Clown Girl - Monica Drake [22]
Just as I found my focus, concentrated on my work, there was a rap against the ambulance. I jumped, startled, and knocked my hat half-off. A man grinned in at me. The man with the lawn mower. “Patient going to make it, Doc?” He was missing two front teeth. I tipped my sun hat back to look at him. He wore a tank top, dripped sweat, and had that red turkey neck from being out in the sun too long. Chance ate grass at the side of the road, eyes on the man. His lawn mower was rusted.
“What’s up?” I said, and stretched a new balloon.
“I’m good, I’m quick, I’ll do the whole lawn, front and back, for eight bucks.” He raised his voice to talk over the ice-cream truck’s song.
We eyed each other through the open back doors. I didn’t mind the grass long; it had a richness to it. A ribbon of tiny white flowers bloomed along a sunken channel where water, or maybe sewer, ran below. Speck-sized insects swarmed above the weeds like a burst of tiny bubbles. I tipped my sun hat down again. The silk flowers made the light scritch-scratch of tiny toenails against the straw like the mice that roamed Herman’s kitchen drawers.
“What makes you think I live in that house?” I said.
“Oh, I seen you’round. You’re the clown girl. I seen you out here in the overgrowed grass, with your little dog and that hula hoop you got.”
I moved in my own newly slowed time, behind the buzz in my head, my after-hospital pace. The sky, through my sunglasses, was a cherry-tinted blue. I took out a yellow balloon for the cross. Gave it a snap, blew it up. The man had a boil on his lip that was lighter than his skin, a swollen flash of white. He said, “What is that ‘Baloneyville Coop’ anyways?” He pointed at the wooden sign over Herman’s door.
I tied the knot at the end of the balloon. “It’s a Co-op,” I said. “There’s a space break in there.”
He let his head bounce in a nod, then said, “OK, whatever. That’s y’all’s business. Mine is mowin’, and I’d say your coop needs a little trim.” He laughed, like it was some kind of big joke. But he was right. Herman only had a push mower, a rusted reel of dull blade. Our backyard was as overgrown and choked as the front, with an aging apple tree in the center and a blackberry thicket along the fence line. It’d been my turn to mow Herman’s lawn for weeks—I was the bottleneck, the hold up. The grass grew longer every day. After the hospital, I needed to rest.
“Everybody needs a little trim, now and again,” the lawn mower man said with a grin.
I could pay this man to do my work, or pay for the return of Plucky. One or the other. I said, “I don’t own the house. Can’t hire you without asking.” I doubled the yellow balloon over, twisted the green Jesus around it.
The man drank from a plastic cup carried in a cup holder taped to the lawn mower’s handle. He ran a hand over his sweaty face. “OK, seven bucks. Can’t go lower,” he said.
Baloneytown was the neighborhood dealers, hookers, scamsters, and gangbangers came home to. It was where they grew up. Every corner was marked with a brick wall broken by a driver too strung out, trashed, or craving to stay on the road. Half the houses were red-tagged—windows plastered with red Condemned stickers—and the red-tagged houses were still lived in. You couldn’t trust anybody.
I picked up Balloon Tying for Christ and slid off the pile of clothes and out of the sauna of an ambulance. Costumes clung to my legs, a sea of velvet, satin, and Lycra. Standing up fast in the heat meant more of the swimming in my head, the warm hum of bees swarming, the blood resting around my lungs, around my stomach, nowhere near my brain. I saw a flash of blue against the inside of my eyes, felt faint, and caught the side of the ambulance for balance. I pressed my wrist against a cool, shaded bit of steel.
BALLOON JESUS BOBBED IN THE ROAD, ADRIFT ON HIS cross. In my dizziness, Jesus was a million miles away and still at my feet, a supplicant. My feet were miles away. I pressed my wrist to a new spot of shaded metal, hoping for