Laughing Man (28 page)

But here they were, in pursuit of him yet again, as if
his
inner self were somehow less important than their own inner selves, as if
his
needs and desires were somehow
different
from their own?

Didn't they know that the woman had been unnecessary to the earth, their mother, a burden to the air itself, and beneath it all, untidy and dying, as well? So it had been his clear duty to rip her throat out, just as it had been his duty to eat the pawnbroker.

"J
ack," Patricia said, "I need you to stop the car. Now!"

He glanced at her. He thought that she looked incredibly earnest, even a little frightened. But why would she be frightened? He was merely telling her the truth, and wasn't that part of his job (and hers)—to ferret out the truth, to
learn
the truth and deal with it in the way it demanded? He said, "I'm sorry, Patricia, if I've upset you. . . ."

"Upset me! Oh, for the love of Christ, it goes beyond that! It goes way, way beyond that!"

"I don't understand." He looked at the road again. They were in a very rural area, now; high, tree-covered hills lay ahead.

"No, I imagine that you don't understand," she said. "It's suddenly too damned easy to realize that you don't understand. Please stop the car,
Jack!"

He looked at her. She had her .38 pointed at him.

He reached out, as fast as a cobra, or a mongoose, and snatched the gun from her.

She screamed.

He brought the car to a screeching halt.

She threw her door open and ran into a field choked with tall summer grasses and dogwoods.

What in the hell is going on?
Erthmun wondered.

V
etris knew that he could not go to bed until he found Villain. He wasn't at all sure what he'd do with him if and when he did find him, but if he simply went to bed, he knew with near certainty he'd wake up to find the cat tearing at his jugular. He was convinced that Villain was possessed by the spirits of its feline ancestry—the lynx, the ocelot. And these were beasts that no thinking person toyed with (and, he realized, which no thinking person took as a pet either).

He called the cat's name. It sounded foolish. He'd named the cat
Villain
because it was a playfully evil name—the same reason people named their large dogs Killer. But he was not a dog person (as the state police investigator had pointed out), he was a cat person; he was interested in covert displays of evil, which described this cat, any cat.

"Villain?" he called again. It was a futile gesture, Vetris knew, because the animal had never responded to his name, although Vetris was certain he knew it. "I know you're hungry," Vetris called. "And I know you're upset with me, but I was delayed by unusual circumstances." He felt very foolish, now—trying to explain himself to the cat.

He saw a flash of black fur at the far end of the kitchen. "Villain?"

The phone rang.

A
s she ran through the fields of tall summer grass, Patricia thought (though not in so many words) that certainly it mattered how Jack Erthmun saw himself, and it mattered very much that he saw himself as someone aligned in an odd way with murderers, and it mattered just as much that he allowed for distance between himself and these same murderers, but it mattered most of all that she had never really known him.

She could hear him far behind her. Although he had told her more than once about his almost preternatural running abilities as a child, those abilities had apparently not stayed with him into adulthood and early middle age. She thought she could even hear him breathing heavily, though this had to be her imagination because he wasn't nearly close enough for that, and she knew that it would be difficult to hear anything above the sound of her own body crashing through the summer grass, and her own heavy breathing.

And she thought it was good that she was not in a complete panic. She may or may not have been fleeing for her life from a man she thought she had known, but who, she realized, she had not known at all. But she was thinking. She was analyzing this situation as well as she could under the circumstances. She wasn't simply tearing her hair out and making a complete ass of herself. That, of course, was because of her training—Always keep your wits about you. Always assess the situation and react to it, not simply to your fear.

She realized that something was running alongside her in the summer grass. She turned her head quickly. She saw a tall shadow not far off. Far behind her, she heard Erthmun call, "Patricia, stop running!" She thought for a moment that what she was seeing was her own shadow, dogging her footsteps. But this couldn't be true, she realized, because the sun was in front of her.

And she knew at once that it was the tall shadow's heavy breathing, as well as her own, that she had heard, and was hearing now.

She lurched sharply to her left, stumbled on a clod of earth, nearly fell, straightened, felt a hand on her back as she ran, felt it lower to her waist, screamed quickly, glanced around, saw a man's naked body, a face at her shoulder. The man was smiling—not in the way that a naked man might smile, but in a way that a man anticipating something tasty might smile, as if he were incredibly hungry and would soon be satiated.

"Get away!" she screamed at him. "Get away!"

"Patricia?" she heard. "Where are you?"

She pitched forward head-first into the grass and earth, tasted the soil, rolled once, twice, came up quickly to her feet, looked right, left, behind, saw Erthmun running toward her.

The naked man was gone.

E
rthmun said, "You're afraid of me, aren't you? I can see it in your eyes. Please, don't be. I am no more to be feared than an old basset hound."

She gave him a questioning look. They were standing together at the spot where she had pitched and rolled and she had yet to tell him about the naked man. "I'll reserve judgment, okay, Jack?" she said stiffly, voice quaking. "Could I please have my weapon?" She extended her hand for it, saw that her hand was shaking. "Jesus," she whispered.

He gave her the weapon; she put it in her shoulder holster and said, "The things you told me were very upsetting. More than upsetting . . ." She sighed. "There's someone else here, in this field. There's a naked man in this field. He . . . goddamnit, Jack, he attacked me!"

"Yes," Jack said, "I saw the naked man. I saw him running with you. Running after you."

She looked wide-eyed at him. "You
saw
him? You
saw
him, Jack? My God, you saw him and you didn't go after him?"

He shook his head, as if in confusion. "I lost sight of him, Patricia. He was there one moment, he had his hands on you one moment, I think, and then he wasn't there. I thought I should tend to you first." He nodded once, twice. "But you're all right. I think you're all right. Are you all right?"

"Yes. I think so. A little dirt in my mouth, but I'm okay." She spit.

"Good," Erthmun said. "Good. So I'll go looking for him, now. I'll go looking for this naked man."

"Yes," Patricia said. "We both will." She unholstered her weapon. "Jack?"

"Yes?"

"Stay where I can see you, okay?"

He nodded.

W
illiamson the Loon thought that he was a powerful son of a bitch, like his father, who had been a very powerful son of a bitch, whose father had been an even more powerful son of a bitch, who had been the product of a never-ending line of awesomely powerful sons of bitches.

And it was altogether possible, and quite possibly even true that he, Williamson, was the most powerful son of a bitch who had ever sprung from the earth, penetrated its women, and eaten of its fruits.

Oh, that was a chuckle deep inside, where chuckles had properly to reside and originate, within his gut somewhere, his lower intestine, no doubt, which was long and thick, red and blue and gray. Sunset and midday and twilight. Shit, shit—he was a poet, too. An awesomely powerful son-of-a-bitching poet!

He was in the grimy men's room of a grimy gas station southwest of Albany. He'd gotten here with the help of friendly people who had, they'd told him, hitchhiked, too, when they were young; "You don't see many people like you, anymore," one said. "Hitchhikers, I mean."

"That as well," said Williamson.

There was a knock at the rest room door. It was a soft knock, not urgent, and Williamson ignored it.

He was looking at himself in the restroom mirror. He worshipped what he saw in that mirror. It was perfection, the perfection of mathematics and poetry and biology and fucking madly, madly fucking, fucking in anger and retribution and . . .

There was another knock, not as soft.

Williamson looked away from the mirror and quickly around at the door. "Be patient," he called. "You'll live longer!"

"I'm sorry," a female voice called back. "I'll wait."

"Damn fucking straight you'll wait!" he called, and felt that chuckle again in his lower intestine;
Damn fucking straight you'll wait!
Poet, poet! Poet, poet! He was a fucking, all-powerful, son-of-a-bitching—

His hearing was so acute that the crash of the door being kicked open made him wince and cover his ears with his hands, which was enough time for the two state troopers who'd been outside the restroom door to wrestle him to the floor and throw handcuffs on him.

"You have the goddamned right to stay good and goddamned silent," one of the troopers said as they hauled him to his feet, "and if you give up this goddamned right. . ."

E
rthmun called across the dozen yards that separated him from Patricia, "He's not here. I know he's not here. I can feel it."

She called back, "You're wrong. He is here.
I
can feel it!"

"But why would he stick around, Patricia?" Erthmun called. "He's got both of us looking for him now."

"That wouldn't scare him, Jack."

He hadn't heard her, so he shouted to her to repeat herself.

"I said, the fact that we're both looking for him wouldn't scare him."

"How do you know that?"

"It was in his eyes. I don't think he was scared of
anything.
I could see it in his eyes!"

Erthmun sighed. Naked men with fearless looks in their eyes running around in a field of summer grass and attacking police detectives. It was ludicrous.

He called back, "I know of such men."

She looked silently at him.

He repeated, "I know of such men. My father warned us about them, so long ago."

She walked toward him, asked him to repeat himself.

"I said, the person who called himself my father warned us often about naked men in the fields." She was only a dozen yards from him, now, and was keeping her eyes locked on his, as if she were wary of him. "He said there were naked men running about in the fields around the house."

Patricia said, "And were there?"

"And were there? I think there were." She was within arm's reach, now. Her eyes were trained on his. He said, "I think that I was one of them. One of those naked men in the fields." He grinned. "But I was a boy, then. I wasn't a man. I was a boy."

V
etris Gambol thought he was dysfunctional. Why else would he be living with an honest-to-goodness killer? A very small killer, certainly; a killer who purred and kneaded and acted, at times (all the wrong times, he thought), like ... a pussycat, but a killer nonetheless. A creature that was born to be a killer and lived its life as a killer (though Vetris had to admit to the dearth of dead mice or moles in and around the house: but perhaps those creatures knew about the killer who dwelt within the house and gave it a wide berth). And now he—Vetris was, damnit, afraid to go to bed and leave the killer loose in the house. Jesus, he had to get rid of the animal. But he knew he wouldn't. In a loopy way, Villain taught him something about human killers, about their predilections and habits and obsessions. Because the predatory nature was as much a part of Villain as it was a part of any human killer. Jeez, it was an interesting theory, wasn't it? But it was bullshit. He knew that he kept Villain around because he respected him. Because he loved him—predatory nature and all. Because Villain represented purity. Vetris sighed. God, he really was dysfunctional!

E
rthmun saw a naked man on a low hill a quarter of a mile from where he and Patricia were standing. The man was looking at them, Erthmun guessed. The man's hands were flat against his ears and his legs were spread wide. Erthmun started to tell Patricia about the man, but then she saw the man, too, and said, "Good Lord, there he is!"

"There he is!" Erthmun echoed.

"What in the hell's he doing, do you think?"

"He's holding his hands on his ears."