The Land of Laughs (32 page)

I was breathing hard and my arms pumped back and forth at my sides, pushing me forward. What would they do down there? How would they all look right at 5:30? What would … ? And then I heard it off in the distance. I stopped and my eyes blurred. There were two short hoots and then a long one. A long one that rose and stayed in the air like an eerie animal calling out to someone. I leaped off the sidewalk and into the street. The whistle blew again and I knew that it was closer, almost there, the train almost in Galen station.
But passenger trains didn’t stop at Galen station anymore
… . The street ended in a small circle, but I vaulted the low stone wall there and kept running. I saw the station for the first time. It was so brightly lit that you would have thought that they were filming a movie. Where had the lights come from? There were hundreds of people milling around out on the platform. I was still too far away to distinguish between any of them, but there was so much noise, voices all talking at once. Then someone yelled, “There! There!” and the voices fell away. From the blackness on the side of the station away from me, from the East, from New York and the Atlantic Ocean and Austria, a pale yellow light appeared, and when I stopped running, I saw the engine pulling into the station. I stood there and my whole body shook. The engine was so old and black, and it was puffing sparks and steam out of its stack. It lumbered in and pulled out again, hauling its gleaming silver passenger cars up parallel to the platform.

It stopped. It was quiet except for the hissing and the clanking of the engine.

I just barely saw a conductor descend the steps and the crowd push up tight to one of the cars.

Then a wave of incredible heat moved out over everything. I could actually see it coming, and when it passed over me it felt like a strong hot summer breeze. Not stronger. Pleasant. I remember thinking that it was very nice.

People down there started to jam even closer to the train. Their noise returned.

And then from behind me the explosion came. This huge sound ripped through the sky, and without thinking, I turned around to see what it was. An oleo-yellow cloud of flame blossomed up and fell halfway back down to just above the tops of the houses and trees. Separate flames kept swimming up and away.

I turned back to the station and saw them mobbed around something on the platform. No one had turned toward the explosion. The train hooted twice and began to chug forward.

I was running up Hammond Street again, running for my house. I heard the train whistle, I saw the flames in the sky in front of me.

The train was picking up speed and was right behind me when I reached the crossing and turned left again up my street. I saw the flames, and now I knew the house. I wanted to stop and look for a moment and take in what was happening. The right of any person whose house is burning down, wife is shot, child is run over. The right of the already doomed to see what their future is about to be. But I didn’t stop. I heard the train pass behind me, and I kept running. The house was a kid’s sparkler in the middle of the street.

“AN-NA! AN-NA! YOU ARE SO FUCKING SMART! YOU WERE SO FUCKING SMAAAAART!”

That’s all that was really necessary, wasn’t it. Have us write a first draft that was so good that it didn’t need to be fixed or redone. Write it right up to the moment that Marshall France arrives in Galen. Go down to the train station then and see if it works, see if it comes in at 5:30 … if
he
comes in at 5:30. If he doesn’t, then you’ve lost nothing. If he does, all you’ve got to do is get rid of your writers, get rid of your evidence. They’re unnecessary now. Father’s home.

I watched the house burn from the other side of the street. I couldn’t get any closer. There was debris strewn everywhere, some of it still burning: a pillow, an upside-down chair, books. And there was part of a body near the front gate. It wore the shredded remains of the bright red mackinaw that I’d bought at Lazy Larry’s.

I didn’t know how much time I had, but I needed every bit of it. My car was parked a few feet away. The fire owned everything. I was in the car, the yellow light flickering across the dashboard. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t have to turn on the headlights for a while because it was so bright. I put it into gear and slowly drove away. There was another explosion while I was still driving down the street. The oil heater? Another stick of dynamite? Looking in the rearview mirror, I saw things flying high in the air over the house, high and in slow motion.

I saw a bull terrier the other day. It isn’t the first one I’ve seen since then, but it is the first time that I haven’t either cringed or run away. It was white with black spots and reminded me of Pete the Dog in the
Our Gang
comedies. I was sitting at a little round cast-iron table out in front of a café. I had been drinking
pastis
and writing a couple of things down in my diary.

The car had thrown a rod, but luckily there was a Citroën repair place in town: one guy in a blue beret smoking one of those yellow Gitanes cigarettes. It wasn’t so bad to stop for a couple of days anyway. The trip from Strasbourg had been done in thunderstorms and I had done most of the driving. But as soon as we got to Brittany the skies cleared and the sun threw out the welcome mat.

The dog’s name was Bobo and he belonged to the owner of the café. After looking at him for a while I went back to my diary. Since Galen, I’ve been pretty good about keeping a record of what has been happening to me.

I bought the book in Burke, Michigan. The first entry went on for pages and pages. Half-coherent, messy, paranoid. A lot of “They’re coming to get me!” sort of thing. Naturally I still have that paranoia, but you get used to living with anything after three years, even that. I don’t know how long it took them to figure out that I wasn’t killed in the explosion, but from the very first I assumed that as soon as they knew for sure, they would come for me.

So I ran like hell, I stopped to pick up a passport in Detroit and then went right over the river to Canada. I worked in Toronto at a paperback bookstore for a while; then I got in touch with my bank in America and had them transfer all of my money up there. When it arrived I quit my job and got on a plane to Frankfurt, Germany. My itinerary since then? Frankfurt, Munich (in time for the Oktoberfest), Salzburg, Milan, Stresa, Zermatt, Grindlwald, Zurich, Strasbourg, Dinard …

My mother still doesn’t know what the hell is going on, but good Joe that she is, she’s never asked questions. When out of the blue she got a wire from me asking for every bit of biographical material on my father that she could find, two weeks later a nicely wrapped package arrived special delivery at the funny post office in Altensteig. It was full of books and articles and yellowed studio handouts that she must have kept over the years.

I started the book in Germany in the winter and worked con stantly on it in small mountain towns that had few tourists. Writing was the only time in the day when Saxony wasn’t on my mind. I’ve cried, I’ve loathed myself for not having saved her, and I miss her more than anything else. In fact I think I might miss her more now than I ever loved her. If that phrase sounds strange, I’m sorry, but it’s the best I can do now.

I also began it because I needed something solid to work on while I tried to figure out what I was going to do. The only thing I knew for sure was that someday I would turn around in Holland or Greece or someplace and see a familiar Galen face smiling evilly at me. But how long would they pursue me? Forever? Or only until they were sure that I wasn’t going to get them back for Saxony’s death? I started the biography of my father to take my mind off my moment-to-moment fears, and because Sax had said that it would be good for me, and because I wanted to.

There were very few long entries in my diary that year. Just brief words of excitement and depression that I would jot down when I could pull myself away from the life of Stephen Abbey, movie star.

I had just gotten him from North Carolina to New York to try out for Broadway when I went to the post office one day and happened to see a package addressed to one Richard Lee, in care of Gasthaus Steinbauer, on a table behind the window clerk. Thank God for small European post offices. Bags and notes were in my brand-new Deux Chevaux in three seconds, and I was on my way down the mountain as fast as that frogmobile would go.

I stayed in Stresa for almost three months because it was lovely and empty, and Lieutenant Henry and his Catherine had rested there before they rowed across Lake Maggiore to Switzerland.

It was so stupid to send Lee after me, but maybe it had a purpose. Maybe now that
he’s
back, they’re trying to purify Galen completely — no more real people, no more normals in Marshall France Town. At least then Anna wouldn’t have to fuck Lee anymore. Yes, and maybe even Anna will be next, who knows? Her father could recreate her, better than ever, the new Anna model. She would never age, never get sick. Maybe that’s why they sent Richard — if anything happened to him, the master would just make another.

It doesn’t make any difference. We waited for him in Zermatt and killed him on a small side street in the middle of the night.

“Hey there, Richard!”

“Tom, Tom Abbey! What do you say!”

He had a long corrugated knife that he was trying to hold close to his side. He smiled and looked around as he walked toward me, just in case any friends of mine happened to be nearby.

When Richard was five or six feet away, Pop stepped out of the pitch dark behind me and said lightly over my shoulder, “Want me to hold your hat for you, kiddo?”

I screamed with laughter and shot right into the middle of Richard’s sad, astonished face.