The one-way bus ticket eats up a big chunk of his earnings and leaves him with just enough cash for a quick fix when he gets home—something to take the edge off while he figures out what to do about his stolen car. His mind is clouded with these thoughts as he climbs on the idling coach under the cover of the late November afternoon gloom. The driver pays him no mind, but a pair of elderly women near the front make their displeasure known, clucking their tongues in unison as he shuffles past. He gets it. He’s not happy about it either, and he wants to tell them that. Lonnie Gulch rubs his fingers against the stubborn greasepaint and curses the tepid tap water and the ultra-thin paper towels in the bus station’s men’s room. The hasty makeup-removal session has left him with a mottled stark-white complexion, a pair of elongated blue diamonds over his eyes, and a faded rictus grin atop his own unsmiling mouth. His appearance is made worse by the bloody tissues he’s stuffed into each nostril, a grim exchange for the bulbous rubber nose that usually completes his ensemble.

On the upside, he figures he looks unapproachable enough he can sleep undisturbed most of the way home. The other passengers—a sketchy, malnourished loner in an acid-washed-denim-and-faded-Budweiser-T-shirt combo and two middle-aged Midwestern women in matching white turtleneck sweaters seductively petting a much younger guy in a purple Adidas track suit—are too preoccupied with what Lonnie presumes are personal demons and cheap highway lust to notice the busted-up clown in their midst.

He breathes heavy in his seat, exhausted. Clowning has been Lonnie’s sole source of income long enough to know the fear most clowns inspire. Especially the ones who, like him, look as though they just crawled out of a burning dumpster to rack up a body count. He wishes someone had told that to the guy who sucker punched him while he was failing to entertain the birthday boys—a trio of humorless, identical nine-year-olds named Otis, Cliff, and Tristan—with distorted balloon animals and shaky sleight-of-hand tricks. Or to the asshole who stole his car—is there really a thriving black-market trade for late-‘90s Chevy Malibus?—and left him stranded in Portland without a phone or a change of clothes, and with just enough money to pay for a ride back home.

The gig was meant to have been the final appearance of his alter ego, Mr. Fiddlestix, and the first step toward Lonnie regaining more granular control over his life. The plan was to come home with a couple hundred bucks in his pocket, grab a nice rotisserie chicken and a moderately priced bottle of wine from the store, then get fixed up by Manny, the high school senior down the street who supplements his allowance with whatever his mother has more than enough of in her medicine cabinet. When all those pieces are in place, Lonnie plans to hold a hermetic ceremony in his backyard where he will erase every last trace of Mr. Fiddlestix in the firepit that he cannot recall ever using.

***

The rhythmic highway sounds and quiet muttering from the front and rear of the bus lull Lonnie into a light sleep. He’s in that twilight state for nearly an hour until the kid starts working his way down the aisle. This child, this unsupervised child, this solitary boy traveler parks himself in the empty seat next to a punch-drunk clown. What galls Lonnie more than the wanton intrusion of his private space is that the boy clearly has no survival instinct and is readily courting danger by sitting next to A) a stranger and B) a clown with blood spattered on everything from the frilled rainbow collar protruding from beneath his black parka to the pair of wide-legged, white-and-blue polka dot clown pants.

Lonnie assumes an air of weariness. He thinks that if he can just keep his eyes shut long enough the kid will get bored and harass one of the other passengers. With any luck, he’ll move past the acid-washed beer commercial back there and instead latch onto one (or both) of the Midwestern Women in Winter until he’s inevitably scooped up by a relative or child protection services or the cops or whatever.

But the little bugger keeps staring at him. Lonnie can feel his needy gaze beneath the darkness of his eyelids. He feels it like a petulant finger prodding his forehead.

Unable to stand it any longer, he opens a single, bloodshot eye and the boy immediately begins talking. He informs Lonnie he’s going to sit with him for the remainder of the trip and that he should call him Kenneth and that he will call Lonnie Dwayne. Dealing with unusual children is a hazard of his trade, but for whatever reason this kid’s brazen weirdness puts him into a kind of slack-jawed paralysis. He does his level best to appear unfazed, to project gentle amusement or good-natured bafflement, an attitude meant to imply he thinks Kenneth’s stunt is cute, maybe even a little clever, but he can’t even muster that. He begins to panic at the thought of committing to an eight-hour bus ride being addressed as Dwayne by this strange child.

Kenneth, oblivious to Lonnie’s growing terror, presses forward. “I had a peach today, Dwayne,” he says. The boy’s slight frame swims in a dull green, surplus Army jacket. His stick legs jut out in front of him as if in search of the bus’s floor. His dirty, blond hair—actually blond and dirty—hangs in a swoop over his face.

“Listen, kid, my name’s not Dwayne. It’s Lonnie.”

The boy turns to face Lonnie and that’s when he sees that Kenneth only has one eye. The right socket is completely empty. “Do you like peaches, Dwayne?”

Lonnie needs a minute to let this unexpected variable sink in. What the hell is he supposed to do? He can’t call attention to the obvious. At the same time, the kid’s Charles-Dickens-by-way-of-Mad-Max aesthetic isn’t something he thinks he should pretend has gone unnoticed. The boy is a sight, but Lonnie will be damned if he isn’t rocking the shit out of that eye socket. He gets the sense that Kenneth is aware of its practical application—the way it helps him to capitalize on the discomfort of others, to make hay from their superficial pity and misguided belief that offering him a little spare cash or a half-eaten sandwich or something will balance the karmic scales in their favor.

“What’re you doing on the bus by yourself?” Lonnie asks.

The boy shrugs.

“Somebody waiting for you up the road somewhere?”

The boy turns in his seat and scans the back of the bus. Lonnie hopes he’s already grown tired of this line of questioning and has begun his search for an easier mark.

“How old are you, Kenneth?”

“I’m twelve,” he says, turning to face Lonnie.

“Oh, yeah?” Lonnie says. The boy’s credulous face and stature defy easy categorization. He’s certain the kid is lying about his age but can’t tell if Kenneth is closer to eight or fourteen. “What year were you born?”

“That’s cop talk, Dwayne. Cops are dickheads. You’re not a dickhead, are you?”

“That’s not a great way to talk to people, Kenneth.”

“I think there’re some people having sex in the back of the bus, Dwayne.”

Lonnie has to hand it to him, the kid's got a knack for changing the subject. He turns in his seat and cranes his neck to see what Kenneth is talking about. Sure enough, the Sweater Women and Track Suit are obliviously dry humping against the dark gray panel separating them from the bus’s toilet.

“Why’re you dressed like a clown, Dwayne?”

Lonnie is so caught up in the interstate orgy that he’s almost forgotten how ridiculous he must look.

“Well, it’s because I am a clown. Well, an Entertainer, really. I just do it for some extra money. Birthday parties. Bar and bat mitzvahs. Little league championships. It’s like a side gig. Do you know what a side gig is?”

“You hustle.”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that. It’s a hustle. But that’s not all that I do. I am more. I was actually this close to having my own TV show.” He uses the small space between his index finger and thumb to indicate just how close he’d come to starring in his own television series. “What do you think about that?”

“What kind of clown are you?”

“Uh, I’m just a regular clown, I guess. Magic tricks and balloon animals and stuff like that. Sometimes I sing or tell funny stories. What other kinds of clowns are there?”

“What’re you called? What’s your clown name?”

“Uh,” Lonnie hesitates, suddenly embarrassed by what he’s about to say. “Mr. Fiddlestix?” He clears his throat and says it again, in a way he hopes exudes a kind of confidence he’s no longer familiar with. “I am Mr. Fiddlestix. With and x.”

Kenneth cocks his head to one side. Lonnie breathes on the window and with his finger writes out MR. FIDDLESTIX in the vapor. The boy nods as though this is acceptable to him. Lonnie is relieved and feels a distressing urge to validate his clowning bona fides.

“Like I said, I was gonna have my own TV show. A kids’ show. They called it Mornings with Mr. Fiddlestix”

“There’s a Blinky the Clown on TV sometimes. You know him?”

“I don—we don’t all know each other, kid.”

Two years ago, Lonnie was working on Mornings with Mr. Fiddlestix for K-CAW, the NBC affiliate near Seattle, when everything came crashing down. Jeb Bustead, the station manager, invited him into his office, told him to “Close the door and have a seat.” Jeb had the competition’s noon newscast on a large, flat-panel television mounted to the wall opposite his desk. The two watched in silence as the twelve o’clock anchors, Deborah Ibarra-Lopez and Curtis Hammer, introduced an innocuous clip of Mornings with Mr. Fiddlestix with a chyron that read: LOCAL CLOWN INVOLVED IN VIOLENT ALTERCATION ON LIVE TV. Jeb proceeded to tell him how sorry he was to have to let him go, and that his dismissal from the station had less to do with the on-air brawl between Lonnie and the station’s co-owner, Buford LaFontaine—no press is bad press—and more to do with the morality clause in his contract. According to Jeb, engaging in a romantic relationship, even a consensual one, with the wife of the station’s co-owner was reason enough to terminate his contract and to halt production on Mornings with Mr. Fiddlestix.

At the time he’d felt it was a fair enough trade: his burgeoning television career for the woman he loved Janine LaFontaine. She even moved into his tiny bungalow outside of Bellingham and together they began to navigate her pending divorce from Buford, the man who not only rubber-stamped Lonnie’s dismissal but also, in what Lonnie was certain had been meant to add injury to insult, gave the green light to Mind Over Mansoor, a more forward brand of children’s programing that to this day stars Lonnie’s former assistant, Mansoor Mithaiwala.

He wants to explain this all to Kenneth, to unburden himself in exchange for being conscripted into childcare, and for not making too big a fuss about the whole Dwayne thing, but he finds it nearly impossible to keep up with the boy’s rapid-fire conversational technique.

“I’m gonna own a watercraft one day, Dwayne,” Kenneth says. “I’m gonna drive it all over the ocean.”

“A boat? Are you talking about a boat? Those are really expensive, and they require a lot of upkeep, Kenneth, I—”

“But the first thing I’m gonna do is find all the people who’re mean to me and I’m gonna tie ‘em up in the water and I’m going to run them over with my watercraft.”

“People are mean to you?”

“It’s because of my eye. People don’t like it. My stepdad really doesn’t like it.”

“What about your mom?”

“She doesn’t like it much either.”

“Well, I think it looks cool. You look—”

“Like a pirate?”

“No, no. Not like a pirate. More like a soldier of fortune. A soldier of fortune from the future. Or, you know what? You ever see a movie called The Road Warrior? I’d figure you being from someplace like that.”

Kenneth considers this. “You’re not very funny for a clown.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what, Kenneth, it’s because I’m off duty. I’m tired. I had a long day. I got into a fight at work and then my car was stolen. Otherwise, I’m normally very entertaining. I don’t go for the Pagliacci stuff.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Of course you don’t, Kenneth. And don’t feel like you have to be ashamed of that. Society puts too much pressure on your generation, asking you to know stuff and to be interesting and to defend democracy. It’s really not fair.”

Kenneth shrugs. “Okay.”

“So, who’s waiting for you on the other side of this bus ride? Your mom or your dad? Stepdad maybe?”

“Mel,” Kenneth says.

“Who’s Mel?”

“The lady waiting for me.”

“Where is Mel waiting for you?”

“Who’s waiting for you, Dwayne?”

Lonnie winces at the question. “I’m an adult. No one needs to be waiting for me. It’s not weird for me to be on the bus alone.”

“It’s pretty weird to me, Dwayne.”

“But you’re just a kid. Who puts a little kid on the bus by himself?”

“Who lets an old man on the bus dressed like a clown?”

“I’m thirty-five. And, I might add, the clown stuff is my job, bud.”

“I don’t like it when people call me ‘bud.’”

“I don’t like it when people call me ‘Dwayne.’”

The two shift into an uncomfortable silence. Lonnie gazes out the window, watches as the bus leaves the interstate for a rural highway. In the darkness all he can make out are the outlines of uneven mounds of earth and scrambled bits of trees and the boundless yellow line slicing down the asphalt. For the better part of an hour, the boy refrains from asking one weirdly pointed question or another, and Lonnie slides into the kind of gratifying fugue state he’d hoped to inhabit before Kenneth materialized next to him. He forgets about the boy and lets the bus’s guttural vibrations coax him into another fitful sleep.

***

He’s unsure how long he’s been asleep—or if at all—but he’s suddenly aware of Kenneth poking at the blood-soaked tissue in his nose. “Who punched you, Dwayne? Another clown?” Lonnie slaps the boy’s hand away from his face and turns to look out the window. He sees only the same blurred landscape of darkened trees intermittently lit by the headlights of passing cars.

“How long was I out?”

The boy shrugs. “Are you sad about it?”

“It’s nothing,” Lonnie says as he touches the swollen skin beneath his left eye. “It was just a…misunderstanding.”

“I’ve never been punched before. Did it hurt?”

“Has anyone told you it’s not polite to ask so many questions?”

“How’m I gonna learn about the world if I don’t ask questions?”

“Have you tried going to school?”

“Teachers hate me.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

“Do you have a girlfriend, Dwayne?”

“Why, you trying to set me up with Mel?”

“No.”

“Your mom?”

“That’d be weird.”

“Why would that be weird? How old’s your mom?”

Kenneth shrugs. “I dunno. Pretty old, I guess.”

“Aren’t we all.”

“I had a girlfriend for a little while,” Kenneth says.

“Oh, yeah? What happened?”

“She started going out with this dickhead in the eighth grade named Stacey.”

“That’s rough, man,” Lonnie says, only slightly weirded out over his commiseration of brokenheartedness with a strange child. “My girlfriend just up and left not too long ago.”

“Because you’re a clown?”

Lonnie gives the question more thought than he expects. “I don’t think it helped.”

Kenneth nods his condolences, which Lonnie appreciates. Then the boy asks, “What’s up with your hair? I thought clowns had red hair.”

“Sometimes they do. I had a blue wig. But I threw it in the street when I found out my car was stolen.”

“What’s she called?”

“Huh?”

“The girl who left.”

“Oh,” Lonnie says. He knows there’s no harm in telling the boy Janine’s name—it’s not as if he could damage the relationship any further. But still, he hesitates. As if the act of speaking her name is to give away the last of her. “You know what, why don’t you tell me?”

The boy smiles for the first time. “Harriet. We’ll call her Harriet.”

“Harriet. Yeah, that’s a good name.” Lonnie pauses. “So, what’s with the name thing? Why do you give people different names?”

“Sometimes people don’t have the right name.”

“Like Lonnie?”

Kenneth nods.

“Or maybe like Kenneth? What’s your real name, Kenneth?”

Kenneth turns in his seat and looks toward the back of the bus. Lonnie can’t help but look too. The throuple has downshifted from vigorous dry humping to a kind of reiki-like aura massage. He watches their flat palms move over one another’s bodies without touching, a rhythmic motion that requires strict focus and attention. He thinks it looks nice and comforting.

“You think they live together, Dwayne? Maybe in a big house somewhere?”

“People who live together don’t find it necessary to connect with each other like that.”

Kenneth looks from Lonnie to the threesome and back again. A familiar kind of outcast-induced melancholy radiating off of him. Lonnie figures now is as good a time as any to get something resembling the truth from the kid.

“Kenneth, you might as well tell me what’s going on? You running away from home? Teaching somebody a lesson? Your mom? Your stepdad maybe?”

He expects silence but is instead buried under a heaping pile of preadolescent bullshit.

As the boy tells it, he’s the only son of an Oregon street preacher who has been in a coma for the past month after a vicious hit-and-run that he was the only witness to. He’s on his way to live with Mel, a shift supervisor at a napkin factory near Everett. Mel owes Kenneth’s father since he helped her find Jesus when she’s begging for spare change on street corners and picking half-smoked cigarette butts out of the gutter. Whenever Lonnie attempts to get more information on the boy’s father’s condition, who Mel is, or why he’s on the bus by himself, he’s met with increasingly cryptic and evasive responses. Frustration sets in, and while he’s in awe of the kid’s ability to fabricate reams of absurd falsehoods whole cloth, he places a hand on Kenneth’s shoulder and says, “Stop it. Just stop lying.”

The boy looks down at Lonnie’s hand, which he slowly withdraws. He’s about to say something—to apologize, maybe?—when the bus slows to pull into a vacant, brightly lit gas station off the side of the highway. Towering above the dense wall of fir trees abutting the road is an uninspired neon sign that says FAMILY MART. When the bus comes to a halt, the driver, a side of beef with legs, hurriedly disembarks and runs toward the blistering light of the station’s convenience store.

Kenneth leans in close to Lonnie and whispers, “I think the driver has to take a shit.”

“Better in there than back there,” he says, motioning to the toilet at the back of the bus.

Kenneth makes a sour face and asks, “How much longer?”

“I don’t know. He’s a pretty big guy. Could be a while?”

“No, the bus ride, Dwayne. How much longer?”

“Depends on where your stop is. Don’t expect me to believe that bullshit about Mel and the Everett napkin factory.”

“Dickhead,” Kenneth says as he backs out of the seat and steps into the aisle. “You’re a real dickhead, Dwayne.”

Lonnie watches the boy exit the bus and walk toward the convenience store. The two women up front peer around their seats at him and shake their heads before returning to their conversation. Lonnie settles into his seat and leans his head against the window. The faint impression of MR. FIDDLESTIX still clings to the cold glass. Dwayne. The name lolls around his brain before it slips from his mouth, a mere whisper. He likes it. There’s something about the boy calling him Dwayne that he finds appealing. Like he’s traveling incognito and can disappear without a trace. If he wants, he can start over. It would be a blank slate. He could be a blank slate named Dwayne. He closes his eyes and tries to calculate how much time is left until he’s home, but he has no idea where he is.

“Hey, clown.”

He doesn’t recognize the voice. It’s not the boys. He’s unsure whether someone was even speaking until he zeroes in on the man in the Budweiser T-shirt looming over him from the back of Kenneth’s seat. The light from the gas station streaks into the bus and he sees the shirt the man’s wearing reads: SUPERCUTS.

“Bus is leaving soon.”

“Okay.”

“You got an ID on you?”

“I don—why?”

“I don’t got an ID. You think you might buy me some beer? I got money.”

“Where’s the driver?”

“He ain’t come back yet. Is twenty enough? I was gonna ask the three sittin’ behind me, but I think they might be perverts.”

Lonnie glances over Supercuts’s shoulder and sees the threesome are fast asleep, three adult bodies stacked atop one another in two cramped bus seats.

“Where’s the kid?”

“He ain’t back yet neither. You don’t need to go looking for anything special. A couple forties of whatever’ll do just fine. Here’s a twenty. Now I don’t mind if you get yourself a Snickers or something—cause you look like you could use one, bud—but don’t go stiffing me on all the change all right?”

“You haven’t seen the kid?”

“No, sir. He ain’t back yet. Say, what happened to your kid’s face? How’d he lose that eye? You ever think about gettin’ him fitted for one of them glass eyes? Course he probably’ll grow out of it and then you’ll just have to get him a new one. I guess I can see why you wouldn’t get him one that young. But what about an eyepatch?”

“Here’s the thing, Supercuts, he’s not my kid.”

“Pardon?”

Supercuts looks at Lonnie in a way that makes him genuinely afraid. It’s the same look he saw on the face of the triplets’ father before the man sucker punched him for his “failure to perform to expectations.” Gerald, a gaunt and impossibly narrow man with a dead front tooth and a chinstrap goatee from the wrong side of the ‘90s, demanded Lonnie recreate his infamous scuffle with Buford LaFontaine for the viewing pleasure of all those in attendance of his boys’ birthday party. While he could understand how emasculating it must have been for Gerald to be refused by a clown when he was paying him good money, in front of his children and guests no less, Lonnie failed to see how the breaking of his nose fixed that. The boys’ mother had been mortified and offered Lonnie an extra hundred dollars to not call the cops. Gerald had been busted one time too many, she told him while pressing a wad of cash into his hand.

Lonnie may be slightly concussed, but he knows he’s said the wrong thing and the only way he can think to save himself from another beating is to take Supercuts’s money. He reaches for the cash. For a brief moment Supercuts hesitates, doesn’t immediately relinquish the damp twenty-dollar bill. He glares at Lonnie, and Lonnie can tell that this man is engaging every last one of his not inconsiderable faculties to really scrutinize the information he’s just received. That he, Supercuts, drinker of beer and rider of busses, must contend with a clown who is traveling with a child that, by the clown’s own admission, does not belong with him.

“Nothing. Don’t worry yourself. Tell you what, I’d be happy to go buy you some beer.”

***

As he makes his way around the array of gas pumps and trash cans, he scans the convenience store for Kenneth and the driver but doesn’t see anyone. Not even a cashier. He pushes through the glass door. An indifferent buzzer signals his arrival.

“Hello?”

“Over here,” a gravelly voice says. It sounds like it’s coming from near the back, past the rows of beef jerky and bags of chips and tiny cans of soup and ravioli. He rounds the last aisle and sees an older man with a pockmarked face and a wispy goatee standing half in half out of an open door with a faded placard reading EMPLOYEES ONLY. The man has on a blue nylon windbreaker which is accented by too much turquoise jewelry—a complicated necklace, several bracelets on each wrist, and four large turquoise rings on each hand. He looks Lonnie up and down as though he’s assessing a threat.

“Holy hell, would you look at that?” the man says. “I thought you were the cops, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t Son of Sam.”

Lonnie brushes the comment off with a civil laugh. “Did a kid come in here just a few minutes ago?”

“A kid?”

“Yeah, he’s a short guy with blond hair. Wearing a green jacket and uh…he uh—” Lonnie can see the cashier isn’t going to help him out. “Well, he’s got a—or rather doesn’t have an…” He makes an ‘O’ with his right hand and then pantomimes looking through a telescope with his right eye.

“Oh, sure, sure, sure,” the cashier says. “Yeah, little man stopped by. Said he was shopping for the clown on his bus. Guess he wasn’t lying.”

“He bought stuff?”

“No, matter of fact he did not buy any stuff. Tried to walk out of here with three bags of jerky—the expensive Teriyaki kind—a bag of chips and a candy bar. Oh, and a big ol’ soda. Said the soda was for the clown he was sitting with on the bus. And I’ll be damned. Here you are. The clown.”

“He shoplifted?”

“Highway robbery more like it. Ain’t that right, boy?”

The man pushes the door open further so Lonnie can see Kenneth sitting in a cheap plastic chair next to a cluttered desk with a severely outdated computer and stacks of yellowed paper. Kenneth waves at Lonnie.

“What the hell, Kenneth?”

“Kenneth? Kid told me his name was Lonnie. I called bullshit on that.”

“No, no. That’s…uh, that’s my name. I’m Lonnie, actually.”

“He said your name was Dwayne. If you’re Lonnie, then who’s Dwayne?”

“Nobody. And to be honest with you, I’m not entirely sure he’s Kenneth.”

“You yanking my crank? Then who’s he supposed to be?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know the kid. It’s like a thing he does. He gives people names.”

“So, you’re Lonnie? You’re not Dwayne?”

“Right.”

“But you are a clown?”

“Yeah, I’m…a clown.”

“You a Bozo or a Pennywise or what?”

“Mr. Fiddlestix. I am—I was—Mr. Fiddlestix. I’m not gonna be that anymore.”

“See, I just don’t know. I don’t know what to believe except my own eyes. Right now, all I see is a clown and I see a little one-eyed thief.”

“Don’t do that,” Lonnie says. “Don’t call him that.”

“I see a lot of weird shit out here at night—all you bus people—but this is something else.”

“We met on the bus. He came in here when we stopped. I thought he had to use the bathroom or something.”

“Good luck with that,” the cashier says. “Gigantor came running in here like the devil’s chasing him. Man’s still wrecking my restroom for all I know.”

“That was the driver. Look, can you cut the kid some slack? I’ll pay for the snacks—he will. With my money.”

“What’re you doing giving some kid you don’t know money when you’re dressed like that? Don’t you have any sense?”

“Apparently not,” Lonnie says.

“I’d offer to beat some sense into you, but it looks like someone beat me to it. I already called the cops and I’m glad I did. Bad enough I got a kid stealing candy, but now I got a clown asking me to cut the thief a break. No, man. Just no.”

“You called the cops?”

“Sure did. They’re sending a patrol car right over. Be here any minute now.”

Lonnie reaches into his parka and pulls out what little cash he has left. He doesn’t bother to count it, just holds it out to the cashier. In his head he kisses his rotisserie chicken goodbye and hopes that Manny will give him something on credit. “Can’t we just settle this you and me? Do we have to involve the cops?”

“You want to bribe me so I give you a kid that ain’t yours so you two can run off into the night together. I look like an asshole to you?”

“Assholes aren’t that ugly,” Kenneth says.

The cashier turns and looks at Kenneth, seething.

“C’mon, Kenneth,” Lonnie says, “that’s not gonna help anything.”

“You oughta listen to the clown, little man,” the cashier says.

Kenneth leans back in the plastic chair and, in what Lonnie assumes is an act of civil disobedience, rips open a bag of jerky and shoves a hunk of dried meat into his mouth.

“You’re entering a world of hurt, boy.”

“Why don’t you shit in your hands and clap?” Kenneth advises the cashier.

“Kenneth! Jesus! Just stop talking, okay?”

Lonnie pleads with the turquoise man and presses the thin wad of cash into his chest. “Please? It’s all I have. I’ve had a very, very bad day. Can you help me out? He’s just a kid. A fucked-up little kid.”

“I’m not fucked up, Dwayne. You’re fucked up.”

“Shut. Up. Kenneth!”

Lonnie pushes the money at the cashier once more. The man hurriedly backs away with both hands held up as though Lonnie was trying to rob him.

“I’m not gonna get involved, man.” He cocks his head in the direction of the gas pumps. “What’s done is done.”

Lonnie peers out into the brightly lit lot. He can see the lights of the police cruiser coming around the bend of the highway, the wall of trees illuminated in flashes of red and blue. He hears the bus idling in the dark. He wonders if Supercuts thinks he took his money and ran. He thinks about the happy threesome, probably still sleeping, warm and oblivious to everything beyond their carnal dogpile. He assumes the two disapproving elderly women have already begun celebrating the arrival of the authorities. He wonders whether Janine will see a chyron on the newscast of the local NBC affiliate outside of Seattle that reads: LOCAL CLOWN APPREHENDED AT GAS STATION WITH UNIDENTIFIED CHILD.

Kenneth sidles up beside him and chews a fresh piece of Teriyaki jerky. “Here’s what we’re gonna do: when the cops get here, you’ll be Mr. Hoover, okay?”

“Kenneth, no. Don’t start with this again,” Lonnie says.

“And I’ll be your son, Cletus. Cletus Hoover.”