Stuart Kaminsky: Catch a Falling Clown

I had been a piece of lettuce for Alex once, and I didn’t look forward to another meeting with him or the charming sheriff of Mirador, but a job is a job.

The highway sign had said that the circus was in Aldreich Field, but I wasn’t going to find Aldreich Field in the dark without some directions. I hit Mirador about ten. The town had tucked itself in and gone to bed with its collective head under the blanket, hoping that when the Japanese decided to land their hordes on the coast, it would be somewhere north or south of Mirador. They had some reason to hope that the sight of the coastline of Mirador would deter an invasion. Once it promised to be the fun center of California. Some big dirty money back in the late 1920s had been washed through clean names, and construction had begun on a series of oceanfront gambling houses, hotels, restaurants, and palaces of dubious amusement. The framework and fronts had been finished when 1929 hit, and the market screamed and died. The workers left Mirador with the money and tools, and the gulls perched at night on the frames of never-to-be-built palaces. Then the wind spit seawater at the partially finished buildings for over a decade, and people forgot what had been a promise. An invasion of Mirador would have confused the Japanese. They would have wondered how the Nazis beat them to it and bombed the place.

From the rubble, Sheriff Nelson and a few others had salvaged enough to make a living by offering Mirador as a place where no questions would be asked if a price was paid.

That was where the circus had stopped and where I now found myself. I drove into the big circle in the center of town, avoided something that may have been alive in the street, and parked alongside a police car in front of Hijo’s, the only place in town with its lights on. I could hear the music of a Mexican band playing “La Paloma” from inside when I stepped out of my car. There were no streetlights in Mirador. It wasn’t just wartime caution. There had never been any streetlights in Mirador.

I examined myself in the window of the darkened Mirador police station, a storefront next to Hijo’s. There wasn’t much light, but I could see all I wanted to see, a not very tall, dark man with a flat nose and a rumpled suit. I pulled at the suit to shake or shame it into some embarrassed dignity, but there was no more chance of that than of my face being taken for that of a priest on a pilgrimage.

I followed the music through the doors of Hijo’s. There were three people at the bar, a woman with a few extra pounds and two men next to her. The music was coming from a radio, not from a band, and the bartender was sitting behind the bar with his head in both hands and a cigarette drooping from his chubby lips. He looked as if he were thinking about doves in a place he hadn’t seen. At one of the three wooden tables, a guy lay dead or drunk with his cheek in a pool of wet amber that I hoped was beer. There wasn’t much light, just a few dim bulbs in the ceiling and a neon Falstaff beer sign sputtering on the wall. The fat woman looked over at me. The bartender didn’t budge, and the two lotharios didn’t seem to notice me.

“A beer,” I said, stepping to the bar, tilting back my hat and plunking down a quarter.

The bartender looked at me through the smoke without moving his head. Then he grunted and rose. He was in no hurry.

“I’m with the circus,” I said. “Been out setting things up down the line. Can you tell me where to find them?”

“The circus,” said the bartender dreamily.

“The circus,” I repeated, taking the beer, which he handed me in the bottle. The bottle wasn’t quite warm, but it was a hemisphere away from cool.

“In the field,” he said, nodding his head toward the door.

I nodded knowingly, as if he had told me something valuable, and gulped down some beer. I thought I tasted something solid coming out of the bottle but ignored it and tried again.

“Right,” I said. “And how do I get to this field?”

The bartender shrugged.

“The other side of town,” came the voice of one of the two men with the woman. He stepped away from her and looked at me floor to hat, deciding what should be done with me.

“OK,” I grinned. “And how do I get to the other side of town?”

“You turn your ass around, go through that door, and start knocking on doors till someone tells you or shoots you,” the man said, stepping toward me. He was bulky, dark, and drunk. His shirt was faded flannel and his pants denim with white patches at the knees.

I looked at the bartender to try to figure out why I had been given such a warm greeting, but he had gone back to his position with head on hands. “La Paloma” played on.

“Hey,” I said, taking in another third of the beer, “I’m just a working man looking for his job. I’m not after trouble.”

The guy in the faded shirt was a few feet in front of me now, and his mouth was open, revealing about six teeth and a pit of darkness. I knew a dentist who would like to get his grubby fingers on that mouth, but I wanted no part of it.

“That circus ain’t for our kids,” he said. “The farm kids and rich kids down the beach. They going to your circus.”

“Come on, Lope,” cried the woman down the bar in a voice that couldn’t decide if it was a tenor or a soprano. It continued to crack as she said, “The circus don’t cost that much. Your kids could go.”

“Fifty cents,” I said with a smile.

“And what about the popcorn and stuff they want?” he challenged, breathing something stronger than beer in my face.

The Falstaff sign crackled and we all looked at it, but it didn’t go out. The amber dead man at the table stirred and rolled over to soak the other cheek. I didn’t turn my other cheek. I finished my beer, put it on the counter and spoke.

“Say it costs a buck for the whole thing,” I said. “I figure that’s the cost of two tequilas and a beer. How much you sunk into your own entertainment tonight, pal?”

It was the wrong thing to say. Maybe it came a little bit from getting into the role of circus front man. Maybe it was from being tired from a long trip. Maybe I was just nervous about being back in Mirador. Fighting with a drunken leather-muscled field worker wasn’t going to get me directions to the circus.

His face was a thought ahead of his actions. His right arm cocked back, and I reached for the empty bottle. Before the thick fist came around, I whacked the bottle against the side of his head just above the right eye. There was no shattering of glass, just a thunk, and the bulk in front of me went down against the bar.

The other man at the bar rushed toward me and stopped a few feet short when I showed the bottle in my hand. He was smaller than the first guy, about my size and weight, and dressed in black pants with matching shirt and sweater. The bartender roused himself from his dream and looked at me with distaste. He wanted no trouble. He wanted nothing. “La Paloma” ended, and a voice came out of the radio in rapid-fire Spanish.

The flannel bulk was out against the bar, probably as much from what he had soaked away as from my tap on his head. A dark lump was closing his right eye.

“No more trouble,” I said to the advancing man, whose eyes were shifting around for something to hit me with or throw at me.

“You hit Lope,” he said evenly through his teeth.

“He was going to hit me,” I explained, holding tightly to my beer bottle. “Hey, I came in here to find the circus, not to take on a tag team.”

Lope’s friend grabbed a bottle from the table where the drunk lay dreaming. His bottle was bigger than mine and had something left in it. The something dripped out as he stepped carefully toward me, eyeing Lope in the hope that the bigger man would get up and join him.