Goldenland Past Dark (29 page)

The bus station lay on the outskirts of town, just like the circus, but it was a long walk there through the lonely cornfields. Nepenthe and Webern took turns dragging her trunk, which quickly acquired a halo of dust and the wayward brambles of several dry weeds. As he lugged the enormous box, Webern thought again of the cut-out photos of his grandfather. He wondered what had made the old man leave, what might have made him stay. Nepenthe’s hair bounced, her hips swiveled languidly, and Webern tried to forget that this would be the last time he got to watch her walking away like she didn’t care if he followed, like it was an inconvenience to her.

Nepenthe and Webern passed a scarecrow farm, with its rows and rows of burlap spectres, and Nepenthe wrested the handle of the trunk from Webern’s hand.

“I’ve got it from here,” she said. She’d been picking wildflowers, and Webern saw now that she’d woven them into a garland. She crowned herself with it, turned her back to him, and gave the trunk a tug. Webern didn’t know if this was supposed to be his cue to leave, but he mutely followed her anyway. About a minute later, without looking back at him, Nepenthe said, “You know, Bernie, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

Webern held his breath. A dragonfly paused on his hump, rubbed its wings together, and flew away.

“Just something you should know. In case you want to find me someday, or, you know. If I send you a letter. Anyway, my name’s not really Nepenthe. It’s Elizabeth. I actually went by Liz, if you can believe that, until my condition started up and I got to be Lizzie the Lizard and tried to drink a bottle of Lysol. Then I became Eliza. Rathbone. Of the shipping Rathbones.” The trunk bumped over a rabbit burrow. “I just thought you should know, I guess.”

“Are you going back to them?” Webern’s mouth felt as dry as the browning stalks of corn that tilted above them. “To your family?”

“If I went back there looking like this I’d probably get gang-raped by the entire Harvard lacrosse team.” Nepenthe sighed. The wildflowers were molting already. Petals streamed through her hair. “No. It’s just starting to feel like my name again. It’s hard to explain why. Though I’m sure my analyst would have plenty to say about it.”

They arrived at the bus station in time for Nepenthe to buy a seat for the 8:15 to Des Moines. She determined she could transfer from there to Omaha, and from there on to Ogallala, Cheyenne, and Denver, where all things would be possible, including a transfer to her ultimate destination, San Francisco. Webern stood behind her and tried to ignore the man behind the counter, who inspected him with naked curiosity. Webern gazed at station’s one clock instead, frozen in the eternal smile of ten oh five. On his own wrist, Dr. Schoenberg’s watch kept on ticking.

“So that’s that.” Nepenthe tucked the ticket into a pocket of her dress.

The two of them sat down on a wooden bench. Outside the station’s windows, a shirtless man with a large red, white, and blue eagle tattoo tinkered with the bus’s engine. Webern’s stomach tightened as the hood swung down with a
clang
.

An old grandma with a sewing basket, a scraggly boy with acne that looked like grease burns, and a portly man with a tuba case each boarded the bus in turn. Nepenthe’s foot began to jiggle. Finally she turned to Webern. Her face had a look on it that he wasn’t expecting—blank fear, like temporary amnesia.

“Listen, this is ridiculous. Just come to California with me.”

“I can’t be a clown in San Francisco.”

“There’s other stuff you could do. You could be a mime, out on the street. Or, I don’t know, maybe you could make balloons for kids’ parties or something.”

“Upstaged by cake,” Webern murmured.

“What? What did you say?”

He didn’t say anything. He imagined himself boarding the bus to California, the way she would inch farther from him in her seat with each passing mile. He saw them disembarking and her vanishing instantly into a crowd where she blended in completely.

“Bernie, look at me. Please.”

Nepenthe stood over him in a flowing paisley dress, her hair corkscrewing in all directions, dotted here and there with the silky hearts of black-eyed Susans. She looked as perfect and unreachable as a girl in a fashion magazine, and for a second he longed for a pen to draw scales all over her. But then he looked away from her clothes, her body, her face even, into those emerald green eyes, and despite himself, he saw
her
there—a flicker of something familiar and wondrous, like the tip of a mermaid’s tail just above the waves.

“I’m not going to forget you, okay?” she told him. She clutched the handle of her trunk. “You ought to know that by now.”

The bus mechanic walked by the window. Webern’s eyes followed his eagle tattoo. A permanent mark.
If you care so much, why don’t you stay? As the tattooed lady, as my wife?
But he already knew the answer. She would never put ink on that skin.

As soon as he walked in, Webern knew it wasn’t an ordinary meeting at Clown HQ. The place was too quiet, to start with. The others sat around the table in a half-circle, like they were waiting for him, but even when he closed the door, they didn’t speak for a long slow moment. Professor Shim Sham raised a skull and crossbones bottle to his lips; Punchy Joe gnawed beef jerky; Pipsqueak rubbed off lipstick with his thumb; Happy Herbert chuckled, low and constant, the first tremors of an earthquake. They reminded him of jurors, jurors or a firing squad. And that was before Silly Billy started talking.

“Now listen, we know you’ve had a rough time lately, Bump. And I’d be the last one to discount what you’ve done here. I mean it. Most of the guys haven’t been around to remember, but I do. Before you came, we hadn’t had a new routine in years. It was all banana peel gags. Bullshit cribbed from Three Stooges movies. You put us on the map. But now we just want to shake things up a little bit. I’m not gonna lie to you—the crowd loves Herb. No hard feelings, it’s just a fact. Between you and me, I was as surprised as the next guy, but there it is. With his mugging and your routines, we’re going places. I mean ticket sales. The kids love his Martian. You saw the show last night. Pandemonium. Management’s starting to notice. So we’ve been thinking. Why not make the most of our talent? Your routines—but with Herb front and centre. Just see what happens. We’re not scaling you back, just moving everybody around a little. You hear what I’m saying, Bump? Just do some things different. See how it works. Like a trial.”

“A trial,” Webern repeated.

“That’s right,” Silly Billy said encouragingly. “A trial.”

Webern looked around the room—the empty bottles, the sticky playing cards, the dusty rug, the pile of girly magazines in one corner. It looked the same as always. It didn’t look like a trap.

“So what do you want me to do?” he asked.

Silly Billy waved his hand. “The usual. Crowd work. Straight man parts. Playing the double to Herb. We’ve got a great one we start rehearsing tomorrow—a mirror bit. Kind of a take-off from that painting routine you do. Real funny stuff. It might be good for you. Take it easy, relax. Unhealthy to work as hard as you do.”

“Unhealthy.”

“That’s the spirit.” Silly Billy picked up his penknife. He poked Webern’s chest with it. “Go home. Sleep on it. We can talk again in the morning if you want. Otherwise, rehearsal at one tomorrow.”

Webern stared down at the floor. His sneakers were untied, the laces dotted with burs from his walk home through the fields. A shriveled balloon-poodle lay on the ground by his feet. He realized he was supposed to leave.

“Okay,” he said. The other clowns blurred into each other. He opened the door to the boxcar and stepped carefully down to the ground.

Outside, Marzipan was waiting for him. She held out her hand and Webern took it. Her skin was cooler than he expected, her palm hairless. But he never would have mistaken it for a human’s. Webern let her lead him home.

Pipsqueak joined Silly Billy at the door of Clown HQ, and they stood there, watching Webern shuffle away.

“Now to me, that’s just sad.” Pipsqueak applied a pair of tweezers to his eyebrow. “In the theatre, they always taught us, if you have to bow out, do it with style. That way, they remember you for next time.”

“The guy thinks he’s an artist. He’s sensitive.” Silly Billy folded up his knife and dropped it into a pocket. “And from what I hear, his main squeeze’s shacking up with a motorcycle gang.”

From the table, Happy Herbert snorted. “He wants to be an artist, he can move to gay Pair-ee. We like things big and cheesy over here.”

It was the beginning of a dark time for Webern
. He thought about his mother more and more—about how years before he was born, she too had faded to a ghost of herself, only to be brought back to life by the volts that arched and crackled through the temples of her skull. As he sat alone in his boxcar, slumped in the red polka-dotted underpants Nepenthe had given him for Valentine’s Day, listening for his sisters and drinking his dead grandma’s ape under the table, he wondered if there was such a cure in the world for him.

Webern knew that his sisters would come for him now. They had done it before. He remembered peering through their keyhole at glass jars with holes poked in their lids, wings fluttering inside like darkly beating hearts, muddy red handprints cave-painted on the walls. Webern’s mother kept the house neat as a pin (her phrase), but she let the door to the twins’ room remain shut as she pushed the roaring vacuum past. Once, long before Webern could remember, she had surprised the girls in their play, and Willow had bitten her. She bore the scar, star-shaped, on her palm for the rest of her life. She hid it in her fist with a private shame that Webern couldn’t understand.

Willow and Billow frightened Webern when he was small, but in those days the world was full of frightening things: the laundry hamper that opened onto an abyss of black; the oak tree branch that rapped insistently at his windowpane; the garbage men, who came to eat his trash. His sisters were six years older than him; they could leave the house of their own accord, but unlike his parents, they had no stated destinations and they brought no stories when they returned. He believed that one day he would awake knowing why they had brought a squirming red possum runt to die in the living room, or why they kept their costume jewelry buried in a box in the backyard. But he knew now that their lives had always been a mystery to him. Their motives were their own.

Webern put his feet up on his desk. He tilted back in his chair.

“Let ’em come and get me,” he muttered.

Nepenthe had left a week earlier, and since she’d gone, the state of the boxcar had taken a definite turn for the worse. The first night, Webern had bundled her newspapers and magazines together with the belt of her forsaken pink robe, but he had become too exhausted and depressed to finish the job, so the pile of papers sat directly in front of the door. Whenever he wanted to go out, he had to kick them aside;
The Druid Free Press
was covered with footprints. Marzipan kept trying to throw them out, but Webern wouldn’t let her touch anything that belonged to Nepenthe. The chimp spent her days on the couch, which was shrouded under rumpled blankets and the two or three dirty T-shirts Webern had been wearing the last several days; when she did rise, which was less and less often, she left behind a great number of coarse black hairs and a lingering scent of Scotch. Right now, she stared up at the ceiling vacantly, arms folded behind her head, as the train jolted and stuttered its way through the dark night.

Perhaps the worst part of the mess was overflowing from Webern’s desk. Crumpled-up pages lay wadded up everywhere, a riotous garden of paper blossoms. These were Webern’s abandoned clown acts. Webern hadn’t exactly been inspired of late. The night before, he’d had one brief nightmare—a blurry interlude in which the clown had cried so hard that his glass eye popped out and rolled away—but other than that, his nights had been dreamless, and more often than not, sleepless, too.

Not that it mattered now anyway. With Happy Herbert centre stage, Webern was less than eager to hand over more of his ideas to be plundered, and the other clowns didn’t seem particularly interested anyway. Happy Herbert’s perspective was simple: if the same gag got the same laughs every night, then what was the point of changing it? Webern could see the logic in this point of view in the same way he could see a car wreck from the windows of the train: just because it was there didn’t mean it should be. Webern had always taken for granted that the audience would laugh—people had been laughing at him since he was a kid. What mattered to him was the clarity of the details: the way he bent to smell a daisy just before it squirted a stream of water in his face, or the startled expression he made upon discovering a hole in the bottom of one floppy shoe. Webern longed to make every moment of his clown routine as crystal-clear and unmistakable to his audience as his dreams were to him. He wanted the act to be a dream they dreamed together, a dream that lingered in their minds even after they emerged, blinking, into the midway’s garish lights.

Webern had been dreaming his whole life. His mother had taught dreaming to him when she opened the picture books and guided his hands over pages of goblins and unicorns, fairy princesses and dragons. She had dressed him for dreaming in red silk pyjamas with blue and white sailboats stitched on the pockets, in a terrycloth robe the colour of the night sky with constellations embroidered on the sleeves. Now that dreams eluded Webern during sleep, he spent his hours in a half-awake daze, where dreams could appear anywhere—in the sawdust that floated like clouds of gold under the spotlights, in the red and white barns that loomed in the fields they passed. He found himself staring into space as the world around him took on the quality of a vision, the cloudy bright colours of paint spilled through water. Sometimes he looked at his hands and found they had become strange to him. Dreams shimmered on everything he touched, like a glaze. But he couldn’t hold them in his mind. He couldn’t shape them into acts or mark them down with crayons. He was in them. He was lost in them. He was alone.

Webern opened the drawer that held the Great Vermicelli. The dummy lay inside, his eyes rolled back inside his wooden head, his lacquered skin rouged. His arms lay empty, crossed on his chest, the smooth pale hands supported by wires. Pale hands, like wings. Magician’s hands.

Carefully, Webern lifted him out of the drawer. The wood felt strangely warm, pliable—almost alive. Webern set the dummy on his knees, and the eyes opened with a satisfying click. He slid his hand under the Great Vermicelli’s tuxedo jacket and touched the talking stick, a grooved spine. The dummy’s mouth formed words; a voice came from a dark place at its hollow heart.

“You know, my boy, you would do well to study the great mimes of the Commedia dell’arte. The incomparable Grosseto, in particular, might lend you inspiration. His
pièce de resistance
was a Pantaloon who, convinced by Harlequin that his young wife has been assumed into the heavens, fires arrow after arrow at the sky, only to be pierced with each one upon its descent. Only when he resembles a pincushion does his beloved return from her tryst.” Vermicelli chuckled. “In theatrical circles, he has become something of a patron saint for cuckolds.”

Webern tipped the dummy back on his lap. The eyes clicked shut again, and the mouth stilled. Webern’s hands were shaking as he lifted a crayon and carefully drew an arrow on the clean page of his clown notebook. One arrow, then another, and another, and another.

Webern stood just offstage in a Martian suit made of cardboard boxes. He hated the way the costume restricted his movements; having it on felt more like standing inside a tiny house than like wearing clothes. The big top was full tonight, full to capacity, and the heat of so many bodies filled the air. Sharp cries and laughter thrummed in his ears, and sweat trickled down his hump. Even here in the darkness, he was starting to cook.

Out into the centre ring, amid dry ice explosions and shattered glass, a travesty was taking place. Happy Herbert was many things, but he was not a natural clown; Webern was sure of that. To be a clown, a person had to lose himself in the reality of the act—he had to be perfectly serious, focused completely on the smallest details of his task. He had to move with the disastrous conviction of a sleepwalker or the self-deluded. People always thought the clown and the straight man were two separate roles, but the opposite was true. The clown
was
the straight man, the only one onstage who couldn’t see the absurdity of what he did. The clown was a comedy to everyone else but a tragedy to himself. He mourned popped balloons, broken eggs, faithless women. But Happy Herbert wouldn’t wipe that smile off his face until someone sprayed mace in his eyes.

Webern grimaced as Happy Herbert cracked the cap off a Coke bottle using an armplate from his Martian suit. Unlike Webern’s costume, which was gilded with aluminum foil and staples, Herb’s was made from real pressed tin. Out in the audience, the kids shrieked with laughter. Of course.

Webern leaned against one of the tent’s poles. He had seen a
real
clown once, just after Dr. Schoenberg found him in Dolphin River. In those first few weeks before he and Nepenthe grew close, he had spent almost every waking hour with the old ringmaster, pouring over ancient playbills and listening to wild stories of the vaudeville days. One night, somewhere in Ohio, Dr. Schoenberg had whisked him away from the camp to see a performer (“An old acquaintance of mine”) in the gloomy basement of a defunct jazz club.

In that small, grimy space—which, despite its moist porous walls and low ceiling, still managed to echo—Webern had watched an old man in a threadbare trench coat attempt to put a bicycle together. The room was empty except for him, Dr. Show, and an aging nightclub singer whose baby daughter wore a sequined dress; it was silent except for the buzzing of a fly that rammed its body repeatedly into the spotlight’s dim bulb. But Webern was transfixed. The old man’s face showed every flicker of disappointment, rage, and elation as he set about his task, and in his hands, the pile of junk and spare parts before him transformed. One bent wheel turned into a hunk of pizza dough; the greasy chain became a bauble of gold. And when the bicycle was at long last completed, it too changed into something glorious: a kind of chariot that its owner could ride into the sky, if he wanted to. That night, Webern finally understood what it was to be a clown, the simple, humble craft of it and the honour, too. But he had forgotten. And now, standing here in the sawdusty shadows, watching Happy Herbert blow raspberries at the audience, that basement room seemed more real than anything that had happened to him since.

Silly Billy blew the whistle, and Webern trotted out to his first position in the ring, careful to stay far from the spotlights. Pipsqueak and Professor Shim Sham wheeled out “the mirror”—really just a huge golden frame with thick screens of black on the sides. The routine played simply enough: Happy Herbert the Martian glimpses his reflection for the first time, and is terrified, then angered by his double, who placidly mimics everything he does.

Behind the black screen on the right side of the frame, Webern tried to compose himself. Heat and alcohol made him woozy, and the cheers of the crowd blended in with the sound of the blood pulsing through his ears.

Happy Herbert began to hum, and, taking a deep breath, Webern stepped out into the light. It was essential that their movements be exactly synchronized, so Herb had devised what he thought was an elaborate system of cues: the tunes he hummed throughout the routine were meant to set the tempo for their movements and actions, as music would for a pair of dancers. Unfortunately, Herb’s sense of rhythm was lousy, so Webern continually had to check his motions against Herb without turning his head in the slightest. It was a strain, and as Webern sauntered into the spotlight—easy and casual, just as they’d practiced it—he saw Herb was almost a full step ahead of him. Damn, damn, damn.

Webern slid his feet through the sawdust as he moved into their second position—the surprise pose, when the Martian first glimpsed his reflection. Mouth ajar, head tilted to the side, Webern found himself looking Happy Herbert square in the face for the first time all evening. At this distance, Herb’s makeup—light green and slightly metallic—couldn’t hide the imperfections of his real face: the stubble, boarish and bristly, already growing in after a five o’clock shave; the low forehead, wrinkled with the strain of thinking. His breath smelled like the hot dog water vendors poured out in parking lots at the end of the day.

But Webern could have borne all this had it not been for one other thing: Happy Herbert was smiling. With his back to the audience, he wasn’t bothering to widen his eyes, to narrow his broad mouth to a tiny
o
of shock. Instead, he was smiling—no, leering, really—at Webern. Tough luck, his dim, contented eyes seemed to say. I’m out here, and you’re in there, looking back.

Later on, Webern didn’t remember making a fist, and he didn’t remember winding back to throw the punch. The big top, the sawdust ring, even his own body felt very far away, and his muscles moved of their own accord, as though executing a pantomime he’d practiced a million times before. But he did remember the expression of Happy Herbert’s face: the eyes opening wider and wider, the mouth falling open. It was the surprise pose after all.

Happy Herbert reeled backwards; one hand flew up to cup his jaw. He staggered, but didn’t fall. Instead he stared at Webern, his wide eyes stretched beyond surprise on into shock, and even terror. Then—unsteadily, clumsily, but at top speed—he turned around and began to run.