The Land of Laughs (29 page)

“Yes, I know about that, but what was Susy like?”

“Oh, she was a great gal — pretty, real smart. We all loved her around here, but there wasn’t anything we could do to stop her. She packed a bag, got on the bus to New York, and was gone. Poor thing — she’d just been in New York a couple of days when she died.”

“But Marshall was alive then. Why didn’t he stop her? He could have done it if he wanted to.”

“Tom, Tom, you’re not thinkin’. Yes, Marshall was alive, and sure he could have stopped her.”

“But he didn’t!”

“No, he didn’t. Think, Tom. Why do you think he didn’t?”

“The only thing I can imagine was to show people that he meant what he said. He used her as a kind of hideous example.”

“Right. You hit it on the head. But I wouldn’t use the word ‘hideous.’”

“Of course it’s hideous! He wrote this poor character so that from the beginning she didn’t want to know, then he wrote that she would leave Galen and die in a week? That’s not hideous?”

“Nobody else has ever tried to leave since then, Tom. And she was happy — she thought she was getting away. She did get away.”

“But he wrote it that way! She had no choice!”

“She died doing what she wanted, Tom.”

Phil Moon and Larry Stone worked together in the Galen post office. They were friends long before they married the Chandler sisters, but the marriages brought them closer.

Their passion was bowling. Both of them owned expensive custom Brunswick balls and matching bags, and if they had been a little better, they might have been pro material. As it was, they bowled every Wednesday and Friday night at Scappy’s Harmony Lanes in Frederick, the next town over. They alternated cars and split the cost of gasoline. Once in a while their wives went with them, but the girls knew how much their husbands appreciated their Boys’ Night Out, so they often splurged on their own Wednesdays and Fridays and went to the movies or dinner and shopping afterward at the Frederick Town Mall.

There were two ways to get over there. You could hop onto the Interstate and then get off at the next exit, or you could take Garah’s Mill Road that more or less paralleled the Interstate until it came to the Frederick traffic circle that spun you off in any direction you wanted. Most of the time they took the Mill Road because they timed it once and it was four minutes faster from door to door, although you could really blow your car out for a mile or two on the Interstate.

I knew all of this because I had gone bowling with them once, and on the way over, the four of them discussed the ins and outs of Wednesday and Friday nights.

On the night of their accident, they took the Interstate. Larry came down the exit ramp too fast in his lavender 442. He hit a long patch of ice, and fishtailing from side to side, took out the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. A Stix, Baer and Fuller trailer truck broadsided them and pushed the car almost two hundred feet up the road.

Larry’s whole side was crushed, and it was a wonder that he wasn’t killed. His wife, sitting directly behind him, broke both legs and her right hand. Phil got a severe concussion, and his wife broke her collarbone.

None of it was supposed to happen, according to the journals.

I heard about it from Anna, who called me from the county hospital. She told me straightaway what had happened. Her voice was thin and frightening. I totally misunderstood why until she reminded me.

“I don’t know what any of this means now, Thomas.” I could hear things bustling, people talking, someone being paged over the loudspeaker in the background.

“What
what
means?”

“This is the first thing that has gone wrong again since you started writing the biography. I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“Look, Anna, it doesn’t
mean
anything. You just got your hopes up too high before. How can things start to go right until the book is written?” As I spoke, I realized how convinced and confident I sounded. Like it was all a snap now: I would just finish writing this book, and bango, there would be Marshall France, back from the dead.

A Dr. Bradshaw was paged while I waited for her to speak.

“Anna? Is there anyone there with you?”

“Richard.” She hung up.

I started working like a man possessed. Two, three, four pages a morning, research in the afternoons, three or four more pages at night.

I had never gotten over the initial shock of “discovering” Galen, but being there every minute of the day forced me to accept it. I was the moth and the town was the flame, and the damned place had me going in such circles that I didn’t know what to do much of the time except to keep writing.

I was living in the middle of the greatest artistic creation in the history of the world. In my own tiny way, I was chronicling the life of the man who had done it. Whether that chronicle would bring him back to life … No, no, that’s not true. I was going to say that it made no difference to me whether that chronicle brought him back to life, but that’s a bunch of bullshit. He had said that it was possible, and then his daughter had chosen me to do it. That’s partly why I sent Saxony away. The other “part” was of course Anna, but after the car accident we didn’t make love much. I assumed that old Richard was still socking it to her, but even that didn’t really bother me that much, because all of my energy — all of it — was going into the work. I would like to have known, though, why she slept with him, but I had a sneaking suspicion now. Suppose Richard had gotten bored with living in Galen. Since Anna and he were the only two “normals” in the town, how could she keep him there? Simple: go to bed with him. Never in his wildest imaginings would a guy like him have thought (or hoped!) of having someone like Anna France. So, so long as she kept him hot and bothered and interested, he was hers. And Galen’s. I wondered if his wife knew what was going on between them.

I went out very rarely. Mrs. Fletcher started cooking for me, and Anna came over once in a while to see how things were progressing. Saxony called a couple of times, but our conversations were short, dry, and stale. I didn’t ask about Geoff Wiggins and she didn’t ask about Anna. I was too tired by then to want to play games, but I did realize that it would be better not to tell her how celibate I had become. Nevertheless, she got so fed up with our conversation one time that she called me a sourpuss and hung up.

Joanne Collins gave birth to a bouncing baby boy who was supposed to be a bouncing baby girl according to the journals.

Anna came over and demanded to see my manuscript. I astonished myself by holding fast and not letting her. She went away but was not at all happy.

Saxony called and asked if I was aware of the fact that she had already been gone a month.

I wrote Tom Rankin back and told him that I would try very hard to get back for his graduation in June.

My mother wrote, and feeling guilty for having been out of touch since September, I called her and chatted on about how wonderful things were for me these clays.

Joanne Collins went in to take care of her new baby one morning and found a three-week-old bull terrier fast asleep in the crib.

I had had enough work for one day and decided to go over to the Green Tavern for a drink. It was nine at night and the town was dead quiet. The snow was slushy in the streets, but up on the sidewalk it was still white and crunchy under your feet. A silent, nasty wind drilled through the dark. Once in a while it stopped, waited for you to come up out of your shell, and then shot back, sniggering. The telephone wires were glazed over, but when the wind gusted it shook them and the ice fell into the street in short straight pieces. By the time I got to the bar I knew I either should have stayed at home or else taken the damned car. It was that cold.

The place had a thick oak front door that you really had to get your shoulder behind to open. A warm blast of stale heat, cigarette smoke, and George Jones’s voice from the jukebox. The bar dog — really a dog, as far as I knew — whose name was Fanny, came over wagging her tail. The official greeter. I took off a glove and patted her head. It was warm and wet.

Because of the dark outside it didn’t take long to get accustomed to the dark fog light in the bar.

I knew most of the people in there: Jan Phend, John Esperian, Neil Bull, Vince Flynn, Dave Marty.

“How are you doin’, Tom?”

I turned around and squinted into the darkness. Richard Lee got up from a table and came over.

“What’re you having, Tom?”

I sniffed back my runny nose. “I guess a beer and a shot.”

“A beer and a shot. That sounds good to me. Johnny, two beers and two shots.”

Richard smiled and came closer. He slapped me on the arm and kept his hand there. “Come on over and sit down at the table with me, Tom. Fuck these up-your-ass bar stools.”

I took off my coat and hung it on a wooden peg by the door. There were other smells in the room now: perfume, potato chips, wet leather.

“So, kid, how’re you doing over there at Goosey’s? Here’s the drinks. Thanks, Johnny.”

I took a sip of beer and a taste of whiskey. One bitterer than the other, the whiskey thick and fiery in my stomach. But it felt good after being outside so long.

“I bet I know one thing for sure, buddy. Ever since Phil Moon’s accident, I bet Anna ain’t so happy with you, is she?”

“You’ve got a point there.” I drank some more whiskey.

“Yep, that’s what I figured. Did you hear about the Collins baby?”

“Yes. Is it still … a dog?”

Lee smiled and drank off the rest of his beer. “I guess so. The last I heard it was. Things are changing around here so fast lately, you never know.” He drank some of the whiskey and stopped smiling. “I’ll tell you one thing, buddy, it scares the hell out of me.”

I hunched in close to the table and tried to talk as quietly as possible. “But why you, Richard? I can see it for the others — the worrying, I mean — but you’re normal.” I lowered my head toward him and said the word in a whisper.

“Normal, shit! Sure
I
am, but my wife isn’t, and neither are my kids. You know what’s been happening to my Sharon lately? I rolled over in the bed one morning last week, and there was fucking
Krang
on the pillow next to me! Can you believe that?”

I didn’t say anything, but I believed it. I had seen it happen the night we went over there for dinner.

“I’m not shitting you, Tom. All of a sudden all of Marshall’s characters are beginning to run together. Not only aren’t things going like they’re supposed to in the journals, but now they’re mixing up all together, changing back and forth. Look at the Collins kid. One minute it’s a kid and the next it’s a fucking
dog
!” He snatched up my glass of whiskey and drank it off with one flick of the wrist. “What the hell is a man supposed to do, huh? I can’t even turn around nowadays without being afraid that my wife or one of my little girls is going to be different. And then what’ll happen if one day one of them stays that way?”

“How are they reacting to it?”

“How the hell do you expect? They’re scared shit!”

“How many people has it happened to so far?”

He shook his head and turned the shot glass upside down on the table. “I don’t know. Not that many yet, but everybody’s scared that they’ll be next. What I want to know is when you’re going to finish that goddamned book.”

The jukebox was still playing, but the talking had stopped all around us.

I fought down a yawn and wanted very badly to be out of there. “I’ve done a lot. But there’s still so much more to go. I have to tell you that. I don’t want to lie about it.”

“That don’t answer his question, Abbey.”

“What can I say? What do you want me to say? That it will be done in ten minutes? No, it won’t be done in ten minutes. You all want this thing to be good and right, but then you all want it done now. Argh, there’s a contradiction there, don’t you see?”

“Fuck your contradiction, asshole!”

“All right, fuck it! Fuck it! You say that because you’re not writing it. If it stinks in the end, then nothing is going to happen here. That’s why France was so great, don’t you understand? That’s why you’re all
here
. He could write like no one else in the world. For God’s sake, why don’t you understand that? Whoever writes this book has got to try to write it as well … I don’t know,
better
than he wrote his books… . The journals, everything, everything that he wrote. It’s got to be better. It’s got to be.”

Another voice climbed out of the swampy gloom at the bar. “Fuck that noise, Abbey. You just get that book done soon or we’ll fuck you up like we did that other biographer.”

The door opened and a fat man and woman came in, beaming. I had never seen them before and assumed that they were from out of town. Normals. The man was slapping his hat against his leg. “I don’t know what the hell the name of this town is, Dolly, but so long as they got a drink for me, then it’s friendly territory. How are you doin’ there, friend? Colder than the dogcatcher’s heart out there, huh?”

They sat down on bar stools in front of me and I was so glad that they had arrived, I could have kissed them. I got up to go. Richard had an empty whiskey glass in his hand and was slowly turning it round and round on his fingertips. He watched me get up but didn’t say anything more. I went over to get my coat. I glanced at the bar and saw the fat couple talking animatedly with the bartender.

When I got outside, the wind ate me alive, but this time it felt like ambrosia. A Ford Econoline van pulled into the parking lot. The Priest of Spiders from
The Land of Laughs
got out and turned up the collar of his red mackinaw. He saw me and gave a half-wave. “How arc you doing, Tom? How’s your book going?”

He loped over to the big oak door and went through it, still the Priest of Spiders.

I stopped where I was and waited to see what was going to happen. If the fat couple hadn’t been in there, it would have been all right, but they
were
there, and who the hell was going to explain what they were seeing?

The door flew open and three men came racing out, the Priest of Spiders held fast in the middle. The door bammed shut, and the only sound was feet moving through the slush. They were almost to the van when Mel Dugan saw me and stopped.