This Clown Convention Is Our Family’s Only Coping Mechanism

This Clown Convention Is Our Family’s Only Coping Mechanism

Bret Anthony Johnston

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“Paradeability” by Bret Anthony Johnston

Serious clowns have their faces painted onto blown-­out goose eggs. My son tells me this on the drive from Corpus Christi to Houston. The custom began in the sixteenth century, a method of remembering makeup patterns, but now it serves as copyright. The eggs are done up with acrylic paint and accented with felt and glitter, with tiny flowers and ribbon and clay, and the records are preserved in the Department of Clown Registry in Buchanan, Virginia. He says a clown’s makeup is called his slap, and whiteface clowns rank highest in the hierarchy. Then the augustes, with their red cheeks and ivory mouths. Then character clowns, then hobos. The first known clown appeared in a pharaoh’s court during Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty—­he was a pygmy. Clowns in Russia carry the same clout as pianists, as ballerinas.

It’s a tepid Friday in March, and we’re going to a clown convention at a Marriott by Hobby Airport. On Sunday he’ll compete in a contest hosted by Clowns of America International. Asher is thirteen. He’s a hobo.

“Fear of clowns is called coulrophobia,” he says. He’s paging through one of his clown books in the glow of my truck’s interior light. Outside, the dusk is particulate. We cross the Brazos River, rust tinted with sediment. A megachurch’s illuminated cross, as tall as the mast of a great ship, rolls over the horizon. My son says, “The fear stems from how the heavy makeup conceals and exaggerates the wearer’s face. Also, the bulbous nose.”

“Do ballerinas carry a lot of clout in Russia?” I ask.

“It’s like being a football player in Texas. Like being one of the Cowboys.”

“Hot damn,” I say because it sometimes gets a laugh. Not tonight. He’s too wound up; he’s been x-­ing out days on his calendar for two months. “Are we talking Landry years or Johnson years?”

“Landry. No question.”

That Asher knows his Dallas Cowboys history always calms me. I’m suddenly more comfortable in the truck’s cab. My wedding band catches the light of the low moon, reminding me of thrown copper. I say, “A lot of wide receivers study ballet. It helps with spatial awareness.”

“Besides Santa Claus,” Asher says, “Ronald McDonald is the most recognized figure in the world.”

At the hotel, two giant plywood clown faces command the lobby. From chin to crown, they’re eight feet tall. Asher stands in front of them while I check in—­he’s so enthralled that I half expect him to kneel—­and only moves when a long-­haired woman asks him to snap pictures of her posing between the clowns. The desk clerk hands me breakfast coupons and keycards, Asher’s welcome packet and lanyard. Our room’s on the sixth floor. As we ascend in a glass elevator, Asher tells me the long-­haired woman has been here a week and she estimates there are over a hundred clowns at the hotel. “Tough luck for coulrophobics,” I say, and he smiles like I’ve passed an exam. It fills my every cell with breath. My mystifying son—­the boy can send a tight, arcing spiral forty yards, but he’d rather hole up in his room with Red Skelton videos. After showering, he emerges from the bathroom wearing a shirt that reads Can’t Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me and orders room service. Throughout the night, the hotel trembles when the nearby planes take off. I wake up often, confused as to how we got where we are.

I work in oil and gas. I’m a geological technician, which means I spend my days pulling well information. I study maps generated by geologists and run numbers to track which wells are still producing and which need to be plugged and abandoned. I like knowing what’s burning beneath our feet, the black oil and farther down, the clean effervescing gas. The knowledge makes me feel simultaneously large and small, and in that I find comfort. After I blew out my knee during a college scrimmage, I switched my major from communications to geology. I wanted, I think, to encase myself in rock, in hard things that last.

Geo techs don’t make a lot of money; we leave that to engineers and landmen. This trip to Houston is a stretch, and although I could’ve saved half a month’s pay by booking a room in the motor court across the freeway, I didn’t want to skimp on what Asher’s taken to calling the most important weekend of his “career.” I want him to feel fussed over. I want him to know I’m on his team. As the convention approached, I imagined moments we might share: father and son splitting their first can of Lone Star, talking about the birds and bees, or maybe passing the pigskin, analyzing the pitiful seasons the Cowboys have been suffering, the injuries and heartbreaks that now define a once-­great team. (Before we left Corpus, I aired up our old football and dropped it into the truck bed, just in case.) I also thought it might be a chance for us to finally talk about his mother. Jill’s been gone two years. She was forty, and the first time she visited the doctor, the tumors lit her X-­rays like a distant constellation. Three months later, the images were blurred with metastases. “Like a snowstorm,” Jill said, sounding oddly pleased. She didn’t make it to Thanksgiving. Asher and I avoided turkey that year and ordered pizza, then we went to a movie full of explosions and rooftop chases. “We’ll make new traditions,” I said. That Christmas he asked for his first makeup kit and a foam nose.

On Saturday morning, at the breakfast buffet, I realize my son will likely get thumped in his contest. He’s just outmatched. Even with their painted faces, these clowns look severe and cagey. Purposeful, I think. Ornery. There are probably thirty of them in the restaurant, and another fifty mingling in the atrium. Their costumes are elaborate and expensive—­billowy and silken and intensely colored. Pigment assaults me. They wear patent leather shoes as big as rural mailboxes. Two of them walk on stilts and can rest their elbows atop the plywood clown heads in the lobby. Some are bald. Others are neon geysers of hair—­red and orange and purple, Afroed and spiky and twisted into formidable braids. One clown wears goggles and flippers and a small inflated pool around her waist. They’re all adults, I’d guess mostly in their sixties, and they’ve come from as far away as Quebec and Maine. Seriousness radiates from them like heat from asphalt. They have swagger and business cards.

I’m embarrassingly relieved Asher didn’t come to breakfast. He’s awake but wanted to rehearse his routine alone in the room. His event is Paradeability. He’ll be judged on the originality of his act and how many times he can complete it while moving through a gauntlet of would-­be parade spectators. We’ve practiced in our backyard with a stopwatch. We record the sessions with a video camera propped on our propane grill, then Asher studies the footage and makes adjustments. As I eat my omelet, I catch myself hoping they give out ribbons for participation, something he can at least hang on his wall.

A clown in the hotel atrium starts squeezing a bicycle horn while another skips in circles, tossing confetti. His limberness surprises me. In a high falsetto, they sing, “We’re having a hoot, an absolute hoot!” It’s easy to imagine Jill here, trailing Asher, snapping candid pictures of him with the clowns. At home, framed photos of him hang on almost every wall—Asher selling raffle tickets, Asher feeding a brown pelican on Padre Island, Asher sleeping. Photography wasn’t her hobby—watching Asher was. She was rarely in front of the camera, something I realized too late. Her absence blitzes me everywhere. The way the sheet and pillows on her side of the bed stay undisturbed, regardless of how I toss in my sleep, is menacing. The junk mail that still comes addressed to her leaves me as cored out as a cantaloupe. Lately, on Sunday mornings, I’ve been hitting open houses in different neighborhoods in Corpus, trying to wrap my head around moving. I tell Asher I’m going to church. Maybe he believes me.

“Here’s someone who knows eggs-actly what he likes for breakfast,” a woman says. She’s beside my booth, but a beat passes before I realize she’s talking to me. She’s in a pinstripe suit, wielding a clipboard and walkie-­talkie.

“Do what?” I say.

“Professor Sparkles got me with that one earlier this morning, but when I say it, people just seem baffled,” she says. She extends her hand. “I’m Dayna. With a y.”

“I’m—”

“Asher’s daddy,” she says.

I shake her hand, puzzled, wondering what kind of information is on that clipboard. Then I remember her: the woman from last night, the one Asher visited with while I registered. Her hair is up this morning, and she looks like a pretty librarian, drab amongst all the color. I say, “Are you a clown parent, too?”

“I wish,” she says. “Mine’s a cheerleader. She’d walk five miles to avoid a clown.”

“I suspect that may be an epidemic among cheerleaders.”

“Asher’s a cutie. What kind of clown is he?”

“Hobo,” I say.

“I would’ve guessed auguste.”

“He likes thrift stores,” I say.

“An original, I love it. Come to enough of these and you see the same getups every year.”

“This is our first. I’m afraid we’re out of our league.”

“Horsefeathers,” Dayna says. “You’re eggs-actly where you’re supposed to be.”

I smile and take a sip of cold coffee. “Professor Sparkles would give you high marks for that one.”

“Let’s hope not. Last time a clown left marks on me, my husband almost put both of us through a window.”

Behind Dayna two clowns are covering a conference room door with pink balloons. Because I can’t think of how to respond, I say, “That’s not so good.”

“Fourth floor, the Hilton in Nashville. Three years ago.”

“I didn’t know clowns were so prone to scandal.”

“Neither did I,” she says. “Isn’t it fun?”

His name is Po’ Boy the Hoboy. He keeps a notebook with ideas for costumes and gags, and on the cover, in pillowy letters, he’s written, Pretty Much the Only Property of Po’ Boy the Hoboy. He subscribes to a quarterly called Clown Alley. He’s saving for a unicycle. Every couple of weeks we make thrift store rounds, hoping to scare up plaid trousers and polka-­dot bow ties. Once, he found a dented bowler hat at the Salvation Army and cradled it like a wounded animal the whole drive home. He spends hours in the bathroom applying and reapplying his slap. I’m positive he’s never kissed a girl.

Not that he’d make a bad catch. He has his mother’s eyes and dark hair. A good jaw and nice posture, sturdy shoulders. Before he cottoned to clowning, I had him pegged as a quarterback, maybe scholarship material. He used to love watching the Cowboys and casting for redfish in Baffin Bay. His grades are good, but not so good that he eats lunch alone; any chance he gets, he incorporates clowns into school projects. He has friends, kids who call too late at night, who invite him to the beach. Last year he flirted with cigarettes for a month; his clothes smelled of sour smoke when I did the wash, but just when I gathered the nerve to confront him, the odor evaporated. Occasionally he’ll get detention for cutting up or skipping algebra, and I admit those infractions probably leave me feeling the way other parents do when their kids make honor roll. I’ll manufacture some annoyed concern and tell him to mow the yard as punishment, but­ really it’s in those moments when I feel most like a father, when my blood duty is clearly defined, when I halfway believe I can do right by my inscrutable son.

After breakfast, I find him in front of the mirror in our room, adjusting his red foam nose. He’s painted on a charcoal beard, and his cheeks and eyes are chalky. His eyebrows are thick rectangles. He wears his bowler and baggy pants, a necktie as wide as a flounder and two-­tone bowling shoes. I suspect the shoes are stolen. They appeared two weeks ago, after he went to a bowling birthday party.

“Looking mighty fine,” I say. I’ve brought up pastries and chocolate milk that I show him in the mirror.

“I had my bow tie on, but I looked butler-­ish.”

“Good call,” I say. “It’s a sea of bow ties down there. Originality matters.”

Asher studies his reflection. He’s remote again, the giddiness from last night buried under his slap. I wouldn’t mind starting to chip away at his hopes for tomorrow’s contest, but I can’t figure out how, so I just sit on my bed and watch him. He fiddles with his tie, loosening and tightening, then moves­ toward the pastries. He shakes the milk carton and debates between a muffin and Danish. His mother used to do this. She never knew what she’d order until the last moment, and then it was even odds whether she’d flag the waiter and reverse her decision. He opts for the Danish.

“I didn’t see any other hobos this morning,” I say, though I’m not sure that’s true.

He chews, takes a swig of milk. In the too-­big clothes, he appears younger than he is. He says, “The hardcore clowns will come tomorrow for the contests. Today’s novice-­y. There’s a talk on balloon sculpting. Workshops on improv and face-painting.”

“Hot damn,” I say. “Should I bring the video camera?”

“I think you’d need a conference badge.”

“I bet there’s an auguste who’d look the other way for a few jars of face cream.”

Asher puts his Danish on the dresser. He slips into his blazer. There are mismatched patches sewn randomly on the coat; I stitched them using a needle and thread from Jill’s nightstand. He says, “I just don’t want you to be bored.”

I’m about to say that whatever we do will be fine, I only want to spend the day by his side, but then I realize he’s brushing me off. My mouth goes thick. I’m awash in a blunted, disconnected feeling, like I’m nothing more than a family friend watching someone else’s kid for the weekend. I resist an urge to ask where he got his bowling shoes.

“Sure thing,” I say. “I need to review some maps anyway, run some petroleum numbers.”

He pulls a pair of fingerless gloves from his pocket and tugs them on. He says, “Are you going to church tomorrow?”

Maybe there’s an edge of suspicion in his tone, maybe not. Either way, my guard goes up. At last week’s open house, the realtor glanced at my wedding ring and suggested arranging a time to show my wife the property. I gave her a false name and the phone number for La Cocina, a Mexican place where Asher and I used to get takeout. Now I say, “I’d planned on skipping. I feel a bout of heresy coming on.”

He steps back from the mirror, assessing his costume. My heart goes panicky. I’m afraid he’s about to call me out on church or ban me from watching him compete tomorrow, but instead he says, “Then we should practice in the morning.”

“I was thinking,” I say, “if you’d rather just watch tomorrow, maybe get ideas for next year, I’d be game. We can make this an annual trip.”

“It’s in Chicago next year.”

“One of America’s finest cities,” I say, though I’ve never been. “We’ll make a vacation of it.”

“Sweet,” he says. “If I win tomorrow, next year’s fees are waived. They want you to defend your title.”

“The most important thing is to enjoy yourself,” I say.

He crosses back to the dresser, takes another drink of milk. I think he’s about to reach for his Danish again, but he goes for the muffin. He tears off a piece with his fingers and places it in his mouth like a dip of snuff. He chews slowly, careful not to disturb his makeup.

Before Asher goes downstairs, I take pictures of him on our balcony. He acts put upon, but he enjoys posing. We make plans to eat dinner together—­it’s clear he agrees to this out of pity, but I’m elated nonetheless—­and then he’s gone. In his wake, the room is littered with makeup sponges and a silence so complete I have to turn on the television. I surf the channels, flipping past adult pay-­per-­view, public access preachers, and movies with actors I don’t recognize. I exhaust the stations a second time, then a third. I try to review the maps for the new prospect my office is vying for, an oil play down near­ La­redo, but my thoughts keep veering. I worry that losing the contest will undo Asher. I worry that for all the ways I know I’m letting him down—­my inability to buy the toothpaste and fabric softener he likes, the grief I occasionally allow him to glimpse, my lies about church, our eating too much takeout—there are still deeper, more insidious failures that will only rise to the surface after doing irreparable damage. It’s disorienting, such melancholy. I can’t remember a day when I haven’t thought that, with his mother gone, I’ve forgotten how to be a father. Not a day when I haven’t thought, I used to be good at this. I leave a note—­addressed to Po’ Boy rather than Asher—saying I’ll be in the hotel bar.

The bar is closed, though, and the lobby is mostly deserted. A family is checking out while a housekeeper, a woman with multiple earrings, polishes the granite planters by the elevator. Behind closed conference room doors, I hear the murmur of people speaking into podium microphones. “Obviously,” a man says, “miming wouldn’t work there. You have to use your noodle.” The plywood clown faces have been commandeered as message centers. There are pamphlets for a San Antonio clown camp tacked to a cheek, a sign-­up sheet for ride-­share on a nose, and pieces of personal correspondence all over—folded notes addressed to Spangles the Clown, Purple Peggy, Sir Smile-­A-­Lot. A table next to the door covered in pink balloons serves as a lost and found. So far, the only thing that’s been lost is a yellow feather boa. The door is propped open with a box holding a disco ball. No lights are burning in the room, so the surfaces are dim, given to deep shadow. Most everything is draped in sheets.

Then a switch is flipped and fluorescent light opens the space. It’s the vendors’ area. A man in denim shorts and rainbow suspenders emerges from the back, whipping sheets from the tables. He says, “When you see something you can’t live without, just holler.”

The vendors’ area is an L-­shaped corridor; it might normally be a hallway leading to the laundry room or kitchen. Inside, I feel the inexplicable need to move stealthily. There are displays of leather shoes—­jester-­toed and oblong, sequined and high-­heeled—­and a few tables boasting nothing but makeup. There’s a walk-­in booth with frilly costumes on hangers and an elaborate wig arrangement—­thirty Styrofoam heads, tiered according to style. Tables are devoted to magic tricks, juggling props, and party favors. The suspendered man leafs through a convention program in an airbrushing booth. He’s surrounded by wispy clown portraits and stacks of white T-­shirts emblazoned with his handiwork. At the far end of the corridor is an open space with a rack of unicycles and large three-­wheeled bikes. I pick up a chrome unicycle, as if gauging its weight, though I have no idea how to assess such a strange machine. I lift it to my shoulder like a rifle and sight down the frame, foolishly making sure it’s straight.

“Careful,” the man says, “she’s loaded.”

I lower the tire to the ground, bounce it a couple of times to check the pressure. “How much?”

“That’s Zany Laney’s booth. She’ll be back after the balloon talk.”

I wheel the unicycle back to the rack.

“What type of clown are you?” he asks, bored.

Without thinking, I say, “Hobo.”

“Hobos are destitute. Where’s he getting the scratch for a unicycle?”

“I’m mixing it up. Come to enough of these and you see the same things over and over.”

The man shrugs, puts his program under his chair, then goes to straighten the pallets of airbrushed shirts on his table. He says, “I like hobos. Emmett Kelly, Otto Griebling. It’s the only truly American clown.”

“You ever get folks asking you to airbrush their faces on goose eggs?”

“Son,” he says, “I’ve been asked to airbrush faces on things that haunt my dreams.”

“How long does it take?”

“To haunt my dreams?”

“To airbrush a face on something.”

“Depends on the face. Depends on the something.”

I like the suspendered man, his irascibility. I like how he’s unfolding the shirts and then gingerly refolding them so his artwork is more visible. He’s the size of a nose tackle. I say, “I’m not actually a clown.”

“And thus the mystery of the unicycling hobo is solved.”

“My son is, though. I’d like to get his face painted on something.”

“Regrettably, I believe the gift shop is fresh out of goose eggs.”

“How long will you be here?” I ask.

“Until the Lord our God rises again or happy hour, whichever comes first.”

In the lobby, there are huddles of clowns deciding which workshops to attend. Someone, somewhere, puffs at a kazoo. Dayna is sitting with an auguste, an unhinged-­looking woman in her seventies, and speaking into her walkie-­talkie. I don’t see Asher. Another hobo has materialized, though, a hunched man shuffling around with a sign that reads CAN YOU SPARE A LAUGH? I watch him, searching out anything that might prove useful for Asher, but the hobo just mopes by, wearing a hangdog expression and tuxedo pants cut off at the calves. One clown waves him away, but another grants him a belly laugh; it’s showy and territorial. The hobo bows. Then he catches sight of a clown with a tinselly wig pushing a whiteface in a wheelchair, and he’s all energy as he maneuvers in front of them. They stop, and he brandishes his sign with a cocked head, pleading. The man in the wheelchair nods. He hunts around for something in his lap. I think he’s misread the sign and is looking for change, but then he produces a device, one of those mechanical larynx numbers, and presses it to his throat. I don’t hear anything at first, but soon there are low peals of disembodied laughter vibrating toward me like a flock of harsh, metallic birds. I retreat into the parking lot, the sad noise still buzzing in my ears when I reach my truck.

Hobo clowns likely came out of the Great Depression, though it’s possible their roots stretch back to vaudeville. Asher wrote a report for his history class. They’re forlorn and downtrodden, ever the brunt of jokes. They’re always on the receiving end of pies to the face, kicks to the keister. That Asher reinvented himself as the only clown without hope or mirth bothers me. I assume it’s because of his mother, but maybe not. I’m afraid to ask.

And yet when he returns to the room on Saturday evening, he’s jazzed up and garrulous. I’m immediately optimistic about dinner. Maybe we’ll split that beer. Maybe I’ll find words to inoculate him against tomorrow’s disappointment. He hangs his blazer on the desk chair and tells me, breathlessly, about the compliments he’s gotten on his costume, about learning to twist balloons into airplanes and dinosaurs. Better still, a workshop instructor said he had such a knack for painting faces that he could get work at birthday parties. The instructor suggested setting up a website, running classified ads in the paper, acquiring a tax ID number.

He’s in front of the mirror again. I think he’s wiping off his makeup, but soon realize he’s touching it up. I say, “Will Po’ Boy be joining us for dinner?”

“Change of plans,” he says. “The Calliope Ball is tonight. It’s unmissable.”

“You have to eat, Ash.”

“There’s a buffet. Mexican, I think. We can eat down there.”

“We? What happened to that airtight clown security?”

“I scored you a badge from Mrs. Barrett,” he says. “She didn’t want you feeling left out.”

“Mrs. Barrett?”

In the mirror, I can see him clipping on a bow tie, sliding the stem of a plastic sunflower through a hole in his lapel. Outside, a jet is descending and the noise rattles the windows.

“Ash?” I say.

“You met her at breakfast.”

“Dayna?”

“She’s the director of the conference. She said you seemed lonesome.”

The lobby is transformed by darkness and oldies music. The disco ball I saw earlier now hangs from a tapestry of Christmas lights, spinning and refracting color. Asher hands me my badge and says he’ll meet me in the room later, then, before I can protest, he squeezes into the crowd and disappears. Clowns sidle past each other with plates of enchiladas raised above their heads. I smell chili powder and corn tortillas. The suspendered man is sipping a beer by the glass elevator, chatting with two clowns in tutus. When he sees me, he cocks his arm and pantomimes throwing a pass. Seconds later, I act like I’ve caught it, right in the numbers.

I climb the stairs to the second-­floor balcony and peer down. Asher is already talking shop with the shuffling hobo and a female auguste. They’re interested in whatever he’s saying, nodding and letting him go on, and I hate that I didn’t bring the camera. Jill would have. She would have stood beside me, snapping pictures and watching the mass of clowns move below us like a cloud of phosphorescent marsh gas. I try to imagine which costumes she’d like. It’s a habit. When I take Asher to the mall, I guess which necklaces she’d want from jewelry store windows. Driving to my open houses, I keep an eye out for gardens she’d appreciate, and inside the rooms, I envision how she’d arrange our furniture, where she’d hang the photos of Asher. Now, I wonder if she’d like the cowboy with the checkerboard Stetson and matching boots. The woman in the yellow jumper and platinum wig? The scarecrow with a black balloon raven perched on his shoulder? I feel no affinity for any of them. They all look grave and infirm to me, an endangered species, a well that will soon be dry and abandoned.

A female clown, a whiteface in a pink jester costume, walks onto the balcony. She wears a ruffled collar and a three-­point hat. I assume she’s looking for someone in the group below, but she steps closer and says, “Sulking alone wasn’t quite what I intended when I gave Asher your badge.”

“Dayna?”

“Call me Ginger,” she says. “Ginger the Jester.”

“I didn’t know you were a clown,” I say.

“I’m good with secrets.”

The glass elevator, packed tight with whitefaces, passes the balcony and stops in the lobby. Asher is still with the hobo and auguste, and soon he’s being introduced to someone in a skunk costume. He doffs his bowler. The skunk curtsies. I feel conspicuous with Dayna beside me. Maybe Asher wouldn’t recognize her dressed as a jester, or maybe keeping tabs on his old man is the furthest thing from his mind, but I worry. Before Jill died, she’d joke about my romantic future. “One year’s too soon,” she’d say, “but if you’re not ringing some gal’s bell by year three, I will, from on high, assume you’ve switched teams.” I did an intentionally poor job of masking how much I despised such talk, but later, when she’d lost so much weight and asked me to promise that I’d eventually move on—­“For me,” she’d said, weeping, “for Ash”—­I had conceded only to spare us the rest of the conversation. I can’t remember the last time I stood this close to a woman. Dayna’s perfume smells of daylilies. Her gloves are satin. My blood is teeming with a miserable, traitorous vitality.

Dayna has been talking. She says, “That’s what my daughter calls it, the John Wayne Gacy Convention.”

“Asher wanted to do a school project on him, but I banned it. I got the silent treatment for a week,” I say. I’d forgotten about that uncomfortable phase last year, when Asher was preoccupied with Gacy and seemed to always be spouting dark trivia. Gacy was a whiteface named Pogo. He painted sharp corners on his mouth, whereas traditional, non-­mass-murdering clowns use round borders to keep from scaring children.

In the lobby, Asher is waving to a group in the glass elevator. They wave back as they ascend, the glimmer of the disco ball reflecting on the windowed wall. “Chantilly Lace” starts up. My heart feels dizzy in my chest.

“Kids are the pits,” Dayna says, dancing a little with her bottom half. Behind her, the elevator opens and clowns slowly exit, like their joints hurt. Dayna says, “My daughter was spatting with another cheerleader, something about a boy, and she mixed Nair into the girl’s shampoo. Can you say, ‘suspension’? Can you say, ‘permanent record’? Can you say—”

“How good?” I interrupt.

“I’m sorry?”

“You said you were good with secrets. How good?”

“Oh,” she says, a lovely lilt in her tone, her hips still keeping time with the music. “­ Really good. Unfathomably good. Better than—”

“Room 618,” I say.

“Wow,” she says. “Okay. Wow.”

“Take the stairs,” I say, making for the elevator.

When I go to my open houses on Sunday mornings, I worry Asher thinks I’m meeting a woman. I expect to return home and find him waiting, his eyes narrow with betrayal. Asher at the kitchen table, glowering. Asher pacing the house and brooding over the questions he’ll hurl at me like stones: Who is she? Do you love her? What would Mom think? But he’s always asleep when I get back, the door to his room unopened since the night before. The house is disappointingly quiet, indicting in its stillness, so I wash the week’s dishes to bide time until my son emerges. Sometimes I intentionally clang pots and pans together, then apologize for waking him. Had I not started telling him I was going to church, he wouldn’t even know I’d been gone.

At the showings, I ask about school districts and property taxes, mortgage liens and mineral rights. Such questions, I think, paint me as a serious buyer, but I’m also hoping for some combination of answers that will spur me to action. Early on, I expected to be easily swayed. The smell of fresh paint and carpet, the gleam of marble counters and the pulsing sound of sprinkler systems in lush lawns—­I thought they would prove irresistible and I’d want to make an offer on every property. But the houses punish me with newness, and I feel negligent and untethered, guilty for having left Asher at home. I can’t actually imagine putting our house on the market or packing up our rooms. Once, the notion of surrendering my keys to another family brought me to tears. I was scrubbing bowls in the sink after visiting a three-­bedroom ranch on Riley Drive, and Asher came out of his room and caught me.

“Dad, I think you’re crying,” he said, as if alerting me to a nosebleed. He wore his Clowns Will Eat Me shirt, his dark hair was mashed from the hard sleep of youth, and he seemed mortified to find me in such a state.

“The service this morning,” I said. “It was beautiful.”

On Sunday, the lobby has been transformed again for the Paradeability event. It’s roped off in a zigzag course. One of the giant plywood faces marks the start point, the other stands at the finish line, and the route is lined with clowns and bleary-eyed family members slurping coffee. There are twice as many clowns as yesterday; if I look in one direction too long, the clashing colors make me lightheaded. I position myself halfway through the course and actually feel like I’m at a parade. Asher waits in queue with the other competitors, pacing. I worry he’ll vomit or faint. He didn’t return to the room until after one this morning, and although Dayna was long gone, it’s possible he spied her leaving. When we practiced his routine before breakfast, he was off his game, sluggish and tentative, and his lassitude felt like an accusation.

Before each competitor enters the circuit, an announcer rallies the crowd. He calls us ladies and germs, fillies and foals, boys and girls. If the clown is new to the competition, he says, “Ladies and germs, our next contestant is a First of May.” But the event is sleepy, tedious. I have to keep turning the video camera back on because it times out between competitors. Some clowns juggle through the course—­rings, bowling pins, rubber chickens. Others just mosey along cracking jokes. There’s a hobo who sneezes into a paper sack every few steps and sends a plume of powder into the air, then he offers the contents of the bag to the crowd and mocks offense when we decline. The woman wearing flippers and the inflatable pool acts like she’s swimming by, and every so often she spits a high arc of water into the audience. How she refills her mouth is a mystery. A whiteface in a silver astronaut costume stomps along, occasionally lifting her bubble helmet to shout, Moonwalk! There’s a clown on stilts who moves in slow motion, reciting poetry with an Irish accent. Passing me, he says, “I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on.”

Then the announcer says, “Boys and girls, how’s about another First of May?”

There’s a smattering of applause, a long, bending whistle.

“Well then, ladies and germs, set my head on fire and put it out with a hammer, here’s Po’ Boy the Hoboy!”

For his routine, Asher wears a pair of boxing gloves and has a small cardboard box tied to his ankle with a yard-­long cut of twine. Once the clock starts, he says, “You want a piece of me? I’m the best kickboxer you’ll ever see!” Then he kicks the cardboard box ahead of him and starts bobbing and weaving and punching his way forward until he catches up to it again. Repeat, repeat, repeat. When he’s throwing his jabs, he exhales through his red foam nose, sharp like a real pugilist. That was my idea. Granting the twine doesn’t get tangled around his shoe, he can usually run through the routine six times in a minute.

And despite his lousy practice earlier, in the contest he’s a crackerjack. I’m caught off guard by how his voice carries, the snap of his jab, the accuracy of his kick. The box lands directly in his path every time. When he passes, spectators whoop and cheer and sound horns. I feel like I’m in the bleachers at a bowl game and the audience wave is approaching. People maneuver for a better view; they lean and jostle and nod venerably. I record everything. I feel an almost unbearable pride, and my stomach roils with guilt for having ever doubted him. On his fourth stop, he’s close enough that I have to unzoom the camera lens. “You want a piece of me?” he says to an auguste. She raises her hands in surrender. Everyone laughs.

Then, when he kicks the box, the twine breaks. The box is borne aloft, cartwheeling through the air, until, after what seems like minutes, it lands in the crowd. There’s a collective gasping—­“Holy smokes,” someone says—­and confusion as to whether this is part of Po’ Boy’s routine, a premeditated flourish at the end. Had he noticed the audience’s credulity, Asher might’ve been able to call an audible. But he freezes. There’s a wretched silence, and I want to run to him, to gather my son in my arms and spirit him away. By the time the box is being passed back ­toward him, he’s composed enough to start throwing jabs again and proceed forward. I expect him to stop when he reaches the finish line, maybe to find me in the crowd so I can reassure or console him, but he bolts from the course. Everyone applauds, more confused than ever, while Asher heads for the exit. I stop recording just before he opens the door and disappears into the radiant sun. Then I go to our room.

Some mornings I wake up forgetting Jill is gone, and for a perfect crushing moment, a moment that is both too long and too brief, I think to reach for her in bed. Then I remember, and the old life recedes, like a tide being drawn back into the ocean. For the rest of the day, I feel halved. Other mornings, I’m positive I’ve lost Asher. Once, the fear was so consuming I snuck into his room and watched the blanket—­a clown print—­rise and fall with his breath; it was all I could do not to lie down beside him. Or I’ll come home after work, calling his name as I close the front door, and if he doesn’t answer right away, my heart will stutter. How often have I braced myself against finding a note, written in the same bubbly hand as Po’ Boy’s notebook, saying he’s decided to light out on his own? I worry my son will run off with the circus the way parents of promiscuous daughters worry about abortions. I can’t believe I’m enough to keep him here.

When I find Asher in the parking lot, he’s on the tailgate of our truck, smoking a cigarette. In his costume and slap, and with the smoke ribboning into his eyes, he looks old and grizzled, convincingly penniless.

“Heads-­up,” I call from across the parking lot and wing our football ­toward him. I’ve had it in our room since yesterday and went to retrieve it after he fled the lobby. My pass is wobbly, shamefully so, but with his cigarette clamped between his lips, Asher scrambles and catches it.

“What’s this?” he says, turning the ball over in his hands.

“It’s you,” I say.

It took the suspendered man only half an hour to cover the football with Po’ Boy’s image—­charcoal beard, thick eyebrows, alabaster complexion, and crimson nose. He worked from the screen of our camera, using a picture I’d snapped of Asher that morning. The ball looked so fine, so astoundingly lifelike, I’d thought to hold on to it for a birthday or Christmas present—I never know what to buy—­but I knew I wouldn’t be able to wait. When I showed it to Dayna last night, she said, “You’re a good father.”

“My wife died,” I said.

“Oh, sugar,” she said, “I know that.”

Maybe Asher told her. Maybe, given the hours she’s spent surrounded by elaborate masks, my unpainted face seemed impossibly readable to her. I don’t know. I broke into a humiliated sweat, sacked by guilt and relief, and willed Dayna to leave. Soon she kissed my scalp and slipped from the room without a word.

In the parking lot, Asher toes out his cigarette with his bowling shoe and blows a stream of smoke over his shoulder. The air smells acrid, poisoned. He studies the ball like a man deciding on a bottle of wine. He says, “This is pretty sweet, Dad.”

“The gift shop was out of goose eggs,” I say. Maybe he smiles a furtive smile, I can’t tell. A silver jet rumbles into the sky behind him.

“The twine broke,” he says.

“There should’ve been a flag on the play.”

“It’s never happened before.”

“You handled it like a pro,” I say. “Next time we’ll use a nylon cord.”

He spins the ball in the air, catches it. He says, “I don’t smoke a lot. I just bummed that cigarette from a housekeeper coming off her break. I’m sorry.”

I avert my eyes, arrange a pensive expression on my face. He expects me to be angry, and I know I should be. I should ground him. I should ask if he’s taken a good gander at that crippled clown with the mechanical larynx. I’m aware of this just as I’m aware of the oil and gas coursing miles beneath our feet. This is prime fathering time here, the moment when I should impart solid, inviolable wisdom that will serve as his north star and guide him into a healthy future. But right now every truth seems porous, every judgment skewed. I feel something give inside my chest, as surely as when my knee buckled in the scrimmage and I knew my world was forever altered. When I look at Asher—­the dour mask, the clothes that once belonged to someone else, the weary secrets buried beneath his obsession—­I see only the smallest traces of the boy Jill and I raised together. Instead, I see myself. It gives me vertigo, this recognition, like I’m staring at a mirror that I’ve always taken for a window.

Asher is looking at his football again. I think he likes it, but I’m careful not to betray how much this pleases me. Cars and trucks are swooshing by on the freeway. A plane is about to touch down.

Asher says, “I ­really am sorry about smok—”

“Come to church with me,” I interrupt.

“Right now?”

“Next week,” I say. “I think a little fellowship might be in order.”

He nods, contrite. He thinks I mean to scold him, and I’ll let that ride to keep him honest, but punishment never enters my mind. The prospect of our finding a church together is invigorating, and I feel as though we’re on the verge of something essential forming between us. We’ll get dressed up. We’ll file into a holy building and take our places among men in bow ties and old women with powdered cheeks and bright lips, believers seeking shelter. We’ll sing and pray, confess our sins and mourn our dead. We’ll kneel before ancient altars, behold the glory of ritual and sacrifice. We’ll weep and be saved. We’ll go every Sunday. After services, Asher and I will hit a thrift store, or we’ll swing by an open house and try to divine the years ahead. We’ll talk about girls and college and his mother. We’ll talk until our voices grow hoarse. When we return home, I’ll slap a couple of steaks on the grill and we’ll scroll through TV channels, looking for a game. If the Cowboys are playing, the stands will be packed with fragile men wearing wild wigs and oversized jerseys and war paint on their faces. Asher and I will root for all of them, the heartsick fans and their doomed, beleaguered team. We’ll hold our breath when the quarterback lets fly with a Hail Mary. We’ll hope for a miracle as the receiver stumbles ­toward the end zone. His arms will be extended and his legs weak and his palms open to the sky, and from where we sit, from our house, he’ll look like a man trying to outrun everything behind him, like a man begging, at last, for mercy.