The Land Of Laughs Read online

  "Galen? Oh, 'bout four miles. You go straight down this road to the junction and turn right, and you'll be there in a few minutes."

  She went back to filling the tank, and I looked at Saxony. She was smiling, but she was obviously as nervous as I was.

  "Well…" I flipped my hand in the air.

  "Well…" She dipped her head in agreement.

  "Well, kid, we're almost there."

  "Yes."

  "The Land of Laughs…"

  "Marshall France Land."

  The road had long gradual dips and rises, and the ups and downs felt good after the straight monotony of the turnpike. We passed a true-to-life railroad dining car, a lumberyard where the fresh smell of cut wood was in and out of the car in a second, and a veterinarian's office with the harsh sound of scared and sick dogs barking crazily from within. At the junction there was a stop sign that had been riddled with bullet holes and BB dents that had rusted orange. A kid was standing next to it, hitchhiking. He looked harmless enough, although I admit that a couple of scenes from In Cold Blood flashed through my mind.

  "Galen."

  We told him that we were going there too and to get in. He had a kind of limp Afro of red hair, and every time I looked in the rearview mirror I saw him either looking me straight in the eye or his burning bush of hair blocking my view.

  "You guys are going to Galen? I saw that you've got Connecticut plates." He pronounced it "Connect-ticut." "You didn't come all the way out here to go to Galen, didya?"

  I nodded pleasantly and looked him over in the mirror. A little positive eye contact. The old stare-him-down game. "Yes, we did, as a matter of fact."

  "Wowie, Connecticut to Galen," he said sarcastically. "Some trip."

  I had had so many twerps like him in class that his rudeness didn't bother me. Boondocks hippie. All he needed was a "KISS" T-shirt and his underpants showing above his blue jeans to make him complete.

  Saxony turned around in her seat. "Do you live there?"

  "Yeah."

  "Do you know Anna France?"

  "Miss France? Sure."

  I chanced another look in the mirror, and his eyes were still on me, but now he was contentedly chewing a thumbnail.

  "You guys are here to see her?"

  "Yes, we've got to talk to her."

  "Yeah? Well, she's okay." He sniffed and moved around in his seat. "She's a hip lady. Very laid-back, you know?"

  All of a sudden we were there. Coming over a small rise, we passed a white house with two thin pillars and a dentist's shingle hanging from a lamppost on the front lawn. Then there was the Dagenais Lawnmower Repair Service in a blue-silver tin shack, a Montgomery Ward outlet store, a firehouse with its big doors swung open but no fire trucks inside, and a grain store that was advertising a special this week on the fifty-pound bag of Purina Dog Chow.

  This was it. This was where he had written all of the books. This was where he had eaten and slept and walked and known people and bought things like potatoes and newspapers and gas for his car. Most of the people here had known him. Had known Marshall France.

  The main part of the town was on the other side of some railroad tracks. As we approached the crossing, the safety bars started to descend and a bell began its warning. I was delighted by the reprieve. Anything that would postpone our seeing Anna France was welcome. I've always liked to stop and watch trains go by. I remember the cross-country trips that my mother and I frequently made on the Twentieth Century and Super Chief when my parents were still married.

  When we got to the lowered bars I switched off the engine and rested my arm on the back of Saxony's seat. It felt hot and clammy. It had turned out to be one of those summer days when the air feels like soft lead and the clouds can't decide on whether they want to downpour or just move on.

  "You can let me off here."

  "Can you tell us where Miss France lives?"

  He stuck his skinny arm between our two seats and jabbed his index finger forward while he talked. "Go to the end of this street, It's about three blocks. Then you take your right onto Connolly Street. Her house is number eight. If you miss it, just ask anyone around there. They'll tell you. Thanks for the ride."

  He got out of the car, and when he walked away I saw that he had colorful patches sewn onto both of his back pockets. One of them was a hand giving you the finger, the other was of a hand giving you the V-for-peace sign. Both patches were red, white, and blue, and the fingers had stars all up and down them.

  The train turned out to be a slow-moving two-hundred-car-long freight. A passing parade of Erie Lackawanna, Chesapeake & Ohio, Seatrain… Loud, even clickety-clicks, the different sounds each car made when it passed. Then the coziness of the little brick-red caboose when it passed and a guy in its high square window was reading a newspaper and smoking a pipe, oblivious of the world. I liked the whole thing.

  When the train was gone, the red-and-white-striped bars began rising slowly, almost as if they were tired and weren't in the mood to go up. I started the engine and bumped the car up and over the tracks. I looked in the mirror and saw that there was no one behind us.

  "You see? That's the difference between here and in the East."

  "What is?"

  "We were just at that crossing for what, five or eight minutes, right? Well, in the East if you were there half that long there would be a line of cars ten miles long waiting to go. Here… well, just look behind us." She did, but she didn't say anything. "You see? Not a car. Not one. That's your difference."

  "Uh-huh. Thomas, do you realize where we are on this earth? Do you realize that we are actually here?"

  "I'm trying not to think about it yet. It makes my stomach ache." An understatement. I was quickly on my way to being terrified of talking to Anna France, but I didn't want Saxony to know that. I kept thinking of every word David Louis had said about her. Witch. Neurotic. To avoid any more conversation, I rolled my window down all the way and took a deep breath. The air smelled of hot dust and something else.

  "Hey, look, Sax, a barbecue! Let's have some lunch."

  A big green canopy had been set up in an open lot between Phend's Sporting Goods and the Glass Insurance Company. Underneath the canopy about twenty people were sitting at redwood picnic tables, eating and talking. A hand-painted sign in front announced that it was the annual Lions Club barbecue. I parked the car next to a dirty pickup truck and got out. The air was still and redolent with the smell of woodsmoke and grilled meat. A slight breeze pushed by. I started to stretch, but when I happened to look toward the eaters I stopped in mid-flight. Almost all of them had stopped eating and were looking at us. Except for one nice-looking woman with short black hair who was hurrying by with a couple of boxes of hamburger rolls in her hands, they were all frozen in position – a fat man in a straw hat with a sparerib held near his open mouth, a woman pouring an empty Coke can into a full cup, a child holding a stuffed pink-and-white rabbit over his head with two hands.

  "What is this, Ode on a Grecian Urn?" I mumbled to no one.

  I watched the woman with the rolls spear open a box with a barbecue fork. The freeze on the rest of them lasted maybe ten long seconds, and then a loud engine noise which turned out to be a truck carrying a palomino horse broke the spell. One of the men behind the grills smiled and waved us over with a greasy spatula.

  "There's plenty here, folks. Come on over and support the Galen Lions."

  We started over, and the man nodded his approval. There was space on one of the benches, so Saxony sat down while I went over to the smoking grills.

  My new pal scraped grease off the silver bars into the fire and called over his shoulder for more ribs. Then he looked at me and tapped the grill. "Connecticut, huh? You came all this way just to taste my spareribs, huh?"

  He had on a puffy white cooking glove that was stained grease-brown on the palm. I smiled stupidly and laughed through my nose.

  "Now, you see, I got the ribs and Bob Schott over there's got the hamburgers. If I were
you, though, I wouldn't eat 'em, because Bob's a doctor and he might try to poison you so he'll have a couple of new customers later."

  Bob thought that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. He looked around to see if everyone was laughing as hard as he was.

  "But now, you take some ribs from me, and you'll know what good is, because I own the market here and this meat is fresh off the truck this morning. It's the best stuff I've got." He pointed at the grilling ribs. They were basted in a red sauce and dripped hot grease onto the coals, which in turn gave off an almost continual sizzle. They smelled great.

  "Sure, Dan, sure. You know that they're just the ones you couldn't sell last week."

  When I looked over my shoulder at Saxony to see how all these knee-slappers were going down with her, I was surprised to see her laughing.

  "Us dopes's keeping you from eating, friend. What would you and your lady like?"

  Dan, the master of ceremonies, was shiny-bald except for some short brown hair on the sides of his head. His eyes were dark and friendly and set into a fat, red, unwrinkled face that looked as if it had eaten a lot of spareribs over the years. He had on a white T-shirt, rumpled tan pants, and black work boots. Overall he reminded me of an actor who died a couple of years ago named Johnny Fox, who was infamous for beating his wife but who nevertheless always played the part in cowboy movies of a cowardly small-town mayor or shopowner. The kind who's afraid to challenge the Dalton gang when they come into town looking to tear everything apart.

  My father used to bring home men like Johnny Fox. They always looked astonished that he had actually invited them to dinner. He would come in the front door and yell to Esther, our cook, that there'd be another for dinner.

  If I was in the room with my mother, she'd inevitably groan and look at the ceiling, as if the answer were written up there. "Your father's found another monster," she'd say, and then push herself wearily up and out of her chair so that she'd at least be standing when he appeared in the doorway with his new pal in tow.

  Looking sheepish and naughty at the same time, he'd boom out, "Look who's in for dinner, Meg, Johnny Fox! You remember Johnny, don't you?"

  Johnny would tiptoe forward and shake her hand as if she were an electric eel about to strike. They were all petrified of her and sensed, despite her invariable politeness, that she couldn't stand having them in her house, much less at her table. But the meals went well. There'd be talk about the movies they were working on, gossip, tidbits from their world. Then, when we were done, Johnny (or whoever) would beat as hasty a retreat as possible out the door, thanking Mother obsequiously for the delicious meal. Once a cameraman named Whitey, who'd brained his wife with a toaster and got thirty days for it, fell back over the rubber welcome mat and sprained his ankle trying to get out.

  When they'd gone, the folks would move into the living room, where Father would light up a Montecristo cigar and she would go to her place by the window, where, with her back to him, she'd begin the battle.

  Matter-of-factly she'd say, "Isn't he the one who beats his wife ((robbed a diner, raised killer dogs, ran Mexicans over the border))?"

  He'd whoosh out a long gray fan of smoke and look at the cigar, a happy man. "Yes, that's right. He just got out of the pokey two weeks ago. Bryson was afraid we'd have to get someone else to play the mayor. It's lucky his wife decided not to press charges."

  "Yes, isn't it?" She tried to shoot out a cynical flame, but her tongue or heart wasn't in it, and as a result her words came out sounding like she was really glad for Johnny.

  "An interesting guy. An interesting guy. I worked with him about five years ago on a picture. He spent the whole time either drunk or trying to put the make on this ugly script girl we had."

  "Delightful. You pick up all the sweetie pies, Stephen."

  This would go on for the time it took him to smoke his cigar. Then he'd either move up behind her and put his hands on her waist or walk out of the room. Whenever he did that, she'd turn around and stare at the doorway a long time.

  "Ribs or a burger?"

  "Excuse me? Oh, ribs! Yes, ribs will be fine."

  Dan scooped up some red sizzlers and put them onto an oversized yellow plate along with two dinner rolls. The grease from the ribs ran across the plate and started soaking into the rolls.

  "That'll be two-fifty, and no charge for the entertainment."

  I got two Cokes and went back to the table. A gray old woman with lined, sunken cheeks and a brown-black tooth in the front of her mouth was sitting next to Saxony and talking low and fast. I thought that was sort of odd, but Saxony listened intently to whatever the other was saying, and when I put the food down in front of her she didn't move. A little miffed, I picked up one of the ribs. It was burning hot and I dropped it on the table. I didn't think that I'd made that much noise, but when I looked up everyone was staring at me again. God, how I hate that. I'm the kind of person who'll order a steak and when the waiter brings fish instead, I'll take it just to avoid making a scene. I hate arguments in public, birthday cakes brought to you in restaurants, tripping or farting or anything out in the open that makes people stop and stare at you for the longest seconds in existence.

  I gave the people around me my "Ain't I a dummy?" smile, but it didn't do any good. They looked and looked and looked..

  "Thomas?" Good old Saxony to the rescue.

  "Yes!" I think I answered loud enough to curdle cream. She picked up the rib and put it back on my plate.

  "This is Mrs. Fletcher. Mrs. Fletcher, Thomas Abbey."

  The old woman stuck her hand out over the table and gave me a strong, pumping shake. She looked about sixty-eight or –nine. I saw her running the town post office or popcorn and candy concession at the movie theater. She didn't have the dry snakeskin of a person who's old and lived out in the sun all her life. More white, an inside-living white that had begun to go gray like an old postcard.

  "How d'ya do? I hear you're out here to stay maybe for a while?"

  I looked at Saxony and wondered how much she had told Mrs. Fletcher. She winked at me in between bites of sparerib.

  "That you might want to rent a place?"

  "Well, yes, maybe. It's just that we don't know how long we'll be here, you see."

  "That doesn't make any difference. I've got so much room downstairs in my house that I could rent it out for a bowling alley. Twice." She took a black-and-gold-plastic cigarette case out of her handbag. Unsnapping it, she pulled out one of those hundred-millimeter-long cigarettes and a black Cricket lighter. Lighting up, she took a huge first drag that quickly burned down into a long ash. It drooped more and more as she talked, but she refused to tap it off.

  "Dan, these ribs look good. Can I have a plate of them?"

  "Sure, Goosey."

  "Notice he calls me Goosey? All of my friends call me that."

  I nodded and didn't know whether it would he rude to start eating again while she talked.

  "You don't have to worry about not being married or anything with me." She looked at us separately and tapped the ring finger on her left hand. "That kind of stuff's never bothered me. I only wish people'd felt that way when I was a girl. I would have had a great time, believe me!"

  I looked at Saxony for her response to that, but she kept looking at Mrs. Fletcher.

  The woman stopped as she was about to say something, and drummed her fingers on the tahle. "I'll rent you my downstairs… I'll rent it to you for thirty-five dollars a week. Now, you can't get that kind of price at any motel around here. It's got a good kitchen down there, too."

  I was about to tell her that we'd have to talk it over when Dan brought her plate.

  "What do you say to thirty-five dollars a week for renting out my downstairs, Dan?"

  He crossed his arms over his stomach and sucked air in through his teeth. It sounded like a steam iron.

  "You people are thinking of staying in Galen for a while, are you?" I didn't know if I was just paranoid, but I was sure that his voice clicked
into being less friendly.

  Saxony spoke before I had a chance to. "We're trying to see if we can talk to Anna France. We're very interested in doing a book about her father."

  And wasn't there a silence then? Faces that showed a slow, thick interest that moved through the air toward us like smoke on humid air?

  "Anna? You say you want to do a book on Marshall?" Dan's voice rose out over the cooking food, the quietness, the breeze that kept coming up out of nowhere and dying just as quickly.

  I was furious with Saxony. I had wanted to poke around the town for at least a few days before I started telling people why we were here. I'd recently read an article about an up and coming writer who lived in a small town in Washington State. The people in the town were tight-lipped about him to outsiders because they liked him and wanted to protect his privacy. Although Marshall France was dead, I was sure all along that the people in Galen would hesitate to talk about him. It was really the first stupid thing Saxony had done. The only thing I could attribute it to was her nervousness at actually being here.

  Dan turned around and bellowed to one of his buddies, "The man here wants to do a book about Marshall France."

  "Marshall?"

  A woman wearing blue jeans and a man's chambray shirt at a table across from us piped up, "On Marshall, you say?"

  I felt like standing up on the bench and announcing through an electronic bullhorn, "YES, FOLKS! I WANT TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT MARSHALL FRANCE. IS IT OKAY WITH YOU?" But I didn't do that. I took a sip of Coke instead.

  "Anna?"

  I wasn't sure that I had heard him right. His voice sounded like he was calling a name rather than stating it.

  "Yes?"

  The voice came up from behind me, and I felt my bowels expand and contract.

  With my back to Anna France, I lived in that momentary limbo that precedes a drastic change in your life. I wanted to turn around, but I didn't dare. What did she look like, what was her voice like, her eyes, her mannerisms? The realization that I was the closest I'd ever come to Marshall France suddenly crept up behind me at a town barbecue, and I was paralyzed.