Buck pushed back on his heels and smiled: a life on the road, a barrel of laughs, and, as always, a hint of mystery.

When my trunk was repaired I headed back to the Alley, where the boys were just beginning to settle into their chairs and apply the first halting strokes of greasepaint. Just as I sat down Jimmy appeared in the entranceway. His reddened face had the stern demeanor that usually suggested a rebuke was imminent. Maybe we were bunched too closely in spec. Maybe he was upset that so few clowns had signed for the following year.

“Okay, boys, here’s the deal,” he said, leaning up against the entrance pole in anguished resignation. “When you make the bangs, no more shooting the shotgun behind the seat wagons. You must shoot it behind the fourth center pole, closest to the band. Plus, no more playing with the kids during autograph party. You can shake their hands. You can sign their books. But don’t touch them anyplace else…”

Some of the boys started to complain, but their pleas came out rather muted. I could feel impending doom. One of the things that had saddened me most about being a clown was all the things I couldn’t do: I couldn’t hug a child or put an infant on my lap. If a mother asked me to hold her toddler for a photograph, I had, politely, to decline. What if that child goes home at night and tells his mother he was touched by a clown? What if that child begins to cry?

“And that reminds me,” Jimmy said. “Who was playing tug-of-war with a kid during autograph party?”

The boys looked around and mumbled at one another, in the process hinting at what everyone knew. He was probably talking about Buck.

Jimmy slapped his hands together in despair. “Well, make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he insisted. “Somebody called the office and complained, and now we have an incident. I’ll have to have a talk with him.”

Jimmy left the Alley and the show began. Later that evening I passed Buck walking back toward his van. His head was drooped and he was talking to himself. He was holding his clown wig in his hand.

“Goddamned parents,” he said. “All they want to do is complain. I tell you, it’s no fun anymore. Once you take away the contact with the kids, you take the fun out of clowning. If that’s the way it’s going to be, I certainly don’t want to clown anymore.”

I brushed off his remark as another one of Buck’s low-grade grumblings. Later, when he took back his red, white, and blue barker’s jacket I had been borrowing for the stomach-pump gag, I took his comment at face value that he wanted to have it cleaned. The next morning when I saw him just before we were paid and he had a frustrated grimace on his face, I took it as a sign of the upcoming “six-pack” weekend with three shows on Saturday and three more on Sunday. That afternoon when I heard Buck had taken the day off and that I would be asked to fire the gun during the firehouse gag, it didn’t even occur to me that his absence was out of the ordinary. But by that evening I began hearing comments from some performers. A few of the workers started asking questions as well. And finally, during the second show as I was sitting in the Alley with the other clowns, the unspoken truth finally sank in: Buck had blown the show.

Immediately I felt the loss. Sure, we had lost workers during the year. Sure, I knew that in the circus people come and go all the time. But Buck seemed like such a fixture to me. He had been with the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus off and on for close to forty years. He was one of the first people I met on setup day in DeLand, when he stepped into my camper, stretched his legs halfway across my floor, and told me the meaning of slukum juice—the syrupy precursor to Sno-Kones. And now he was gone. I wouldn’t have anyone to recommend whether to eat in the cookhouse (Buck’s favorite was the country-fried steak). I wouldn’t have anyone to suggest alternate routes to the next lot that were shorter than following the arrows. I wouldn’t have anyone who could direct me to the cheapest gasoline, the largest thrift store, or the best homemade pie in any city east of the Mississippi, and a few on the other side as well. I had no source for duct tape either.

And why? What drove Buck from the circus was not health, or money, or even a desire for a normal life. It wasn’t even one of the many mysteries he had been eluding all his life. Instead it was the times. Buck Nolan was the epitome of an old-fashioned clown—indeed an old-time circus man. He joined the show because it kept him on the run. He could live his life and pursue his predilections through the immunity of travel. Outside the tent he might engage in indiscretions, but inside the ring he was always professional, despite his sometimes gruff demeanor and often corny jokes. Unfortunately the distinction between public performance and private life seems less possible in America today. These days every public act is viewed as an expression of private demons.

Ultimately this is what chased Buck from the ring: a pernicious climate of mistrust, a kind of sexual McCarthyism that seems to be spreading across America. I had felt it from my earliest days on the show. In my first week as a clown a teenage boy came up to me during autograph party and asked me if I would sign his hand since he couldn’t afford a coloring book. I happily obliged. A mother who was waiting nearby snatched her daughter’s waiting hand and said in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, “Never let a strange man do that to you.” The girl looked up at me and burst into tears. Now, for her, clown equals pervert. In Virginia several weeks later, as Big Pablo was trying to coax his four-year-old son inside the trailer, the boy started throwing a tantrum. When Pablo reached down and started tugging his arm, several high school students who were passing by started yelling, “Child abuse! Child abuse!” at the top of their lungs. Maybe it was just bad manners, maybe bad luck, but I feared it was a sign that we are starting to believe that behind every strange face—even the face of a clown—is a serial rapist waiting to pounce.

To make matters worse, no one outside of Clown Alley seemed to miss Buck at all.

“Good riddance,” one band member said.

“He was a horrible clown anyway,” said one of the performers.

“I saw him play that handshake game,” one of the butchers complained. “Usually the kid fell down when it was over.”

“So is that all there is?” I said to Jimmy, surely Buck’s closest friend on the show. “No one seems to care that he’s gone.”

“Are you kidding?” Jimmy asked. “This is the circus. I warned you, Bruce. The circus just eats you up. It sucks your blood and spits you out on the floor. If I dropped dead right now from a heart attack, I would probably lie here for several hours and then they would carry me out of the tent and red-light me from a truck tonight.”

“Red-light?” I repeated.

“Throw me from a moving vehicle. That’s what they do to people they don’t want. You’ve got to realize that. Even if we die they don’t stop for a minute. The truth is, they don’t really care.”

The next day few people talked about Buck. Some of the clowns speculated he might jump to another show. One person suggested he might just go home. Before the first show Arpeggio found one of Buck’s old size-sixteen vermilion shoes and hung it from the center pole in Clown Alley. After the firehouse gag he found a bunch of dead daisies and stuck them in the heel. Before autograph party he sketched a sign on the back of a magazine that said: WE WANT BUCK BACK.

The next day the entire effigy was gone. The World’s Tallest Clown was not mentioned again.

A week later it happened again.

“You see, I told you the circus was killing its stars.” Little Pablo was sitting on a beach chair in front of his trailer late on Friday afternoon. His dog, Jordan (named after Michael), was scratching and digging in the sandy grass behind the flea market in Commack, Long Island.