Life Expectancy

agreed.
        "He can't scare off monsters," Annie said. "They'll eat him."
        "Yeah," Lucy concurred. "Eat him and puke him up."
        "On the contrary," Lorrie told them, "the captain is very smart and comes from a long line of bears that have for centuries guarded good little girls. They have never lost one child."
        "Not one?" Annie asked dubiously.
        "Not one," I assured her.
        "Maybe they lost some but lied about it," Annie said.
        "Yeah," Lucy said. "Lied about it."
        "Does Captain Fluffy look like a liar?" Lorrie asked.
        Annie studied him. Then: "No. But neither does Gran-gran Weena, but Grandpa says she didn't either know any guy blew himself up with a fart like she says."
        "Yeah," Lucy said, "blew up with a fart."
        I said, "Grandpa never accused Gran-gran of lying. He just said she sometimes exaggerates a little."
        "Captain Fluffy doesn't look like a liar, and he isn't a liar," Lorrie said, "so you should apologize to him."
        Annie chewed on her lower lip for a moment. "I'm sorry, Captain Fluffy."
        "Yeah. Fluffy," Lucy said.
        In addition to leaving on a Pooh night-light, we gave each girl a small flashlight. As everyone knows, a beam of light will vaporize either a vomiting or a nibbling monster.
        Twelve months passed, another sweet year crowded with bright memories, without real terror.
        Although three of the five dates on the back of the circus pass remained in the future, we could not assume that any of the ordeals ahead of me had anything to do with Konrad Beezo. Prudence required that we be more alert for threats that might come from sources having nothing to do with the clown or his imprisoned son.
        Twenty-eight years had passed since the night of my birth. If still alive, Beezo would be nearly sixty. He might still be as insane as a maze-crazed lab rat, but time had to have taken a toll on him as it does on everyone. Surely he wouldn't be as passionate in his hatred, as energetic in his fury.
        As the summer of 2002 waned, I felt that we had most likely seen the last of Konrad Beezo.
        By September, when our Andy was twenty-six months old, he had a closet monster of his own. His was a child-eating clown.
        Our apprehension at this revelation cannot be exaggerated. Although our house didn't easily lend itself to such retrofitting, we contracted to have an alarm system installed, wiring all doors and windows.
        We hadn't told the kids about Konrad Beezo, Punchinello, or anything regarding the violence those men had perpetrated and the threats they'd made. Annie, Lucy, and Andy were far too young to understand any of that macabre history, too young to be burdened with it. The scariest thing they could handle at their age was a closet monster or three.
        We considered that they might have heard something of the story from a playmate. This was unlikely, because our kids never played with other children out of our sight.
        We had never felt we could afford to assume for certain that Konrad Beezo was dead or moldering in a booby hatch; therefore, one of us always remained with the kids when they were at play, and often one or both of my parents were there, as well. We watched. We listened.
        Surely we would have heard.
        Maybe Andy had seen a bad clown in a movie, on TV, in a cartoon.
        Although we monitored their exposure to packaged entertainment and tried to protect them from a media that seemed hell-bent on corrupting them in a hundred different ways, we could not be certain beyond all doubt that we had not slipped up and that impressionable little Andy hadn't glimpsed an evil clown with a chainsaw.
        The boy provided no insight into the inspiration for his fear. From his perspective, the situation was simple:
        There was a clown.
        The clown was bad.
        The bad clown wanted to eat him.
        The bad clown hid in his closet.
        If he fell asleep, the bad clown would munch on him.
        "Can't you smell him?" Andy asked.
        We couldn't catch a whiff.
        We put a solemn sign on the inside of his closet door, warning off the cannibal clown. We presented Andy with a teddy bear named Sergeant Snuggles, his own version of Captain Fluffy. He received his own special monster-vaporizing flashlight with an easy-on switch for small uncertain hands.
        In addition, we put