Strikeout of the Bleacher Weenies (18 page)

 

THE QUILTY CLOWN

The life of the
average six-month-old baby is pretty sweet. Quentin, who was slightly above average in many ways, but still just an infant, was no exception. He got fed, he got hugged, and he got loved. Life was definitely sweet. At least, that's how it was before the quilty clown showed up.

He heard about it, first, before he saw it. Quentin couldn't talk all that much, yet. Mostly, he burbled and cooed. He hadn't figured out how to make all of the sounds his parents made, and he was still learning what words were all about. But he understood what he heard.

Dinga-chinga-dinga-bing.

That was the doorbell. Quentin loved hearing the bell. It was like music. And it meant someone was coming for a visit. Visitors were wonderful. They leaned over his crib and smiled. They adored him. They tickled his belly and sang songs to him.

“Hello, dearie.”

Quentin smiled. He knew that voice, even when the speaker was all the way across the house. Faraway voices were softer. But this one was still recognizable. It was Mrs. Pepson, from across the street.

“Hello,” his mother said. “What do you have there?”

“Something for the precious little one,” Mrs. Pepson said. “I saw it at a garage sale, and I just knew your little boy would love it.”

For me,
Quentin thought. Even though he didn't hear his name, he knew he was also
the little boy
. He burbled. He wanted to say, “Yay!” but he hadn't quite mastered that word, yet. Besides, burbling conveyed his feelings perfectly adequately.

He heard footsteps coming his way. Sounds got louder when they got closer. His mom and Mrs. Pepson reached the crib.

“Look, Quentin,” his mom said, holding something up. “Mrs. Pepson brought this for you. Isn't it wonderful?”

Quentin laughed and clapped his hands. His mom was holding a quilt. It was filled with bright colors. Quentin knew all about quilts, since he slept with one that covered him and kept him snug, and he took naps on the couch on another one that his grandma had made for him.

But this quilt was different. Instead of squares and triangles, it was a clown—a big, smiling clown, with a huge red mouth, a red-and-blue-striped shirt, white gloves, yellow pants, and enormous black shoes. One raised hand clutched strings tied to a bunch of balloons. The other hand pointed straight out, as if to say, “These are for you.” The quilt was stretched over a frame.

“I know just where to put it,” his mom said. She walked to the wall opposite his crib and took down the painting of three men in a tub that hung there. Then she hung up the quilted clown, gave Quentin a kiss, and left the room. Quentin liked the men in the tub, but he'd seen them all of his life, so he was ready for something different.

Quentin watched the clown, and smiled. He was happy all morning and afternoon. He was happy for part of the evening—until the clown smiled back.

It wasn't a nice smile, like the clown had worn until now. It was a mean smile. And it didn't happen until the sun set and the room grew dark. Quentin lived in a house on a corner where two busy streets crossed. Every time a car drove past his house, the headlights would shine in through his bedroom window, sweeping across the wall.

As another pair of headlights highlighted the smile, which had grown larger and scarier, Quentin screamed. His mom and dad came running into the room. They flipped on the lamp next to his crib.

“What's wrong?” his mom asked.

Quentin hated this question, because there was never any way he could answer it. No matter what was wrong—hungry stomach, wet diaper, itchy bottom—he didn't know how to make the words that would explain the problem.

He wanted to scream, “Get that clown out of here!” But he lacked the skills to do that. So he pointed and howled.

“I think he's scared of the clown,” his dad said.

“He couldn't be,” his mom said. “He loved it. You should have seen how his face lit up when I showed it to him. He watched it all day. He loves the clown.”

“No I don't!” Quentin wanted to scream.

His mom picked Quentin up, whispered, “Hush,” and rubbed his back.

Quentin was powerless against that sort of magic. Despite his fears, he fell asleep and didn't wake until the next morning.

Across the room, hanging from the wall, the clown looked safe and cheerful in the early sunlight. The evil smile was gone. Quentin wondered if anything had actually happened last night. He was still getting used to seeing and hearing things. And he was often wrong about what he thought he was experiencing. He didn't quite understand how his father made his whole face disappear when he played the peek-a-boo game or how the pictures appeared and disappeared on the television. And things were tricky to watch in the moving beams of headlights that danced across his walls at night. So maybe there was nothing evil about the clown.

He changed his mind when night fell.

The clown gave him the same evil smile. Things grew rapidly worse after that. Even in the dim light between the cars, Quentin could see the quilt jerk, as if someone inside were pulling down at it. The frame bumped the wall, but not loudly enough to wake his parents. More bumps followed, like the beating of a slow heart. Then, Quentin heard another sound that was far worse.

Rip.

The clown's raised arm tore free of the cloth on either side.

The arm reached across toward the opposite shoulder, grabbed a fistful of quilt, and yanked.

Rip.

Quentin howled.

His parents rushed in. The clown's free hand slipped back where it belonged. As his mom picked him up and soothed him, his father said, “I hope this isn't some new thing. Please tell me he won't wake us up every night.”

“It's just a phase,” his mother said as she rubbed Quentin's back and swayed from side to side. “All babies go through phases.”

Quentin's head started to droop. As it flopped down, he caught a glimpse of the grinning clown.

He's going to get me.

Quentin let his whole body go limp, as if he were already asleep. It was the first time he attempted an act of deception. At the same time he pretended to be asleep, he also struggled to stay awake. His mom gave his back several gentle pats, bringing him dangerously close to drifting off, then lifted him from her shoulder.

“There we go,” she said. “He's fast asleep.”

She put him back in the crib. He'd done it. He'd managed to stay awake. Quentin lay still, pretending to be asleep. The idea that he could fool his parents amazed him. But he had more important things to think about right now. He opened his eyes the tiniest slit, to watch the wall.

The clown reached up, again, and pulled at his shoulder. He was ripping himself from the quilt, one stitch at a time. The shoulder and arm came free.

The clown grabbed his head with two hands, scrunching the material of his forehead, and pulled downward. In a moment, he'd torn his whole upper body out of the quilt.

He flopped down and worked on his legs, like someone unlacing tall boots.

Quentin screamed again.

The door opened. “Oh, good heavens, Quentin, go to sleep,” his mom said.

“We should go in,” his dad said.

“No,” his mom said. “The books say that sometimes you just have to let them cry. It's hard. But it's the right thing to do.”

“We might as well try that,” his dad said. “We have nothing to lose.”

The door closed.

The clown dropped to the floor as the last stitches broke. He hit with a thud that sounded heavier than it should have.

Quentin watched the clown crawl across the floor toward the crib. It reached the leg near Quentin's head and started to climb up toward the rails.

“Oh, baby,” the clown whispered. Its voice was like gravel and steel.

It climbed higher up the leg. The passage was slow on the slippery, polished wood. But the clown was making progress.

“I'm going to hug you tight,” the clown said. “Right around your neck.”

Quentin screamed, then looked at the door. He listened for footsteps.

Nothing.

No sign of rescue.

Quentin, pushed by fear and a survival instinct, began his first complex chain of thoughts.

I have to keep the clown from reaching me.

How?

He watched the clown inch up the leg of the crib.

Heavy things are hard to lift.

The clown needed to be too heavy to climb. But it wasn't.

I need to make it heavier.

What made things heavy?

Quentin thought about his diaper. When it was dry, it was light. When it got wet, it was heavy. He clutched his bottle and turned it upside down. The water wouldn't come out.

A white gloved hand grabbed the bottom of the rail. “Got your nose,” the clown said. “Not yet. But soon.”

How did his mom open the bottle?

“Rip it right off,” the clown said. “Ouchies!”

Quentin shut his eyes and pictured her twisting the top.

A second hand grabbed the rails. “Baby go bye-bye,” the clown whispered.

It was hard. Quentin wasn't sure how to do it. But somehow, he got the top loose.

He tipped the bottle and poured the water on the quilty clown just as the dreadful head rose into sight above the mattress and the smile stretched so wide, it became a red slash across the clown's entire face.

Soaked, the clown slid back down the leg to the floor. It spouted angry words and made a few attempts to climb back up the slick surface, but then lay limply on the floor, as if exhausted.

Look! I did it myself!

That's what Quentin wanted to scream. But he knew nobody would come, tonight. And even if they did, nobody would understand the burbled half-formed words. As Quentin slipped back to sleep, he had another surprise. But this one was pleasant and full of promise. He discovered he could finally say, “Yay!”

His parents came in the morning. They stared, they talked, they made guesses to explain the inexplicable, and they failed to understand. But they took the clown away, and put it in the garbage, where it belonged.

 

A WORD OR TWO ABOUT THESE STORIES

Since writers are always being asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” I like to end each collection with some insights into my inspirations. It's best to read this after you finish the stories, since there will be some spoilers.

Easy Targets

Charter schools were in the news a lot when I was working on this collection, as were stories about violence in schools. This led me to think about schools as safe environments. It wasn't hard to go from there to thinking about a school specifically designed to have no bullies, which led me to think about what would happen if there was one bully in that school. Which led, as you've seen, to taking the idea one step further.

Parasites

I really did hear that poem when I was a kid. I've written other stories about this sort of concept, where there are levels of things, most notably in “Bad Luck,” from
The Battle of the Red Hot Pepper Weenies,
where the guy who is in charge of causing bad luck discovers that he, too, can become a victim of bad luck. But I think this is one of my favorites. I like that I can put stories with a wide variety of moods into these collections. I suspect some readers might object to the idea that vampires have blood. In some stories, they don't. In others, they do. I guess I'll just have to ask the next vampire I meet to settle things for me.

Frozen in Time

One of the great luxuries given to me as a story writer is that I can explore all sorts of structures, concepts, techniques, and literary devices. Ideas that might be too risky to use for a whole novel are perfect for short stories. (More about that when I discuss “Dominant Species.”) There are certain concepts that have been trotted out over and over for stories. These are called
tropes.
A trope can be a cliché, but it can also be fun to play with. Getting a message from your future self is definitely a trope. But I think I managed to turn it into an amusing story. I hope you agree.

In Warm Blood

The sanguine idea for the ending came first. It's a fairly basic concept—letting the hunter become the victim. Once I knew how I wanted it to end, it wasn't hard to figure out the rest of the story. Sometimes, I'll get an idea for an ending that is fairly hard to orchestrate. Let's say, to use a wild, hypothetical example, I have an idea that requires my character to end up climbing a tree while holding a pickle in his mouth and a checkerboard under his arm. That's going to be a tough story to write. If you work too hard to set up an ending, or make the characters do unlikely things, the ending will feel contrived. That's not good. By the way, there's been a bit of debate recently over whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded. But given that the air was hot, I could safely describe the blood as warm either way. And there's a bit of debate about the distinction between the brontosaurus and the apatosaurus. At least if there's a mistake about that, it's Kenneth's error and not mine.

Interestingly enough, just as I was going over the final edits for this book, a new largest dinosaur was discovered. I considered changing the story so it mentioned the titanosaur, but I realized there will inevitably be other, larger discoveries. So I decided to leave things alone.

The Duggly Uckling

Ever since I wrote “The Princess and the Pea Brain” for
The Battle of the Red Hot Pepper Weenies,
I try to make sure each collection has a fractured fairy tale. The idea for this one came straight from the title. As you may know, that sort of wordplay where the opening letters of words are swapped is called a Spoonerism. Puns, Spoonerisms, and other types of wordplay are great starting points for ideas. If you are having a hard time finding an idea for a story, look at the titles of fairy tales, songs, or even paintings, and see what your mind does with the words.