Nightmare Carnival

We’d barely got him to trade Dick’s.38 snub nose for the twenty gauge. The black rubber grip was sticking up from Garret’s pants like a billy club handle in a gangster movie. But it was better than a shotgun.

“We can go back—” I started to say, my soggy toast halfway to my mouth.

I stopped it there.

Dick and Garret looked where I was looking.

A clown was crossing from a booth on the east side of the Egg Shack. He was making for the bathroom.

Regular clothes, but the white was still on his face. Just smeared around.

“No nose,” Dick said.

He was right.

Not no clown nose, but no nose at all. Like, he’d left his foam one in some kid’s bed, and so the one he wore in the daytime, it hadn’t come back, looked all scooped out now, like on a skull.

Garret’s hand jabbed down for the.38 but I took him by the elbow, guided him calm.

“Get the truck,” I told him, sliding my keys across the table at him.

Dick was already laying a ten and a twenty on the table.

Ninety seconds later, on the east side of the Egg Shack, I managed to sideswipe a waitress, sending her coffee and flapjacks and ketchup bottles crashing all over the floor.

Where nobody was looking for about ten seconds then was at the short hall that fed down into the bathrooms.

Had they been, they’d have seen a thirty-six-year-old man dragging a sleeping clown out the front door, rolling him into the bed of a truck. The clown wasn’t exactly sleeping, though.

I didn’t help pick up the breakfast I’d spilled.

“This is for my dad,” I said, and applied the water pump pliers to the clown’s lower lip and gave it my weight slow, pound by pound.

What Dick had was a horse inseminator, long retired.

Instead of pulling the clown’s pants down, we just cut them up the back, right along his crack.

What Garret had was his fists. I finally made him put gloves on.

It was eleven in the morning. We’d hardly even started.

Dick was right, too. He could bring a clown back from the dead, it turned out.

We splashed water over him and then hid.

He came to slow.

The water hadn’t even washed his white paste off. Maybe if you wear it enough nights, it doesn’t come off anymore.

Once he got his bearings, he reached over for whatever he could grab onto. It was an old pen, like for milking. He pulled himself to it, climbed it like a ladder.

Because Dick was Dick, he’d figured that’s what the clown would do. So he’d broke a green-glass bottle, spread it out along the top of the boards of that milking pen.

The clown fell back, curled around his hands, and rocked sideways in the dirt.

When he stood the next time, it was with the help of a shovel handle we’d planted. It was just a handle, because it’s no fun if the whole world is sharp edges.

He used it like a crutch, like an oar, and made his way to the wide door we’d left thrown open.

The clown nodded about all the open space and took off at a hobble across the field. It was winter wheat gone native, all golden and headed out. Garret’s dad had sown it probably twenty years ago, just to hold the topsoil down, keep it from blowing into town.

Thirty yards out, one of the steel traps Dick had bought bit up into the clown’s shin.

We just watched.

The trap wasn’t tied to anything.

The clown fought it for a minute or two then stood again, started clumping to freedom.

Until the next trap.

Dick had thirty of them, all told.

“Now that’s a funny clown,” he said.

This time we drowned him. Slow.

Because Dick couldn’t guarantee bringing the clown back a third time — the second time had been shaky enough, sparks and the smell of burnt meat everywhere, the needle in the clown’s heart over and over, like looking for the magic spot, the on switch — I finally flicked my yellow pocketknife open.

It had been my dad’s.

When he’d died in Huntsville, they’d mailed us the envelope of possessions he was supposed to get back.

It was sharper than sin, could cut a hair longways two times if I held steady.

You know how sometimes when you’re eating a roast on a Sunday afternoon, and there’s a dark purple vein in there, and you kind of pull on it and it comes with your fork for a little ways before snapping?

That’s where I was going. That’s what I wanted to burrow around for, pull up into the daylight, show this clown.

“Now hold him,” I said to Dick and Garret.

It was a joke. The clown didn’t have any fight left to him.

I rolled his sleeve up and jerked my head back.

“Now that’s commitment,” Dick said.

The clown’s white makeup was even under his shirt.

None of us said it, but I know it made me wonder what else was white, in his pants. And whether that had rubbed into any of us that one summer, like Desitin.

I ground my teeth together.

Already this clown’s face was a mash of blood and meat, and he was bleeding into what was left of his underwear for sure, and there was battery acid mixed in with that blood instead of horse semen, and one of his feet flopped over now from the teeth of that first trap, but all of that fell away when I saw the fish belly part of his arm.