The Land of Laughs (16 page)

“Oh no.”

“Yes. Gert Inkler. Born 1913, died 19 … Wait a second.” She reached out and rubbed her hand across the face of the gray-pink stone. “Died in 1964. He wasn’t that old.”

“That’s what you get from walking around the world. Dammit! I was sure that we’d made this great discovery. A Marshall France character that never appeared in any of his books. Now all he turns out to be is some stiff in the local graveyard.”

“You sound like Humphrey Bogart when you talk like that. ‘Some stiff in the graveyard.’”

“I’m not trying to sound like him, Saxony. Excuse me for being so unoriginal. We’re not all great creators, you know.”

“Oh, be quiet, Thomas. Sometimes you pick fights just to see if I’ll snap at your bait.”

“Mixed metaphor.” I stood up and rubbed my hands on my legs to get the dirt off them.

“
Sorry
, Mr. English Teacher.”

We threw halfhearted insults back and forth until she saw something behind me and stopped. In fact, she not only stopped, her whole face shut down like an airport in a snowstorm.

“This is a nice place to have a picnic.”

I knew who it was. “Hiya, Anna.”

This time she wore a white T-shirt, brand-new tan khakis, and her scruffy sneakers: a cutie.

“Why are you two out here?”

How did she know that we were there? Chance? As far as I knew, the only one who had seen us was the priest, and that was only a few minutes before. Even if he had called her and told her, how had she gotten there so quickly — by rocket ship?

“We’re doing some research. Thomas discovered where your father got the names for the characters in
The Night Races into Anna
. He brought me out here to show me.”

My head swiveled around on my neck like Linda Blair’s in
The Exorcist
.
I
discovered?

“And were you surprised?”

“Surprised? Oh, at this? Yeah. No. Uh, yeah, I guess so.” I was trying to figure out why Saxony had lied. Was she trying to make me look good in Anna’s cool eyes?

“Who are you visiting? Gert Inkler? Father never used him in a book.”

“Yes, we know. The man who walked around the world. Did he ever do it?”

The smile slid right off her face. And Christ, could her eyes get small and mean. “Where did you hear about that?”

“
Railroad Stations of America
.”

My answer didn’t bring the sunshine back. Her look reminded me of the way she had treated Richard Lee in the woods the other day. It wasn’t the same kind of fire-and-brimstone fury that David Louis had portrayed, but kind of a turn-to-ice, stone-cold anger.

“The librarian in town gave me a book that your father liked. The one on train stations in America? I skimmed through it and found a description of Inkler in one of the margins. I have it at home if you’d like to see it.”

“You two are really doing your homework on this already, aren’t you? But what if I don’t authorize the biography?”

She looked straight at me first, then flicked her eyes over my shoulder to Saxony.

“If you weren’t going to let us do it, then why have you been so nice to us all this time? David Louis said that you were a monster.”

Good old Saxony. Tactful, sensitive, always there with the right compliment at the right time. The born diplomat.

I was tempted to put my hands over my head to protect myself against the Battle of the Titans, but astonishingly it never came. Instead, Anna sniffed, shoved her hands down into her pockets, and nodded like a doll with its head on a spring. Up and down and up and down .

“Saxony, you are right. I must admit that I do enjoy taunting people sometimes. I wanted to see how long you would wait before you became annoyed with my little games and just
asked
if you could do it.”

“Okay, can we do it?” I wanted the question to sound forceful, convinced, but it crawled out of my throat as if afraid of the daylight.

“Yes, you can. The book is all yours if you want to write it. If you aren’t too mad at me, I’ll help you in whatever ways I can. I’m sure that there are ways that I can help.”

I felt a surge of triumph. I turned to Saxony to see how she’d taken it. She smiled, picked up a little white pebble, and threw it at my knee.

“Well, Miss Sporty?”

“Well what?” She picked up another pebble and threw it.

“Well, I guess we’re all set.” I reached out and took her hand again. She squeezed it and smiled. Then she turned and smiled at Anna. France’s daughter stood there in all of her adorableness, but that moment was for Saxony and me, and I wanted her to know how happy I was that it had come and that she was there with me.

“Be careful that you don’t break your neck going down these stairs. One of Father’s favorite unkept promises was that he would fix them one day.”

Anna had the flashlight, but she was in front of Saxony, who was in front of me. As a result, all I saw of the weak yellow beam was a straight snake of it here and there as it darted around their legs.

“Why do all basements smell the same?” I reached out to touch the wall for balance. It was crumbly and damp. I remembered the smell out at the Lee house in the woods.

“What’s the smell?”

“Like a funky locker room after the team has taken a lot of showers.”

“No, that’s a clean smell. Basements smell secretive and hidden.”

“Secretive? How can something smell secretive?”

“Well, I know it doesn’t smell like a locker room!”

“Wait a minute, here is the light.”

A click and then the same kind of piss-yellow light illuminated the large square room.

“Be careful of your head, Thomas, the ceiling is low in here.”

I hunched down and looked at the room. An army-green furnace loomed over in a corner. The walls were rough plaster and uneven. The floor was a step away from being dirt. There weren’t many things down there besides some tied bundles of old magazines.
Pageant
,
Coronet
,
Ken
,
Stage
,
Gentry
. I’d never heard of any of them.

“What did your father do down here?”

“Wait a minute and I’ll show you. Follow me.”

When she moved, I noticed for the first time an open doorway that apparently led to another room. A snick of a light switch and we went in.

There was a school blackboard on the wall about three feet high and maybe six feet long A chalk holder was attached to one end of it, and it was filled with long, brand-new sticks of’ white chalk. It made me feel right at home. I had to restrain a mad urge to go up there and diagram a sentence.

“This is where he began all of his books.” Anna picked up a piece of chalk and started to doodle in the middle of the hoard. A kind of crude, not very good rendition of Snoopy from the
Peanuts
comic strip.

“I thought that you said he worked upstairs?”

“He did, but only after he had mapped out all of his characters here on his board.”

“He did it for every book?”

“Yes. He would hide down here for days and create his next universe.”

“How? In what way?”

“He said that he always had a main character in mind. For
The Land of Laughs
it was the Queen of Oil, Richard Lee’s mother, He would put her name at the top of the board and start listing other people’s names under it.”

“Names of real people, or ones that he had made up?”

“Real people. He said that if he thought of the real people first, then the things he wanted to use from their personalities came right to his mind.”

She wrote “Dorothy Lee” on the board and then “Thomas Abbey” under it. She drew arrows from both of our names out to the right. Then she wrote “The Queen of Oil” next to the first, “Father’s Biographer,” next to mine. Her handwriting was nothing like her father’s — -it was squiggly and wide and messy, the kind I’d comment on at the bottom of an essay after I’d read it.

Then under “Thomas Abbey — Father’s Biographer,” she wrote: “Famous father, English teacher, Clever, Insecure, Hopeful, the Power?”

I frowned. “What do you mean by ‘the Power?’”

She waved the question away. “Wait. I’m doing it the way he did it. The things that he didn’t know about, or didn’t know if he wanted to use, he would put a question mark next to.”

“Are all the rest of the things up there me too? Insecure, hopeful …”

“If I were my father, I would write down what I felt about you and what I thought was interesting enough to use. These things are just my own impressions. You aren’t angry with me, are you?”

“Who, me? Nooo. Not at all. Nooo. Not a —”

“Okay, Thomas, you made your point.”

“Nooo. Not —”

“
Thomas!
”

Anna looked at Saxony. I guess she didn’t believe me. “Is he mad at me?”

“No. It’s just the ‘insecure’ and ‘famous-father’ parts that got him, I think.”

“You have to remember too that I’m me and not my father. If he were going to use you, he might have seen totally different things about you.”

“Seriously, Anna, I think this would be a really nice beginning to the book. In the prologue, I’d simply describe your father coming down those creaky stairs by himself, turning on the lights, and starting to work on one of the books by doing this thing at the blackboard. The whole first few pages are both the beginning of his book and the beginning of mine. What do you think?”

She put the chalk down for the first time and erased Snoopy with the flat of her hand. “I don’t like it.”

“
I
think it’s an excellent idea, Thomas.” I didn’t know whether Sax said it because she did like it or because she wanted to pick a fight with Anna.

“But you don’t like it, Anna.”

She turned from the board and dusted her hands against each other. “You don’t really know anything yet, Thomas, and you’re already trying to come up with all of these clever little tricks to use… .”

“I wasn’t trying to be clever, Anna. I honestly thought that —”

“Let me finish. If I am going to let you do this book, you have got to do it carefully and beautifully. Do you know how many terrible biographies I’ve read that don’t even begin to bring their subject back to life, much less make them interesting or intriguing? You cannot imagine how important it is that this book be well done, Thomas. I’m sure that you care enough about my father to want to do it right, so any kind of cleverness is out. Any kind of cleverness or shortcuts or paragraphs that begin with ‘Twenty years later …’ There can’t be any of that. Your book has to have it all, or else he won’t …”

Her tirade had been so kooky and heartfelt and loud that I was taken off-guard when she stopped in mid-sentence.

I swallowed. “Anna?”

“Yes?”

Saxony interrupted. “Anna, are you sure that you want Thomas to write this book? Are you really sure?”

“Yes, now I am. Positive.”

I took a deep breath and let it out loudly, hoping it would somehow break the tension that was hovering in the air up around A-bomb level.

Saxony went to the blackboard, picked up some chalk, and began drawing a cartoon near where our names — Mrs. Lee’s and mine — were written. I knew she was a good artist from the sketches I had seen of her puppets, but she outdid herself with this one.

The Queen of Oil — a very good, quick rendering of the famous Van Walt illustration — and I stood over the gravestone of Marshall France. Up above us, France looked down from a cloud and worked puppet strings that were attached to both of us everywhere. It was certainly well done, but it was also a disturbing picture in light of what Anna had been saying.

“I don’t think you are positive, Anna.” Saxony finished sketching and put the chalk back in the holder at the end of the board.

“Oh, you don’t?” Anna’s voice was low. She watched Sax intently.

“No, I don’t. I think a biography is very much a writer’s interpretation of his subject’s life. It shouldn’t just be ‘he did this and he did that.’”

“Did I ever say that it should be?” Anna’s voice dropped its urgency and sounded … amused.

“No, but you have already made it pretty clear that you want to call all the shots on it. I get the distinct feeling already that you want Thomas to write your version of the life of Marshall France, and not Thomas Abbey’s.”

“Come on, Sax… .”

“No, you come on, Thomas. You know that I’m right.”

“Did I say anything?”

“No, but you were about to.” She licked her lips and then rubbed the side of her nose. Her nose got itchy when she got really angry.

“That’s a rather rude thing to say, Saxony, considering who I am and how much I have at stake in this matter, wouldn’t you say? Yes, of course I am biased. I
do
think the book should he done in a certain way… .”

“What’d I tell you?” Saxony looked at me and nodded ruefully.

“I did not mean it that way. Don’t misinterpret what I’m saying.”

Both of them had their arms crossed,
locked
, over their chests.

“Hey look, ladies, cool it. I haven’t even started on page one yet, and you’re already at battle stations.” They wouldn’t look at me, but they were listening. “Anna, you want the book with everything in it, right? So do I. Sax, you want me to write it my way. So do I. So will someone please tell me what the big problem is here? Huh? What is it?”

While I talked, I kept thinking that it was the kind of scene my father would play. Maybe a little too hammy, but enough to stop their attacks.

“All right? Okay, look, I want to make a proposal. May I have the floor? Yes? Okay, here it is: Anna, you give me all the information I need to write the first chapter of the book
my
way. However long it takes me, you can’t look at it — any of it — until I’m finished and satisfied with it. When I’m done, I’ll give it to you and you can do whatever you want with it. Cut it, rearrange it, throw it out … I don’t know, maybe you’ll even like the way I’ve done it. Anyway, if you don’t, and end up hating it, then I promise I’ll work as closely with you as you want after that. I won’t tape you or anything, but it’ll be a collaborative effort of the three of us from start to finish. I’m sure this idea is totally unprofessional and any publisher would pull out his hair if he heard about it, but I don’t care. If you agree to it, then that’s the way we’ll do it.”