When Anna agreed to come home, the understanding was that it would be for just a few months. After her mother got better, the plan was for Anna to return to school. But her mother never got better, just wasted away slowly. Anna remembered how her mother never complained, even though it seemed so unfair that she was the one with lung cancer. Her mother was a nonsmoker; it was Anna’s father whose chain-smoking habit ended up killing his wife.
And ended up killing Anna’s dreams.
Her mother’s drawn-out death should have released Anna from her familial bondage, but three days after her mother was buried, her father had a debilitating stroke. Even now, he only had limited mobility. Once again, it had fallen to Anna to look after a sick and aging parent. What made it even harder this second time around was that no one expected her father to ever get better. It was just a matter of time—his and hers.
Anna knew how frustrated and depressed her father was. Even before his stroke, he’d been living with a partially ruptured disc in his spine that he refused to have repaired. Because of his constant pain, he’d started drinking heavily. Anna was never sure whether his refusal to have surgery was so he could justify his own heavy drinking, or whether it was a self-imposed penance for the death of his wife.
There had been a time when Fowler’s Service Station was a respected business in the heart of Oakley. Anna had even worked in the small, attached convenience store throughout high school. For a while, her father had continued to operate the business, but as his health declined, so did his work. Business went from bad to worse, and Anna’s proud, independent father turned into a bitter alcoholic. That’s what Gary Fowler now was—an alcoholic. Anna had warned her father that his drinking was going to kill him.
“Let’s hope that’s sooner rather than later,” he’d replied.
When he’d said that, Anna hadn’t argued. As terrible as it was, that was exactly what she’d been thinking—and perhaps wishing.
Diseases of despair, she thought. So many deaths in Appalachia were the result of what those in the medical and mental health fields called diseases of despair.
Anna tried not to be bitter, but here she was in the prime of her life doing something she didn’t want to do. Her siblings were of little help. Her brother, Tim, was in the army, and her younger sister, Lynn, lived in Maryland with three little ones under the age of six who took all her time.
The glamorous life of a homecoming queen, Anna thought with a sigh. She began shivering from the cold but still resisted going inside. Once more, she looked to the stars. What she really wished was to be the same girl she was ten years ago.
I wish I could be that innocent again, she thought.
Jake Rutledge probably thought she still was. She’d thought about him often since she’d run into him at the cemetery. Standing there, talking about Blake, she’d felt like a hypocrite. Even though she and Blake hadn’t spoken much since she’d moved back to town, she’d seen him often enough to know what he was going through. She’d feared Jake would see the same signs in her, and so she’d hurried to wrap up their conversation and get away before he noticed anything.
Earlier in the year, a snake had slithered into the garden. No, that wasn’t quite right, thought Anna. She had welcomed the snake into the garden. Her father had slipped and didn’t have the strength to get up off the floor by himself. When Anna had pulled him to his feet, her own back had given out. She’d learned the hard way that bad backs ran in the family.
It was a shame she hadn’t learned another lesson from her father or Blake Rutledge: that it was all too easy to become dependent on drugs.
Anna had decided to forgo the expense of a doctor and medicate herself. In Oakley, it was easy to get pain pills. She’d taken a couple for relief, and then a couple more. In the beginning she had tried to limit herself to one in the morning and one at night, but she’d been increasingly unsuccessful. Upping the dosage was the only thing that made her feel better. Still, she continued to convince herself that she wasn’t hooked, like so many other people she knew. The pills eased both her pain and her worries, but Anna kept telling herself they didn’t have the hold on her that they had on others. I can give them up, she thought, whenever I want to. At the same time, Anna didn’t like to admit that there were times during the day when she found herself thinking about the relief the pills brought. The snake told her things would be better if she just took one, its whispers growing louder and louder until she succumbed to its hissing and took another pill.
Her back was long recovered now, but she had never put away the pills. There was a time when she’d been certain that after her father’s death she’d return to school, but now she wondered if she’d be stuck in Oakley forever.
She offered up one last wish to the stars: Don’t let the snake deny me my dreams.
vvv Anna checked in on her father before leaving for work the next morning. “Here’s a bologna sandwich for you, Dad,” she said, putting a plate down on her father’s nightstand.
“I don’t want any damn bologna sandwich,” he said. His speech was much improved from when he’d first had his stroke. There were some days when Anna wondered if that was a good thing. From what she could determine, his mental faculties were as sharp as ever. If anything, his memory might be too good. He’d caught Anna in a few fibs when it came to her explaining the sometimes-slurred speech and slow reactions that came from taking the pills. That’s why a recent visit from sheriff’s deputy Dunn had come as a surprise to her. Supposedly her father hadn’t filed some paperwork that pertained to their family business, or he had overlooked paying some bill. Of course, her father insisted that the government was wrong and he was right. For him, that was the end of the subject. Anna wouldn’t be surprised if his heavy drinking was finally catching up to him.
“You might be hungry later,” she said, leaving the plate of food where it was.
“Where you going?” he demanded.
“You know very well I’m going to work,” she said. “I’ll be modeling for Mr. Smith.”
“Mr. Smith,” her father said in a mocking voice. “I hear your Mr. Smith is painting a bunch of filth nowadays. You’ll be taking your clothes off for him, won’t you?”
“Dad,” Anna said, “you know his work isn’t like that.”
She wished that were true. When she’d first gotten the job modeling three days a week, she’d loved her work. Clint Smith was renowned in the region for his bucolic rural images. The fifty-five-year-old artist had painted the world he knew very well. Initially, Clint had been a hobby painter while working his small farm. His success had freed him to paint full-time, which he’d done for the past quarter century. Anna’s favorite painting of his was one where he’d had her model atop a haystack in blue jeans and a white blouse. She’d been looking up at the clouds while chewing on a piece of hay. (It had sold for a lot of money, she’d been told.) But the job had changed, along with the artist’s motifs. His bucolic images had morphed into what Clint called phantasmagorias. He liked to say a phantasmagoria was like a dreamscape, but to Anna they looked more like nightmares.
“Uh-huh,” said her father. “Well, before you go, get me a beer.”
“It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”
“I know what time it is.”
“Our rule is you don’t start drinking until noon at the earliest. I am not getting you a beer, Daddy. If it’s that important to you, then you’ll have to get it on your own.” Trading one vice for another hadn’t improved his temper. Her father had finally quit smoking after the damage to her mother had been done, and now he sucked on a bottle instead of on a cigarette. It was his liver taking the abuse instead of his lungs.
Her father grumbled something, but Anna chose not to hear it. She would be late for work if the two of them got into an argument. Modeling might not pay much, but it was the only spending money she had.
Clint’s farmhouse was a fifteen-minute drive from downtown Oakley. His family had been tobacco farmers. In fact, Clint’s s
tudio had been converted from an old barn formerly used to cure tobacco. On warm days in particular, Anna was sometimes able to catch a scent of leaf tobacco wafting down from the rafters. It was almost like being able to sniff a memory—a reminder of how their forebears had been able to endure. That meant they could as well.
When Anna had first entered Clint’s studio, he’d almost been persnickety about the way everything was set up. Even though it was a barn, he’d laid down oilcloths before setting up his easel. His paints were carefully laid out, along with his brushes. Anna had never known that brushes came in so many shapes and sizes—some were used for broad strokes; others were very fine. As messy as the work could be, the studio was neat and tidy. There had even been times when Clint had joked about getting “ready for surgery,” usually while putting on his latex gloves right before painting.
Anna had enjoyed her first two years of modeling, but this third year hadn’t been going well. Clint had lost much of his discipline and had let things slip in both his personal and professional lives. There had been a time when he was a stickler about setting up her work schedule so that he could get the lighting he wanted. But now he didn’t seem to care much about the lighting. His brushes were no longer as carefully cleaned, and he often wore the same clothes several days in a row.
Anna suspected the cause of his transformation, not only in personality but in subject matter. It was the cause of so much other torment in and around Oakley. Clint had been dealing with severe arthritis for years. His joints were sometimes so inflamed and sensitive that it was difficult for him to hold his brushes, let alone make the exacting strokes his craft often called for. The menthol fragrance of the BENGAY he rubbed into his hands usually greeted Anna when she arrived at work, but one day it wasn’t there.
The cure, Anna was convinced, was worse than the disease. His pain had seemed to rein Clint in. He had worked in a very orderly fashion. In the absence of pain, he had lost his structure. Clint tried to explain his altered persona by saying that he was going through a new artistic phase. Sometimes, especially when his painting wasn’t materializing as he’d hoped, he’d offer up angry explanations.
“You can’t always do the same old shit,” he’d rail. “Look at Picasso. He had at least ten different periods. One day he was a cubist, and then he was a surrealist, and then a Postimpressionist. He had his Blue periods and Rose periods and African periods. An artist has to evolve.”
Evolve or devolve? Anna was afraid it was the latter.
She drove up the gravel driveway and parked her father’s truck next to the old tobacco curing barn. She saw smoke rising up out of a vent and was glad that Clint had been organized enough to start a fire. These days she was glad to even find him awake. Over the last month, there had been a few days when he’d overslept and arrived late to their sessions.
Before getting out of the truck, she took a deep breath. Clint’s ever-more-erratic behavior made her edgy. She hated to think about how much more anxious she would feel if she wasn’t being fortified by the OX 20 pill she’d taken an hour earlier.
No, she thought, it was possible she’d taken two. Was it that easy to lose count?
Inside the studio, Clint was staring down into his coffee cup. When he looked up at her, Anna could see that his eyes were bloodshot. In the old days, he used to offer her a cup of coffee. She usually accepted, and the two of them often chatted for a few minutes before getting to work. Today he said, “Well, if it isn’t my muse.”
Anna wasn’t sure if she should smile or not. There was an ugly undertone to his words.
“Speak to me, muse,” Clint said.
Was he speaking metaphorically? “Good morning, Clint,” she said carefully.
“Strip,” he said.
“Strip?”
“Get out of your damn clothes.”
When Anna had first started modeling, she’d made it clear that she was a life model and wasn’t interested in nude modeling. But over the past year, he’d increasingly asked her to pose without clothes. Afraid of losing the income, she’d agreed. Only two things made it bearable, though: the pills she took, and Clint’s distorted vision of her nude body. He drew naked harpies and succubi and maenads—his personal demons materializing in his paintings. The final images looked nothing like Anna, or at least that’s what she wanted to believe.
“Isn’t it early—”
He silenced Anna with one word: “Strip.”
A voice in her head said, “You should have taken another pill. That way you wouldn’t care.”
Anna wasn’t sure if those were her thoughts . . . or the serpent’s.
“How do you want me to pose?” she asked, hoping her voice sounded professional.
“Like a fallen angel,” he said. “Like the whore of Babylon.”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Anna said.
“You’re Eve,” Clint said. “You’re twined around a tree. A snake has entered your little paradise. He’s lowering himself from a branch and whispering his sweet nothings in your ear. And what he’s saying sounds good to you.”
Anna’s heart started pounding. It was just a coincidence, she told herself. There was no way Clint could have known about the serpent in her imagination. Still, the fact that he was even talking about the snake scared her.
“Can you hear his hissing? I know you can, Anna. It’s like the buzz of a bee entering the flower and stirring up that pollen, isn’t it? The bee wants that nectar. And so does the snake. You can hear it whispering its desires.”
Clint’s words made sibilant hissing sounds. It was altogether too much like the voice of the snake that tested Anna’s limits and tempted her daily—no, hourly. How did he know?
Anna had stripped down to only her panties. Clint was pacing in front of his easel, staring at the canvas. He raised a brush, but the naked canvas seemed to ward off his brush. He picked up his palette and jabbed at the paint, but he still couldn’t bring himself to apply that first stroke. He looked up, saw that Anna wasn’t completely unclothed, and pointed his brush at her.
“Are you planning to pose sometime this century?” he asked.
Anna hurriedly removed the last of her clothing, but it didn’t help his mood.
“You think clothing hides the real you? You think you can walk in here wearing a tiara and acting like a beauty queen and I can’t see the real you?”
Was it Clint talking, thought Anna, or the snake? She prayed for the pills to fully kick in so that she wouldn’t have to feel any of this. But the pills, Anna knew, were a vicious cycle. To get to the elusive calm she desired required more and more pills.
He raised a brush, but once again the blank canvas seemed to repel his efforts to paint. Furious, Clint turned to Anna, and then closed the space between them.
Anna wasn’t sure if she should scream, or even if she was able to scream. Clint’s wife, Ruth, rarely came into the studio. She knew that Clint didn’t like being disturbed. Would she even hear Anna’s screams from the house? Looming over her, Clint plunged his brush at her, jabbing paint over her breasts and torso. His intensity frightened Anna; she froze, afraid to move while he grunted and groaned.
Stroke by stroke, the form of his nightmare materialized on her body. He started with a white base, then added blues, grays, blacks, and reds. By the time he stepped back to view his creation, Anna was trembling so hard she thought she might vomit. Then he pulled out his cell phone and began taking pictures. All the drugs in the world couldn’t deliver her from her terror, from the humiliation of being treated like she was nothing more than a canvas. She wondered what monstrous image he had depicted.
Clint stopped taking pictures and returned to his easel. He took up a brush and began painting as if she were no longer in the room. With his attention elsewhere, Anna slowly got to her feet. She shuffled over to a full-length mirror in the corner of the studio and looked at her reflection.
Staring back at her was something not quite human. The black, sunken eyes against the white-a
nd-blue face looked dead, as did the black lips. Around her left breast was the appearance of a deep gash; from her heart it appeared that blood was oozing out.
Anna stepped away from the mirror, afraid of the creature looking back at her. Was that how he saw her? Was that what she had become?
“What is it?” she whispered.
Her question managed to get through to Clint. He looked up from his canvas and pointed his brush at her with a cruel smile.
“What is it?” he said, repeating her question. “It’s you.”
Anna began sobbing silently. Without removing the paint, she dressed herself and then ran out of the studio.
11
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
Guillermo Flores—whose friends back home called him “Guillo”— had lived and worked in America for almost a year now, but there were times when he wondered if he would ever understand the first thing about this strange land in which he now resided.
The motto of the state of Jalisco, located in the western part of central Mexico, was Jalisco es Mexico—“Jalisco is Mexico.” So many things that outsiders associated with Mexico originated in Jalisco— mariachi and ranchero music, the sombrero. Even tequila originated in Guillo’s home state. Geographically, Jalisco and West Virginia were little more than two thousand miles from each other, but Guillo had come to realize that their cultural divides were immense.
Growing up working on his family’s small corn farm had molded Guillo’s character and instilled in him a strong work ethic. He had a farmer’s patience, and the fortitude to persevere even in the wake of difficult circumstances. The gold that had always interested him most was the golden silk of growing corn. Most people never gave a second glance to dirt. But when Guillo looked at it, he saw potential. That was one of the things he liked about West Virginia. Most of the soil was rich, even though it was full of stones. He would often
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