Laughing Man (24 page)

It knew what the earth demanded of it, and it was not reluctant. Or regretful.

E
rthmun thought,
Who in the hell can know about such things?
The thought upset him because it seemed so callous. After all, there was his mother in front of him, dressed in a long blue terry cloth robe with small white frogs imprinted on it, on her knees, leaning into her oven, and she was dead. He could see only the back of her head—straight, shoulder-length gray hair recently permed, he guessed—the clean, white soles of her bare feet, her bare hands sticking out of the terry cloth robe. One hand was palm-down, on the inside of the oven door, so her elbow was bent; the other hand hung over the edge of the door, so her fingertips grazed the black and white tile linoleum. Erthmun could smell the awful odor of the gas, though the oven had been turned off nearly ninety minutes earlier.

"Coming through," he heard, and when he turned his head, he saw a couple of men from the Medical Examiner's Office carrying a stretcher in. "Step aside," the lead man said to Erthmun, who nodded and stepped aside.

He felt someone tapping his shoulder. "Jack?"

He looked, saw the round and pleasant face of Lieutenant John Blair, from the 11th Precinct, with whom he'd worked on a couple of cases.

Blair said, "I'm awfully sorry, Jack. Really. This is terrible."

Erthmun nodded a little.

"Jack," Blair said, "you know that your mother left a note, right?"

"No," Erthmun said, "I didn't know that. I just got here."

Blair nodded. "On the table." He gestured toward it. Erthmun went over to the table and bent a little to read the note, while keeping his hands at his sides.

"The element of truth in all this is the rape, of course," he read aloud. His mother's handwriting was elegant. "The rape is not a kernel of truth. The rape is a hard and
grim truth, with which I have tried to live peacefully within myself for a very long time. But the hard truth of the rape has jumped on me like an animal, and I cannot rid myself of it.

"Because I wonder, of course, what the rape has produced, and I know only a little of what it has produced—perhaps as one can know only a little, a very little, of what the infant at one's breast will become, what its potential is, what strange, horrific, ghastly, or beautiful creature actually dwells inside it.

"Oh, I love all my children, none any more than another, but some of our children become mysteries to us, to everyone, and we make excuses for them. We say, 'He's his own man,' or, 'He's in therapy; everyone should be in therapy, don't you think?' even when it isn't true. Or we simply believe that one or another of our children is on a different path than the rest of humanity, although the sky they peer into is just as blue as ours, and the flowers they pause to enjoy are the same flowers we all enjoy—these children are simply on a path of their own.

"But such excuses eventually pile up and become mountainous and we can no longer cope with the simple fact and process of being alive. It becomes a great and unbearable burden.

"And at some point we realize not only that we are doomed, but that our children are doomed as well. That some of them, one of them, not all of them, is as strange in his skin as a frog with wings. But the frog would never dwell on the fact of his wings. The wings would simply be a burden because the frog could never fly—it's too heavy. But the frog wouldn't fret about the burden; the frog would simply carry it. We humans, and those so much like us—those to whom we may have given birth—are not made that way. We sometimes spend a lifetime in
regret at this or that. We do not shoulder lifelong burdens well. We become cranky. Strange. Or suicidal. There, the word.

"Who can bear to outlive her children?

"I'm sorry."

Erthmun glanced solemnly at Lieutenant Blair, then silently read the note again, straightened, glanced at the oven—his mother's body had been removed while he had read her note—then at Blair again.

After several seconds, Blair told him, "It says a lot, and it says very little."

Erthmun said, "I think it says everything that she wanted to say."

W
illiamson the loon, as Erthmun liked to think of him, believed everything about himself that he remembered. And he remembered much—a father who took him fishing at a place called Beaver Pond, who taught him to ride a two-wheeled bicycle, how to piss against the side of a car stopped on the expressway, how to swear, size up a woman, make people afraid. And he remembered a mother who was as beautiful as blood, as beautiful as floods and tornadoes, who taught him to cherish his needs as if his very life depended on them, which it did, and how to grow and carry on a conversation and eat a school lunch.

Many of these memories were real, and gave him comfort in the noisy hours between the frenzied satisfaction of his needs and the time for blissful sleep, the hours when people talked to him about this and that, over and over and over, like squirrels chattering, when he needed to smile and react—the hours when the woman he lived with pestered him about children or groceries or car payments, and he had to smile and react and pretend that it wasn't really his need, in those moments, to tear her brain from her skull.

So, in this place where he'd been put, he dwelt on his memories, leaned into them, made them a part of the gray bars, the hard, pencil-thin mattress, the cement floor and foul air; he saw his mother there, as naked and appealing as trees, and his father, too, standing naked with her, hard and ready, like a summer rain. They were two naked creatures of a day that dawned and dawned again; two who sprang from sassafras root, limestone, the bacterial deluge of the earth's living under-layer.

He found arousal in all this, but it was no great thing because he found arousal often, even in the mundane, especially in the mundane, in snow that lingered at the edges of sidewalks, in a woman's arm moist with sweat, in naked feet, in cats battered bloody after a fight.

He did not hear the guard. "Okay, Williamson, you're gone." He heard only his father—standing naked with his mother under a towering oak at the edge of a woodland he recognized too well—telling him with a fist raised, as if in anger, "Go on out there, boy, and do what you have to do." Which was advice that he gave himself often, and followed religiously.

"Williamson, you listening to me? I said you're outta here."

"Son, you can go," Williamson's father told him.

"Go where?" Williamson said. "I don't want to go." He missed his mother and father very much, hadn't seen them in decades, wondered often if he had ever seen them.

"Well, that's too damned bad, isn't it?" the guard said. "Because you ain't got no say in the matter."

"I'
ll tell you what she was doing the last time I saw her," said a man named Berko. "She was fixing her hair. She was sitting at her table there, looking in her mirror, and fixing her hair. She fixed her hair a lot, even if it didn't need fixing. She loved to fix her hair."

Patricia said, "Do you mean she was combing it?"

Berko gave her a quick, disbelieving look. "Did I say she was combing it? No. I said she was fixing it. She was messing with it the way women mess with their hair—you know, poufing it and straightening it and scowling at it like it was a bad movie. I'll bet you mess with your hair, right? Well, that's what she was doing. She was messing with hair. She was fixing her hair. She thought it was beautiful. It was, I guess. But she fixed it, anyway."

Patricia said, "It's not important what she was doing with her hair, Mr. Berko. Did you say anything to her then, or did she say anything to you?"

"Yeah, she said, 'Don't bother me, Tommy. I'm fixing my hair.' So I closed the door."

"And that's all she said? You said nothing to her? You just closed the door and that was that?"

Berko sighed a long-suffering kind of sigh. "Listen, if Tabitha told you she didn't want to talk, you didn't talk. That's the kind of woman she was."

"And when you looked in on her later . . ."

"I didn't look in on her. No one just 'looks in' on Tabitha, unless they want to get their head handed to them. I knocked a couple of times, waited a minute, knocked again, then I called to her, and when she didn't answer, I opened the door. She wasn't here."

"And you'd been waiting out there"—Patricia nodded
to indicate the living room—"the entire time and didn't see her leave this room?"

Berko nodded. "That's right. I didn't go and take a piss, or make a sandwich, or watch TV. I just waited for her to come out. And when she didn't come out—I guess it was an hour—I knocked on the door."

Patricia glanced about. The bedroom was large and sported a dark cherry four-poster bed, two huge armoires, a glass dressing table, and a walk-in closet. There were also two long, narrow windows that looked out on 42nd Street, thirty stories below. She said to Berko, "It's a very strange story."

He shrugged. "Shit," he said, "Tabitha is a fucking strange woman."

"I
t's what I'm telling you," said the head of the search team in South Oleander. "We haven't found anything. Just lots and lots of blood. But no bodies. No parts of bodies either. Nothing."

Vetris Gambol didn't know what to say, and when he glanced at Myrna Guffy, he could see that she didn't know what to say either.

After a few uncomfortable moments of silence, Myrna said, "Well, Jesus, then you haven't looked far enough, have you?"

The head of the search team—a balding, rotund man who wore brown horned rim glasses and spoke with the hint of a wheeze—said, "You know, first
we
looked until we reached the perimeter of all that blood. Then we looked further. A couple of miles further. Then we did it all over again. Now we're going to do it a third time. But I can tell you that I'm just about positive we
still
won't find anything because I'm just about positive that there's nothing to find."

Myrna scowled. "Well, I can tell you this—all that blood means bodies. A dozen bodies. Two dozen. I don't know. But bodies. Or pieces of bodies. And they weren't eaten by forest rats!"

"Maybe it was a prank," Vetris Gambol offered.

Both the head of the search team and Myrna Guffy looked wide-eyed at him, as if he'd sprouted a third arm.

"Because," he explained, "you're right. All this damned blood
has
to mean bodies. Or small pieces of bodies. Maybe just fingers, or tips of fingers, or—I don't know—an eye or two, a cuticle . . ." He shook his head. "Forget that. Sorry. It was stupid." He sighed. "I'm merely suggesting that since we're looking at what seems to be an impossibility that we need to rethink what's possible and what isn't." He paused to give Myrna and the head of the search team time to jump in; they said nothing. He went on. "And since it's literally impossible, considering all this goddamned blood, that we
wouldn't
find bodies or parts of bodies, then, ipso facto, there are no bodies or parts of bodies to be found. Just blood. Because someone dumped it all around as a prank."

Myrna said, "And where would they have gotten so much blood, Vetris?"

"Don't you see?" he said. "Don't you see? That's just secondary. If we determine that all of this blood has been dumped here as a fucking prank, then we—"

A uniformed state trooper came quickly up to them; "We found something," he said. "We found some pieces of bone."

J
ack Erthmun's sadness over his mother's suicide was like a lingering dream of claustrophobia, as if he were within his mother at the moment that she had decided to end her life, and at the moment before her life ended. Within
her, too, minutes earlier, when she had thrown the green robe festooned with white frogs around herself, and within her when she stared at the oven and wondered if her plan really would work, if she would allow it to work, if sleep induced by the gas would overcome her before she could change the plan, and hoped it would, knew that such a sleep had, after all, to be quiet and thankfully peaceful, and blessedly eternal. Erthmun knew that had always been the way she thought. As if life and death constituted nothing more than a dream wrapped up in poetry, wrapped up in confusion, wrapped up in heartbreak.

Good for her
, Erthmun thought. She had lived and died as a poet, which she had wanted. But no one would ever know or care or remember. Except him. And for Christ's sake, what in the hell did
he
know about poetry? He knew as much about poetry as he knew about himself. His mother had gotten that right, for God's's sake. He was the odd man out (among himself and four sisters); he was the stranger, the one she had written about in her suicide note, the one she thought she'd outlive, and, since she couldn't bear that thought, she had decided to go first.

Christ! Christ! He wished he could chalk it all up to simple craziness. But his mother wasn't crazy. She was loving. She loved him.

And the irony of it all, he thought, was that he expected to live another seventy-five years, at least. So what in the hell had she been talking about?