He couldn’t help it. His mother was the only person he cared about or felt comfortable with, and everyone else grated on his nerves. The people in his family had their good points, he supposed, in that they all seemed to like him, but his grandfather was too loud, his grandmother was too quiet, Aunt Mildred was too bossy, Uncle Paul was too fond of listening to his own voice, Great-aunt Pearl was too smothering in her affections, cousin Betty was too brash, cousin Charlotte was too stupid, little cousin Eric was too rambunctious, little cousin Judy was too much of a crybaby, and the one relative he would have given anything to see again, his cousin Francie, was a college student in faraway California. As for his classmates at Hilliard, he had no real friends, only acquaintances, and even Dougie Hayes, the boy he saw more than anyone else, laughed at things that weren’t funny and never understood a joke when he heard one. Except for his mother, it was hard for Ferguson to attach himself to any of the people he knew, since he always felt alone when he was with them, although being alone with others was probably a little less terrible than being alone with himself, which invariably seemed to push his thoughts back to the same old obsessions, as with his constant begging of God to produce a miracle that would finally put his mind at rest, or, even more insistently, with the photograph in the Newark Star-Ledger that he wasn’t supposed to have looked at but did, studying it for three or four minutes while his mother left the room to fetch a pack of cigarettes, the picture with the caption that read The scorched remains of Stanley Ferguson, and there was his dead father in the burned-down building that had once been 3 Brothers Home World, his body stiff and black and no longer human, as if the fire had turned him into a mummy, a man with no face and no eyes and a mouth wide open as if locked in the middle of a scream, and that charred, mummified corpse had been put in a coffin and buried in the ground, and whenever Ferguson thought about his father now, that was the first thing he saw in his mind, the scorched remains of the black, half-incinerated body with the open mouth still screaming from the bowels of the earth.
It’s going to be a cold day, Archie. Remember to wear your scarf to school.
Morbid ruminations were among the not-good things that belonged to that rough year of being eight and turning nine, but there were some good things as well, even things that happened every day, such as the after-school television program that ran from four o’clock to five-thirty on Channel 11, ninety straight minutes (with commercial interruptions) of old Laurel and Hardy movies, which turned out to be the finest, funniest, most satisfying movies ever made. It was a new show that had been launched in the fall, and until Ferguson accidentally turned it on one afternoon in October, he had known nothing about that ancient comedy team, since Laurel and Hardy had been mostly forgotten by 1955, their films from the twenties and thirties were never shown in theaters anymore, and it was only because of television that they were starting to make a comeback among the little people of the greater metropolitan area. How Ferguson came to adore those two idiots, those grown men with the minds of six-year-olds, brimming with eagerness and goodwill and yet always quarreling and tormenting each other, always falling into the most improbable and dangerous predicaments, nearly drowned, nearly blown to bits, nearly brained into oblivion, and yet always managing to survive, hapless husbands, bumbling schemers, losers to the last, and yet in spite of all their punching and pinching and kicking, what good friends they were, bound together more tightly than any other pair in The Book of Terrestrial Life, each one an inseparable half of a single, two-part human organism. Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy. It pleased Ferguson immensely that those were the names of the real men who played the make-believe characters of Laurel and Hardy in the films, for Laurel and Hardy were always Laurel and Hardy no matter what circumstances they happened to find themselves in, whether they lived in America or another country, whether they lived in the past or the present, whether they were furniture movers or fishmongers or Christmas-tree salesman or soldiers or sailors or convicts or carpenters or street musicians or stable hands or prospectors in the Wild West, and the fact that they were always the same even when they were different seemed to make them more real than any other characters in movies, for if Laurel and Hardy were always Laurel and Hardy, Ferguson reasoned, that must have meant they were eternal.
They were his steadiest, most reliable companions all during that year and well into the next, Stanley and Oliver, a.k.a. Stan and Ollie, the thin one and the fat one, the feebleminded innocent and the puffed-up fool, who in the end was no less feebleminded than the first, and while it meant something to Ferguson that Laurel’s first name was the same as his father’s, it didn’t mean that much, and surely it had little or nothing to do with his growing fondness for his new friends, who in no time at all had become his best friends, if not his only friends. What he loved most about them were the bedrock elements that never varied from film to film, beginning with the Cuckoos theme song in the opening credits, which announced that the boys were back for another adventure and What would they think of next? the familiar turns that never grew tiresome to him, Ollie’s tie twiddles and exasperated looks into the camera, Stan’s dumbfounded blinks and sudden tears, the gags that revolved around their bowler hats, the too-big one on Laurel’s head, the too-small one on Hardy’s head, the smashed-in hats and burning hats, the hats yanked down over the ears and the hats stomped underfoot, their propensity for falling down manholes and crashing through broken floorboards, for stepping into muddy bogs and neck-high puddles, their bad luck with automobiles, ladders, gas ovens, and electric sockets, Ollie’s blowhard gentility when talking to strangers, This is my friend Mr. Laurel, Stan’s nonsensical gift for igniting his thumb and puffing on nonexistent but functioning pipes, their out-of-control laughing jags, their penchant for breaking into spontaneous dance routines (both so light on their feet), their unanimity of purpose when confronting their adversaries, all bickering and discord forgotten as they pulled together to destroy a man’s house or wreck a man’s car, but also the variations on who they were and how their identities sometimes overlapped and even merged, as when Ollie rubbed Stan’s foot thinking it was his own foot and sighed with pleasure and relief, or the ingenious ways in which they sometimes duplicated themselves, as when big Stanley and big Oliver babysat their toddler sons, little Stan and little Ollie, who were miniature replicas of their fathers, since Laurel and Hardy played both sets of roles, or when Stan was married to a female Ollie and Ollie to a female Stan, or when they met their long-lost twin brothers, close friends whose names were of course Laurel and Hardy, or, best of all, when a blood transfusion went wrong at the end of a film and Stan wound up with Ollie’s mustache and voice and the smooth-faced Hardy collapsed into a Laurel crying fit.