Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

Earl called me a few more times, in irate puzzlement over his life. The last time was at the end of the summer, on Labor Day. Usually Ann and I and the boys go out on Labor Day to a Metropark and take the last long swim of the summer, but this particular day was cloudy, with a forecast for rain. Ann and I had decided to pitch a tent on the back lawn for the boys, and to grill some hot dogs and hamburgers. We were hoping that the weather would hold until evening. What we got was drizzle, off and on, so that you couldn’t determine what kind of day it was. I resolved to go out and cook in the rain anyway. I often took the weather personally. I was standing there, grim-faced and wet, firing up the coals, when Ann called me to the telephone.

It was Earl. He apologized for bringing me to the phone on Labor Day. I said it was okay, that I didn’t mind, although I did mind, in fact. We waited. I thought he was going to tell me something new about his daughter, and I was straining for him not to say it.

“So,” he said, “have you been watching?”

“Watching what? The weather? Yes, I’ve been watching that.”

“No,” he said, “not the sky. The Jerry Lewis Telethon.”

“Oh, the telethon,” I said. “No, I don’t watch it.”

“It’s important, Warren. We need all the money we can get. We’re behind this year. You know how it’s for Jerry’s kids.”

“I know it, Earl.” Years ago, when I was a bachelor, once or twice I sat inside drinking all weekend and watching the telethon and making drunken pledges of money. I didn’t want to remember such entertainment now.

“If we’re going to find a cure for this thing, we need for everybody to contribute. It’s for the kids.”

“Earl,” I said, “they won’t find a cure. It’s a genetic disorder, some scrambling in the genetic code. They might be able to prevent it, but they won’t cure it.”

There was a long silence. “You weren’t born in this country, were you?”

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t think so. You don’t sound like it. I can tell you weren’t born here. At heart you’re still a foreigner. You have a no-can-do attitude. No offense. I’m not criticizing you for it. It’s not your fault. You can’t help it. I see that now.”

“Okay, Earl.”

Then his voice brightened up. “What the hell,” he said. “Come out anyway. You know where Westland is? Oh, right, you’ve been here. You know where the shopping center’s located?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s the clown races. We’re raising money. Even if you don’t believe in the cure, you can still come to the clown races. We’re giving away balloons, too. Your kids will enjoy it. Bring ’em along. They’ll love it. It’s quite a show. It’s all on TV.”

“Earl,” I said, “this isn’t my idea of what a person should be doing on a holiday. I’d rather—”

“I don’t want to hear what you’d rather do. Just come out here and bring your money. All right?” He raised his voice after a quick pause. “Are you listening?”

“Yes, Earl,” I said. “I’m listening.”

Somehow I put out the charcoal fire and managed to convince my two boys and my wife that they should take a quick jaunt to Westland. I told them about Earl, the clown races, but what finally persuaded the boys was that I claimed there’d be a remote TV unit out there, and they might turn up with their faces on Channel 2. Besides, the rain was coming down a little harder, a cool rain, one of those end-of-summer drizzles that make your skin feel the onset of autumn. When you feel like that, it helps to be in a crowd.

They had set up a series of highway detours around the shopping center, but we finally discovered how to get into the north parking lot. They’d produced the balloons, tents, and lights, but they hadn’t produced much of a crowd. They had a local TV personality dressed in a LOVE NETWORK raincoat trying to get people to cheer. The idea was, you made a bet for your favorite clown and put your money in his fishbowl. If your clown won, you’d get a certificate for a free cola at a local restaurant. It wasn’t much of a prize, I thought; maybe it was charity, but I felt that they could do better than that.

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.