The Land of Laughs (13 page)

I changed into a pair of corduroy shorts, T-shirt, and sandals and got another cup of coffee from the kitchen. Nails followed me everywhere, but I was already getting used to that. I had all but decided that no matter what happened with this book, as soon as I got back to Connecticut I was going to buy one of these loony dogs. Maybe I’d even buy one here and have a relative of one of Marshall France’s dogs. If I couldn’t have a biography, at least I could have a bull terrier.

I sat down on one of the rocking chairs and put the coffee cup on the floor within easy reach. Nails tried a tentative sniff or two at my java, but I gave him a bop on the head and he lay down. I opened the book and began reading. I had gotten through about half a page when the image of the boy lying in the street floated up into my mind and stayed there. I tried to think of Saxony, of Saxony in bed, of what my book had just said about Raymond Chandler, of how nice a day it was, of what it would be like to go to bed with Anna France … but the boy in the street refused to leave. I got up and walked over to the porch railing to see if I could make out the spot where he had been hit. To see if there was still blood or any other sign that an hour ago we’d all been out there watching him die.

I remembered that I’d also been sitting on a porch when I heard that my father had been killed. The night before, I’d been on the living-room floor of Amy Fischer’s house with Amy Fischer watching him in
Mr. & Mrs. Time
. I was much more interested in undressing Amy than in his performance, which I’d seen countless times. Since Amy’s parents weren’t there, she let me do whatever I wanted. The whole time we were at it, I kept hearing his voice behind me, and I even laughed once or twice because it felt strange screwing in front of my father. The gray-white from the television washed in different, changing patterns over our bodies, and when we were done we lay side by side and watched the end of the film. The next morning Amy decided that we should have breakfast out on the porch. We set the table together, and she even brought out her portable radio so that we could listen while we ate. “Massachusetts” by the Bee Gees was playing, and I was slumped down into the hammock when the news bulletin cut through the song and announced that Stephen Abbey’s plane had crashed in Nevada and that there were no survivors. I didn’t move when the last part of the song came back on. Amy walked out of the house with a frying pan full of scrambled eggs and Canadian bacon. She called me over to eat. She hadn’t heard the bulletin yet, and as I said, you end up doing strange things when something horrible has just happened to you. What did I do? I sat down at the table and ate everything on my plate — I even had seconds on the eggs. When I was done I put my fork down beside my empty orange-juice glass and said, “My father was just killed in an airplane crash.” Those were the days in prep school when every other word out of your mouth was cynical, so sweet Amy Fischer shook her head at my bad taste at the breakfast table and went on eating.

Whenever I turn on the television and
Mr. & Mrs. Time
is playing, the first thing that comes to mind is that disgusted look on Amy’s face and the way she kept eating her yellow scrambled eggs.

It was several seconds before I realized that a car had stopped in front of the house. I couldn’t see the driver, but I could see a big white blob of something pressing its nose against the half-open glass of one of the back windows. The car was an old gold-and-white Dodge station wagon like the one
Leave It to Beaver
‘s mother used to cart the family around in. I tried to focus on the driver, but the white bull terrier was now hopping back and forth from the front seat to the back, and I assumed that it was Anna and Petals. The driver’s door opened and that perky head of black monk’s hair emerged. She shaded her eyes and looked toward the house.

“Hi!”

I waved my book at her and felt embarrassed about my shorts and T-shirt. I don’t know why, because I’ve succeeded so well at repressing my childhood self-consciousness that I’m usually indifferent to what people think of the way I dress.

She stood against the door and talked with one hand cupped to the side of her mouth.

“I came over to see if you two survived last night. I’m so sorry that I had to leave like that.”

Petals pushed her nose up against a window and started barking in our direction. Nails perked up his ears but didn’t look overly thrilled by the sound. He stayed where he was.

“Oh, that was okay. It was a fine night, Anna. I was going to call and thank you.” For the chicken ŕ la Dead Sea Scroll, the bum’s rush out the door …

“Well, then, I don’t feel so guilty. You are telling the truth, aren’t you?”

Petals disappeared from the window, and then Anna disappeared down into the car. There was some scuffling and slurred voices, and then the dog was out and flying up the garden path, full tilt. She tried to leap too many porch steps with one bound and fell flat, but she was up in a flash and on her way over to her boyfriend. Nails’s indifference disappeared and the two of them waltzed back and forth across the porch in a leaping frenzy of delight and bites. They barked and bit each other’s heads and kept falling down every three steps.

“Petals is cuckoo for Nails. Mrs. Fletcher and I take them over to the high-school football field once or twice a week and let them run all of that energy out of their systems.”

She stood at the bottom of the porch steps and beamed up at me. She was wearing a scarlet T-shirt that said CODASCO across its front. The shirt accused her of having much bigger breasts than I had originally thought. A pair of faded blue Levi’s that were tight in a nice, sexy way, and ratty blue tennis sneakers that were holey and comfortable -looking.

I was about to say something about how good she looked when she pointed at me. “What does your T-shirt say?”

I looked down at it and unconsciously put my hand over the huge white letters. “Uh, ‘Virginia Is for Lovers.’ I, um, a friend gave it to me.”

She stuck her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. “So you are a lover, huh?” She said it with a naughty-nasty smile that made me feel two feet high.

“Yes. Very famous too. I’m written up in
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
.”

“I don’t.” Her smile got bigger.

“Don’t what?” Mine got smaller.

“Believe it.”

Appropriately, Nails chose that moment to start humping Petals, and I was embarrassed but glad for the distraction. I pulled him off. He growled. I think both of them growled.

“Where is Saxony?”

“She and Mrs. Fletcher went shopping.”

“That’s too bad. I was going to ask if you two would like to come swimming. It’s going to be a hot day.”

“I’m not really in the mood for it, to tell you the truth. Did you hear about what happened here this morning?” I pointed the book out toward the road.

“The Hayden boy? I know. That was terrible. Did you see it?”

“Yes, the whole thing.” I put the book down on the railing and crossed my arms over my chest. The dogs had collapsed a foot away from each other and were panting like little steam engines.

“Then why don’t you come out for a ride with me? I’m sure that it will take your mind off things. We’ll take the dogs with us.”

The two of them jumped right up, as if they understood.

“Okay, sure, that would probably be very nice. Thanks, Anna.”

I went back into the house, got my wallet and keys, and wrote Saxony a note. I didn’t know how she’d take my not being there when she came back, so instead of rubbing salt into the wound by saying that I was with Anna, I wrote only that I was going out with Nails for a while. Anyway, why not? And why should I feel guilty?

Weren’t we here to write a book on Marshall France, and so wasn’t all contact with his daughter helpful? Bullshit — I felt guilty writing the note because I was excited about whatever was going to happen with Anna today, and not only because she was his daughter.

The car was full of things. Empty cardboard boxes, a yellow garden hose, an old soccer ball, a case of Alpo dog food. The dogs got in back, and Anna pressed a button which lowered the window in the tailgate for them.

“I think that the population of Galen has increased by ten people in the last few years.” She took a piece of bubble gum out of her pocket and offered it to me. I said no, and she started peeling it for herself. “Farming is about the only thing that people can do around here, but like so many places, the kids don’t want to farm anymore. As soon as they get old enough, they go to St. Louis and the bright lights.”

“But you’ve stayed?”

“Yes. I don’t have to work because the house was paid for a long time ago. The royalties from my father’s books are more than I need to pay for everything else.”

“Do you still play the piano?”

She blew a bubble and it popped almost as soon as it came out of her mouth. “Did David Louis tell you that? Yes, I play once in a while. I had a passion for it at one time, but as I’ve gotten older …” She shrugged and blew another bubble.

She chewed the gum like a kid — mouth open, popping and cracking it until I thought that I would go crazy. Women look terrible chewing gum. Any woman, I don’t care who she is. Luckily, she took it and threw it out the window.

“I don’t like gum when the taste’s gone. Did David tell you about the other man who came here and wanted to do a biography of my father?”

“Yes, the man from Princeton?”

“Yes, what an
ass
. I invited him to dinner and he spent the evening telling me how heuristic
The Land of Laughs
was.”

“What does that mean?”

“Heuristic? You’re the English teacher, you should know.”

“Oh, yeah? I don’t even know what a gerund is.”

“Isn’t that terrible? What’s our educational system coming to?”

I rolled down my window and watched a bunch of healthy-looking cows whisk flies away with their big ropy tails. Far off behind them, a tractor worked its way across a flat brown field, and an airplane moved at a pinpoint crawl.

“We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Where? Am I allowed to ask where we’re going?”

“No, you’ll see. It’s a big surprise.”

We drove on for three or four more miles, and then, without putting on the blinker, she took a sharp left off onto a narrow dirt road and into a forest so thick that I couldn’t see more than fifteen feet into the trees on either side. The car became cooler, and a rich, full smell of wood and shade took over. The road got bumpy, and I could hear rocks banging up into the wheel wells.

“I never thought of Missouri as being very foresty.”

Sunlight sneaked in and out of the trees. A deer appeared and disappeared through the trees, and I looked over at Anna to see if she’d seen it too.

“Don’t worry, we’re almost there.”

When she stopped, I looked around but saw nothing.

“Let me guess: your father planted all the trees in this forest, right?”

“No.” She switched off the motor and dropped the keys on the floor.

“Uh … he used to go walking here?”

“Now you’re getting closer.”

“He wrote all of his books on that stump?”

“No.”

“I give up.”

“You didn’t try hard enough! Okay. I thought that you would like to see where the Queen of Oil lived.”

“Where she lived? What do you mean?”

“Aren’t people always asking writers where their characters come from? Father got his Queen from someone who lived in these woods. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Getting out of the car, I started phrasing the whole passage in my mind for the biography. “The road that led to the Queen of Oil’s house snaked its way through a forest which appeared out of nowhere. France had discovered the main character for
The Land of Laughs
in the heart of a woods that should never have been there in the first place.”

Boy, that was pretty bad. While Anna led the way into Sherwood Forest, I tried to come up with a couple of other beginnings, but then gave up. The dogs ran everywhere after each other. Anna walked about ten feet in front of me, and I divided my time between watching where I was going and watching where her very nice rear end was going.

“I keep expecting to see Hansel and Gretel out here.”

“Just watch out for wolves.”

My mind moved over to the time my father went hunting in Africa with Hemingway. He was gone for two months, and when he came back my mother wouldn’t let him in the house with all the rhino heads and zebra skins and whatnot he had brought home to be mounted.

“There it is.”

If I’d been expecting a gingerbread house with smoke from the chimney that smelled like oatmeal cookies, I was wrong. The house, if you could call it that, was a crudely built wood thing that sagged to one side as if a giant had leaned on it. If there had been glass in the two windows, it was gone now, replaced by pine boards nailed across in an X pattern. There was a crude porch missing several floorboards. The step leading up to it was split in half.

“Watch your step.”

“You did say that no one’s living here now, didn’t you?”

“Yes, that’s right. But it was very much like this when she was alive, too.”

“And who was
she
?”

“Wait a minute and I’ll show you.”

She pulled out one of those long old-fashioned keys and stuck it into the lock under the rusted brown doorknob.

“You need a key to get in?”

“No, not really, but it’s better this way.”

Before I had a chance to ask her what she meant, she had shoved the door in and a huge smell of dampness and clean decay moved out to meet us. She started to go in but then stopped and turned to me. I was right behind her, and when she turned we were face-to-face. She moved back half a step. My heart did a hop when it realized how close we’d been for half a second.

“Stay here for a minute and I will light a lamp in there. The floor is full of holes, and it’s very dangerous. Father once sprained his ankle so badly that I had to take him to the hospital.”

I thought about holes in the floor and snakes and spiders, and I yawned. I usually yawn when I’m nervous, and it either makes people think that I’m very courageous or stupid. Sometimes I can’t stop yawning. When I thought about it, it was ridiculous: one of the great moments of my adult life — going with the daughter of Marshall France to the house of the person who had inspired him to create his greatest character in my favorite book … and I was yawning. Before that I was scared, and before that I was thinking about her ass. Not about Anna France, daughter of … , but about Anna’s ass. How did biographers ever manage to keep their lives separate from their subjects?