Smile, Junior.
SMILE, I SAID!
His teeth gritted in a rictus, he lay with night pressing in on the house and darkness coiled within.
When he got out of bed, the sun was shining again. His father was gone, and so was the briefcase and the yellow pad. His mother made him breakfast. She had a split lip, but most of her bruises never showed. She smiled and laughed, a brittle sound, as she moved around the kitchen, and when she asked Junior what he was going to do today he said he had plans.
He left home early, bound for the secret place. He passed Eddie Connors’s red Chevy, a deballed stallion at the curb. It would take more than a wrench to get the fuel line unclogged. He continued along the street where sunlight and shadows intermingled, and he went his way alone.
Atop the water tower on the high hill, Junior stood staring toward the spires of Gotham City. The chimneys of the factories were pumping out smoke, the arteries were clogged with traffic, and life went on whether your old man was crazy or not.
Junior opened the tower’s hatch, and that was when he heard the voice.
“Hey, Junior! Hey, I’m down here!”
He walked to the edge, looked down at the green earth, and there stood Wally Manfred in his T-shirt and shorts, this time wearing purple socks with his sneakers. Wally was grinning, and the sun sparked off his glasses. Wally waved up at him. “I see you!”
Junior felt his eyes narrow. Felt his face tighten, around the bones of his father. Felt rage open inside him like the unfolding of a dark flower, and black seeds spewed forth.
“I followed you!” Wally said. “Fooled you, huh?”
Junior trembled. It was a quick trembling, over and done with, but it was like an inner earthquake and left cracks in his foundation.
The secret place had been found. His haven of solitude was no longer his. And what did he own on this earth, except the toys that were stored within?
“What’re you doin’ up there?” Wally called.
Junior made his face relax. He made a smile rise up, through the hot flesh. He opened his mouth, and he said, “Climb up.”
“Is this where you go all the time? It sure is high!”
“Climb up,” Junior repeated. “The ladder’s strong.”
“I don’t know.” Wally kicked at a stone with the toe of his sneaker. “I might fall.”
“I won’t let you fall,” Junior said. “Honest.”
“Maybe I can come up halfway,” Wally said, and he started up the ladder.
What he was going to do about this, Junior didn’t know. Sooner or later, Wally would tell somebody else about the secret place. Wally might even come up here alone, open the hatch, and see what was inside. Wally might go tell his mother, and then his mother might tell Junior’s mother, and then . . .
They might get the wrong idea. They might think he was like his father. They might want him to go to that hospital where his father had gone, and where his father would be returning to soon. They might think something was wrong with him, and that something had been wrong with him for a long time but he’d been very good at hiding it.
“I’m halfway up!” Wally called out. He sounded scared. “I’d better stop!”
Junior was staring toward Gotham City, a garden of stones. “Come on the rest of the way,” he said quietly. “I’ve . . . got a joke to tell you.”
“I’d better get down!”
“It’s a good joke. Come on up, Wally. Come on up.”
Silence. Junior waited. And then he heard the noise of Wally climbing the rest of the way up, and Junior said, “That’s a good boy. Know what a boy is? An appetite with a skin pulled over it.”
Wally reached the top of the tank. There was sweat on his face, and his glasses had slid down to the end of his nose. He was shaking as he got off the ladder and stood up.
“There’s a good view of Gotham City from here. See?” Junior pointed.
Wally turned to look at the city. “Wow,” he said, his back to Junior.
One push.
Sixty feet down.
Drag Wally into the bushes. Hide him. Who was Wally, anyway? He was a little nothing, and he should never have sneaked up here to the secret place. One push, and the secret would be a secret again. But Junior didn’t move, and then Wally turned around again and saw the open hatch. “What’s in there?” he asked.
And it all came clear to Junior, what should be done, like a burst of brilliant light in his brain.
“Want to see?” Junior asked, smiling. He was cold, even standing in the sunshine, and he trembled though he could feel sweat on his back.
Wally walked carefully to the hatch and looked in, but it was dark in there and he could see nothing. “I don’t know.”
“I’ll go down first. I’ve got a light in there. Want to see?”
Wally shrugged. “I guess.”
“Just come down the ladder slow and easy,” Junior told him. “Wally? You like me, don’t you?”
“Yeah.” Wally nodded, but he was looking at the open hatch.
“Follow me down,” Junior said, and he slid into the hatch and descended the ladder.
In another moment, Wally Manfred followed. Junior reached the bottom and picked up a flashlight he’d brought from home. He didn’t switch it on yet, and Wally said nervously, “Where’s the light?”
“I’ve got it. Just come on down.”
“It smells bad in here. It’s hot, too.”
“No, it’s not,” Junior said. “It’s just right.”
Wally reached the tank’s floor. His hands found Junior’s arm. “I can’t see anything.”
“Here’s a light,” Junior said, and he switched it on. A heat was building in his skull, and his temples were pounding. “See my toys?” he asked, as he swung the light slowly back and forth. “I made them, all by myself.”
Wally was silent.
Wires dangled from pipes overhead, and from those wires hung the bones.
There were over a hundred. Constructions of wire and small skeletons—birds, kittens, puppies, chipmunks, squirrels, lizards, mice, snakes and rats. Junior had not killed all of them himself; most of the carcasses he’d found, on his long solitary treks. He’d only killed maybe forty of them, the kittens, puppies, and some birds with broken wings. But the skeletons had been reformed, with wire and patience, into bizarre new shapes that did not resemble anything that had ever lived. There were birds with the skulls of kittens, and kittens with wings. There were comminglings of rats and puppies, squirrels with beaks, and other things with eight legs and three heads and ribcages melded together like strange Siamese twins. There were things freakish and hellish, constructed from Junior’s imagination. And here, on these wires, was the result of the only thing that excited Junior and made him truly smile: Death.
“I . . . think . . . I’d better go home,” Wally said, and he sounded choked.
Junior’s hand closed on the boy’s wrist, and held him. “I wanted you to see my toys, Wally. Aren’t they pretty?” He kept moving the light, going to one grotesquerie after another. “It takes hard work to do this. It takes a careful hand. Do you see?”
“I’ve gotta get home, Junior! Okay?”
“I do good work,” Junior said. “I make things that not even God can do.”
“Junior, you’re hurtin’ my arm!”
“You like me, don’t you?” Junior asked, as he moved the light from monster to monster.
“Yeah! I like you! Lemme go, okay?”
Junior swallowed thickly. His face was damp with sweat, his heart racing. “Nobody who likes me,” he said, “is worth anything.”
He let Wally go, and he picked up the hammer that lay near the bottom of the ladder, next to the coil of wire, the wire-cutters and glue and the can of Rust-Eater. Wally was pulling himself up on the first rung of the ladder, but Junior grinned and swung the hammer and as the hammer crunched into the back of Wally Manfred’s skull, Junior was filled with a blaze of joy.
Wally gave a little
cry, and he fell backward off the ladder. In the wind of his passage, the freakish skeletons danced. Wally tried to get up to his knees on the floor, and Junior watched him struggle for a moment. The red was coming out of Wally’s head.
Junior thought of his father, scribbling fevered jokes on the yellow pad. He thought of his mother, and how she sobbed through the wall on the nights when Junior locked his door.
Smile, Junior.
SMILE, I SAID!
Wally was mewing, like a wounded kitten.
“Know what a laugh is?” Junior asked.
Wally didn’t answer.
“It’s a smile,” Junior said, “that explodes.”
He hit Wally with the hammer again, in the back of the head. Again. And again. Wally was on his stomach and he was making no noise. Junior lifted the clotted hammer to strike Wally Manfred once more, but he stopped himself.
There was no use breaking the skull anymore.
Junior sat down beside the corpse, making sure not to get any blood on his clothes. He listened to the rustling of his toys overhead. The secret place was a secret again, and all was right with the world.
After a while, he prodded dead Wally with the hammer. Poked him all over, seeing how much meat there was on the bones. Wally was a skinny kid. It wouldn’t be long. Wally had never known he was a walking Erector Set, with so many different neat parts.
Junior switched off the flashlight and he smiled in the darkness.
He was a happy boy.
He left the hammer in its proper place. Atop the tank, he sealed the hatch good and tight. Maybe he’d come back in a month and see how things were going. It would be like opening a Christmas present, wouldn’t it?
Junior stood up and stared toward Gotham City with dark, hollowed-out eyes.
The chemical factory’s chimneys were spouting a mixture of white, reddish-brown, and pale green smoke. The haze filmed the sky between him and Gotham’s towers, and it shimmered like a mystery on this beautiful summer’s day.
Junior descended the ladder to the earth and started walking home through the woods. The replay of a hammer striking flesh reeled itself over and over in his brain, and it got better every time.
On the way home, he came up with a joke of his own that he’d have to tell his father: Why is a dead person like an old house?
Because they’re both morgue-aged.
Smile, Dad.
The Man Who Laughs
Stuart M. Kaminsky
Delicious. There they stood watching my raised right hand, their faces frozen in that wonderfully comic rictus grin of fear and horror. It was a moment to be savored, remembered. If Gideon had been there, I could have had him take a photograph to carry in my pocket, but Gideon was dead. Ah, ah, I’m getting ahead of my story. In my desire to get to my moment of triumph when all attention was focused on my performance, I neglected to tell you how this magic moment came to be.
Gideon, as we drove into Florida down Highway 41, suggested that we should never have left Gotham. The F.B.I., the Georgia and South Carolina State Police were somewhere behind us. The pitiful pack of clowns who considered themselves the Joker’s gang was dispersed or dead. But it had been great fun. A vacation. A series of banks visited and withdrawn from to finance my triumphant return to Gotham.
Disaster. Disaster? I had surrounded myself with incompetents with no sense of humor. One must have a sense of humor, I reminded Gideon as he drove. I sat deep in the night shadows in the backseat of the recently stolen automobile. My face is a bit distinctive and has been known, for what reason I cannot imagine, to frighten rather than amuse small children. Gideon could do one thing well. He could steal automobiles. He couldn’t drive them, but he could steal them.
We moved cautiously down the highway through the heart of Tampa and then St. Petersburg. The night-caws of pelicans sounded like fingernails against pitted glass. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the moment, forgetting the blue and mufti figures behind us.
“They’ll spot us,” Gideon mumbled as we crossed over a long arching bridge. “They’ll spot you.” Gideon wore a wide-brimmed hat of some distinction. He pulled it down further over his eyes.
I tried to ignore him. I sang dirges.
“Did you know, Gideon,” I informed him, “that the nursery rhyme, ‘Ring Around the Rosey,’ dates back to the plague years? The children danced around bodies and when they sang ‘Ashes, ashes, all fall down,’ they were referring to the death and burning of the victims. That has always been my favorite nursery rhyme.”
Gideon grunted unappreciatively. I admit I need an audience. What great performer does not. But this uncultured twig barely qualified.
“Pull over,” I said.
“Why?” asked Gideon.
“Because the Joker says,” I replied leaning out of the shadows, putting my face next to his. I could feel him hold back the urge to recoil. “We are going to play Joker Says. Joker says pull over.”
Gideon found a place on the side of the road beyond the bridge. Traffic was light. It was well past midnight. He parked about twenty yards away from the highway, but kept the motor running.
“Joker says, turn the engine off.”
Gideon turned the engine off.
“Joker says, get out of the car, but leave the key.”
Gideon might have let out a sigh. I felt it deep within him as I touched his shoulder, but he contained it and got out. I followed him closing the backdoor as I got out. The car had been air-conditioned. The night was hot and moist.
“Joker,” Gideon said, full of false bravado, “what’s this? You need a toilet?”
“Sadly,” I said, “we are no longer friends. Remember that wonderous moment in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Blanche lies dying on the beach and Jane, beautifully made up, says, ‘You mean that all this time we could have been friends?’ ”
“Joker, come on,” Gideon said backing away. We were on a bay, the vastness of dark water catching glints of the half moon beyond the railing toward which Gideon was moving. “You can’t get anywhere without me. You’ll be spotted the minute the sun comes up.”
“Joker says, let me worry about that,” I said. “It will be more fun solving that problem than enduring another minute with the humorless creature you have probably always been.”
A car breezed past behind me and in its headlights I could see the frightened eyes of Gideon. His hands were against the rail almost as knuckle-white as my face.
“Okay,” he said, his voice quivering. “That’s the way you want it. No hard feelings. I’ll just stay here, walk to town.” He looked around to see which way a town might be. Little lights danced across a curve in the bay.
“Joker says,” I whispered, moving close to him, “it doesn’t work like that. You know too much.”
“Know too much,” Gideon bleated like a lamb sensing slaughter. “I don’t know anything.”
“True.” I sighed, grinning into his face, hoping the light of the moon from the water cast an appropriate macabre shadow, “but it seemed like the right thing to say. It suggests motive, albeit sinister, for what is about to transpire.”
Gideon tried to duck under my arm, but I grabbed him. He lost his wide-brimmed hat. He punched at my face but I did not evade him. I took the punch and laughed. I let him punch me again and laughed even louder.
“Joker says, take a moonlight dip.” And with that I threw the gurgling Gideon over the railing. I heard the splash, heard him come up gasping. I leaned over and covered my mouth to keep from laughing.
“Can’t . . . swim,” he gasped.
“Can’t . . . swim,” I mimicked. “But you must. Swim,” I commanded.
“Can’t . . . please,” he gasped and thrashed.
“Swim, Gideon,” I ordered, but all I got back was a burble. “Oh,” I said with small laugh, “I forgot to say ‘Joker says.’ ”
I found Gideon’s hat. It fit surprisingly well. I got back into the stolen vehicle, turned on the air conditioner and proceeded on my pilgri
mage heading south, knowing that I was running out of gas, knowing they were behind me, knowing the dawn was coming. Only the Joker could truly appreciate the aesthetic joy of this instant.
I drove listening to a predawn preacher on the radio foretelling the end of the world, the decline of morality. I prayed to my own demons that he was right and I encouraged him with amens. Dull road, hat pulled down, gas gauge dancing the Danse Macabre, I encouraged the preacher and pulled off the highway at a sign which told me that here I would find both Bradenton and coastal beaches.
I did not get as far as Bradenton and I never reached a coastal beach. As the car sputtered along the two-lane road, I found a turnoff in the headlight beam, a narrow stone-covered road along a thick growth of trees. As the last sputum of gas died, I turned the car toward a break in the trees and found myself going down the embankment of a creek. A pair of startled masked raccoons caught in the beams scuttered away from the lurching metal beast. When the car stopped, I turned off the lights and leaned back with a massive sigh.
“What a day,” I uttered aloud.
The air-conditioning had, with the engine, failed, and the night heat oozed through the pores of the car like boneless fingers of the dead, but I was comfortable, the result of a day well spent. I slept.
The sleep was brief. The Joker requires little sleep, for he needs no dreams. My life is an elegant nightmare. Dreams are for those whose lives are dull. When my eyes opened, they opened on a wondrous sight. On the opposite shore of the small creek, up the slight embankment, stood a Ferris wheel. I reached into the backseat for my purple carpetbag, pulled Gideon’s hat over my eyes at a jaunty angle, and stepped out into the ankle-deep water of the creek.
“Life,” I announced to the hiding wildlife, “is a brief adventure.”
The Further Adventures of The Joker Page 8
