange headgear, holding wands and lightning and pointing upwards toward heavens busy with swirls and flashes and hovering discs. Tsarthor studied the figures and symbols, recognition gathering in his mind.

  “So, I’m not the first.”

  * * *

  “You see, the trick was in the discovery that time was not linear, like everyone always assumed. You know, one moment following another, day after day, year after year, lifetime after lifetime. Only when we realized that time was flat, like an endless horizon, could we re
ally make advances in travel theory. In fact, actually, there is no tomorrow, or next year, or yesterday. Everything that has happened or is about to happen is happening now, you see. You only have to move sideways along on the horizontal line to the moment you wish to inhabit. Yes, indeed, that’s the trick.”

  Running Rabbit reached out a small hand and touched the rock chips which fell at the base of the cliff. Tsarthor had lectured on like this for the last three hours and the rest of the group wandered off long ago. They found the sound of his flat and monotonous voice boring, if not downright disturbing. Only the little girl stayed to watch him chip away at the rock face, but now even she wondered at the strange mind of the creature they found in the desert.

  As he talked, mostly to hear a familiar voice, Tsarthor used a small hand ax of smooth granite to peck at the rock under the large mysterious pictographs of strangers. He had chosen a red triptych of tall men wearing antennae-equipped headgear, and each holding a different geometrical symbol or instrument. Along the base of this ancient and awesomely powerful image, Tsarthor labored to chip a horizontal line of dashes and squares.

  In about two months, when he finished, he would have a design stretching over 50 feet and accentuated with little V-shaped marks over the seemingly-random dashes and squares. Just left of the center point of this line, he would carefully carve a ‘+’ symbol in the center of one of the little squares and a horizontal ‘8’, lying just below it.

  The little band of desert people watched his work with interest at first, as they considered Tsarthor to be a spirit of the Green Wind and thought he would eventually share some secret of life. But as he continued, chipping and talking in his obnoxious manner, they were dismayed to see neither secrets nor patterns in his art.

  As the summer wore away, Stalking Bird watched the pale man work and worried as he ate much more than his share of the food supplies of the group. Only Running Rabbit still found him interesting and the others were starting to grumble about his lack of both hygiene and manners. He always reached to eat first and asked neither permission nor blessing of the older men. He didn’t wash himself in the little pool half a mile down the ravine and his breath was foul. But worst of all, and a source of constant complaint from the women, was that he never went far to relieve himself. The camp was beginning to smell like the lairs of large desert cats.

  Stalking Bird knew it would be soon that they would have to leave their sanctuary and their unwelcome guest and start out again towards the home of more friendly spirits to the east. He consulted the other men of the band and came to the fateful conclusion that they would kill the pale man and attempt to discover any magic which he might possess. He knew the long-day was coming and he would have to fast and ask the Great Spirit for guidance. It was on this night, the shortest of the year, that he planned to bring the band together under the canopy of watchful stars and to sacrifice the unsuspecting Tsarthor.

  He could never have dreamed what would really happen that year, on the night of the summer solstice.

  * * *

  The heat shimmered off the smooth rocks by the little ravine. Stalking Bird stopped to rest briefly in the shade provided by a boulder the size and shape of the lodges the people built when they ventured out upon the vast grasslands to the east. It took him all morning to fill his little pouch with the white chalky stones that he needed. Running Rabbit helped for a while, but was sidetracked by the calls of a covey of desert bobwhites and went off to see if she could catch a couple for their supper.

  It was three days after the summer solstice, or ‘long day’, as they knew it. He and the little girl were all that were left of the band, the others fled silently in the night, in fear of what they saw and the terror of the individual parts they played. Stalking Bird fasted three days and went alone to sit on the eastern rim of the mesa. During this vision quest he sought answers for the most troubling intuitions of his life. He came to feel that the tall, pale man with the eyes of summer wind was an evil spirit, put in his way to test him in this, the last earthly year of his life.

  Yes, he knew the signs well enough and he had already lived beyond the years of most of the people. It was time for him to prepare and to teach a young one his accumulated wisdom. Months later, on an early spring afternoon as he fulfilled his own prophecy, Running Rabbit would wrap him tightly and place his body upon the feathered platform before walking off alone to become a legendary figure among the scattered peoples of the Father Mountains. But that is another story and Stalking Bird still had one last major project to attend to.

  The next morning as the sun found its way into the enclosed mesa, he led Running Rabbit to a large space on the wall, as yet unadorned by paintings or carving. He explained that here, they would draw a monumental tableau commemorating the events of the long day; here would be the figures of their little band and here would be the swirling flashes of lightning. Here would be the great pale figure with green eyes, flying upwards to disappear into the mouth of the Blue Raven, the claimer of souls. It would be the first white figure of a man ever depicted by the people and it would take them until well into the autumn to finish it.

  In the waning years of her own life, Running Rabbit would return alone to the hidden mesa and look again on their handiwork. She would again moisten her own hands with the white chalk-paint and place them near the bottom of the flying man. The next woman to enter the mesa would marvel at the delicate hand prints, and Agnes would find that they were a perfect match for her own.

  * * *

  “YEE-OW! Hey, Billy Joe, come look at this—here.”

  The young man stood just inside the sagging screen door of the Rusty Star Gas and Grill. He wore faded jeans, ragged at the cuffs where the edges hung under the heels of his scuffed and stained Justin ropers. His left rear pocket was permanently shaped and faded in a three-inch circle from the can of Copenhagen snuff it contained. His long-sleeved, snap-buttoned shirt was tucked in and held securely by a wide latigo belt with a trophy buckle roughly the size of a trash can lid.

  Billy Joe Murphy was identically dressed, with the addition of a rakish pair of aviator sunglasses. He sauntered over to his friend, whistled low and placed his hand over his heart, faking sudden severe pain.

  “Now, I ask you boy. Why don’t we have women like that in Lamesa?”

  “Hell, I don’t know, but if you want to start a breeding program for ‘em, that ‘un would make a nice brood mare and I’m just the stallion she needs.”

  What the two macho young cowboys were staring at was a tall woman filling the gas tank of a nondescript, tan sedan with government plates. She stood stiff-legged and bent slightly at the waist, causing the hem of her impeccable dark blue silk dress to ride up extraordinarily long calves. The tightened fabric accentuated the cleavage of her posterior, afforded by her recent acquisition of several pairs of thong panties.

  The swarthy little man still sitting in the front seat removed his blue-green golf hat and stuck his balding head out the window.

  “C’mon, will ya’, Agnes! I’m gettin’ heat rash here, for cryin’ out loud!”

  * * *

  After their last successful and highly covert mission, Agents Maggart and Redford were each given promotions within FACT. Those in the agency who knew the two partners realized it was plain and simply a case of being in the right place at the right time. Special Agent Mason had been understandably brief in reporting his involvement that afternoon at the old mansion in Louisiana and was subsequently exonerated and allowed to return to his deep cover assignment as a Jersey police detective. The two civilians involved, a West Texas rancher and his slightly schizoid wife, each gave glowing testimony of the bravery and initiative of the tall female agent and her rotund counterpart. But those who really knew the whole story understood that the promotions were only the agency’s way to tighten its grip on the young agents and to ensure their silence concerning the events of that sultry night among the moldy ruins under a swollen swamp moon.

  Doris Haggarty was o
ne of those few who knew the whole story and it had been she who personally called Agent Agnes Maggart and instructed her to assist in the search for Arthur LeMaire. Two weeks later, Agnes and Agent Robert Redford had interviewed absolutely everyone involved with this latest lead; the Highway Patrol officer and the illegal alien, who repeated his tale about the hidden mesa and its rock drawings. They had visited the mesa and interrogated the rancher on whose land it was located and were now on their way to question a new and laughingly suspect lead—the town psychic in the semi-ghost-town of Seminole.

  Actually, it was the psychic, an ancient and incredibly wrinkled Indian who called herself Still Water Woman, that gave them their only fruitful clue. She claimed to trace her ancestry back through a hundred generations of her people who knew the secrets held within the fluid depths of human memory.

  “Oh, for crimony sake, Agnes, we ain’t really going to see some old broad living in a shack on the desert are we? She’ll probably put a hex on us and turn me into a slimy little lizard or something.”

  Agent Redford sweated profusely and tugged at the waistband of his trousers as they walked along the trail which led to a small adobe dwelling, maybe 200 yards from the highway. A small hand-painted sign proclaimed ‘Still Water Woman - Seer of Souls - Teller of Secrets - Readings $12’.

  “Would you quit whining and grow up? And you’re already a slimy little lizard.”

  With a stride length of half that of the tall female, Agent Redford had already fallen ten feet behind, and he now lowered his voice to a mumble. “Yeah, well, that’s better than bein’ a female daddy longlegs spider, I guess.”

  “WHAT was that? Did you say something, Special-Agent-NOT-in-Charge, Redford?”

  “Geeze, Agnes, I don’t mind you being the boss, but you don’t have to throw it in my face alla time, do ya’? I mean we both know it’s just because you’re a woman, and that old bat Doris Haggarty has a thing for women agents.”