A Fear of Clowns (The Greasepaint Chronicals) (4 page)

Oh, he was a
loser
, no
doubt about that. It was also true that work was scarce and competition fierce
at the moment. So, doing what he was. Being the best clown he could be. In the
spring he'd have to branch out, and try something else. Get in at a casino as a
dealer. Join the circus. Slash his wrists.

Not that he wanted to die,
anymore. Now he just wanted out. That was all. A chance to stand on his own
feet, without shackling himself to someone that was going to abuse his good
will and trust at that kind of level. Taking him for a ride that no one would
ever have even seen coming, like Lynn had.

Whining about the past didn't get
the work done, so he hit the web, applying for everything he could find. He
even put in for a job on a cruise ship. As a
clown
, of all things. That
meant doing more than that, he knew, having been on one before. Back in the
days when going on a cruise was a luxury, but one that could be planned for. No
one did only a single thing on a boat. That was fine. Good tips and steady
work. He could do worse.

The rest of the day was spent on
similar things. Going out, even to the corner store, just put temptation in his
way. It made him consider getting something to drink, or spending money on junk
that he didn't need. He could go on a walk, later, but other than that, he kept
himself to his search. No one was going to just come and magically give him a
chance. He had to find his own good fortune.

That was true for everyone, and
always had been. It didn't seem like a lot, but his life, as ruined and poor as
it was, was better than most. In a world of seven billion people, Jason wasn't
doing
all
that bad. He had enough food, and a place to stay. Friends
that hadn't kicked him out yet, and even some savings. In the morning he'd walk
down to the bank, and make a deposit. Keeping his life savings under his
mattress was just asking for it all to be stolen. That, or eaten by a mouse or
lizard.

There were little things that
made a difference in life. Things that being an educated and even middle class
person had taught
him
that most of his friends from his street days
hadn't known at all. Like how having a checking account saved you money, as
long as you had any at all to start with. Things were more expensive if you had
to get money orders and use check cashing places. They took a percentage that
was large enough to hurt.

He'd also learned some things
from the street as well. One of them was that you
didn't
buy on credit.
Fools did that, and ended up with broken fingers or selling their asses for a
pimp. That had been in Vegas. The rules were different there. On the surface it
was pretty, as long as you only ever looked up. The lights were bright and kept
you from noticing the rest of it. The dirt was always by your feet. So were the
invisible people. The pariahs and untouchables. The lowest class of person.

So he'd learned. Neither a
borrower, nor a lender be.

It had shocked him when Carlos
and Wendy had first approached him. He'd literally been standing behind a
casino, not having any place to go, and wondering when the guards were going to
come and get him to move along. That happened every few hours in most places.
Faster if you tried to sit. It wasn't that they cared about some bum drunkenly
lurking, they were just worried about their guests being harassed. Beggars and
thieves drove away business. If you tried either of those things out front, you
wouldn't last ten minutes. If you tried it twice, then you'd probably find
yourself lying in the gutter, with something broken.

Looking over at the light colored
house, he remembered that day. It had been almost a year before, if just shy of
that by a few days. Wendy and Carlos had just walked up to him, and started
talking, like he
wasn't
a homeless man. As if, by some strange chance,
he'd simply been a real person, just standing around, for some unknown reason.

At first he figured they were
going to try and score drugs, but they'd just wanted help moving some large
equipment, and offered a free meal and twenty bucks for the work. It wasn't
like he'd been doing anything else, so he decided to give it a try. It was more
than he'd figured, since some of the larger gimmicks were pretty bulky. He'd
done well enough, and took care to pay attention, asking questions about what
needed to go where and how to preserve the edges against bumps, so they'd
offered to let him sleep in their van for the night, if he'd help out in the
morning.

It was interesting. As a
historian, Jason could sometimes look back at the clues of the past and work
out some of
how
things had happened, but not always why. Almost never
that, in fact. Rome had fallen due to an insane imbalance of power. That was
clear, to him, at least. Other opinions varied. They were wrong. The haves
virtually cut off the have-nots, and made certain they could never change the
game. Eventually that led to ruin. People now spoke of lack of expansion, or
the impossibility of sustaining a large city at that time, but those were
symptoms, not reasons
why
.

Was it the lead all the rich
people ate off of? Simple greed and corruption getting out of hand? That kind
of thing was much harder to guess at. In the end, that was something most of
his fellows hadn't been able to come to terms with. They didn't know the real
reason, so just made guesses. He was too, but could see the answer more clearly
now, having been both on the bottom and near the top himself.

That day, when Carlos had waved
him over and offered him a job, had been a turning point in his own story. That
was so clear he could feel it. It hung around him like a cloud, every day of
the week. It marked the difference, within seconds, between the lowest point in
his miserable life, and the bounce upward. A stone shed with a power cord to it
wasn't just a step up for him, it marked about six moves.

It was the point where he decided
to finally stop drinking. Not that he did it right then, it had taken months
for him to really find the courage to throw his crutch away, and he was still
close enough to it that having a drink seemed like a good idea all too often.
If he let himself dwell on the idea, it would get to be too much, so he just
didn't. Just like with the past. It didn't help him at all to sink into a
miasma of despair. Now all he had was his climb out of the pit he'd dropped
himself into, all those years ago. He couldn't even blame Lynn for that one.
Carl Morse either.

They were both scum. He didn't
try to defend them at all. Carl had wanted his mistress to have a good life, so
farmed out the hard parts to
him
. It was done so coldly and callously
that even his ex hadn't denied it had always been the plan. He was just the
shlub they'd decided to use. It hurt and had stripped away all sense of self-worth
when he'd found out. He'd been invested in three things. His wife, his daughter,
and his work.

When the first two went sour, he
ended up throwing the third away, not able to trust that it was real either.
Now, as the pain eased over time, he could see that part was all on him. The
college would have put up with him being the lonely and wacky professor, as
long as he'd done his job. Crawling into a bottle had come after that. He'd
imbibed before, on a pretty regular basis. After leaving his life though, he
just threw everything away, and drank.

It wasn't a medication for him. A
lot of the people on the street had claimed that, but for Jay it was different.
He didn't forget when he got drunk. He remembered. Alcohol wasn't his savior,
it was the scourge he used to flog his own back, for being a fool. Jason had
felt that he deserved the pain, because he just wasn't worth anything more.

Not that his life now was perfect,
as far as that went. There was no sense of real worth yet. Not inside. He
played at being a clown, because Carlos had told him to. If the man had suggested
something else, Jay would have probably just done that. Gone on tour as a band
roady, or learn magic. In a way, he even understood why his friend had picked
being a clown. Not because it was low skilled and so worthless no one else did
it anymore. That wasn't the case. It was simply that clowns had to take their
makeup off, over and over. Each time he made money, got a reward for doing his
job well enough, he came home and removed the mask that he'd hidden behind.

 That was the part that he'd only
started to understand recently. His little friend had set him up not to learn
to hide, but to practice becoming himself again. It wasn't perfect yet, since
he didn't know who he was, but it was getting closer each time. Someday,
possibly soon, he'd take the mask off for the last time and find himself
looking back in the mirror.

Which he was smart enough to know
he always had been. It just didn't feel like that at the point he'd gotten to.
He lived in a raw state still, stunted by his years of self-excoriation. Jason
had let other people decide what he was worth, and had been paying for it for a
long time now. The easy answer was that it was time to stop doing that. The
harder one was that at some point he needed to let himself actually believe
that what bad people did or thought wasn't the sum total of his personal value.
A man was more than his job. More than a husband and father.

That was the tough part. After
everything that Lynn had put him through, he didn't feel like a man anymore. It
was more like he hadn't even been real. Just a tool for Lynn and her real love
to use in paying the bills. A thing that didn't even count.

Darkness was falling, and his
single lamp was still off. Going to bed early seemed like a great idea, but
eight o'clock was pushing it a bit too far. He wouldn't go for a walk in the
dark either. Not in Brickston. The cops around there were too likely to use
that as an excuse to arrest him for something made up. Claim that any crime
that happened might be his fault, or even that he was a vagrant. On the street
people knew the places to avoid. The areas where people just vanished from. For
him the whole town was like that. The whole area around it, for a long way. The
one saving grace was that there was a lot of county, and very few deputies. They
still managed to find him a lot, but that was probably about some trick or
observation technique that he just didn't know about. A tracker under his car,
or something.

It was one of those wacky
thoughts that drunks, and clearly ex-drunks, or recovering ones if that was the
lingo used, came up with. It couldn't be simple happenstance,
that
would
be stretching things too far. So of course it was some new technology that
bordered on magic. Like anyone would bother doing that with him. He was either
there, out on a job, or walking in the neighborhood. It really wasn't worth the
expense.

It wasn't a great idea to go and
do yard work at night, since the neighbors might complain. Instead he went in
and started cleaning the house. It was something productive, and would keep him
busy. All he had to do was avoid the fridge.

The cold box of temptation. It
was a strange habit, since neither Carlos or Wendy drank all that much, but
they liked to make certain they had a lot of white wine on hand. For cooking,
he guessed. Except that it was always chilled and ready to drink. You didn't
chill wine you were going to add to food. He'd asked about it once, but Carlos
had only shrugged and muttered about a family tradition. It was always exactly
seven bottles, too. Not five one day and eight after the weekly shopping trip.
Seven.

The labels changed, so it wasn't
that it was never used. If so, they ate in secret, since they never offered him
any food that tasted of it. They also weren't big on entertaining, on their
three days off each week. So no one was simply drinking it, and not telling him
just to be kind to the ex-drunk. It was a mystery.

Once, when he'd been a younger
man, before losing his life to study, and later Lynn, Jason had been really big
into mysteries. Not novels or stories so much, but real ones. It had nearly had
him going into archeology as a profession. It was what his minor had been in.
He'd switched over to history for teaching after Lynn had suggested that she'd
like him to be around more than going off on digs would allow. They'd been
dating for a long time then, but it had been about the time she'd gotten
pregnant with Alex.

That shook him. The realization
actually dipped all the way into his soul and whipped him around like a dog
with a toy. She'd gotten him to change career paths, just so he'd be available
for her as a
babysitter
. So that she could have her three times a week
girls' night out. How had he never worked that out before?

It was, when he thought about it,
probably just like the rest of the whole thing. No one was
supposed
to
do things like that to anyone else. That meant sane people didn't suspect it. A
good and trusting husband didn't question his wife having friends, did he? Now
it seemed gullible and weak.

Jay decided to scrub the floors.
All of them. It took hours, since the house had a lot of hardwood, but when he
finished... it looked almost exactly the same. Just getting them a bit cleaner
hadn't made any visible difference. There had been some dust, since the area
bred it. The sweeping had probably been enough. Except that now the place
smelled faintly of lemons from the cleaner.

It was one of those things that
nagged at him, from time to time. Like the wine, and his old love of mysteries.
No matter what he did to make things better for the people around him, it never
amounted to much. Really, it never had. The house was clean, and was going to
stay that way, unless he made a mess. Even the shed was tidy and scrubbed.

The refrigerator called to him
then. More to the point, the alluring wine did. What with its strange mystery
and supposed family tradition. That could have been said to mislead him. Jason
found himself going over, and opening the door slowly. It wasn't the only time
that he'd done something like that, but this time he wasn't actually interested
in the booze inside. He just wanted to figure the whole thing out.