Mark Mayer, “The Clown”
“Cruelty and pain were easy quantities, but murder used to express something in him. Take the kings of Greece and Persia who entertained guests with hollow bronze bulls that seemed to bay when wheeled over a fire, when in fact it was condemned queens screaming from inside. It was cruel, it was painful—but it was so kingly too. The court clapping and marveling, pretending they didn’t know, while the king spat seeds from his grapes. The Aztecs murdered like Aztecs, the Nazis murdered like Nazis. The clown, meanwhile, had groomed himself to match the Lexus that was supposed to give him credibility regarding other people’s homes. ‘Been saving this place for a special family,’ he said, pulling into the driveway. It was true.”
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“Las Vegas was near the very end of our family, when Chuckles had the Pontiac Firebird that looked from the front like a human face, and we drove with Our Lady of Perpetual Sadness across the desert with all kinds of plans to witness exotic things we’d never seen before in Sin City. Sonny was just a little kid and I was in the spring of eighth grade, and after Our Lady had her finale, after she dropped from a high casino balcony on our first day there and tumbled to the ground like a flightless bird, we drove back home alone and unfeathered ourselves, just the three of us, without seeing any of the spectacles that were promised to us, and I held Sonny’s hand in the backseat the whole way while Chuckles sobbed over the steering wheel, squeegeeing the bugs off the windshield with his own tears.”
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“The town was so small. There was barely a police force. There was no mobile command unit or elite squad. There was no ice-queen special agent who had experienced her own tragedy years before and used complicated methods of deduction to find missing people. There was nothing but the expansive nature of the universe and her son, her baby, lost in it.”
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“The Devil is in the barn, and Sally has dreams of spiders. At morning prayer, when we kneel before the cross, the hard-packed dirt slick with rain, Brother Thomas says that the Devil came to tempt us. My hair sticks to my face and my skin prickles, cold against the rough, wet fabric of my dress. We are like Jesus in the desert, and the nearness of the Devil is proof of God’s love—if we were not so holy, the fallen angels would not be compelled to come near. Our faith is the rasp of saws, the beating of hammers, building an ark ready to cleave the rising waters.”
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“The four members were all guys in their mid-twenties and originally from Weslaco. They’d been saving—therefore thinking about money, therefore selling out, therefore not being punk at all—as a small sacrifice to one day becoming the first real punk band in the world, and people always gave them shit because punk has been around for centuries.”
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“On Front Street: darkened store windows reflect the waning sun, the first headlights. Lamps have come on in the interiors of buildings, houses. And the sky still glowering-bright overhead. A blue neon sign at the shadowy end of a block—Blue Moon Café.
By day neon is cheap, sleazy. You don’t glance at neon by day.
But it is dusk now. The dingy blue neon in the café window is a hook in the heart.
In an instant her mouth has gone dry, she feels such yearning. She has been so lonely.”
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