The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll Page B

and listen to the ball game in that sleepy and calm way that men get when they’re bullshitting and looking off into space. We’d talk about Stan Musial’s batting average or Fred’s new tractor. .
    I was off in my dream world chatting with France when I heard Saxony say “something-something-something Stephen Abbey.” That brought me around, and when my eyes locked back into the scene, Mrs. Fletcher was staring at me with her mouth wide open.
    “Your father was Stephen Abbey?”
    I shrugged and wondered why the hell Saxony had let that cat out of the bag. Oh, we were going to have a lovely talk later on.
    The soft chain-saw whine of a crying baby cut through the air and covered the halt in conversation.
    “The man’s father was Stephen Abbey.”
    That did it. Eyes came up, hamburgers went down, the baby stopped crying. I looked at Saxony with instant death in my eyes. Her face fell and she looked away. She tried to get out of it by saying to Anna that since we both had famous fathers, we probably had quite a bit in common.
    “If that’s true, then my father wasn’t in the same league as Mr. Abbey’s.” Anna looked at me while she said this. Her eyes moved freely over my face. I half-liked, half-didn’t-like the inspection.
    “Then it is true? Your father was Stephen Abbey?”
    I picked up a cold sparerib and took a bite. I wanted to play down my answer as much as possible, so I thought that a mumble through a mouthful of meat would be a good place to start.
    “Yes.” Chomp chomp. “Yes, he was.” I looked hypnotically at the rib and my greasy fingers. Chewing was easy, swallowing wasn’t. I ulked it down with half a can of Coke.
    “Do you remember when me and your father took you to see The Beginners , Anna?”
    “You did?”
    “What do you mean, ‘You did?’ Of course we did. We went over to that theater in Hermann and you had to go to the bathroom the whole time.”
    “What was it like, Mr. Abbey?”
    “You tell me , Ms. France.” I gave a two-second nasty-sly smile that she picked up and shot back at me.
    “Two people with famous fathers right at the table with us, Dan.” Mrs. Fletcher clapped her hands, then, laying them flat on the table, rubbed them back and forth as if sanding it.
    “Anna, you gotta get me more rolls again!”
    She stood straight up, looked down the front of her overalls, and brushed off some crumbs. “Why don’t we talk about this some more, okay? Would you two like to come over to my house for dinner tonight? Around seven-thirty? Eddie told you the address and how to get there, didn’t he?”
    I was stunned. We all shook hands and she went off. Dinner tonight at Marshall France’s house? Eddie? The hippie kid we’d given the ride to? There was no way he could have gotten to that barbecue before we did.
     
    We drove Mrs. Fletcher over to her house, which was on the other side of town. It was great. To get there you went up a flagstone walk that cut through a garden of six-foot-high sunflowers, chestnut-size pumpkins, watermelons, and tomato vines. According to her, the only kind of garden she could see was one that you ate. She didn’t hold with roses and honeysuckle, no matter how good they smelled.
    You climbed four broad wooden steps to the kind of shaded porch you dream of drinking iced tea on in the middle of August. Real Norman Rockwell stuff. There was a white hammock big enough for ten people, two white rocking chairs with green cushions on the seats, and an all-white dog that looked like a baby pig.
    “Now, that there’s Nails. He’s a bull terrier, if you don’t know the breed.”
    “ Nails? ”
    “Yeah — doesn’t his head look like one of those wedging nails? Marshall France gave him that name.”
    I’ve never been crazy for either dogs or cats, but one look at Nails and it was love at first sight. He was so ugly, so short and tight-skinned — like a sausage about to burst its casing. Eyes on either side of his head like a