“Ixnay.”
“I can if I want to!” Wally said, a note of petulance in his voice.
Junior stopped. This wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all. “Go home, Wally!” he commanded. “I mean it!”
Wally had stopped, too, and he looked as if he might be about to burst into tears. Junior knew Wally lived with his mother, in a house even smaller than his own, and Wally’s father had gone out for a pack of cigarettes a year ago and never come home. Or that was the story, at least. Junior had overheard his parents talking about it, when they thought he was asleep. Parents had their secrets, just like kids. “I mean it,” Junior said. “I don’t want you to go with me.”
Wally just stared at him, as the summer sun beat down on both of them.
“Go find somebody else to bother,” Junior told him.
Wally took a backward step. His eyes looked wet behind his glasses. “How come you don’t like me?” Wally asked, and something in his voice was terrible. “How come nobody likes me?”
Junior strode past him, and began walking alone again.
“I like you!” Wally called out. “How come you don’t want to be friends?”
Know what a friend is, Junior? It’s somebody who has the same enemies as you.
Smile, Junior!
He went on. He started up the path, and about fifty yards into the woods he hunkered down and waited to see if Wally Manfred was following. “I don’t care!” he heard Wally shout from the street. “I still like you!”
Junior waited for about ten minutes, there in the underbrush. When he was sure Wally wasn’t coming after him, he stood up and continued on his way.
The trail led through the last of the neighborhood’s woods. Trash and bottles littered the ground, proof that others had followed this path, but Junior’s secret place was up higher on the hillside and about a quarter of a mile away. The trail steepened and became a rough climb, and Junior had to struggle up by grasping onto tree roots that emerged from the dirt. He left the last of the trash and bottles behind, and climbed up through green woods. The secret place was well-hidden, and he’d only found it himself by accident, a couple of years before on one of his long solitary treks.
At last, there it was. A rusted, brown water-tank that rose about sixty feet from the crest of the hill and was all but obscured by trees. A ladder led up, and Junior began to ascend with a quick, easy grace. The ladder took him to the top of the tank, where he stood up and looked to the northeast.
The gray towers of Gotham City loomed before him, and in the valley below were thousands of houses and buildings that radiated out from Gotham City on its maze of streets. There seemed to be nothing green in there, nothing but concrete and brick and stone. Factories stood between him and the central city, and the haze today was a pale, shimmering brown that clung close to the earth. One of those factories was the chemical company where his dad used to be a shift manager, last year, before his nervous breakdown. His dad still worked with the company, but now he was a salesman and he was on the road a lot. The factory was the one with the six tall chimneys, and today white streamers of smoke were rising from them into the brown air.
Junior felt like the king of the world, looking down from this height. But he had the bones in his pockets, and there was work to be done.
He went to the tank’s hatch, where there was a flywheel. The flywheel had been tough to crack open. He’d had to bring a can of Rust-Eater—one of his dad’s products—and a hammer, and even then it had been a hard task to loosen the wheel.
Junior bent down and began to turn the wheel. It was still a tough job that he had to put his shoulders into. But the hatch was coming open, and in another moment he lifted it and looked down the hole. Another ladder led into the empty tank. Hot, dry air rose into Junior’s face. He let most of the heat out, and then he eased down into the hole and began to descend the ladder, eagerness working in his brain like a hot little machine full of oiled gears.
He was happy for a while, industrious amid his toys.
He emerged when the afternoon had cooled. His pockets were empty. He resealed the water tank, went back the way he’d come through the woods, and headed for home.
Eddie Connors and his buddies were no longer in sight, but the red Chevy was still there. Junior stopped at Mrs. Broughton’s and leaned over her fence to smell a rose, and his gaze ticked back and forth, looking for Junior or the others. A few beer cans lay on the street near the car. Junior stared at them, and began to shred the petals from a yellow rose. Then he crossed the street to the Chevy, took a handful of dirt and grit from the Connors’ yard, and opened the Chevy’s gas portal. In went the dirt, quick as you please. He washed it down with some beer left in a can, and then he closed the gas portal and returned the beer can exactly as it had been.
He went home smiling.
And there he found his mother, on her knees in the front room, scrubbing the threadbare carpet around the easy chair that faced the television set.
“He’s coming home!” Mom said, and her eyes were wild in her pallid face. “He called! He’ll be home by six o’clock!”
Two hours. Junior knew the routine. There was no time to be lost. He shoved down the terror that threatened to rise up within him, and he caged it. Then he hurried past his mother into his small dark room, and he began to straighten his shelves of books and put them all in alphabetical order. If there was one thing his father demanded, it was order in this chaotic world.
Oh yes: and one other thing, too.
Smile, Junior! Smile, Wifey!
SMILE, I SAID!
When Junior was finished with his books, he worked on his closet. Blue clothes together, white clothes together, garments with red next, then with green. Laces tied in all the shoes. Socks balled up, just so. A place for everything, and everything in its place. “Help me!” his mother called, her voice getting frantic. “Junior, help me mop the kitchen floor! Hurry!”
“Yes, Mother,” he said, and he went into the kitchen where his mother was working on the yellow linoleum tiles that would never fully be clean, never, never in a hundred years of scrubbing even with Stain-Away.
At four minutes before six o’clock, they heard his car turn into the driveway. They heard the engine stop, and the driver’s door open. They heard him coming, and mom said to her son, “Daddy’s home!” She clicked on an awful smile, and went to the front door.
“Darling!” she said, as the tall, slim man in a dark brown suit came into the house, carrying his briefcase of samples. She hugged him, stiffly, and drew away as soon as she could. “How was your trip?”
“It was,” Dad answered. “Thank you. This is the only job I know of where you can have breakfast in Lynchton, lunch in Harrisburg, and indigestion in Fremont.” His eyes, darker than his son’s, searched their faces. “That’s a joke,” he said. “How about a couple of smiles?”
Mom gave a bright, forced laugh. Junior stared at the floor, and smiled with aching jaws.
“Come give me a hug,” Dad said. “Know what a hug is? The freedom of the press.”
Junior walked to his father, and hugged him with labored arms.
“Good boy,” Dad said. “Know what a boy is? An appetite with a skin pulled over it. What’s for dinner, Wifey?”
“I was going to put some turkey dinners into the oven.”
“Turkey dinners.” Dad nodded. “Okay, that’s all right. It’s a good night for the funnies. Turkey: that’s a bird who’d strut a lot less if he could see into the future.” Their smiles weren’t quick enough. Dad slammed his briefcase down into his easy chair, and the noise made both mother and son jump. “Damn it, where’s the happiness around here? This isn’t a funeral home, is it? I’ve seen bigger smiles on dead people! That’s no wonder, since the dead don’t have to pay taxes! What’s wrong with you two? Aren’t you happy?”
“We’re happy!” Mom said quickly. “We’re real happy! Aren’t we, Junior?”
Junior looked into his father’s face. It was a t
ight face, with hard, sharp cheekbones. His father’s eyes were dark and deep-set, and down in that darkness there was a rage coiled up and waiting. It flew out without warning, but most of the time it lay inside Dad’s head and simmered in its stew of perpetual jokes and gritted-teeth smiles. Where that rage had been born, and why, Junior did not know, and he figured his father didn’t know either. But jokes were its armor and weapons, and Dad wore them like metal spikes.
“Yes, sir,” Junior answered. “I’m happy.”
“Remember what I told you.” Dad placed a finger against his son’s chest. “People like to smile. If you can make people smile, you’ll be a success. People like to hear a joke or two. They like to laugh. Know what a laugh is? It’s a smile that’s exploded.” The finger moved to one corner of Junior’s mouth and hitched it up. Then to the other. “There,” Dad said. “That’s what I like to see.”
Mom turned away and walked into the kitchen to put three turkey TV dinners in the oven. Then Dad began his weekly inspection of the house—a wandering from room to room as he spouted off jokes and comments he considered funny, punctuated by the opening of drawers and cabinets. The rest of the evening would be spent with John in front of the TV set, watching the sitcoms and scribbling down on his yellow pad jokes and repartee that particularly caught his interest. Grist for the grin mill, he called it.
That’s a joke, Junior.
Smile.
Sometimes between the third and fourth comedy show of the night, Junior opened a door and went down the stairs to the dirt-floored basement. He switched on the light bulb, picked up a flashlight, which was always in its proper place, and went to the far corner at the rear of the basement. He lifted a cardboard box and watched roaches scurry in the flashlight’s beam.
The ants were swarming. They’d done a good job. The chipmunk was almost down to the bones, and most of the kitten’s bones were showing now, too. It wouldn’t be too much longer. But Junior was impatient for his toys. The basement was very damp, the walls mildewed. He wondered if he’d have skeletons faster if he put the dead things in a dryer place. He lifted a second box, looking at his newest acquisitions. He’d found the dead bat in the abandoned house near the church three blocks away, and the robin had been snatched from a cat’s jaws just yesterday. They weren’t going to smell very good soon. The smell would rise into the house, as the beautiful summer days got hotter. Junior had been wanting to kill a full-grown dog or cat and watch its skeleton come out, but that smell would get up into the house for sure and his mother might come down here and find everything. His father he didn’t worry much about; nothing pulled his father away from the comedies and the yellow joke pad.
But if he was going to start finding bigger playthings, maybe he needed somewhere else to keep them.
At nine-forty, Junior was sitting in the living room watching his father snore in his easy chair. His mother was on the telephone in the kitchen, talking to her friend Linda Shapona, who lived a few streets over. They’d gone to high school together, and Linda owned the beauty shop on Kerredge Avenue. Mom was usually on the telephone most of the evening; it was her only route of escape. The television was on, the last of the night’s comedies. The yellow pad had slipped to the floor, and Junior picked it up to see what his father had written there.
It was hard to read the writing. The pen had attacked the paper. Junior could only make out a few of the mass of scribbled jokes and puns, the writing running together and overlapping like a nest of thorns.
Boss. A big noise in the office but at home a little squeak.
What’s a diplomat’s favorite color? Plaid.
Heaven’s where God pays all the bills.
A father always no’s best.
Middle age is the time in life when a girl you smile at thinks you know her.
“It’s late.”
Junior looked up. His father’s eyes were swollen, and he was peering at his wristwatch under the dim lamplight. “Gosh. I went to sleep, didn’t I?”
“Yes, sir.” Junior put the yellow pad down beside his father’s chair. His father stretched, and his joints popped.
“I get tired early, I guess. I didn’t even know my eyes closed.”
“Yes, sir,” Junior said.
Dad picked up the yellow pad and examined it. The way the light caught his face made him look very old, and the sight made Junior think of the collection of skulls at the Gotham Museum, one of his favorite places to spend a Saturday. “People like to smile,” Dad said, in a quiet voice. “They like a man who tells jokes. A happy man.” Junior suddenly tensed, because he heard the sound of a car’s engine racketing. Dad stared at the front door, as if he expected Eddie Connors’s red Chevy to come roaring up the porch steps and into the house. Eddie revved the engine a few times, getting ready to lay rubber on the street right in front of the house—and then the car began to pop and sputter, and after a few seconds of that the engine died.
“Thank God,” Dad said, and let out the breath he’d been holding. “I can’t stand that noise. It makes my head hurt.”
Junior nodded. Eddie Connors wasn’t going to be tearing the street up tonight.
Dad was looking at his son. They stared at each other, their faces similar constructions of flesh and bone. The people in the situation comedy prattled on, and the canned laughter filled the room. “You’re my boy, aren’t you?” Dad asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“My boy,” Dad repeated. “And you’re not going to be one of those people who think the world owes him a giving, are you?”
“No, sir.”
“That’s a joke. Smile.”
Junior did, on command.
His father leaned toward him. Closer. And closer still. Junior could see pinpricks of sweat glistening on his father’s cheeks and forehead. His father’s skin had a sour smell, and the man’s eyes were like black glass. “Junior?” his father whispered. “I want to tell you a secret. Know what a secret is? It’s anything a woman doesn’t know. But I want to tell you, because you’re my boy.” His father’s face floated before him in the dim light, half of it in shadow like a waning moon. “I’m afraid,” Dad whispered. He swallowed thickly, as the canned laughter swelled. “I’m afraid I’m getting sick again.”
Junior didn’t speak. A small vein was beating very hard at his right temple, and his lips were bloodless.
“Sometimes,” Dad said, “I feel like the world is spinning so fast it’s about to throw me off. Sometimes I feel like the sky is so heavy it’s crushing me down, and I can’t get a breath. They gave me a second chance, at the company. They said I was good with people, and I could make people smile so I ought to be able to sell things.” A grin flickered across his mouth like quicksilver, but his eyes remained black. “A salesman. That’s somebody with two feet on the ground who takes orders from a person with two feet on a desk.”
Junior did not smile.
“I feel like . . . the wind’s about to take me away, Junior. I feel like I can’t get steady. I don’t know why. It’s just . . . I can’t stay happy.”
Junior didn’t move. He could hear his mother, talking on the telephone. He thought of the toys in the basement, slowly being whittled down to the bones by ants and roaches, a little more hour after hour.
“I can’t go back to that hospital,” his father whispered, right in his face. “I couldn’t stand that place. They don’t know how to smile there. That’s what Hell would be for me, Junior. A place where people wouldn’t smile. If I had to go back there . . . I don’t know what I might do.”
“Dad?” Junior’s voice cracked. “I . . . wish you wouldn’t . . . talk like this.”
“What’s wrong with wanting to be happy?” his father asked. The whisper was gone. “Is it a sin to be happy? Is it a damned sin?” His father was getting louder, and he drew his face back from Junior’s. “You know, that’s what’s wrong with this world! They take everything away from you, and then they try to cut the smile off your face! Well, I won’t let them! I’ll
see them in Hell before they break me down! They broke down my old man, and he was crying with that bottle in his hand and I said I’ll make you smile again, I will. I’ll make you smile, I’ll do anything to make you smile, but the world broke him down! Because a man who smiles is a dangerous man! They want to cut the smile off your face, and make you weak! But I won’t have it. I swear to God I won’t have it! And you’re part of me, Junior, you’re my boy, you’re my flesh and bone!” One of Dad’s sinewy hands grasped his son’s shoulder. “The world’s not going to break us down, is it?”
“No, sir,” Junior said, lifelessly, but in his chest his heart was pounding.
“Junior?” It was his mother. She was standing in the doorway between the front room and the kitchen, and her hands had seized the wall like white spiders. Her eyes tracked back and forth from the boy to his father, and over the noise of the television laughter Junior could hear his father’s harsh, slow breathing. “Why don’t you get ready for bed? All right?”
A silence stretched. And then Dad said, “Mom’s the word,” and released his son. As Junior walked toward the hallway that led to his room, his father said, “Know what a mother is, Junior? It’s a woman who spends twenty years making a boy into a man so another woman can make a fool of him in twenty minutes.” Junior kept going, his insides quaking. He had taken three more steps when his father said, easily, “Lock your door tonight.”
Junior stopped. Terror had crippled him. Those words were not said very often, but Junior understood them. He looked at his mother, who seemed to have diminished in size, her skin turned a sickly gray.
“Lock your door,” Dad repeated. He was staring at the television screen. “Say your prayers, will you?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy answered, and he went to his room and locked the door. Then he lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, where cracks riddled the plaster.
In the morning, he could pretend he had had a particularly terrible nightmare. He could pretend he had not heard, as the clock’s hands crept past midnight, the muffled noise of his father’s voice beyond the wall, speaking stridently—commanding—and his mother’s weak begging. He could pretend he had not heard his father shouting for her to laugh, to laugh, to fill the house with laughter. To laugh and laugh until she screamed. And there was the slapping noise of the belt and a lamp going over and the bed creaking savagely and his mother’s sobbing in the silence that followed afterward.
The Further Adventures of The Joker Page 7
