Stuart Kaminsky - Catch a Falling Clown

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.