The Laughterhouse

CHAPTER THREE

Caleb Cole is excited. He doubts the old guy is going to remember him, but he’ll get there with some explaining. He wasn’t sure what to get him; he did wonder if flowers would be appropriate before deciding it would just be a little weird. Showing up empty-handed would be just as strange, so he settled on a six-pack of beer, which he decided was perfect. He wasn’t sure what Albert drank, but figured at Albert’s age it probably wouldn’t matter too much. Beer, wine, he guesses one type tastes like any other when you’re closing in on a hundred. Not that Albert is a hundred, but he’s certainly closer to a hundred than he is to fifty.

He parks outside the retirement home. He doesn’t know if driving in will be enough to wake half of the residents even though it’s only seven thirty, or whether it’d be like waking the dead, which in a place like this would be a pretty neat trick. He carries the beer and straightens the fresh shirt he put on only half an hour ago, after taking a shower. The rain is coming and going-one moment it’s there, the next it’s gone.

He’s never stepped foot in a retirement community before today. No reason to. His parents both went to one for almost ten years before they died, but he never visited them, and he doesn’t have any uncles or aunts that he’s kept in touch with. His grandparents-well, half of them were dead before he was born, and the other half not long after. Looking around, the retirement community feels like exactly what it is-a holding pattern for old people between this world and the next. All the homes are made from brick with aluminum windows and are well insulated. They’d stay warm in the winter and cook anything inside in the summer, but they all look the same, and he struggles for a few minutes to figure out exactly which one he’s supposed to be heading to. Once he thought it was the kind of place he and Lara would end up living in. The kids would get sick of looking after them and put them into a home. They would grow old together, dreading that day when one of them got sick, picked up pneumonia or a lung infection to complicate the matter, then say goodbye.

He finds the right unit. There are lights on inside. He feels nervous. He tucks the beer under one arm and knocks on the door. He can hear a TV going inside, but nothing else.

He knocks again. “Albert?”

Nothing. He walks around the unit and is able to peek through a gap in the curtain and into the living room. Albert is facing away from him, toward the TV, of which they both have a clear view. Turns out the world is full of reality shows these days. He wonders if his own life would ever make for good reality TV, and decides it probably wouldn’t. It would, for lack of a better word, be too real. Albert is sitting on a couch with patterns of flowers on it. There is a machine next to him that looks like a dehumidifier, only there’s a clear tube leading from it to Albert, providing him oxygen.

Caleb taps on the window.

Albert jumps a little, then turns toward the sound. It’s obvious he can’t see anything beyond the window, so Caleb taps on the window again, then moves to the door. He knocks and waits, and a few seconds later the front door opens.

“Yes?”

“Albert McFarlane?” Caleb says.

“Yes, that’s right,” Albert answers. He’s bald with ears that are pushed out slightly wider than normal because of the oxygen tube going over them and tucking into his nose, which is red and looks irritated. When he talks, he wheezes, and the effort is making him puff hard. He puts a finger on the bridge of his glasses and pushes them a little closer to his eyeballs, so close the lenses must nearly touch. His eyes narrow as he focuses on the way everything has just been magnified.

“My name is Caleb Cole,” Caleb says, “do you remember me?”

“Remember you?” Albert leans forward and takes a closer look. “Are you one of my grandchildren?”

Caleb shakes his head. “No. Do you mind if I come in?”

“Are you trying to sell me something, son?”

He lifts up the beer. “No. I just wanna shoot the breeze,” he says, figuring the term will make Albert happy.

“Ah huh, well that’s mighty good, son, but I still don’t remember you, and I don’t drink beer anymore. Doctor’s orders. But hell, it’s not like I got much more to do, so sure, come on in.”

Albert steps aside and Caleb walks in and closes the door behind him. Albert’s clothes are hanging from his body with all the shape of laundry hanging on the line, and he’s squinting, as if trying to see past the cataracts clouding his vision. He doesn’t look well. Caleb has seen people with cancer before, and that’s exactly what it looks like Albert has.

“Take a seat,” Albert says. “Can I make you a coffee?”

“Sure, thanks,” Caleb says, and he sits the beer on the coffee table and makes a mental note to take it with him since Albert doesn’t want any. He follows Albert into the kitchen, which isn’t far since it’s effectively part of the living room. The oxygen tube looks long enough to hang somebody a few times over.

“Kettle just finished boiling a few minutes ago,” Albert says, then reaches up into the cupboard for a cup. “How do you like it?”

“Strong,” Caleb says. “No sugar. No milk.”

“Well, that I can do.”

The house is small. From the space between the kitchen and living room he can see down the hallway. It’s not a complicated layout. A bedroom, a toilet, a bathroom, not much else. It looks like a lonely life, and he guesses that’s just the way it goes when you get to this age. It’s not like people are dancing in the streets. Hell, nobody even saw him come in here and no doubt nobody will see him leave either. People in this community can only see about thirty feet ahead and fifty years into the past and not much else.

“What did you say your name was again?” Albert asks.

“Caleb Cole,” he says.

“And we know each other,” Albert says.

“This is your family?” Cole asks, looking at some of the photographs in the room. There are pictures of a lady in most of them, she ages at the same rate as Albert, then disappears. There are children and grandchildren. The living room is full of the knickknacks of life. There’s a cordless phone on a small table to the side of the couch, the phone large and heavy and perhaps one of the first ever built. The TV is on mute, but the oxygen machine is humming like a fridge. He wonders how Albert can sleep at night with it running.

“Yep.”

“You see them much?”

“Huh! You’ve got to be kidding. Here,” Albert says, and slides a coffee along the bench toward Caleb. It’s hot. He picks it up and both men sit down in the living room, and Caleb rests the coffee on the table next to the beer.

“Caleb Cole,” Albert says, then sips at his own coffee, which he was already working at when Caleb arrived.

“That’s right,” Caleb says, picking his coffee back up and blowing at it, trying to cool it down. People on the TV are chanting at something, yelling at somebody to “jump, jump, jump.” Maybe reality TV is all about people standing on rooftops. The room is hot. There is a fan suspended just below the ceiling, slowly circulating the sticky air. If the future he’d meant to have had come true, he’s not so sure he’d have liked living in a place like this.

“Can’t say it rings a bell.”

“Think back,” Caleb says. “Seventeen years.”

The edges of Albert’s face turn downward, and his face seems to shrink in on itself. “Seventeen years? Jesus, son, I’m lucky if I can remember back seventeen hours.”

“There was a legal case you were involved with.”

“A case? You got the wrong man, son. I’m not a lawyer. I used to be a teacher. A damn good one too. Why, some of my students still write me. I have letters, a whole bunch of them, maybe two dozen from kids who have grown up and made something of themselves. Ah, hell, that’s where I know you from, right? You used to be a student. Which year, son? How old are you?”

“Fifty,” Cole says. “I turned fifty last year.”

“Fifty! Well now, no way you can be one of my grandkids, and I don’t see how I would have taught you,” he says. “You’ve got the wrong teacher. What did you say you were? A lawyer? What kind of lawyer?”

“No. I used to be a teacher too.”

“You’re a teacher? You teach law?”

“I taught high school. At least I used to, I gave it up fifteen years ago.”

“Ah, that’s what I did. Did that for over forty years. You’d have been ten at the time when I started, unless my math is wrong, which means-ah, hell, you could have been one of my students. Is that where I know you from?”

Caleb shakes his head. “No.” He keeps blowing at his coffee, cooling it down. “You were on a case,” he says, “seventeen years ago. You were involved in a trial. You were a character witness.”

“A witness? Oh, that takes me back. I haven’t thought about that in years. When was that? Twenty years ago.”

“It was seventeen.”

“Seventeen? Well, if you say so. It was an awful case,” he says. “Was my first and only time in court. I’d never want to do that again. But what could I do? I had to go. And that poor little girl,” he says, “kidnapped and. . and. . the things he did to her. She was lucky to have survived. That boy, he was something. Scary as shit. But it wasn’t his fault, you know? That’s what I said. He used to be one of my students.”

“I know.”

Albert leans forward and adjusts the flow on his oxygen machine, turning one of the dials up from a three to a three and a half. “I mean, it was pretty obvious he was messed up in the head. His mother, she’d done a hell of a job on him. Ruined him for life. Made him completely mental. Poor bastard never had a chance. The same year he was in my class, she put him into a coma. Beat the shit out of him. He tried coming back later that year, but it just didn’t work.”

Caleb is nodding. The coffee is finally cool enough to sip at. He’s going to either need to clean the cup when he’s done or take it with him. “So you got up in the witness box and told the jury and the judge that what he did wasn’t his fault.”

The old man fixes him an annoyed look. “It wasn’t like that. Sure, I got up there and I had to tell everybody what he’d been like as a kid at school. I had to explain how much he changed after the beating, and yeah, of course I said things weren’t his fault. He was a victim too. I didn’t get up there and say it was okay what he did. If I remember right, he still got locked away. Went to a hospital, didn’t he? Jury found him not guilty because he wasn’t competent. Not sure how long he got. Ten years. Twenty, maybe.”

“Two.”

“Two? Are you sure, son?”

“Very.”

Caleb keeps drinking, staring over the top of the cup as he does so. When a quarter of it is gone, he looks down at it. “This is good coffee, Al. Do you mind if I call you Al?” And before Al can answer, he puts the coffee back onto the table and stands up. “Let me ask you a question, Al. If I were to kill you right now do you think a jury like the one you spoke to would make the same decision? Do you think they would find I wasn’t competent and put me away for two years?”

“How did you say we know each other exactly?” Al asks, his tired old face forming concern.

“Well, I didn’t say exactly,” Caleb says, “and the truth of the matter is we’ve never really met until tonight,” he says, and he reaches around to his back where he has the handle of the knife tucked into his belt, the blade safely flat against his spine. He pulls it out. “But we’re meeting now, so how about I explain why I’m here, see if I can get you to remember why it was only two years and not ten,” he says, and then the explaining begins.