The Clowns

by Tim McBain

  Moffit felt his pulse quicken, the blood slugging away in his neck. He felt that little twinge of electricity flare in his head, a fevered excitement that made his cheeks ache with the desire to laugh. It was a particular kind of pleasure that he only associated with small cruelties such as this. Scaring someone. Teasing someone. Knocking someone flat on their ass in soccer. The little humiliations that made life worth living.

  When the apartment buildings got within viewing distance, Moffit crouched in the brush just along the edge of the woods, and Danny followed his friend’s lead. They said nothing, just looking up at the glow of the apartment windows, most of them lit with the harsh shimmer of fluorescent bulbs. All of those shining rectangles with movement flitting around inside of their borders. It almost looked like a bank of TV screens, Moffit thought, like maybe this whole building existed for his amusement.

  “Masks on,” Moffit said, and they pulled them on.

  Next he reached into the cargo bag at his side, and there was a metallic clatter before he pulled the knives free. They were dull steak knives, not very intimidating when it came to weapons. But in the dark, they would do. The streetlight caught the blade, and the metal glittered for a moment as he passed one to Danny.

  “Have your phone at the ready, bro,” he said. “You’re the director and shit. If Turdholder pisses himself, and we don’t get that up on YouTube pronto, it’s you who will have to live with the eternal shame of missing that opportunity. Probably not worth it.”

  “Right. No pressure,” Danny said, laughing.

  They waited for a long while. The wind blew through the thicket, brushing floppy fern leaves at them and rattling dried out stalks of thistle.

  Moffit’s mind wandered as they crouched there in silence. He thought about his dad. The smell of the fallen pine needles they were sitting on made him remember the time they went on a camping trip when he was young, and his parents were still together. It was a blurry memory, smudged and smeared by the years gone by, but he remembered building a bonfire as the night crept in. He could still call to mind the picture of his dad hunched over the fire, the orange light flickering on his beard. It was the first time he’d ever had S’mores.

  His father had canceled again as far as picking him up this weekend. The visits were supposed to be every other weekend, and they'd maintained that biweekly schedule for the first two years after the divorce. The regularity slipped as time wore on. Now it was more like every six or eight weeks. He’d done the math. That made it around seven times per year total. Fourteen days out of 365, not quite four percent. He knew it’d be less – that it’d be zero percent – if his dad didn’t have to feel guilty about it.

  The night air grew thicker as they sat there, and inside the mask, it was almost unbearably humid, a wet and warm that contrasted with the chill outside in a way that made Moffit a little queasy.

  The wait continued.

  Chapter Seven

  October 29th

  5:47 PM

  The police scanner blared when Phillip got home, as it often did. His mom loved that damn thing more than TV or movies or books. Distorted voices droned, nearly indecipherable, every exchange punctuated with an “over” or a “roger that.”

  He closed the door with great care to keep it quiet and set his bag down next to the door with a similar effort at soundlessness. Detention had kept him an extra 90 minutes after school, and he’d walked the long way home after that, not relishing the conversation that was sure to transpire when he finally got here. Maybe he’d get lucky, though. Maybe she had the police scanner up so loud that she wouldn’t hear that he was home.

  No luck. Her lilting voice called from the next room.

  “Phillip?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come in here.”

  The stern edge was there in her tone. She didn’t yell, or at least it was a very rare occasion. Her voice hardened, though. It solidified into something angry, something angular and mean. Sharp.

  He stood in the doorway to her room, eyes aimed low. He could see her, just barely, a blurry blob at the top of his field of vision. She was big. Very, very big. So far as Phillip knew, it’d been years since she left the bed. It’d been this way for so long, in fact, that he couldn’t remember what things were like before very well, back when she was still ambulatory. She didn’t talk about her medical problems much, but he knew enough to know that it was an untreatable glandular disorder that had done this to her, had imprisoned her in this bedroom.

  “A detention? A tardy? That’s quite a day, huh? I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately.”

  He said nothing, his fingers fidgeting a little.

  “I know things aren’t always easy for you. I wish so badly I could be the kind of mother that could take you to the zoo or to the arcade, but I just can’t.”

  Though he remained silent, his lips tightened. Zoo? Arcade? It was like she thought he was seven years old.

  “No PlayStation for two weeks,” she said, that hard edge in her voice receding into breathy resignation. “Bring it to me.”

  He nodded and turned to go to his room. Again, those rapid blinks transpired, eyelids juddering up and down in fast motion. He didn’t know if it was anger or sadness or frustration that caused them this time around. Maybe all of the above.

  Kneeling, he un-snaked the wires from behind the bulk of the ancient TV and went to work wrapping them around the gun metal gray box, making everything neat and tidy. It was a PS1 he’d found at a garage sale. Old, but still fun.

  He could try to tell her about what really happened, about what Moffit and his friends were really like. But adults didn’t want to hear these things. They could understand cruelty in the abstract, but they suddenly turned obtuse when confronted with the real thing. That sadistic glee some took in making others suffer, in power and control. It didn’t fit how they wanted to see the world.

  Plus, he didn’t want to tell her that Moffit had insulted her. What had he called her? A “weird gross fatty” or something like that? What a penis that guy was. He hated to even think that kind of language, but there it was. Greg Moffit. Total penis.

  She was his mother, and he would take all of the humiliation and embarrassment to protect her if he could. Let him be the one to see how cruel the world really was. Let him suffer to spare her from the awful truth as much as possible. She didn’t know any better, he figured. Her life was a different experience from most altogether.

  If anyone had the inkling to get to know her rather than judging her on sight, they would have found an exceptionally sweet person with an almost girlish voice and a high tinkling laugh. How she maintained her sense of humor, her good spirits, he never knew, but she always did. She never got down, or if she did, she didn’t show it.

  It seemed so unfair. Sometimes he lay in bed, so angry about it that he cursed God. Why? Why make a world as dumb and mean-spirited as this? What for?

  He carried the box with the wires wrapped around it into his mother’s room. She pointed, hand bouncing on a pudgy wrist.

  “In the closet,” she said.

  The closet door slid open. He stooped and nestled the PlayStation among all the shoes she hadn’t touched in years.

  “I love you, mom,” he said, his back still to her, and then he turned to look at her.

  “I love you, too,” she said, and she smiled, but her eyes were far away, her attention occupied by those walkie-talkie voices spilling endlessly out of the speakers.

  Out in the kitchen he fixed himself some dinner, his usual meal – a box of off-brand mac and cheese which he seasoned with spurts of ketchup now and then. Before taking the first bite, he bowed his head. There was a long beat of silence before he muttered an, “Amen.” The noodles squished when he took the fork to the bowl, a noise he originally thought was kind of gross and had grown to find great comfort in as this process became a ritual.

  After dinner, he sat before the TV, fidgeting with the RCA rabbit ears he’d bought from Radio Shack f
or $8. Channel 7 cut in and out a few times, the picture flashing to a black screen that said “No Signal” over and over until he set it just right.

  The local newscasters gushed about the presidential candidate who would be in town this week. They also covered a string of breaking and entering reports, a traffic jam on the interstate, and they closed out with sports, one last check on the weather, and a viral video of a kitten and a pug playing together. No mention of the clowns. No mention, so far as Phillip was concerned, of anything that actually mattered.

  “What the heck?” he muttered to himself. “The public has a right to know!”

  He flipped the TV off and stared at the blank screen a while before he moved on. He shouldn’t be surprised or disappointed that they’d ignored the message he’d left on the Channel 7 Hotline answering machine this morning, he knew. He should have seen this coming from miles away.

  The police scanner barked cop jargon all through this. Most of it meant nothing to Phillip, but he knew that his mom knew all of the codes. Of course, he found the hobby a bit distasteful – ghoulish, even – finding entertainment in the emergencies and crimes happening around town.

  He cleaned up after his meal, washing and drying the dishes and putting them away, erasing all evidence that anyone used the kitchen.

  The daylight drained to a gray sky out the window while he worked. The days got so much shorter in October, and every year it caught him unaware. He wondered if that was something anyone ever got used to – the way everything around them never stopped changing.

  “I’m going out for a walk,” he said.

  No matter how much trouble he was in, walking was the one thing he was always allowed to do – perhaps because his mother couldn’t. He walked to his room and slid on a jacket, eyes catching the woods for just a second and remembering the clowns, but he pushed the thought away. It was just another thing that nobody wanted to believe, another awful truth he had to hold onto on his own.

  “Be back before nine,” she said, lifting her voice to be heard over the police chatter. “We can’t have another tardy tomorrow morning, can we?”

  Chapter Eight

  October 29th

  6:27 PM

  Instead of driving, she walked to Rick's, to clear her head and to prepare her break-up speech. She reminded herself again that Rick wasn't actually her boyfriend.

  Ahem.

  Rick, I can't see you anymore.

  See him? Were they “seeing” each other?

  I don't think we should hang out anymore.

  Did that get the point across? Or should she be more firm?

  Listen, asshole. I'm done with you.

  Heh. That did sound more like Rick's style.

  Her ribcage expanded and expelled a long sigh. Too bad she didn't have a friend she could talk to. Someone to tell her she was doing the right thing. Someone to back her up. Someone that would make sure she actually went through with it.

  But she had no friends. There had been Molly, an older girl she met at a show. They'd hung out for a while. Molly was the one that had pierced her lip and nose. Molly's boyfriend was in one of the local grindcore bands, and a few months back, the band decided to move to LA. Molly had followed. She told Chloe she'd send a postcard when they got there, but she never did.

  By eighth grade, almost all of the other girls in her grade had started to show signs of puberty. Faith was bemused to still be as flat-chested as ever, but Chloe was finally not the only girl with breasts. She wasn't totally immune to the staring and crude comments, still being more well-endowed than most of her peers and having been marked because she'd been the first. Boys still dropped pencils in front of her in an attempt to get her to bend over. Older men sometimes still had that wandering gaze. But it was less pronounced than before.

  Or maybe she'd just started to get used to it.

  That changed one day in gym class, when she noticed a group of boys in her class giggling. She turned around to find Greg Moffit standing behind her. He held a giant red wiffle ball bat to his crotch and was doing pelvic thrusts in Chloe's direction.

  She told him to quit, but it was too late. Faith was also in their gym class, and she'd been trying all semester to get Greg's attention. Before Chloe could stop her, Faith ran crying to the girl's locker room.

  Michelle Cousineau intercepted Chloe at the threshold of the locker room. She stood in the middle of the doorway, arms crossed in front of her like a bouncer at a club.

  “Faith is very upset with you right now. You need to give her some space.”

  Chloe frowned. “But I didn't do anything.”

  “Chloe, we all saw what you did. You were practically drooling on Greg.”

  Chloe opened her mouth to respond then stopped herself.

  OK, so she'd been smiling when she told Greg to quit. That was what she always did. She was afraid that if she showed how mad or embarrassed she was, it would just make things worse. She often tried to play it off like she was in on the joke. Like: Haha, guys. Very funny. Now stop screwing around.

  Chloe tried to be patient with Faith. The whole thing would blow over eventually. But it didn't. Faith stopped talking to her and ignored Chloe's many attempts to apologize.

  She was utterly convinced that Chloe was at fault. That she liked the attention. The thought made Chloe's lip curl in distaste. The irony, Chloe thought, was that Greg didn't even like her anyway. She was just a pair of boobs to him. An object. Not to mention the fact that him gyrating at her was hardly flirting in her book.

  She wrote Faith note after note and text after text, begging her forgiveness. Eventually word got back to her that Faith was telling people that Chloe enjoyed how the boys teased and fawned over her. According to Faith, Chloe referred to herself as, “God's gift to men.” Chloe tried to imagine those words coming out of her own mouth. It sounded more like something her mother would say. She suspected Michelle Cousineau had something to do with it. She'd always been envious of her closeness with Faith.

  Eventually Chloe stopped apologizing. She figured that eventually things would go back to how they were. They had to. She and Faith were BFFs. That didn't just end.

  Thinking back on it now, she remembered that Faith's parents had been going through a divorce around that time. It made her former friend's actions make a little more sense but no less hurtful.

  Chloe opened her locker one day to find that someone had slid something through the slats. It looked like a page from a magazine. She unfolded it to reveal a picture of her from an old yearbook, her face pasted onto the topless body of a Playboy playmate. She stared at the image, confused. Disgusted. Humiliated.

  Laughter erupted behind her from a group that had no doubt been standing around to watch her reaction. She crumpled the glossy paper and threw it in the nearest trash bin. She didn't want to look back at them, but she couldn't resist. When she glanced back at the group, they were still laughing. All but Faith, who stood toward the back. Faith's eyes met Chloe's; a hard, cold stare, no trace of a smile.

  When she got home from school that day, Chloe tore through her closet and dresser drawers, tearing anything that was too tight or too low cut from the hangers and tossing them into a heap at the center of her room. The wad of clothes got shoved into a garbage bag and put in the pile her parents kept in the basement for things they would eventually donate to the Salvation Army.

  She started wearing the baggy t-shirts she normally wore to bed as pajamas. If she wore anything remotely formfitting, she made sure to wear a hoodie over top. It didn't really work. It wasn't like anyone was going to suddenly forget that she had big boobs just because she started wearing loose-fitting clothing. But she supposed the girls at least couldn't accuse her of asking for the attention anymore.

  As she neared Rick's place, Chloe's pace grew slower and slower. When the house came into view, she stopped completely and jostled her lip ring from side to side with her tongue. Was this it? Was she actually going to do it?

  Remember how he alwa
ys sneers when he mentions you going to school, she told herself.

  Remember his stupid spiel about bum flaps being a lifestyle choice.

  Remember that he's afraid of hitting the ground but not of falling.

  She nodded once and strode up the rotted wooden steps leading to the front door. The angle of the landing was off, and when she paused to open the door, she had a pang of vertigo.

  The screen door – which was missing the screen, therefore maybe it was just a door – screeched as she pulled it wide. She didn't knock, because the door was never locked. That wasn't really how things worked at a squat. She just turned the knob and entered.

  The aroma of the squat hit her like a slap in the face. It was a heady fragrance of piss, rotten food, stale cigarette smoke, and unwashed crusties.

  Rick's room was up a rickety staircase, just as rotten and unstable as the one out front. Rick's door was the last one in the hallway, on the left. She swallowed before stepping into the dank chamber.

  Her eyes did a quick scan, taking in the graffiti-covered walls and the bare, stained mattress in the corner. The mattress was empty, as was the rest of the room.

  Damn it.

  She gave a quick glance into each of the other rooms upstairs, but they were also vacant. Back down the stairs her booted feet stomped. There was no one in the kitchen or the dining room. The only person she could locate in the whole house was Malcolm.

  He was passed out in a recliner in the living room. The same recliner she and Rick had been in when he sauntered in and puked all over the floor. Judging by the smell and the crusted stain that remained, no one had bothered to clean it up.

  “Hey,” she said.

  Malcolm did not stir at her voice.

  “Hey,” she repeated, kicking the recliner this time. “You.”

  He still didn't move.

  Chloe took a step closer, studying Malcolm. His greasy hair had fallen over his eyes, so she couldn't see his face very well. Christ, was he even breathing?