Laughing Man (15 page)

Jocelyn made pushing motions at him again, and added, in a whisper, "Go away, Jackie."

Lila appeared then. She was younger than Jocelyn by a year and a half, but she was taller, and prettier, and Jack liked her better because she usually listened to him when he talked to her.

He looked blankly again at Jocelyn, and then wandered from the yard, past the ornate picket fence, and into the tall fields beyond.

These fields were alive with honeybees and warm sunlight. They smelled of wet earth, which was a smell that excited Jack and gave him an odd and pleasurable feeling he hoped his father didn't know about—he seemed to know about so many things.

And, quickly enough, he was beyond the noises of his sisters at play, beyond the smells of the house, beyond his view of the house itself, and he knew all at once that he had gone far from his mother.

He ran.

No one in his family had ever seen him run. If they had, they would have been astonished. They would have said, "How can such a little fireplug run like that?" He had told Lila how much he liked to run, and he'd asked her to come out in the fields and run with him, but she told him that although she'd like to, it was not a thing that young girls did, and he had read regret in her.

This morning, he ran for hours. The tall grasses passed him by as a whir of green and brown. Insects tried to hop out of his way, but he trampled many underfoot, and others hopped headlong into him.

He laughed as he ran. And as he ran, he could hear the laughter of others. It came from the high hills that surrounded these fields, and it came from the trees, too, from the tall grasses, from the earth itself. It came from everywhere.

Then, at noon, he was finished running and out of breath, at last, so he made his way back to his house and sat at the dining room table—which was one of his favorite places to be—and ate a hearty lunch of meat and fruit.

H
elen saw the snow and knew that it was temporary.

Months earlier, she had seen birds flying south and she had known that their leave-taking was temporary.

She had watched daylight come, and had known that it was temporary, too.

She'd seen clouds covering the sun, people walking stiffly against wind and cold, ice forming on the lake in the park, butterflies emerging from their cocoons in summer, and she had known that it was all temporary.

Just as she knew that she was temporary.

She could not give voice to this fact—it was real,
she
was real, and now the time was coming when she would not be real. It was all right, because the earth—which was her mother and her father—was not temporary. The earth was eternal, so she was eternal.

She could feel her own disintegration starting. It was like a flower blooming deep inside her.

It was exhilarating.

T
he two young people had once assumed that they were immune to homelessness, that their jobs and their place in society were secure, that such awful things as homelessness happened only to other people. They had even had long discussions about the kind of society that would actually accept homelessness. The man had postulated that if a label—"the homeless"—is assigned to a group of people, it gave them a kind of awful validity, which meant that others in society could pity them, but didn't really have to help them. Their label was "the homeless," just as others were "the sick," or "the rich," or "the working poor."

But then one unfortunate and unforeseen event piled on top of another, and, in a few months, the young couple found themselves penniless and on the street. They had no family to turn to, no place to go, and no prospects for improvement, except in the eyes of the New York County Social Services Department, which deemed them "employable" and denied them benefits.

It was a great comfort to them that they had each other. They also thought, at first, that it was probably fortunate this thing had happened to them in a city like New York, where there were a number of places they could find shelter from the winter nights. There were Salvation Army missions, places underground—they had heard many stories about what lay beneath Grand Central station;
Beauty and the Beast
had been one of their favorite TV shows—and countless abandoned buildings within a few minutes' walk. Certainly, with all that to choose from, they could find a safe place to spend their nights.

He was tall and lanky, and he had quickly begun to look unhealthy—"Gaunt," his wife told him—after they had found themselves on the street. He wore a blue knit cap that had been given to him by a beloved aunt, now dead, and an army coat that offered him more protection from the cold than any other coat he had owned. He had caught glimpses of himself in shop windows, and had thought each time that he really did look like the archetypal homeless man, which made him abysmally sad.

This day, he and his wife had decided to leave Manhattan. They thought they could walk across the George Washington Bridge and make their way downstate, through Delaware, eventually, then into Maryland, and finally back to South Carolina, which was where they both had been born. They had no real plan about what to do for food and shelter; they knew only that the city had worked its grim magic on them, that there really was no safe place to spend their nights, and that if they wanted to put their lives back on track, their first step was to leave Manhattan. It was a desperate idea, they realized, but it was their only idea.

E
rthmun sat huddled in a trench coat and two blankets at his white enamel table, near the open window. He had turned the heat to maximum, and he could hear the radiators clicking as hot water raced into them.

A cold breeze was blowing on him from the open window, but it touched just his face, the only part of his body that was exposed. The idea that he should close the window was never far from his mind, and he wasn't sure, either, why he had opened it in the first place. He realized that, in the past few weeks, he had become an enigma, not only to Patricia David, Mark Smalley, and the woman down the hall, but to himself. It was painful not to know the reasons for the things he did. It made his future, his present, and even his past, seem uncertain and treacherous.

He wished that he had kept a photo album. He thought that it would have thousands of photographs in it, and they would show not only him, but all the people in his life, from the moment of his birth. They would show his sisters, his mother, and his dead father. They would show all the women he had slept with, and all the murder victims whose eyes or wounds or lives he had looked into—the woman in Central Park who'd had her throat slashed and her red wig stolen, the woman in Harlem whose husband had shot her first with a handgun, then with a shotgun, and, finally, had put an arrow through her heart, all in an effort, he said, "to destroy the evil that settled in her" when she joined a weight-loss club. The man on 42nd Street who had simply been beaten to death for his wallet. The family in Queens who had been variously shot, drowned, and stabbed, and then incinerated by a perpetrator who had never been caught. And a thousand other victims, some unique, most mundane, culminating in the women who'd had cheap chocolate stuffed in their mouths and their faces cleansed.

And all the photographs in his personal photo album would be in black and white because that was the way he saw scenes from his past—in black and white.

Except for his birth.

Which was a world of color, pain, and pleasure. His phone rang.

He let it ring until it stopped.

"D
amnit!"
Patricia David whispered. Where the hell was he? She'd dropped him at his apartment only an hour and a half earlier, and he had seemed to want only to go to bed and get warm. She tried his number again, let it ring nearly two dozen times, hung up. She wished he had a goddamned answering machine, like everyone else.

She decided that she'd have to go back to his apartment. He was probably asleep, and it wasn't hard to imagine that in his condition he could sleep through a ringing telephone.

She looked at McBride, who was standing at a file cabinet nearby and was obviously waiting for her to acknowledge him. "I'm going to Erthmun's apartment," she said.

"You can't," McBride told her. "The lieutenant says he needs us both on this, like now!"

"It's too bad," Patricia said as she stood and shrugged into her coat.

"Is that what I tell the lieutenant?"

"Sure. Tell him it's too bad. Use those words exactly." And she walked briskly past McBride and out of the squad room.

E
rthmun saw his face in his memory. It was in shades of black and white, too. Round and jowly, dark-eyed, thick-lipped, heavy-lidded, and prematurely aged. He thought that age had become a reality when the person on the outside mirrored the person on the inside. He hoped that it wasn't the face that other people saw. He hoped it was a kind of quirky Dorian Gray portrait that only he could see.

It occurred to him all at once that he had done a lot of sitting at this window, had watched a lot of people passing by. Thousands, maybe. Thousands of victims, and thousands of passersby.

He became aware that something strange was happening inside him. As if some anonymous thing deep within his biology were bursting or blossoming slowly. This frightened him. He thought it foretold his death, and he did not want to die. He thought again about his Uncle Jack and his last words. "Oh, shit!"—such lazy and damnable resignation in the face of death. He—Jack Erthmun—wasn't going to die that way. He would
fight
Death, he would spit it in the eye and blind it so it wouldn't recognize him. No one was going to shovel him into a rectangle of earth without a lot of kicking and screaming!

So what, he wondered, was he doing at this open window, wrapped up in his cocoon of blankets, waiting for that anonymous thing inside him to burst? It was almost as if he were offering himself to it.

In his mind's eye, he saw himself throwing the blankets off, slamming the window shut, and giving Death a real fight, if only with action and movement and noise.

But it was a fantasy. He did not move from his cocoon of blankets, the cold breeze pushed hard against his face, and he felt the thing inside him blossoming, as if it were about to slowly consume his internal organs from the inside and leave him nothing but a shell of skin and hair, jowls and heavy eyelids.

And suddenly he found that this was a gratifying and pleasant thing he was doing. It spoke of some great inevitability that he had long denied, and, with that denial, he pushed back—as if he had lived his entire life tottering on one leg, afraid to fall. What right did he have to spit into the eyes of eternity?

H
elen didn't know how long she had, and it didn't matter. A week. A month. An hour. She would be what she was until she came apart, then the flies and the burying beetles could have her. She had made food of the living. Soon she would be food
for
the living, and that irony wasn't something she easily understood. She was breasts, hair, gut, teeth, palate, heart, legs, and hunger.

She was hungry now.

And so she would eat.

T
he young homeless couple was peering in a shop window at TV sets. They were both thinking that it would be nice if they had even just one room to live in and that room had a TV set in it. They wouldn't even need a remote control. The TV set could have an old fashioned rotary dial; they wouldn't mind at all getting up from the bed or their chairs to change channels. And it didn't need to be a color set, either, and it didn't need to be hooked up to cable. Three channels would be fine.
Two
channels would be fine.

They were on West 161st Street and they had been on their way out of the city, on their way to the George Washington Bridge, then to New Jersey, then Delaware—on their way to South Carolina, eventually—and they had begged enough money to enjoy a breakfast of fried eggs, toast, and coffee, which had been the best eggs, toast, and coffee they'd ever eaten. They had stopped to look in the shop window because, since childhood, they had been addicted to television.

The young man said, "See, I told you. Reruns of
Let's Make a Deal.
Look at that. Jesus, Monty Hall's giving away a twenty-five-year-old Dodge."

His wife said, "It wasn't twenty-five years old, then. It was new."

"Yeah," he said. "I guess."

This conversation had been designed to give them each a little comfort because it was one they had had in their pre-homeless days. But now it only punctuated their desperation, and so they quickly moved on.

It had been a couple of hours since breakfast, and both of them were starting to grow hungry again. After a few days of homelessness, they had tried to ignore hunger pangs, but with little success.

"I
t's not such a bad face, is it?" Erthmun whispered to Patricia David, who was bending over him and was looking very concerned.

"It's a beautiful face, Jack," she said.