Nightmare Carnival

“It’s because he’s a freak,” I said, licking my lips to get this cut right. To keep my hand steady.

“And we’re sure he’s the one, right?” Dick said for the second time.

It was because of how old the clown was, or wasn’t.

“They don’t age the same,” I said up to Dick, staring hard at him to make my case.

Not like we could stop now anyway.

“One clown’s as good as any other,” Garret said.

His voice was coming back. His head was starting to work again.

“Just do it,” Dick said.

I did, the blade slipping into the clown’s arm like the arm was made of butter, like the flesh wanted my knife.

The white didn’t stop at the skin, as it turned out.

The clown was paste all the way in.

When I looked up, he smiled at me, dark blood spilling from the low corner of his mouth, and then his whole face bulged up at once, the instant before it burst onto mine.

Garret had had the.38 right to the clown’s temple.

He was pulling the trigger and screaming, screaming and pulling the trigger.

I spit out what I could — it tasted like paint — let the clown slump away.

To finish it, we tied the clown to my truck like we’d promised, dragged him in figure eights across the other side of the field from Dick’s traps. We kept having to stop to tie onto a different part. He was loose. He was coming apart.

“How many clowns can you fit in a car?” Dick asked, turned sideways to look through the back glass.

“A lot, like this,” I said.

We piled what was left in the barn and burned it.

“Let it go,” Garret said, when the barn itself caught.

If I say we held hands in that firelight, then it was as third graders, and the light on our faces, it was from the entry arch of a carnival, when the world was a different world.

Because I wanted it to stop with me, I didn’t pass my yellow knife on to Josh like I’d always meant to.

Instead, at work one day I just dropped it down a drain, walked away.

As for Dick, he called his ex three days later, made her listen on the phone when he shot himself.

They found him naked at his kitchen table, his dinner dishes drying on the rack. He’d drawn the black crosses over his eyes. With a ballpoint pen, the coroner said at first. But it turned out he’d used a razor blade first, then cracked a pen open, smeared the ink in, and washed the extra off.

It was a closed casket.

At the funeral Garret just looked at me, didn’t say anything.

What can you say?

Because nobody else would know to, I looked in Dick’s shed and his truck and even out at the old barn, but his steel traps were all gone. Maybe cocked and loaded out in the scrub now, waiting for some other clown to step into them.

When Josh asked where Aunt Dick was, I let my eyes catch Tina’s for a moment, got the go-ahead from her, and took Josh for a walk, explained a few things.

“Like Rusty,” Josh said.

Rusty, my dog I’d had when I married Tina. Rusty, Josh’s first friend. His best friend. Rusty was buried in the church cemetery, now. We’d had to sneak in to do it. Because we loved him. All three of us had been crying. I’d thought for sure we were going to last forever.

“Like Rusty,” I said, and took his hand.

Josh smiled.

“What?” I said.

“He brought me that chocolate bar last night,” he said, trying not to smile.

I walked for sixteen more steps, replaying this in my head, and when I asked Josh the next question, I didn’t stop and squat down and square him up to me so I could watch his face. I just said it real casual, like we were already talking: “He?”

“Aunt Dick,” Josh said.

“But—” I said.

“His name isn’t Dick anymore, though,” Josh said, and whispered the next part: “It’s Rich.”

My face was hot, then cold. Then numb.

“And he’s not like Rusty,” Josh said. “He said he, that he ran away, that’s all. That he joined the carnival.”

I shut my eyes, walked blind the next three days, the next week.

Where I found Garret was the fairgrounds. It was still trashed up from the carnival.

“It’s just wood and fiberglass,” he said.

He was talking about the Tunnel of Love.

“And electricity,” I said.

“And electricity,” he said, nodding.

Neither of us were standing where the Tunnel had been. We were in line, or would have been, had it still been there.

But I guess it was. I guess it always is.

A popcorn bag blew against my leg. I kicked it loose, watched it leave.

“He’s here, isn’t he?” Garret said.

Dick. Rich.

“You’re not going to—?” I said across to him, holding my gun finger into my own mouth like Dick had.

“Got this for you,” Garret said back.

It was my yellow knife. From work.

I took it, looked at both sides, then up to him.

He looked at me in a way I couldn’t figure. A way that meant everything and nothing both at once.