Ivyland (3 page)

We leave the leader unconscious on the table and move into the living room, where his cronies are rung out and drooling—light poppers. We roll them over and take their guns and money and any Belltruvin they couldn't cram in. Before I can stop myself I punch the lavender one in the face, to see how it feels, and he smiles back with a wet split lip.

Lev's car won't start.

“I feel tight,” I say, muscles locking.

We walk towards the Parkway to hitchhike, back past the duck pond, eventually passing the pink slab of a middle school.

An ice cream truck appears on the road. After feeling for the Collars' money in my pocket I try to flag it down as Lev kicks at the curb, only when it won't slow up a change crashes over him like a wave: he spins into the road, pulls his gun and starts firing wildly as the truck skids, chuckling that we're going to get some ice cream satisfaction dammit, specifically a chocolate éclair bar he's craved since the end of last summer when the trucks stopped running, and he's so committed that
I
start shooting, which I maybe hoped would validate his gut reaction. Which I hoped said, “Hey, your emotions can't be wrong, and I'm also feeling that heady mix of frustration and adrenaline that makes shooting guns an attractive option.” But only Lev hits the thing, a big white snaking crack on glass that goes red. Jesus do I swear that.

The truck finishes its swerve to miss us, coasting to a crunching stop in thick hedges alongside the school, and when we get to it we see it's crowded full of scared-looking people (for some reason most with briefcases), and the driver is hit—well, is probably dead.

“You killed him!” this woman with a goiter screams. “You gas-heads killed him!”

“What are you doing back here?” Lev asks, rubbing his temple with the grip of the gun, “This isn't a bus, people.” Turning to me: “Don't think they're selling ice cream.”

“The song wasn't on,” I say.

“Okay, out out out,” Lev says, and everyone bolts except the driver and one other dead person. As we reverse and get back on the road I turn the song on. It makes me ache just right. I drag the pair of bodies towards the back and go through every pocket. Lev finds an empty parking lot, grabs a wrench from the glovebox, jumps out, comes back in a minute with the truck's license plate in hand. He starts the truck again.

“Lev,” I say, “it was a cop driving.”

Lev takes us to the soccer fields at the foot of Floods Hill, where they're having a huge tournament. He pulls right in front of this other ice cream truck playing the same song as us, sweaty uniformed kids with fistfuls of money lined up. I remember the song out of nowhere, this ragtime number now weirdly overlapping itself, repeating on different cycles from two sets of speakers. The Johnstons' real kid practiced it all the time that year.

The other truck driver is leaning out of his window to yell, but we can't hear him over the songs grinding against each other in bad harmonies, and besides, he has a confusing accent. Lev tells me to sell ice cream while he handles things, so I shout to the kids that I'm giving away my stuff for free. They ditch the original line and mob my truck, shrieking, and as I go back and forth between the freezer and window I keep tripping over the bodies.

All this hoopla about the giveaway operation is pissing off the real ice cream guy even more; he jacks up the volume of his song, so I crank mine, and the kids in their muddy jerseys are so disbelieving it hurts. I shower them with popsicles and chocolate tacos and ice cream sandwiches. I need to be rid of it all.

Finally the real ice cream vendor steps out to get physical, but Lev appears between the two trucks, cocks his gun and puts a bullet through the guy's windshield, making a giant twisted snowflake. Now it kind of looks like ours. The kids scream and run in no particular direction. Parents and players turn around and look from sidelines. The driver shrieks in a language; he's lying in the grass, hands on head. Lev chucks the gun at him, jumps into our truck and drives drives drives.

“Won't fool the dumbest cop in this town, even if that guy is an illegal.”

“Slapped our license plate on his truck to be safe,” Lev says. “We'll get this to my cousin's chop shop in Newark, make some adjustments. Take our cosmetic on the road.”

I get one look at the unrolling fields behind us, at Ivyland, at the children who fell over each other in the scatter, now staring down at their ruined ice cream like if they focus hard enough it'll jump back into their hands, clean of dirt and grass. A last look at the kid whose birthday it might be, because he's got this red balloon that he lets float away in the chaos, float up till it's the head of a pin, till it's nothing.

I got out of the hospital a while back. I'd never seen my mom cry like she did when I told them I didn't need to be wheeled to the exit. Her shoulders jumped horribly with each sob. Her body wanted to be rid of a presence—me, I figured. I knew enough to let her keep going. Finally, on the ride home, somewhere in the smear of pocked concrete and For Sale signs I was slow to recognize as home, condemned houses standing merely because demolition teams were booked solid the next two years, she stopped long enough to say one thing: Thanks for sticking around this time.

I consider the bodies resting up against the freezers, their surprised faces, the ragtime still on maximum, a lone caterpillar crawling up the window's rim, and I lose it. I don't know. I guess Lev and I ruin people on the operating table, but they know the risks. And Lev says to shut up, cause all my shots flew off harmlessly into the trees, he killed them and he's the one with peace to make. Now we'll fix things, he says, help people from here on out, these two won't die in vain. I say it's not that, it's that they didn't expect it, they didn't see it coming, and that's not even what I mean.

AIDAN /// IVYLAND, NEW JERSEY

If you ever have the misfortune of meeting Henri Acton, please note three things:

(1) Avoid the French reading of his name. He giggles unforgivably at this. It's really “Henry,” like, as American as possible. His parents belonged to an endangered species of WASP that valued “exotic” spelling in names while clinging to the blandest pronunciations.

(2) Be prepared to endure one of the most repellent faces ever conceived. The features are far-flung, pieces of a Pangaea disassembled by continental drift. Piggish nose, epic forehead, lips crusty and peeling. Also high on the try-to-ignore-it list is this nauseating green rim of spongy fungus that's developed on the ridge where his left front tooth meets excessive gums. Even if the tooth isn't rotting out of his head (it protrudes a little where its partner recedes, flattened), it can't be considered a dental success. At this point I'd prefer a gaping hole.

(3) If you play an instrument, don't mention it. You'll be forced to jam with him pounding away on his broke-down keyboard before you can say “next year's battle of the bands.”

When Henri starts talking to me, the first couple sentences don't register at all, dull sonorities thumping through tiny bone but not translated. Like meeting someone whose name you won't remember: acknowledgement of vibrations, inconvenient to actually sort them out. You hear
my name is blah
, blah being a variant, white noise, antiformants. Nothing.

Henri looks at me now, gearing up to ask a question, forehead pre-furrowed. He doesn't have a unibrow so much as a diehard colony of hairs that populate the upper bridge of his nose. He's releasing air through a puckered mouth in the controlled
whhhhh
that accompanies his thinking—but this is just further introduction, a way of signaling the extent of his confusion. A “pre-apology,” as Professor Fleer would have said of some timid philosopher with rotten ideas in his back pocket.

Finally he releases and launches in. Again, we're not sifting through phonemes of speech; we're assigning Henri as their source, same as if he'd burped or farted.

I say: “O.”

I realize too late that this is rookie. “O” will suggest that I'm to some degree surprised and therefore invested. After the next patch of talk, I correct with an “uh-huh.” Bored, prepping for the brush-off.

Following the next bit, he chuckles to himself in this way where I know he's laughing at my expense. It's the way one eye collapses in accidental winks, the crooked smile, the quiet snorts. I mutter the punch line of a long joke, Henri's absolute favorite, and the fact that it's his favorite is about all you need to know. It goes, in full, like this:

 

Henri's Favorite Joke

 

Okay once there was this little kid, right? Normal, suburban little boy, nuclear family plus like the perfectly trained collie, the works. So his dad comes home one day and says, Son, Daughter (the boy's got a sister, see), Wife, guess what I bought on the way home today. So the kids and mom are guessing and guessing, but Dad's stumped them. The dad is all, I got us tickets to the circus this Saturday! The family is psyched and everything, but the little boy is Eck. Stat. Ick. It is un-
friggin-
believable how berserk this kid is about going to the circus—he's never been. He's just bonkers all week, off the wall in school because of the circus, won't shut up at dinner about the circus. Can't sleep at night, what with his circus-soaked delirium.

Finally, yes, it's the night before, and the kid can't sleep, can't even close his eyes. He's drawing ever closer to the circus. In the morning, he puts on his favorite of many dinosaur T-shirts (it features a grinning velociraptor), rushes the family through breakfast, demands to know why they aren't on the road already. Mom suggests he go run around the house a few times. Eventually, they get out the door, take a short car ride, and there they are—
unbelievable,
the boy whispers to himself—at the circus.

Now he's finally stepping inside. He's actually in
side
the tent: this,
this
is where it's going to happen. They move through the tent to amazing seats in the front row; he could cry he's so happy about the gloriously unobstructed view they'll have.

The show begins, and instantly the boy is blown away. Elephants, acrobats, tightrope walkers, balancing acts, trained lions, fire-breathers, please—the goddamn
ringmaster
. Everything is pitch-perfect, lives up to this boy's self-made hype, improbably enough, and tends the seed of his very young soul.

Between acts, a clown comes out and starts doing bits. Hey, thinks the boy, this clown is pretty funny! He puts kernels of popcorn on bald people's heads! His pants keep falling down! Soon enough the clown makes his way over to our boy's section, breezes past, then seems to remember a crucial fact. He slowly backtracks until profiled directly in front of the boy. Carefully he rotates his head as a barn owl turns its gaze on a field mouse.

“Excuse me, sir!”

The boy is thunderstruck. Surely the clown couldn't be talking to him?

“Excuse me?”

He is! Our boy hesitates.

Then: “Yyyes?”

“Are you the horse's head?” asks the clown.

Here was a problem. What did the clown mean? How could he possibly be the horse's head? Which horse was
the
horse? The boy has a million questions about the question, but a tentful of eyes are fixed on him, so he shudders and wagers a reluctant guess:

“No?”

“Well then,” says the clown, “you must be the horse's ass!” He whirls about and bows deeply to the crowd, with not a little showman's flair, to thundering laughter and applause.

And the boy: my God, you can only imagine. Humiliated, his stomach flops inside out, his heart pounding so hard and nastily that it may as well be a ball of worms, squirmy and terrified. The hot tears come, of course, the source and result of shame, as the boy sees his family laughing along, assuming he's keen on the joke. Clearly, okay, he's not.

So he runs. He just gets up and runs.

He runs past the box office, out through the park, sprints across town and all the way home, body burning, face wet and crunched in pain. He heaves himself onto his bed and weeps. His family gets home soon after, and they want to comfort him, naturally, feeling awful about laughing at him back there, not realizing, but he locks them out, continues to sob for hours over the sound of his parents' embarrassment and apologies and loving words.

Around midnight, long after he's passed on dinner, it hits him. Why sit here and pity himself when he can
get even
? That's it! This clown is going to taste some bitterly cold revenge and wish to God he'd never made our boy the butt of his gag. He will hang his novelty shoes and seltzer spritzer up in shame when our boy is through with him.

He begins at the library, borrowing every book ever written on clowning, comedic acting, mime; he studies everything imaginable and/or academic on the art of theater, from Stanislavsky to the commedia dell'arte, all the method and the madness, and finally, when he's old enough, enrolls in a prestigious clown college.

He's mastered theory on the page but finds himself hopelessly lacking onstage—there's this one total bastard instructor who picks on him incessantly, says he's got no talent, no inner clown to speak of, is going nowhere in the cutthroat world of professional clowning. But our boy is not so easily dissuaded. He grits his teeth and endures all this bastard's snide insults and shitty sneering, works his ass off really, stitching each convoluted clown gesture into the fabric he used to call himself, and finally it becomes clear to the boy that this prof is trying to motivate him, trying to unlock some latent glimpsed potential, which he finally
does
, if you can believe it, achieving a naturalism awesome for this day and age, and the boy goes on to graduate top of his class, for whatever that's worth in clown college.

At last he is unquestionably prepared to confront the old clown. He has spite in his sweat and cunning to match. He is ready. Now it's merely a matter of tracking down, footprint by absurdly huge footprint, his only, ever and unwitting foe.

The circus could be anywhere by now, years after the fact, but the young man's desire to punish the clown seems to overcome all logistical snags, and after driving around the country for two months and countless interrogations of squinty locals, he finds the circus setting up just outside a Northwestern hamlet, among towering pines. He smells victory. Our boy buys every ticket to the show that night, using virtually his whole life savings.

As he sits, immaculately dressed in his only suit, alone in a tent smaller and more squalid than he remembers, he reflects on the simple brilliance of his plan. With no one else at the show, the clown will be forced use him for the horse's ass bit—a delicious setup for humiliating ruin. Okay, so the show begins, business as usual, all the other animals and performers showcasing their respective talents, slightly confused by the empty house but professional about it, the young man watching in a distant fog, biding his time, tensing and un-tensing muscles, starting to fidget in psychotic excitement.

Finally, the aging, near-retirement clown, sad face locked in rictus, makes his fateful entrance, does some half-hearted solo shtick, meanders over to the young man, not recognizing his victim, and sets the trap in motion.

“Excuse me, sir!”

No response.

“Excuse me, sir?”

The young man can barely keep a straight face.

“Yes,” he answers, too coolly for his own good.

“Are you the horse's head?”

Déjà vu. The young man is smiling too hard.

Through a sadistic smirk: “No. I'm not.”

“Well then,” says the clown (who would like to get this over with; doing private shows isn't really what he got into the business for, and he's about ready to have a drink with the lion tamer out back) as he whirls about to an imaginary audience, maybe even winking at an imaginary pigtailed girl in the front row, “you
must
be the horse's ass!”

There is a fleeting breath of uncertainty with that diseased logic frozen between them. The young man draws himself up to stand at an intimidating height, but if you were there, you wouldn't have noticed. The clown turns back, finds himself looking quizzically up at the tall young man, unable to see the angle, the trajectory, of what's next.

Suddenly our boy snaps his arm upward as if unholstering a gun. The clown is staring down the barrel of a knobby index finger that trembles a millimeter away from his red foam nose.

Moment of truth. Heart beginning to wormify, stomach contracting before the backsprings. Licking cracked lips, the grown and tortured boy speaks with undying hate and frothy venom, unbridled disgust and final superiority.

“Fuck you, Clown!”

End of Henri's Favorite Joke

 

Right—what I say to Henri is: “Fuck you, Clown.” Can't tell if he loves the joke because he thinks the boy chokes on his moment of triumph or because he believes the revenge is somehow perfectly executed. He'd probably say for both reasons, if only to confuse the issue.

Henri continues, unfazed by the comment, which has lost its impact since we started using it to mean anything at all.

“I can't find paper towels,” he finally interrupts himself to say.

“Behind you,” I mutter.

He rips off a few squares and asks do I remember Larry M. from high school.

“He dated that girl with the hot star tattoo but hairy arms for like a day maybe?”

“Sure, Laura-who-came-out-afterwards. Plus wasn't he legally blind, I mean as far as getting to drive.”

“No.”

“Whatever, okay.” His sentence cracks: o-
gnay
.

“And Laura was friends with the pregnant twins.”

“Weren't both pregnant. One was pregnant twice.”

“This is about Larry, anyway.”

“Yeah. What'd you need paper towels for?” He's just holding a wad of them.

“Nothing. Listen. Remember when Larry was out for like a week of school and never said why?” Not really. “He was having surgery on his dick.”

I want to find out who told him this and violently mute that mouth forever.

“Like enlargement,” is all I can think to say.

“That's the thing: emergency room. He had to get stitches cause he cut it in an accident or some shit.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Seriously!” I can't believe he's bought this story, and probably off some deep-in-shit acquaintance from high school. “I ran into DH at Sipwell's a while back”—yep—”and he swears it's true, he's seen the scar.”

“You in Sipwell's? I didn't think you'd been there since your open mic.”

“So you have to at least acknowledge the scar.”

“Must I.”

“He gets the stitches. And afterward, guess what the doctor says.”

“Never reproduce.”

“He says, ‘As long as you have these stitches in, you can't get an erection.' “

In the ensuing weird silence, I can divine the steady murmurs of a few collected voices outside.

“Can't as in … physically unable to get aroused.”

“Aidan, brace yourself: Can't as in the imperative. I am ordering you to not get turned on.”

“Lunacy. Never happened.” Henri nods with sympathetically arched eyebrows and a sad-but-true face that nearly conceals his perverse amusement.

“He couldn't, or the stitches would pop.”

“Have you called that tree guy yet?”

“For real.” This clearly applies to his anecdote, not my question.

“Doctor can't expect that.”

“I dunno, but it's not like they can just prescribe you pills, okay, there's not a huge market for chemicals that make your dick flaccid.”