Laughing Man (10 page)

I was raped!
she heard herself whisper, and wondered if the words had actually passed her lips.

"What was that?" Thomas said.

She thought that he had heard her say something, and that he was asking her to repeat it. She shook her head. "Nothing," she said.

"More than
nothing
,"
he said, and moved quickly past her, into the hall. She saw him look left, right. "Damnit," he whispered. He looked back into the bedroom. "Well, didn't you see it?" he snapped.

"See what?"

"Someone ran past this doorway."

"One of the girls—"

"Not one of the girls! It was male."

"My God!" Cecile breathed.

Thomas went to the railing that looked out on the first floor of the house.

"Thomas?" Cecile said.

He waved his hand behind him. "Quiet. I'm listening."

"To what?"

"Shut up, Cecile!"

She fell silent.

The house had been built so its facade faced east, and the rising sun. A huge open area stood at the front of the house; a tall, multi-paned window had been built above the front door. It was not quite 6:15, and the sun was rising now, casting yellow light through the tall window, into the house, and onto the landing, where Thomas stood. A stationary, horizontal shadow was also cast through the window; this was from the limb of a huge oak tree just inside the perimeter of the stylized picket fence.

As Thomas stood at the landing, a shadow moved on top of the horizontal shadow. "Oh, yes," Thomas whispered.

"What is it?" Cecile said.

"Your damned cat!" Thomas said, and turned to face her. "See there?" He pointed. The shadow of a cat moving on the limb was on the floor of the landing, and on the railing. "It was your damned cat!" Thomas repeated.

Cecile shook her head quickly.

"But it was," Thomas assured her. "It was the cat."
It wasn't the fucking cat!
Cecile heard herself say, but realized, again, that she had said nothing.

"Mystery solved," Thomas declared. "No mystery whatever." He looked questioningly at her. "Breakfast?" he coaxed once more.

P
atricia David thought that her night with Jack Erthmun had been incredible. She thought that she was a reasonably attractive woman—she exercised, usually ate the right foods, wore nice clothes, kept up with current events. Men were
attracted
to her, for Christ's sake. She got asked out by strangers at least three or four times a week. So why in the hell had Jack Erthmun let her sleep on his bed—while he slept on the couch—without making a move? What had the evening actually meant? It was clear that he was attracted to her, and she had to admit, however reluctantly, that she was attracted to him.

Her new partner, McBride, apparently caught on to her perplexity, because he said, from his desk, "Something wrong?"

She had just come into the squad room; she was forty-five minutes late. She shook her head too quickly, muttered, "No. Nothing," heard the peevish tone in her voice, and hoped that McBride hadn't heard it, too. She didn't want him asking a lot of questions.

He shrugged. "Okay." He handed a Polaroid snapshot across the desk. "I hope you haven't eaten yet."

She took the photograph. Her stomach lurched. "Jesus," she said, "this guy looks like he's been
cannibalized
!"

"He was," said McBride. "They found him early this morning. He was a bus driver. They found him in his bus."

Patricia said, staring open-mouthed at the Polaroid, "You mean, someone actually ate him?"

McBride nodded. "Not all of him, though. Just the juicy parts. His hands, you know. The fleshy parts of his hands, and his gut. His genitals, too."

"Yes," said Patricia. "I see."

"It's not without precedent, of course. Even in this country. People get eaten a lot more than you might like to think, and I'm not talking only about Jeffrey Dahmer. Sometimes we pull transients and homeless people out of some of these abandoned buildings and you'd swear that it wasn't only rats that had been eating them. Of course, no one looks too closely into these deaths. I mean, who cares, right?"

Patricia didn't answer. She handed the Polaroid back. "I assume he's at the morgue."

McBride nodded.

Thirty-six Years Earlier

In the House on Four Mile Creek

T
his is how Cecile Erthmun wanted to begin her admonition to her six-year-old daughter, Rebecca: "If I've told you once, I've told you a
thousand times
. . ."
But she didn't say that because her mother had said the same thing to her, a thousand times, and she wasn't about to repeat her mother's mistakes.

Rebecca looked expectantly at Cecile Erthmun. Rebecca was a child who could guilelessly defuse anger with just such a look; it said,
I am listening to you because you love me, and because I love you.

Cecile Erthmun asked, "Do you remember what I said about that place?"

Rebecca nodded, her pretty rosebud mouth open a little, as if she did not really understand the purpose of her mother's question, and her gray eyes locked on her mother's dark brown eyes, because her mother's eyes were, of course, the source of all love and caring.

"Good, then," said Cecile Erthmun. "Good." She leaned over and gave her daughter a hug. Rebecca very much enjoyed these hugs because her mother smelled like freshly washed clothes and sweet perspiration. Cecile sat on her haunches, took her daughter by the shoulders, and added, "So you know that it is not a good place to play?"

Rebecca nodded a little, as if unconvinced.

"And you're going to stay right here. In the yard. Isn't that right?"

Another slight nod. "Yes."

Cecile hugged her again. "I know you are, sweetheart," she said as she hugged. She heard the infant, Jack, crying from the other room. "I've got to see to your brother now. I'm sure one of your sisters will be out to play with you as soon as they're done with their chores."

Rebecca did not respond to this. It wasn't awfully important to her that her sisters come out and play. Their games weren't very much fun—hide and seek around the tall bushes that were everywhere near the house, leapfrog (which she wasn't big enough for), Simon Says, and tree-climbing, sometimes (though she wasn't big enough for that either).

But she had other playmates. And they were quicker, and smarter, and they knew lots of tricks. They could run as fast as birds could fly, and they could say things to her sweetly, the way her mama did, or angrily, like her father, and they could giggle like her sisters, and disappear,
poof!
too—she'd seen it!

They were everywhere. Not just in the place her mother had told her to stay away from. They were in the trees that her sisters climbed, and in the bushes where her sisters played hide and seek, and around
the
yard where they played Simon Says, and they were in the house, too.

They were everywhere.

They were wonderful!

E
rthmun asked his reflection, "What in hell is this? Who in the hell are you?" He saw his lips form the words, and heard the words come back to him from the enamel and the glass, from the hard, white plaster walls and the gray tile floor.

He told himself that he was being foolish. He said to his reflection, "You're a fool." He saw his lips move, and heard the words come back to him from all the hard surfaces in the little room. "You're a fool," he said again.

He was looking into a small mirror, mounted at head height above the sink, and he was naked. He couldn't see himself completely in the mirror unless he leaned toward it and looked down. He did this, and studied his body in the mirror. It seemed foreshortened. Fat. He thought that his penis had disappeared into the fat below his belly.

What was there to look at? A little dark pink nubbin, like the head of a turtle.

He leaned back from the mirror, looked at his face, said, "My face." He leaned forward again and looked very closely at the eyes reflected in the glass. They were brown and black, rimmed by folds of dark pink skin.

He thought that he should be able to see himself in his eyes, in the irises. But he saw only darkness. He pushed his forehead and the bridge of his nose hard against the glass for a better look. He felt the cold enamel sink on his belly and his penis. He felt the cold mirror against his forehead and the bridge of his nose. He tried to find himself in his irises, but saw nothing in them but darkness. The cold enamel sink against his penis had given him an erection. This made him angry, and he shouted an obscenity that came back to him a hundred times from all the hard surfaces in the little room. He felt his hands tighten around the edge of the sink, felt himself push his forehead harder into the mirror, until it cracked and he saw a half-dozen eyes in it.

He pushed his forehead into the cracked mirror, until the shards themselves cracked, so there were two-dozen or more eyes looking back at him. The eyes were brown, and they were rimmed by folds of dark pink skin.

H
is mother was clearly surprised to see him, and her smooth, round face lit up with enthusiasm and happiness. For the first time, he noticed that strands of gray had crept into her red hair. It had been too long since he had last seen her.

"Jack," she said, and leaned up a little to hug him. They did not hug for very long—their hugs had always been brief—and when they stopped, he said, "I need to talk to you."

She nodded enthusiastically, said, "Of course," led him into her small, white Cape Cod, and sat him down on a massive blue cloth couch. There were two cats sleeping on the back of the couch, and when Erthmun sat down they opened their eyes a moment, blinked at him, blinked again, and, together, slunk off the couch. They threw him backward glances full of fear and mistrust as they made their way out of the room and into the kitchen.

His mother sat beside him and said she was going to make him something to eat, that she'd only be a moment. She said that he looked skinny and that he clearly had not been feeding himself properly.

"No. I'm not hungry," he told her.

"When you were a boy," she said with a smile, "you were forever hungry."

"We need to talk," he said.

"Yes," she said, "I can see that." She stopped smiling and looked concerned.

A long silence followed, while she waited politely and respectfully for him to speak. At last, he said, "I don't know what I want to say."

She told him that of course he knew what he wanted to say.

He said, "I should come here more often. I'd like to come and see you more often."

"Would you?" she said.

He nodded vigorously. "I would, yes."

"Then why don't you?"

"Work," he answered at once.

"Of course," she said. "I understand."

He said, "I didn't know you had cats."

"I do, yes, I do," she said. "I've had them since the summer. You weren't here in the summer, were you, Jackie? I didn't have them the last time you were here. I got them in the summer, and I named them Oriskanie and Powhattan. Those are good names for cats, don't you think?"

"They are, yes," he said.

"You seem . . . distracted, son," she said. "I can tell these things about my children. You especially." He said, "I have some questions."

"Yes," she said, and put her hands comfortingly on his, which were resting on his knees.

He looked at her hands on his. They were not as smooth as her face, and they felt cold against his skin. They were heavily veined and the skin was gray-blue. He thought, looking at them, that the veins were like the branches of an old tree that reaches into the sky. The comparison appealed to him and he supposed that if this were some other day, he'd share it with her, because she'd enjoy it, too.

He said, his gaze still on her hands, and quickly, as if the words had been piling up for years, "I don't believe that the man I called Father was the man who was my father. I don't think I ever believed it." He looked into her eyes, saw something like panic in them, and said, "Tell me if I'm wrong, Mother."

She quickly looked away, took her hands from his, stood, leaned over the couch, as if to steady herself. He could see that she was shaking. "Of course he was your father, Jackie," she said. "I wasn't a promiscuous woman. Did you think I was promiscuous?"

"Promiscuous? No, I didn't think that."

"Your father wasn't easy to get along with, but he was the only man I ever slept with. I never slept with any man but him. Why would I? I'm not promiscuous." She was crying softly now.

He stood, put his hands on her shoulders, said, "I'm sorry."

She shook her head. "No. I understand."

"Do you?"

"Of course. You don't even look like your sisters. But that's all . . . genetics. Who knows what's going to pop out of the mix? Who knows? You throw in a little bit of this and a little bit of . . . that . . ." Her voice was quaking.