Happyland

by J. Robert Lennon

  “Yes, indeed,” Shorty confirmed.

  “In exchange,” Reeve asked, slumping in his chair, “for what?”

  It was with evident excitement that Dumbo blurted, “For a seat on this board!”

  “Miz Masters would like to have greater input into the way this institution is run,” Fuzzy intoned, “and I think you will agree that there are few women more qualified to do so than she.”

  “I bought my granddaughter a Zulu Akimbe doll and book!” Dumbo cried.

  “Not,” Fuzzy said with a small cough, “Miz Masters’s finest moment.”

  “Well, Jeanette,” Fatty inquired, “what about Sally the slave girl? You like her, don’t you?” Reeve was not, he thought, imagining the cavalier edge that had crept into her voice.

  But Fuzzy merely rolled her eyes. “Please, Emily, you know that Mr. Tennyson is uncomfortable with ethnically challenging conversation.”

  Reeve slid farther still into his chair.

  “As for the library, Mr. Tennyson,” Fatty was saying now, “Mrs. Masters has also offered to build us a new one, should the structural problems be systemic.”

  “And they just might,” Shorty piped up.

  “You’re kidding,” Reeve said, his shoulders up around his ears.

  “It’s true!” trumpeted Dumbo. “Frankly, I never liked that library. It looks like a broken pop bottle. I’m not at all surprised it’s unsound.”

  “Ugly. Ugly,” said Shorty.

  Reeve spoke cautiously. “Has Ruth been informed of this plan?”

  Fuzzy scowled. “I hardly see why she should be concerned. She is the steward of the information housed within, not the keeper of the grounds.”

  “Ah,” said Reeve. “I see.” There was an uncomfortable silence, which Reeve broke by spinning his teaspoon in a little circle on the tabletop. He said, “What’s the second thing?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Fuzzy inquired.

  “The second thing we have to discuss.”

  “I should hope, Mr. Tennyson,” Fatty said, “that we have nothing more to discuss, because the other item on our agenda is our accreditation problem. Please do tell me that you have this firmly under control, and we need not address it this afternoon.”

  The ladies glared. Reeve nodded, as if to himself, and spun the spoon again. “I have it,” he croaked, “firmly under control.”

  17. Evidence

  Early the following morning, Ruth Spinks made an investigative tour of the library exterior. She brought along an umbrella, a digital camera, and the mayor. To her complete unsurprise, she discovered certain evidentiary inconsistencies that indicated a suspicious, if not sinister, human intervention.

  The “decay” which was supposed to be affecting the library did indeed seem to be present in a number of places underneath the wide eave that zigzagged around the Hayao Shinohara Memorial Library. Mortar was worn away in several places where the eaves hung low, and some bricks appeared ready to let themselves loose and fall to the ground. On and around the bench where the amorous Equinoxians had sat lay a collection of these bricks, along with chips of the mortar which held them together.

  With these data alone, a case might be made for the ongoing disintegration of the building. But there were other things.

  Why, for instance, she rhetorically demanded of Archie, should gritty mortar dust be found under each area of wear, scattered on the gravel and bark mulch that skirted the building? If the problem were gradual, as one would be inclined to expect, then this dust would long ago have been washed away by successive rainstorms and gusts of wind, or covered over by landscapers. When she dug underneath the gravel and mulch, Ruth was not able to find evidence of any former accumulation of dust.

  “Huh,” Archie remarked.

  And if this decay had occurred naturally, Ruth wondered, then what caused it? Water erosion, one might say—but it was raining right now, at this very moment, and the extremely sturdy system of gutters and downspouts that kept the library intact showed no evidence of any leaks in the areas the water supposedly affected. And if water had created the decay, then would there not be moss, or lichen, or some kind of discoloration between the bricks? Well, there was none.

  “I guess not,” Archie admitted.

  More incriminating, however, was what Ruth did find, on the ground around the little piles of dust. She found footprints, faint ones, in the mulch, and much clearer ones in the muddy patches where the gravel met the grass and the grass met the service road. She photographed these in great detail, as they revealed a large boot, well worn at the heels and toes. She also discovered twin impressions in the mulch, some as deep as three inches, where, unless she was mistaken (and she was not, she said in a snorting aside), a ladder had been placed.

  “You’re probably right.”

  She photographed the ladder marks, too. “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “No,” said the mayor, “I mean yes, it’s convincing, but…”

  “But it doesn’t matter to you,” she spat.

  “No, it does,” Archie said, with a small, uncomfortable cough.

  Finally, cigarette butts were lying all over the place. Not American Spirits. Marlboros. Ruth filled a ziploc bag with them. She stood up and said, “Archie, this woman is trying to ruin our town. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “I suppose it does,” he admitted, folding his arms over his chest. He longed to return to the orchard, to his ladder, his roadside stand; she could see it in his face, the set of his shoulders. His downcast eyes.

  “Say what’s on your mind, Archie.”

  He peered up at her from under his wild gray eyebrows. “Well. It’s just that—you know. There’s a lot of paranoia going around just now.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And this all seems like—that is, it’s going to sound like—like another crackpot theory. First she kills Glenda, and then—”

  “I am not,” Ruth said, “in that camp.”

  “No, but…well… It all seems too…complicated. To me. That’s all.” He straightened a bit, his back audibly cracking.

  Her response was a little wave of the hand. “Go on,” she said. “Back to the apples with you, then. Back to the simple life.”

  He delivered a wounded look. “That’s not fair.”

  “No, it’s not,” she said, and they stood, staring at one another for a moment. Archie broke their gaze with another cough. One night, in a moment of weakness, he had asked her to move in with him. This was years ago. He had muttered the words into his pillow, unwilling even to look her in the eye. She had pretended not to hear, not to have been awake. He didn’t ask again, and she hadn’t ever brought it up.

  He kissed her cheek, and she let him. Then she got back to work.

  It didn’t take a great deal of effort to enlarge her photos on her computer and print out glossy eight-by-tens of them. It required only slightly more effort to walk with a floppy disk over to the art department and her acquaintance Pam Kulp (a feminist, graphic artist, and disliker of Happy Masters), who promptly altered the color spectrum of the bootprint photos to more clearly reveal the tread. By lunchtime, then, Ruth had amassed a considerable collection of artifacts and evidentiary research to combat this supposed building inspector when he or she arrived to do the bidding of Happy Masters.

  Because it was Happy, Ruth knew, who was responsible. It had gotten around that Happy had met with the trustees, that she intended to expand the work-study program, that she was offering to help “update” Equinox College for the new millennium. It had gotten around that she had designs on the college, and not just philosophical ones. Actual designs, on paper, of how the college would be altered to suit her vision of this town—a town she intended to use to promote her fascistic agenda of aesthetic prettification.

  How convenient that the only architecturally arresting building in town should suddenly begin, after thirty-seven years of uninterrupted structural integrity, to fall apart—just when Happy Masters was about to meet with the b
oard of trustees to offer them a bunch of money! If anyone still had to be convinced that Happy’s aims were profoundly, and irreversibly, destructive, they needed only to gaze into the mud-filled pit that used to be a 175-year-old hotel—or upon the six-foot-square billboard that had been erected on the empty lot, of an artist’s rendering of the turreted, gingerbread-encrusted, cedar-shaken monstrosity slated to be built there.

  Then again, a lot of people had seen the billboard—yet riots had failed to break out in the streets. There was a growing anti-Happy movement, of course, led by Jennifer Triesman, but it was poisoned by paranoia and conspiracy theory, and Ruth wanted no part of it.

  Not for now, anyway. For now, she was on her own. When the building inspector arrived, Ruth would be armed and ready.

  He came at about two in the afternoon, a giant man in a navy jumpsuit that had worn to an almost uniform medium-gray. His hands were thick and broad as volumes of an encyclopedia, and his face was large and fleshy and tan, overhung by eyebrows that resembled the eaves he had come to inspect. It was hard to believe, looking at him, that he got up on ladders, climbed onto roofs, peered down into chimneys for a living. The embroidered tag on his chest read Harv.

  “I’m very eager to hear your assessment of the damage, Harv,” Ruth remarked as she followed him around the building. He didn’t speak as he worked, gazing up under the eaves with sleepy eyes, scribbling illegibly on a clipboard that appeared tiny in his hands. From time to time he glanced at Ruth, blinking, as if waiting for her to go away.

  After about fifteen minutes, he seemed to be finished. He signed the bottom of his form and walked back to his truck, which was also blue and as faded as his clothes. She accosted him as he opened the driver’s-side door.

  “Is that it? You aren’t going to get up on the roof? You’ve seen all you need to see?”

  “I’m finished,” he said, pausing with one leg in the cab, the other out.

  “May I have, please, a copy of your report?”

  The eyes narrowed, the ears twitched, like a bull’s brushing away flies. He said, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Ruth Spinks. This is my library.”

  “I report to Mrs. Masters.”

  “Why on earth would you report to Happy Masters, when Happy Masters is in no way officially affiliated with this institution?”

  He finished climbing into the truck and shut the door. He looked at her through the open window. “Happy Masters hired me. Happy Masters gets the report.”

  “Didn’t you see the marks where the ladder had been? Didn’t you see the footprints? And why would there be little piles of dust under the eaves? Piles of dust, as if someone had been scraping away at the mortar. And the gutters, the gutters are sound—what then could have loosened the bricks? You didn’t climb up there, sir, you didn’t so much as stand on tiptoes. You cannot possibly have discovered anything of importance.”

  Harv shrugged. “Looks unsound to me.”

  “It is not. It is sound, sir.”

  “Gotta go deliver my report,” he said, and added, “ma’am,” before starting his truck.

  “I have documentation!” Ruth shouted, waggling a nail-bitten finger in front of his agelessly rutted face. “I have taken photos! I have collected evidence! There is nothing, nothing to support your claims! You are trying to destroy my library!”

  The giant shook his head. “Not your library,” he said simply, and threw the truck into gear. With a clank, it jerked back onto the road and out of sight.

  * * *

  The next morning, the dust piles, footprints, and ladder depression were gone. The photographs and cigarette butts were missing, as well, from the locked file drawer, in the locked office, where Ruth had stashed them. They had even been erased from her computer.

  * * *

  A few days later, Janet answered the house phone and found herself talking to James Masters. “Hi, Janet,” he said, just like that: “Hi, Janet,” as if they were good friends, as if they had just seen each other yesterday, instead of almost a month ago. Happy was out of the house—she had gone to check out her ongoing construction projects—and the only noises were of distantly passing cars and the housekeeper’s AM talk radio show, coming up through the heat registers.

  “I’m glad I got you,” he said.

  “Really?” she couldn’t help saying.

  “Really. Is Happy around?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” came the voice, or at least it sounded that way: the connection was bad, and the vowels were swept away by a gust of crackling static. “I need your help with something.”

  “Sure, Jims,” she said. “James, I mean! Can you hear me?”

  “Yes. Sorry, I’m in a jeep.”

  “A jeep?”

  “In the Congo. On a dirt road. Whoop!” She heard some sharp conversation, and a clunking sound.

  “Mister Masters?”

  “No, hi, it’s me, I mean, call me James, sorry about that. Janet?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Let me call you back.”

  “Okay,” she said, and waited for his okay before hanging up.

  Call me James. How could you not like these people? They were friendly, powerful. The world was theirs to…do stuff in. And do stuff to. They just thought things up and made them real—big things, heavy and complicated and expensive things. And they did them swiftly, decisively, with hardly any forethought at all, like kings. Like they deserved it! This was what Janet wanted from life, to move through the world, agile as a thief, and say the right things to the right people and make things happen. She was aware that she didn’t have the personality for it, nor the energy; all she wanted to do half the time was draw pictures and drink wine. She was, in fact, an art major, but the stuff she liked to do—tiny, ornate things like vines and flowers and insects—had not impressed her teachers, and she passed every class with a B-minus, which at Equinox was a pretty bad grade. They called her efforts “illustrations” if they were feeling generous, or “decorations” if they weren’t. She’d once had the idea that she could be a famous artist, living on a beach in California or on Long Island, or at least shack up with one, a scraggly-haired older woman, divorced maybe, and they would drink a lot of wine and hibiscus tea, and Janet would have her own little studio in the back of the house but would mostly apprentice herself to the artist, running errands or cleaning brushes or something. And they would have sex, but only when the famous artist said so, and it would be in the bathtub—a big cast-iron bathtub under some big open windows—surrounded by candles.

  But this was close enough, for now. Happy was better than an artist—she made things that people actually liked, and she made a lot of money. And she used the money to make more things. She had a presence in the world. She was big. And if she didn’t have sex in the tub with Janet, then fine, that was something to shoot for.

  The house Janet had grown up in was very tiny—a narrow townhouse squeezed in between a used bookstore and a health food market. Her parents had liked it that way: they had grown up in large cities, Milwaukee and Taipei. Her mother had told the teenage Janet, “Never live in a place you can’t clean yourself.”

  “I’ll hire a maid,” she defiantly replied.

  Which sent her mother around the bend. “If stamping on the face of the underclass is what you want to do, go ahead,” she spat. “But no woman worth her salt hires another woman to clean her shit stains out of the toilet!”

  Louisa, the housekeeper, however, did not seem especially stamped on just now, as she loitered by the edge of the lake smoking cigarettes. And Janet liked this house. A lot. It was big and airy. You could sit in it and think. You could just…live. No wonder Happy accomplished so much here—there was room enough for a life.

  The phone rang and Janet picked it up. “J-Jim? James?” she said.

  “No, it’s Happy.” A pause. “Who’s Jim-Jim?”

  Janet said, “What do you mean?”

  “Did you think your pet monkey was callin
g, dear?”

  “I said ‘Happy Masters’ but I dropped the phone.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Okay. Ah—well, actually, I was calling about James. Or rather Jims. My husband. My pet monkey. Did he call me?”

  “No,” Janet said. That was easy!

  “Well, have him call the cell if he does, I need to ask him something.”

  “Okay. How’s it going?” How’s it going? What was wrong with her?

  “Oh, fine. They’re digging out the new foundation here. It could be going faster, if you ask me. I want it framed out before the first big snow.”

  “That could be tomorrow. Or tonight.”

  “I know, I know.” There was a beep—call waiting. “Get that,” Happy said. “Tell him to call me if it’s Jims. Go on.”

  It was Jims, in fact. “Sorry about that, all the roads are terrible out here. What were we talking about? Right—you doing me a favor. Actually this idea has developed since I hung up. I have a plan. Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” she said. His voice, deep and jaunty even through the satellite link, seemed oddly over-voluble, nervously so. It excited her somewhat, she didn’t know why.

  “You may not be aware that Happy’s birthday is in a couple of weeks. And I wanted to ask your help in finding her a present.”

  “Oh!”

  “But I was thinking,” he went on, “I’m going to be back in the city this weekend. Maybe you could meet me there. I’ll put you up someplace nice. You spend more time with Happy than I do these days, you could come shopping with me. I’ll pay you—it’s work after all, you’re her assistant. Stop me if you think this is completely ridiculous.”

  Janet was speechless. New York City? To pick out a birthday gift? She opened her mouth.

  “It’s silly, I’m sorry,” James Masters said. “I’ll just—never mind, I’ll think of something.”