The Land of Laughs (12 page)

“It’s so empty.”

“Yes, it’s very different from the living room. Father said that anything distracted him when he worked, so this is the way he wanted his room.” A phone that turned out to be behind the door rang, and she excused herself to answer it. Sax went up to the desk and ran her hand over the top of it.

“
Blinded?
What do you mean, blinded? It’s impossible. How did it happen?”

I looked at Saxony and knew that both of us were eavesdropping. Anna’s face was tight, and she looked at the floor. She looked more angry than upset.

“All right, all right. Stay there and I’ll come as soon as I can. What? No,
stay there
.” She hung up and ran her hand across her forehead. “I’m sorry, but one of my friends was just hurt in an accident. I have to go to the hospital right away. I’ll drop you at your house.”

“I’m sorry. Is there anything we can do? Really, we’ll be glad to.”

She shook her head and looked out the window. “No. No, there’s nothing.” She turned out the light, and without waiting for us, hurried down the hall toward the stairs.

“Are you awake?” She touched me very lightly on the shoulder with one finger.

I rolled over in bed so that I was facing her. The light from the full moon came in through the window and cut long white patches across her hair and pale blue nightgown. Even half-asleep, the color reminded me of looking in France’s living room before Anna had turned on the lights.

“Awake? Sax, I’m not only awake, I’m —”

“Please don’t be funny with me, Thomas. I don’t want you to be funny now, okay? Please?”

I couldn’t see her face clearly, but I knew from the tone of her voice what it would look like. Eyes impassive, but her lips would be turned down at the corners, and after a while she would start to blink a lot. It was her silent sign that she wanted to be touched and held. As soon as you did, she clutched you twice as hard, and it made you sad and it made you wonder if you had the strength at the moment for both of you — which was what she was demanding.

“Are you okay, babe?” I cupped the back of her head and felt the clean smoothness of her hair.

“Yes, but just don’t talk now. Hold me, please, and don’t talk.”

It had already happened before. Some nights she would get small and scared, convinced that anything good in her life was about to disappear and she wouldn’t be able to stop it. I called it her “night fears.” She was the first to admit that they were stupid and that it was pure masochism on her part, but she couldn’t help it. She said the worst part was that they’d come most often when she was either completely happy or in-the-pits sad and depressed.

While I held her, I wondered if I’d done something to bring them on this time. I went through a two-second instant replay of the night at Anna’s house. Uh-oh; the cold shoulder from Anna. The lousy food. No definite answer on the biography. The casual flirting between Anna and me. What a schmuck I was. I hugged Saxony to me and kept kissing the top of her head. The rubbing and touching and guilt made me want her very much. I rolled her gently onto her back and slid her nightgown up.

The next morning the sun sneaked into the room and on across the bed about seven o’clock. It woke me with its heat on my face. I hate to get up early when it’s not necessary, so I scrooched around and tried to find a shady spot. But Saxony had Scotch-taped herself to me during the night, so moving was hard.

To top it all off, the door creaked open, Nails trotted in, and leaped up onto the bed. I felt like the three of us were on a life raft in the middle of the ocean, because we were all three huddled up together in the middle of the bed, leaning on the nearest body. I haven’t mentioned my claustrophobia before, but sealed in between two hot bodies, the sun frying my head, the sheet wrapped around my feet … I decided that it was time to get up. I patted Nails on the head and gave him a little push. He growled. I thought that it was just a little morning grouchiness, so I patted him again and pushed him again. He growled louder. We looked at each other over a thin pink wave of blanket, but bull terriers have absolutely no expression on their faces, so you never know what’s what with them.

“Nice Nails. Good boy.”

“Why is he growling at you? What did you do to him?” Saxony cuddled a little closer, and I could feel her warm breath on my neck.

“I didn’t do anything. I just gave him a little push so that I could get up.”

“Wow. Do you think that you should do it again?”

“How do I know? How do I know he won’t bite me?” I looked over at her, and she blinked.

“No, Thomas, I don’t think so. He likes you. Remember yesterday?” She sounded convinced.

“Oh, yeah? Well, today’s today, and your arm’s not in jeopardy.”

“Then do you plan on staying here all morning?” She smiled and rubbed the flat of her palm across her nose. Thank God she’d snapped back from last night. “Tommy is a chicken …”

I looked at Nails and he looked at me. A standoff. The tip of his prune-black nose poked up from behind one of his paws.

“Mrs. Fletcher!”

“Oh, come on, Thomas, don’t do that! What if she’s still asleep?”

“Too had. I ain’t gonna get bit. Niiiice Nailsy, good boy! Mrs. Fletcher!”

We heard footsteps, and a second before she popped her head into the room, Nails jumped off the bed to greet her.

Saxony started laughing and pulled the pillow over her head.

“Yes? Good morning.”

“Good morning. Uh, well, Nails was up on the bed and I gave him a little push because I wanted to get up, you see, and, uh, he sort of growled at me. I was afraid that he might mean it.”

“Who, Nails? Naah, never. Watch this.” He stood next to her but kept looking at us on the bed. She lifted a foot and gave him a little shove sideways. Without looking at her he growled. He also kept wagging his tail.

“What do you two want for breakfast? I decided to throw it in for you on your first day. I bet you haven’t done any shopping, have you, Saxony?”

I sat up and pushed my hands through my hair. “You don’t have to do that. It’s easy for us —”

“I know I don’t have to do anything. What would you like? I make good pancakes and sausages. Yeah, why don’t you have my pancakes and sausages.”

We decided to have pancakes and sausages. She left the room and Nails jumped back up on the bed. He climbed over my legs and settled down halfway across Saxony’s stomach.

“Are you okay this morning, Sporty?” I asked.

“Yes. I just get crazy at night sometimes. I start thinking that everything is going to go wrong, or that you’ll go away soon … things like that. I’ve been doing it all my life. I think it’s just because I’m overtired now. Usually the next morning everything is okay again.”

“You’ve got a little split personality in you, huh?” I pulled a lock of hair away from her eyes.

“Yes, completely. I know what’s going on in me when it happens, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it.” There was a pause, and she took my hand. “Do you think I’m crazy, Thomas? Do you hate me when it happens?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Sax. You know me by now — if I hated you, I would have gotten away from you. Stop thinking that way.” I squeezed her hand and stuck out my tongue at her. She pulled the pillow over her head, and Nails tried to shove his head under there with her.

I looked out the window, and the garden was all sunny and moving back and forth in the wind. Bees hovered over some of the plants, and a redbird lit on the porch railing not three feet away.

Early morning in Galen, Missouri. A few cars drove by, and I yawned. Then a little kid passed, licking an ice-cream cone and running his free hand along the top of Mrs. Fletcher’s fence. Tom Sawyer with a bright green pistachio cone. I dreamily watched him and wondered how anyone could eat ice cream at eight o’clock in the morning.

Without looking either way, the boy started across the street and was instantly punched into the air by a pickup truck. The truck was moving fast, so he was thrown far beyond the view from our window. When he disappeared, he was still going up.

“Holy shit!” I snatched my pants off a chair and ran for the door. I heard Saxony call, but I didn’t stop to explain. It was the second time I’d seen someone hit by a car. Once in New York, and the person landed right on his head. Going down the porch steps two at a time, I thought how unreal these goddamned things looked. One minute a person’s there, talking to a friend or eating a green ice-cream cone. The next thing you know you’ve heard a fast thump and there’s a body sailing away through the air.

The driver was out of the truck and stooped over the body. The first thing I saw when I got there was the green ice cream, half-covered with dirt and pebbles and already beginning to melt on the black pavement.

No one else was around. I came up to the man and hesitantly peered over his shoulder. He smelled of sweat and human heat. The boy was on his side on the ground, his legs splayed apart in such a way that he looked as if he’d been stop-framed, running. He was bleeding from the mouth and his eyes were wide open. No,
one
of his eyes was wide open; the other was half-shut and fluttering.

“Is there anything I can do? I’ll call an ambulance, okay? I mean, you stay here and I’ll go call the ambulance.”

The man turned around, and I recognized him from the barbecue. One of the cooks at the grill. One of the big jokers.

“All this is
wrong
. I knew it, though. Yeah, sure, go get that ambulance. I can’t tell nothin’ yet.” His face was pinched and frightened as hell, but the tone of his voice was what surprised me. It was half-angry, half-self-pitying. There was no fear there at all. No remorse either. It had to be shock: horrible events make people act crazy and say mad things. The poor fool was probably realizing that the rest of his life was now shadowed, no matter what happened to the boy. He’d have the guilt of having run over a child to live with for the next fifty years. God, I pitied him.

“Joe Jordan! It wasn’t supposed to be you!”

Mrs. Fletcher had come up from behind us and was standing there with a pink dish towel in her hand.

“I know, goddammit! How many things are going to fuck up before we get this straightened out? Did you hear about last night? How many things’ve there been already, four? Five? No one knows
nothin’
anymore, nothin’!”

“Calm down, Joe. Let’s wait and see. You going to call that ambulance, Mr. Abbey? The number’s one-two-three-four-five. Just dial the first five numbers. That’s the emergency line.”

The boy began gurgling and his legs jumped and twitched involuntarily, like a frog touched by an electric prod in a biology experiment. I looked at Jordan, but he was looking at the boy and shaking his head.

“I’m telling you, Goosey, it wasn’t supposed to be me with this!”

As I turned to run to the phone, I heard Mrs. Fletcher say, “Just quiet down and wait.”

The pavement was hot under my bare feet, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the melting ice-cream cone again. I ran by Saxony standing on the top step of the porch, holding Nails by his thick leather collar.

“Is he dead?”

“Not yet, but he’s in bad shape. I’ve got to call the ambulance.”

When it came, a few people were standing around and watching from a distance. A white police car was in the middle of the street with its row of busy blue lights on the roof flashing back and forth.

The short bursts of people’s voices from its radio filled the air with a staccato crackle that was both adamant and annoying at the same time.

We watched from the porch while they gently lifted the flaccid body onto a stretcher and slid it into the back of the van. When it was gone, Joe Jordan and the policeman stood in front of our house and talked. Jordan kept running his hand across the lower part of his face, and the cop rested both hands on the front of his wide black belt.

Mrs. Fletcher moved away from a bunch of onlookers and joined the two men. They talked for several minutes, and then Jordan and the policeman drove off together in the patrol ear. Mrs. Fletcher stood there and watched them go. After a while she turned around and waved me over to join her. I walked down the steps and across the warm flagstones.

“You saw it all, eh, Tom?”

“Yes, unfortunately. The whole horrible thing.”

The sun was high and directly over her shoulder. I had to squint to look at her.

“Was the boy laughing before he got hit?”

“Laughing? I don’t know what you mean.”

“Laughing. You know, laughing? He was eating that pistachio cone, but was he laughing too?”

She was totally serious. What the hell kind of question was that?

“No, not that I remember.”

“You’re sure about that? You’re sure that he wasnt laughing?”

“Yes, I guess so. I saw him right up until he got hit, but I wasn’t really paying that much attention. No, I’m positive about that, though. Why is it so important?”

“But he was touching the fence with his hand, right?”

“Yes, he was touching the fence. He was touching the top of it with his free hand.”

She looked at me. I felt very confused and uncomfortable. To get out from under those X-ray eyes, I looked around, and everyone was staring at me with that same impassive gaze that had made me feel so squirmy the day before at the barbecue.

An old farmer in a rust-red Corvair, a teenager with a bag of groceries under his arm, a doughy-looking woman with her hair up in hot pink curlers and a cigarette dangling unattractively from her lip. All giving me the gaze… .

About an hour later, Mrs. Fletcher and Saxony went off to shop for groceries. They said they wouldn’t be back until the early afternoon. I secretly wanted to go along with them, but they didn’t ask me, and I’ve always felt strange inviting myself to things. Anyway, I thought that it would be good for us to be separated for a while. I wanted to work on some notes that I’d had floating around in my head since we’d arrived. First impressions of Galen and all that. I also wanted to start reading some of the literary biographies we had brought along to see how it was supposed to be done.