The Land of Laughs (22 page)

Sometimes in the afternoon when I came home Saxony wouldn’t be there. I never asked her where she went, but I assumed that she was with Mrs. Fletcher. The house would be cold and dark, with only the saddest kind of October-gray light lying tiredly on the floor and on the furniture near the windows. The whole air of the place made me feel wintry and sad. To combat the emptiness that went along with it, I would move madly around, turning on all the lights. I resented her not being there, but I would catch myself for being such a hypocrite. Especially when I had just gotten back from working half the afternoon and making love to Anna the other half.

There was a lot of sex then. I didn’t know if I was trying to punish Anna for Richard Lee or trying to show her that I was better. But then I started to see him as only a kind of shadow, his hands appearing out of a darkness. It was what I knew she was doing in return, returning in real life the caresses of this shadow, moaning and moving to him, wanting him. That was what drove the white spike through my imagination every time I thought about her.

It was on one of those absently sad afternoons that I found out about Nails. Anna and I had really gone through the floor with our fucking. It was intense and the orgasm was crazy, but I hadn’t done any good work that day, and afterward I felt tired and depressed. I was looking forward to spending the evening with Saxony. We were going to watch a Ronald Colman classic on television that we had been anticipating all week. As a surprise treat, I had stopped at the market on the way home and bought all the fixings for hot-fudge sundaes.

Walking up the steps, I saw that the lights were off in our part of the house. I grimaced and hiked the bag of groceries higher on my chest. Driving home, I had worked out a whole nice, silly scene: flinging the door open, I would race to wherever Sax was. I would tell her to drop everything because “The Great Thomas” had arrived. “Treasures from the Mysterious East, lady.” Out would come the chopped walnuts. “Frankincense and myrrh from the Caves of Zanzibar,” the maraschino cherries next. Then some other dumb line — the creme de la creme or something — and the fudge sauce would jump onto the counter. I had even gone to two places to find the kind she liked most.

But it didn’t make any difference anyway, because she wasn’t there. I opened the front door and closed it quietly behind me. The house smelled of dusty heat from the radiators and a kind of damp wood funk that came up from the floors in winter. I started to reach for the light but hung back when I heard someone talking or murmuring in the bedroom. Ah ha! Saxony was having a snooze.

Walking on the toes of my sneakers from the kitchen to the bedroom, I heard a voice murmuring again. It was almost unfamiliar. Almost too high and disconnected for it to be hers. I opened the door as slowly as I could to avoid any creaks it might make. The shades were drawn all the way down. The only thing on the bed was an ethereally white, totally familiar lump with its back turned to me. Nails. Very adorable, but a lousy substitute at the moment for Saxony.

His legs stuck out stiffly in front of him. He twitched a few times and his jaws snapped at the air. I thought he was just having another Nails nightmare. Then he spoke.

“The fur. It is. Breathe through the fur.”

A chill needle ran up my spine to my neck. The fucking dog talked. The fucking dog talked. I couldn’t move. I wanted to hear more, I wanted to run like hell.

My eyes raced past the corners of the room. We were alone. I was alone.

Willie Morris’s memoir of James Jones was on the night table, my other pair of stringy black sneakers was outside the closet door, the dog was on the bed.

“Thomas. Yes, Thomas.”

I screeched. I didn’t leap in the air when he said my name, but a spasm flicked down my backbone at the same time as I yelped.

There was a flurry of white motion, a couple of sharp barks, and then he was standing on the bed looking at me, tail wagging. He looked like lovely old dumb Nails.

“I heard you!” Scared as I was, I felt like an idiot talking to him like that. He kept on wagging his white whip tail. It slowed for a split second when I said that, but went right back up to its fast windshield-wiper speed.

“Don’t you shit around with me, Nails. I’m telling you — I heard you!” What the hell was I doing? He played out the whole bad-doggie bit: the tail went between his legs and his ears pressed down close to his head.

“Goddammit, goddammit, dog. I heard everything. Don’t fuck around with me! I heard what you said. ‘Breathe through the fur.’”

I was about to say more when he did an odd thing. He closed his eyes for a long time, then sat back on his legs like a frog, looking resigned.

“Well? Huh? Well, say something more. Go ahead. Just don’t fool around!” I honestly didn’t know what I was saying. He opened his eyes and looked right at me.

“They’re home,” he said. “They’ll be in here in a minute.” His voice was clear and understandable, but it sounded like a dwarf’s — high and squeezed up through his throat. But he was right. Car doors slammed and I heard the mumble of voices from outside. I looked at him and he blinked.

“But who
are
you?”

He said nothing more. The front door clicked, and seconds later the house was filled with light brown shopping bags, cold cheeks, and Nails’s barks.

I wanted to tell someone, but every time I got up enough nerve to talk to Saxony, I remembered the James Thurber story about the unicorn in the garden. A mousy little man discovers a unicorn in his garden. He tells his monstrous wife. She laughs it off the way she laughs off everything he says. The unicorn keeps coming to visit, but it only visits him. In turn he keeps telling the old battle-ax about his nice new friend. Finally she gets fed up and calls for the guys in the white coats with the butterfly nets. The story goes on, and in the end she’s the one who gets carted away, but I only thought about it up to that point: where the husband told her once too often about the unicorn and she reached for the telephone and the number of the loony bin.

If not Saxony, then I certainly wasn’t going to tell Anna. I had gotten myself into enough trouble when I told her about seeing Krang the Kite on Sharon Lee’s face. All I had to do now was add Nails the Talking Dog to my list, and my days as Marshall France’s biographer would be over.

But after that, he stayed away from me. He didn’t come up on the bed in the morning, didn’t follow me around the house anymore. I watched him like a hawk whenever we were in the same room together, but his tight, absent face betrayed nothing but dog eyes and a flash of bubblegum-pink gums whenever he was eating or cleaning himself. He was very much the dog.

Porpoises talked, didn’t they? And hadn’t they discovered a couple of words in ape language? What about that woman in Africa, Goodall? So what was so strange about a talking dog? These and other stupid rationalizations fluttered across my brain on featherless wings. I had witnessed one of the great wonders of the world, and yet I wondered if it wasn’t the way all mad people began down “that” road. Kite faces on women, talking dogs … All the things that I knew were a little weird about me stood up, took a bow, and started walking around inside me at top speed: liking my mask collection a little too much, talking about my father so much that I obviously had some kind of fixation about him … Things like that.

Nails was killed forty-eight hours later. Every night before bedtime, Mrs. Fletcher fed him and led him out for his last run. No one paid much attention to the leash law in Galen, and wandering dogs were a common sight at all times of the day.

That night a thick winter fog had settled over everything, and the few sounds that seeped in from the street were muffled. Saxony was working on her marionette in the kitchen and I was typing up some notes on Chapter Three when the doorbell rang. I yelled that I would get it and tapped a last key before I got up from my chair.

A young pretty girl I’d never seen before stood on the porch under the bare overhead light. She looked very happy.

“Hi, Mr. Abbey. Is Mrs. Fletcher in?”

“Mrs. Fletcher? I think so.” The door to the upstairs was closed. I climbed all the way up and knocked to get her. She came out in her robe and slippers.

“Hi, Tom. What’s up? I’m right in the middle of
Kojak
.”

“There’s a girl downstairs who wants to see you.”

“At this time of night?”

“Yes. She’s waiting for you at the front door.”

“Out in this weather? Give me your arm so I can get down these stairs without breaking my leg.”

When we got to the bottom, the girl was standing in the same place.

“Carolyn Cort! What brings you out here tonight?” She rummaged through the pockets of her robe and came up with a battered pink leather eyeglass ease. Hooking the fragile-looking spectacles over her ears, she took a step forward. “Huh?”

Carolyn Cort smiled, reached out, and touched the old woman on the elbow. She looked back and forth between the two of us. For a moment I was afraid that she was a Friend of God or a Jesus freak or something, come out in the middle of the night to convert the heathen. “Mrs. Fletcher, you’ll never believe this. Nails just got killed! He got hit in the fog!”

I closed my eyes and rubbed the bottom of my face. I felt the fog come up into my nose, and it almost made me cough. I still had my eyes closed when the old woman spoke. Her voice was shrill and excited.

“What’s today? Is it right, Carolyn? I can’t remember!”

I heard a nervous giggle and opened my eyes. Carolyn was smiling from ear to ear and nodding. “It’s exact, Goosey! It’s October 24th!”

I looked at Mrs. Fletcher. She was smiling too, just as hard as Carolyn. She put a hand to her mouth. Her smile sneaked out from beneath the hand and somehow continued to spread.

“Who did it, Carolyn?”

“Sam Dorris! Just as it was supposed to be!”

“Thank God!”

“Yes. Then Timmy Benjamin broke his finger playing
football
with his brothers!”

“The little one? He broke his little finger?” Mrs. Fletcher grabbed hold of Carolyn’s sleeve.

“Yes, yes, the little pinkie on the left hand.”

They were ecstatic. They hugged and kissed each other as if it was the end of the war. Mrs. Fletcher looked at me and her eyes were brimming with tears. The whole thing was crazy.

“You
must
be the one, Tom. Now it’s all going right again.” Her face was radiant. Her dog had just been killed and her face was radiant.

“Can I give you a kiss, Mr. Abbey? I mean, only if it’s okay with you.”

Carolyn gave me a hot peck on the cheek and then twittered away, back into the fog. I didn’t know if it was creepier out there or in here.

Mrs. Fletcher gave me another delighted look. “Ever since you started work on his book, Tom, everything here has gone right. Anna knew what she was doing with you, boy.” She took my hand and held it in both of hers.

“But what about Nails, Mrs. Fletcher? He was just run over. He’s dead.”

“I know. I’ll see you in the morning, Tom.” She waved once when she got to the top of the stairs, and then she closed the door that separated her world from ours.

I went back into our apartment and silently closed the door behind me. Nails was dead. The dog that had talked to me was dead. That was bad enough (or good enough, depending on how you looked at it), but then the joy on both women’s faces when Carolyn gave the news …

I didn’t understand anything, but on the other hand I remembered a section from
The Land of Laughs
where the Queen of Oil says to one of her children:

The questions are the danger.

Leave them alone and they sleep.

Ask them, awake them, and more than you

know will begin to rise.

“Thomas? Are you there? What happened?”

I saw the yellow light spilling out of the kitchen and I heard Saxony’s portable radio tinnily blasting out the new rock song that was being constantly played then. She called it “The Chinese Water Torture Song.”

When I walked in, she looked up from her carving and shrugged. “What was that all about?”

“Anna?”

She pushed the hair out of her eyes and put one bare arm behind her neck. “Yes?”

“Do you know about Mrs. Fletcher’s dog?” I looked at her breasts. The small nipples were still hard and dark in the cold bedroom.

“Yes, I heard that he was run over last night. It’s sad, isn’t it?” Her voice didn’t sound very sad. I didn’t know if I wanted to see her face when I asked the next question. The bedroom was dark and shadowy. It smelled of love and old wooden furniture exposed to winter’s cold. For the first time I was aware of both the smell and the fact that I didn’t like it much.

“I was there when she heard about it.” The first two fingers on my right hand started tapping on the part of the blanket down around our waists.

“Hmm?”

“I said that I was there when she heard about it. Do you know what she did?”

She turned her head slowly to me. “What did she do, Thomas?”

“She smiled. She was delighted. She made it sound like it was the best thing she had heard in years.”

“She is a crazy old woman, Thomas.”

“I know, you keep telling me that. But Carolyn Cort’s not crazy, is she?”

“What about Carolyn Cort? How do you know her?” She sounded peeved.

“She was the one who came out to the house to tell Mrs. Fletcher. She was smiling too. She gave me a kiss when she left.” I took a handful of blanket and squeezed it.

“God_damn_ them!” She sat up in bed and reached to the floor on her side for her sweatshirt and blue jeans. I didn’t know whether to move or stay where I was. You didn’t want to get in Anna’s way when she was mad.

She was dressed in two minutes. When she was done, she stood next to the bed with her hands on her hips and scowled at me. For a moment I thought that she was going to give me a smack or something.

“Petals!” She stared right at me while she bellowed for the dog in a very un-Anna-like voice. “Petals, get in here!” We looked at each other while we waited. I heard toenails clicking on the wooden stairs, then feet padding down the hall rug. Anna walked to the bedroom door and opened it. Petals trotted in and, after a cursory glance at me, sat down on Anna’s foot and leaned against her.