Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [79]
Earl was clown number three. We’d brought three umbrellas and were standing off to the side when he came up to us and introduced himself to my wife and the boys. He was wearing an orange wig and a clown nose, and he had painted his face white, the way clowns do, and he was wearing Bozo shoes, the size eighteens, but one of his sleeves was rolled up, and you could see the tattoo of that impaled rose. The white paint was running off his face a bit in the rain, streaking, but he didn’t seem to mind. He shook hands with my children and Ann and me very formally. He had less natural ability as a clown than anyone else I’ve ever met. It would never occur to you to laugh at Earl dressed up in that suit. What you felt would be much more complicated. It was like watching a family member descend into a weakness like alcoholism. Earl caught the look on my face.
“What’s the matter, Warren?” he asked. “You okay?”
I shrugged. He had his hand in a big clown glove and was shaking my hand.
“It’s all for a good cause,” he said, waving his other hand at the four lanes they had painted on the parking lot for the races. “We’ve made a lot of money already. It’s all for the kids, kids who aren’t as lucky as ours.” He looked down at my boys. “You have to believe,” he said.
“You sound like Jaynee,” I told him. My wife was looking at Earl. I had tried to explain him to her, but I wasn’t sure I had succeeded.
“Believe what?” she asked.
“You’ve been married to this guy for too long,” he said, laughing his big clown laugh. “Maybe your kids can explain it to you, about what the world needs now.” There was a whistle. Earl turned around. “Gotta go,” he said. He flopped off in those big shoes.
“What’s he talking about?” my wife asked.
They lined up the four clowns, including Earl, at the chalk, and those of us who were spectators stood under the tent and registered our bets while the LOVE NETWORK announcer from Channel 2 stood in front of the cameras and held up his starter’s gun. I stared for a long time at that gun. Then I placed my bet on Earl.
The other three clowns were all fat middle-aged guys, Shriners or Rotarians, and I thought Earl had a good chance. My gaze went from the gun down to the parking lot, where I saw Jaynee. She was standing in the rain and watching her old man. I heard the gun go off, but instead of watching Earl, I watched her.
Her hair was stuck to the sides of her head in that rain, and her cotton jacket was soaked through. She had her eyes fixed on her father. By God, she looked affectionate. If he wanted his daughter’s love, he had it. I watched her clench her fists and start to jump up and down, cheering him on. After twenty seconds I could tell by the way she raised her fist in the air that Earl had clumped his way to victory. Then I saw the new woman, Jody, standing behind Jaynee, her big glasses smeared with rain, grinning.
I looked around the parking lot and thought: Everyone here understands what’s going on better than I do. But then I remembered that I had fired shots at a nuclear reactor. All the desperate remedies. And I remembered my mother’s first sentence to me when we arrived in New York harbor when I was ten years old. She pointed down from the ship at the pier, at the crowds, and she said, “Warren, look at all those Americans.” I felt then that if I looked at that crowd for too long, something inside my body would explode, not metaphorically but literally: it would blow a hole through my skin, through my chest cavity. And it came back to me in that shopping center parking lot, full of those LOVE NETWORK people, that feeling of pressure of American crowds and exuberance.
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