The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll Page A

skin grafts and that kind of thing?”
    She didn’t say anything. I looked over at her, but there was no expression on her face. I hadn’t meant to pry, and as the silence continued, I felt like apologizing, but I didn’t.
    A big thunderstorm was brewing up over the hills in front of us, and we drove into a lowering curtain of smoky pearl clouds. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the sun still shining down on where we’d just come from. I knew that most of the people back there had no idea of what they were in for later that afternoon.
    “When did you fall out of love with my father?”
    “Thomas, do you really want to know about when I was in the hospital? I’ve never liked to talk about it, but if you’d like to know, I’ll tell you.”
    She said it with so much conviction in her voice that I didn’t know what to answer. She went on before I had a chance to say anything.
    “The first time was horrible. They’d put me in these baths so that all of the dead skin would come off and the new could start to grow. I remember that there was this stupid nurse named Mrs. Rasmussen who took care of me and always talked to me like I was a moron. I don’t remember much else about it except that I was scared and hated everything. I guess I’ve blocked a lot out. The second time was a lot of therapy, and everyone seemed much nicer. It’s probably because they knew I’d be walking again. When I was in there, I discovered that people treat you much more … I don’t know, humanely, when they see that you’re going to be all right again.”
    A snake of yellow lightning skittered across the clouds, followed closely by one of those quick cracks of thunder that make you jump a little in spite of yourself. The radio had become almost pure static, so I switched it off. Big marbles of rain began to fall, but I held off turning on the windshield wipers until the last moment. My side window was down, and I could feel the dying heat and heaviness on the air. I thought about a little Saxony Gardner sitting bolt upright in a hospital bed with her little-kid legs bandaged all the way up and down. The picture was so sad and sweet that it made me smile. If I’d had a kid like that, I would have bought her so many toys and books that she would have suffocated under them.
    “What was it like being the son of Stephen Abbey?”
    I took a deep breath to put her off for a minute. In the time that we’d been together she’d asked me very few questions about my family, and I was damned grateful.
    “My mother called him Punch. Sometimes he’d walk off a set in the middle of the day, come home, and take us all out to someplace like Knott’s Berry Farm or the beach. He’d run around and buy us all hot dogs and Coke and ask us if this wasn’t the best time we’d ever had in our lives. He got pretty manic sometimes, but we loved it all. If he got too crazy, then my mother would say, ‘Take it easy, Punch,’ and I’d hate her for it. He always had to be the life of the party when he was around, but since he was around so little then, we all ate him up.”
    The rain came down in transparent curtains, and you could hear it slooshing up under the wheels. I was driving in the slow lane, and whenever someone passed us there was so much water flung across the windshield that the poor wipers could barely keep up with it. The lightning and thunder were simultaneous now, so I knew that the storm was right over us.
    “He took me to the studio once when they were filming A Fire in Virginia . In a way, it was one of the greatest days of my life, I guess. All I remember about it was that someone was always asking me if I wanted an ice cream, and that later I fell asleep and was carried into his dressing room. When I woke up he was standing over me like a white mountain, smiling that famous smile. He had on an all-white shirt and a huge cream panama hat with a black band.” I shook my head and tapped out a tune on the steering wheel to swish