Read Online The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll - Free Book Online Page B

thin pillars and a dentist’s shingle hanging from a lamppost on the front lawn. Then there was the Dagenais Lawnmower Repair Service in a blue-silver tin shack, a Montgomery Ward outlet store, a firehouse with its big doors swung open but no fire trucks inside, and a grain store that was advertising a special this week on the fifty-pound bag of Purina Dog Chow.
    This was it. This was where he had written all of the books. This was where he had eaten and slept and walked and known people and bought things like potatoes and newspapers and gas for his car. Most of the people here had known him. Had known Marshall France.
    The main part of the town was on the other side of some railroad tracks. As we approached the crossing, the safety bars started to descend and a bell began its warning. I was delighted by the reprieve. Anything that would postpone our seeing Anna France was welcome. I’ve always liked to stop and watch trains go by. I remember the cross-country trips that my mother and I frequently made on the Twentieth Century and Super Chief when my parents were still married.
    When we got to the lowered bars I switched off the engine and rested my arm on the back of Saxony’s seat. It felt hot and clammy. It had turned out to be one of those summer days when the air feels like soft lead and the clouds can’t decide on whether they want to downpour or just move on.
    “You can let me off here.”
    “Can you tell us where Miss France lives?”
    He stuck his skinny arm between our two seats and jabbed his index finger forward while he talked. “Go to the end of this street, It’s about three blocks. Then you take your right onto Connolly Street. Her house is number eight. If you miss it, just ask anyone around there. They’ll tell you. Thanks for the ride.”
    He got out of the car, and when he walked away I saw that he had colorful patches sewn onto both of his back pockets. One of them was a hand giving you the finger, the other was of a hand giving you the V-for-peace sign. Both patches were red, white, and blue, and the fingers had stars all up and down them.
    The train turned out to be a slow-moving two-hundred-car-long freight. A passing parade of Erie Lackawanna, Chesapeake & Ohio, Seatrain … Loud, even clickety-clicks, the different sounds each car made when it passed. Then the coziness of the little brick-red caboose when it passed and a guy in its high square window was reading a newspaper and smoking a pipe, oblivious of the world. I liked the whole thing.
    When the train was gone, the red-and-white-striped bars began rising slowly, almost as if they were tired and weren’t in the mood to go up. I started the engine and bumped the car up and over the tracks. I looked in the mirror and saw that there was no one behind us.
    “You see? That’s the difference between here and in the East.”
    “What is?”
    “We were just at that crossing for what, five or eight minutes, right? Well, in the East if you were there half that long there would be a line of cars ten miles long waiting to go. Here … well, just look behind us.” She did, but she didn’t say anything. “You see? Not a car. Not one. That’s your difference.”
    “Uh-huh. Thomas, do you realize where we are on this earth? Do you realize that we are actually here?”
    “I’m trying not to think about it yet. It makes my stomach ache.” An understatement. I was quickly on my way to being terrified of talking to Anna France, but I didn’t want Saxony to know that. I kept thinking of every word David Louis had said about her. Witch. Neurotic. To avoid any more conversation, I rolled my window down all the way and took a deep breath. The air smelled of hot dust and something else.
    “Hey, look, Sax, a barbecue! Let’s have some lunch.”
    A big green canopy had been set up in an open lot between Phend’s Sporting Goods and the Glass Insurance Company. Underneath the canopy about twenty people were sitting at redwood picnic tables, eating