The Further Adventures of The Joker (10 page)

Heaven’s where God pays all the bills.

A father always no’s best.

Middle age is the time in life when a girl you smile at thinks you know her.

“It’s late.”

Junior looked up. His father’s eyes were swollen, and he was peering at his wristwatch under the dim lamplight. “Gosh. I went to sleep, didn’t I?”

“Yes, sir.” Junior put the yellow pad down beside his father’s chair. His father stretched, and his joints popped.

“I get tired early, I guess. I didn’t even know my eyes closed.”

“Yes, sir,” Junior said.

Dad picked up the yellow pad and examined it. The way the light caught his face made him look very old, and the sight made Junior think of the collection of skulls at the Gotham Museum, one of his favorite places to spend a Saturday. “People like to smile,” Dad said, in a quiet voice. “They like a man who tells jokes. A happy man.” Junior suddenly tensed, because he heard the sound of a car’s engine racketing. Dad stared at the front door, as if he expected Eddie Connors’s red Chevy to come roaring up the porch steps and into the house. Eddie revved the engine a few times, getting ready to lay rubber on the street right in front of the house—and then the car began to pop and sputter, and after a few seconds of that the engine died.

“Thank God,” Dad said, and let out the breath he’d been holding. “I can’t stand that noise. It makes my head hurt.”

Junior nodded. Eddie Connors wasn’t going to be tearing the street up tonight.

Dad was looking at his son. They stared at each other, their faces similar constructions of flesh and bone. The people in the situation comedy prattled on, and the canned laughter filled the room. “You’re my boy, aren’t you?” Dad asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“My boy,” Dad repeated. “And you’re not going to be one of those people who think the world owes him a giving, are you?”

“No, sir.”

“That’s a joke. Smile.”

Junior did, on command.

His father leaned toward him. Closer. And closer still. Junior could see pinpricks of sweat glistening on his father’s cheeks and forehead. His father’s skin had a sour smell, and the man’s eyes were like black glass. “Junior?” his father whispered. “I want to tell you a secret. Know what a secret is? It’s anything a woman doesn’t know. But I want to tell you, because you’re my boy.” His father’s face floated before him in the dim light, half of it in shadow like a waning moon. “I’m afraid,” Dad whispered. He swallowed thickly, as the canned laughter swelled. “I’m afraid I’m getting sick again.”

Junior didn’t speak. A small vein was beating very hard at his right temple, and his lips were bloodless.

“Sometimes,” Dad said, “I feel like the world is spinning so fast it’s about to throw me off. Sometimes I feel like the sky is so heavy it’s crushing me down, and I can’t get a breath. They gave me a second chance, at the company. They said I was good with people, and I could make people smile so I ought to be able to sell things.” A grin flickered across his mouth like quicksilver, but his eyes remained black. “A salesman. That’s somebody with two feet on the ground who takes orders from a person with two feet on a desk.”

Junior did not smile.

“I feel like . . . the wind’s about to take me away, Junior. I feel like I can’t get steady. I don’t know why. It’s just . . . I can’t stay happy.”

Junior didn’t move. He could hear his mother, talking on the telephone. He thought of the toys in the basement, slowly being whittled down to the bones by ants and roaches, a little more hour after hour.

“I can’t go back to that hospital,” his father whispered, right in his face. “I couldn’t stand that place. They don’t know how to smile there. That’s what Hell would be for me, Junior. A place where people wouldn’t smile. If I had to go back there . . . I don’t know what I might do.”

“Dad?” Junior’s voice cracked. “I . . . wish you wouldn’t . . . talk like this.”

“What’s wrong with wanting to be happy?” his father asked. The whisper was gone. “Is it a sin to be happy? Is it a damned sin?” His father was getting louder, and he drew his face back from Junior’s. “You know, that’s what’s wrong with this world! They take everything away from you, and then they try to cut the smile off your face! Well, I won’t let them! I’ll see them in Hell before they break me down! They broke down my old man, and he was crying with that bottle in his hand and I said I’ll make you smile again, I will. I’ll make you smile, I’ll do anything to make you smile, but the world broke him down! Because a man who smiles is a dangerous man! They want to cut the smile off your face, and make you weak! But I won’t have it. I swear to God I won’t have it! And you’re part of me, Junior, you’re my boy, you’re my flesh and bone!” One of Dad’s sinewy hands grasped his son’s shoulder. “The world’s not going to break us down, is it?”

“No, sir,” Junior said, lifelessly, but in his chest his heart was pounding.

“Junior?” It was his mother. She was standing in the doorway between the front room and the kitchen, and her hands had seized the wall like white spiders. Her eyes tracked back and forth from the boy to his father, and over the noise of the television laughter Junior could hear his father’s harsh, slow breathing. “Why don’t you get ready for bed? All right?”

A silence stretched. And then Dad said, “Mom’s the word,” and released his son. As Junior walked toward the hallway that led to his room, his father said, “Know what a mother is, Junior? It’s a woman who spends twenty years making a boy into a man so another woman can make a fool of him in twenty minutes.” Junior kept going, his insides quaking. He had taken three more steps when his father said, easily, “Lock your door tonight.”

Junior stopped. Terror had crippled him. Those words were not said very often, but Junior understood them. He looked at his mother, who seemed to have diminished in size, her skin turned a sickly gray.

“Lock your door,” Dad repeated. He was staring at the television screen. “Say your prayers, will you?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy answered, and he went to his room and locked the door. Then he lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, where cracks riddled the plaster.

In the morning, he could pretend he had had a particularly terrible nightmare. He could pretend he had not heard, as the clock’s hands crept past midnight, the muffled noise of his father’s voice beyond the wall, speaking stridently—commanding—and his mother’s weak begging. He could pretend he had not heard his father shouting for her to laugh, to laugh, to fill the house with laughter. To laugh and laugh until she screamed. And there was the slapping noise of the belt and a lamp going over and the bed creaking savagely and his mother’s sobbing in the silence that followed afterward.

Smile, Junior.

SMILE, I SAID!

His teeth gritted in a rictus, he lay with night pressing in on the house and darkness coiled within.

When he got out of bed, the sun was shining again. His father was gone, and so was the briefcase and the yellow pad. His mother made him breakfast. She had a split lip, but most of her bruises never showed. She smiled and laughed, a brittle sound, as she moved around the kitchen, and when she asked Junior what he was going to do today he said he had plans.

He left home early, bound for the secret place. He passed Eddie Connors’s red Chevy, a deballed stallion at the curb. It would take more than a wrench to get the fuel line unclogged. He continued along the street where sunlight and shadows intermingled, and he went his way alone.

Atop the water tower on the high hill, Junior stood staring toward the spires of Gotham City. The chimneys of the factories were pumping out smoke, the arteries were clogged with traffic, and life went on whether your old man was crazy or not.

Junior opened the tower’s hatch, and that was when he heard the voice.

“Hey, Junior! Hey, I’m down here!”

He walked to the edge, looked down at the green earth, and there stood Wally Manfred in his T-shirt and shorts, this time wearing purple socks with his sneakers. Wally was grinning, and the sun sparked off his glasses. Wally waved up at him. “I see you!”

Junior felt his eyes narrow. Felt his face tighten, around the bones of his father. Felt rage open inside him like the unfolding of a dark flower, and black seeds spewed forth.

“I followed you!” Wally said. “Fooled you, huh?”

Junior trembled. It was a quick trembling, over and done with, but it was like an inner earthquake and left cracks in his foundation.

The secret place had been found. His haven of solitude was no longer his. And what did he own on this earth, except the toys that were stored within?

“What’re you doin’ up there?” Wally called.

Junior made his face relax. He made a smile rise up, through the hot flesh. He opened his mouth, and he said, “Climb up.”

“Is this where you go all the time? It sure is high!”

“Climb up,” Junior repeated. “The ladder’s strong.”

“I don’t know.” Wally kicked at a stone with the toe of his sneaker. “I might fall.”

“I won’t let you fall,” Junior said. “Honest.”

“Maybe I can come up halfway,” Wally said, and he started up the ladder.

What he was going to do about this, Junior didn’t know. Sooner or later, Wally would tell somebody else about the secret place. Wally might even come up here alone, open the hatch, and see what was inside. Wally might go tell his mother, and then his mother might tell Junior’s mother, and then . . .

They might get the wrong idea. They might think he was like his father. They might want him to go to that hospital where his father had gone, and where his father would be returning to soon. They might think something was wrong with him, and that something had been wrong with him for a long time but he’d been very good at hiding it.

“I’m halfway up!” Wally called out. He sounded scared. “I’d better stop!”

Junior was staring toward Gotham City, a garden of stones. “Come on the rest of the way,” he said quietly. “I’ve . . . got a joke to tell you.”

“I’d better get down!”

“It’s a good joke. Come on up, Wally. Come on up.”

Silence. Junior waited. And then he heard the noise of Wally climbing the rest of the way up, and Junior said, “That’s a good boy. Know what a boy is? An appetite with a skin pulled over it.”

Wally reached the top of the tank. There was sweat on his face, and his glasses had slid down to the end of his nose. He was shaking as he got off the ladder and stood up.

“There’s a good view of Gotham City from here. See?” Junior pointed.

Wally turned to look at the city. “Wow,” he said, his back to Junior.

One push.

Sixty feet down.

Drag Wally into the bushes. Hide him. Who was Wally, anyway? He was a little nothing, and he should never have sneaked up here to the secret place. One push, and the secret would be a secret again. But Junior didn’t move, and then Wally turned around again and saw the open hatch. “What’s in there?” he asked.

And it all came clear to Junior, what should be done, like a burst of brilliant light in his brain.

“Want to see?” Junior asked, smiling. He was cold, even standing in the sunshine, and he trembled though he could feel sweat on his back.

Wally walked carefully to the hatch and looked in, but it was dark in there and he could see nothing. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll go down first. I’ve got a light in there. Want to see?”

Wally shrugged. “I guess.”

“Just come down the ladder slow and easy,” Junior told him. “Wally? You like me, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” Wally nodded, but he was looking at the open hatch.

“Follow me down,” Junior said, and he slid into the hatch and descended the ladder.

In another moment, Wally Manfred followed. Junior reached the bottom and picked up a flashlight he’d brought from home. He didn’t switch it on yet, and Wally said nervously, “Where’s the light?”

“I’ve got it. Just come on down.”

“It smells bad in here. It’s hot, too.”

“No, it’s not,” Junior said. “It’s just right.”

Wally reached the tank’s floor. His hands found Junior’s arm. “I can’t see anything.”

“Here’s a light,” Junior said, and he switched it on. A heat was building in his skull, and his temples were pounding. “See my toys?” he asked, as he swung the light slowly back and forth. “I made them, all by myself.”

Wally was silent.

Wires dangled from pipes overhead, and from those wires hung the bones.

There were over a hundred. Constructions of wire and small skeletons—birds, kittens, puppies, chipmunks, squirrels, lizards, mice, snakes and rats. Junior had not killed all of them himself; most of the carcasses he’d found, on his long solitary treks. He’d only killed maybe forty of them, the kittens, puppies, and some birds with broken wings. But the skeletons had been reformed, with wire and patience, into bizarre new shapes that did not resemble anything that had ever lived. There were birds with the skulls of kittens, and kittens with wings. There were comminglings of rats and puppies, squirrels with beaks, and other things with eight legs and three heads and ribcages melded together like strange Siamese twins. There were things freakish and hellish, constructed from Junior’s imagination. And here, on these wires, was the result of the only thing that excited Junior and made him truly smile: Death.

“I . . . think . . . I’d better go home,” Wally said, and he sounded choked.

Junior’s hand closed on the boy’s wrist, and held him. “I wanted you to see my toys, Wally. Aren’t they pretty?” He kept moving the light, going to one grotesquerie after another. “It takes hard work to do this. It takes a careful hand. Do you see?”

“I’ve gotta get home, Junior! Okay?”

“I do good work,” Junior said. “I make things that not even God can do.”

“Junior, you’re hurtin’ my arm!”

“You like me, don’t you?” Junior asked, as he moved the light from monster to monster.

“Yeah! I like you! Lemme go, okay?”

Junior swallowed thickly. His face was damp with sweat, his heart racing. “Nobody who likes me,” he said, “is worth anything.”

He let Wally go, and he picked up the hammer that lay near the bottom of the ladder, next to the coil of wire, the wire-cutters and glue and the can of Rust-Eater. Wally was pulling himself up on the first rung of the ladder, but Junior grinned and swung the hammer and as the hammer crunched into the back of Wally Manfred’s skull, Junior was filled with a blaze of joy.