Catch a Falling Clown

7

I made my call to Los Angeles and then put myself in the hands of Elder and Emmett Kelly. What they did with those hands was transform me into a clown. My brother would have said that it didn’t take much, but it had to be enough to fool Nelson and Alex, who made it to the circus no more than twenty minutes after us. I had a little blue hat on and a shiny suit with an inflated inner tube inside it. I began to sweat almost immediately and knew that the greasepaint wasn’t letting me perspire enough; I was getting sicker by the minute.

Almost any law-enforcement agent, even the dumb cops played by people like Bill Demarest or Nat Pendleton in the movies, would have considered a clown costume.

“I’m going to tear this circus apart, elephant puddle by elephant puddle, until I find Peters,” Nelson told Elder through closed teeth. Kelly, I, and four other clowns were within listening distance. I was playing with a fake rope that looked as if I was twirling a lasso, only the lasso was a rigid hoop. It was a third-rate gag but a first-rate disguise.

“Lots of elephants, lots of people,” said Elder evenly. He leaned against a huge trunk in Clown Alley, where we were putting on costumes and fixing props. “Besides, Peters isn’t here. If he killed Rennata, this is the last place he’d come. He’d get himself torn to pieces.”

“Maybe,” said Nelson. Alex was looking around at every face, and when he came to mine I concentrated on the little hoop. He fingered his Adam’s apple, and his eyes went past me. I was sick of twirling the lasso.

“I don’t know where he is,” said Elder evenly.

“You are lying,” Nelson went on, letting his tongue go over his lower lip.

Elder laughed, a nice deep laugh. “Sheriff, how am I supposed to answer that? Say I’m not lying? Admit that I am, which I am not? Feel free to look around here as much as you want. My guess is that Peters got his car and is back in Los Angeles by now.”

Alex wandered over to me slowly, suspiciously. I kept twirling madly. I could feel him behind me, but I didn’t look.

“I have taken the precaution of doing just that,” sighed Nelson, removing his sweat-stained hat and wiping the band with his dirty handkerchief. I could see Nelson’s gray-stubbled chin announcing that he was losing his grip on his minimal appearance and the case.

“Hey,” said Alex behind me. Kelly, who was applying the end of his makeup, looked up, hesitated, and went back to finishing his mouth.

“Hey, you,” Alex repeated, touching my shoulder.

I turned to him, still twirling, and pointed to myself with my free hand. His eyes were looking into mine.

“How do you do that?” he said, pointing to the twirling rope. I stopped twirling and held out the hoop to him. I could see the black-and-blue mark on his neck, and his voice sounded more than a little raspy. He took the rope and held it up.

“When you are through fooling around like a damn baby,” Nelson called to him, “we can get on with catching a killer and, maybe, this time holding onto him.”

Alex stiffened at the public dressing-down, and I took the rope from his fingers. Maybe something about the way I took the rope attracted Nelson, who moved two steps toward us away from Elder, cocked his head to one side like a constipated stork, and looked at me.

Kelly stood up and looked at me, but of course he wasn’t Kelly as I knew him. He was a sad-faced tramp clown, as sad a face as could be painted on a human. His hands were plunged in his grungy pockets, and he winked at me as Nelson decided to take another step forward.

Before Nelson could challenge me, Kelly reached behind him and picked up a sledgehammer. Nelson hesitated, stopped, and put his hand on his gun. Suspicion had started to turn to more than that.

Kelly put the hammer in my hand and reached into his shaggy pocket to pull out a peanut, which he held up mournfully for us all to see. The other clowns in the tent, six of them, stopped what they were doing and watched. Kelly’s tramp went through a weary effort to crush the peanut with his fingers, under his arms, against his head, and by sitting on it. Finally, he dropped it on the ground, reached for the sledgehammer in my hands, and lifted it over his head. Nelson began to draw his gun, and Alex pushed me out of the way to make a plunge at Kelly if he attacked. Kelly brought the hammer down quickly on the peanut on the ground, dropped the hammer, looked down, knelt, and held up the crushed pieces of peanut in his hand.

Behind me I could hear laughter. Alex let out a small chuckle, and Nelson looked relieved. As frightened as I was at the prospect of being carted back for torture in the Mirador jail while wearing a clown suit, even I found Kelly’s act funny.

“We are wasting our damn time here,” said Nelson in exasperation. “Let’s look.” Alex followed him out of the tent, with Elder behind them to keep an eye on the Mirador duo.

“Thanks,” I said to Kelly.

“Thank Willie,” he said. “Willie took over.”

“Took over?” I said, trying to sit in a wooden chair in front of the line of mirrors in the tent. I couldn’t sit. The costume wouldn’t let me.

“When I’m Willie, he takes over. I mean, I always know I’m me, nothing like that, but Willie is a funny man. I’m not funny. I don’t even know what makes Willie funny. Most of my act just happened when I made it up while walking around the tent during a show. That bit with the peanut. Willie made it up in England a year ago. People ask me what makes it funny. I don’t know. I just do it, and people find it funny. I do another bit with pretending to saw wood. Audiences fall apart. I’m not sure why. Actually, the peanut thing builds up better than that. If you watch the show tonight, you’ll see what I mean.”

It was nearly time for the show and there wasn’t much time to talk, but I asked Kelly a few questions about himself and found out that he was married but not with his wife, that he had two sons, and that he had grown up in Huston, Missouri. He hadn’t run away to the circus. He had gone to the big city to get work, the big city being Kansas City, and had tried everything including cleaning milk bottles before getting a job with a company that did advertising films. He created the Willie cartoon. Later, when he was with the circus, he painted circus wagons before he became a performer. For a while, between seasons, he had done a nightclub act with his cartoons. He’d also done a little Broadway, working a few nights in Olsen and Johnson’s Hellzapoppin and then a comedy called Keep Off the Grass.

“Got good reviews for that play,” he said. “Met some nice people, Ray Bolger, Jimmy Durante. Nice kid named Jackie Gleason. Durante didn’t care for me getting big laughs, though. The circus is harder, but better. Might like to do a movie someday.”

“Movie director named Hitchcock has been hanging around the circus today,” I said, looking at myself in the mirror and not believing it was me. I tried not to think what would happen if I needed a toilet.

“The circus?”

“Right,” I said. “Short, fat, wears neat suits. Looks like he’s pouting.”

“Oh,” said Kelly. “I’ve seen him. That’s Hitchcock the director? I saw the one with the poisoned milk. Liked it. Something about him I don’t like, though.”

“The milk wasn’t poisoned,” I said.

It was now ten minutes before showtime. We could hear the crowd coming in, vendors hawking candy and souvenirs, the lions and tigers catching the scent of the crowd, getting restless and growling into the night. I had an appointment with the one person in the tent this morning I had not talked to. Kelly told me how to get to him, and I walked past the other clowns, into the night and the crowds.

Some adults pretended I wasn’t at all unusual. Others nudged their children to look at me. I had a hell of a time making my way with my inner-tube stomach through the crowds shoveling cotton candy into their mouths.

I was just about to enter the sideshow tent which announced the presence of Gargantua when a hand grabbed my arm. I turned, expecting to face Nelson, and found instead a sober man in a faded suit, flannel shirt with no tie, and as sober a face as ever graced American Gothic.

“You a clown?” he asked.

I wondered what the hell else I could be taken for, Eleanor Roosevelt? Instead of answering, I nodded.

“Then do something funny for me and Sis,” he said soberly.

Sis was about six years old and came up to my kneecap. She wore a thick, gray-wool sweater a few sizes too big for her, obviously a hand-me-down. Her brown hair was in two braids, and her pale face was turned up at me with more fear than hope of joy. The crowd moved around us. I stuck my thumbs in my ears and wiggled my hands wildly. Sis still looked scared, and Pop was looking down blankly at her. I tried scratching my fake stomach, lifting it up and down, babbling like Bert Lahr. I even considered singing an Eddie Cantor song. It suddenly became very important to me to make this little girl smile. Maybe she was the little girl I would never have. I could imagine her next week on her farm with the unsmiling but probably loving Pop. I could imagine her looking out over the fields of whatever the hell Pop grew and petting her dog. Damn the circus.

I grabbed the man’s hand and guided it out in front of him. Then I pretended I was seeing the hand for the first time. I put one foot up on it as if to rest it, and then, ignoring truth and gravity, I raised my other foot as if to rest it also on his arm. Obviously, I fell on my rear in the dirt. I bounced on my inner tube and felt the pain in my back. Without the tube, I would have been bound for the hospital. With it, I felt like hell. I had seen Buster Keaton do the same gag onstage. I never knew how he could do it. I still didn’t.

Sis wasn’t laughing, but there was definitely a smile on her face when I looked up at her. Something touched the corners of Pop’s mouth too, but there wasn’t enough there to call it a smile. Some people in the crowd who had watched my act laughed. I picked myself up awkwardly and had a sense of why people wanted to be clowns. They had laughed at me when I wanted them to. Usually, people laugh at me when I don’t want them to. It was almost as good as being a private detective and just as bad on the back.

I was on my knees when Pop and Sis walked away to look for a new adventure. I got up and limped into the tent. A few people were blocking the front of a big cage, but the crowd wasn’t large. It was almost time for the circus to begin.

I looked around for Henry, the keeper, and saw him sitting on an upside-down bucket, apparently counting the bristles on a broom. I walked over to him as a few more people left the tent. I was aware of animals pacing in cages all around me and the acrid smell of creatures with bulk, fur, and toilet habits that weren’t those of humans.

“You Henry?” I said, standing over him.

He looked up, a lanky creature with an open, unlined face and straw hair that fell in strands over his forehead. “Henry,” he acknowledged.

“I’m …”

“The police guy,” he finished. The clown costume had fooled Henry for not even an instant.

“Right,” I said. “Elder told you I have some questions.”

He nodded without speaking and went on looking for something among the bristles of the broom.

“What do you know about this morning?” I asked quietly, as a few more stragglers went out of the tent heading for the big top.

“Monkeys,” he said. “I know monkeys. Big ones mostly. I’m intense with monkeys.”

“Intense?”

“Mr. Ringling said I was once,” he explained.

“No,” I said, trying to readjust the hat on my head. It was small and cardboard, which didn’t bother me, but the rubber band holding it was cutting into my chin. “Tanucci and his wife, the younger Tanuccis, are dead, murdered,” I said. “Did you see anyone fooling with the harness and rigging this morning?”

“I am poor with cats, horses, and people,” answered Henry, examining one strand of straw that caught his eye. “Not intense with them. Just ain’t.”

“Few of us are,” I tried. “You didn’t see anything?”

Henry stopped looking at the broom and closed his eyes to think. I had the impression that he had learned to do this to convince others that he was doing what he really could not do, think. I watched politely while his eyes went tighter and tighter and then relaxed.

“Nope,” he said, getting up and holding the broom out ahead of him. I followed him toward the cage where the small crowd had gathered and could see that one person remained in front of it. His back was turned, but I recognized the form.

“Mr. Hitchcock,” I said. He turned and saw me, and so did the mass of darkness in the cage. His bellow shook me and probably the walls of the tent. Gargantua began to rattle the bars of his cage. He reached down, grabbed his tire, and began banging against the bars of his cage as he bared his teeth at me, and large yellow teeth they were.

“I think,” said Hitchcock evenly, “that he doesn’t like you.”

“An understatement,” I said, worrying about the bars of the cage.

“Chrome steel,” said Henry without emotion. “He can’t get out.”

“That’s what Carl Denham said about King Kong, and look what he did to New York,” I answered.

Henry gave Gargantua the broom. The gorilla took it, was about to throw it, and then became curious.

“Don’t like clowns,” said Henry. “Sometimes he don’t care much. Some clowns.”

The other animals were reacting to Gargantua, starting to growl and complain. I went for the tent flap with Hitchcock waddling beside me.

“Mr. Peters,” he panted. “You are Mr. Peters?”

“Right,” I said, stepping outside and trying to rub my back under the inner tube. Most of the crowd was in the big top now, and the band started up with a familiar circus song whose name I didn’t know.

“Why, may I inquire, are you wearing a costume?” he said with dignity.

“Simple. The police are after me for murder, murder I didn’t commit. They are also unhappy about my poking a policeman and running away. I’m trying to catch the real murderer and save my life.”

“That,” sighed Hitchcock, “is quite interesting.”

“There’s a difference between interesting and fun,” I said, looking around for Alex or Nelson.

“Not as far as I’m concerned,” he said.

“You haven’t remembered anything about this morning, have you?” I took a few steps away from the tent. The cats had brought their noise level down to a growl.

“Nothing whatsoever,” he said.

“I thought you were going back to Los Angeles today,” I said.

“I am,” he said. “Just as soon as I see tonight’s performance. A murder,” he went on, savoring the word and then backing away from it when he repeated it, “a murder.”

Maybe I would have thought of another question, maybe an important one that would have cracked the case, but I spotted Alex coming around a tent about forty feet away. He might wonder why a clown wasn’t with the other clowns. I lifted my hat to Hitchcock and went toward the big top as quickly as my costume and back would let me. I could feel the wet mud oozing under my shoes. I was afraid my costume might come apart. It reminded me of the time I was in kindergarten back in 1904 or 1905.1 was spending a few months with my aunt in Chicago. It was Halloween. I wore a paper devil’s costume she had made for me. It started to come apart on the way to school, and I was scared through the whole morning that it would all come off and I’d be in school in my underwear. Each movement had terrified me. Ever since then, I’ve hated the idea of wearing a costume. The clown suit was no exception. I was afraid Alex would chase me right into the light inside the tent I was heading for and into the middle of the ring, where I’d trip and my costume would come off.

I didn’t know if Alex was after me, but I kept moving toward the music, the light, the big tent as if I were late for my act. I went through a small flap and found myself right next to the band. A tuba blasted in my ear. I looked down and saw that the round piece of metal on top of the drum an old guy in a maroon uniform was playing was rotting with age or accident and had been placed behind the tuba player and out of sight of the crowd. That was the way the whole circus operated, on the surface, a thin, fragile surface.

I began twirling my lasso furiously and headed away from the tent flap and the band. Some wire acts were just coming down. One of them had been using a bear; and the bear, the same one I had run into earlier, went by and took a swipe at me. I jumped back, and the crowd near us roared with laughter.

The band stopped and the tent went dim. I looked out into the arena and saw nothing. The ringmaster announced nothing, and then I saw Willie walk out, Emmett Kelly’s Willie.

The audience sounds were loud, but they went down as he moved forward and began to plant imaginary seeds in a victory garden in the center ring. As he planted, he also ate some of the seeds. Soon there were no seeds. He took off his hat to scratch his head, and there was a frog perched there. He spent a few minutes trying without success to determine where the frog sound was coming from. The crowd roared.

Then he picked up a broom and began to sweep or pretend to sweep. It took me and Willie a few seconds to see that he could also sweep the spotlight that lit him up. The spotlight grew a bit smaller as he swept it, and then it tried to run away. Willie chased it, holding onto his hat with one hand and the broom with the other. Gradually the circle of light got tired and Willie began to sweep it smaller and smaller until there was only a yellow spot about the size of a plate. He reached under his jacket, pulled out a dustpan, put it down, swept the last circle of light into the pan, and the tent went dark.

There was a beat of silence and then thunderous applause in the darkness. I was crying. I didn’t know what the hell I was crying about, and I didn’t want that light to come on and people to see me, but it came on. Two boys, fat kids stuffing their faces with popcorn, looked at me. One pointed and spit out about half a pound and laughed. I walked away and out the same tent flap I had come in, expecting to run into the waiting arms of Alex the angry cop, but I didn’t. Alex wasn’t there. Hitchcock wasn’t there. The band struck up behind me, and I walked slowly away, determined that if there was a threat to Emmett Kelly, it had to be stopped.

I stayed in the shadows, moved past tents and wagons, people talking in concession stands, and to a wagon I had been told to find marked with a big red number forty-five. Elder and I had agreed to stay away from Kelly’s wagon, the clown tent, and Elder’s office wagon, in case Nelson decided to look where he had already seen me or might look.

I knocked at the door of forty-five, and it opened. Peg was startled for a second and then put out her hand to help me up. I had trouble getting through the door with my inner tube and ache, but we popped me in.

“Nice place,” I said, starting to take off my pants.

She was wearing a robe and pajamas. Her hair was down, and she looked comfortable and comforting.

“Hold it,” she said.

“Don’t get me wrong,” I said, continuing. “I’ve got to get out of this tube and sit down. My back hurts, and I miss the feeling of just getting off my legs. I’m not going to attack you in a clown suit.”

“Or any other way?” she asked with a smile, watching me struggle.

“Depends on if you keep laughing at me like that or give me a hand.”

She gave me a hand, getting close enough for me to decide that she smelled good, not perfume good but clean good. As soon as I had inched out of the tube after removing my pants, I sat in a chair in my shorts, still wearing my clown makeup, tore off the hat, rubbed the indentation under my chin from the rubber band, and scratched my stomach furiously.

Peg was holding her stomach with laughter.

“I’d rather face Alex in that Mirador cell than put that costume back on,” I said. “You’ve got a great laugh.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Want some coffee?”

“Thanks.” I got up and found a towel in a corner near a mirror. “Can I use this?”

She told me to go ahead, and I removed the makeup. It took me awhile to find me, and I didn’t get it all off, but it was enough off me for me to be comfortable. I looked around the small room. Peg had done what she could to make it look like home. Curtains, a quilt on the cot, photographs on the wall of a family that was probably hers, a small table with a cloth, three chairs, a small icebox under the window.

“Nice,” I said, going back to the table.

“It’s enough,” she said, handing me a cup of coffee with one hand and a doughnut with the other. I was hungry and stuffed the doughnut in my mouth.

“You wouldn’t have another two or three doughnuts?” I asked with my mouth full. She grinned and reached back through a cloth covering a cabinet to pull out a plate with two more doughnuts.

“The start of real romance,” I said, gulping down some coffee.

“You look silly,” she said.

“Try to ignore it,” I suggested, choking on the last bite of my second doughnut.

“Can’t,” she said.

“You really look great,” I said.

“You don’t,” she answered.

“I give up,” I said, and I did, for the moment. “Will you marry me?”

“You serious?” she said.

“Hell, no,” I said, going for the last of the coffee and handing the cup to her in hope of a refill. “Don’t you know what you’re supposed to say?”

She got up, pulled her robe around her, turned her back, and poured more coffee.

“Nope,” she said. “I don’t know much about man-and-woman games.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be.” She turned and handed me the cup, looking into my eyes with a soft smile. “I don’t go to movies much, just circuses.”

“I’d like to take you to a movie,” I said, accepting the cup and deciding to try to do some dunking with the final doughnut. “You make a mean doughnut.”

“Stole it from the mess truck.”

“You know how to steal a good doughnut.”

We sat watching me try not to lose any of the soggy doughnut until the whole thing was gone. I sat back, wishing I had my pants on and something over my chest besides the purple silk clown’s shirt. Peg was looking at me with a soft amusement that might turn to more, and I was trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t be a game when the knock came.

“Who is it?” she asked, with just enough touch of fear to show she cared.

“Elder,” came the voice.

She told him to come in, and he did. At the top of the step, he looked at both of us, me with my pants off, Peg in her pajamas and robe. Something like anger crossed his face and then disappeared.

“Some visitors from Los Angeles,” he said, pointing to the door, through which came the bizarre trio that passes in this life as my best and only friends.

“Shelly, Jeremy, Gunther. Close the door.”

And they did.