The Land of Laughs (19 page)

“It’s fine with me. Thomas? We’re not doing anything, as far as I can remember.”

“No. Yeah. No, that’s great. That would he terrific, Richard. Thanks a lot for asking.”

“Good. I’m going fishing this afternoon, and if we’re lucky we’ll be having fresh catfish right off the line.”

“Hey, that’s great. Fresh catfish.” I tried to nod enthusiastically, but if my expression betrayed me it was only because I was thinking about the whiskers on catfish.

He left and then Saxony decided to buy the Max Factor. I went to the counter to pay. While he rung it up, Mel the Druggist shook his head. “Personally, I never liked catfish. The only reason they’re always so fat is that they eat anything. Real garbage fish, you know? That will be two-oh-seven, sir.”

There were crosses on top of crosses. Jesus bled all over the room from fifty different places, each showing him suffering some new kind of agony. The whole house smelled of frying fish and tomatoes. Except for the couch I sat on, which smelled like wet dogs and cigarettes.

Lee’s wife, Sharon, had the kind of innocent but odd pink face that you often see on midgets. She never stopped smiling, even when she tripped over their bull terrier, Buddy, and fell down. The daughters, Midge and Ruth Ann, were just the opposite: they slumped around the place as if the air were too heavy for them.

Richard brought out his handgun collection, his rifle collection, his fishing-pole collection, and his Indian-head nickel. Sharon brought out a photo album of the family, but most of the pictures were either of dogs they had had through the years or, for some reason, pictures of the family when they were injured. Richard smiling at his leg in a thick white cast, Midge merrily pointing to an ugly blue-black eye, Ruth Ann on her back in what was obviously a hospital bed, and in apparent pain.

“My God, what happened there?” I pointed to this one of Ruth Ann.

“When was that? Let me think. Ruth Ann, do you remember when I took that one of you?”

Ruth Ann scuffed over and breathed on my head while she looked at it. “That’s when I slipped that disk in gym, Daddy. Don’t you remember?”

“Oh, that’s right, Richard. That one’s of the slipped disk she got.”

“Hell yes, now I remember. That cost me about three hundred bucks to put her up in the hospital. All they had down there was a semiprivate room, but I put her in anyway. Didn’t I, Ruth Ann?”

Tobacco Road
-y as they sounded (and looked and were), you could tell that they liked each other very much. Richard kept putting his arm around the girls or his wife. They loved it; whenever he did, they would snuggle up into him with little peeps of delight. It was bizarre to think of this bunch together in their sad white house looking at pictures of Ruth Ann in traction, but how many families do you know that are happy and enjoy each other’s company?

“Dinner’s ready, everyone.”

As guest of honor, I got the biggest catfish, its mouth open in a final rictus. Stewed tomatoes and dandelion greens were there too. No matter how much I cut or pushed the catfish to the farthest corners of my plate, I couldn’t lose it. I knew that the battle was lost and that I would have to eat some.

“Have you got a lot of work done on your book?”

“No, we’re really just beginning. It will probably take quite a long time.”

The Lees looked at each other across the table, and there was a pause of a couple of seconds.

“Writing a book. That’s something I’d never do. In school sometimes I liked to read.”

“You read now, Richard. What are you talking about? You’ve got all kinds of subscriptions.” Sharon nodded at us as if to reaffirm the truth of what she had said. She hadn’t stopped smiling once, even when she was chewing.

“Yeah, well, Marshall sure could write though, huh? That guy had more damned stories in his little finger …” He shook his head and picked up a drooling tomato from his plate. “I think you’ve gotta be a writer when you’ve got so many crazy ideas and stories to tell. You’d blow up if you didn’t get them down. What do you think, Tom?” He put the whole tomato in his mouth and talked through it. “Some guys got stories, all right, but all they got to do to keep from explodin’ is to tell them. Talk them out and then they feel okay again. Like Bob Fumo, right, Sharon? This guy Bob can tell you the damnedest stories all night long and then wake up the next morning and tell you a hundred more. But he just tells them and then he’s done. I guess guys like you have got it a lot worse, huh?”

“And a lot slower.” I smiled at my plate and pushed some more of the fish around with my fork.

“Slower’s right, boy. How long do you think it’ll take you to finish off this one about Marshall?”

“It’s really very hard to say. I’ve never written a book before, and there are a lot of things that I’ll have to know before I can really get going on it.”

Again there was a pause in the conversation. Sharon got up and started to clear the table. Saxony offered to help but was quickly smiled down.

“Did you hear that that Hayden boy that got hit out in front of your place the other day died?” There was no expression on Richard’s face when he said it. No concern, no pity.

But I felt a whomp in my stomach, both because I had seen it happen and because it was a little boy who had been happy two seconds before he had been splattered all over the road.

“How are his parents handling it?”

He stretched and looked at the kitchen door. “They’re okay. There’s not much you can do about it, you know?”

How can people do that? When a boy gets killed, how can you not want to punch something or at least shake your fist at God? Farmers and guys like that are of another breed, sure, they see death all the time, everybody’s heard that story, but human is human, dammit. How do you not mourn the death of a child? I hoped that Lee was just being stoic.

“My God, I just remembered something! Anna
told
me that he would die. Isn’t that strange?”

Saxony, who had devoured her fish, tomatoes, and dandelion greens, twiddled a spoon. “What do you mean, she told you? How could she know that he’d die?”

“Don’t ask me, Sax. All I remember is that she said he would. I mean, it wasn’t any kind of big Svengali thing — he was in very bad shape when they picked him up.”

“What do you think Anna is, Tom, the Amazing Kreskin? Did you ever see that guy on
Johnny Carson
? The magician? You can’t believe what he does up there… .”

The kitchen door swung open and Sharon came in with a big hot pie on a black metal tray.

Now. This is what I saw, and you can draw your own conclusions. But I did see it. No, Saxony said she didn’t. She thought I was crazy when I told her afterward; then she got really solicitous when I kept insisting that it was true. It
was
true.

There is a character in
The Green Dog’s Sorrow
named Krang. Krang is a mad kite that has decided that the wind is its enemy. It begs to go up every day so that it can continue its war on its constant battlefield, the sky. The Green Dog falls in love with the face painted on the kite. When he runs away from the house where he lives, the house where “Yawns owned everything that men thought was theirs,” he steals Krang from the closet, ties her white string to his collar, and the two of them go off together.

The first thing I saw when Sharon Lee came out of the kitchen was Sharon Lee. I blinked, and when I looked again, I saw Krang coming out of the kitchen holding a hot pie on a black metal tray, The Van Walt illustration: the wide empty eyes that betray the joy in the mouth’s full, happy smile. The red checks, red lips, circus-yellow skin … At first I thought that it was some kind of remarkable mask that the Lees owned. And I’d thought that they were dumb? Anyone who owned a mask like that, much less put it on at that perfect moment, was brilliant. Nutsy-brilliant, but brilliant, It was like a Fellini movie or a funny-bad dream that you don’t really want to wake up from even though it is frightening.

“That’s incredible, Sharon!” I said it twelve times too loudly, but I was astonished. Then I looked to my right to see how Saxony was taking it. She frowned at me.

“What’s incredible?”

“Sharon! Come on, Sax, it’s amazing!”

She looked past me and smiled in Krang’s direction. “Yes, yes!” she finally piped up, but then muttered to me under her breath, “Don’t overdo it, Thomas, it’s only a pie.”

“Yeah, ha ha, pie-shmy. Very funny.”

“Thomas …” Her smile went away and her voice had a warning in it.

Something was wrong. I whipped around and saw good old Sharon cutting the pie. Not Krang. Not a single Krang in the house. Not nobody but smiling Sharon Lee and her famous hot peach pie.

“I guess that that Tom wants a big piece, huh, Richard?”

“I guess that that’s about the loudest hint I ever heard. Maybe you should give him the whole thing, honey, and make up a batch of popcorn for the rest of us!”

They all laughed, and Sharon served me an enormous piece. My mouth hung open. It
was
Krang, dammit. The same everything from the Van Walt illustration. I checked it out later to be sure. I checked it several hundred times later.

But there was no mask either. It was Sharon and then it was Krang and then it was Sharon. I was the only one who saw it happen. I was the only one it happened to. If I had been working night and day on the biography, it would have made a kind of sense: Biographer A leaps into the life of Author B and gets so deeply into it that soon he’s seeing B’s characters all over the place. Okay, okay, the idea has been overcooked a million times, but in my case I hadn’t even started the book yet, really, much less been at it for a long time,

I had lunch with Anna a couple of days later when Saxony went off shopping again with Mrs. Fletcher.

I told her about my “vision,” with a dismal chuckle.

“Krang? Just Krang? No one else?” She passed me the scrambled eggs.

“Just Krang? Jesus Christ, Anna, at this rate, next week I’ll have all of the characters riding Nails around the backyard.”

Petals heard his name and her tail thumped twice on the floor. She was sitting next to Anna, waiting for any table scraps that might come her way.

Anna ate some chutney and smiled. “I guess Sharon Lee isn’t much like Krang, is she?”

“Hardly. The only things that they’ve got in common are those vacuous smiles.”

“I’ll tell you something though, Thomas, that might make you feel better. Did you know that Van Walt was my father?”

“Van Walt was your … You mean to say that your father illustrated his own books? Those are all his drawings?”

“The real Van Walt was a childhood friend of his who was later killed by the Nazis. Father took his name when he started doing the drawings for the books.”

“So, hypothetically, Sharon Lee in some kind of crazy way might have been the inspiration for Krang?”

“Oh, yes, it’s possible. You said yourself that they have the same smile.” She brushed her lips with her napkin and put it down next to her plate. “Personally, I think it’s a good sign for you. Father is becoming your little dybbuk, and now he’ll haunt you all the time, night and day, until you finish his book.”

I looked at her over the fresh white tablecloth. She fluttered her eyes, laughed, and slipped Petals a piece of egg under the table. It took me a moment to realize that her looking at me like that gave me a terrific erection.

If this story were a forties movie, then the next shot would be of a big calendar. Its pages would begin to flip by a day at a time, Filmland’s way of showing you that time is passing. I worked like a dog, cleaning and cutting and polishing. On alternate days I loved it and hated it. Once I got up in the middle of the night after making long, exhausting love with Saxony. I walked over to the desk and just stared like an idiot at the damned manuscript in the moonlight. I gave it the finger for at least a minute before I got back into bed without feeling any better. I wanted it all to be so good — better than anything I had ever dreamed of doing. In a way, I secretly knew that it was a kind of last chance for me. If I didn’t give it everything I had, it would make much more sense to go back to Connecticut in my station wagon and teach
The Scarlet Letter
to tenth-graders for the rest of my life,

In the meantime, between researching and reading and our constant discussions, Saxony had found time to begin work on a new marionette. I didn’t pay much attention, I must admit. We got into the habit of getting up early, eating a light quick breakfast, and then disappearing into our respective hideaways until lunchtime.

I finished-finished two days before my month was up. I capped my Montblanc, quietly closed my notebook, lined the pen up right alongside it, I put my hands on top of the book and looked out the window. I asked myself if I wanted to cry. I asked if I wanted to jump up and dance a few jigs, but that got vetoed too. I smiled and picked up the big chunky Montblanc. It was shiny black and gold and weighed much more than a fountain pen should have, I had corrected a few million essays with it, and now it had written part of my book. Good old Montblanc. Someday they would have it under glass in a museum with a white arrow pointing to it. “This is the pen Thomas Abbey used to write the France biography.” I felt like I’d float right up out of my chair and around the room on the slightest breeze, My mind lay down and put its hands behind its head. It looked up at the sky and felt pretty good. Pretty goddamned good.

“You’re really done.”

“I’m really done.”

“Completely and totally?”

“The works, Saxolini. Everything.” I jigged my shoulders and still felt as if I weighed two pounds.

She was sitting on a high chromium stool, sanding what looked like a rough wooden hand. Nails was under the table snuffling around a big bone we’d gotten him the day before.

“Wait a minute,” She put the hand down and got off the stool. “Go out of the kitchen for a little while. I’ll call you when I want you to come back in.”

Nails and I went out on the porch. He dropped the bone where I stopped, and lay down on top of it. I looked out at the still garden and empty street. I literally had no idea of what day it was.