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“What are you talking about?” I said. Several members of the Rodríguez family were gathered in a circle around the door, drinking iced tea and looking somber.
“Da
“Da
“He left.”
“Left?”
“In the middle of the night.”
I leaned against the open screen door. His sister looked up from the ground. “Without even saying goodbye.”
I sat down. For several moments the group was silent. A series of images from the last several weeks went skidding through my mind. Just a week earlier, after riding the ferry to Manhattan for our long-pla
When we came back at around two in the morning, Kris and I went to knock on Da
“Of all the problems in the world,” Little Pablo said. “If he had stolen some money. If he had hurt somebody. Then I could understand his feeling that he had the world on his shoulders. But a girl?”
A few hours after the incident in his room Da
“You know what bothers me most,” Antonio Rodríguez told me later. “Beyond what he did to his brothers, his friends. It’s what he did to his mother. She’s been crying all day.” Antonio, Da
“And he didn’t say anything to you?”
“He left a note.”
“A note? What did it say?”
“I didn’t read it. I just put it away. If I see him at Christmas I’m going to hand it back to him. He never should have lied.”
In silence the rumors quickly spread. By evening they had turned malicious.
“They say a pussy pulls stronger than an elephant,” Big Pablo said. “Now I know why. But you know what? He can’t blame it on her. He can’t blame it on the circus. He can’t blame anyone but himself. He’s the one who got into this mess and now he has to get himself out of it. And he can forget coming to me for help. As far as I’m concerned, he’s out of the family. Anyone who breaks a contract doesn’t have any place here. And anyone who treats his own mother like that doesn’t deserve respect. He told everyone in the family he was thinking about leaving but he never came and told me. He knows I wouldn’t have tolerated the idea. I have no sympathy for crybabies. Now, I have no respect for him.”
Reeling, none of us left the lot that night. I, like many, went to bed early. The circus seemed so unforgiving. The dream seemed out of control.
Where Are the Clowns?
Just in time the clowns arrive.
Walking now instead of ru
“Hurry, hurry, hurry…”
At the begi
“Step right up, boys and girls, and see the circus sideshow…”
Within a few days I had slowed myself down, and within a few weeks I had deepened my tone in an attempt to mimic the full-bodied bass that Jimmy used so well. A former clown himself, Jimmy had a way of hanging on certain vowels and soaring with certain syllables (“The Flying Rodríguez Faaaamily…”) that gave his otherwise flat-footed phrases the ability to turn somersaults in the air. It was by listening to him over several months that I learned the central lesson of a