Life Expectancy

from newspapers?"
        "Capitalist lapdogs is all they are," Crinkles observed.
        "They said my mother died in childbirth and Dad shot the doctor in a mad rage, as if that makes any sense."
        The nameless maniac could have been my age. To the day? To the hour?
        Almost to the minute? If he'd gotten his good looks and green eyes from his mother… Astonished, without thinking, I said,
        "Punchinello?"
        When Honker furrowed his forehead, his push-broom eyebrows swept shadows of suspicion over his eyes.
        Crinkles slipped his right hand inside his windbreaker, touching the butt of his holstered pistol.
        The shooter of newspapers took a step back, startled that I knew his name.
        I said, "Punchinello Beezo?"
        The three clowns placed the last of the explosives and inserted synchronized detonators.
        Clowns they were, though not in costume. Honker, Crinkles: stage names that would seem entirely appropriate when they were cavorting in size 58 shoes, baggy polka-dot pants, and bright orange wigs. Maybe Punchinello used his real name as his stage name, or perhaps under the big top he was known as Squiggles or Slappy.
        Either in the center ring or out here in the world of rubes, the name Nutsy also would have suited him.
        Lorrie and I sat on the stone floor, our backs against a row of green filing cabinets filled with the historical records of the bank's first hundred years. Judging by the preparations being made around us, the building would implode seventy-eight years short of its second century.
        I was in a mood.
        Although I wasn't yet gripped by terror, which overwhelms the will and paralyzes, my condition was well north of mere misgiving.
        Combined with my anxiety was a sense that fate had not dealt with me fairly. No family of good, kind-hearted bakers should have to be afflicted with two generations of Beezos. It would be like after Churchill wins World War II, a week later a woman moves in next door with twenty-six cats, and it's Hitler's batty sister.
        All right, that's not a brilliant analogy or maybe not even one that makes any sense, but it expresses how I felt. Put-upon. Cruelly victimized. The innocent whipping boy for a universe gone mad.
        In addition to anxiety and a keen sense of injustice, I was tormented by a formless determination. Formless because determination requires the setting of limits within which one must act, but I did not know what those limits should be, didn't know what to do, when to do it, or how.
        I felt like throwing my head back and screaming in frustration. The only thing preventing me from doing so was the unnerving concern that when I screamed, Honker and Crinkles and Punchinello would scream wildly with me, honk horns, blow whistles, and squeeze rubber bladders that made a farting sound.
        Until that moment, I had never suffered from harlequinaphobia, which is a fear of clowns. Too often to count, I had heard the story of the night I was born, the tale of the murderous chain-smoking fugitive from a circus, but never had Konrad Beezo's homicidal acts instilled in me an uneasiness about all clowns.
        In less than two hours, the lunatic son had achieved what the father could not. I watched him and his two subordinate merry-andrews at work with the explosives, and they seemed to me to be alien in the most troubling sense-like the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers-passing for human beings but with an ultimate agenda so dark and so strange that it lay beyond human comprehension.
        Like I said, I was in a mood.
        The Tock family's exquisitely sensitive funny-recognition gene was still functioning. I remained aware of the screwball nature of the situation, but I did not feel in the least amused.
        Insanity is not evil, but all evil is insane. Evil itself is never funny, but insanity sometimes can be. We need to laugh at the irrationality of evil, for in doing so we deny evil's power over us, diminish its influence in the world, and tarnish the allure it has for some people.
        There in the subcellar of the bank, I failed in my duty to deny, diminish, and tarnish. I was offended by fate, anxious, angry, and even Lorrie Lynn Hicks in all her glory could not lift my spirits.
        She had a lot of questions, as you might imagine. Usually I enjoyed recounting the story of the night of my birth, but not