Laughing Man (31 page)

So Erthmun and Patricia had waited in silence as night had fallen. No one talked among the people searching either, and the view that Erthmun and Patricia got was of a dark blue sky and dark grass punctuated by the intermittent glow of flashlights, as if huge fireflies were loose in the field.

For some time, as he stood silently, Erthmun had been wondering about his name.
Erthmun.
He had made endless apologies to himself for dwelling on something so mundane while something so momentous—the search for a boy whom he, Erthmun, had apparently shot—was going on before his eyes. But he couldn't help thinking about his name. It was such an unusual name. As far as he knew, no one else on all of God's green earth had it, except his mother and the man whom he had called his father, and his sisters. He had once asked his father about it: "Where did our name come from?"

"It's German," his father had answered. "We're all German. Even your mother. She's German. So we're completely German. And that name is German."

"Oh," the young Jack had replied. "I didn't know we were German."

"German as the Kaiser," his father said. "German as Volkswagens."

"Oh," said the young Jack. "I don't know about those things."

"No need to," his father said. "A boy like you."

Young Jack had wondered what his father meant by that, but had said nothing because he hadn't wanted to appear stupid. Certainly
he
should know what kind of boy he was; he shouldn't have to ask someone else.

His father said, "You're German, too, I think. Half German, probably." The young Jack thought that the man looked suddenly annoyed, or bothered, hurt, or angry. It was difficult for the young Jack to sort out such emotions; it was not nearly as difficult for the middle-aged Jack to sort them out, and he realized—looking back thirty-five years at the face of the man whom he had called father—that the man had been hurt and angry at the same time, as if some great wrong had been done to him and all he could do about that wrong was simply bear it.

And so many people had asked him how he spelled his name. People to whom he had to give his name—store clerks and people carrying out official business—and though he spelled it carefully, they almost always misspelled it as "Earthman," or "Earthmun," and he had given up trying to correct these misspellings. Even the name on his driver's license was misspelled—"Jack Erthman," which was, at any rate, a unique misspelling.

He said now, breaking the long silence between himself and Patricia, "What do you think of my name?"

She glanced at him, and he at her, though he could see little of her face in the darkness. "I think it suits you," she said. "It's a strong name. A male name."

"Erthmun?" he said.

"Oh." She shook her head. "No. Jack. That's a strong name. I don't know about Erthmun. I've often wondered where the hell it came from."

"It's German," he said. "My family was German." She shrugged. "Sure. It sounds German."

The search went on for another three hours. No body was found, and no further signs of the missing boy.

W
hen he woke at 3:00 A.M. and did not find Villain on his chest, Vetris was disappointed. And relieved. He enjoyed the idea of leading a basically uneventful home life, which was one reason he had never married. But he also enjoyed the possibility of the strange and the unpredictable finding its way through the door and into his house. And what could have been more strange and unpredictable than the ghost of his psychotic cat waking him early in the morning? He wondered how he'd react. Would he scream and attempt to throw the creature off? Would he jump from his bed and run from the room? Would he and Villain stare at one another for a minute while the wide-eyed Villain let him know that nothing as insignificant as death was going to get in the way of their bizarre relationship, and while Vetris tried to understand where his ideas of reality had all gone astray?

And yet, Vetris thought, he had indeed awakened only a few hours after going to bed, and he had awakened because it was about the time that Villain had always awakened him. Old habits are hard to break, especially when they're lodged in the subconscious as tenaciously as a virus.

He heard movement in the room, and he thought at once that mice were taking over the house again, now that Villain was gone. The mice, he supposed, could sense the departure of an enemy as lethal and as omnipresent as Villain, so they thought that it was time to party.

The movement continued. Pitter-patter sounds, similar, Vetris thought, to the sounds that a large cat on the prowl might make, or several mice on the retreat might make.

He didn't like the idea of mice overrunning the house. It presented him with agonizing decisions about how to get rid of them. Another cat? Where would he find one with the lethality and lordly demeanor of Villain, whose very presence kept the mice at a distance? Traps? What kinds? He didn't at all like the idea of getting up to find mice nearly cut in half by the classic mouse trap, and the "Have-a-Heart" traps were too much work; he'd tried them. Plus you couldn't catch all the mice. And the ones you did catch had to be taken at least five miles from the house, otherwise they always found their way back. God knows how.

The sounds in the room became louder, Vetris thought, as if the creature making them had suddenly gained fifty pounds. But the sounds were still pitter-patter sounds, the sounds of something moving stealthily. He wished he could see better without light. His night vision had been deteriorating ever since he had hit forty and he sometimes believed it was a precursor to blindness. His father and two of his uncles had succumbed to early blindness caused by an esoteric illness, and the idea that he might go blind scared the hell out of him.

Perhaps he should turn on a light, he thought. Perhaps he should know what was in the room with him. Perhaps he should know if it was a fifty-pound mouse, or Villain being what he always knew that Villain could be.

A small face, nearly lost in darkness, appeared just above him. "Oh, my God!" it whispered.

W
illiamson the Loon knew about the Chocolate Murders. Everyone knew about the Chocolate Murders. Everyone whose mother had great oaks growing out of her forehead and hollyhocks growing from her feet and rivers flowing through her belly. And everyone who knew intimately about the Chocolate Murders—and, of course, everyone else with the same mother knew about them intimately—thought that they were strange, perverse, and unacceptable. That they were a waste of food and resources and too similar, far too similar, to the foolishly complex actions of those whose mothers had red lips and breasts brimming with milk.

Williamson the Loon thought that way, in those words, and he thought in other ways, too, when the occasion required. He thought in less lyrical ways, in direct ways, like an apple hitting the ground, or a honeybee, heavy
with pollen, lumbering from one flower to another, or a man in pursuit of his survival pursuing women to impress and penetrate. There was nothing calculated about anything Williamson did. He did what was necessary to him, without embellishment, introspection, afterthought, or regret. He was not a man driven. He was simply not a man.

He wanted to pity the female state trooper whose body he had left behind in the front seat of her car. He wanted to pity her because he knew that pity was an emotion worth cultivating, because many in that other culture—the one born of women with red lips—seemed to value it in others, and seemed to know when it was offered without sincerity. But he wasn't absolutely certain what pity was. Could it be a feeling of sadness or regret in the face of another's misfortune? If so, what really were sadness and regret all about, except—as far as he could see—becoming emotionally entangled in the fate of someone else? And to what end?

But still, cultivating the emotion of pity, after he found out what pity was exactly, could be an asset. It might enhance the few days and nights that were left to him in ways he could not imagine now. It might give him greater access—at necessary times—to the bodies and vaginas and wombs of women of that other culture whom he required to bear his children, which promoted his own survival, as well as the survival of his species. Oh, it was such a heady time, this time of transition, from being to nonbeing to existence all over again.

But for now he was hungry for a cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke, and the idea of cross-species, cross-cultural philosophy simply stopped appealing to him.

He had grown to love cheeseburgers, but found that their appeal was enhanced tenfold by the addition of French fries and ketchup, and enhanced ten-fold again by the addition of a tall, cold Coke, half-filled with ice, and served in a genuine Coca-Cola glass that had been chilled. The whole meal was as heavenly as any that a vegetarian such as he could dream of, though he had often considered substituting Coke with Starbucks Mocha Frappucino, though Mocha Frappucino, he decided, was best drunk all by itself, unencumbered by other flavors and textures.

He had, however, drunk a bottle of Mocha Frappucino while devouring a housewife named Betty, who had very willingly let him into her house because he had told her that he was a representative of the TV show
Who Wants
to
Be a Millionaire
,
and that she had been suggested as someone with an unquenchable appetite for knowledge and, thus, the possible winner of a million dollars. Perhaps more, depending on how well her appetite for knowledge had been satisfied.

When Williamson's appetite for her had been satisfied, and his bottle of Mocha Frappucino drunk, he had made his way back to the place where he stayed so that he could wash his hands, mouth, and face, and to change his clothes, which were unsightly with much of Betty herself, and then back to his job as a shoe salesman. He had always loved his job as a shoe salesman. It kept him close to the earth. God but he missed that job.

T
he face was the face of a boy who spoke in Vetris's voice, "Oh my God!" it said, then vanished into the darkness of the room, leaving Vetris breathless and shaking from the surge of adrenaline that had pushed through him.

He did not leap up, though he knew that he should, because he had seen something strange and threatening in the boy, who might, he knew, still be in the room, as he—Vetris—lay in the bed, quivering, trying hard to peer into the darkness above him, trying to make out, at least, the overhanging lamp on the ceiling, or the color of the ceiling itself—bright white—as he tried to push the darkness away by sheer force of will.

But his hearing had shut down, too. Or his brain's ability to process what he heard in the room had shut down. A big windup alarm clock ticked loudly on the nightstand next to his bed, but he couldn't hear it. And he thought that if the boy were still in the room, he wouldn't be able to hear him either, because he could hear only his pulse in his ears, and it was deafening, maddening, too fast.

Damnit! He was a fucking cop! And the image of a spectral child in his room, mouthing only three words at him, had made him almost comatose. Where were his balls, for Christ's sake!

His stomach muscles tightened—his body was readying itself for action, he knew. Fight or flight.

"Shit!" he whispered.

"Shit!" he heard from somewhere else in the room. In his voice.

An echo!
he thought, and knew that the idea was foolish. There could be no echo in a small, furnished room.

Oh God, he was being what he had once been, long ago. A small boy frightened into inaction by what most small boys are frightened of—an unseen and unknowable, fantastic and deadly something that had invaded and corrupted the sanctity of his bedroom.

He threw himself from the bed, stood by it for a moment, glanced about frantically. "Where are you?" he whispered. "Where are you?"

And he heard, from somewhere in the room, from everywhere in the room, in his voice, as if it were an echo that could not exist here, "Where are you? Where are you?"

God, he was out of the bed at least. He was standing naked in a room without light and addressing a boy he could not see who spoke in his voice. But he was out of the fucking bed! He was
no
longer comatose. He had taken action. He had stopped being the small, frightened boy he had been so long ago.

"Turn the light on," he whispered to himself.

"Turn the light on," he heard.

He cast about for the source of the voice. He saw large, softly dark lumps that were his dresser, his bed, his bedside table.

"Turn the light on," he heard.

"Goddamnit! Shut up!" he screamed.

"Goddamnit! Shut up!" he heard.

He felt something touch the small of his naked back and he whirled about, groaned "Uh!" grabbed for whatever had touched him, grabbed only air.

Something touched his naked stomach, his naked legs and buttocks, and he whirled about and whirled about, groaning, "Uh!" again and again, told himself frantically that whatever was touching him could not be a threat, that it was only a boy who had gotten into his house and was playing tricks, playing with the naked man, making him grunt and groan and grab the night air.

"Uh! Uh!" he heard.