School of Fortune

by Amanda Brown

  His face fell. “But you only just got here.”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll be paid for the full week.”

  That’s not what he meant at all. “Where’s your luggage?”

  “This is it.” Pippa slid into the back seat. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  She was staring bleakly out the window when a high voice inquired, “Where’s that smile?” “Gone. Go away.”

  Clownie slid below the seat but popped up again, holding a two-inch square of paper. “I have something for you, Miss Flushowitz.” It was a lilliputian Matchmaking Diploma. “Congratulations!”

  “That’s not remotely funny,” Pippa yelled, tearing the paper in shreds. She burst into tears. “You have no idea what losing that diploma cost me! I may as well join the circus!”

  Clownie clapped his hands. “Yes, be a clown! Then you’d smile like me.”

  The puppet’s words slowly sank in. Pippa slid over to the laptop in the back seat and Googled “clown school.” Why not? She excelled at disguise and slapstick. If she couldn’t pass that, she might as well go on welfare. She called a place in Milford, Pennsylvania, because it was farthest away from Phoenix.

  “Da?” a man snapped after eight rings.

  “Is this the Russian Circus Arts Academy?”

  “Da. I am Slava Slootski. You are who?” demanded his thickly accented basso.

  Pippa looked in desperation around the back seat. Clownie? Nyet. “Cluny... Google.”

  “Gogol? You are Russian?” “No.”

  “Then you not understand Russian clowns.” “Please, Mr. Slootski! I’m desperate to study with you! Your Web page says you’re the best teacher in the world.” “I am best clown in world.” “That, too. I can be there tomorrow.” “What is your best trick?”

  Pippa thought back to her cheerleading days. “I can do six back somersaults in a row.” “You dance?”

  “Perfectly.” Lance had thought so, anyway. “Cha-cha is my specialty.” “You are how tall?” “Five feet nine inches.” “You like bears?”

  Pippa thought he said “pears.” “Love them.”

  “Okay,” Slava agreed fatefully. “But you audition first. You must have talent or I don’t take you.”

  “Thank you so much! I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Pippa found an overnight flight to New York on Travelocity. Mike watched his rearview mirror in fascination as his passenger rebounded from dead to very alive. She pulled out her cell phone. “Hi, Sheldon! I have good news and bad news. The good news is I actually did earn a diploma at matchmaking school.”

  “Did?”

  “Unfortunately, I lost it in a poker game. Plus a bit of cash.” “You should have had four thousand dollars left after paying tuition.”

  “It was a close game. We almost won twice that amount.”

  We? Almost? Sheldon didn’t want to know. “Any reputable institution will replace your diploma for twenty dollars.”

  “It’s not that simple. The director of the matchmaking school was also in the game. She lost the diploma.”

  “How could she lose your diploma?”

  “Look, she just did! It’s literally down the toilet now. I can’t get it back.” What was his problem? “The point is I’m flying to New York tonight. I’ll be back in school tomorrow. In a week I’ll have a diploma for you.”

  “In which field this time?”

  “I’m going to the Russian Circus Arts Academy.” Pippa took a deep breath. “Clown school.”

  “You want to be a clown? And I thought matchmaking was bad.”

  “This is the Harvard of clown schools. Slava Slootski is a world-famous authority. It’s like studying political science with Hillary Clinton.”

  Sheldon audibly shuddered. “And where might this ‘clown Harvard’ be located?”

  “Milford, Pennsylvania.”

  Sheldon closed his eyes and thought of Anson Walker, his beloved friend. “I’ll try to find a reputable hotel in the area,” he said with deep resignation.

  “How’s my mother doing?” Silence. “My ex-mother? Sheldon?”

  “Since you ask, she was arrested yesterday for assaulting a woman named Nori Nuki and allegedly defacing a spa with mud and melted chocolate. Would you care to comment?”

  “Nori called the newspapers while we were having facials. She’s the one who should be in jail. She nearly got us killed.”

  “Thayne certainly settled the score. Nori has a triple concussion. Ginny’s SUV also sustained some damage.” Actually, Thayne had totaled it when she drove it through the front of the spa. “The hearing is tomorrow afternoon.”

  Pippa was crushed. “I’ll be right there.”

  “Absolutely not! Thayne is under sedation. Her doctors agree that seeing you put her over the edge.”

  “I had no idea she would be at that spa. You’ve got to believe me.”

  “She will go to a sanatorium in Kalamazoo until she recovers some degree of sanity. Your ex-father will return to Morocco. You are not to see or communicate with your former parents in any way. Even by coincidence. Is that clear, Pippa?”

  “Thanks a lot, Sheldon.”

  As Mike watched his passenger revert to a zombie, he suspected that not even Clownie could bring her back to the land of the living. They rode in silence to Sky Harbor Airport. “American Airlines,” Pippa said tonelessly.

  The words felt like daggers in his heart. Mike opened her door. “When MatchMace hits it big I’ll pay back all the money I lost.”

  “Don’t even think about it.” She kissed his cheek. “You were a good sport.”

  Inside the terminal Pippa hit bedlam in the form of fifty or so people toting large placards. At first glance it looked as if the baggage handlers were on strike. Then she read a few of the signs: MARRIED COUPLES EARN MORE MONEY. MARRIED PEOPLE LIVE LONGER. MARRIAGE WORKS! BE FRUITFUL AND LEGALLY MULTIPLY. “Who are those crackpots?” she asked the ticket agent.

  “They’re from WedLock. A coalition of dating services and marriage counselors.”

  She had to squeeze past the demonstrators to get to security. “Hello there,” greeted a woman whose tight smile bore a frightening resemblance to Marla’s. She had pamphlets. “Are you married?”

  “Three times. I love it,” Pippa called over her shoulder, ducking into line. Rub my face in it, schmucks! How kind of them to remind her she was destined for a B-minus job, an early death, and zero offspring. Pippa was nearly at the X-ray machine when she realized that her little souvenir, MatchMace, would be about as welcome aboard her flight as a shoe bomb. She didn’t want to throw it away: it had meant the world to Mike. She had just enough time to find a FedEx outpost and send it to Sheldon, who was a heavy smoker.

  The overnight flight was totally booked. Many seats were occupied by a marching band from Poughkeepsie returning home from a national competition. Sleep was the last thing on seventy teenagers’ minds, as the other passengers swiftly discovered. Each time Pippa closed her eyes, shrieks would rend the air. Nonstop traffic in the aisle kept the odor of dirty sneakers, peanut butter, and French fries recirculating throughout the cabin. Worse, Pippa was wedged between two very large people. The one on the aisle had breathing problems. The other ate from a bottomless carry-on and had to visit the bathroom every fifteen hundred calories.

  Between all that and worrying about Thayne’s day in court, Pippa felt spry as a fossil when the plane landed in New York. She hit an ATM, then found a cab. “Take me to Milford, Pennsylvania.”

  “Miffa?” He turned down the steel drum music. “Whe’ dat be, mon?”

  The next cabbie found a filthy Esso map of Pennsylvania in his glove compartment. He and Pippa finally spotted Milford in the Poconos about seventy miles west of New York. “That’s gonna cost,” he said.

  “Five hundred bucks door to door. Including gas and tip.”

  “You’re on.”

  Pippa paid. “Wake me when we get there.”

  She dreamed of surreal characters
and events. One vision involved Thayne in a vat of chocolate, playing poker. In another dream Pippa was in the woods fleeing a moose with heart-shaped sunglasses driving a blue Maserati. An insistent dinging finally evaporated her nightmares. Pippa opened her eyes to find herself sprawled across the back seat of the cab, soaked with more sweat than her Prada suit could handle. Her neck felt broken, having propped her head at a forty-five-degree angle for the last hour. She sat up. The cab was parked at a ramshackle one-pump gas station, receiving air in a rear tire.

  Humidity engulfed her the second she got out. Huge mosquitoes attacked her ears and ankles. “Are we in Milford?” she asked, swatting them away.

  “Yep.” The little dings stopped when the driver hung up the air hose. “Now where?”

  Pippa called Slava Slootski. After a distressing number of rings, someone picked up but didn’t say anything. “Mr. Slootski? This is Cluny Google.”

  “Slava is gone,” a woman with a Russian accent told her.

  “Gone where?” Pippa tried to keep her voice calm. “He’s expecting me.”

  “Yes, I know, you are where now?”

  Pippa couldn’t even read the paint above the rotting porch. “At a gas station with a blue sign.”

  “Go right, take fifth left, stop when you see elephant. Leave now. I meet you.”

  “Go right, take fifth left,” Pippa repeated, diving back into the cab before the mosquitoes sucked her last drop of blood. “Someone will meet us at the elephant sign.”

  The fifth left was miles down the seedy, deserted highway. Pippa had never seen so many big dead animals in the road. “Think this is it?” the cab driver asked, stopping at a dirt path disappearing into the underbrush.

  “Let’s give it a try.”

  Before doing so, he reached under the front seat and handed Pippa a crowbar. The other he kept for himself. “Like the Boy Scouts say, be prepared.”

  Too bad her MatchMace was with FedEx. They bumped along the rocky way for what seemed like miles. There was no place to turn; Evel Knievel would think twice about backing out of here in reverse. “This don’t look too promising,” the cabbie observed nervously.

  Pippa tried not to dwell on the fact that, were she raped and murdered in this godforsaken thicket, her remains would never be found. “Give it another minute.”

  They gingerly proceeded around a sharp curve. “Holy shit!” the driver cried, stomping on the brakes. “There’s a friggin’ elephant!”

  Seeing them, the beast emitted a roar that threatened to shatter the windshield. It lumbered in their direction. As Pippa and the driver watched in horror, it raised its massive right foot. Two tons of that were about to come smashing through the hood when a voice called, “Mitzi! Behave or no dinner!”

  Mitzi whapped the roof of the cab with her trunk a few times before shuffling off. A roly-poly woman with white hair and the features of an old potato appeared in the road. “Where is Cluny?”

  Pippa got out, with the crowbar. The woman smelled like a swamp. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “I am Masha.” She studied Pippa’s suit. Shaking her head, she instructed the cab driver, “You turn here.”

  He was delighted to take advantage of a small roundabout and rocket out of there. “Hey!” Masha looked anxiously at Pippa. “He forgets your trunk.”

  Pippa batted away the instant swarm of mosquitoes. They weren’t going near Masha, she noticed. “I’m afraid this bag is all I have.”

  “But your dancing shoes? Wigs and makeup? Where are they?”

  “The airline lost them. Really lost them,” Pippa added. “They got sent to Haiti by mistake.”

  “Slava will be furious.”

  A short, rotund man with a long white beard burst through the foliage. Briars clung to his patched clothing. His boots and face were monuments of mud. He carried a machete and a basket full of dark mushrooms. Demonic forces radiated from his blue eyes. Pippa screamed in fright. Sure that her end was at hand, she cowered behind the older woman and, eyes closed, waited for the inevitable.

  “Morels,” she heard Masha say. “Very good, Slava.”

  Pippa peeped around the apron strings. “Mr. Slootski?”

  He brandished his machete. “Off my property or I kill you!”

  “Slava, stop! She is new clown, not tax assessor.” Masha took Pippa’s hand. “Cluny.”

  Slava inspected Pippa head to foot, as one would a horse at auction. Despite the mosquitoes, she didn’t dare move, sensing that this examination was a critical part of her entrance audition. “Funny costume,” he pronounced finally. “Grace Kelly suit, black eye, straw hair.”

  “Thank you.”

  A large bear scampered out of the bushes. Seeing Pippa, it reared on its hind legs and came at her, waving its paws in the air. Pippa screamed a second time. Lunging backward, she tripped over her crowbar and fell flat on her butt. The bear kept coming at her so she covered her head with her laundry bag and kicked her shoes in the air, hoping to ward it off.

  “Ha ha!” Slava laughed. “Like overturned beetle! Very good.”

  Pippa slowly removed the bag from her face to find Slava feeding red berries to the bear. “Meet Pushkin.” Slava began humming “Tea for Two.” “Dance with him.”

  Swallowing her fright, Pippa did as she was told. She had to admit that, claws aside, Pushkin had better moves than most guys at fraternity dances. “He likes you.” Slava clapped his hands. “You like him?”

  “He’s adorable,” Pippa replied, quivering with terror.

  “Good. You come to school then.” Slava plunged into the bushes on the other side of the road. Pushkin disappeared after him.

  Pippa nearly fainted with relief. “Are there more bears?” she asked Masha.

  “Only Pushkin. He dance boogie-woogie. He is star of our circus.” Masha frowned as the elephant unleashed another bloodcurdling bellow. “Maybe Mitzi is jealous. You do not be afraid of her. This way, Cluny. I get you better clothes.”

  Masha headed briskly down the overgrown drive. After struggling for twenty minutes in her sling-back heels, Pippa debated whether it would be better to take them off and slash her feet on the rocks, or keep them on and break an ankle. She nearly stepped on a toad: keep the shoes on. Every once in a while Pippa swore she heard a menacing snort in the woods behind her. After an eternity the driveway ended and she found herself in a clearing.

  Two young men and a woman were yanking at ropes and poles, apparently unfazed by another elephant just a few feet away. “Cluny! Come quick!” Masha yelled. Pippa ditched her shoes and ran over. “When I say three, pull rope. One! Two! Three!”

  A gigantic swath of canvas rose from the ground. The other elephant curled its trunk around a telephone pole and poised it under a peak in the cloth. As the three workers hammered spikes into the ground, securing the tent, Masha pointed at another rope. “Pull!”

  The elephant put a second pole in place, propping up the other half of the tent. “Good Bobo,” Masha said, giving him an apple.

  Pippa looked down at her scarlet hands. She had the makings of a major blister between her thumb and first finger. Her suit was a ruin of grass stains. There was no school building in sight. The three circus hands headed in her direction. An aroma of skunk cabbage enveloped them, same as with Masha. “Hi. I’m Cluny.”

  An elfin young woman squeezed Pippa’s blister with excruciating force. “Lulu. I was with Cirque du Soleil.”

  Pippa had been around enough SMU cheerleaders to know that Lulu already considered her a mortal enemy. “That’s wonderful.”

  A guy with a mangy pony tail stepped forward. Everything about his loose-jointed body said “airhead.” His squidlike handshake confirmed the impression. “Benedict.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” she said, slapping away a fresh cloud of mosquitoes.

  Her third classmate, a fine specimen of manhood, undressed her with his eyes. “Cluny.” His tongue luxuriated over the two syllables. “I’m Vik. Where’d you get the black eye?�
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  “I drove a car into a swimming pool.” At least it sounded like a circus stunt.

  “You come with me, Cluny,” Masha said.

  At the edge of the field stood three dilapidated trailers. Two were half buried in the dirt, like unexploded bombs from World War II. Masha opened the door to the most decrepit one. “You sleep here.”

  Pippa picked a path through piles of clothing to a tiny bunk. “Is this the dorm?”

  “What is dorm? This is trailer, like circus.”

  “Where’s the bathroom?”

  Masha pointed out the window to the outhouse. “Very handy.” Pippa’s nose wrinkled: a little too handy. “And the shower?” “We have river.” “May I see it?”

  Masha led Pippa down a briary path to the banks of a slow-moving body of water. “Delaware. Very warm this time of year.”

  A nearby plupp made Pippa jump. “What was that?”

  “Bullfrog. If you catch, I cook for you. Excellent with mushrooms from Slava.”

  Pippa took out her cell phone: she needed Sheldon immediately. “If you don’t mind, I’ll be staying in a hotel.”

  “No! Everyone lives together, like circus.” A moot point, in any case: no cell phone service. Masha led Pippa back to the second trailer. She emerged with rugged pants and shirt, socks, a pair of old boots, and a jar of oily brown liquid. “For bugs. Slava makes himself.”

  Pippa changed into the uniform. She sniffed Slava’s insect repellent and almost passed out; however, since it appeared to work for everyone else, she slathered it on. When she emerged from the trailer, her classmates were setting plates on a nearby picnic table. Masha appeared with a steaming pot of oatmeal, a platter of smoked fish, and coffee. Everyone, especially Lulu, packed away an enormous amount of breakfast in very little time. “Eat up,” she told Pippa. “You’ll work it off.

  The smoked fish made Pippa thirsty. She guzzled a mouthful from the glass at her plate before a fit of choking overtook her. “That was not water,” she croaked, tears gushing down her cheeks.

  “It’s vodka.” Lulu picked a bone out of her teeth. “Slava makes it himself.”

  Pippa’s voice eventually returned. “You drink that for breakfast?” “Breakfast, lunch, dinner,” Vik said. “Russian circus tradition.” That was as much alcohol as Thayne slugged down when she lost important tennis matches. Impressed, Pippa took a second look at her tablemates. No one seemed in the least tipsy. How would she ever be able to polish off a glass of vodka at breakfast? She was already feeling the effects of the first swallow.