I was out of my house as much as possible for different reasons, so Phil and I took refuge together, and the first home we both felt comfortable in was an abandoned pigeon coop we found on the roof of an industrial garage on Sudan Street. We cleaned all the white shit out and reinforced it with boards from old pallets and slid some abandoned furniture in there, and pretty soon we picked up other strays like ourselves—Bubba, Kevin Hurlihy for a while, Nelson Ferrare, Angie. The Little Rascals with class rage and larcenous hearts and complete lack of respect for authority.
As he sat across from me at his ex-wife’s table, I could see the old Phil again, the only brother I ever had. He grinned, as if remembering it all himself, and I could hear the sounds of our childhood laughter as we roamed the streets and ran like wolves over rooftops and tried to stay three steps ahead of our parents. Jesus, we’d laughed a lot for kids who should have been permanently angry.
Outside Angie’s house, the clatter of hail sounded like a thousand sticks beating against the roof.
“What happened to you, Phil?”
His grin disappeared. “Hey, you—”
I held up a hand. “No. I’m not judging. I’m wondering. Like you told Bolton, we were like brothers. We were brothers, for Christ’s sake. And then you went south on me. When’d all the hate take over, Phil?”
He shrugged. “I never forgave you for some things, Pat.”
“Like what?”
“Well…You and Angie, you know…”
“Sleeping together?”
“Her losing her virginity to you. You were my best friends and we were all so Catholic and repressed and sexually skewed. And you two, that summer, you distanced from me.”
“No.”
“Oh, yes.” He chuckled. “Oh, yes. Left me with Bubba and Frankie Shakes and a bunch of other pituitary cases with mush for brains. And then—what was it, in August?”
I knew what “it” was. I nodded. “August fourth.”
“Down at Carson Beach, you two, well, did the deed. And then, genius that you were, you treated her like shit.
And she came running to me. And I was second choice. Again.”
“Again?”
“Again.” He leaned back in his chair and spread his arms in an almost apologetic gesture. “Hey,” he said, “I always had charm and I always had my looks, but you had instinct.”
“You kidding me?”
“No,” he said. “Come on, Pat. I was always thinking things through too much, and you were doing them. You were the first guy to realize Angie wasn’t just one of the guys anymore, the first to stop hanging out on the corner, the first to—”
“I was restless. I was—”
“You were instinct,” he said. “You always could size up any situation before the rest of us and act on it.”
“Bullshit.”
“Bullshit?” He chuckled. “Come on, Pat. It’s your gift. ’Member those spooky fucking clowns in Savin Hill?”
I smiled and shivered at the same time. “Oh, yeah.”
He nodded, and I could tell that two decades later he still felt the fear that had gripped us for weeks after our encounter with the clowns.
“If you hadn’t thrown that baseball through their windshield,” he said, “who knows if we’d even be here today.”
“Phil,” I said, “we were kids with overactive imaginations and—”
He shook his head violently. “Sure, sure. We were kids and we were on edge because Cal Morrison had been killed that week and we’d been hearing rumors about those clowns since forever and blah, blah, blah. All that’s true, but we were there, Patrick. Me and you. And you know what would have happened to us if we’d gotten into that van with them. I can still see it. Shit. The grime and grease all over the fenders, that smell coming from the open window—”
The white van with the broken windshield in the Hardiman file.
“Phil,” I said. “Phil. Jesus Christ.”
“What?”
“The clowns,” I said. “You just said it yourself. It was the week Cal was killed. And then, shit, I hummed the baseball through their windshield—”
“Damn straight you did.”
“And told my father.” I’d raised my hand to my mouth, half covering it because it was wide open in shock.
“Wait a second,” he said and I could see that the same knowledge prickling like fire ants against my spinal column had invaded Phil. His eyes lit up like flares.
“I marked the van,” I said. “I fucking marked it, Phil, without even knowing it. And EEPA found it.”
He stared at me and I could see that he knew it too.
“Patrick, you’re saying—”
“Alec Hardiman and Charles Rugglestone were the clowns.”
31
In the days and weeks after Cal Morrison was killed, if you were a kid in my neighborhood, you were afraid.
You were afraid of black guys, because Cal had supposedly been killed by one. You were afraid of mangy, grizzled men who stared too long at you on the subway. You were frightened by cars that paused at intersections for too long after the light had turned green or seemed to slow as they approached you. You were terrified by the homeless and the dank alleys and dark parks in which they slept.
You were afraid of almost everything.
But nothing frightened the kids in my neighborhood as much as clowns.
It seemed so silly, in retrospect. Killer clowns rampaged in pulp fiction and bad drive-in movies. They lived in the realm of vampires and prehistoric monsters stomping Tokyo. Fictions conjured up to scare the only targets gullible enough to be afraid of them—children.
As I reached adulthood, I was no longer afraid of my closet when I woke in the middle of the night. The creaks of the old house I grew up in held no terror either; they were simply creaks—the plaintive whine of aging wood and the relaxed sighs of settling foundations. I grew to fear almost nothing except the barrel of a pistol pointed in my direction or the sudden potential for violence in the eyes of bitter drunks and men realizing their entire lives had passed unnoticed by all but themselves.
But as a child, my fear was embodied by the clowns.
I’m not sure how the rumor started—maybe around a fire at summer camp, maybe after one of our group had seen one of those bad drive-in movies—but by the time I was six or so, every kid knew about the clowns, though no one could actually claim to have seen them.