Would It Kill You to Smile? - Hardcover

Lawson, Philip

3.2

10 ratings by Goodreads

9781563525117: Would It Kill You to Smile?

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1563525119 ISBN 13: 9781563525117

Publisher: Longstreet Pr, 1998

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Will Keats follows his ventriloquist-father's last wishes to be buried with his favorite dummy, but when Will dreams about the dummy and goes to the grave to retrieve the valuable piece of teakwood, he finds someone else has beaten him to it and begins asearch to recover his father's missing alter ego

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From CHAPTER 1: At least sixty people watched my father die. I did not number among the witnesses, but I learned of his death only fifteen or twenty minutes after it happened. Sixty spectators for his final performance: the club half full on a slow Thursday night. The old man would have been happy. Because he measured love by the size of the audience, a family of merely three spectators had never quite satisfied him.

I had not driven down to Columbus for his Thursday-evening gig at the Gag Reflex, the comedy club he owned with Satish Gupta. I had a calling I loved in the workaday world of people with mortgages, kids, and unpaid dental bills--though none of those three applied to me. Still, Fridays cut me no slack in the Speece County School System. So when Skipper Keats and his teakwood alter ego, Dapper O'Dell, collapsed in front of that audience like a sniper victim and his knee-riding child, I lay in bed dreaming of a school of neon blue parrotfish.

Kelli, my sixteen-year-old kid sister, telephoned me near midnight from the Gag Reflex's kitchen. "Will," she said, audibly on the edge of tears, "Skipper just crashed. For good. Dr. Sammons has pronounced him dead."

"Where?" The glowing red digital display on my clock radio read 11:43. I had slept maybe forty minutes, but the illusion that Kelli had spoken to me through the beak of a parrotfish persisted for several heartbeats.

"Here at the club," she said. "He had his military routine going. You know, Dapper in khakis and a service cap. A lot of visiting Canadian officers from Fort Benning in the audience. Skipper had them hooting at him and the chip-block."

Chip-block. Received Keats-family terminology for any of the dummies that Skipper used in his act, with specific reference to Dapper O'Dell. Once, Skipper had hopefully applied the term chip-block to me too.

I turned on the lamp, sat up groggily in my sleep-creased birthday suit. "What happened, Kelli?"

"A vein burst in his brain. An aneurysm, Dr. Sammons says. Can you come, Will? I can't talk anymore over the phone." Her voice had begun to spongify, thickening and softening.

"Sure. Where to? The hospital?"

"The hospital can't do him or us any good. Come to the house, okay?"

I pulled on jeans and an oatmeal-hued sweatshirt with "Save The Kids" in crimson lettering, pocketed my wallet, then groped outside through the April chill to my car, a '92 Saturn S-1. My father, the quasi-famous Kevin "Skipper" Keats, had just died. With my key in the car's door lock, I covered my face with my hands and exhaled deeply. No one, it occurred to me, would now begrudge me Friday off.

Friday off: every worker's dream. A fine long weekend. Full of delightful arrangements to make.

LaRue would probably cringe before the responsibilities of mortality, but Kelli would soldier through. I could count on her and on Denise Shurett, Skipper's latest agent, and maybe on Burling Whickerbill, a family attorney. But most of the fallen sky's weight rested on my shoulders, and in my disoriented grogginess I felt like a roustabout trying to pitch a collapsed circus tent all by myself.

I looked up. Stars prickled the sky. Earlier, on the northern porch of my rented house, I had seen the Comet Hale-Bopp, named like some old vaudeville act, streaking motionlessly over Georgia and Alabama like one of Van Gogh's nimbused stars. How could it concurrently suggest fiery speed and self-possessed repose? Just as Skipper Keats had, I figured. Like a comet, he had come and gone, blazing through our family's life with a spectacular evanescense.

Driving, I lusted for hot coffee. What had my father felt as his brain spurted and he began to slide off his trouser-polished high stool? He may have taken a greedy satisfaction from dying in performance, the jaunty Dapper O'Dell again on his lap, his hand clandestinely gripping the dummy's headstick. Skipper's lips as he fell would have still held the minimal twist that cast his reedy wiseacre voice into Dapper's spooky-looking chops. From the boozy crowd: titters, guffaws, and a few ungovernable bellylaughs, segueing into gasps.

His military routine, Kelli had said. For some Canadian army officers on a get-acquainted goodwill tour of the prettiest little city in the Chattahoochee Valley.

Imagine a tall, thin sixty-seven-year-old man with a silver pompadour, darting eyes, and a wide slack mouth: Skipper Keats. Imagine, in his arms, a boy-sized wooden replica of himself with features similar to those in old photos of Skipper in his thirties (my own age now): Dapper O'Dell. Imagine both Skipper and Master O'Dell, the eternal Irish bad boy, in tailored U.S. Army uniforms, a captain's outfit for Keats and a corporal's khakis for Dapper.

Above the hum of my tires, I could almost hear the act. Tarted up with "contemporary" references already growing moldy, it had persisted intact since the Korean War. I had sat dutifully through it hundreds of times.

"The Pentagon appointed me an aide to General Ironbutt," Dapper says. "Right in the middle of our last run-in with the Arabs."

"I guess the General needed a swagger stick. Did he hold you by your ankles or your neck? Me, I'd choose the neck."

"Stow it, Keats! Or I'll stick my hand up your back and close that fat trap of yours!"

"Oh, Corporal Log has feelings, does he?"

"You bet I do! One more comparison to my inanimate cousins, and I'm out of here!"

"Okay, I promise: no more wooden jokes. Now, back to your military career. Is it true you once helped out the MPs?"

"Not that I recall. Say, you're not insinuating--"

"That you should change your name to Billy Club?"

"That did it! You and I are history, pal!"

"Now, now, settle down. I'm sorry. Go on with your heroic story."

Dapper fumes for a moment, and then proceeds:

"Well, one day our camp came under attack by five or six lost and starving Republican Guards. The General said, 'Give me my red shirt, Dapper!' 'How come?' I asked. The General replied, 'If I'm wounded, the blood won't show and my men won't get discouraged.' What a man! I thought. The next day word came that eight divisions of towelheads were on their way, with full armor and air support. Guess what the General asked me to fetch?"

"His red shirt?"

"No -- his brown pants!"

"D'oh!"

Even passing the carnival-lit trailer of a droning diesel semi on I-185, I could see the entire scene: Skipper, Dapper, the appreciative crowd, cigarette smoke curling through the footlights and the beer-sign glow. The Gag Reflex jumping even as Satish Gupta, there only for solidarity's sake, stood at the head of the stairs inventorying the evening's take. At length, the laughter dies, Dapper swivels his head and looks directly at my father: original and reflection in a bizarre time-distorting mirror. Everyone knows what lumberboy intends to say, but everyone's accurate anticipation of this line fails to subvert its ritualistic bite:

"Come on, Keats: Would it kill you to smile? "

Going around the shuddering eighteen-wheeler, I imagined the eruption that had greeted this shibboleth -- that almost always greeted it -- and imagined, too, Skipper Keats glorying again in this repetitive Podunkish triumph, sensing at that moment the failing vein in his skull, as he rocked on the toes of his spit-shined boots in a futile attempt to stand, then slumped to the dais as if from the impact of a rifle shot. Dapper O'Dell, rudimentary arms and polio-stricken legs frantically aflail, loyally following his master down to hell like a demon familiar. A stunned silence. Shrieks. Chair-scrapings. Free-for-all chaos.

How I hated show business. It robbed even death of its grim dignity. And how I resented Skipper for suddenly nominating me by his death the head of our shambling family.

From Publishers Weekly:

Ventriloquist Skipper Keats suffers a fatal aneurysm while performing at his comedy club in Columbus, Ga. Skipper's son Will, a school counselor, harbors painfully mixed feelings about his father, whom he considered a second-rate talent and third-rate parent who lavished more attention on his favorite dummy, Dapper O'Dell, than on his son. Skipper had even insisted that Dapper be placed in his coffin, keeping the act together forever. After the funeral, Will imagines a cry for help from his wooden "brother," so he breaks into his father's crypt and discovers that Dapper has disappeared. Will's suspicions focus on ventriloquists jealous of Skipper, the mercenary co-owner of Skipper's club and the hearse driver. His search for Dapper leads him to family secrets and a little larceny. Although Will is soured by his Daddy-loved-the-dummy-best resentment, Lawson's otherwise strong characterizations and a stage trunk full of ventriloquism lore make this comedy caper worthwhile.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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