The Comedy is Finished (39 page)

At the sound of the first shot, Peter leaped to his feet from the living room sofa, staring around in terror and disbelief.
This
wasn’t the right way! He started instinctively toward the glass doors leading to the cantilevered deck, wanting to see what had gone wrong, but then the firing started in earnest, and two of the glass panels ahead of him shattered as they were hit. “No no
no
!” Peter cried, backing away, making patting motions at the outer world with both hands. Not like this! Not like this!

Mike wanted more. Hurrying to stay ahead of everybody else, but at the same time striving to be meticulous, accurate, correct, he
squeezed
again. Yes! High on the right side of her chest, puffing a ragged red-black hole, straightening her against the glass door when she might have fallen forward. And again, the cartridge leaping from him to her, embedding in her body, thumping in, holding her in place, not letting her fall.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Like spikes into rotten wood, like
stakes into soft clay, he pounded the wads of metal into her flesh, watching each bloody crater blossom. Forty or fifty guns were rattling now, light-reflecting glass shards were spraying, the bedroom curtains were whipping and snapping as though in a high wind, other men’s bullets were biting into that body, but it was still first and foremost
his
. Thump. He spaced them, timed them, placed them to keep her upright, prevent her from falling. Blood and meat obscured the details of her now, someone else’s magnum cartridge swept the top of her head away as though with a scythe, but Mike kept punching, punching, punching into the torso, seven, eight, nine, ten—and the rifle didn’t kick. That was when he knew it hadn’t fired, it was empty, and at last the ragged thing on the porch toppled forward, jerking as it was hit several more times on the way down.

The bedroom was full of buzzing. Angry metal bees swarmed everywhere, stinging and biting, knocking Larry down as he tried to run through the bedroom door into the hall. Eleven bullets struck him, leaving him broken, impaired, profusely bleeding, unconscious, but alive.

Peter, mad with fear, clawed at the carpet, trying to dig down through the living room floor. Blood and saliva ran from his open mouth, tears ran from his eyes, and all he could hear was everything in the world breaking, cracking, splitting, shattering as the bullets flashed through the rooms. He lay chest-down on the floor, gasping, staring wide-eyed at nothing, scrabbling with raw fingertips, shredding his nails, until something burned the back of his neck; a spent bullet, hot from its journey through the air. Screaming, Peter leaped up into the trajectory of half a dozen more.

*

Mike lowered the rifle. The shooting went on and on, like strings of firecrackers on Chinese New Year, the officers around on the roadside firing now as well, pumping hundreds of bullets into the featureless front wall. Mike, breathing heavily, as dazed as though he’d come out of a movie house to bright sunshine, turned and saw Lynsey staring at him in shock, comprehension and rejection.

“I want to warn you something,” Koo says. “I did too much USO; when I hear gunfire, I go into my act.” He and Mark are sitting side by side now on the floor at the foot of the bed. In here, the massed shooting outside the house has the lightweight mild quality of dried beans ratting in a coffee can.

“That isn’t the cops,” Mark says. “It sounds like the critics found you.”

“Their aim never was any good.” To Koo’s right, another mirror cracks. “Jesus,” he says, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice. “So far, that’s a hundred forty-seven years’ bad luck.”

They’re safe in this room from all that heavy firing, but it doesn’t
feel
safe. The occasional bullet penetrates the house deeply enough to hit one of the surrounding mirrors from the back, and then that mirror cracks or splinters, so that by now over half the mirrors are broken, the reflections of the room becoming increasingly fragmented and crazy. With the room’s color scheme of black and white and purple and red, with the furniture piled up against the door and all the mirrors sharding and shattering so that wherever Koo turns he sees reflected the images of disjointed parts of himself and Mark, sometimes weirdly linked, the effect should be nightmarish; but it’s merely ugly and dangerous, and rather trite. Koo says, “I’d be ashamed to tell a dream like this to a psychiatrist.” Putting on the standard comic’s Viennese-psychiatrist accent, he says, “Vot’s dis mit de broken mirrors? Ged adda here, you’ll
be coming in mit de freight trains next. Vot are you, some kind a
normal
or something?”

“In my flying dreams I always go economy fare,” Mark says, “and my luggage winds up in Chicago. What does that mean, Doctor?”

“It’s ein deep-zeeted neurotic re-action. Vot does dis inkblot look like to you?”

“A four-dollar cleaning bill.”

Koo laughs, in surprised pleasure. “Nice,” he says, in his own voice. “Very nice. I don’t think I heard that one before.”

Mark seems highly amused by that: “You only like jokes you recognize?”

“Old friends are best.”

This patter started back during that ludicrous terrifying few minutes when Koo and Mark were braced side by side against the barricading furniture while Peter and the others struggled to push open the door. Much of comedy is a way of trying to deal with tension and fear, both of which Koo now possesses in abundance, so it was in a spirit of whistling-in-the-graveyard that he looked across the barricade at Mark and said, “Maybe we should just
take
the magazine subscriptions.”

And Mark immediately answered, “
Collier’s? Life?
I don’t trust these people; keep pushing!”

The jokes and gag-lines have been running ever since, a lengthening routine which almost distracts Koo from the truth of his surroundings and circumstances, and which in any event delights him.
Mark
delights him. Neither of Koo’s sons—his other sons, he has to be careful about that—neither of them has followed in Koo’s funnyman footsteps. Frank has a kind of salesman’s hearty good humor while Barry sports a self-amused wit, but neither has Koo’s love for or skill with
gags
. Astonishingly, down inside that raging murderous beast which has apparently always been Mark’s surface
persona, there lies a
comic
. It doesn’t matter if the jokes are good—we’re going for quantity here, not quality—the point is that they’re jokes and they’re delivered with a natural sense of style and timing, and to Koo’s joy and bewilderment he and Mark
work well together
. This, he thinks, aware of the exaggeration but not caring, must be what Abbott felt when he met Costello, Hardy when he met Laurel. “Well,” Koo says. “This is
another
fine mess you’ve gotten me into.”

“Hush,” Mark says; seriously, not part of any routine. “Listen.”

Koo lifts his head to listen, and realizes it’s stopping. The war is coming to an end out there. The rattle and clatter of gunfire is reducing rapidly to a mere scattered popping, it’s thinning out, thinning...one last distant
crack
. “Somebody’s always late,” Koo says.

Mark doesn’t answer. There’s silence, stretching on. Looking around, Koo sees jumbles and shards and geometric segments of the room, all ricocheting back and forth among the fractured mirrors; a crazy quilt in glass. When he raises one bandaged arm, bewildering quick movements flash from the mirrors all around, like a flight of tiny birds. And the silence stretches on. “Peace, it’s wonderful,” Koo says.

And still Mark says nothing. Koo looks at him, suddenly apprehensive, and Mark’s head has lowered, he’s brooding with hooded eyes at the floor between his feet. In profile he seems cold and humorless, reminding Koo uncomfortably of the Mark he’d known at first. Suddenly very nervous, not wanting to lose their connection, Koo says, “What’s up?”

Mark makes no response.

“Listen,” Koo says, keeping it light even though his old terror of Mark is rapidly returning, “just ’cause I won’t kiss on the first date, you don’t have to get sore.”

Now Mark shakes his head, with a small brushing-away hand gesture, but he won’t meet Koo’s eyes, and he still doesn’t speak.

“Mark,” Koo says. He feels it all slipping away, and he
must
hold onto it. “Mark, for Christ’s sake, what’s happening?”

“It’s coming to an end.” And Mark turns to show Koo a painful bitter smile. “It’s all over,” he says. “The law’s on its way.”

“And the west will never be the same again.”

“Neither will I.” Lifting his head, his expression almost playful, Mark says, “I was trying to decide whether to take you with me.”

Koo doesn’t get it, and it alarms him when he doesn’t understand Mark. Peering intently at the boy, he says, “Take me with you?”

“Oh, I’m gone, Koo.” Mark chuckles, not pleasantly, and shakes his head. “I’ve been gone since last night. I just came back to help you with Joyce, that’s all.”

“Take it easy, Mark,” Koo says, and rests his hand on the boy’s forearm.

But Mark shivers and pulls his arm away, as a horse sometimes flinches from being touched. “Better not, Koo,” he says. “I don’t know who I am right now. I don’t want to kill you by mistake.”

As so often before, Koo’s fear of Mark leads him to face the boy directly, insist on the clarifying statement. Heart in his mouth, he says, “The question is, do you want to kill me on purpose?”

“That’s the question, all right.” Mark glances toward the door. “And I don’t have much time to find the answer.”

“Mark, listen, it doesn’t have to be this way. We can work things—”

“Don’t make promises!” The harshness in Mark’s voice shocks Koo into silent rigidity. “What are you gonna do, sign me up with a contract? Make me second banana on your TV shows?”

“I thought I’d let you handle my negotiations with the network.”

Mark grunts in amusement, but then once again shakes his head.

“Listen,” Koo says, putting all the sincerity he can muster into his voice. “We
can
work something out. You’re not—”

“I will kill you, Koo.” Mark’s eyes as he gazes at Koo are as cold and empty as a northern lake. “If you sweet-talk me to save your life, I’ll strangle you this second.”

Koo blinks and blinks, staring into those clueless blank eyes. Mark wants something from him, he knows that much, but if he tries to give what he wants the boy will accuse him of hypocrisy. And the finish
isn’t
resolved in Mark’s mind, the old need to kill is still inside him, like snake venom. Whatever Koo does now is wrong, and whatever mistake he makes is fatal.

It’s too much. The seconds go on, and Koo remains impaled here, and at last there’s nothing left to do or say, no more twists and turns. Koo closes his eyes, his head dropping back to expose his throat; finally, after all this time, he’s giving up. “Do what you want,” he says. “Take me with you if you have to.”

“Do you want to be with me?”

Something strange in the wording, and in the boy’s voice, plucks at Koo’s attention, bringing him back from defeat. But he’s too tired, he’s been through too much, he can’t defend himself anymore. He doesn’t move. He waits for it to happen, the hands on his windpipe or whatever it’s going to be.

“Koo? Do you
want
to be with me?”

Since it doesn’t matter, the simple truth will do: “Yes,” Koo says. His eyes remain shut, his body is limp and relaxed, his voice weak and without inflection.

Mark says, “Your place or mine?”

Koo could never resist a straight line; not even here, on the brink of the grave. In doubt and wonderment, with great reluctance to answer the bell for yet another round, he nevertheless lifts his heavy eyelids, looks at Mark’s expressionless face, and says, “Mine.”

Mark is about to answer, express some mistrust, but then his
eyes flicker, and Koo hears it, too: Voices outside the door, coming up the stairs. “Sounds like the cavalry,” Mark says, then glances toward the barricade. “Still, they’ll take a while to get through all that.”

“Mark.”

The head swivels back, the eyes study Koo’s face. “Yes?”

“I’m about to say something stupid.”

“Go ahead.”

“I—” Koo hesitates, tries to find a more self-protective way to phrase it, fails, and goes on: “I want you to love me.”

Mark stares. There are people in the hall, just outside the door, shouting to one another, but Mark and Koo both ignore them. Mark says, “You want me to love you. So I won’t kill you?”

“No. Regardless of anything. I just want it, that’s all.”

“I thought you were smart, Koo.”

“You were wrong.”

“I sure was.”

In sudden rage, Mark says, “You complete schmuck, why do you think I
wanted
to kill you? It’s because I
wanted
to love you, you asshole!”

“What?” Koo can’t follow this last turn.

“You’ve been my father all my life,” Mark says; then in sudden disgust he twists away from Koo, scrambling to his feet. “Oh, the hell with it. The hell with
you
. What made me think you were worth struggling over?”

Mark begins with quick angry movements to dismantle the barricade, pushing the television set away, tossing dresser drawers to left and right. Outside, the voices are calling Koo’s name. “In here,” Koo shouts, as much to recapture Mark’s interest as to answer the voices, but Mark pays no attention. Koo struggles to rise, having trouble because it hurts to put pressure on his arms, and in a
hurry because there’s something left to say to Mark. He doesn’t know what it is, but he feels the urgency and he believes the words will come of their own accord if he can ever get up on his damn
feet
.

But it takes too long. He is barely standing, weaving, when the final pieces of the barricade are shoved out of the way by people on the outside pressing against the door. And now they all burst in, and a pistol butt flashes through the air, and Mark reels backward, blood pouring from his temple.

“Mark!” Koo tries to catch him, but the boy is falling, and his weight drags Koo down onto the floor with him; Koo bouncing at a tangent off the edge of the bed, finishing in a seated position on the floor among all those uniformed legs, with Mark’s bloody head in his lap.