The Land of Laughs (23 page)

“Petals, tell Thomas who you are.”

The dog looked at her with that stony blank face.

“Go on, tell him! It’s all right — it’s time. We have to let him know.”

The dog whimpered and dipped its head. It put a paw out, as if it was trying to shake hands.

“Tell him!”

“Wil-Wilma Inkler.”

I started to move up and out of the bed. The voice was the same as Nails’s. A dwarf’s voice, only this one was more macabre or perverse because it was distinctly feminine. A woman was in there somewhere. Dwarf or bull terrier, it was a woman’s voice, loud and clear.

“Tell him what Nails’s real name was.”

The dog closed its eyes and sighed as if it was in great pain. “Gert Inkler. He was my husband.”

“Fucking
A
! The guy in the train-station book! The guy who walked around the world!”

I was talking to a dog. “What am I, nuts? I’m talking to a goddamned dog!”

“I’m not a dog! I’m just one now, but all of that changes today! Today it’s over for me! Over! Forever!” Petals was indignant. Her face still had no expression, but she spoke in a higher, more adamant voice. Don’t ask me what was going through my head, I couldn’t begin to explain. I’m naked, sitting in Anna France’s bed, talking with a bull terrier who is saying that she won’t be a bull terrier after today.

“Wilma, go out for a while and let us talk. I’ll call you back in in a few minutes.”

I watched her leave. I felt like a tight ball of yarn was beginning to unravel in my head. I expected to feel dizzy when I stood up, but I didn’t.

“Do you understand yet, Thomas?”

I sat back down on the bed, defeated. I had only gotten as far as my white underpants.

“Understand what, Anna? That you’ve got talking dogs here? No. The fact that you knew that little boy was going to die? No. The fact that people around here celebrate when a dog gets run over? A talking dog, by the way. No. Do you have any other questions for me? The answer to them is no too.”

“How do you know about Nails?”

“He talked to me right before he died. Purely by accident — I came on him when he was napping. He talked in his sleep.”

“Are you frightened?”

“Yes. Where are my pants?”

“You don’t look frightened.”

“If I stopped moving around now, I’d have a spastic attack.
Where are my fucking pants?
” I jumped up and moved madly around the room. I was scared to death, exhausted from fucking, curious as hell.

She grabbed my leg and pulled me toward her. “Do you want me to explain everything to you?”

“Explain
what
, Anna? Will you please let me go? What the hell is there to explain?”

“Galen. My father. Everything.”

“You mean that none of what you’ve said so far is the truth? Well, that’s wonderful.
Shit
, where is my goddamned shirt?”

“Please stop, Thomas. What you have gotten so far is true, but it’s only part of it. Please stop pacing around. I want to tell you all of this, and it’s important!”

I saw a corner of my shirt sticking out from beneath one of the pillows, but Anna’s voice was so strong and insistent that I didn’t go over to retrieve it. There was an old Mission morris chair near the bed, so I sat down on it. I didn’t want her touching me while she said whatever she had to say. I looked at my bare feet and felt the cold wood floor coming up through my heels. I didn’t want to look at Anna. I didn’t even know if I could look at her then.

I heard a car horn honking outside. Maybe old Richard Lee was going to come over and join us. I wondered what Saxony was doing.

Anna padded over to a chifferobe that reminded me of an iron maiden whenever I saw it. She opened one of the doors and bent down into it. I didn’t give a full look her way until I was sure she couldn’t see me. Clothes and shoes were shuffled and pushed around. A sandal came flying out, followed closely by a thick wooden clothes hanger. After a while she reemerged with a large gray metal strongbox about the size of a portable typewriter. She opened it and took out a blue spiral notebook. She put the box on the floor and flipped through the first pages of the book.

“Yes, this is the one.” She looked at it once more and then handed it to me. “The pages are numbered. Start reading at about page forty.”

I did, and there it was again — the funny, long-stroked italic handwriting in faded brown fountain-pen ink. There were no dates on the pages. One continuous flow. No drawings, no doodles. Only descriptions of Galen, Missouri. Galen from the east, Galen from the west, everywhere. Every store, every street, people’s names and what they did for a living, whom they were related to, the names of their children. I knew so many of them.

An individual description would sometimes go on for ten or twelve pages. The line of a man’s eyebrow, the color of the faint mustache shadowing a woman’s lip.

I skimmed through and saw that the whole book was like that. France had done an inventory of a whole town, if that was possible. Suspiciously, I turned to the last page of the book. At the very bottom it said, “Book Two.” I looked up to find Anna. She was staring out the window with her back to me.

“How many of these books are there?”

“Forty-three.”

“All like this one? Lists and things?”

“Yes, in the First Series there are only lists and details.”

“What do you mean, the First Series?”

“The Galen First Series. That’s what he called them. He knew that the only way he could even attempt the Second Series was to begin by making up a kind of Galen encyclopedia. The town and everything in it as he perceived it. It took him over two years to finish.”

I put the notebook down in my lap. The room was colder than before, so I got my shirt from under the pillow and put it on.

“But what’s the Second Series, then?”

She spoke as if she hadn’t heard a word I’d said. “He stopped writing
The Night Races into Anna
so that he could devote all of his time to that. David Louis wanted him to rewrite whole sections, but by then that book didn’t mean anything to him. The only important thing that had come out of it was discovering the cats.”

“Wait a minute, Anna, stop. I think that I’ve missed something. What about cats? Where do they plug into all of this?” I picked up the notebook and fiddled around with the silver metal spiral.

“Have you read
The Night Races
? The version that the people here in Galen have?”

“Yes, it’s longer.”

“Eighty-three pages. Do you remember what happens on the last pages of our edition?”

Embarrassed, I said no.

“The old woman, Mrs. Little, dies. But before she does, she tells her three eats to go and stay with her best friend after she’s gone.”

I began to remember. “That’s right. And then when she does die, the cats leave her house and walk across town to her friend’s house. They understand everything that’s happened.”

Rain was pattering on the roof. A streetlight blinked on outside, and I could see the rain slicing down through it.

“Father wrote that scene the day that Dorothy Lee died.” She stopped and looked at me. “In the book, he changed Dorothy’s last name to Mrs.
Little
. Dorothy Little.” She stopped again. I waited for more, but only the rain filled the silence.

“He wrote that scene the day she died? Christ, that’s a hell of a coincidence.”

“No, Thomas. My father wrote her death.”

My hands were freezing. The rain came across the streetlight in diagonals.

“He wrote her death, and then an hour later Dorothy’s cats came over to tell us, just as he had written. That’s how he discovered it. I heard them and opened the door. They stood on the bottom step of the porch and their eyes caught the hall light so that they looked like molten gold. I knew that Father hated cats, so I tried to shoo them away, but they wouldn’t go. Then they started to cry and whine, and he finally came down from his workroom to find out where all of the noise was coming from. He saw them down there, crying and eyes glowing, and he understood everything in an instant. He sat down on one of the steps and started to cry, because he knew that he had killed her. He sat there, and the cats climbed up into his lap.”

I sat on the edge of the chair and rubbed my arms. A wind blew around outside, whipping the trees and the rain. It died as suddenly as it came. I didn’t want to understand, but I did. Marshall France had discovered that when he wrote something, it happened: it was: it came into being. Just like that.

I didn’t wait for her to say anything. “That’s ridiculous, Anna! Come on! That’s bullshit!”

She sat down on the windowsill and put her hands underneath her sweatshirt to warm them. A picture of her bare breasts skipped blithely, incongruously across my mind. She started bumping her knees together. She continued to do it while she spoke.

“Father knew that something had changed in him after he finished
The Land of Laughs
. My mother told me that he was very close to having a nervous breakdown because he was so wrought up. He didn’t write anything for almost two years after he finished that book. Then she died, and that almost drove him crazy. When the book was published, it became so famous that he could easily have become a big celebrity, but he didn’t want that. Instead, he worked down at the supermarket for the previous owner and took his little trips to St. Louis and Lake of the Ozarks.”

I wanted to tell her to cut the shit and answer my questions, but I realized that she would, sooner or later.

“I was in college by then. I wanted to be a concert pianist. I don’t know if I was good enough, but I had the drive and dedication. That was right after Mother died, and sometimes I felt guilty about his being here alone in Galen, but whenever I brought the subject up with him, he would laugh and tell me not to be silly.”

She pushed off from the sill and turned around to look out at the rainy night. I was trying to stop my teeth from chattering. When she spoke again, her voice, reflected off the windowpanes, sounded slightly different.

“I was seeing a boy named Peter Mexico at the time. Isn’t that a funny name? He was a pianist, too, but he was great, and all of us there knew it. We could never figure out why he was still in America — he should have been in Paris studying with Boulanger or in Vienna with Weber. We were inseparable from the minute we met. We had only known each other for a week before we started living together. You’ve got to remember too that that was back in the early sixties, when you didn’t do that sort of thing yet.

“We were totally gone on each other. We had these grand visions of living in an atelier somewhere with skylights and twin Bösendorfer pianos in the living room.” She turned from the window and came over to my chair. She sat on the wooden arm and put her hand on my shoulder. She spoke to the darkness.

“We had this terrible little apartment that we could barely afford. We both had rooms in the dormitory, but this was our secret sanctuary. We would go there after classes or at night, whenever we weren’t practicing. We would sign out for the weekend and fly over there as fast as we could. And the place was so absolutely barren. We had bought two army-surplus cots and had tied the legs together to make it into a sort of double bed.

“One morning I woke up and Peter was dead.”

Do you know the tone of voice of the announcer in an airport or a train station? That absolute monotone? “Train leaving on Track Seven.” That was Anna’s.

“The police came and did their stupid little tests and said that it was due to a heart attack.

“As soon as the funeral was over, Father came to get me and I came home to live with him. I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t care about anything. I sat in my room and read heavy tomes —
The Trial
and
Heart of Darkness
, Raskolnikov… .” She laughed and squeezed my shoulder. “I was so very existential in those days. I read
The Stranger
ten times. Poor Father. He was just recuperating from his breakdown, and I came home with my own in hand.

“But he was an angel. Father was always an angel when it came to things like that.”

“What did he do?”

“What didn’t he do? All of the cooking and cleaning, listening to me while I endlessly whined about how cruel and unfair life was. He even gave me the money to buy a wardrobe of black dresses. Do you know Edward Gorey’s work?”

“
The Unstrung Harp
?”

“Yes. Well, I was like one of Gorey’s dark women who stand out in the middle of a field at dusk and look off toward the horizon. I was quite a case, believe me.

“Nothing really worked to bring me out of it, so Father started
The Night Races
, out of desperation. It was going to be a complete departure from anything he had ever done. I was the main character, but it was going to be a mixture of truth and fantasy. He told me that when I was a little girl he would tell me stories when I woke up howling from a nightmare. He thought that maybe if he wrote a story for me now it would somehow have the same effect. He was such a wonderful man.

“That ass David Louis had been harping on him to get something new done. When he heard that Father had started this book, he wrote and told him that he wanted to come out to Galen and read what he had written.

“It just so happened that he arrived two days after Dorothy Lee died. You can imagine what it was like having him around here then!”

“Anna, these are all incredible things. You’re telling me that your father was
God
! Or Dr. Frankenstein!”

“Do you believe me?”

“Come on, what am I supposed to say to that, huh?”

“I don’t know, Thomas. I don’t know what I would say if I were you. It’s quite a story, isn’t it?”

“Uh, yeah. Yeah. I guess you’d say that.”

“Do you want more proof? Wait a minute. Petals! Petals, come in here.”

When I left the France house that night, I was convinced. I had seen books, papers, journal entries. Petals even came in and talked about her “former life” as the human being Wilma Inkler.

Can you imagine that? You’re sitting there in a chair and a dog is at your feet staring you right in the eye. It starts talking about being a dog in this high gravelly voice that sounds like something out of Munchkinland. And you’re sitting there nodding your head like it happens to you all the time.