The Further Adventures of The Joker (9 page)

That’s a joke
.
Get it?

Smile, Junior
.

Junior did.

“Skinny little fruit!” Dennis Hafner shouted at Junior’s back. And Eddie Connors called out, “It’s a free country! You tell him that, you hear me?”

Know what normal is, Junior? It’s somebody before a shrink gets hold of him
.

Smile, Junior
.

He walked on, along the street layered with sunlight and shadows, his fingers grasping the bones in his pockets and his heart dark as a piece of coal.

But he was smiling, on this beautiful summer day.

Junior turned right at the next block. Ahead of him, shimmering in the heat, was the last remaining wooded hillside in this suburb. It was green and thick and held secrets. It was a wonderful place, and it was his destination.

Before he reached the end of the street, where a rugged trail led up the hillside, Junior heard the noise of sneakers on the pavement behind him. Somebody running. His first thought was that Eddie Connors had decided to chase him down, and he spun around to face his attacker and try to bluff his way out of a bloody nose. But it wasn’t Eddie Connors, or any of his ilk, at all. It was a gawky, frail-looking boy with curly brown hair and glasses, a dumb grin on his face. The boy wore a T-shirt, short pants that exposed his skinny legs, black socks, and sneakers, and he stopped just shy of running into Junior and said, “Hi, Junior! I saw you from over there!” He pointed at a house further up the block, near the intersection where Junior had turned. The boy aimed his dumb grin on Junior again. “Where you goin’?”

“Somewhere,” Junior said, and he kept walking toward the hillside.

“Can I go with you?” Wally Manfred began to lope alongside. He was ten years old, his blue eyes magnified behind his glasses, and he needed braces in the worst way. Junior thought of Wally Manfred as a little dog that liked to chase cars and follow strangers, eager to be petted. “Can I, huh?”

“No.”

“Why not? Where you goin’?”

“Just somewhere. Go on home, Wally.”

Wally was silent. The noise of his sneakers on the pavement said he was still following. Junior didn’t want him to see the secret place. The secret place was his alone. “Go home, Wally,” Junior repeated. The beginning of the forest trail was coming up pretty soon.

“Aw, come on!” Wally persisted, and he darted in front of Junior. “Lemme go with you!”

“Ixnay.”

“I can if I want to!” Wally said, a note of petulance in his voice.

Junior stopped. This wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do at all. “Go
home,
Wally!” he commanded. “I mean it!”

Wally had stopped, too, and he looked as if he might be about to burst into tears. Junior knew Wally lived with his mother, in a house even smaller than his own, and Wally’s father had gone out for a pack of cigarettes a year ago and never come home. Or that was the story, at least. Junior had overheard his parents talking about it, when they thought he was asleep. Parents had their secrets, just like kids. “I mean it,” Junior said. “I don’t want you to go with me.”

Wally just stared at him, as the summer sun beat down on both of them.

“Go find somebody else to bother,” Junior told him.

Wally took a backward step. His eyes looked wet behind his glasses. “How come you don’t like me?” Wally asked, and something in his voice was terrible. “How come nobody likes me?”

Junior strode past him, and began walking alone again.

“I like
you!”
Wally called out. “How come you don’t want to be friends?”

Know what a friend is, Junior? It’s somebody who has the same enemies as you
.

Smile, Junior!

He went on. He started up the path, and about fifty yards into the woods he hunkered down and waited to see if Wally Manfred was following. “I don’t care!” he heard Wally shout from the street. “I still like you!”

Junior waited for about ten minutes, there in the underbrush. When he was sure Wally wasn’t coming after him, he stood up and continued on his way.

The trail led through the last of the neighborhood’s woods. Trash and bottles littered the ground, proof that others had followed this path, but Junior’s secret place was up higher on the hillside and about a quarter of a mile away. The trail steepened and became a rough climb, and Junior had to struggle up by grasping onto tree roots that emerged from the dirt. He left the last of the trash and bottles behind, and climbed up through green woods. The secret place was well-hidden, and he’d only found it himself by accident, a couple of years before on one of his long solitary treks.

At last, there it was. A rusted, brown water-tank that rose about sixty feet from the crest of the hill and was all but obscured by trees. A ladder led up, and Junior began to ascend with a quick, easy grace. The ladder took him to the top of the tank, where he stood up and looked to the northeast.

The gray towers of Gotham City loomed before him, and in the valley below were thousands of houses and buildings that radiated out from Gotham City on its maze of streets. There seemed to be nothing green in there, nothing but concrete and brick and stone. Factories stood between him and the central city, and the haze today was a pale, shimmering brown that clung close to the earth. One of those factories was the chemical company where his dad used to be a shift manager, last year, before his nervous breakdown. His dad still worked with the company, but now he was a salesman and he was on the road a lot. The factory was the one with the six tall chimneys, and today white streamers of smoke were rising from them into the brown air.

Junior felt like the king of the world, looking down from this height. But he had the bones in his pockets, and there was work to be done.

He went to the tank’s hatch, where there was a flywheel. The flywheel had been tough to crack open. He’d had to bring a can of Rust-Eater—one of his dad’s products—and a hammer, and even then it had been a hard task to loosen the wheel.

Junior bent down and began to turn the wheel. It was still a tough job that he had to put his shoulders into. But the hatch was coming open, and in another moment he lifted it and looked down the hole. Another ladder led into the empty tank. Hot, dry air rose into Junior’s face. He let most of the heat out, and then he eased down into the hole and began to descend the ladder, eagerness working in his brain like a hot little machine full of oiled gears.

He was happy for a while, industrious amid his toys.

He emerged when the afternoon had cooled. His pockets were empty. He resealed the water tank, went back the way he’d come through the woods, and headed for home.

Eddie Connors and his buddies were no longer in sight, but the red Chevy was still there. Junior stopped at Mrs. Broughton’s and leaned over her fence to smell a rose, and his gaze ticked back and forth, looking for Junior or the others. A few beer cans lay on the street near the car. Junior stared at them, and began to shred the petals from a yellow rose. Then he crossed the street to the Chevy, took a handful of dirt and grit from the Connors’ yard, and opened the Chevy’s gas portal. In went the dirt, quick as you please. He washed it down with some beer left in a can, and then he closed the gas portal and returned the beer can exactly as it had been.

He went home smiling.

And there he found his mother, on her knees in the front room, scrubbing the threadbare carpet around the easy chair that faced the television set.

“He’s coming home!” Mom said, and her eyes were wild in her pallid face. “He called! He’ll be home by six o’clock!”

Two hours. Junior knew the routine. There was no time to be lost. He shoved down the terror that threatened to rise up within him, and he caged it. Then he hurried past his mother into his small dark room, and he began to straighten his shelves of books and put them all in alphabetical order. If there was one thing his father demanded, it was order in this chaotic world.

Oh yes: and one other thing, too.

Smile, Junior! Smile, Wifey!

SMILE, I SAID!

When Junior was finished with his books, he worked on his closet. Blue clothes together, white clothes together, garments with red next, then with green. Laces tied in all the shoes. Socks balled up, just so. A place for everything, and everything in its place. “Help me!” his mother called, her voice getting frantic. “Junior, help me mop the kitchen floor! Hurry!”

“Yes, Mother,” he said, and he went into the kitchen where his mother was working on the yellow linoleum tiles that would never fully be clean, never, never in a hundred years of scrubbing even with Stain-Away.

At four minutes before six o’clock, they heard his car turn into the driveway. They heard the engine stop, and the driver’s door open. They heard him coming, and mom said to her son, “Daddy’s home!” She clicked on an awful smile, and went to the front door.

“Darling!” she said, as the tall, slim man in a dark brown suit came into the house, carrying his briefcase of samples. She hugged him, stiffly, and drew away as soon as she could. “How was your trip?”

“It was,” Dad answered. “Thank you. This is the only job I know of where you can have breakfast in Lynchton, lunch in Harrisburg, and indigestion in Fremont.” His eyes, darker than his son’s, searched their faces. “That’s a joke,” he said. “How about a couple of smiles?”

Mom gave a bright, forced laugh. Junior stared at the floor, and smiled with aching jaws.

“Come give me a hug,” Dad said. “Know what a hug is? The freedom of the press.”

Junior walked to his father, and hugged him with labored arms.

“Good boy,” Dad said. “Know what a boy is? An appetite with a skin pulled over it. What’s for dinner, Wifey?”

“I was going to put some turkey dinners into the oven.”

“Turkey dinners.” Dad nodded. “Okay, that’s all right. It’s a good night for the funnies. Turkey: that’s a bird who’d strut a lot less if he could see into the future.” Their smiles weren’t quick enough. Dad slammed his briefcase down into his easy chair, and the noise made both mother and son jump. “Damn it, where’s the happiness around here? This isn’t a funeral home, is it? I’ve seen bigger smiles on dead people! That’s no wonder, since the dead don’t have to pay taxes! What’s wrong with you two? Aren’t you
happy?”

“We’re happy!” Mom said quickly. “We’re real happy! Aren’t we, Junior?”

Junior looked into his father’s face. It was a tight face, with hard, sharp cheekbones. His father’s eyes were dark and deep-set, and down in that darkness there was a rage coiled up and waiting. It flew out without warning, but most of the time it lay inside Dad’s head and simmered in its stew of perpetual jokes and gritted-teeth smiles. Where that rage had been born, and why, Junior did not know, and he figured his father didn’t know either. But jokes were its armor and weapons, and Dad wore them like metal spikes.

“Yes, sir,” Junior answered. “I’m happy.”

“Remember what I told you.” Dad placed a finger against his son’s chest. “People like to smile. If you can make people smile, you’ll be a success. People like to hear a joke or two. They like to laugh. Know what a laugh is? It’s a smile that’s exploded.” The finger moved to one corner of Junior’s mouth and hitched it up. Then to the other. “There,” Dad said. “That’s what I like to see.”

Mom turned away and walked into the kitchen to put three turkey TV dinners in the oven. Then Dad began his weekly inspection of the house—a wandering from room to room as he spouted off jokes and comments he considered funny, punctuated by the opening of drawers and cabinets. The rest of the evening would be spent with John in front of the TV set, watching the sitcoms and scribbling down on his yellow pad jokes and repartee that particularly caught his interest.
Grist for the grin mill,
he called it.

That’s a joke, Junior.

Smile.

Sometimes between the third and fourth comedy show of the night, Junior opened a door and went down the stairs to the dirt-floored basement. He switched on the light bulb, picked up a flashlight, which was always in its proper place, and went to the far corner at the rear of the basement. He lifted a cardboard box and watched roaches scurry in the flashlight’s beam.

The ants were swarming. They’d done a good job. The chipmunk was almost down to the bones, and most of the kitten’s bones were showing now, too. It wouldn’t be too much longer. But Junior was impatient for his toys. The basement was very damp, the walls mildewed. He wondered if he’d have skeletons faster if he put the dead things in a dryer place. He lifted a second box, looking at his newest acquisitions. He’d found the dead bat in the abandoned house near the church three blocks away, and the robin had been snatched from a cat’s jaws just yesterday. They weren’t going to smell very good soon. The smell would rise into the house, as the beautiful summer days got hotter. Junior had been wanting to kill a full-grown dog or cat and watch its skeleton come out, but that smell would get up into the house for sure and his mother might come down here and find everything. His father he didn’t worry much about; nothing pulled his father away from the comedies and the yellow joke pad.

But if he was going to start finding bigger playthings, maybe he needed somewhere else to keep them.

At nine-forty, Junior was sitting in the living room watching his father snore in his easy chair. His mother was on the telephone in the kitchen, talking to her friend Linda Shapona, who lived a few streets over. They’d gone to high school together, and Linda owned the beauty shop on Kerredge Avenue. Mom was usually on the telephone most of the evening; it was her only route of escape. The television was on, the last of the night’s comedies. The yellow pad had slipped to the floor, and Junior picked it up to see what his father had written there.

It was hard to read the writing. The pen had attacked the paper. Junior could only make out a few of the mass of scribbled jokes and puns, the writing running together and overlapping like a nest of thorns.

Boss. A big noise in the office but at home a little squeak
.

What’s a diplomat’s favorite color? Plaid.