David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

"Varoom," the clown says to himself weakly, squashing a placid gnat.

J.D. is suddenly very calm. He has a wristwatch. Jack Lord is scheduled to arrive over Collision soon. He is afraid. Sadness and anger and disgust at Ambrose's not-worth-it betrayal are scattered like the dust the car's halt has made, all before the great cold wind of a genius's fear. J.D.'s two great sheet-wrecking nightmares are missing his own Reunion and being stalled in someplace sweeping and panoramic and unenclosed and ever-growing.

There's a great ripping fart of thunder.

"Fix the car, please," he says softly as the first fat drops hit the windshield.

DeHaven is out with a stiff whimper. The windshield yields a sudden view of glittered hood.

"Could we just walk?" asks D.L.

"Not getting out of the car," J.D. says calmly. "Still two total miles or more. Rain. My suit will run. I can't preside wet. We'll stay here. The kid's got a way with machines."

Streaks of DeHaven's real face can be seen through the trademark face as the clown slams the hood shut in the spattered rain. The dice under the rearview jump at the slam, and the oil light pulses.

"Filter's a gem," he says, reentering. "My dipstick's clean as a whistle."

"I'll let that pass," J.D. says coolly.

"The lubrication seems totally OK," the clown sums up in a voice that makes you think he wishes it weren't.

"So start the car," J.D. says, managing at once both to clap his hands and look at his watch. "Hibbego. Let's go. Couple more miles. It'll be tit."

DeHaven shakes his head miserably, his lipstick rained into something sad. The trashcan clatter of more thunder is now indistinguishable from echoes of that thunder. Big Midwest drops start hitting the car's roof in that rhythmless, tentative, pre-serious way.

"Start the car!" Sternberg screams, so that Magda jumps on the hump. Mark closes his eyes, silent, lost in his own counsel.

DeHaven hooks a begrimed wrist over the fuzzy wheel and lights an unfiltered with maddening deliberation. He shakes his head:

"This car doesn't just stop and start. The engine's Detroit and the ignition's foreign. It's an admittedly ad hoc combination. You'd call it a bad marriage, Pop. But those were the parts I could get deals on. So I have to just keep it running all the time. Can't let it stop. A motherfucker on gas. You wouldn't let me park it by the greenhouses, Pop, remember? Because of the exhaust? It doesn't even need a key, see?" — pointing a grease-tipped glove-finger at the empty slant of an ignition receptacle where a key should be. "Because if it stops, when you try to start it, the engine goes like out of control." He exhales smoke with force. "Plus it was the oil light made it stall, Pop," indicating the little plastic window that covers his costume's nose. "I'm sure we've got internal problems somewhere. I'll fuck up the belts."

"Try it, please."

"I'll make the timing belt jump if I do. We'll jump time. We'll fuse cylinders."

"Give it a try, please, son," J.D. whispers, as roof-rain sounds.

The empty ignition screams to life. And, true to the clown's word, the car's idle is now wild, tortured; the engine revs crazily, way too high, so that ancient needles flap spastically in the dash. The malevolent car stalls the second the clown reaches up by the furry wheel to put it in a forward gear. It shudders.

"Great," Sternberg yells, having cadged the Ziploc J.D.'s left on the front seat's backrest. "Great. Fix the car, you shitspeck rotten clown." He feels too enclosed to bear.

The adman is looking through the shield's angled rivulets at the three wharf-gray shanties up where the last road takes its final Westward curve. The ancient askew shacks are interconnected by a system of corrugated plumbing pipe. J.D. breathes deeply and counts the three shanties out loud, willing the Reunion to remain temporarily on hold. They'll wait for him. Jack, aloft with his bullhorn, above a sea of red smiles, the cameras sweeping panoramic, looking for what to latch onto. The rain can be worked in somehow. Could enhance the whole conceit. Funhouse 1 will be opened and used, then 'dozered. J.D. Steelritter gets stabbed in the back by a client exactly once. No Funhouse franchise. No erection of memory for Herr Professor C— Ambrose, rat. No angled systems of mirrors Windexed nightly by anally compulsive teams in white. No barrels and disks on the dance floor. No happy fellatory door. No parts that shine, burnished to reflect and refer to every other part. No whole new dimension in alone fun.

It's going to rain one fuck of a lot, they can all see. 2500W steams. The stuff seems to fall in bright curtains that close and part at the discretion of gusts. The rain threatens to enclose the stalled car. Sternberg's bad cheek is right up next to his smeared window, pressing against it, bloodlessly white. He's sure he's going to puke. The clouds before the curve and car are huge. They have an almost Trump-like architectural ambition. Mark can see still more rain coming, off to the West, but coming, braids of it hanging from the sky and whipping back and forth like tinsel in wind, the real meat of the thunderstorm now probably over Collision and the now-obscured giant arches and the sheltering tight-roofed Funhouse club, where all the adults and former kids are in out of the elements, waiting, raising flashcards emblazoned with the word GLASS, drinking the symbolic health of the very idea of toasting itself. He's sure now they've got it all backwards.

"Look, kid. Three shanties up there," J.D. points. He squeezes his son's pastel shoulder pad. "I want you to go have a look and a knock, see if anybody's home. Somebody rural, with a way with a homemade idle."

"The car's going to go down in this mud, Pop," DeHaven sniffles across D.L. "We'll get stuck sure, anyway. The fucker's already level, in back." He wipes clotted talc off his cheek. "God am I sorry, Pop."

"Hush, kid. Not your fault. Just go have a look. Please. Here," handing him the noseless yarn tangle from the dashboard. "Wear the wig. Keep your head dry. Don't catch cold. No sniffling Ronalds."

DeHaven keeps his chin up. "Right." He's out of the car and behind the silver curtain of serious rain — you can hear the hiss as his cigarette's hit and extinguished — and he's off up the road, his orange yarn held to his scalp like a hairnet, riding-habit hips jouncing under his orange trousers, big red shoes sending water everywhere, up the steaming rural blacktop road and out of sight into the breath-mist that collects on the windshield of the utterly enclosed, sheltering, rained-upon car.

This is pretty much the climax of the whole journey, by the way, pending arrival. The final impediment — reimbursement and revelry and meat and fried roses, all the roses anyone could want, roses right out the bazoo, just up ahead: past the impediment.

Drew-Lynn Eberhardt can tell DeHaven Steelritter and J.D. love each other, deep down, and this affects her. She is enormously sensitive to who is loved by whom.

While J.D. Steelritter settles back cigarless, letting condensation collect unwiped over a watch-face which why worry if worrying won't serve purposes; while D.L. flicks at the dice that hang from the rearview; while Tom Sternberg snacks, watching his gabardines go up and down like a derrick at his discretion alone; Magda uses an initialed cotton hankie to wipe at Mark's window, and they look out at the fallow field to the left of the fence, the black muddy field fallow and empty right to the skyline but for Pest-Aside-maddened pests and one old, rickety, blue-collar, and totally superfluous scarecrow. The scarecrow looks somehow both noble and pathetic, like a stoic guard standing sleepless watch over an empty vault. Mark and Magda both look at the field and scarecrow and all-business Illinois rain like people who are deprived. Magda feels an overwhelming — and completely non oracular — compulsion to talk to somebody. Mark, a born listener, right from day one, feels nothing at all.