The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll Read Free Book Online

it, I had to admit that I sort of liked it. It wasn’t fake-y or put-on.
    Lucente was short and wiry. His face was tobacco brown and he had white hair cut in a to-the-bone crew cut. No nonsense there. His eyes were powder blue and bloodshot. I thought that he must be in his seventies or eighties, but he looked strong enough and still full of beans. When I didn’t say anything, he looked annoyed. He sat down behind the desk.
    “You wanna sit down?”
    I sat, and we looked at each other for a while. He clasped his hands in the middle of the desk and nodded, more to himself than to me. I watched his eyes and realized that they were too small to contain all the life that was behind them.
    “Yes now, sir, so what can I do for you?” He slipped open a desk drawer and brought out a long yellow pad and a yellow Bic pen with a black cap.
    “Nothing, Mr. Lucente. I, uh, I mean, nobody’s died in my family. I’m here to ask you a few questions, if I may. About someone who once worked here for you.”
    He uncapped the pen and began drawing lazy circles on the top of the paper, one overlapping the next. “Questions? You wanna ask me about someone who worked for me?”
    I sat up straight in my chair and couldn’t find anyplace to put my hands. “Yes, you see, we’ve discovered that a man named Martin Frank worked here for you years ago. Around 1939 or so? I know that that’s quite a long time, but I was wondering if you’d remember him or anything about him. If it’s of any help, not long after he was here he changed his name to Marshall France and later became a very famous writer.”
    Lucente stopped drawing his circles and tapped the pen on the pad. He looked up once, expressionless, then turned in his chair and yelled over his shoulder.
    “Hey, Violetta!”
    When there was no answer, he scowled, dropped the pen on the desk, and got up.
    “My wife’s so old now she don’t even hear the water running no more. I gotta turn it off for her half the time. Wait a minute.” He scuffled to the door, and I saw for the first time that he was wearing a pair of plum-colored corduroy bedroom slippers. He opened the door but didn’t go into the room. Instead he screamed for Violetta again.
    A steel-wool voice rasped back, “Wha’? Whadya want?”
    “You remember Martin Frank?”
    “Martin who?”
    “Martin Frank! ”
    “Martin Frank? Ah ha ha ha!”
    Lucente was smiling crazily when he turned again and looked at me. He pointed off into the dark room and shook his hand as if he’d just burned it on something.
    “Martin Frank. Yeah, sure, we remember Martin Frank.”

6
    The long train ride back gave me a lot of time to think about Lucente’s story. Violetta, who I assumed was his wife, never came out of the other room, but that didn’t keep her from yelling things to the old man. “Tell him about those two midgets and the trains!” … “Don’a forget the butterflies and that cookie!”
    Apparently the first day on the job, Lucente brought in some man who’d jumped off a building and who’d been scraped up with a shovel and shoved in a box. According to the undertaker, his new employee took one look at the body and threw up. They tried it a few more times, but the same thing happened. However, Mrs. Lucente was a cripple, so they put him to work in their apartment cleaning and cooking and doing the laundry. Needless to say, it pretty depressing at first to hear that the author of my favorite book in the world was kept on at the job because he cooked a mean lasagne.
    But then one day Lucente was working on a beautiful young girl who had killed herself by overdosing on sleeping pills. He was halfway through the job when he stopped for lunch. When he returned, the woman’s arm was on her stomach and she held a big chocolate-chip cookie in her hand. Next to her on a small side table was a glass of milk. Lucente thought it was a great joke — this kind of black humor was traditional in the funeral business. A few weeks