Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)

But the rumors were rampant.

They drove a van and carried bags of candy and bright balloons, and bouquets of flowers exploded out from their oversized sleeves.

They had a machine in the back of that van that knocked kids out in under a second, and once you were unconscious, you never woke back up.

While you were out, but before you died, they took turns on your body.

Then they cut your throat.

And because they were clowns and their mouths were painted that way, they were always smiling.

Phil and I were almost at the age when we would have stopped fearing them, the age when you knew there was no Santa Claus and you probably weren’t the long-lost son of a benevolent billionaire who’d return some day to claim you.

We were on our way back from a Little League game in Savin Hill, and we’d lingered until near dark, playing war games in the woods behind the Motley School, climbing the decrepit fire escape to the roof of the school itself. By the time we climbed down, the day had grown long and chilly, the shadows lengthening against walls and spreading out hard against bare pavement as if they’d been carved there.

We began the walk down Savin Hill Avenue as the sun disappeared entirely and the sky took on the cast of polished metal, tossed the ball back and forth to keep the gathering cold at bay and ignored the rumbles in our stomachs because they meant we’d have to go home sooner or later, and home, ours, at least, sucked.

The van slid up behind us as we started down the slope of the avenue by the subway station, and I remember very distinctly noticing that the entire avenue was empty. It lay before us in that sudden emptiness that comes to a neighborhood around dinner time. Though it wasn’t yet dark, we could see orange and yellow squares of light in several homes fronting the avenue, and a lone plastic hockey puck curled against the hubcap of a car.

Everyone was in for dinner. Even the bars were quiet.

Phil rifled the ball with his shotgun arm and it rose a bit more than I first expected; I had to jump and twist myself to snag it. When I came down I’d twisted myself to the side and that’s when I saw the white face and blue hair and wide red lips staring out the passenger window at me.

“Nice catch,” the clown said.

There was only one way kids in my neighborhood responded to clowns.

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Nice mouth,” the clown said, and I didn’t like the way he smiled when he said it, his gloved hand resting on the outside of the door panel.

“Real nice,” the driver said. “Real, real nice. Your mother know you talk that way?”

I was no more than two feet from that door, frozen on the pavement, and I couldn’t move my feet. I couldn’t take my eyes off the clown’s red mouth.

Phil, I noticed, was a good ten feet down the hill, frozen too, it seemed.

“You guys need a ride?” the passenger clown said.

I shook my head, my mouth dry.

“He’s not so mouthy all of a sudden, this kid.”

“No.” The driver craned his head around his partner’s neck so that I could see his bright red hair and the bursts of yellow around his eyes. “You two look cold.”

“I can see goose pimples,” the passenger said.

I moved two steps to my right, and my feet felt like they were sinking into wet sponge.

The passenger clown glanced quickly down the avenue and back toward me.

The driver looked in the rearview and his hand disappeared from the wheel.

“Patrick?” Phil said. “Let’s go.”

“Patrick,” the passenger clown said slowly, as if he

were licking the word. “That’s a nice name. What’s your last name, Patrick?”

Even now, I have no idea why I answered. Total fear, perhaps, a desire to buy time, but even then, I should have known to give a false name, but I didn’t. I had some desperate feeling, I guess, that if they knew my last name, they’d see me as a person, not a victim, and I’d receive mercy.

“Kenzie,” I said.

And the clown gave me a seductive smile, and I heard the door latch unlock like a round ratcheting into a shotgun.

That’s when I threw the baseball.

I don’t recall planning it. I merely took two steps to my right—thick, slow steps as if I were in a dream—and I think initially I was aiming for the clown himself as he started to open his door.

Instead, the ball sailed out of my hand and someone said, “Shit!” and there was a loud popping noise as the ball buried itself in the center of the windshield and the glass fractured and webbed.

Phil screamed, “Help! Help!”

The passenger door swung open and I could see fury in the clown’s face.

I stumbled as I leaped forward and gravity pushed me down Savin Hill Avenue.

“Help!” Phil screamed and then he ran and I was right behind him, my arms still pinwheeling as I tried to keep my balance and the pavement kept jerking toward my face.

A beefy man with a mustache as thick as a brush head stepped out of Bulldog’s bar at the corner of Sydney, and we could hear tires squealing behind us. The beefy man looked angry; he had a sawed-off bat in his hand, and at first I thought he was going to use it on us.

His apron, I remember, bore swaths of meaty red and brown.

“Fuck’s going on?” the man said, and his eyes narrowed at something over my shoulder, and I knew the van was coming for all of us. It was going to jump the curb and mangle us.

I turned my head in order to see my own death, and instead I saw a flash of grimy orange tail lights as the van spun the corner onto Grampian Way and disappeared.

The bar owner knew my father and ten minutes later my old man came into Bulldog’s as Phil and I sat at the bar with our ginger ales and pretended they were whiskeys.

My father wasn’t always mean. He had his good days. And for whatever reason, that day was one of his best. He wasn’t angry we’d stayed out past dinner time, though I’d been beaten for the same offense only a week before. Usually indifferent to my friends, he ruffled Phil’s hair and bought us several more ginger ales and two heaping corned beef sandwiches, and we sat in the bar with him until night had risen up the doorway on our left and the bar had filled.

When I told him in a faltering voice what had happened, his face grew as tender and kind as I’d ever seen it, and he peered at me with soft worry and wiped my wet bangs off my forehead with a thick, gentle finger and dabbed the corned beef off the corner of my mouth with a napkin.

“You two had some day,” he said. He whistled and smiled at Phil and Phil smiled back broadly.