The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll Page A

does.”
    She seemed pleased by the compliment but squinted up her eyes and touched me briefly on the hand. “I have told you a million times not to exaggerate, Mr. Abbey.” She smiled like a little girl absolutely delighted with herself. The joke and the smile made me delighted with her too.
    What the hell was David Louis talking about when he pictured her as some kind of shrewy weirdo who vamped around in black dresses with a candle in her hand? She was pretty and funny and wore Dee-Cee overalls, and from what I’d seen so far, everyone in town knew and liked her.
    “It’s true, Miss France.” Saxony said it so ardently that we all stopped and looked at her.
    “Did David tell you, though, how I felt about a biography of my father?”
    Saxony spoke. “He said that you were very much against one being written.”
    “No, that is not quite true. I’ve been against it because the people who have wanted to write about him have come out here to our town for all of the wrong reasons. They would all like to become the authority on Marshall France. But when you talk to them, it is easy to see that they aren’t interested in what kind of man he was. To them he is just a literary figure.”
    A kind of low-level bitterness moved in over her voice like a cloud bank. She was facing Saxony, so I only saw her in profile. Her chin was angular and sharp. When she spoke, her white teeth came out from under those dark, heavy lips in sharp contrast, but then they went back into hiding as soon as she stopped. She had long sparse eyelashes that looked recently curled. Her neck was long and white and incredibly vulnerable and held the only wrinkles on her face. I guessed that she was either in her forties or late thirties, but everything about her looked firm and healthy, and I could picture her living to a very old age. Unless she had the same weak heart as her father.
    She turned to me and started playing with the blue plastic fork they’d given me for my spareribs. “If you had known my father, Mr. Abbey, you would understand why I’m so sensitive about this. He was a very private person. The only real friends he had outside of my mother and Mrs. Lee were Dan” — she smiled and nodded up toward the grocer; he shrugged and looked modestly at his spatula — “and only a few others in town. Everybody knew him and liked him, but he hated being in the public eye and worked very hard to avoid it.”
    Dan spoke, but only to Anna, not any of us. “The thing he liked to do best was come into my store and sit behind the butcher counter with me on those little wood-stump stools that I keep back there, you know? Once in a while he’d work at the cash register if one of my regular people didn’t come in.”
    What a great beginning for my biography! Open it with France working at the cash register of Dan’s store in Galen… . Even if the possibility of the book was gone, it was a joy to be sitting here with these people who had been so much a part of his life. I envied all of them incredibly.
    “And I could tell when he was back there with ya, Dan. There’d never be no service up front!”
    Dan scratched his head and winked at us. There was a thought in my mind that wouldn’t disappear. Here was this nice little fat guy, a grocer, who’d probably spent what amounted to years in the company of my hero. What could they have talked about? Baseball? Women? Who got drunk at the firehouse last night? It was an obnoxious and condescending attitude to have, but why couldn’t I have switched places with him for even one of those afternoons behind the butcher counter? One afternoon shooting the bull with Marshall France and maybe talking about books and fantasy … about the characters in his books.
    “Hey, now, Marshall, how did you ever come up with ((fill in the blank))?”
    He would lean back against a couple of legs of lamb and say something like, “I knew this sword swallower when I was a kid… .”
    Then we’d turn on the radio