People always looked at Carl funny once they realized that he still had a sense of humor.
People that knew him. People that knew him before his daughter and wife had passed. He could still remember how he'd cracked a joke two months after Donna's death, and how his local pharmacist had looked at him with cautious dismay written all over her face – as if she couldn't believe he had the audacity to do such a thing, or maybe wondering if he'd just...gone off the deep end. Even his former boss had trouble figuring out how to deal with Carl's sense of humor whenever they met up in the months following her death – seemingly torn between relief that Carl was 'moving on' and bewilderment that he could.
Carl supposed he couldn't blame them. Maybe he had lost his marbles somewhere along the way, and had yet to get the memo.
It'd been a whopper of a shock, the first time he'd laughed after her death - three weeks had gone by, if he remembered right, and he'd been in the midst of buttoning up his pajama shirt when out of nowhere he'd recalled a line from a Marx Brothers film he'd gone to see a couple months prior to her passing:
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.
He'd laughed out loud at the memory, and immediately frozen from the guilt of it.
Carl didn't feel guilty about it anymore. It'd been over a year since Donna died – approaching two, now, and he felt like enough time had passed that his late wife would forgive him for retaining his sense of humor. Yes – retained, not regained. He thought the distinction was probably an important one. When it came down to it, he'd never actually lost his sense of humor in the first place. Nearly two years on, and people still acted as if he ought to have done just that. Permanently.
And, God help him, he had a bit of a bone to pick with 'em.
So he still chuckled over the funnies in the newspaper. So he regularly went to go see the latest Laurel and Hardy pictures, so he'd gone to see Horse Feathers when it hit cinemas earlier in August – so he still found it within him to enjoy life a little. People liked to act as if he ought to still be enveloped in mourning shrouds and grieving twenty-four seven, a perfect embodiment of misery and woe nearly two years onward since her passing.
Hell, maybe he should be – but he'd been down this train of thought before, and these days he didn't carry on thinking about shoulds and shouldn'ts too much.
Instead, he saw Donna in every passing young teenager on the street, every youngster at the cinema, every adolescent at the local ice cream parlor, which if Carl was being perfectly honest was probably…not very healthy of him.
He couldn't help it, though. He'd look into the ice cream parlor window at a couple of fourteen year olds sharing a sundae and think about all the parlor dates that Donna would never experience, think about the pining crush she'd had on her classmate Clifford Marlow right up until she'd died; he'd brush past girls window-shopping at clothing stores and think of Donna wearing her mother's pearl necklace in front of her vanity mirror – he'd seen her in Mark, too, and now he couldn't get the boy out of his head.
A week had passed since he'd offered to adopt Mark, and he found himself dwelling on that offer more than he'd expected since the boy had rejected him – dwelling like he was now, sitting at the bar in the Jane Doe speakeasy. He'd offered to adopt Mark out of sympathy for him, certainly – sympathy for the boy who'd felt he had no other choice but to become a murderer, sympathy for a boy who had lost his mother and quite frankly needed a strong parental role in his life. But Mark had rejected him, and now lived under the wing of a wannabe assassin as his apprentice.
Carl hadn't been all that upset over the rejection – he'd half expected the rejection in the first place. But now he couldn't help but wonder if he'd really made the offer in heartfelt good standing.
Was I really prepared to call Mark a son out of honest love for him?
Or was he just a convenient replacement for Donna?
At that thought he slammed his empty glass down upon the counter, earning him a doozy of a warning glare from the scarred bartender.
Nobody could replace her.
Mark wouldn't have replaced her. Of course not. …Of course not. Carl had offered to adopt him out of a honed paternal instinct, that was all. To offer Mark a way out of the grisly underworld, a second chance at a safe and lawful life. To become a father figure to a boy who'd never really had one in the first place.
But Mark had chosen Raz Smith and the underworld over him, and Carl hadn't been surprised because after everything that boy had experienced, Mark had probably felt like there was no way he could ever readjust to a normal life. Not after becoming a killer. Not after losing his mother.
And besides, Carl reasoned, signaling for a refill, wasn't it a little arrogant of me to think that I'd be good for him?
Still, he'd spent the past week at the Daily Days eying his office door and hoping that Mark would show up and take him up on his offer to teach the boy the basics of journalism.
Mark had yet to pay him a visit.
Which was fine. It was fine. It'd only been a week. Maybe after a couple years Mark would get tired of the whole assassin business and and come see him with a change of heart about his choice of careers.
As Carl sipped his whisky, he allowed himself to indulge in that little what-if. Of Mark accompanying him on interviews, studying old newspaper articles and jotting notes down in notebooks, instead of Mark trotting after Raz Smith-the-not-quite-an-assassin, resigned to a life in the shadows. Of Mark growing into a fine young man with a kind smile and strong shoulders, instead of Mark with a dark gaze and furrowed brow, silent and quick and deadly.
Of Mark healing, instead of Mark surviving.
Mark Digness. He tested the name out loud, rolling it around on his tongue and popping the consonants against his teeth. He liked the sound of it. Mark Wilmans Digness. Did Mark have a middle name?
Then again – even if Mark had agreed to become Carl's son, Carl doubted he would have been willing to give up his mother's surname. Still…Mark Digness. It sounded right.
Mark and Donna Digness.
Donna would have liked Mark for a sibling. Carl knocked back the rest of the whisky, and called for another. She liked being my whole world, but she would have liked a sibling too. He had to believe that Donna would have liked Mark. Would Mark have liked Donna? She always liked people. She'd have teased him and told him everything about her day whether he liked it or not, and demanded that he sit with her and do the same.
Warmth crept up Carl's neck. He undid the top button of his collar and loosened his tie.
The bartender slid a new whisky glass down the counter, grunting, "Last one."
"Naturally," Carl replied, pulling out a couple bills from his wallet and setting them down next to the glass. The bartender took them, and turned to the till to count out Carl's change.
"Hey, Digness," called Hershel, from where he sat two stools down on Carl's right. Hershel Spelman was one of the Jane Doe's regulars, and like most of Jane Doe's regulars he walked on the shadier side of the law. His specialty happened to be small-time tax evasion consultancy – and he didn't particularly care that Carl knew it. "You going to visit her today?" Hershel shot a meaningful glance toward the ceiling, turning his shifter of brandy between his hands.
Carl nodded, his latest sip of whisky burning at the back of his throat. "Haven't been for a while. Thought I'd stop by and say hello."
Some of his old coworkers would have probably found it extremely morbid that Carl regularly frequented a speakeasy under the very same cemetery his daughter was buried in. He might have quipped back something about it merely being convenient, but that would firmly remain a might. That was a fictional conversation that was going to stay fictional.
"Ah, well," said Hershel, his voice colored with vague sympathy, "give her my regards."
Carl smiled, and raised his glass to the other man. "I'll pass them along, Hershel. Always do."
Hershel raised his shifter in turn, and the two of them imbibed their liquor in companionable silence. The accountant had been a little standoffish with him the first time they met in the Jane Doe, but he'd quickly warmed up to Carl once he realized Carl wasn't at the speakeasy to snoop on him (nor the rest of the patrons, for that matter).
Carl made sure not to break that trust. The most he knew about Hershel (aside from his profession) was that he had multiple alias surnames (Spelman, but also Speltzer, Strenburg, and Scheffler), but he didn't know which one was Hershel's real surname, and he planned to keep it that way.
He had a good reputation as a reporter, but his firm willingness to overlook the…not so legal practices of many of the Jane Doe's customers would have definitely put a dent in that reputation had anyone at his old workplace known about his connections to the speakeasy. He suspected that his colleagues at the Daily Days weren't quite so oblivious as to where he spent his free time, but he had yet to be reprimanded for his actions.
Consequently, Carl saw no reason to stop coming here. As long as he didn't look too closely into Hershel's aliases, as long as he didn't get curious about Judson Brawley (sitting in the corner; dirty blond hair, blood on chin) and his latest fist fight, as long as he didn't ask Merle Keating (end of bar, playing with lock picks, scar on right knuckles) what he thought of larceny – he'd do just fine.
After all, it wasn't as if Carl's nose was clean either. He frequented speakos, for one thing (but then, didn't everybody?), and for the other – well, he'd toed the line between legal and illegal more than once back when Donna was sick and he needed to earn money any way he could for her medical fees.
He'd say it before and he'd say it again – these days he didn't really think too hard about shoulds and shouldn'ts.
"By the way," said Hershel, setting his shifter down with a sigh. "I saw that picture you recommended me the other day. The Horse one by those Marx fellows."
That was Hershel to the letter - casually seguing from commiserating over cemetery visits to the latest entertainment in under a minute. Carl swirled the last bit of whisky around his glass. "Oh? What'd you think?"
Hershel grinned. "'The liver if neglected, invariably leads to cirrhosis. Of course, you are all familiar with the symptoms of cirrhosis.'"
Carl matched Hershel's smile with one of his own. "'Sure. Cirrhosis are red, so violets are blue…so sugar is sweet - so, so are you.'"
They looked at each other, and broke out into laughter.
"I'm going to go see it again this Friday," Hershel said, once he got a hold of himself. "Can't remember the last time I ever laughed so hard."
"Good man," replied Carl, taking out a flask from his coat's inner breast pocket. "In this economy, folks need all the laughs they can get. That's my view of it, at least."
He tipped the rest of the whisky into his flask and returned the flask to its pocket. After setting his glass down, he swept up the change the bartender had left for him on the counter.
"I'd better be off," he said, and reached for his coat.
The summer climate, coupled with his heavy coat and the warmth of the whisky fuzzing his insides made the trek through the aboveground cemetery an uncomfortably hot one. Carl wasn't much of a complainer though, and he elected to keep his coat on rather than shrug it off for temporary relief. The few other cemetery-goers wore more sensible attire made from cotton and linen as opposed to Carl's tweed outerwear, though one or two groups stood out in their somber black clothing. Recent deaths. My condolences.
Finally, he reached Donna's grave.
The last time Carl had visited it was a month ago, and it was as neat and orderly as he remembered. The surrounding grass was not overly long, and there were no signs of trampling from rowdy guests – he'd have to thank the curators later, he supposed, for their attention. Still…the grave plot was orderly, yes, but it was bare, and he regretted not stopping by a florist shop for a bouquet to place front of Donna's grave marker. Next time.
Carl idly swatted away a few gnats with his hat while grasshoppers chirred away in the surrounding greenery. It would have made for peaceful background noise had the cemetery not also been situated in a city, and he tried to ignore the blaring of traffic in the distance as best he could. Somewhere below his feet, Hershel continued to drink away in a speako more suited to be a mausoleum than a bar.
"Hey there, honey," he said, reaching into his inner breast pocket for his flask. A quick look to his right and left found no nearby cops, so he unscrewed the top and poured the last of his whisky onto his daughter's grave. Once his flask was safely ensconced within his coat once more, he quipped, "I think you're finally old enough to try a sip or two of liquor. What do you think? Too strong? Maybe I'll bring wine next time."
A gentle breeze rippled through the grass, and Carl mopped sweat from his brow with his handkerchief. "The Marx Brothers put out another picture a couple weeks ago. Groucho sings this one song, it, uh… It went something like…" he cleared his throat. "'…I don't know what they have to say…it makes no difference anyway…whatever it is, I'm against it.'"
He closed his eyes, and envisioned Donna laughing away in her sickbed, her eyes fever-bright and her cheeks flushed. He'd often sung her lullabies when she was little – or tried to, anyway, though he would swear up and down that his wife had been the better singer. And when Donna had first become bedridden, years later – he'd sung to her then, too, when she was floating and needed something to anchor her.
She would have liked that song.
He let out a long sigh, and cleared his throat again. "I haven't visited your mother in some time, but I can tell you that Clifford's doing well," he continued, idly observing two parakeets flitting about a gravestone a few rows away. The evening air settled on his shoulders and in the bottom of his lungs, humid and muggy. Carl resisted the urge to sneeze. "I ran into him at the barbershop last week. Gail and Louise too – not at the barbershop, at the library. Bet I worried you for a minute there, huh? Don't worry, Mister Marlow is still flying solo."
A police whistle sounded off somewhere in the distance, followed by a cacophony of dogs barking with a few human shouts mixed in for good measure. That was Manhattan for you. Always something going on. Speaking of which…
"What an August," Carl mused, crouching so that he was eye level with Donna's name. He used his left thumb to scrub at a few flecks of dirt by the engraved capital D, ignoring the complaints of his knees. "I know, I know – I've gotten involved in my fair share of danger before, what did the old man get himself into this time, right?"
A shadow passed over him, and then two more. Carl glanced upward, and watched as a woman and two children walked along the aisle behind Donna's row. All three wore black attire. He lapsed into respectful silence as the trio continued onward, eventually coming to a stop at a relatively new grave toward the end of the row.
One hell of an August, he hummed in the meantime, standing upright to stretch his back and shake a few aches out of his legs. Ice Pick Thompson terrorizes the streets of Manhattan, delinquents and assassins every which way you turn, and the shadow of Szilard Quates looming as large as ever over this city. And Lester…
Carl shook his head at the thought of his old coworker, and moved on. …Well, one hell of an August, and one hell of a story to boot.
A certain blond mechanic came to mind, and he paused halfway through cricking his neck. Story, huh…
"Hey, Donna," he said, a conspiratorial grin spreading across his face, "Guess what? You almost had a serial killer for a brother."
He imagined her sitting up a little straighter in bed, all at once delighted and mystified.
(Wasn't it a shame? He remembered her in her sickbed more than he did her out of it).
"What!" she exclaims, shining with anticipation. "You're just teasing me again."
"I suppose it wasn't quite fair of me to start at the end," Carl admitted, "but it's the truth. I'll tell you all about it, if you'd like – this time I'll start at the beginning, and end on a cliffhanger so juicy you won't be able to stand it."
There were only a few other visitors left in the cemetery now that the sun had nearly set, and Carl figured he only had a half hour or so until closing time.
"Don't worry – I'll make sure to come back tomorrow and pick up where I left off. That's a promise. Now, let's see…where is the beginning, I wonder?"
He scratched his cheek, momentarily nonplussed.
"The beginning starts with you," suggests Donna, "because you're the narrator."
Carl chuckled, and shoved his hands into his coat pockets. As good a place to start as any. He leant backwards, staring upward at the sky for a moment of quiet contemplation – and began to speak.
"Let me tell you a sad yet incredible story…"