The Further Adventures of The Joker (11 page)

Wally gave a little cry, and he fell backward off the ladder. In the wind of his passage, the freakish skeletons danced. Wally tried to get up to his knees on the floor, and Junior watched him struggle for a moment. The red was coming out of Wally’s head.

Junior thought of his father, scribbling fevered jokes on the yellow pad. He thought of his mother, and how she sobbed through the wall on the nights when Junior locked his door.

Smile, Junior.

SMILE, I SAID!

Wally was mewing, like a wounded kitten.

“Know what a laugh is?” Junior asked.

Wally didn’t answer.

“It’s a smile,” Junior said, “that explodes.”

He hit Wally with the hammer again, in the back of the head. Again. And again. Wally was on his stomach and he was making no noise. Junior lifted the clotted hammer to strike Wally Manfred once more, but he stopped himself.

There was no use breaking the skull anymore.

Junior sat down beside the corpse, making sure not to get any blood on his clothes. He listened to the rustling of his toys overhead. The secret place was a secret again, and all was right with the world.

After a while, he prodded dead Wally with the hammer. Poked him all over, seeing how much meat there was on the bones. Wally was a skinny kid. It wouldn’t be long. Wally had never known he was a walking Erector Set, with so many different neat parts.

Junior switched off the flashlight and he smiled in the darkness.

He was a happy boy.

He left the hammer in its proper place. Atop the tank, he sealed the hatch good and tight. Maybe he’d come back in a month and see how things were going. It would be like opening a Christmas present, wouldn’t it?

Junior stood up and stared toward Gotham City with dark, hollowed-out eyes.

The chemical factory’s chimneys were spouting a mixture of white, reddish-brown, and pale green smoke. The haze filmed the sky between him and Gotham’s towers, and it shimmered like a mystery on this beautiful summer’s day.

Junior descended the ladder to the earth and started walking home through the woods. The replay of a hammer striking flesh reeled itself over and over in his brain, and it got better every time.

On the way home, he came up with a joke of his own that he’d have to tell his father:
Why is a dead person like an old house?

Because they’re both morgue-aged
.

Smile, Dad.

The Man Who Laughs

Stuart M. Kaminsky

D
elicious. There they stood watching my raised right hand, their faces frozen in that wonderfully comic rictus grin of fear and horror. It was a moment to be savored, remembered. If Gideon had been there, I could have had him take a photograph to carry in my pocket, but Gideon was dead. Ah, ah, I’m getting ahead of my story. In my desire to get to my moment of triumph when all attention was focused on my performance, I neglected to tell you how this magic moment came to be.

Gideon, as we drove into Florida down Highway 41, suggested that we should never have left Gotham. The F.B.I., the Georgia and South Carolina State Police were somewhere behind us. The pitiful pack of clowns who considered themselves the Joker’s gang was dispersed or dead. But it had been great fun. A vacation. A series of banks visited and withdrawn from to finance my triumphant return to Gotham.

Disaster. Disaster? I had surrounded myself with incompetents with no sense of humor. One must have a sense of humor, I reminded Gideon as he drove. I sat deep in the night shadows in the backseat of the recently stolen automobile. My face is a bit distinctive and has been known, for what reason I cannot imagine, to frighten rather than amuse small children. Gideon could do one thing well. He could steal automobiles. He couldn’t drive them, but he could steal them.

We moved cautiously down the highway through the heart of Tampa and then St. Petersburg. The night-caws of pelicans sounded like fingernails against pitted glass. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the moment, forgetting the blue and mufti figures behind us.

“They’ll spot us,” Gideon mumbled as we crossed over a long arching bridge. “They’ll spot you.” Gideon wore a wide-brimmed hat of some distinction. He pulled it down further over his eyes.

I tried to ignore him. I sang dirges.

“Did you know, Gideon,” I informed him, “that the nursery rhyme, ‘Ring Around the Rosey,’ dates back to the plague years? The children danced around bodies and when they sang ‘Ashes, ashes, all fall down,’ they were referring to the death and burning of the victims. That has always been my favorite nursery rhyme.”

Gideon grunted unappreciatively. I admit I need an audience. What great performer does not. But this uncultured twig barely qualified.

“Pull over,” I said.

“Why?” asked Gideon.

“Because the Joker says,” I replied leaning out of the shadows, putting my face next to his. I could feel him hold back the urge to recoil. “We are going to play Joker Says. Joker says pull over.”

Gideon found a place on the side of the road beyond the bridge. Traffic was light. It was well past midnight. He parked about twenty yards away from the highway, but kept the motor running.

“Joker says, turn the engine off.”

Gideon turned the engine off.

“Joker says, get out of the car, but leave the key.”

Gideon might have let out a sigh. I felt it deep within him as I touched his shoulder, but he contained it and got out. I followed him closing the backdoor as I got out. The car had been air-conditioned. The night was hot and moist.

“Joker,” Gideon said, full of false bravado, “what’s this? You need a toilet?”

“Sadly,” I said, “we are no longer friends. Remember that wonderous moment in
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Blanche lies dying on the beach and Jane, beautifully made up, says, ‘You mean that all this time we could have been friends?’ ”

“Joker, come on,” Gideon said backing away. We were on a bay, the vastness of dark water catching glints of the half moon beyond the railing toward which Gideon was moving. “You can’t get anywhere without me. You’ll be spotted the minute the sun comes up.”

“Joker says, let me worry about that,” I said. “It will be more fun solving that problem than enduring another minute with the humorless creature you have probably always been.”

A car breezed past behind me and in its headlights I could see the frightened eyes of Gideon. His hands were against the rail almost as knuckle-white as my face.

“Okay,” he said, his voice quivering. “That’s the way you want it. No hard feelings. I’ll just stay here, walk to town.” He looked around to see which way a town might be. Little lights danced across a curve in the bay.

“Joker says,” I whispered, moving close to him, “it doesn’t work like that. You know too much.”

“Know too much,” Gideon bleated like a lamb sensing slaughter. “I don’t know anything.”

“True.” I sighed, grinning into his face, hoping the light of the moon from the water cast an appropriate macabre shadow, “but it seemed like the right thing to say. It suggests motive, albeit sinister, for what is about to transpire.”

Gideon tried to duck under my arm, but I grabbed him. He lost his wide-brimmed hat. He punched at my face but I did not evade him. I took the punch and laughed. I let him punch me again and laughed even louder.

“Joker says, take a moonlight dip.” And with that I threw the gurgling Gideon over the railing. I heard the splash, heard him come up gasping. I leaned over and covered my mouth to keep from laughing.

“Can’t . . . swim,” he gasped.

“Can’t . . . swim,” I mimicked. “But you must. Swim,” I commanded.

“Can’t . . . please,” he gasped and thrashed.

“Swim, Gideon,” I ordered, but all I got back was a burble. “Oh,” I said with small laugh, “I forgot to say ‘Joker says.’ ”

I found Gideon’s hat. It fit surprisingly well. I got back into the stolen vehicle, turned on the air conditioner and proceeded on my pilgrimage heading south, knowing that I was running out of gas, knowing they were behind me, knowing the dawn was coming. Only the Joker could truly appreciate the aesthetic joy of this instant.

I drove listening to a predawn preacher on the radio foretelling the end of the world, the decline of morality. I prayed to my own demons that he was right and I encouraged him with amens. Dull road, hat pulled down, gas gauge dancing the
Danse Macabre,
I encouraged the preacher and pulled off the highway at a sign which told me that here I would find both Bradenton and coastal beaches.

I did not get as far as Bradenton and I never reached a coastal beach. As the car sputtered along the two-lane road, I found a turnoff in the headlight beam, a narrow stone-covered road along a thick growth of trees. As the last sputum of gas died, I turned the car toward a break in the trees and found myself going down the embankment of a creek. A pair of startled masked raccoons caught in the beams scuttered away from the lurching metal beast. When the car stopped, I turned off the lights and leaned back with a massive sigh.

“What a day,” I uttered aloud.

The air-conditioning had, with the engine, failed, and the night heat oozed through the pores of the car like boneless fingers of the dead, but I was comfortable, the result of a day well spent. I slept.

The sleep was brief. The Joker requires little sleep, for he needs no dreams. My life is an elegant nightmare. Dreams are for those whose lives are dull. When my eyes opened, they opened on a wondrous sight. On the opposite shore of the small creek, up the slight embankment, stood a Ferris wheel. I reached into the backseat for my purple carpetbag, pulled Gideon’s hat over my eyes at a jaunty angle, and stepped out into the ankle-deep water of the creek.

“Life,” I announced to the hiding wildlife, “is a brief adventure.”

I climbed the embankment, turned, and looked down at the car. Unless someone came across a thick patch of weeds, inched through tightly packed trees, and walked to the very lip of the creek, they would not see the car. I could have covered it, but that would not have been sporting, and I was impatient to see what the Ferris wheel promised.

When I crossed the weeded field, I found that the wheel promised much. I was at the edge of a small, traveling circus. I knew they still existed, had read about them; usually they had a dozen or so people from some South American country who doubled at everything, changed their names for each act. The tiger tamer doubled as bareback rider and catcher in the trapeze act. Back in Gotham, I had a wondrous collection of clippings about circus disasters. Nothing compares with a good cat-mauling in front of a full tent.

I quickened my step and found the peanut-torn ticket-and-cigarette-butt-strewn entrance to the traveling circus. It was even smaller than I had thought—three trucks and two trailers. The Ferris wheel was the only ride. There was a single cage and inside the cage slept a tiger.

The only person awake besides the Joker was a lean man in gray work clothes who worked on the mechanism of the Ferris wheel with a massive wrench. I moved toward him. He was, perhaps, forty years old, though the world had worn him badly. He was a walking set of contradictions. One could see the unsettled morning eyes, the thin body of the recently reformed alcoholic. But he also had the wry, long muscles of a laborer, not uncommon in a carnival or circus. He wore a gray baseball cap with faded lettering, and his face was stubble covered.

As I approached, he looked at me with eyes the color of his cap and clothes. I lifted the hat from my face and watched him. No reaction. None. Not even a blink. Was he blind? Nearsighted? Acting?

“What can I do for you?” he said.

“Surprised?” I asked moving closer.

He didn’t even grip his wrench more tightly.

“Take more than you to surprise me,” he said, removing his cap to show short gray hair. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “Had a lifetime of surprises. Seen every kind of person and creature there is, from three-headed cows to men who look like pigs.”

“I’m a clown,” I said.

“Yes,” he agreed.

“I need work,” I said.

“Not much work here,” he said.

“I’ll work for almost nothing,” I said. “Life has been hard for me recently.”

“Been hard for me all my days,” he said. “But you’re talking to the wrong man. You want McCoy. This is his show. You’ll find him in the first caravan.” He pointed to the proper van and he went back to work, ignoring me. I am not accustomed to being ignored. This had started as a good morning but the gray man had put me in an ill humor.

The van, with a neat row of beer bottles on the step, was marked: ORSINI CIRCUS, HOWARD McCOY, Prop. The lettering was fresh though the paint cheap and already showing signs of the moist weather. I removed my hat and knocked. Something grunted inside. I knocked again more loudly and grinned at the rising sun. The door opened and a small, red fat face with no hair beneath the nose or on the head emerged. He looked like the old carnival bumpkins who stuck their heads through tent holes so other bumpkins could try to hit them with baseballs. I considered the comic image of this head upon the impact of a steel baseball and I felt better.