The Funnies (22 page)

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 photos, 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 something 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.”

Wurster shook his head. He took two small spiral notebooks and a couple of pencils from his shirt pocket and handed me one of each. “You're going to have to be more specific than that,” he said. “The Mix family is at the mall. I want you to sit on this bench and make up five gags about this fountain.”

“Five!”

“For starters, yes.” He took a seat on the bench. “We'll compare notes in a little while.”

I sat beside him and stared hard at the fountain, concentrating this time. It wasn't very funny. He began to push his pencil almost immediately, a maddening sound, like mice scrabbling in a cell wall. It took me twenty minutes to come up with any jokes, and by the time half an hour had passed my little notebook read:

This was as far as I got. The fountain was so perfectly vapid, so meaningless and foul, that I might have believed it was specifically constructed to befog my comic sensibilities. Furthermore, I didn't know how to draw water. Resigned, I turned to Wurster and admitted I was finished.

“Let me see,” he said. I gave him my notebook. He read it carefully, then pointed to what I'd written. “This one about God is pretty good. You got one of the common FF themes in there. I like that. The other stuff, though…you get a twenty-five percent. That's an F.”

“Gee, thanks, teach,” I said. “What have you got, then?”

He handed me his notebook. The gags covered several pages in his neat, heavily slanted handwriting.

“Hmm,” I said. “Not too bad.”

“One and five are terrible,” Wurster said. “But four will do.” He cracked his knuckles. “Okay, we've got two we like. You draw mine and I'll draw yours.”

“Really? I've never tried a whole cartoon.”

“It's time. Go to it.”

I made several test sketches of the fountain of youth gag: in one, Lindy and Bitty were sitting at the edge of the pool with their feet in the water; in another they were on a bench, off to the side. In the end I decided to put them left of center, standing in the foreground; the fountain was visible in the background, small enough to obscure my poor draftsmanship. Kids frolicked in it. Lindy was bending over, her finger held up like a teacher's, while Bitty, in a typical pose, had her hand in her mouth. It looked all right to me—something that an expert inker, which I was not, might be able to make whole. When I was done I found that Wurster had already finished his. He handed it to me.