Nightmare Carnival

“Having fun?” Dick said, his lips thin.

I didn’t answer, just pulled Josh past.

For two hours, we rode everything at least once, and then it was hot dogs and ice cream and paper boats dripping with nachos. For all of us.

Clown killing, it’s hungry work.

Finally, Dick pushed his second hot dog away half-finished, looked to Garret and me in a way we couldn’t ignore.

“Enough of this,” he said, and balled his napkin up, rolled it onto the table like he was calling our bluff.

It had all been a good idea two months ago, when the carnival’s fliers first started showing up stapled to telephone poles, taped to the gas pumps, tacked on the bulletin board at the laundromat.

Dick had the make-do medical degree.

Garret had his dad’s old barn.

I had my son.

Two months ago, it had made perfect sense, hadn’t seemed unfair at all.

* * *

I told Josh that Uncle Garret and Aunt Dick were going to ride a ride finally.

Garret leaned over, spit in front of my boot, his eyes on mine the whole time.

“They’ll sit right behind us,” I said to Josh, staring back at Garret.

We were standing in line for the Tunnel of Love. We weren’t tallest — there were some varsity linemen there, with their bubbly dates — but we were the oldest, by about a generation.

We were the least smiley, too.

What had happened sophomore year was that Garret’s dream had made us remember our own dreams.

For a few nights after the Tunnel of Brotherly Love — it’s hard to even talk about. And it was different for each of us, as near as we could compare, that long after the fact.

Garret’s dream pretty much stopped when he saw that clown’s head twitch over, become aware of us, its eyes completely fixed on me and Dick, kissing. It was like his dream was stopping there because that’s where he flinched.

The way it was for Dick was that he woke in his bed for no reason.

He was living in town with his grandparents then, sleeping in the same bed his dad had slept in before him.

Their street was Durham, and it was the same as Dogwood and Emerald and every other street.

A hundred times before, he’d lifted the old-fashioned window of his bedroom, stepped out careful of his grandmother’s prize flowers, and gone off into the night with us, the silver spokes of our bikes’ wheels flashing moonlight.

It’s what he thought was happening again. That we’d touched the glass of his window with a twig, were waiting out on the lawn for him.

The way he told it, looking away so we couldn’t make out what exactly was happening to his eyes, he kind of drifted up from bed, ghosted across to the window, dodging the creaky floorboard.

The lawn was empty. Just moonlight on dead grass.

He looked up the street, then back again, said out loud, “Hunh,” and turned to get back in his bed.

Except there was a clown in it. A clown lifting up the sheet, in invitation.

Which is where it cut off for him, the whole rest of that night.

Some people are blessed, I guess.

Where it picked up for me was in the nurse’s office at school.

I was bleeding into my underwear.

From back there.

The sheriff came down, the district’s counselor drove in, and then Doctor E showed up, a sour look on his face. I was wearing dark green sweatpants from the lost and found by then. Doctor E said it was recent, what had happened to me, what had been happening to me. Just a night or two ago, and this was Thursday. I hadn’t been anywhere but home right after school all week.

There was only one answer who it could be.

My dad didn’t know what was waiting for him when he coasted in at seven that night, his hard hat cocked up on the dashboard.

My teacher then was Ms. Willoughby.

She walked right out across the sidewalk in her skirt and cardigan, waited for my father to stand from the truck, his gloves folded in his hands like he’d always taught me — a man’s only as good as his gloves, always take them inside for the night — and she slapped him across the face, then hid her face and ran down the sidewalk.

I know because I was watching from the back seat of my mom’s car, three houses down.

We were supposed to have left, my mom even had a thick clutch of one-dollar bills for the motel that night, from a hat the principal had passed, but she couldn’t do it. She had to see.

The men gathered on the lawn took turns on my father. Boots, fists, knees. When one of them limbered a crowbar up from the side of his leg, though, the sheriff guided it back down.

My father woke up in jail, and then in court, and then in lockup in Lubbock, waiting for transfer down to Huntsville. That simple.

I don’t know what ever happened to his gloves.

All I did know, the secret I only ever told Garret and Dick, was that in my bed a few nights later, something caught behind my knee. Something that had been lost in the sheets.

It was a little red ball made from foam. With a slit in the side.

A clown nose.

The car jerked us forward, into the past.

Because this was the Tunnel of Love, the seats weren’t molded for two, but for one, and angled to the center so you slid into whoever you were with.