The Funnies (21 page)

Of course, we should have just gone and asked Rose what was going on. There had to be a reason she didn't come back. But we decided to see Rose as a quitter, as the primary aggressor in the breakup of the family, and for a long time that made things a little easier.

I ran around FunnyFest in a fever, looking for Susan. It wasn't that I had anything in particular to say to her, but at the moment she was the only person I knew in town who didn't know things I didn't want to know, or forgotten things I did want to know. I had developed a sudden and highly specific fear on the way back from the nursing home: that my brother and I would live in the house together as eternal bachelors, Pierce growing gradually less crazy and me crazier until we met in a highly eccentric middle ground, where we would remain until we had both reached an age too advanced to measure. At that point nobody would be able to tell us apart, and would have no reason to. I was one hundred percent sure this would happen.

Susan was not to be found. I saw a lot of familiar-looking people—high school acquaintances or their parents and siblings, I guessed—and they made me feel more than a little bit amnesiac, as if I had once had a real family and a sprawling group of loyal pals and had scorned them all without realizing it.

I had just passed a rickety-looking espresso-and-chai stand in front of the roller coaster when a young girl jumped up from a bench and called out my name. I recognized her, after a moment's confusion, as the girl who had been wearing the Tim costume, the one I'd talked with behind the bushes. She flounced up to me, her face absurdly serious, like an undercover agent's. She was wearing a colorful striped tank-top and, beyond all reason, given the heat, a pair of dark blue jeans with flaring cuffs. A cigarette—clove, by the smell—dangled with studied perilousness from her right hand, and she switched it to the left to shake my hand. “Hey,” she said. “Gillian Millstone.”

“Tim Mix.”

“Sorry about my buds yesterday. Those guys are all dorks.” She shook her head gravely. “I wanted to talk to you, man.”

“About what?”

She studied my face a second, then turned suddenly coquettish, twisting her body half-away from me and producing a wry smile. “You look like your brother,” she said.

“Which one?”

“Piercey.”

“I see. And you're…”

“Yeah, his girlfriend, sort of, I guess.” She straightened, flicking the cigarette aside and dropping the coy flirtation like a dusty rug snapped in the wind. “That's what I wanted to talk to you about.”

I shook my head. “I don't think I want to know about that,” I said. “I'm looking for somebody, really.” And I started edging away.

“The chubbette? Is she your girlfriend?” She was following me.

“No, my editor.”

“Oh, a business relationship.”

“You could say that.”

We were walking freely now, fast, with her close behind me. “It's not our love I want to discuss with you, Tim. It's just I'm worried about him. He's a little obsessed lately.”

I came to a stop before the entrance to the Centrifuge of Death. There was a large wooden cutout of me, the cartoon me, holding its hand out at head level. The voice bubble above me read, “You must be this high to ride!!”

“Lately?” I said. “He's always obsessed. It's chronic.”

“It's aggravated by stress,” she said seriously. “Hey, my dad was a shrink before he croaked. I know nuts.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Which part?”

“Your dad being dead.”

“Yeah, well. So's my mom.” She shrugged. “What are you gonna do?” She tilted her head toward the ride, a massive black cylinder the approximate shape of a tin of Christmas cookies, which had spun to a stop and was letting off nauseated-looking passengers. “Come on, I'll fill in the blanks on the ride.”

I laughed. “That? Forget it.”

“Don't be a wimp, Mix.”

“I don't have tickets.”

She dug into her jeans pocket and pulled out a wad of crumpled tickets big as a fist. “We stole a bunch from the booth. The goober who runs it hides the key under a rock.”

I sighed. I didn't want to talk to this girl, nor go on this ride, yet the combination seemed so ludicrous as to be, on this day, inevitable. She winked at me. “Come on. Everybody's doin' it.”

This was demonstrably false. The stragglers coming off looked like the remains of an army battalion decimated by friendly fire, and we were the last two people in a line of seven. I shook my head no, no, but there I was, climbing up the steel stairs, clomping across a metal platform, approaching the curved black door. The twin iron doors of the crematorium occurred to me and I froze at the threshold, but Gillian Millstone pushed me in.

Unlike, say, a coffin, the Centrifuge of Death was almost completely unadorned on the inside, save for a series of thin steel dividers that marked rider compartments and the wide safety belts that dangled between them. Gillian grabbed my hand and dragged me clunking across the floor, pushed me into a compartment and wrapped the seat belt around my waist. I half-expected to be injected with some sort of truth serum, but instead she gently punched my gut. “You two have the same bod, except you've got a little more meat on you.”

“That's not saying much.”

“Guess not.”

She strapped herself in next to me, then reached over and grabbed my hand. Her face poked around the divider, and of her I could see only that face, the tips of her breasts, her shoes and the flare of her jeans. A metallic groan issued from beneath us, and we slowly began to turn. In half a minute, we were spinning at breathtaking speed, and the entire apparatus began to tilt. Gillian screamed. I screamed. I pictured all the blood in my body pooling at my back, my spine swimming in it. I pictured the Centrifuge breaking free, rolling toward the river, crushing revelers in its path, sinking slowly in the water while I struggled to extricate myself from the belt. The sky and treetops wheeled madly, and I shut my eyes.

For the rest of the ride, Gillian Millstone told me, at a near-shriek, her story: that her parents, both doctors, were killed two years before in a plane crash in Montana, where they had gone to attend a conference on expert witnessing; that she had fought to be declared an adult a year early to prevent falling into the custody of her aunt and uncle, whom she detested; that she lived alone in an old house in the Pines once owned by her grandfather, and lived off the money from the sale of the family home and grew cranberries in a bog; that she met Pierce when he drove into the Pines and tried to drown himself by plunging the Cadillac into a nearby pond. The pond had been insufficiently deep. She had the car towed at her own expense.

She said she loved Pierce, that he talked incessantly about our father and acted like he wasn't really dead, and that the Pines was the only place where he never felt him watching. That his greatest fear now was the key he had been willed, that it represented dangerous knowledge, that he didn't deserve to have it, that he could not rid himself of it lest he suffer dire consequences, that because of it his father could still control his thoughts, his death notwithstanding. And throughout this gush she held my hand tightly, her fingers linked with mine, and sweat from her palm mingled with mine and disappeared in the wake of the Centrifuge's crosswinds.

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.

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.