Archive of Our Own ^beta

The Tobaccos had this clown lamp, right. Ugly thing, antique. The base of the lamp was the clown, who his dad christened Garbanzo. Garbanzo had ceramic skin yellowed by time, a cherry nose with a bit of the paint chipped off it, soulless black eyes, and a light bulb that sat above his head like a big idea always ready to be had. Mike used to get a kick out of the goddamn thing, liked it as a show of how his family didn’t take life too seriously, but the day after the real clowns paraded into town, he took the lamp into the garage and smashed it to pieces with his old little league bat, until he saw its wired guts spill out and the nose was cherry dust beneath his shoe.

He assumed a bunch of officers or government goons would want to talk to him, some press, too, but no one in uniform ever came knocking. Down at the station, Dave was juggling calls with the state police, playing phone tag with the county seat, listening to the hold music of the governor’s office, and, worst of all, shouldering the grief of the people in town. Missing posters had gone up everywhere, papering over the windows of businesses with owners who hadn’t been seen or heard from in days. The town’s police force, whatever was left of them, did their best to tape off and guard the scenes of the crimes, but Mike kept driving figure-eights around the sites to see people kneeling in puddles of melted ice cream, picking through globs of cotton candy, searching for what might remain of the people they loved.

Debbie wasn’t home much either. Or she was, but just not home for him. Mike hated himself, kind of, for caring the most about that, how he couldn’t seem to get his girlfriend in the same room with him for more than five minutes, when half his hometown wouldn’t get their husbands, wives, sons, and daughters in the same room ever again, but he was eighteen, had almost died more than a few times if anyone was counting, and the girl he wouldn’t have minded spending forever with had gone missing in action. He looked for her in the most obvious place, the police station, but just found good old Dave, who he did not hate. Not anymore, though not from lack of trying.

“Just give her time,” Dave said with a hand wave that read as dismissive, distracted by another call he was logging with the feds. Lucky number seven in three days, none returned.

Mike wanted to tear his hair out, and tell Dave to give it up already because no one gave a shit, and slump into the chair beside him, hang his head, and feel a heavy but gentle hand rest between his shoulder blades, as it had so many times on the night they thought they might get crushed like circus peanuts.

“How much time?” he asked sarcastically, half-assing the part of the little shit and waiting for another phoned-in answer.

Dave pinched the bridge of his nose, an exasperated gesture that aged him thirty years. At least they still had their song and dance routine down pat. His call didn’t connect, but across the room, another line started ringing. “You’re going to be alright, Mike,” he said with a tired sigh, his eyes somewhere over Mike’s head. He shouldered past him to pick up the other call.

Pay attention to me, Mike wanted to scream, but Dave didn’t need another reason to think of him as a punk kid. So, he left the station without saying goodbye and drove past Debbie’s dark house three times before he called it quits on that front, too.

Back home, he found an old lava lamp in the attic, the globs inside beady but pink as a packet of artificial sugar, and smashed it with the same bat he took to the clown lamp. The saccharine goo oozed beneath the soles of his shoes, sticky like a big-top floor.

“Entrance of the Gladiators” was the name of that song, by the way. The one that went yat da da-da-da-da Da da da-Da. The song stuck in everyone’s heads as they filed out of a candy-striper tent, bellies aching thanks to a jumbo-sized popcorn and their helium-filled laughter, so much goddamn laughter. Mike heard that wheezy laughter and that stupid fucking song as he surfaced from another nightmare, one where he made it to the flap of the tent and turned around in time to see Debbie and Dave zapped into clouds of shimmering confetti.

His parents, self-medicated with enough diphenhydramine to knock out a pack of elephants, didn’t hear him screaming.

Sweaty and shirtless in a kitchen lit only by the refrigerator light, chugging from a spoiled carton of OJ, Mike almost missed Dave sitting on his back stoop. He was smoking, a vice Mike wouldn’t have pinned on him. When Mike stepped outside, he stubbed out his stick.

They didn’t talk for a while. The moon was new that night and a thin fog of clouds covered most of the stars, but Mike preferred it to the alternative. Less of a chance to see another fake shooting star.

“Weren’t you going to knock?” Mike asked ultimately, because he didn’t like his chances of trying to bum a cigarette.

Dave knotted his fingers together, hanging them between his splayed legs. “I never have before.”

Mike turned his head sharply, searching for a clue in Dave’s stoic face that would key him in on how many nights he had spent camped out on the stoop, even though he was already pretty sure of the answer. What Mike should say was Debbie was the one whose house needed guarding, she was the one whose home had been invaded, but his throat was dry despite the lingering, acidic taste of the pulpy orange juice and his teeth were chattering. He didn’t think he could say thanks and fuck off in the same breath, especially when he wouldn’t mean either. Something else was on the tip of his tongue, aching from where he must have bit down on it sometime in his sleep, but maybe it wasn’t words.

Still not exactly looking at him—and when was the last time he looked at Mike, really—Dave leaned off the stoop and opened something Mike couldn’t see. Then, lo and behold, the cop passed the underage kid a beer. Cold, just off ice, so Mike hissed when he wrapped his feverish palms around it. Dave grimaced but said nothing and fished for a beer of his own.

“You’re breaking the law,” Mike pointed out, at the risk of Dave taking it back. He liked him best with his middle finger up.

Dave sighed into his first, long swig. “I’m starting to think there is no law.” He wasn’t in his uniform, Mike realized, just a white t-shirt tight across the shoulders, and suddenly he was racking his brain, trying to remember if he had ever seen Dave out of it.

Instead of cracking open the beer, Mike put the base of the bottle against his forehead and hissed again at the sensation, an ice cube meeting a hot skillet. The longer they sat in silence, Dave drinking and Mike trying to cool down, the louder the song played in his head. Yat da da-da-da-da, yat da da-da-da-da, a record skipping, a music box opened and slammed shut, opened and shut. He never thought of clowns as gladiators, but maybe they were, if they came from outer space and they could take out half a town in the middle of the night, leaving behind a quiet, devastating chaos in their wake.

Everything else from that night paled in comparison to almost exploding in an alien spaceship in the shape of a circus tent, but Mike did wonder, “Did you really think I was bad news?”

“No,” Dave answered automatically. The speed of it mattered to Mike for some reason, that Dave didn’t have to think about it. He even came close to smiling when he added, “I just thought you were an idiot.”

“It’s not the same thing?” Mike asked wryly. He took the bottle off his forehead. A bead of condensation rolled down his nose, canting right, and he wiped it away like he would a tear. That had Dave looking, finally, of all things, at the place where Mike still felt moisture on his cheek.

“Debbie wouldn’t have gone for a bad guy,” Dave said quietly, with conviction.

It was like she was sitting there between them, one step down, her cheek resting on Mike’s kneecap and her arm slung over Dave’s lap. She’d be humming the song that none of them could get out of their heads, because Mike was sure the thread connecting them went as far and as deep as their dreams. 

Yat da da-da-da-da Da da da-Da, yat da da-da-da-da Da da da-Da. Enter, gladiators.

He drove by her house again and saw a blue light in the window, but no one came to answer the door when he rang the bell. He sat in the police station, at another desk newly-vacated, and answered local calls for Dave, until someone on the other end of the line inevitably brought him close to tears and Dave apologized by hanging up the phone himself and letting him sleep it off in a cell.

There were a lot of things he missed—kids biking down his street, pizza deliveries, everyone talking about the big game, traffic, the rose notes in Debbie’s perfume. He should probably be doing more. When the old man next door broke his hip last summer, his mom baked him a casserole a day and Mike couldn’t kick the smell of tuna out of his nostrils for a month, but Debbie would probably let the food rot on her front doorstep, and Dave never ate, and Mike was a shit cook anyway, so what was he supposed to do? The only other thing he could think of was when Dave pushed a frustrated hand through his hair and Mike thought he wouldn’t mind doing that for him.

The first time he thought that way about Dave, Mike threw himself into a cold shower and banged his head against the tile like cranial trauma would drive the fantasies away. The second time, he figured freaking out over wanting to play tongue hockey with Officer Dave was better than constantly freaking about the clowns. The third time, fuck, did it have to be Dave? The fourth time, he couldn’t imagine how it would be anyone else.

He’d apologize to Debbie for beating it off to her ex-boyfriend while they were still nebulously together and Debbie and Dave were sort of—fuck if he had a clue—but for him to drop to his knees and beg for forgiveness, he’d first have to see her again.

After three more days of space, Debbie showed up at the station with her hair shorn off, holding a deflated balloon animal. Mike hazarded a guess it might have, at one point, been a giraffe.

She held the drooping giraffe out to Dave, who took it without blinking. “For evidence,” she said, then cupped the back of her neck where Mike used to have to brush aside a cloud of hair to do the same.

“I like it,” Mike said softly, and felt stupid immediately afterwards when her eyes darted to him and widened like she hadn’t registered he was there. Maybe her way of dealing with him, and with the memories that came packaged with him, was finding a way to turn him invisible.

But Debbie smiled, just shy of self-conscious, and said, “I like yours, too.”

His hands flew to his hair, like he might tame what was becoming a lion’s mane. Brushing or cutting it wasn’t exactly priority number one these days, but Mike probably should have checked for stray leaves and twigs after falling asleep in the grass last night, after two beers and with Dave’s snoring tickling his ear. He smoothed down what must have been an impressive cowlick and caught Dave, out of the corner of his eye, busting at the seams.

“Asshole,” he breathed out, before he could stop himself but without any heat. For an anxious moment, he feared Debbie would spin on her heels and storm out of the station, because even after everything they had been through, he still hadn’t managed to grow up.

Then Dave lost the good fight and burst out laughing, joined quickly by Debbie with a half-hysterical giggle. Dave slapped Mike’s back, and Debbie clutched at her chest, tears wetting her lashes, and Mike did his best not ruin it by giving voice to one of his greatest fears, after clowns but before nuclear warfare: what if this was the part they couldn’t make it out of alive.

For a while, not even the phones rang, to move them on to the next act.

“So, are you still in love with him?” Mike asked, which was an unfair question to pose in the position they were in, him cross-legged on the tile floor between her legs, Debbie on the lip of the bathtub and cutting his hair. If he wasn’t just a little bit of a coward, he would have asked while looking her in the eyes.

His excuse, if allowed one, was that whatever the answer, he wouldn’t be mad. He’d congratulate them both. Hell, he’d help address the wedding invitation, perform a double-bill as maid of honor and best man, and only then slip out quietly during the reception to find a place where he could throw himself into a pit of lions. Dear sweet Mike, what a good guy he was, the Terenzi brothers would pronounce during his eulogy. Never stood in the way of true love.

Debbie snipped off a tuft of hair close to his ear and said something under her breath that he couldn’t quite hear. When he shifted, trying to get a look at her, the tip of the scissors skimmed his temple. She forced his head back forward and finally answered, “Who says I loved him before?”

That stalled his brain for a minute.

Debbie and Dave, they had just been so intense during their first meeting at the station. The way Dave talked about her and to her, the way he looked at Mike with such evident disdain, what else was Mike supposed to think, other than that Dave had been Debbie’s first great love before she broke his heart and the poor guy never managed to get over it. 

So what, that animosity Dave treated him to during an apocalyptic crisis was over some six-month fizzle? Dave was more of a freak than Mike realized. Reflected pretty badly on him, that it made Mike like him more.

“Huh,” he exhaled and watched another clump of his hair sprinkle onto the floor, wondering if that made him her first love, or if it was neither of them. He couldn’t think of any two-man races where both guys crossed the finish line as the loser, but there had to be a first time for everything.

“Are you in love with him?”

Debbie said it so gently, so free of judgment, Mike felt like an ass for even opening his mouth to try and deny it. He snapped his trap shut, took a deep breath in through his nose, and nodded very slowly, same as a bobble head as it was coming to rest. So, here was how he lost the two-man race: by running back to where the race began and trying to shoot himself in the foot with the starting gun. Famously, loaded with blanks.

“But you know I still…” He couldn’t say it, not when she might not say it back, or say it out of pity, or say it but mean it as a friend. Dave said he wasn’t a bad guy, just an idiot, but Mike didn’t really believe it at that moment. Good guys didn’t secretly hope their girlfriend, floating somewhere between once and future, would be okay with them also being in love with someone else.

Debbie surprised him, because didn’t she always, by draping her arms over his shoulders and pressing her cheek against his. He smelled roses and a bit of spearmint toothpaste. “Yeah,” she said with a deep, longing sigh. “Me too.”

Mike placed a hand on her wrist, thumb skating over the lines of her palm, and they stayed like that, in her bathroom with his hair half-cut, until they could hear a car pulling into the driveway and her mom calling up the stairs to ask if he wanted to stay for spaghetti and meatballs.

They sat across from each other at the dining room table and played footsie during dessert like they did the first time the Stones hosted him. Mr. and Mrs. Stone were old-fashioned suburbanites, which meant they were great practitioners in the art of denial, so the subject of clowns didn’t come up once. Dinner was so normal, in fact, that when Mike met Debbie’s eyes across the table and knew she was wondering, same as him, what Dave was doing right then, it didn’t throw him for a second. Of course that was what they were thinking about.

“My backyard tonight, around midnight,” he whispered in her ear, right before kissing her cheek in a respectful, parental-approved goodbye. He wasn’t going to risk waiting for a sign she understood, but then Debbie grabbed him by the collar, kissed him full on the mouth in view of her parents sharing a cigarette in the living room, and smiled widely at him as she pulled away. They both knew who else they’d be seeing that night.

Clowning was an art form, if you could believe it. It had rules. 

See, in clowning, there existed a hierarchy, a pyramid of buffoonery. One clown sat at the top of the pyramid and they decided how long the skits lasted, when the joke stopped being funny. When that clown talked, honked their horn, or took out a banana peel, every other clown was supposed to shut their pie holes and listen. Top clown definitely had a shiny badge or a cool haircut. Top clown was brave.

The top clown’s opposite, the clown at the very bottom of the pyramid, was the ultimate stooge. They fell on their face the most, ate the greatest amount of shit, lived to be laughed at. All clowns lived and died by the laugh, but the bottom clown really went through the ringer. So long as the audience was entertained, they were supposed to take the hits long past the point that it hurt.

Slowly, Mike was coming to the conclusion he was the bottom clown. He’d let it keep going on until it hurt, and then not say when. Debbie had been smiling more lately, and catching fireflies in his backyard, and holding his hand in the grass, and nestling her head on Dave’s shoulder. Dave, who fell asleep most nights in the middle of Mike or Debbie telling a story, who kept showing up in his backyard anyway, who kissed Debbie’s temple and let his eyes linger on Mike when he thought Mike was looking at Debbie. None of them talked about it. No one asked, was any of this supposed to be funny? Who was laughing now?

Mike wouldn’t. It wasn’t his job.

Of all the places in and around town the clowns had struck, Lover’s Leap might have been the worst casualty. No one had gone parking in weeks, and when Mike, Dave, and Debbie showed up on foot with trash bags and the Tobaccos’ inflatable raft, they found the ground littered with the same empty beer cans everyone parked there that night had thrown at the Terenzi brothers and their ice cream van.

Dave had been the one to suggest they go, because he was the type to believe in exposure as a way to combat fear, a family inheritance no doubt. If your kid was afraid of clowns, drag him to the circus. Mike thought he would be more anxious to be back in the place where it all began, but maybe exposure therapy had something to it. As he went to work clearing a space to lay out the raft, a sense of calm settled over him. It felt like for the first time in weeks, they were setting something right.

The clean up took the better part of two hours and they almost ran out of bags, but the Leap looked less like a dump site and more like the nature point it was by the time they finished. Mike crashed face down on the raft, inhaling the strong stink of rubber. It brought him back to kissing Debbie in the back of his car and, for once, Mike actually smiled at the memory.

Mike flipped over and propped himself up on his elbows where his sleeves were bunched up. To Dave, he called out, “So, how many girls did you park up here with, Officer?”

Dave rolled his eyes as he dropped the last of the full garbage bags into a pile, awaiting pick-up tomorrow. “That’s classified.”

“Aw, c’mon,” Mike whined, egged on by a giggling Debbie. “You had to have gotten around back in the day. Seriously, how many girls?”

“None.”

A breeze kicked through the clearing, ruffling through the pines and through a laughing Debbie’s hair. “Liar,” she teased lightly, with a toothy smile that said she of all people would know for sure. She tossed a look over her shoulder at Mike, one that would have knocked him flat on his back if he wasn’t already there. Man, did he love her, and Dave, too. Even if he didn't know what he was supposed to do about it, at least he got to feel it.

As distracted as he was by Debbie and how the sun reflected in her smile, Mike hadn’t noticed Dave striding towards the raft. He glanced up to find himself cast in Dave’s shadow. His eyes were dark, something serious and decided in them.

Dave crouched beside him, his knees pressing down against the walls of the raft. “Fine, there were some girls.” Then, without another word of warning, he grabbed Mike by the collar and kissed him.

Now, Mike had never kissed an officer of the law before. He had never kissed a man before either. Really, before Debbie, he had kissed only two other girls and one was a middle school dare, the other a sophomore year relationship with braces heavily involved. For most of his kissing career, he was the awkward, leading partner.

Kissing Dave was not awkward. His lips were warm, a little chapped, and he applied just enough pressure to have Mike’s head spinning. The angle was slightly uncomfortably, with Dave crouching and Mike splayed in the raft, so Mike surged up and tangled his fingers in Dave’s hair, pulling insistently to get him on top of Mike. Dave swung a leg over, bracketing Mike’s hips, and nipped at his bottom lip, once, before coming up for air.

“Some girls,” he repeated, while Mike was busy catching his breath, “but you’re the first guy.”

“I’m—” Mike cleared his throat. The brain fog that kiss put him in made full sentences difficult. “I’m flattered.”

Dave huffed, shaking his head fondly. His hand moved from Mike's collar to carefully cup his jaw, the pad of his thumb swiping across his cheekbone. "Alright?" he asked quietly, like he needed some extra reassurance he hadn't crossed a line too far.

Mike nodded, because if he opened his mouth, he'd blurt out every dirty thought he had had about Dave over the last two weeks.

“Well, about time,” Debbie sounded off from the base of the raft. Mike caught a glimpse of her face over Dave’s shoulder, looking thrilled. Before he had the chance to extend the invitation, she climbed into the raft and wormed her way to Mike’s side, pressing a sweet and lingering kiss to the underside of his jaw.

She blinked up at Dave expectantly and Mike watched as Dave ducked his head and kissed Debbie, both of them sighing like the long day was over and finally they had made it home. Where a few weeks ago Mike would have felt a raging jealousy, followed by a devastating hurt, today he just felt his heart expanding, creating room.

Mike still groaned when Dave collapsed onto his chest. “Heavy,” he complained, pushing halfheartedly at Dave’s shoulder. He would have wrestled Dave back down if he tried to move an inch, but Dave stayed put, his breathing evening out.

The sun had begun to sink behind the trees, preparing the stars for their entrance. “Feels familiar,” Debbie murmured in his ear, snuggling closer.

“Yeah,” Mike agreed, his eyes searching the sky for any unidentified flying objects. He didn’t find any, but said, “We can take them.”

“Us against the world,” Debbie breathed out.

Because she had drifted too far into sleep, Mike didn’t bother correcting her. Not the world, just a bunch of clowns. He kissed her forehead and, after hesitating for a split second, kissed the top of Dave’s head. As he closed his eyes, he knew already he’d have another nightmare, of Garbanzo the Clown coming to life and taking everything he loved away from him with one blink of his light bulb. But he would wake up, with Debbie and Dave there, and they could laugh about it together.