The Land Of Laughs

by Jonathan Carroll

  For the next few weeks we poked around more and more together. We went down to New Haven to see a play, drove all the way to Sturbridge Village for dinner one night, and sat out a freak hailstorm in a little cottage my mother owned on the Rhode Island shore.

  One afternoon she sheepishly asked if she could go to Galen.

  "Yes, but only if you promise to go with me."

  Part Two

  1

  "Saxony, you can't take all of those suitcases! What do you think this is, Wagon Train?"

  All she needed was an ancient steamer trunk to complete her lineup. There was a delicate yellow-and-red wicker basket, a scruffy knapsack that bulged like a bratwurst, an old brown leather suitcase with brass locks and edges. She'd topped it all off with several things just back from the dry cleaner's in plastic wrap on metal hangers.

  She scowled at me and walked around to the back of the station wagon. She flipped down the gate and laid the first of her many things in.

  "Don't you hassle me, Thomas. I've had one lousy day so far, okay? Just don't hassle me."

  I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, looked at my new haircut in the rearview mirror, and wondered whether it was worth a fight. For a week I'd been telling her that I wanted to travel as light as possible on this trip. Since we had been together almost every day after my New York trip, I'd come to believe that she had about three shirts and two dresses and a white smock that looked like a peasant castoff. At one point I wanted to buy her an Indian dress she admired in a store window, but she wouldn't let me, even when I insisted. "Not yet," she said, whatever that was supposed to mean.

  So what did she have in those bags? Another nightmare grew in my mind – groceries and a hot plate! She was going to cook our meals all the way to Galen! Banana bread… curry… apple tea…

  "What've you got in those things anyway, Sax?"

  "There's no reason to yell!"

  I looked at her in the mirror and saw her with her hands on her hips. I thought of how nice those hips were without any clothes on them.

  "Okay, I'm sorry. But how come you're taking so much?"

  I heard gravel crunch, and then she was standing by my door. I looked up at her, but she was busy undoing the straps on the wicker basket.

  "Just look."

  It was full of handwritten notes, magazine clippings, blank yellow pads, yellow pencils, and the fat pink erasers she liked to use.

  "This one is my work bag. Am I allowed to take it?"

  "Sax…"

  "The duffel bag has all of my clothes in it…."

  "Look, I wasn't saying…"

  "And the suitcase has some marionettes in it that I'm working on." She smiled and clicked the latches shut on the bag. "That's the one thing that you'll have to get used to around me, Thomas: wherever I go, I always carry my life around with me."

  "I would hope so."

  "Oh, you're very funny, Thomas. So clever."

  June graduation ceremonies had taken place several days before, so the campus of my school was summer-green and silent and kind of sad when we drove away. Schools without students are always strangely ominous to me. All the rooms are too clean and the floors too polished. When a phone rings it echoes all over the place, and it will go eight or nine times before someone feels like answering it or the caller realizes that everyone's gone and he hangs up. We passed a huge copper beech tree that was a great favorite of mine, and I realized that I wouldn't sit under it again for a long time.

  She reached over and turned on the radio. "Thomas, are you sad that you're leaving?"

  The last part of "Hey, Jude" was on, and I remembered the girl I was dating on Nantucket when the song first came out in the sixties.

  "Sad? Yes, a little. But I'm pretty glad, too. After a while you discover that you're talking and moving in a trance. Do you know that I taught Huckleberry Finn for the fourth time this year? It's a great book and all, but it was getting to the point where I wasn't even reading the stuff anymore. I didn't have to be able to teach it. That kind of thing's not good."

  We sat and listened to the song finish. I guess the station was doing a Beatles retrospective, because "Strawberry Fields Forever" came on next. I drove up a ramp onto the New England Thruway.

  "Did you ever want to be an actor?" She pulled a thread off the sleeve of my shirt.

  "An actor? No, not after my father, hell no."

  "I remember being madly in love with Stephen Abbey after I saw him in The Beginners."

  I snorted but didn't say anything. What person in the world wasn't in love with my father?

  "Don't laugh at me – it's true!" Her voice was almost indignant. "I'd just gone into the hospital for the first time, so my parents got me a little portable television set. I remember the whole thing very clearly. It was on Million Dollar Movie, which showed the same old film every afternoon for a week. I watched every showing of both The Beginners and Yankee Doodle Dandy."

  "Yankee Doodle Dandy?"

  "Yes, with James Cagney. I was madly in love with both James Cagney and your father when I was in the hospital."

  "How long were you in there?"

  "The hospital? For four months the first time and two the second."

  "And what did they do – skin grafts and that kind of thing?"

  She didn't say anything. I looked over at her, but there was no expression on her face. I hadn't meant to pry, and as the silence continued, I felt like apologizing, but I didn't.

  A big thunderstorm was brewing up over the hills in front of us, and we drove into a lowering curtain of smoky pearl clouds. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the sun still shining down on where we'd just come from. I knew that most of the people back there had no idea of what they were in for later that afternoon.

  "When did you fall out of love with my father?"

  "Thomas, do you really want to know about when I was in the hospital? I've never liked to talk about it, but if you'd like to know, I'll tell you."

  She said it with so much conviction in her voice that I didn't know what to answer. She went on before I had a chance to say anything.

  "The first time was horrible. They'd put me in these baths so that all of the dead skin would come off and the new could start to grow. I remember that there was this stupid nurse named Mrs. Rasmussen who took care of me and always talked to me like I was a moron. I don't remember much else about it except that I was scared and hated everything. I guess I've blocked a lot out. The second time was a lot of therapy, and everyone seemed much nicer. It's probably because they knew I'd be walking again. When I was in there, I discovered that people treat you much more… I don't know, humanely, when they see that you're going to be all right again."

  A snake of yellow lightning skittered across the clouds, followed closely by one of those quick cracks of thunder that make you jump a little in spite of yourself. The radio had become almost pure static, so I switched it off. Big marbles of rain began to fall, but I held off turning on the windshield wipers until the last moment. My side window was down, and I could feel the dying heat and heaviness on the air. I thought about a little Saxony Gardner sitting bolt upright in a hospital bed with her little-kid legs bandaged all the way up and down. The picture was so sad and sweet that it made me smile. If I'd had a kid like that, I would have bought her so many toys and books that she would have suffocated under them.

  "What was it like being the son of Stephen Abbey?"

  I took a deep breath to put her off for a minute. In the time that we'd been together she'd asked me very few questions about my family, and I was damned grateful.

  "My mother called him Punch. Sometimes he'd walk off a set in the middle of the day, come home, and take us all out to someplace like Knott's Berry Farm or the beach. He'd run around and buy us all hot dogs and Coke and ask us if this wasn't the best time we'd ever had in our lives. He got pretty manic sometimes, but we loved it all. If he got too crazy, then my mother would say, 'Take it easy, Punch,' and I'd hate her for it. He always
had to be the life of the party when he was around, but since he was around so little then, we all ate him up."

  The rain came down in transparent curtains, and you could hear it slooshing up under the wheels. I was driving in the slow lane, and whenever someone passed us there was so much water flung across the windshield that the poor wipers could barely keep up with it. The lightning and thunder were simultaneous now, so I knew that the storm was right over us.

  "He took me to the studio once when they were filming A Fire in Virginia. In a way, it was one of the greatest days of my life, I guess. All I remember about it was that someone was always asking me if I wanted an ice cream, and that later I fell asleep and was carried into his dressing room. When I woke up he was standing over me like a white mountain, smiling that famous smile. He had on an all-white shirt and a huge cream panama hat with a black band." I shook my head and tapped out a tune on the steering wheel to swish away the memory. A Grand Union trailer truck floated by in slow motion.

  "Did you love him?" Her voice was quiet and held back, I guess a little afraid.

  "No. Yes. I don't know – how can you not love your father?"

  "Very easily – I didn't love mine. His greatest dream in life came true when one of his students got into Harvard."

  "What do you mean – your father was a teacher?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "You never told me that."

  "Yes. He taught English too."

  I slid a quick look at her, and she puffed out her cheeks so that she looked like a squirrel with a lot of nuts in there.

  "I guess I shouldn't say this, but he was awful, from everything I remember about him." She put her hands on the dashboard and patted out a kind of soft African beat. She spoke while she patted. "He used to eat sliced pineapple and read Hiawatha out loud to my mother and me."

  "Hiawatha? 'By the shores of Gitchy Gummi, / On the bottom of the lake, / Hiawatha and his buddies / Playing poker for a stake.'"

  "Gee, you must be an English teacher too."

  The sky was so dark that I switched on the headlights and slowed down to forty. I had often wondered what she was like as a kid. That nice, moony-pale face in miniature. I could see her off in a dark corner of a dark living room playing with her marionettes until nine, when her mother would tell her to go to bed. White socks that were falling down, and black patent leather shoes with gold buckles.

  "You know, Thomas, when I was little about the only exciting thing my family ever did was to go to Peach Lake on the weekends in the summer. I used to get sunburned."

  "Oh, yeah? Well, the only exciting thing that ever happened to me was reading The Land of Laughs and drinking Hires root beer out of a big glass bottle. Whatever happened to Hires root beer in a big glass bottle?"

  "Oh, come on, you can't tell me that your life out there with all of those famous people wasn't neat. You don't have to try to make me feel better."

  "Better? That has nothing to do with it. At least you had a normal father! Look, being his son was like living in this birdcage. You couldn't open your mouth without everyone being fake-nice to you or telling you how much they liked your 'Papa's' movies! What the hell did I care about his movies? I was a little kid, for Christ's sake! All I wanted to do was ride my bike."

  "Don't shout."

  "I don't have to…" I wanted to say something more, but I saw the turnoff for a roadside rest stop so I took it instead. It was dark as night outside as I crept down the exit ramp. The parking lot was filled with camper trucks and cars with overflowing luggage racks. Many of them were open to the rain, so the exposed suitcases, baby strollers, and bicycles were totally soaked and shiny. I found a parking space when a white Fiat with Oklahoma plates almost hit me while backing out of it. I switched off the motor and we both sat there while the rain hammered on the roof. Her hands were folded in her lap, but mine still gripped the steering wheel. I felt like ripping it off and handing it to her.

  "All right, do you want something to eat or what?"

  "Eat? Why? We've only been on the road for an hour."

  "Oh, well, I'm sorry, dear – I'm not supposed to be hungry, huh? I'm not allowed to eat or anything unless you do, is that it?" I sounded like a kid who's just discovered sarcasm but doesn't know how to use it yet.

  "Just shut up, Thomas. Go outside and have a fishburger or something. I don't care what you do. I don't deserve your anger."

  There wasn't much else I could do but go. We both knew that I was making more and more of an ass of myself, but by then I didn't know how to stop. If I'd been her, I would have been royally bored by me.

  "Do you want any… ? Oh, shit, I'll be back in a little while."

  I opened the door and stepped right into this monstrous puddle, drenching both my sneaker and sock in one plunge. I looked to see if she'd been watching, but her eyes were closed, hands still folded in her lap. I put my other, dry foot carefully into the puddle and left it there until I felt the cold seeping in. Then I paddled both feet up and down in my new little footbath. Splish splat.

  "What… are… you… doing?"

  Splish splat.

  "Thomas, don't do that." She started to laugh. It sounded so much better than the rain. "Don't be crazy! Close the door."

  My back was to her, and I felt her grab a handful of my sweatshirt. She laughed harder and gave a strong tug.

  "Will you please get back in here? What are you doing?"

  I looked up into the rain, and it was coming down so hard and sharp that it forced my eyes closed. "Penance! Penance! All of my fucking life people have been asking me what it was like to be Stephen Abbey's son. Every time I try to answer that question, I sound dumber and dumber."

  I stopped flapping my feet. I felt so sad, like such an idiot. I wanted to turn around and look at her, but I couldn't. "I'm sorry, Sax. If I had anything to say, God knows, I'd tell you."

  The wind was blowing the rain right into my face. A family walked by and gaped at me.

  "I don't care, Thomas." The wind gusted and closed my eyes again. I didn't know if I'd heard her right.

  "What?"

  "I said that I don't care about your father." She touched my back with the flat of her hand, and now her voice was strong and insistent and loving.

  I turned around and put my wet arms around her. I kissed her warm neck and could feel her kissing mine.

  "Hold me tight, you old sponge. You've already got me soaked." She squeezed tighter and gave my neck a bite.

  I couldn't think of anything to say except for a line from France's book The Green Dog's Sorrow: "The Voice of Salt loved Krang too. When it was with her, it always whispered."

  2

  We had planned to make the trip in two days, but suddenly we were stopping at Stuckey's for pralines, Frontier Town or Santa Claus Village or Reptile City whenever we saw them advertised, and anywhere in general if we were in the mood.

  "Wait a minute. Do you want to see… hold it… the site of the Battle of Green River?"

  "I don't know. Sure. What war was it in?"

  "What's the difference? Five miles to go. Sax, what's your favorite France book?"

  "It's a toss-up between Pool of Stars and Land of Laughs."

  "Pool of Stars? Really?"

  "Yes, I think my favorite scene of all is in there. The one where the girl goes down to the beach at night. When she sees the old man and the white bird scooping those blue holes out of the ocean."

  "Jeez, I couldn't say what my favorite scene is. Something out of Land of Laughs, though. Definitely. But I'd have trouble choosing between a funny scene and a magical one. In many ways I like the funny scenes more now, but when I was little those battles between the Words and the Silence… phew!"

  "Thomas, don't drive off the road."

  Sometimes we pulled off the highway into a parking area and perched on the hot hood of the car, watching everyone fly by. Neither of us would say a word, and there wasn't any urge to keep moving, to get there.

  The first night out, we s
tayed in a little town just west of Pittsburgh. The people who ran our motel raised black-and-tan coonhounds, and after dinner we took a few puppies out onto the front lawn and let them bite us for a while.

  "Thomas?"

  "Uh-huh? Hey, catch him before he gets away."

  "Listen to me, Thomas, this is serious."

  "Okay."

  "Do you know this is the first time I've ever been to a motel with anyone?"

  "Is that right?"

  "Uh-huh. And you know what else? I'm very pleased." She handed me a puppy and stood up. "When I was younger and used to think about my burns all the time, I never thought any man would ever want to go to a motel with me, the way I looked."

  The next morning when we were about to leave, the woman came out of the office and gave us these beautiful lunches she had packed, complete with beer and Milky Way candy bars. She whispered something to Saxony and then went back into the office.

  "What'd she say?"

  "She said that you were too skinny and that I should give you my Milky Way."

  "You should."

  "Nothing doing."

  The whole trip went like that – one nice thing after another – so by the time we got to St. Louis and saw the Saarinen Arch, we were both a little rueful that we'd already come this far. We stopped in the middle of the day in Pacific, Missouri, and wandered around the Six Flags amusement park there. That night we went back to our air-conditioned motel room and made love. She kept saying my name over and over again. I'd never been with anyone who'd done that. Things were so nice now. I looked in all the dark corners of my life and wondered which one of them had something up its sleeve…. No answer. Not that I was expecting one.

  3

  I pulled into a Sunoco station and a pretty blond girl with a bright red St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap came out of the garage.

  "Fill it up, please. Also, how far is it to Galen?"

  She bent down and put her hands on her knees. I noticed that her fingernails were short and that two of them were completely blackened. As if something heavy had fallen on them, the blood came up from the finger underneath and stayed.