Read Online Clown Girl by Monica Drake; Chuck Palahniuk - Free Book Online Page A

my turn to mow Herman’s lawn for weeks—I was the bottleneck, the hold up. The grass grew longer every day. After the hospital, I needed to rest.
    “Everybody needs a little trim, now and again,” the lawn mower man said with a grin.
    I could pay this man to do my work, or pay for the return of Plucky. One or the other. I said, “I don’t own the house. Can’t hire you without asking.” I doubled the yellow balloon over, twisted the green Jesus around it.
    The man drank from a plastic cup carried in a cup holder taped to the lawn mower’s handle. He ran a hand over his sweaty face. “OK, seven bucks. Can’t go lower,” he said.
    Baloneytown was the neighborhood dealers, hookers, scamsters, and gangbangers came home to. It was where they grew up. Every corner was marked with a brick wall broken by a driver too strung out, trashed, or craving to stay on the road. Half the houses were red-tagged—windows plastered with red Condemned stickers—and the red-tagged houses were still lived in. You couldn’t trust anybody.
    I picked up Balloon Tying for Christ and slid off the pile of clothes and out of the sauna of an ambulance. Costumes clung to my legs, a sea of velvet, satin, and Lycra. Standing up fast in the heat meant more of the swimming in my head, the warm hum of bees swarming, the blood resting around my lungs, around my stomach, nowhere near my brain. I saw a flash of blue against the inside of my eyes, felt faint, and caught the side of the ambulance for balance. I pressed my wrist against a cool, shaded bit of steel.
     
    BALLOON JESUS BOBBED IN THE ROAD, ADRIFT ON HIS cross. In my dizziness, Jesus was a million miles away and still at my feet, a supplicant. My feet were miles away. I pressed my wrist to a new spot of shaded metal, hoping for anything cool.
    In 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