A Calling for Charlie Barnes Page 6

  There was a long pause.

  “I’m sorry, are you a patient of Dr. Skinaman’s?”

  “I am,” he said. “But I’m also a financial adviser.”

  “And you would like to …?”

  “Send the doctor some free literature. Dr. Skinaman treated me very well. I would just like to repay the favor.”

  Outrageous puppet masters, incorrigible forces had his balls on a string, and he danced for them, he danced, and knew no shame. He would not go back to working for the Man in his declining years, as collection agencies and a dying clientele, falling markets and a failing business, would demand he do. He hung up with the doctor’s office. Down in the basement again, the debasing basement, astronomical quantities of a once-stunning brochure, in boxes, in bales, confronted him in the corner. He removed one from the topmost brick, dusted it off, addressed it to the doctor with a personal note, and readied it to be taken to the mailbox with the rest of the day’s mail.

  22

  His first stab at making a killing took place in ’59 when, a year out of high school, he had an idea for a landscaping concern. Newly married and low on funds, he mowed the lawn and trimmed the hedgerows of the apartment complex called Dodge Flats on Vermilion, the first in a series of bad rooms he shared with Sue, in exchange for a discount on rent. He hated mowing the lawn. If he were correctly interpreting life, no one in his right mind would ever do it willingly, which was how he came to devise an alternative. He persuaded Rudy, a more promising Danville scholar, to make a proprietary weed killer using his chemistry set and a selection of poisons procured from Greeley Farm & Tractor. Together they created a knockoff of American Chemical’s Weedone which Charlie christened “Endopalm-T.” If it was not designed to crackle upon application or to release a visible miasma unscatterable even by a stiff wind, it did a damn fine job of eliminating every living thing it came into contact with. They expanded their experiment from a little test patch in one corner of Delwina’s yard to her sister’s crosstown residence, a stately Victorian with green, gorgeously conforming lawns, where their recently widowed Aunt Jewel sat grieving day and night. Without fully understanding what she was agreeing to, Jewel consented to their offer of free labor in exchange for allowing Charlie to advertise with a little sign from Speed Lang’s Print Shop, complete with phone number, which he planted in the yard near the curb.

  Endopalm-T worked wonderfully well. It turned the grass white overnight, and by the time the two boys returned the next morning, a wee bit twitchier than they were the day before, the tough stuff was so routed it needed only a light kick to crumble to dust. But then Jewel came stumbling out of the house calling the name of her dead husband.

  “Leonard, is that you? I don’t feel too good, Len.”

  She collapsed on the porch and was rushed by ambulance to the Minta Harrison Wing of Lake View Hospital, where she was treated for confusion and cardiac arrhythmia. She had to move out for a time. The Danville Fire Company paid Charlie a visit at the apartment he shared with Sue and the new baby. Endopalm-T was shelved forever, and he went back to mowing the lawn the despised way.

  His next real stab was in ’62, during the pinnacle of America’s clown craze. A lover of children and a natural performer still capable, at twenty-two, of tapping firsthand into what made boys fall down with a belly laugh, and what made girls slap their cheeks and freeze, and what common spectacles could hold such primal foes as girls and boys rapt together for a full half hour, Charlie Barnes painted his face and put on clown shoes and became Jolly Cholly, available for hire at birthday parties and special events.

  And he didn’t do half bad. All his tricks were self-taught and his routine unscripted, but he brought an energy to every show that more than compensated for a lack of original genius. When it failed to launch him to national stardom, however, he grew a little bored. He had bigger dreams. Then one day, it hit him. He was driving down Vermilion Street in full regalia on his way to a gig when, one after the other, he encountered the Cadillac dealership, the Standard Oil filling station, and the Osco drugstore. Reflecting on the ingenuity of the American franchise, he determined that Danville’s Jolly Cholly was all well and good, but a cadre of Chollies, a franchised fleet of clowns, an army of profiteering performers sweeping the nation, would mean, for him, a cut of the action on every backyard party in the land, and the Clown in Your Town™ was born.

  He was working for GE at the time. Ronald Reagan was the host and occasional star of General Electric Theater and a spokesman for GE while Charlie, damn near as handsome, was busy assembling ballast for fluorescent lamps inside the plant on Fairchild. Using half a paycheck, he had Speed Lang print him up some more promotional materials, which he delivered by hand to libraries and veterans’ halls in towns like Kankakee and Decatur: ARE YOU CREATIVE? DO YOU LIKE TO ENTERTAIN CHILDREN? HIRING OPPORTUNITY! Then he lay in bed at night, worrying about logistics. How to contract with potential clowns in Indiana and Ohio? How to expand out to the coasts? (He was always expanding out to the coasts.) Sue was irate over the expense, especially as his costs kept ballooning (which, he joked, he would take in hand and begin manipulating into wiener dogs and lions’ manes), but he soon had interest from two guys in Chebanse and a third outside Morris. He found all three a little too weird for the sort of respectable outfit he hoped to run, but a fourth guy was perfect: a fellow shoe man, for Nunn Bush, he was a graduate of Northwestern Business College and a Springfield Jaycee. They agreed to meet halfway, at the I-72 HoJo, where Charlie bestowed seed money on him in return for a 40 percent cut. But he never heard from the man again, and when he drove clear down to Springfield to demand his money back, his address turned out to be a vacuum-cleaner dealership.

  That seed money was also rent money. Sue stopped speaking to him. He put the franchise on hold, but now, broke and behind on rent, his side gig as a clown became a crucial lifeline. After one particularly successful Sunday party in Westville, as he was packing up his supplies, he was approached by an evidently coulrophobic young man in a bolo tie. “Hello, good sir!” Jolly Cholly said. He was accustomed to people coming up to him after a show to request a booking. “What can I do you for?”

  “Your tricks are stupid,” the man said.

  This undesirable, when he spoke, which he did with quiet menace, somehow managed to keep his cigarette smoke clinging to the cave of his mouth, so that he looked almost demonic. Charlie’s smile behind the makeup faded quickly. “Beg your pardon?”

  “I said your tricks are stupid, and your show is a pile a shit.”

  The man stared at him with stone-gray eyes. It looked like he might just haul off and punch him.

  “You’re a goddamn fraud,” the man continued, taking a step forward, “and you stole these good people’s money.”

  “I did no such thing,” Charlie objected. “I gave them a good time.”

  “You gave them herpes,” the man said as he poked Charlie in the testicles with the two fingers that clenched his cigarette. “You gave all these children herpes, too.”

  As the man walked away, Charlie felt it was unconscionable that someone could be so damn mean on such a pleasant afternoon. It made positively no sense in a civilized Christian nation. “Fucker,” he mumbled, and flipped the guy the bird behind his back. But then some kids saw the gesture, and soon it was all a big mess.

  It wasn’t long before the poisonous seed the mean man planted in an impressionable mind took root and flowered. Maybe the reason he hadn’t been launched into national stardom had something to do with a performance that was less than sublime. What easily tickled the hicks and farmers of Hoopeston and Westville was to the discerning viewer just a case of herpes. He quit clowning altogether. He ate four hundred dollars in sunk costs and retired his would-be franchise. They found a cheaper apartment, their fourth, this one with water bugs.

  23

  “What the fuck? Why would you leave a message like that at my work?”

  His daughter, Marcy, returning his call. Marc
y was the spitting image of her mother, Charley Proffit of Peoria, Illinois, and had her toughness, too. A man wanted his daughter to be able to defend herself in a world full of dickheads, but when she turned on him (he could well picture her contemptuous squint, the skeptical twist of her mouth), he relived in an instant all the scorn and vitriol of a mideighties divorce.

  He had just fed the fish and was vacuuming the front room when she called. The pattern in the plush carpet was important to him. Straight lines, strict rows: small consolations for the room itself, which displeased him. The vacuum cleaner displeased him. The mind he tricked by making pleasing patterns in the carpet displeased him most of all, so easily soothed yet constantly clamoring. Well, what will it be: resigned contentment? Or permanent struggle? He unplugged the vacuum cleaner and wrangled the cord into place, its retraction button having broken some months ago. Vacuuming for whom? he wondered as the phone began to ring. That nice neat pattern for whom?

  “Good to hear your voice, too,” he replied.

  “Is it true you have cancer?”

  A damn fool thing not to call the kids back and immediately inform them that he wasn’t dying.

  “So you got my message,” he said.

  “Is it true you have cancer, Dad?”

  Marcy was lucky to have Charlie, an American original, for a father, but she had her gripes, same as Jerry. Charlie adored her, of course—she was daddy’s little girl—and longed for her good opinion, but that came and went, depending.

  It seemed he was getting the irked daughter that day, the one with funny ideas about 9/11 and fluoride, the wackadoo loner who liked to keep people at bay.

  “I was just about to call you with an update,” he said.

  “I’m not flying home, Pop. I will not fly home.”

  “Okay,” he said. This changed things. “And why not?”

  “She’s jealous, she’s vindictive, she’s cold, she’s calculating, she won’t look me in the eye or say my name, she hates seeing me on her couch, she hates having me in her kitchen, she turns her back on me and segregates me at family functions, she freezes me out and denies my existence, but there’s just no way I can open your eyes to any of these otherwise universally acknowledged facts.”

  “Universally acknowledged?” he scoffed. “By whom?”

  Marcy paused confidently.

  “The universe,” she said.

  Charlie was sorry. He knew he’d fucked up. But alongside his efforts to earn Marcy’s forgiveness, he retained the right to perpetuate a dear hope into the present day: that his children might accommodate his current wife. Yes, Barbara was aloof. She disappeared too easily into her work and proved difficult to get to know. She lacked the hot-blooded passion so endemic to the Barnes clan, the Agincourt speeches and histrionic displays, and made no attempt to blend in. She preferred to read alone in a quiet room those biographies of plagues and hospitals so curious to the rest of us, or to tend to her summer garden at a green distance, or to spread across the bed the Sunday circulars and patiently clip the week’s coupons, or to change the oil in her car on her day off (a habit peculiar even to Charlie)—solitary activities that hardly included him any more than they did his children. But by God she was his wife, and by some yin-yang magic (and a sexual chemistry he wisely did not try to explain to his children) they got along, and he wished his kids would respect that and treat her well and not like some part-time help whose shift was about to end.

  “So your father tells you he has cancer,” he said, “and not just any cancer, Marcy. Pancreatic cancer, which I assume you googled if you got my message. But you can’t fly home to help because of some … I don’t know what … little beef with Barbara?”

  “It’s not my beef, Dad. It’s Barbara’s beef.”

  “Barbara doesn’t have a beef.”

  “She does, too, have a beef! A big fucking beef! I can’t believe I’m using the word beef.”

  “Pancreatic cancer,” Charlie said. “People who’ve been shot at point-blank range will sometimes survive longer than the patient with pancreatic cancer.”

  “Dad, listen. I’m just going to be honest with you here, okay?”

  “I would hope you’re always honest with me,” he replied.

  “I have a hard time believing you actually have pancreatic cancer.”

  There was a long pause.

  “And why is that?”

  “Do you remember the time you read the NyQuil bottle wrong?”

  “That was an honest mistake.”

  “You weren’t having a heart attack. You were just accidentally overdosing on a sleep aid. And you didn’t have testicular cancer, either.”

  “That was a real scare, Marcy! Testicular cancer is a real scare.”

  “Or Parkinson’s. Remember that shake? It went away. And bleeding gums isn’t even a sign of leukemia.”

  “You know what, Marcy?” he cried before slamming the phone down. “Screw ya! Stay home.”

  24

  So he’d had a scare or two in the past. Being alive was, as far as he could tell, an unrelieved nightmare of strange twinges and mysterious growths. The least a man might be allowed to do is share his fear with loved ones at a moment of uncertainty—but no, you get a reputation for being tender.

  Unfortunately, however, he couldn’t forget that Marcy’s suspicions were well founded and that he didn’t, in fact, actually have cancer.

  He called the nurse at First Baptist.

  “Hello, young man.”

  “Hello, young lady,” he said. “I just got off the phone with Marcy. She refuses to fly home.”

  Busy at work and totally unaware of the day’s phone calls, voice mails, pronouncements, and reversals, Barbara hadn’t known that Marcy’s flying home was even under discussion and did not immediately reply.

  It must be said, we were a tight-knit group, with our inside jokes and movie quotes, our comic tales of abandonment. It was no great surprise that Barbara might feel like the odd one out. We got together in state parks, split the difference between cities. Sunday evenings, we talked on the phone. It was all the bad shit we’d been through, the custody battles and whatnot, the new schools, the secret drunks. Strangers shacking up together, sharing towels. It was enough to overcome the age gaps and competing paternities. We saw many things we shouldn’t have. We carried around a lot of shame. But in the end, there was something bronze-aged about our clannish bond, evoking concepts like kin and barter and hearth, though we remained tight by entirely contemporary means: the text message and connecting flight, the online multiplayer shooter game. Without a little hazing of the newcomers, how could we know for sure they’d stick around? How could we confidently give our hearts to them? It might sound strange that after fifteen years Barbara was still on probation, but we did that to protect ourselves—and one another.

  “I didn’t realize she was flying home,” Barbara said at last.

  “She isn’t. And she won’t. But it would have been nice to know she was willing.”

  “What would she be flying home for?”

  “What for? To help.”

  “Do we need help?”

  “I could always use a little help,” he said.

  “Is this your way of telling me that you’ve heard from the doctor?”

  There was a long pause. He badly needed to tell Barbara, of all people, about his clean bill of health from Dr. Skinaman’s office. He kept nothing from Barbara, or as little as possible, anyway, having learned from marriages past that secrets and lies end badly. But the morning was full of phone calls and panic and a bout of vacuuming, and it just slipped his mind. Then Marcy flatly refused to come home, which eclipsed every other consideration, and now, unfortunately, he was forced to twist himself into knots.

  “Not yet,” he said, quickly adding, “but I’m sure I’m fine.”

  “That wasn’t your opinion this morning.”

  “I tend to assume the worst, as you know. But I’m trying to be more … what is the word?”

>   “Positive?”

  “Optimistic,” he said, “which is even better. When I do hear from the doctor, likely any minute now, I’m sure he will give me a clean bill of health and we can put all this behind us. However, let’s not forget: something will get me, Barbara. Sooner or later, something’s coming for me, something big, and it will get me.”

  There was a considerable pause.

  “Is that your idea of being optimistic?” she asked.

  He drifted off momentarily, into a reverie about pancreatic cancer, testicular cancer, rare blood cancers, and other forms of cancer.

  “You would welcome her home, wouldn’t you?” he asked. “You would be eager to welcome her?”

  “Welcome who?”

  “Marcy,” he said.

  There was a long pause.

  “Barbara? Would you welcome Marcy home?”

  “I guess that depends,” she said. “Why is she coming again?”

  “She isn’t. I’m saying, if we needed her to.”

  “But why would we? Shouldn’t we wait to hear what the doctor has to say before we start making flight arrangements?”

  “You’re right,” he said. “Of course we should.” He might have left it at that. “But you wouldn’t mind, would you?”

  “Mind what?”

  “If Marcy came home.”

  “Why would I mind?”

  “All the kids think you hate them,” he said.

  “That’s ridiculous, Charlie, and you know it.”

  “That’s what I tell them!”

  “I don’t hate them.”

  “So just give her a call, will you?”

  “Give her a call? What for?”

  “To tell her that I might be sick. She doesn’t believe that I might be sick. It’s a little insulting, if you ask me.”

  “But you might not be sick.”

  “She doesn’t have to know that.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “I want Marcy to want to come home, you see? Not that she needs to. She probably doesn’t. The odds are against it. Besides, she can’t. She has a job. She has a life. And no doubt I have a clean bill of health. Who needs her? But she could offer. She could say, you know, sure thing, Dad. What do you need, Dad? That’s all I’m looking for here. Hey, I adore Marcy. I cherish my time with her. But whenever I encourage her to come home, she says you don’t want her.”