Happyland

by J. Robert Lennon

  Ah—the offer. Jennifer had been waiting for it—Happy Masters had been cruising past this place for weeks, ogling it like a bond trader sizing up a hooker. What was she supposed to do now—jump for joy? Well, she’d seen the New Town Order, and she thought it sucked. She had liked buying cigs from a tired old whore, and getting her hair cut by fat ugly broads, and she liked old man Huber and his AM radio—plenty of Saturdays she spent hanging around at the counter listening to the races broadcast from Watkins Glen. So fuck the offer.

  But first, play with her a little. “Well,” Jennifer bellowed. “It’s about time! We’ve been waiting!”

  A quizzical smile on the dollie’s face. Happy Smiles-A-Lot. “If you’d wanted to sell, Jennifer, you could have come to me first.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to sell.”

  “No?”

  “No. I just wanted the chance to do this.” And she snatched the envelope from Happy’s hand, spit on it, tore it up, and threw the pieces back at her.

  Happy flinched—Jennifer’d been looking forward to that—but she did it behind a tinted power window, which she’d evidently had the presence of mind to shut during Jennifer’s performance. The pieces of envelope fluttered to the ground.

  “There!” Jennifer shouted through the window. “You gonna kill me now, too?”

  Happy’s response, muffled by the glass, was a tut-tut, a finger-wag. “Read it before you recycle it, Jennifer. You may change your mind.”

  “We don’t recycle around here!” she yelled at the SUV as it rolled away. “We throw shit in the trash!” She stalked to the edge of the property and leaned into the road, her fist in the air. “Don’t come back, slut!” she screamed. “Take your hush money somewhere else!”

  Well, that felt good.

  Sort of. Actually, not at all. In fact, she suddenly felt like total shit. She’d lost her cool. Or rather, she didn’t have any cool.

  And if there ever was evidence of that, it was indelibly marked on the pavement between here and the pump island: glossy white footprints, tracing her rage across the lot. And there was Bud, standing at the garage door, wrench in hand.

  “Aw, geez,” he said.

  “Fuck off, Bud!” she replied.

  “Okay, okay,” he whimpered, and scuttled out of sight.

  * * *

  In the Goodbye Goose, Dave Dryer was talking with an old friend, though this isn’t how either of them would have put it. They didn’t have the kind of friendship that admitted it was a friendship—it was more of a long, lumpy acquaintance that had endured (more because of proximity than affection) periods of both disturbing intensity and almost complete detachment, and had now settled into a solid, if not entirely comfortable, détente.

  It was one in the afternoon. They sat at the bar, each on his proper side. There was nobody else around. Between them sat a large plastic popcorn bowl printed with a woodgrain pattern, its insides slick with melted butter and encrusted with salt and unpopped kernels. Beside the bowl stood three empty beer bottles, one half-full beer bottle, and most of a can of soda. The soda was Dave’s. The beer was Kevin Russell’s.

  Kevin gave a general impression of lankness, as if he had been cooked too long, using too much grease. Though he often worked outdoors—he was generally known as the town handyman—his skin was doughy and pale, and his thin body, though capable, seemed delicate and poorly nourished. His black hair was long and uncombed, but his mustache, which drooped down to his chin on either side, was always carefully groomed. He lived in a fishing shack and drove an old German motorcycle that had used to be his father’s. Both his parents, like Dave’s, were dead. He and Dave had gone to high school together in Auburn, though Dave had been a decent student and Kevin a truant.

  Kevin had never exactly been fun, but he was always available, and during a particular few years of Dave’s post-adolescence, it was Kevin’s kind of existence to which Dave aspired. Especially after his dad died. During that year, when all of Dave’s more uptight, college-bound friends had retreated into an awkward fake amiability, Kevin re-upped his commitment to showing Dave a no-frills good time, inviting him out frequently to drink, drive, and shoot guns at trees. Kevin would say things like, “I feel for you, man. When my mom croaked, I was seriously fucked up. As if I ain’t fucked up now!”

  Stupid funny things were Kevin’s specialty. He crapped in some old guy’s mailbox once, and wiped his ass with the guy’s Scientific American. He shot a rat and stuffed and mounted it as a trophy, which he gave to Dave as a gift. He liked to strip naked and dive screaming into the lake, or drive dirt roads at night with the lights off and the stereo blaring. Nothing seemed to frighten him, everything was hilarious.

  But Dave started thinking about going to college himself, and he developed an attitude about Kevin. They still did the same shit together, but it wasn’t all that funny anymore. Dave always told him to shut up or knock it off, and Kevin grew resentful. One night they were out camping—it was supposed to be a hunting trip, but it was really nothing more than an excuse to go drink beer in the woods—and Kevin got up from the fire, went to the truck, and came back with his rifle. He did a fake military drill, tripping over his bare feet, farting, dropping the gun. Then he sat down and told this story about a girl from a couple towns over who’d sucked his dick, and he stuck the barrel of the rifle in his mouth and started kind of slipping it in and out, mumbling “Yeah, oh baby, come on baby, give it to me.” He moaned and whimpered, his lips smeared with gun oil. Drool dribbled down the barrel. Dave watched him lift up his unshod foot and move it toward the trigger, wiggling his big toe. “Mmm! Mmm!” he said, “oh, come, baby, come!” And he shoved the toe into the trigger guard and got a look in his eye like he really, honestly, totally was going to do it, he was going to blow his fucking head off right here in front of Dave, and what was Dave gonna do about it?

  Dave tackled him. He made sure it hurt like hell, because Dave had a thing about suicide. About its not being funny. What the fuck, Kevin yelled at him, a little blood dripping from the corner of his mouth, you didn’t think I was serious, did you? Man, can’t you take a joke? Well fuck you then, some fucking friend you are, why don’t you go off to fucking business school and suck a little businessman dick, asshole.

  They didn’t talk for a while after that. Dave didn’t see Kevin much—or pretended not to—until he got back from college and opened the bar, and even then Kevin didn’t come in too often because he never had any money. But they came to an understanding. Dave started giving him free drinks, and Kevin started speaking to him again. Some nights, drunk, Kevin would help Dave clean up. Some nights they stayed after hours in the closed bar, continuing to drink, reminiscing or telling jokes about homos or Mexicans. Some nights one of them ended up crying, though not so often, lately, with Dave on the wagon. They were the kind of best friends friendless people have, the two guys in town everybody knew a little and nobody knew a lot, except for each other.

  For all that, they didn’t like each other much at all.

  Today they were talking about Happy Masters, because Kevin had heard that she had offed the old lady in order to get her house. “The perfect murder,” he said, nodding sagely. “Make it look like a suicide, that’s how the CIA does it.”

  “I kind of doubt that,” Dave said.

  “How could the old lady pick up that rock, huh? It was fucking heavy!”

  Dave shrugged. “She used to move boxes of cans around the store. And there was a suicide note.”

  “Could’ve been forged.” He guzzled his beer, leaving Dave to shake his head and wipe, with mesmerizing redundance, the bar top. “Anyway, I don’t give a shit who she killed. If she’s throwing money around, I wouldn’t mind getting a piece. I got lakefront property.”

  It was true that the fishing shack stood on the lake. “What have you got though, like sixteen feet of shoreline?” Dave asked.

  “So?”

  “So what is she going to do with that?”

  “Up to her,�
� Kevin said, as if there were many choices.

  Dave, of course, had his own choice to make, for Happy’s offer to him was shrinking every day. It had begun at an absurd price—$200,000. Twenty-three days had passed, which meant the offer was down to $177,000, which was still ridiculous. He wondered why he didn’t just tell her to go to hell, and he wondered why he hadn’t sold out yet, and he wondered why she hadn’t been back to demand an answer. Well, that one was easy: for her, the deal was getting sweeter and sweeter.

  But there was no real choice: he just wasn’t going to sell. The bar would be worth a lot more when the town filled up with tourists, as Happy planned for it to do. There was the bistro going in across the street, but it was hard to imagine any of his customers hanging out there—right in plain sight, where he could watch them betray him. No, he would hang on to his assets, bide his time. He just wanted to put it out of his mind.

  It was at this moment, however, that Happy Masters walked through the door, her arm raised in mid-wave, like a regular in a bar on TV. He was unable to restrain himself from waving back. Kevin swiveled around on his stool.

  “Well, hello!” Happy said, and took the stool next to Kevin. “I’m Happy.”

  Kevin didn’t say anything at all, just looked at her.

  “This is Kevin,” Dave said. “What do you want?”

  “Some more of that chablis on ice, if you don’t mind,” she said. “I’m developing a taste for the local grape.”

  While he got her drink—from the same bottle, she would likely be disgusted to learn, that he served her from nearly a month ago—he heard her ask Kevin Russell what he did for a living.

  “Little of this, little of that.”

  “Little of what, Kevin,” Happy said with sudden sternness, and Dave glanced up from the freezer to check out his response.

  He wasn’t looking at her. “Little of minding my own fucking business.”

  “If you want some fucking business,” Happy came back, “you’ll look me in the eye.”

  In the silence that followed, Dave poured her wine and put it in front of her. She didn’t look, though; she was intent upon Kevin. Slowly he sat up straight and turned, insolently, to face her.

  “Paint houses,” he said. “Fix boats. Fix cars.”

  “So you’re that Kevin,” she said. “The boat guy.”

  “Yeah,” Kevin said, and finished his beer.

  “Well, I have a rowboat I want sealed and painted. When can you do it?”

  He glared a moment, then turned away. “I’m busy.”

  “No you’re not,” Happy said, and took a nice long swig of her wine.

  Dave was impressed and unnerved. Nobody talked to Kevin this way.

  Happy went on. “Here,” she said, reaching into her purse, “I’m paying you up front. Come to my house first thing in the morning.” She finished her wine with a second gulp, and said, “Put it on my tab, Dave. We’ll settle up when you sell me the bar.” Then she got down from her stool.

  Kevin appeared to be holding a hundred-dollar bill.

  “I’m not selling you the bar,” Dave said.

  But, “See you tomorrow, Kevin,” was her only response. And she began to walk out.

  “What if I don’t know where you live?” Kevin shouted suddenly.

  Happy didn’t turn around. “Then I’m out a hundred bucks,” she said, and was gone.

  The two of them sat in silence for a minute or two. Then Kevin pushed the bill across the counter to Dave. “Let me buy the bitch a drink,” he said.

  13. The neurophysiology of the frog

  Dissent was fomenting on the hill, though not quite as quickly or with as much intensity as Ruth might have liked. News of Happy’s work-study program had gotten around, and in general the students liked it. They liked having money, and there weren’t enough jobs to go around in Equinox. There were jobs at the shopping mall in Nestor, but you either had to have a car or time to take the bus, and not many Equinox students did. Of course, Ruth thought, they certainly had time to take the bus to the mall when they had money to spend—but it was better not to enter the domain of pet peeves, where she could go on for hours, categorizing everything that was wrong with the spending of money as a recreational activity.

  And then there was the conspiracy theory. The one rotten thing to happen in Equinox during the past month that Happy Masters demonstrably didn’t do—this is what the anti-Happy contingent most wanted to discuss. “You think she killed that lady?” students demanded at the circulation desk, their voices deafeningly hushed. Every conceivable inconsistency was trumped up into damning evidence—the weight of the stone, the time of death, the angle of the body in the water. Motives were invented, scenarios assembled. Never mind the suicide note. Never mind Happy’s absence from town that day, or the clear set of footprints—Glenda’s—leading to the water’s edge. The worst part about it was that what Happy really did—threw an old woman out into the cold, and drove her to take her own life—wasn’t nasty enough. The students preferred the web of lies, the fascinating tapestry of implausibility, to the terrible truth.

  And it wasn’t just the students. She’d gone to buy an ice cream cone from Jennifer Triesman yesterday. “Closed for the season,” she’d grunted. And then her voice brightened. “So, how’dy’a think she did it?”

  “Who? What?”

  “Fascist Takeover Barbie—how’d she kill the old lady?”

  Ruth’s response—gentle but firm discouragement—fell upon deaf ears. Jennifer shook her head, waved her off. “Aw, go read a book,” she spat, as Ruth began the walk back to campus. Anger fueled her weary steps; she took it out on rocks and pine cones.

  But enough for now. Growth in wisdom may be measured by decrease in bitterness: thus spake Nietszche, anyhow. It was time to pour her mental energy into the October newsletter, which scrolled, nearly complete, across the screen of her computer.

  Dear Equinoxians:

  Let me begin with a schedule change, for those students and citizens who might not already have heard: Parents’ Weekend, that 37-year-old Equinox College tradition, which had been scheduled for the third weekend in October, has been cancelled. The reason? There is no longer anywhere in Equinox for parents to stay. The Equinox Inn, in case you haven’t noticed, has been closed “for renovations.” What these renovations will entail is unclear, as the new owner—you guessed it, Happy Masters—has declined to reveal her plans. Some parents have demanded that the cost of their airline tickets be refunded; allow me to refer you to Dean Bullers’s office if your parents are among them, or wish to be.

  As for local business owners who had expected to earn, as they have every year since 1972, additional money from the arrival of hundreds of parents to our town, I’m sad to tell you that you are simply out of luck.

  I would also like to call to your attention, Equinoxians, a commonly known fact about the neurophysiology of the frog.

  (Surely our beloved librarian/editor has lost her marbles? you ask yourselves. Bear with me, friends!)

  Take any common species of frog—the kind, perhaps, that you might find living along the shoreline of our own Onteo Lake—the very shoreline that is now being sullied by shards of broken glass, splinters of clapboard, the exhaust from construction machines and the deep ruts left by their treads. Capture this frog and bring it into your home, into your kitchen, and place it in a deep pan of cold water.

  Now place the pan onto the stove and turn on the heat. Watch what your frog does as its little bath grows more and more uncomfortable. Does it thrash around in terror? Does it cry out in pain? Does it leap out of the pan to safety? Certainly it should, it is equipped with powerful hind legs for the very purpose of escaping danger! But, alas, the frog does nothing whatsoever. It is incapable of perceiving the incremental increase in temperature, and so sits in puzzlement as it is boiled to death.

  Students, citizens, friends, is anyone beginning to feel a little warm here in Equinox, despite the dropping temperature? Does anyone f
eel a little itch in their legs telling them that a bit of leaping might be in order? If so, please visit me here at the Hayao Shinohara Memorial Library, and join my little save-the-frog society. Don’t wait until you’re boiled alive!

  Your faithful servant,

  Ruth.

  A sigh escaped the librarian’s lips: it always made her heart heavy to invite anyone to do anything. She was only setting herself up to be disappointed by her fellow man. But disappointment was different from despair; disappointment could be transformed into action. Besides that, it was inevitable. She would use her failure as a benchmark from which to judge future success. Truth, Schopenhauer once said, passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed, then it is violently opposed, and finally it is accepted as self-evident. She could hardly skip straight to step three, could she? Her disappointment would be the first step in the ratification of the truth that, so far, only Ruth wanted to hear.

  She printed out the newsletter, xeroxed it (blue this time, to match the sky, which had cleared for the first time in a week), and left the stack on the circulation desk. She would distribute at lunchtime. Meanwhile, Janet Ping, herself in possession of the best work-study job in town, slid the first page off the top and read it in silence. Ruth watched her from the stacks, where she had gone to shelve books: Janet revealed a great deal with her body language, and Ruth was curious to know if she could be recruited for the cause. She’d seen Janet at Happy’s house the other night, looking suspiciously starstruck, and so had her doubts.

  These were promptly borne out. Janet blushed, hung her head, and replaced the newsletter, face-down, on top of the stack. Then she moved as far from the pile as she could get.

  “Fess up,” Ruth said to her, seconds later. “You’re a fan, aren’t you.”