Clown Girl - Monica Drake [3]
I tied another sheep and broke a clown rule by making two of the same animal in a row. While I tied the sheep and drew the line on the ground to hold back the pack of tiny, sticky hands, a man passed me his business card. Who are you? he’d written on the back. Can I get your number?
He was an architect, the card said. A Spatial Use and Planning Consultant.
A clown fetishist. A coulrophile. I put the card in my bag and gave a fresh balloon a quick, professional snap. Blowing up balloons made me dizzy, but it was only a passing moment of dizziness. Learning to blow a long, tight, and skinny balloon is a trick in itself—it’s all diaphragm, no cheek action. Maybe that’s what the fetishists like, the lip work. I smiled at the architect sweating in his summer suit. His face was flushed. His hands ended in a row of rubbery pink fingers like underinflated balloon art.
A second man gave me the dancing-eyebrow leer, flashed a rack of polished teeth. He was tall, with a head of white-blond hair like a dandelion gone to seed.
I winked back. Gave him a quick wolf call with the whistle now hidden in my pocket. He stepped forward in an amateur clown walk, all bent knees and low to the ground in a long stride like an old R. Crumb “Keep on Trucking” poster. Nice try. I squirted my squirting daisy. A silver thread of water arced through the short space between us and rained down against the dandelion man’s khaki-clad crotch. Ta da! He stepped back, half-laughed, stepped forward again.
Fetishists don’t give up.
I squirted a second warning shot, fluttered my eyes over a fresh balloon, doubled over, then reared back and blew the balloon up like playing a wailing saxophone. I turned to the kids. The balloon grew larger and tauter until it was long and arched as an eager cock. A cock that I’d twist into a religious trick, maybe a Sacred Heart, one of the Shepherd’s flock, an angel or cross.
Baby Jesus in a crèche is a quick trick, fast in pale pink. But kids never get it. Some fly it like a bumblebee, others hold it against their knuckles like a swollen hand, a vaginal cluster of plump pink rolls.
Then the crown-of-thorns girl came back, the princess in her leopard sundress. She pushed her way past kids and coulrophiles, mom in tow. The girl was screaming, crying, her free hand full of damp, split rubber.
Such a big voice from such a tiny girl.
“It’s OK, baby. The clown’ll make you a new one,” the mother said, and signed me up like she didn’t see the pack of kids already waiting.
I had to move fast. Once kids start cycling back through the line, balloon tying is a losing battle. Sheep boy would be next, his sheep-styled balloon popped in the heat, swollen with the day’s sun, twisted into final submission and gone to the big balloon party in the sky.
Nothing lasts forever, right?
It was time to rove. Get lost in the crowd. The kids had me trapped, as Our Lady of the Perpetual Poppers. I tied a third sheep and let the leopard sundress cry. I held up a finger, pointed to another child. Clown sign language for wait your turn. I meant to start making anything else—Jesus on the Cross, a wise man, one of the lowing cattle, or even a good old nondenominational, interfaith duck, balloon loon, or common quacker—but all my hands could tie was another sheep. The kids screamed, No.
I did a little polka with my sheep, then passed it to a quiet-seeming girl. She tucked her hands under her armpits. “A flower,” she said. “I want a flower.”
All I could tie was sheep! I couldn’t think. This had never happened before. It was like some kind of a stroke, my brain shutting down. The screaming and laughing and crying of children was a wall of white noise that severed my body from my brain. Sheep and sheep and sheep. Light blue, I tied a sheep. Green, more sheep. Even yellow—a wise sheep.
Fake leopard sundress howled and clung to her mother. I waved good-bye, clown sign language for go away. The fetishist architect hovered in the near distance. The other, the dandelion-headed dandy with the high-buck smile, he was gone.
I started to tie a replacement