Touch of the Clown (11 page)

“Lots of little kids don't.”

“But it's worse with Livvy. She's only got one kidney and sometimes she has even more than one accident in a day.”

“And you clean her up.”

“Most of the time.”

We drink our drinks quietly for a few minutes, listening to the sound of the late-afternoon traffic getting all mixed up with Italian conversations at the tables around us.

“Daddy thinks it's because he and Mama were old when Livvy was born. I heard him telling Grandma, and then he cried. Mama was forty-four. Do you think that could be the reason?”

“I don't know.” Cosmo holds his cappuccino cup in both hands. “Whatever the reasons, though,” he moves his cup slightly forward like a kind of pantomime toast I've seen him do in skits at the workshop, “I think you're…” He looks around the room as if there is a word somewhere, and then he smiles. “I think you're swell.” He is laughing, and I'm afraid he is going to choke on his cappuccino. “I can't believe I said swell,” he says. “Swell. Some words should never be used. What I meant to articulate, Miss Barbara Stanwyck Kobleimer, is that I think you are caring and tenacious and talented.”

“I don't mind swell,” I say.

Myron Perth drives a potato-chip truck. It says
Crispy Dan the Potato Chip Man
in big red letters on the outside.

“That's me,” Myron Perth says. “I'm Crispy Dan. My professional nom-day-ploom.” He wiggles his false teeth at Livvy and makes her laugh.

There is only room in the cab for two other people, Grandma and Mrs. Perth, but Crispy Dan has put a kitchen chair in the back of the panel for Daddy to sit on, and a foam mattress for Livvy and me.

“I'm gonna have to lock the back so you don't all fall out,” Crispy Dan says, “so I'm assignin' you, Livya, to be the keeper of the light so none of them groblems get ya.” Myron Perth talks like he has a mouth full of rags. He gives Livvy a large flashlight.

“Yippee!” Livvy beams it to all the corners of the truck, flashing it back to the tower of trays filled with bags of potato chips and cheese puffs. “Me hungry,” Livvy shouts. The flashlight scampers over a bag of picnic stuff, and the woven plastic and metal pipes of folded-up lawn chairs.

“Keep that light in one place,” Daddy says, settling onto the chair. “When you flash it all
around it gives me motion sickness.”

“Help yusself,” Crispy Dan says before he bolts the door. “You girls each grab a bag to munch on. There's salt and vinegar on top, and ketchup on that second tray or, if you like dill pickle, there's a few left on that flat over there. You wan' one, Edwin, help yusself.”

We hear the catch closing on the outside. Livvy clicks off the flashlight and we are all sitting in a thick, close blackness.

“Quit horsing around, Olivia.” Daddy's voice cuts through the darkness. “If I'd known how primitive…” he mutters. “Olivia, turn that light on now and leave it on.”

Livvy turns it on, beaming it onto my face, blinding me.

“Brat.” I close my eyes. I wonder what they are doing at the clown workshop. I can imagine Cosmo on the stage with everyone gathered on the closest seat-steps surrounding it. In his soft voice he would be telling them things about what a clown does. I wonder where Nathan is sitting. I wonder if he's wondering where I am today.

“I want dill pickle,” Livvy says. She gets up off the foam mattress, staggering back and forth
in a mock effort to keep her balance. The light flashes all over the place. Daddy groans in his chair. “Can I have a beer?” Livvy says, stumbling over a case.

“Livvy, I'm beginning to lose my patience,” Daddy says. “Sitting back here is intolerable,” he mutters. Intolerable, I decide, is a good word to know. I say it twice, quietly.

At the campground, Daddy and Crispy Dan set up the lawn chairs for Grandma and Mrs. Perth. Livvy loves Crispy Dan. She follows him around. “You ‘n' me,” he says, “we better fine some kinling wood and get us-selves a good weenie fire goin' here, eh, Livya? Whaddaya think?”

“You want to walk down by the river,” Daddy asks me, “while Myron and Olivia are looking for firewood?”

I'm surprised. My head nods automatically. We have walked only part of the way when I hear his breath coming out in wheezes. We walk slower. The path along the river is thick with trees, and it is cool with the sunlight blocked by branches.

“So quiet and peaceful,” Daddy says, stopping and leaning with his hand at arm's length against a large poplar. “Whew. Am I out of shape.”

“It's nice down here.” I smile at Daddy. I can't think any more about the workshop. I look at Daddy, streams of perspiration running along his face. He finds a handkerchief and rubs it away, mussing his hair where it is turning gray at the edges. He pats it smooth again.

“Your mama and I used to go on picnics when we first got married,” he says. “Uncle Potts–do you remember Uncle Potts and Auntie Vitaline? No. I guess not. You'd be only about two when they passed on. Always had a cottage at Alberta Beach for the summer, Uncle Potts and Auntie.”

We have moved on to the edge of the river bank where we can look down and see the North Saskatchewan. It is low and muddy, moving with a summer slowness.

My mind is filled with questions. Was that the cottage we used to stay in at Alberta Beach? Why don't we have it anymore? Did you and Mama come to this park?

But before I can decide which question to ask first, Olivia and Crispy Dan burst through the bushes.

“Dad-dee,” Livvy shrieks, “we got weenie roasting sticks and we can use them for marshmallows,
too. And Uncle Crispy and I got goodles of wood, didn't we, Uncle?”

“Nuff to cook a moose,” Crispy Dan says. “Boy, you gotta keep hoppin' to keep up to this 'un, lemme tellya. You never move' this quick, Eddie, I remember. We allus had to wait for you. You wuz the cow's tail.”

“Cow's tail,” Livvy giggles. “Daddy's the cow's tail.”

“Oh, yeah,” Daddy says. “This cow's tail could beat you any day, Miss Smartypants.”

“No, no,” Livvy shrieks, jumping up and down, and suddenly Daddy is stumbling up the path, weaving back and forth, making it impossible for anyone to get past him, but Livvy darts into the trees and comes out ahead of him. She is shrieking and laughing, her feet barely touching the ground, dancing back and forth in front of us all the way to the picnic tables.

“Lord have mercy,” Grandma Kobleimer says. “What a ruckus. We could hear you coming half a mile away.” She and Mrs. Perth are sipping from big glasses of pink Kool-aid.

“I want Kool-aid,” Livvy says. “Me thirsty.”

“How about you, Edwin?” says Crispy Dan. “We have kiddie Kool-aid, and…” he pulls out a
big bottle of vodka that has been hiding inside the picnic bag, “we got the grownup version.”

Livvy and I walk to the playground after we've stuffed ourselves with hot dogs. I take the survival bag with me, and when Livvy gets tired of playing on the equipment, we sit leaning against a big tire. Livvy draws a picture of a tiger roasting a marshmallow while I try to read. She talks nonstop, though, as she colors, and I give up on
Jane Eyre
and pull out the word-search book. There is one puzzle left. I work at it slowly to make it last as long as possible.

“Can we come here tomorrow?” Livvy asks. “I want to come here every day.”

“What about art school? Don't you want to go anymore? Besides, we can't come tomorrow. This is a one-time thing.”

“Oh, baa,” Livvy scowls as she colors her tiger chartreuse with magenta stripes.

“Tigers are orange and black,” I say.

“Not this one.” Livvy looks at me defiantly.

I am searching for the word
pomegranate
in the puzzle book. It's a tricky puzzle filled with words that have a lot of p's in them:
hippopotamus, proposition, pepper.

It is late in the afternoon when Livvy and I
walk back around the little lake to the picnic site. Before we can get to the shelter and picnic tables, we can hear Crispy Dan whooping with laughter.

“O-oh,” he says when we get there, “betta not tell ya the enda that 'un. Little pitchers got bigyears.” His words are even fuzzier, and Grandma and Mrs. Perth in their lawn chairs laugh at the way he staggers back and forth in front of the camp stove and makes funny faces at them. The vodka bottle hidden behind the picnic bag is nearly empty.

“Uncle Crispy's walking funny!” Livvy claps her hands. “I want to walk funny, too.”

“Now see what you've done, Myron,” Mrs. Perth cackles. “There'll be no stopping her now.”

But Livvy does wind down. “Me want hot dogs,” she says when it's past suppertime and Crispy Dan has brought out a few more bags of potato chips.

“There are no more. We ate them all at lunch.”

“Pooh.” Livvy makes a little hill of ripplechip crumbs and starts dropping them into her grape Kool-aid.

“Smarten up.” I grab the bag of chips away from her but she lets out one of her full-force shrieks.

“Barbara, you quit teasing the baby,” Grandma hollers.

I give Livvy back her bag of chips but she bats it onto the ground.

“Be a brat. I don't care.”

I go for a little walk around the campsite and expect she'll be tagging along in a minute or two. She doesn't, though, and when I get back, I see she has draped herself across the picnic table. I wish we were at home so I could get her to bed.

“Are you having a nap?” I ask her, but she just makes a cranky
mmm
sound for an answer. She doesn't want to hear
Winnie-the-Pooh
or draw pictures in the scrapbook or play catch with Bingo. The back of Crispy Dan's panel is open and I can see the end of the foam mattress.

“Let's play Pocahontas,” I say. “In the tent of Pocahontas, her bed of soft buffalo-skins waits, ready for Pocahontas to lie down, to sleep and dream…”

“I'm not tired,” Livvy grumbles. “I want to go in a canoe.”

“Dream of the sky people who will come and
get her so she can go hunting with them, hunting through the stars, shooting arrows at the moon…”

“That's not in Pocahontas.”

The vodka bottle is empty now and the grown-ups are drinking beer out of their Koolaid glasses.

“What I wanna know…” Crispy Dan is waving his glass, flinging out splashes of beer and foam, “is why the guvment don't do nothin' for us. I mean, I should be legible…eligible…illegible for disability…”

“Don't be hollering.” Mrs. Perth looks like she's trying to get out of her lawn chair but can't quite do it. “Keep your voice down, Myron, or the cops'll be over here like a duck on a June bug.”

A family at the next picnic site is quickly packing up their supper. They look over at us and the mother shakes her head back and forth with a sad look on her face.

“What's she staring at?” Daddy mutters and then says in a loud voice, “This is a public place…”

“Yes, it is a public place,” the woman says, herding a couple of wide-eyed children Livvy's
age into the back of the car.

Finally, after a trip to the washrooms in the shelter, I lure Livvy into the back of the panel and get her to lie down on the mattress. She curls herself into a ball and falls asleep almost at once. I turn on the flashlight and aim the beam at the page where I've left off in
Jane Eyre.

Crispy Dan and Daddy are having an argument.

“Yeah, Edwin, tell someone who cares…” Crispy Dan chants over and over again. “The guvment don't care…”

I switch off the light and curl against Livvy. I can feel the tangle of her hair against my cheek. She makes little stirring sounds like a sleeping puppy. I fall asleep, too, until I feel the back of the panel shuddering as Daddy tries to climb in. It is totally dark now and he trips, falling into the trays of potato chips. The whole back part of the truck is filled with the sound of crashing trays and broken bags of chips being crunched by Daddy's flailing body. There is swearing and Livvy is suddenly wide awake and crying.

“What in tunnation goin' on?” Crispy Dan yells from the parking gravel below us. “Careful them trays. That's produce, y'know.”

I can see Daddy lying on the floor of the truck when I finally find the flashlight. He is moaning. Crispy Dan slams the door shut and locks it.

“I don't like it in here,” Livvy is screaming. “I want out.” I try to wrap my arms around her. “No,” she wails. “Let me go. I want out of here.”

“Shhh,” I say. “Everything's okay.” When Livvy quits crying long enough to catch her breath, I realize that Daddy isn't making any sound at all. Maybe he's dead. Maybe he hit his head as he fell. The thought feels like ice when you hold it and it gets to be more than your skin can bear. I shine the flashlight back over him. He does look dead, a dead man with potato chips caught in his hair. And then I see his chest rise, and before Livvy can start into her crying again, I hear a snore against the sound of the truck motor.

The truck seems to go back and forth a lot on the road. More than once we can hear the sound of someone honking his horn loudly at Crispy Dan. Livvy's crying has settled into a quiet shuddering. Finally the truck gears down and, climbing up onto a curb, stops. I have kept the light on all the time and the beam finds Crispy Dan's
face as he unbolts the door. He opens his mouth in horror at what has happened to the back of the truck and his trays of potato chips. “Awww…” It sounds like he's going to cry, and in the big circle of his mouth, I can see he has lost his teeth. “Get outta there you sumbitch,” he hollers at Daddy and tries to climb up into the truck, but he slips and falls back, and lies gasping on the boulevard.

“Daddy.” I let go of Livvy for a minute and shake his arm, but I know I won't be able to wake him. “C'mon, Livvy, we'd better get Grandma.”