LITMIR.BIZ

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the middle of a wrist’s suicide slash-line, below the layered skin and above the pulse, there’s an acupuncture point that says, Get back to who you were meant to be. This is the heart spot, the center. Your whole life the skin on that place will stay closest to being a baby’s skin, as close as you can get anymore to the way you started, the way you once thought you’d always be. I pressed my baby-heart-spot center into the shaded metal’s coolness, the pulse in my wrist talking to my whole body, to the hum in my head and the blue behind my eyes, saying don’t faint now.

      The lawn mower man wiped his face with one sweaty arm. He said, “I do the lawn next door, and done this one, last time with a push mower. Now I got my own. Got an edger now too, and can come back with that tomorrow. I charge three bucks to edge her. Ten bucks total.”

      I’d never seen him do anybody’s lawn, but when he said he did our lawn with a push mower that sounded about right. Whose turn was that? Herman’s? I bent for the fallen balloon Jesus. Lofted him, cross and all, into the ambulance.

      “My old lady’s at Bess Kaiser Hospital. We need money to have a carbuncle lanced off her breast.” He ran his tongue over the boil, then patted his pockets like he was looking for a business card.

      A cop car turned the corner, came our way. Quick as Keno, Mr. Lawn Mower took his loping stride off to somewhere behind the ambulance. I bent, looked in the cop car window, and caught a glimpse of light hair cut short, the blue uniform. My heart knocked, lurched. Was it my cop—and when did he become my cop? The cop with my urine funnel. With no time to hide—I held my big straw hat in front of my face and looked through the rabbit-ear holes in the hat’s crown.

      It wasn’t my cop. It was somebody younger, weasel-faced. Nobody. The nobody cop gave a thumbs-up and a smirk, then passed on by. Only then did my blood start to move again, heart still beating.

      The lawn mower man came out to collect his mower. Maybe I gave something away, a shift in my face, a green tinge of guilt, because to me, joking or not, he said, “That cop looking for you, Clown Girl?” Ha! It didn’t come across as a joke. We were each in our own private cold sweat. That’s the problem—a cop is a loaded question. Let one cop in, and the rest of the picture is a whole new story.

      AT HERMAN’S, I TRIED TO CALL REX AGAIN FROM THE phone in the kitchen. Italia stopped licking peanut butter off a knife long enough to say, “Herman wants to know when you’re going to get on with your chores.” Her skirt barely covered her ass. She dropped the knife in the sink.

      “He asked you to ask me, or what?” I said.

      “Look, Herman can be an easy touch, and you’re a sad case. But that yard’s gone to weeds waiting for you to make a move.”

      With one ear to the phone, I put a finger to my other ear.

      “You heard me, clown.” She looked in the fridge and showed me her back, that cascade of ink, the geisha and blue waterfall. It looked as though a smaller, more demure woman in a tiny landscape stood in our kitchen.

      I picked up a dead fly from the windowsill. When Italia’s back was turned, I floated the fly on her coffee. The oldest joke in the book: Waiter, what’s this fly doing in my soup? Looks like the backstroke, Miss. Nyah, nyah, nyah.

      I took the phone to my room and called again. The machine picked up: “Yello, yello, yello! We’re off to the races, kiddos…” I lay on our mattress while the sun dropped lower outside my backyard windows, and I said an incantation: Call me, call me, call me.

      The third time I called, a man answered. He didn’t sound like a clown. There was no fun in the rasp of his voice. “Ain’t here,” the man said. “He’s out.”

      Rex was always out. “Could you ask him to call Nita?”

      “Will do.” Before I could get in another word, with a click the line went dead.

      Then I heard Italia sputter and cough in the other room. “Jesus Christ. Clown Girl!” She kicked my bedroom door open with one muscled leg. A canvas of Rex fell from where it leaned against the wall and hit the ground with a smack. I started coloring on the Missing Rubber Chicken poster again, fast.

      “What?”

      She said, “Don’t mess with my food.”

      I said it again, “What? I didn’t do anything.”

      She even had knotted muscles in her face, her cheeks. She said, “Look—mess with my food, and I’ll kill you. No joke.”

       6.

       We’re All Chaplin Here

      “IT’S FOR YOU, NITA,” HERMAN CALLED.

      Ta da! Rex! It was about time. I ran for the phone; my bare feet slapped against the worn floorboards of Herman’s old house. “At last,” I said, breathless, into the receiver.

      “Now that’s a reception,” Crack coughed back, her voice in my ear. “Listen up. I’ve got a chief gig, a big check here. They want the three of us. A package deal, see? If one falls through, we’re all sunk. So go to Goodwill, get yourself an undersized suit coat—smallest one you can get your bones in—and a pair of baggy pants. Black. They’ve got a pile of’em. Meet us in the lobby of the Chesterfield, 6:30 tonight. Got it?”

      “Got it,” I said.

      She said, “What’s a matter? I hook you up with a sweet deal, you sound like I stepped in your birthday puddin’.”

      I said, “No, no, I’m glad. I just thought…”

      “Ah, you’re missing your man, is that it?” Her voice was a finger jabbing me in the ribs. “Well, the bigger the dog, the longer the leash. Let him roam,” she said. “Listen, here’s the lemonade to the story, right? With Rex out of the way, we can run this town. Take over the whole King’s Row. By the time you see his mug again, we’ll be flashing the cash. He’ll love you for that, see?”

      Right. I said, “Thank you. Thanks for bringing me along.” Before I met Crack, I advertised with an index card on a corkboard at the old Pawn and Preen, and got maybe one job a month.

      “No balloons this time,” Crack said. “No tricks, and no excuses. Leave the chicken, the popgun, and the exploding gum at home.”

      The chicken. Plucky. I wished Plucky were home.

      “This is the big bucks, Sweets, the real deal. I’ll set you up with a hat and a cane.”

      I said yes to all of it.

      I’d been out of the hospital three days, was still on the dizzy side, head buzzing, but could move without feeling faint, could walk at almost normal speed. The orange plastic jug sat empty in my mudroom waiting for a day I could devote to collecting urine. Twenty-four hours of contiguous urine is a tougher trick than it seems. One pee away from the orange jug on ice, and the whole day’s urine file is shot.

      ON THE WAY TO THE GIG, I STOPPED AND COPIED MISSING Rubber Chicken posters. The poster had a drawing of Plucky, my name, Herman’s address, and a dancing money sign as promise of a reward. I stapled flyers to phone poles, one eye out for cops, always ready to silly-walk away fast in my oversized wing tips. Posting flyers on phone poles is illegal, but how else to tell the neighborhood?

      To keep my chin up, I recited the Clown’s Prayer: “As I stumble through this life…May every pratfall pay the bills. May every tumble lighten strife, all the aches be cured with pills.”

      I MET UP WITH CRACK AND MATEY IN A HOTEL LOBBY.

      The lobby was wide and lush, with a thicket of plants in the middle. Prom night. Girls dressed like faded flowers lingered with acne-faced dates outside the hotel restaurant. Skinny kids danced through the lobby like they were on vacation, rustling and laughing, calling out names.

      Matey, all in black and white, was perched on the back of a couch, feet

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