A Fear of Clowns (The Greasepaint Chronicals) Read online

  "I'll need some tape!" He had it in his pocket, being that some of the more advanced balloon animals really did need it, if you wanted them to be identifiable. Awkwardly he pretended to struggle with it, playing up the gag for a bit, then made four legs and a snout and set them down on the table in front of the sofa that Seth sat on in the large living room. "There, one elephant!"

  No one clapped. The little ingrates. With just a bit of imagination, it was clearly good work.

  Maggie made a face and pointed, "it doesn't have a body."

  Helpful of her, really. It was what was needed, for the rest of the gag. Not that Jay couldn't have worked off of almost anything. There was a lot of improv involved in being a party clown. More than he would have expected, when he'd first started. He smiled and nodded.

  "Oh, right! I forgot that part. Let's see, I need a really big balloon for that. A huge one." Snapping his fingers, Joey the Clown chuckled, his voice becoming ever so slightly more menacing. Dark. He worked the pitch change into what he said next. "I know. I have just the thing. More... body."

  Then he pulled a condom from his pocket, slipped there before the show, and blew it up, exaggerating the amount of force it took. To a lot of very awkward giggling. They were all just about the right age for things like that to still seem dirty. Alluring too. It was linked to that secret world of things that most of them hadn't really tried yet, but desperately wanted to.

  So they had to laugh, to relieve the pressure and awkwardness.

  Taping it all together, using just enough of the clear plastic that it wouldn't show, but would work well, he settled it back into place, getting applause this time. Finally. It really did work out pretty well, and the whole thing was clearly an elephant, just as requested. After it quieted down the girl from earlier, who probably thought she was being funny, spoke again. They always figured themselves for being humorous. It was the job of a heckler.

  "So you are a perv?" It was a bit snotty sounding, like she meant it. Honestly, it couldn't have been better done if he'd paid her for it. The words, meant to be a dig at him, and how silly or weird he was being, made her sound a bit annoying. It got everyone on his side, almost immediately. For a half second a few people looked at her, and then back to him, waiting for the reaction.

  So he dropped his mask, throwing it violently to the floor, showing the rather evil looking face paint underneath, getting a gasp from about half the people. It was rewarding, since it meant he'd engaged them enough that they'd forgotten he wasn't just a man in a mask. When that changed, without warning, they weren't ready for it. A bit of disruption to their thinking that startled them into paying more attention.

  Then, he let himself seem a tad insane for a bit. He looked the part and changed his voice, which had people laughing again. Especially when he chased the mouthy girl around with a straight balloon, pretending it was a sword. It was so easy to get people to move from thinking clowns were happy to scary. Not that they were truly afraid of him. These kids were close enough to adult that they knew better than that. He was just a performer, and that would bleed through the shock at the change, eventually.

  The gags then were still pretty traditional, since he hadn't worked up a blue act. Adults didn't hire him for themselves, and if he got too raunchy some of the girls would start to feel legitimately uncomfortable. He kept it to squirting flowers, a never ending handkerchief and glaring looks whenever they didn't laugh loudly enough. It worked pretty well.

  Even when the car pulled up in the back.

  It wasn't bad, being sporty enough that girls would probably want to ride in it, and the other guys would think that putting up with the lame clown thing had been worth it for Seth. They might even be right. Not that the boy hadn't been a trooper the whole time, going along with whatever Joey had asked of him without resisting at all. Trying to make things work, even at the expense of his own dignity. A good kid, like Maggie had mentioned.

  Slipping the mask back on so that he'd be happy again, he clapped for a bit, keeping everyone's attention up front, as the man in the car, who was clearly just some guy that worked at a sales lot in town, according to the design on his jacket, got out and put a bow on the top of the thing. It was vast and red, which worked well with the car. The edges of it hung down over the windows on the side.

  Moving back to his happy clown voice, he took a bow. A few people even laughed and clapped for him, including Seth, which got the others going. It was slow at first, but they wouldn't remember that part, just that everyone else seemed pretty pleased by the act at the end.

  At least that was the hope. Then he waved Maggie over and gestured with both hands out the window, as if it were all planned. She saw the car and seemed wonderfully pleased. It was a shining thing. A moment that reminded him to love the woman, just a little. In a platonic way, naturally. She was his boss, for the afternoon, if nothing else.

  She gestured too, mimicking him well enough that everyone looked out the window.

  "Happy birthday, Seth!"

  Then she started singing, which got everyone else to go along. Just before they rushed out to the car, with Seth hugging his "mom" tightly enough that Jason was pretty well convinced that his initial guess about the woman was right. That kid so wanted to bang her. Probably in the car she'd gotten him, as if his dad hadn't provided the funds for it. It had been her idea, so there was probably merit that way.

  That let him pack up his props and start to leave, it was a bit of a press near the patio, so he walked back through the house, managing to bump into a plant on the way past. It was a huge thing. Very green and leafy. Real too, so he moved around it with care. He used to have a plant like that, in his office at the university. Before he'd given all that up for a life on skid row.

  He considered that as he got outside and then into his car, his little black case being set in the back, on the wide seat. He took the mask off, but not the makeup. You didn't get greasepaint off that easily. It stuck with you, never really seeming to come off, once it was on. The sticky leavings that being a clown forced on you.

  Jason drove carefully, holding exactly to the speed limit, and stopping for all the signs and lights. He was in Brickston after all, and while the local Sheriff only had three deputies for a fairly vast area, they always managed to stop him, when they could.

  That wasn't on accident. Carl Morse had been having an affair with Jay's ex-wife. The entire time they were married. That hadn't come out until Lynn had gotten mad at him one day over something stupid, and screamed at him that their daughter Alexis should be glad that she didn't have a lazy slob like him as a father. It came back to him, as he drove, which was a horrible habit. He tried to pay attention to what he was doing, focusing on the road as hard as possible, and still couldn't help but remember it all.

  It had been the garbage. He'd been a bit late getting home, because his old department head had gotten to chatting with him about Mediterranean wars. Again. It was his life, and the man, Henry Boggs, had a penchant for going on about it. He was older and a bit lonely. That meant that he wouldn't stop talking if you let him go on. So he'd been late getting the trash out, and Lynn had been drinking, at six in the evening.

  It was always a bad plan.

  It hadn't even been a real fight, just her attacking him, as if he weren't a good husband and father. Like he didn't spend all of his free time making sure they had a good life. Doing what she wanted and watching their daughter when she went out with her friends. After that he'd been a bit suspicious, so to reassure himself, Jay had gotten Alexis to give him the samples that a company needed to run for a paternity test. He'd found them online, since it was a real business. A place that did nothing but determine who the father was.

  Three weeks later, when the letter came back in the mail, he showed it to Lynn. That hadn't gone well at all, but he had gotten the whole story from her. Carl Morse, the County Sheriff, and general a-hole, had been screwing his wife the whole time. Letting Jason pay for his kid and take care of what was e
ssentially his mistress, while he had his own wife and family. The man had encouraged Lynn to do it, even working to pick him out carefully, and groom him for the job of being her personal meal ticket.

  After that, after Lynn and he broke up, he didn't have a lot of chance to get custody of Alex. The state was a lot more likely than not to think the mother was the one in the right, especially with the crooked Sheriff on her side. So Jason had told the entire country about what the man had done. Going online, and even calling news agencies. That meant almost nothing, to anyone. It was Nevada, and men slept around. So did women. It didn't affect Carl's reelection, or anything like that. Really, he'd done slightly better in the polls after all the news items about it. People recognized the name, Jay guessed.

  Even the man's wife and kids were still with him. The only one to care about it at all was the jerk that had been sleeping with his wife. He didn't even send child support payments. The state had tried to get them from Jason, for a while, until he'd gone into court and told the judge the whole story, with proof. The woman had agreed that Carl should be the one making the payments, and dropped that part of things. The man had never been made to pay up. Naturally.

  After that things had gotten hard for him. Yes, Carl sent his goons out to harass him, but that wasn't the worst of it. That was, in fact, more of a nuisance than anything else. The single sign that Jay had which showed that, somewhere in all that had gone on, he'd managed to score a hit against the man. Somehow. What that really was, he had no clue.

  That was what he was thinking when the siren blared, and lights filled the window behind him. Jason used to feel a trickle of terror when it happened, like he'd broken a rule or law, but it came about so often now that he just couldn't be bothered to. Instead he simply got his license, proof of insurance and registration out. He had copies of them all too, in case it was Deputy Richmond. He liked to take things back to his car and then claim to have "lost" them. Thankfully he normally just dumped them by the road side, so Jason could get them back. He'd had to get a replacement license once, which had taken weeks. That meant walking and not working for a while, since doing otherwise would have led to trouble. It would have been an excuse to punish him for not having his license on him, and then starting a cycle of pain. It had, he knew, been the point. A trap that he'd been clever enough to get around.

  It wasn't Richmond at all, but the new guy on the force, Deputy Mills. He'd been around for about six months, Jason thought. The man was actually, except for being about twenty years younger than Jay, pretty similar in looks. Jay was a bit slimmer, but the other man wasn't too far off that way. They both had a full head of brown hair, and wore it short. They even both had brown eyes. If Jason had known his mother back in college, he would have had to ask if the man was his. Or Carl's. He looked a lot like Alexis too. That probably had more to do with the fact that white people with dark hair often looked sort of similar.

  The guy was also fairly decent, as far as law enforcement went. Not happy and cheerful all the time, but polite enough. He followed orders, and the law. It was just that the entire force had all been told to try and find something to stop him for every time he went outside. If they could. If they couldn't, why then they'd just stop to chat.

  Rolling the window down he smiled, which got the Deputy to make a face that was a lot funnier than he normally went for. Real, and a bit annoyed, or even scared. Some people were like that with clowns. They found them disconcerting. Legitimately creepy, even if they knew on some level that they were just ordinary people in makeup.

  "What the hell is this, Hadley? I saw you driving by and was about to let you go on past, until I realized that you'd gone all psycho on us." He waved toward the face paint, which got Jason to actually smile a bit. It wouldn't show very much, not with the dark red he had around his mouth, in an angularly downturned frown.

  He made a circle around his face.

  "The modern 'scary clown'. I had a job earlier, the mother didn't seem to understand that a boy might not really want a clown for his sixteenth birthday. Winthrop? Nice kid. The mother was really friendly, too. She managed to get the kid a car as a consolation prize, after letting me embarrass him for forty minutes. I was impressed."

  The man looked at him for a long time, then took the papers back to his vehicle. After far too long, he was back, but actually handed everything over. That was refreshing. No games meant to harass more than the rules stated.

  "All in order. Like always. Just so you know, I would have pulled your butt over anyway, orders or not. You look insane. Then, clowns always do. That's not right, going around like that." There were two taps on the top of the car, but he didn't move, his brown uniform jacket catching in the wind a bit. It made his shiny star move just enough to twinkle. "Winthrop's boy? That makes sense. His dad owns three car lots in the area, and two more over in Links. I met the new wife, once. The old one died, so it's only half as creepy as you'd think, the new one being so young. You say she's nice? That's good to hear. My stepmother wasn't." He coughed. "I'll let you go. Keep up the good driving work." Then he went back to his car, which was actually a decent sized truck with a covered back to it and a Sheriff's logo on the side. A big gold star. It was supposed to be that color anyway, but was actually mustard colored, since that was more practical. The main body was one of those things that was harder to name really. A silvery green. It was probably called forest mist or something like that, on the color swatch.

  Waiting for the man to get back on the road, and ahead of him, Jason made certain he followed every single road rule to the letter. It was about the only protection he had. It was amazingly hard to complain to anyone about a County Sheriff abusing his powers. He'd tried, at first, but no one was willing to do anything about it. The State Police didn't see it as a big issue, since he wasn't being beaten regularly, and the FBI didn't have jurisdiction. The agent he'd talked to had suggested that he simply move. It was the plan, as soon as he could save up enough money for it. Hopefully after getting a teaching position somewhere. That wasn't going to be in town there, given that the Sheriff had put him on a list that meant the man got a chance to bad mouth him every time someone wanted to check his credentials.

  It wasn't, as far as anyone had told him, that the man lied about him. He just told them all that a few years before, after he'd gotten a divorce, that Jay had quit his good, decent paying and secure job. Then took to drinking and lived on the streets for over a year.

  That was enough to keep anyone from wanting to work with him, or had been so far.

  No one had ever said that getting back on his feet would be easy.

  It just felt like it was a bit simpler for a lot of people. As long as they weren't him.

  Chapter two

  Jason had to use the guest bathroom in the house to get the paint off his face. The cleanup was one of the reasons he charged so much for each gig. Sure, he was only on for half an hour normally for the main act. Then Joey would do up some balloons for anyone that wanted them, pull some coins and trinkets from ears, and all that. In all that tended to take about an hour. It wasn't worth a hundred and fifty bucks. Even the humiliation was good for fifty, tops.

  He wasn't selling anything that people thought would be too bad. It could be embarrassing, and hard on the ego, but it wasn't illegal or immoral. Plus, he got to have a disguise on. That made it easier. No one recognized him in the store when he shopped. Kids didn't see past the giant fake grin, or the fuzzy hair he'd been wearing. In normal clothes he went back to being invisible to most people. There were a lot of ways to make money that wouldn't be half as anonymous. Hookers generally had to move after they were done with the life. That was what they'd always talked about when he'd been on the street.

  They all wanted to go away, get off the drugs and leave it all behind.

  The funny thing there was that most of them really didn't care about the sex that much. All the church ladies acted like it was men, touching them, violating their virtue, that was the bad part. The
girls he'd known had all pretty much figured the violent rape and beatings as the part they didn't like. It was a different world, when you were at the bottom looking up. The perspective change had been enlightening.

  Now he lived in a shed. It was still better than the street. Better than being with Lynn, too. The betrayal still hurt, a bitter taste in his mouth that came with a single thought. Even years later. It stung nearly as much as his eyes did, after he managed to rub them with the sturdy gray washcloth while trying to get his face clear. The cold cream itself wasn't too bad, when that happened. The rag however stung enough to remind him not to get lazy. Like sandpaper on his eyeball where it touched. He was getting better over time that way. Pain was a powerful teacher.

  No, he really charged for this part. The hour and a half it took to get really clean after he was done for the day. Scrubbing, searing his flesh with hot water and rubbing at places where stuff collected that he could never see. Behind his ears was the worst, but along his hairline in the back was nearly as bad. Sticky white clung to him there. Like memories of the past. Both were things he just didn't need.

  At the time they'd seemed good, but one simple truth, a few words said in anger, and it all fell apart. Not that the job that day had done that. For once things had gone really well. He'd nailed the act, played the audience just right and managed to get out with no one crying at him. No one had stabbed him, either, and he'd been paid enough that it would all be worth it.

  Jason hadn't counted the money. That way he could just pretend it was enough. Twice what he'd asked for, or even more. Not too much, since then he'd have to give some of it back, but just enough to really make his life a bit easier for a few days. It seemed like she'd doubled it. That was good. A dream that left him feeling slightly hopeful, for the time being. It would probably last right until he opened the envelope to find that she'd only added ten dollars, or that the bit extra was a coupon for a free car wash.