Laughing Man (12 page)

"Shit, Denise," he said, "I jog every day."

H
is leg cramps began twenty minutes later, when the light gray overcast had turned dark gray and a lazy snowfall had begun. He sat on a tree stump and massaged his thigh. "This is a very different kind of muscle action I'm employing here than when I jog," he explained.

They were in a sparse grove of evergreens. Beyond it, to the east, the land sloped severely into pitch darkness; to the west, a few rust-colored remnants of dusk remained. There were no hazy reflections of city lights anywhere on the dark cloud cover, no distant noises of cars or airplanes. The air was as still and cold and quiet as stone.

Denise realized all at once that she wasn't absolutely certain of their location. She asked for the compass, which Hal kept in his jacket pocket. He fished it out and gave it to her. She checked it, looked at the dark gray overcast and the lazy snowfall, checked the compass again, gave it back to him, and grinned nervously.

He said, "Are we waist-deep in shit now, Denise?"

Her grin quivered. "Mid-calf, I'd say."

He stood, leaned over, massaged his thigh some more, and said, "A week from now, we're going to look back on this and say, Now that was a night to remember.' "

She gave him a quick, quivering grin.

He said, "We are, aren't we?"

She said nothing.

"Denise?" he coaxed, and noticed, then, that her gaze wasn't on him, but beyond him. He turned his head, looked.

She said, "Hal, I think that's a goddamned house."

He didn't see it. "Where?" he said.

"What do you mean 'Where?' Right there."

He turned around, so his back was to her, moved forward a few paces, then stepped to his right. The snowfall had picked up; a quirky breeze had started. He thought he was thankful for it, thankful for the whisper it made on the snow and in the trees. He had never been comfortable with silence.

He saw the house, then, though not much of it—a steeply pitched roof, part of the top floor. It was too dark now for him to
say
what kind of windows there were. "Do you think someone lives in it?" he asked.

"How would I know?" Denise answered.

"It doesn't matter, does it?"

"Goddamn right."

"I
want you to admit one thing to me," Hal said.

"Oh, yeah? What?" Denise said.

"I want you to admit that you've fucked up. I want to hear you say, 'Hal, I've fucked up. It's a first, but I've done it.' Can you say that?"

They were standing in deep snow inside the remains of a picket fence. It was very stylized; each picket was flattened at its point, and, just beneath that, much fatter and rounder than normal picket fences. Denise had said that she liked this design quite a lot, and Hal had claimed that he could fashion similar pickets for their own fence, should they decide at some point to build one.

They were not far from the house itself, which was large, gray with age, sturdy-looking, and clearly empty. Denise said, "Do you require that I confess to having fucked up, darling?"

"Sure, I do," he said.

She admitted that she had, and it made him happy. Then she said, gesturing to indicate the area inside the fence, "They liked bushes."

"Those are forsythia," Hal declared.

"I know that," she said.

"Well, then, that makes two of us."

She looked apologetically at him, then at the house, which, oddly, looked less forbidding from this vantage point—inside the friendly picket fence—than it had when they had first seen it. "Are we going inside?" she asked.

"Yes," he said. "I'm cold."

H
elen heard the music of living things, which, in this place, was at once dissonant, like the raucous noises of blue jays, and melodic—the wet and powerful noises of sex, which are the noises that scream into the ear of eternity. And she heard the whispers that come from sleep, and the cries and the shouting that leaped from the minds of those who dreamed. And she heard the music that
was
music to other ears, too—Mozart, George Harrison, Marianne Faithfull, John Prine, Samuel Barber—because these were the sounds that living things made to put themselves in harmony with the earth.

Helen's life was music, which was sex, which was food, which was music, and sex, and food, which was one thing, which was Helen.

The dapper man, wrapped only in a towel, and peeking around the open door to his apartment, said, "My God, how did you get in here?" because the building was very secure, of course. There were smells wafting out from within the apartment; they were the commixture of beef, mushrooms, cheese, and red wine, and they got Helen's saliva flowing again. And there was Hank Williams on the CD player, because the dapper man loved Hank Williams, though he played him only when he was alone.

How she got into the building was of little concern to Helen. She did what was necessary. It had been necessary for her to get into the building, so she had gotten in.

She said now, "I need you!"

"You
need
me?" The dapper man was astonished, confused. He touched the fresh bandages on his cheek, and repeated, "You
need
me?" and added, "For what?"

Helen did not recognize such questions. She barely recognized questions as questions. They indicated uncertainty, which was not a part of her existence.

She said, "You!" then swept past him, and shredded his stomach with her graceful fingers.

And when she was inside, and had turned to face him, he had begun to double over from the pain she had inflicted, and his gaze was rising questioningly to meet hers, to find some answer in her sky-blue eyes.
Why do you want to hurt
me?
his gaze said.

But there were no answers in her eyes, and no questions in them either. There was simply need, hunger, and certainty.

"I
t's very dark," Hal said.

"That's because there aren't any lights," Denise said. "Do you think this is safe?"

"What do you mean? The floor? Are you asking if the floor is safe? It feels safe." She lifted one foot and brought it down softly; it made a slight
whumping
noise. "See, safe enough." She thought that she was babbling, trying to find solace in the sound of her own voice. But solace from what?

Hal said, "There should be lights."

"And room service, too," Denise said.

"Okay, so what do we do now? Spread our sleeping bags out here?"

"No." She bent over and held her hand near the bottom of the front door; "See," she said. "Feel that draft? Jesus, we'll be popsicles by morning."

"I thought our sleeping bags were rated at twenty below."

"I really think that our best bet is to find some inner room and sleep there," Denise said.

"Inner room where? Down here? Upstairs?"

"I don't think it matters."

"Maybe there's a fireplace. I mean, there
has
to be a fireplace."

"I'm sure there's a fireplace." She looked at him; his face was only an elongated oval a little paler than the darkness in the house. "But I'm just as sure we shouldn't use it. I'd say that birds have been building nests in the chimney for a couple of decades. We might light a fire and fill the whole damned place with smoke."

"Oh, sure," Hal said, sounding chastened. "You're right. That was stupid."

She looked at him, again. Her eyes were beginning to adjust to the low light. She could see his features swimming on the creamy oval that was his face. "Am I a bitch?" she said.

And he answered, too quickly, she thought, "No. You're not a bitch."

She sighed. "I treat you badly sometimes, don't I?"

"No more than I deserve," he said. "Why are you suddenly assuming your 'true confessions' mode?"

This surprised her. "'True confessions' mode? What's that? I'm just trying to be honest—I'm just trying to be fair."

"I understand that's what you're doing. But why here, and now?"

It was a good question, she thought. "Because I'm a . . . fair and honest person," she said.

A tall window, covered by the sad remains of a lace curtain, stood near the front door. Remarkably, all the glass was intact, and, judging from the motionless air in the house, all the window glass on the entire first floor was probably intact as well. Denise stepped over to the window, peered out, said, "You know what, it doesn't look too bad out there, Hal."

"Meaning?"

She straightened. "I think the snow has stopped."

"You're not suggesting we go and look for the damned lean-to in the dark, are you?"

She shook her head briskly. "Of course not. I was simply making an observation."

A brief and incoherent whisper crept out of the darkness in the house and made them fall silent for a moment. Denise said, "What was that?"

Hal said, "I don't know. Nothing important."

She glanced at him. "Nothing important?" She smiled. "What would have made it important?"

"I don't know," he said again.

Another whisper crept out of the darkness in the house. But it was not incoherent. It was a sentence. "The damned lean-to in the dark."

Hal said, "It's a fucking echo."

Denise said. "It would have to be a very weird echo, Hal."

They heard birdsong, then. It was extended, tremulous, beautiful; it filled the dark house. And when it was done, Hal said, "A bird."

"Yes, a bird," Denise whispered, as if in awe.

"Yes," they heard from within the bowels of the house, "a bird."

"Nothing important," said the voice of the house.

They fell silent. The house fell silent. After several minutes, Hal said, "These phenomena must be repeatable."

Denise looked at him and forced a grin. "Huh?"

He said again, with emphasis now, "These phenomena must be repeatable. It's a respected tenet of science. In the face of unexplainable events, those events must demonstrate repeatability. Take the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, for instance. Do you know what that is?"

"Of course I do."

"Okay. In the past thirty years of that endeavor, there have been numerous instances of strange radio transmissions from sources beyond our solar system. But none of these radio transmissions has . . ." He paused and finished, "Sorry, I'm babbling."

"It's all right," she said.

"And there's something else, too. I've got to pee."

"So do I," she said.

"And I think what I'm going to do"—he reached behind him and pulled a flashlight from his backpack; it was something he should have done before they stepped into the house, he realized—"is find the downstairs bathroom."

"You're kidding."

"Kidding?" He turned the flashlight on and shone it in Denise's eyes. She squinted because of the light and told him he was being an asshole, but he was happy to see her face. "Why would I be kidding?" he said, and shone the flashlight briefly up the stairs in front of them, and to the left, into a huge, open room. There was no furniture in the room, but there was a thick layer of dust on the floor, and the footprints of bare feet in the dust.

"Look there," he said.

"Yes, I see," Denise said. "Kids come in here and play. It's fun. I used to do it myself when I was a kid—go into an old house and play."

"Kids from where, for God's sake?" he said. "We're twenty miles from any kids."

Denise thought about this question a moment, then said, "I don't know."

The footprints in the dust were fresh because the hardwood floor was visible beneath them. Denise pointed this out, and Hal told her she didn't need to point it out, but then he said, "They're small footprints. They're just kid's footprints, like you said."

And another whisper wafted out of the bowels of the house. It was followed by birdsong, and by the chortling of toads, and the twittering of crickets, as if they were in a meadow in summer.

Denise, said, "What the hell
is
that?"

"Only what it sounds like," Hal said.

"Jesus," Denise said, "I don't know
what
it sounds like." After a moment, she added, "We should leave, Hal. I get an awful feeling here." But there were no whispers in the house now, and no chortling of toads, no echoes. A creeper of wind had snuck in from somewhere and had obliterated the footprints in the dust. Hal pointed out that the footprints weren't that fresh, after all,
look at them.
And Denise said that maybe he was right. What choice did they have, really? The night had thrust them into a life-and-death situation, and they had to make the most of it.

"Yes," Hal agreed glumly. "We do."

Denise cupped her hands around her mouth. "Hello," she shouted.

"Hello," they heard from within the house.