Clown in the Moonlight

11

Life has tightened to a manageable level. I have a new function. I exist for one thing at a time now. I need to find Ricky.

It takes time. He's hidden himself well. In the meanwhile I do what he does. I live on the streets of Northport. It's a small, quaint town and they want to keep it that way. The cops patrol in high volume. I don't sleep much. I keep watch, but not closely enough.

I keep moving. The spiral shrinks. I think about him and I dream about him and I feel him in cemeteries playing with the dead. Three days pass and he still eludes me. Another kid has gone missing. I visit Linda in the ICU. She's mostly incoherent. Her fever spikes at 108 and she falls into a coma. Forty-eight hours later they're still not sure if she's brain damaged or if she'll ever wake up.

Ricky's crows circle above and follow the Mustang day and night. I slip into Aztakea Woods one afternoon and tell Gary Lowers my half-forgotten secrets. He might pass them on, but I risk it. He's decomposing but his presence hasn't diminished. He takes strength from his audience. There are hundreds of different tracks around his body. The entire graduating class must have stopped by.

Once the words begin to tumble from me there's no way to stop them.

Lowers's ruined face seems to stir subtly as if he's contemplating all I'm saying. He appears to be sympathetic and understanding. He knows where I'm coming from, knows where I'm going. The crows descend and pluck at the frayed muscle of his throat, as if to stop him from speaking. But his voice is clear and full of warmth.

As I sit there, a couple of junior high kids come trudging up the trail. A boy and a chick four or five years younger than me, mouths curled in barely contained exhilaration, eyes as old as the bottom of the desert.

They're surprised to see me, wondering if they're in trouble. They turn to bolt. I say nothing to them. There's nothing to say.

They decide to stay. They light a joint and pass it back and forth before offering it to me. They hold the roach by an alligator clip. I take a hit and can taste the oils from Ricky's fingers on the rolling papers. He's dealt them the weed.

The boy can't resist conversing.

"You think it's true?" he asks me. "You think he really said that he loved his mother?"

"Yes, I believe so."

He nods in his stoner way. The girl nods with him. The boy huffs smoke over the corpse. "They lit him on fire."

"Yes."

"They took his eyes. How could he stand that?"

"I think he was tough as the great iron door at the entrance to Hell."

"Hells yeah."

He carries a copy of the Satanic Bible the same way that Ricky does. It's halfway out his back pocket. Baphomet finds me again. He grins and winks at me. I wink back.

I wait for the kids to pull the book like pulling a gun, like drawing an athame, a witch's blade. When they finally do, they read a false and hollow incantation. They draw a pentagram around Lowers's body with a stick. There are outlines of other pentagrams in the dirt too, partially erased by the rain and nearly obliterated by leaves crushed by couples making awful love.

"What about the guy who did it?" the boy asks.

"What about him?"

"You think…you know…that he was possessed? That demons told him to do it? That crows talked to him and the trees bowed down?"

"No."

The girl whispers in the boy's ear. Gary Lowers's knows what they're saying. So do I. So do the crows. So do the bugs in Gary's dead, toothless mouth.

This gets boring. This gets tiring. I've enjoyed my talk with Gary, but now it's over. I stand just as the boy rushes me, tugging his mother's stolen butcher knife from the small of his back. He swings the point toward my heart. I snap my forearm across the inside of his wrist and he drops the knife as his hand goes numb. I give him a short chop in the throat and he collapses to his knees, gagging.

I pick up the knife and remember my mother cooking dinner, cutting fat from my father's steak, showing me at length how to slice meat. I picture the boy's flayed flesh wrapped neatly and laid out on a reliquary. The girl runs up the trail, screaming. "Don't rape me! Please don't rape me!"

Compared to Linda and Gwen she's not even pretty enough to fuck, much less rape. It's insulting that she thinks I would.

I grab her by her dirty blonde hair and yank her head back, exposing her throat. I place the dull edge of the blade to her carotid and hug her to me like every person in my life that I hate but want to love. Like everyone I love who's dead. Because of me or for any other reason. There's not that many but they cling and grow heavier and heavier the farther on you go.

I kiss her under the ear and her boyfriend has enough breath to cry out, "No!"

"Do you love her?" I ask.

"Yes!"

"Would you die for her?"

There's no hesitation. "Yes!"

It's easy to say when you're stoned. I check his eyes. Beneath the setting sun they're pinpoints lit by molten gold.

"You love him?" I ask her. "And think about it carefully before you answer. Because one of you has to die."

She bursts into tears. "We were only messing around. We didn't mean anything!"

"He tried to stab me in the heart."

"No no, it was just a…a game. We were playing. It…it…"

"You wanted to screw while my hot blood pumped across your tits, didn't you?"

"No!"

"Don't lie to me. I'm the king of lies, I'm the master of lies. I'm Black Shuck."

"I don't know what you're talking about!"

"And you, you're the one who gets to choose. So, shall it be him or you?"

"Him!" she shouts. "Kill him! Cut his dick off, cut his throat, I don't care. Him! Do it to him."

"Sure, but then you have to fuck me while his blood jets over us."

"I want to!"

It's all so dramatic. That's really all that they want. To be on a human stage full of pith and tragedy, so long as it's not their own. Ricky understands the truth. So did Gary, even before they took his eyes from him.

I kick her in the ass and she goes flying into the brush. The boy attacks and I slash him across the forehead so blood runs down his face in a death mask. "You bastard!" he moans. He holds his arms out in front of him, blindly staggering, searching for the girl. She yelps and he trips over her, and they both sprawl into the weeds. They find each other on their knees and kiss and groan and weep. It'll keep them happy for a while.

I stare at myself in the side of the shining blade. The birds chitter and squawk, laughing. So do the angels of death hovering high in the trees. It's all right. I have to admit that it's a ridiculous story bound to become myth. Somehow I've become a part of it, though no one will ever know in the retelling.

I spin and hurl the knife upward and pierce the heart of a crow. Or perhaps it's a black angel simply posing as a crow. The blade sails down with the impaled bird and lands a few inches from Gary Lowers's head. The point of the knife thunks within the defined lines of the latest pentagram. Let the next group of curious children think on it.