The Funnies Page 17

  We leveled out, slowed down. The last revolution was the worst, when the spinning had slowed too much to seem incredible, thus potentially imaginary, but was fast enough to toss my meager lunch around in my stomach like a whirlwind of autumn leaves. I wrenched the belt free, staggered off the ride and out into the world, listing slightly to the left. I found a bench and collapsed into it. Soon enough I felt Gillian collapse there next to me. I flinched. The ride seemed a betrayal, though nothing untoward had occurred. I thought about the cool sensation of another person’s sweat evaporating from my hand.

  “So will you help me?”

  “Help you?” I gasped.

  “By helping Pierce.”

  “By doing what? He doesn’t need my help.”

  “You could open the safety deposit box for him, find what’s inside. He trusts you. If there’s something in there that would scare him, something that could convince him your father still holds power over him, you could lie.”

  I opened my eyes and looked into hers. They had taken on a startling and persuasive intelligence. I considered this, in light of what I now knew about her. I could see it, her and Pierce.

  “I bet you’re good for him,” I said.

  “He needs me.”

  “I can’t lie to my brother. Whatever’s in there, I’ll have to tell him.”

  “That’s selfish,” she said. “That’s you holding on to a habit because it’s easier to do that than to take responsibility for him. He wants you to be responsible for him, you know. He trusts you.”

  “You said that.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Before I came back here, I hadn’t been close to him in years. Why would he trust me?”

  She shrugged. “Beats me.”

  * * *

  I finally found Susan standing in the middle of the food vendors’ circle, blankly glancing around through her glasses, as she had at my father’s wake. I noticed for the first time that the circle looked much like a ring of covered wagons, cowering in the dust on a prairie of the American West, shielding itself from an attack by marauding Indians. Susan seemed unaware of any such attack. She took a bite out of something in her hand, and as I came closer I noticed it was a corn dog. She saw me, made a move to hide the corn dog, then gave up and brought it back into view.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” she said. “The ultimate popular culture nostalgia cliché food. Would you believe I’ve never had one before?”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “Really, this is my first.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said suddenly, surprising myself with my vehemence.

  She started. “About what?”

  “Leaving you to your own devices this morning. Not letting you know I’d be going out to see our mom.”

  “Good Lord, Tim, I don’t care about that. I’m a big girl.”

  “I’m just not used to dealing with all these new people,” I said. “And old people too. Not that you personally are hard to deal with.”

  “No offense taken.”

  “I don’t feel like myself,” I said. “Do you know what I’m saying?”

  She nodded. “I never feel like myself. Or rather I never feel like the person I think of myself as actually being, the sort of Platonic ideal of myself I always picture doing the things I’m about to do. And then when I do them this other person takes over and screws them up.”

  We stood silently in all the commotion, nodding. Susan offered me a bite of her corn dog. I refused, still queasy from the Centrifuge of Death, but I didn’t tell her this, and I feared that this rebuff without explanation would give offense. Then I came to my senses and simply let it go. It was a wonderful feeling, like dropping a box off at the Goodwill.

  “Is this on?” came a shrill voice, then a squeal of feedback. I turned to see the mayor, perched on the bandstand with a brass band setting up behind him, peering at the microphone as if it were a mutant strain of lab rat.

  “Speaking of clichés,” Susan said.

  “Hello? Hello?” The mayor was wearing a Family Funnies T-shirt, the one with a picture of Bobby saying, “Why’s it called a tea shirt? There’s no tea on it!” He also wore a deep, rich tan he hadn’t had the day before.

  “It’s five o’clock,” Susan said. She pulled a folded schedule from her shorts pocket. “Time for the election results.”

  “I forgot about that.”

  Francobolli was fumbling with his notes now. A few people had gathered in the field, not many. I wondered how many townspeople had actually voted.

  And then, something very strange happened: I became suddenly, inexplicably happy. It came to me like a faint, delicious scent swept from a distant place, and tumbled over and over itself, snowballing inside me, taking on weight. I shifted my feet to support it. Then the mayor coughed, bent to receive a sealed envelope, and just like that it left me. But its faint impression remained, lending me lightness, the way an extra bat gives the slugger in the on-deck circle his effortless swing at the plate. I hopped once, then again, testing it.

  “What?” Susan said with a puzzled smile.

  “Nothing, nothing.”

  The mayor gave a brief speech. He talked about the things that made Riverbank great, its natural beauty, its notable figures of the past, then segued into my father, then into the town council’s decision to change the name in his honor. He clawed at the envelope.

  Not Familytown, I begged him silently.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the mayor announced. Behind him, the trombone player raised the trombone to his lips and adjusted the slide. “I’m pleased to report that our town is now called…”

  A beat, in which only the distant sounds of the rides and riders could be heard.

  “Mixville! Mixville, New Jersey!” And as the band ripped into the air with a ragged vaudevillian vamp, the mayor yelled, drowned out by the sound, “Welcome, one and all, to Mixville, New Jersey!”

  I looked around, at my new town, the one named after my family. People were clapping, infected by Francobolli’s manic exuberance. I was unsurprised to spy Ken Dorn hunkered among them, looking vaguely Teutonic in a gratuitous leather vest and khaki hiking shorts, and he eyed me from twenty yards away with a knowing smirk, as if he could read my mind. But I was just as sure that he couldn’t. Try your damnedest, Ken, I told him silently. You will never know me. And I turned to my editor and accepted my great, ironic handshake that for the moment I thought I deserved.

  nineteen

  Monday morning was relentless in the wake of my undone cartooning work, with the curve of the pen itching away at my bones, Wurster hanging over my shoulder, barking instructions, the house’s oily cold clinging to my skin and clothes. By the time I got out, the early clouds that had been massing on the horizon had arrived and gushed forth their rain, and the heat wave had finally broken. I blinked in the bright gray light, listening to water dripping off trees.

  When I got home I asked Pierce for money. I hadn’t wanted to do this, but I had been letting him pay for groceries and gas for weeks now, and he hadn’t appeared put off by it.

  “Oh, yeah, okay,” he said. We were in his bedroom, where he had been playing solitaire and smoking cigarettes. He got up and went to the closet. I heard some clunking around from there. When he came out, he had a neat handful of twenty-dollar bills, which he handed to me.

  “You’ve got cash in there?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “Where from?”

  “The account Dad left me. I got a lot out at once.” He sat down on the bed, reluctant to meet my eyes. “Banks make me nervous.”

  I glanced at the money. It was a thick little pile, and I had to restrain myself from counting it. “Jesus, Pierce, thanks.”

  He shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

  “It’s a lot.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  His tone was dismissive. But I lingered, letting my eyes navigate the room, wondering if he had other things stashed here: drugs, old phot
os, letters. “Speaking of banks,” I said, and felt the temperature in the room drop half a degree. “That key.”

  He bent farther over his game, emphatically flipping cards into piles.

  “Are you going to look and see what’s in it? Aren’t you curious?”

  “Nope,” he said.

  “Not even a little bit?”

  He placed a club onto the pile slowly, his hand shaking. He straightened but didn’t look at me. “It’s just the title. Or something.”

  “Or something?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t go back to his game, either. He just sat there, staring at the closet doors as if into a deep darkness, where the ominous outlines of things were barely visible. After a while I looked down at the money in my hand and felt like a thief. Not long after, I left.

  * * *

  I was running out of certain supplies, so I decided to go to the art store. Nobody was around now that FunnyFest was over with, and the streets were empty of cars. Shopkeepers propped their doors open, letting in the cool summer air. A woman sat cross-legged on the floor of a clothing boutique, painting her fingernails.

  The art store was in a small converted town house just off Main Street that was also home to a music studio. I’d often gone there with Dad, and while I poked through the dusty rows of art supplies I could hear the muffled sound of scales artlessly played on a variety of instruments. Occasionally an instructor would grow bored with one of her students and begin playing something beautiful, and I would stand transfixed, listening.

  When I got there I found that little had changed. The proprietor, a barrel-shaped man in his sixties, was standing on a ladder, repainting the hanging sign that had read “Riverbank Art Supply.” He had finished the first few letters of “Mixville.” When I approached he looked down and called to me. “Timmy Mix!”

  “Hi,” I said.

  “You remember me? I used to sell your daddy his pens and paper.”

  “Sure do,” I said. “I’m here for the same stuff.”

  “Yeah, yeah!” he said. “Hear you’re taking over!”

  “Looks that way.” I pointed to the sign. “How’s it going?”

  He shook his head. “No offense,” he said. “But I’m not voting for that Francobolli next time around. This here’s a pain in my ass. I gotta send out change of address cards, for Chrissake. All of a sudden I’m living in a different town.”

  Inside, I noticed one other customer. He looked familiar to me—a fiftyish man, thin hair, wearing khaki shorts and a blue chambray shirt—but I couldn’t place him. We passed in an aisle and he smiled at me in a comradely way. I gathered a few items—pens and pencils, fresh paper, all from the list my father had included with his letter, which I kept in my wallet. Overhead, something that sounded like a cello grunted through something that sounded like Bach. I went to the counter, where the familiar-looking man was already waiting for the proprietor. “Hello, Tim,” he said.

  We shook hands. “Hey, uh…”

  “It’s Father Loomis,” he said. “You didn’t recognize me.”

  “Oh! No, you know, your clothes…”

  “Not very priestly.”

  “Uh-uh, no.” I smiled at him. There was the ecumenical collar, tucked discreetly under the work shirt. He looked weirdly like his Family Funnies counterpart, who almost invariably was depicted at a great distance: behind his pulpit, in the background of one or another whispered misunderstanding over matters ecclesiastic. I’d been having a lot of trouble drawing him. He had spread out his purchases on the counter: red sable brushes, cadmium red and cerulean blue oil paint, turpentine. I said, “You paint?”

  He blushed. “Oh, yes, a little bit here and there…”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Landscapes, mostly. You know, glory of God and all that.” He said this with more than a little irony. I liked him. “So,” he said, “I hear you’re in the driver’s seat now.”

  “That’s the rumor.”

  “How’s it going?”

  I told him briefly about my lessons, how easy it all seemed at first, and how hard it turned out to be. “I have new respect for my father,” I managed to say, “as an artist.”

  He nodded expansively. “Your dad was a strange man, Tim.” His face froze a little at this; he thought he had gone too far. “I mean, he was complex, very complex. A troubled man. There was more to him than people know.”

  “I’ve guessed that.”

  “Pardon me, I’ve said too much.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I’m very interested. He seemed so…covert, I guess.”

  Father Loomis wagged his finger in the air, and nodded faster now. This had obviously been on his mind. “Yes, yes! At our last confession…” But then he stopped himself. “Well, he had a lot of guilt, Tim, a lot of pain. He made his mistakes, you know, but…” He reached out and touched my shoulder. “He was a good man. I truly believe that. He was a friend. I think there will be a place for him in God’s Kingdom.”

  “Great!” I said moronically.

  The proprietor appeared, red-faced and paint-spattered, and rung us both up. When I went outside with my purchases, Father Loomis was standing on the sidewalk, gazing up into the sky. “Yes,” he said. “A lovely day indeed,” as if this had been the subject of our conversation.

  “It was good to see you,” I said.

  “Oh! You too! It would be nice to see you a little more often. Sunday mornings, perhaps.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well…”

  He waved his hand in the space between us. “No, no guilt please. I have to make my pitch, though. There was nothing wrong with your father a little extra prayer wouldn’t have fixed.” He raised his eyebrows. “And maybe a little therapy.”

  “Maybe a lot.”

  We had a quick laugh together. Something of the previous day’s rush of happiness had stuck with me, and the new, cool air tasted like lemonade. Father Loomis and I said our goodbyes. And then—I guess it was something in the way he had spoken that made me think of it—I said, “By the way, when was the last time you saw him? For confession, I mean.”

  We were standing half-turned from one another, gazing up at separate patches of sky. Father Loomis shrugged. “A few weeks, I guess.”

  “A few weeks?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “He was coming to you up until he died?”

  I realized I was making him uncomfortable. “Yes, Tim, he was.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Sorry. I just didn’t know.”

  “Well. You never know everything, I suppose.”

  “I guess not.” Father Loomis was shifting from foot to foot, and I decided to let him off the hook. I raised my hand, bid him a good day, and left.

  * * *

  That night I drove to Philly and got my stuff. There wasn’t much. A few records, some clothes. I left all the furniture and dragged the remains of my art studio out onto the sidewalk. Most of it went into the wet, reeking dumpster out back, where it landed with a deadened clang on the bottom. It didn’t look out of place there at all. The trash can that had been part of my work-in-progress I left on the curb, next to the one it was modeled on, and the two stood there, identically scratched and dented, like a frowzy set of twins waiting for the school bus.

  Before I left, I opened and closed each of Amanda’s drawers, looking at the clothes there. I set the box of things from her car on the bedroom floor. Maybe I cried a little. Mostly I felt the bulky and annoying weight of things, which massed to ruin the otherwise modest pleasure of clearing out of the place forever. I shut the door on the apartment’s dim double in my mind, which though closed would always be there, taking up space. Then I dropped my key on the coffee table and closed the door on the real apartment. I went home and slept badly.

  One morning that week, when I got to Wurster’s house, I found him sitting in a lawn chair in the middle of the cool, shade-ruined yard. He was drinking a glass of iced tea and squinting. “Good morning,” he said. It wasn’t so
mething I’d ever heard him say before.

  “What’s up?”

  “We’ll be doing something different today. You mind driving? I don’t drive.”

  “Oh, no, that’s all right.” In fact, I had been, for perhaps the first time, actually looking forward to our session. I’d been working on a portfolio of the characters, one drawing of each of them doing ten different things, and I thought it was going extremely well. I was beginning, in fact, to believe I could start doing full strips.

  “Good,” he said. “Put your work away. We won’t be talking about drawing today.” He stood up, stroked his chin. “Actually, that’s not true. It’s always about drawing, one way or another. We’ll be implying about drawing.” He walked to the Caddy and got into the passenger seat. I stowed my work in the trunk with some consternation, climbed in beside him and started the car.

  “So what is this mystery topic?”

  He fastened the seat belt, and when he was through gave it a sharp tug. “Gags. What kind of driver are you?”

  “Careful.”

  He leveled me a skeptic’s glare. “Are you, now?”

  “Yes! I’m very careful. What about gags?”

  “We’re going to make up gags. We’re going to see how good you are at Family Funnies humor.”

  “Oh, great,” I said, pulling out.

  “Drive the speed limit, please,” said Brad Wurster.

  * * *

  We went to the Brunswick Plaza, one of the early malls: a single-story quarry-tiled complex with no skylights and a central fountain, dark with thrown pennies, that juggled filthy warm jets of water. Wurster and I walked slowly around the fountain, our hands in our pockets. He nodded every now and then.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well what?”

  “What do you think?”

  I looked down at the fountain. A soaking child was kneeling at the water’s edge, raking the cement bottom with a grubby hand. He came up with a fistful of pennies and ran off, trailing damp footprints. “I think it stinks.”