A Graveyard for Lunatics

THOMAS WOLFE WAS WRONG. YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN. TURN LEFT AT CARPENTERS’SHEDS, SECOND OUTDOOR SET ON THE RIGHT. YOUR GRANDPARENTS ARE WAITING THERE! COME SEE! ROY.

I looked around at the tarpaulins. The unveiling! Yes!

I ran, thinking: What does he mean? My grandparents? Waiting? I slowed down. I began to breathe deeply of a fresh air that smelled of oaks and elms and maples.

For Roy was right.

You can go home again.

A sign at the front of outdoor set number two read: FOREST PLAINS, but it was Green Town, where I was born and raised on bread that yeasted behind the potbellied stove all winter, and wine that fermented in the same place in late summer, and clinkers that fell in that same stove, like iron teeth, long before spring.

I did not walk on the sidewalks, I walked the lawns, glad for a friend like Roy who knew my old dream and called me to see.

I passed three white houses where my friends had lived in 1931, turned a corner, and stopped in shock.

My dad’s old 1929 Buick was parked in the dust on the brick street, waiting to head west in 1933. It stood, rusting quietly, its headlights dented, its radiator cap flaked, its radiator honeycomb-papered over with trapped moths and blue and yellow butterfly wings, a mosaic caught from a flow of lost summers.

I leaned in to stroke my hand, trembling, over the prickly nap of the back-seat cushions, where my brother and I had knocked elbows and yelled at each other as we traveled across Missouri and Kansas and Oklahoma and

It wasn’t my dad’s car. But it was.

I let my eyes drift up to find the ninth greatest wonder of the world:

My grandma and grandpa’s house, with its porch and its porch swing and geraniums in pink pots along the rail, and ferns like green sprinkler founts all around, and a vast lawn like the fur of a green cat, with clover and dandelions studding it in such profusion that you longed to tear off your shoes and run the whole damned tapestry barefoot. And—

A high cupola window where I had slept to wake and look out over a green land and a green world.

In the summer porch swing, sailing back and forth, gently, his long-fingered hands in his lap, was my dearest friend

Roy Holdstrom.

He glided quietly, lost as I was lost in some midsummer a long time back.

Roy saw me and lifted his long cranelike arms to gesture right and left, to the lawn, the trees, to himself, to me.

“My God,” he called, “aren’t we—lucky?”

7

Roy Holdstrom had built dinosaurs in his garage since he was twelve. The dinosaurs chased his father around the yard, on 8-millimeter film, and ate him up. Later, when Roy was twenty, he moved his dinosaurs into small fly-by-night studios and began to make on-the-cheap lost-world films that made him famous. His dinosaurs so much filled his life that his friends worried and tried to find him a nice girl who would put up with his Beasts. They were still searching.

I walked up the porch steps remembering one special night when Roy had taken me to a performance of Siegfried at the Shrine Auditorium. “Who’s singing?” I had asked. “To hell with singing!” cried Roy. “We go for the Dragon!” Well, the music was a triumph. But the Dragon? Kill the tenor. Douse the lights.

Our seats were so far over that—oh God!—I could see only the Dragon Fafner’s left nostril! Roy saw nothing but the great flame-thrown smokes that jetted from the unseen beast’s nose to scorch Siegfried.

“Damn!” whispered Roy.

And Fafner was dead, the magic sword deep in his heart. Siegfried yelled in triumph. Roy leaped to his feet, cursing the stage, and ran out.

I found him in the lobby muttering to himself.

“Some Fafner! Christ! My God! Did you see?!”

As we stormed out into the night, Siegfried was still screaming about life, love, and butchery.

“Poor bastards, that audience,” said Roy. “Trapped for two more hours with no Fafner!”

And here he was now, swinging quietly in a glider swing on a front porch lost in time but brought back up through the years.

“Hey!” he called, happily. “What’d I tell you? My grandparents’ house!”

“No, mine!“

“Both!”

Roy laughed, truly happy, and held out a big fat copy of You Can’t Go Home Again.

“He was wrong,” said Roy, quietly.

“Yes,” I said, “here we are, by God!”

I stopped. For just beyond this meadowland of sets, I saw the high graveyard/studio wall. The ghost of a body on a ladder was there, but I wasn’t ready to mention it yet. Instead, I said: “How you doing with your Beast? You found him yet?”

“Heck, where’s your Beast?”

That’s the way it had been for many days now.

Roy and I had been called in to blueprint and build beasts, to make meteors fall from outer space and humanoid critters rise from dark lagoons, dripping cliches of tar from dime-store teeth.

They had hired Roy first, because he was technically advanced. His pterodactyls truly flew across the primordial skies. His bron-tosaurs were mountains on their way to Mahomet.

And then someone had read twenty or thirty of my Weird Tales, stories I had been writing since I was twelve and selling to the pulp magazines since I was twenty-one, and hired me to “write up a drama” for Roy’s beasts, all of which hyperventilated me, for I had paid my way or snuck into some nine thousand movies and had been waiting half a lifetime for someone to fire a starter’s gun to run me amok in film.

“I want something never seen before!” said Manny Leiber that first day. “In three dimensions we fire something down to Earth. A meteor drops—”

“Out near Meteor Crater in Arizona—” I put in. “Been there a million years. What a place for a new meteor to strike and…”

“Out comes our new horror,” cried Manny.

“Do we actually see it?” I asked.

“Whatta you mean? We got to see it!”

“Sure, but look at a film like The Leopard Man! The scare comes from night shadows, things unseen. How about Isle of the Dead when the dead woman, a catatonic, wakes to find herself trapped in a tomb?”

“Radio shows!!” cried Manny Leiber. “Dammit, people want to see what scares them—”

“I don’t want to argue—”

“Don’t!” Manny glared. “Give me ten pages to scare me gutless! You—” pointing at Roy—”whatever he writes you glue together with dinosaur droppings! Now, scram! Go make faces in the mirror at three in the morning!”

“Sir!” we cried.

The door slammed.

Outside in the sunlight, Roy and I blinked at each other.

“Another fine mess you got us in, Stanley!”

Still yelling with laughter, we went to work.

I wrote ten pages, leaving room for monsters. Roy slapped thirty pounds of wet clay on a table and danced around it, hitting and shaping, hoping for the monster to rise up like a bubble in a prehistoric pool to collapse in a hiss of sulfurous steam and let the true horror out.

Roy read my pages.

“Where’s your Beast?” he cried.

I glanced at his hands, empty but covered with blood-red clay.

“Where’s yours?” I said.

And now here it was, three weeks later.

“Hey,” said Roy, “how come you’re just standing down there looking at me? Come grab a doughnut, sit, speak.” I went up, took the doughnut he offered me, and sat in the porch swing, moving alternately forward into the future and back into the past. Forward—rockets and Mars. Backward—dinosaurs and tarpits.