Nightscript 2

by C M Muller

  The weather stayed shitty for a while, but on a Sunday late in June I finally got my act together, hopping in the Jeep and tooling around town from Short Pump to Manchester and back again. Nothing felt quite right, though, and I quickly got tired of dodging church traffic while waiting for inspiration. Soon I was following that same cracked, potholed road along the James River, looking for the place I’d last painted. I found it soon enough, and although there weren’t any cars parked nearby, I saw a familiar shape out in the dead field. I parked on the muddy shoulder and hoofed it down the embankment and through the trees.

  “Hello again,” I said. “No wind this time.”

  Sharon turned and gave me a little smile. “Maybe later. Doesn’t look like rain today, but we’re going to get a cold spell soon.”

  I made a noncommittal noise and started setting up within earshot. After I figured out my scene, I took a surreptitious look at Sharon’s work so far: mostly brush and stagnant water. Not surprising, given what she’d said last time, and the fact that she could have passed for Wednesday Addams if she were twenty years younger. What she’d laid down so far struck me as—

  Beautiful. All that brown ought to feel like just an imprimatura, but it’s got polish. What does she have on her palette? Looks like umbers, sienna, ochres, white. Dang. Girl knows how to paint.

  In the face of that, I was at a loss. I looked into my paint box, and that moment in the studio the other week echoed in my mind. These tubes before me were too bright. Couldn’t do for painting unless I mixed them to mud, so that was what I did. Sap green blended with Venetian red, dioxazine purple with Hansa yellow, and before long I had a palette full of no-colors. With them in mind I looked around, eventually settling on a cluster of stumps where the water deepened, with a stand of trees off to one side.

  As I worked into the painting, the world faded away like usual, but the color did as well. What remained were mostly darks and lights.

  “Wow, that’s toned down,” Sharon said some time later, when she’d paused for a drink and come over to look.

  I looked away from the canvas and blinked to refocus. She was smiling almost sardonically. It struck me that I didn’t know her at all, not really, and yet we seemed to mesh perfectly in our desire for uninterrupted painting. It was a thin bond, perhaps, but camaraderie nonetheless.

  “There’s something about this spot, isn’t there? Makes you feel like, well, lots of things don’t matter.”

  “I guess,” I said slowly. “I thought I just needed a change of pace. Back to basics.”

  “Hmm. Well, I like what you did with the trees there. Is this going to be that stump’s root structure?"

  I looked where she was pointing and saw that I’d somehow rendered it less fully than I’d thought. Looser than my usual brushwork, the tree faded into rough strokes that could have been many things—worms, braided hair. Seeing how the shadows came together, possibilities floated through my mind. Finally I felt lethargy creeping over me as I tried to imagine what it was supposed to be.

  “I guess I’ll know eventually,” I said.

  She laughed. “Everything becomes something eventually, even dust.”

  The weeks passed, and my color sense kept changing. It was strange, given I painted to free myself from the strictures of design work, but when I gazed out at the world, increasingly I sought out shadows and dying plants. They were always there, of course, because that’s the world.

  One day I drove out to Louisa and wandered the back roads until I found a big field lying fallow for the summer. The remains of last year’s crop made a web of fibrous browns and almost-blacks atop the soil. I found myself looking for hollows in trees and dark spots in the sky.

  What’s this about? I like Sharon’s work and all, but...

  I tried to put it out of my head. I squeezed out this color and that on my palette, wanting the purest hues, entirely unmixed, but before long I found myself taking a swipe of this or that and dulling what lay at the end of my brush. It wasn’t like I was trying to paint landscapes full of nothing, but that’s where I kept ending up. I felt frustrated by it, but there was a painful satisfaction in looking at my canvas and then back at the world, thinking about the canvases stacked in my studio, or hanging on buyers’ walls. Today I felt like I’d painted a secret world that nobody else could see, one where no decay was possible, because everything had already happened.

  Two kids walking a dog came into view, crossing the opposite corner of the field from where I’d set up. They were wearing vibrant-looking shorts and tank tops, and their golden retriever sported a red bandana around his neck, but clouds had occluded the sun and washed them out. I heard their high, sweet voices raised in argument, and the dog was dancing around them, and yet I felt removed from it all—cut off in a way that normally didn’t happen when I was painting outside. It was the opposite of why you were supposed to paint outside. The clouds passed, but not before the kids vanished into the trees, joining the rest of the shadows and leaving behind only silence.

  As the light was starting to fade, I looked at the canvas carefully, trying to decide whether I liked it or not. Eventually I took out my pocket knife and cut a slash through the heart of it. Usually that gave me a perverse kind of pride—knowing that I had judgment enough to recognize my failures—but this time I felt only tired, a failure for having brought nothing to life. I looked back at the field, wanting to see what had drawn me there in the first place, but night had taken it.

  A late August heat wave turned my apartment the kind of unbearable that only happens in old brick buildings, where you actually bake if you stay inside. I drank endless iced coffees, ate cold bean salad for dinner, left for work early to get more air conditioning than my tiny window units put out. The Fan got even quieter as wealthy residents headed out to the beach. Painting was on hold along with everything else, aside from one disastrous attempt to “fix” an old painting I’d kept lying around.

  One day I decided to take a sketchbook over to the VMFA, wondering why I hadn’t done it sooner. A few blocks’ walk later, I was entering the vast, cool lobby, passing the greeter and guard, and picking up one of their collapsible sketching stools at the coat check. There wasn’t a traveling exhibition on at the moment, and apparently other people were equally forgetful about the pleasures of a cool museum, because that day I was alone in most of the galleries where I walked.

  Eventually I settled down in early American, homing in on Hiram Powers’ Cleopatra, a sculpture that I always stopped to see. The glowing white marble stood out against the deep red walls, and I felt some of my heat-daze lift as I gazed at her cool bosom and shoulders. Pencil flew over paper, and minutes turned into hours.

  After a time I stopped and really looked at what I’d drawn.

  The Egyptian queen’s face had taken on the structure of Sharon’s. My sometime painting companion looked out at me with dead eyes and half-rotting skin, and that felt…

  Right. It feels right. Jesus Christ. What is wrong with me?

  I thought of the spot down by the river, and how things got quiet there. When I stood there, the world seemed not to matter. Nothing mattered in that place. I looked back at Cleo, but she was pensive and silent. Her world had ended long ago, and even if her lips had moved, I could never have understood what she said, no more sense in her words than the whistling of the wind.

  A week passed. The heat dwindled into the false autumn that sometimes comes to Virginia early in September, cooling the ground before roaring back like a dragon in October. One day I got some time and walked out into an afternoon glowing with a peachy, golden light. There was only one place I wanted to go, of course. The ground under my feet was both soggy and full of sun-scorched grass, and everything was silent apart from the chuckle of the river.

  Standing there, I felt color fade from the world. My heart pounded as I looked around, half-wondering if I’d see Sharon, but there was no sign of anyone. In fact, there was nothing in sight to indicate
that there were still people. No planes, no empty bottles, nothing. The pounding of my heart eased, and I felt myself sinking into a half-torpor.

  This patch of ground stagnates, endlessly. This is an honest-to-God damned place, but I’m not going to let a fucking field get the better of me, however many ghosts or demons or whatever there are here.

  I looked upriver toward a spot where big rocks rose out of the water and made my choice. I started blocking in the bank on my canvas panel, even as I grumbled about the shade of blue that I’d toned the upper half months ago, back when nothing could be bright enough. Now the color blared out at me like an alarm, volume beyond tone or sense.

  “Going to have to knock it back,” I murmured, barely aware I’d spoken.

  I got into a rhythm after a while so that at first I didn’t notice when Sharon arrived and started setting up her own rig. I opened my mouth a couple times, trying to make the right words come out, to ask something—if she’d been painting here a long time before I first showed up, if she had been someone else once. Flash of tightness in my chest as I started to open my mouth, and so I turned back to painting.

  The sun, when it started to set, burned a scarlet so clear that it could have come straight from a tube. My palette knife swept in blobs of ivory black and terre verte before I knew I was going to do it. Soon I was looking at a muddled, almost-warm color that might have glowed in cracks where the sun never shone and Hell was close at hand. Sharon came over and placed one hand beside the pile of paint. Her flesh had turned ashen as the day I’d sketched her in the museum, her veins blue-black in the sunset light. Next to her my paint shone with hectic radiance.

  “See?” she said. “Color comes from contrast.”

  I looked up at her, watching how her cheeks changed as the sun touched the horizon, turning a vivid pink.

  “But I don’t always paint at this time of day,” I said, “and I sure don’t look at my paintings only at this time of day.”

  “I never look at mine again after I’ve finished them. They’re dead things.”

  Her expression was wistful, and I wanted to know why she still came here to do this. Far downriver some people had gone out onto the rocks, and they were throwing something back and forth. Too distant to tell for sure, but they looked like high school kids, just on the verge of adulthood and at the end of sweetness.

  “Paintings help me remember,” I said slowly. “They tell me who I am, what I saw. When I look at them, especially the newest ones, I know that I’m still alive.”

  Sharon turned to face me, and her eyes were black like dusty basalt. She removed her hand from the palette and looked at her own setup, then back at me. The sun was bleeding the last of its light for the day, and her face had gone flat and entirely unreadable. She walked away then, toward the trees between us and the road, and soon she was gone. I didn’t know what to do about her easel and paints, so they stayed when I left.

  That was the last time that I saw her. As time has passed, my vision has weakened, and if the colors don’t come clear like they used to, that’s okay. My paintings are as bright as I can make them, with nothing to dull their riotous, vibrant cries of life. In my mind’s eye, clear and cold I see her hand, and I feel the call of that place, where life drains out of the world. With each brushstroke I paint out the darkness, holding onto the light that lingers before sunset, staving off the grays and browns that creep in with the night.

  The Inveterate Establishment of Daddano & Co.

  Eric J. Guignard

  We handled the undertaking arrangements for them all: Bosses, capos, killers, tough guys—once you reached certain levels in a family, it was known you’d be cared for when the time came, like part of a benefits package. And we were strictly neutral territory, no affiliations. We didn’t take sides, didn’t ask questions, didn’t exclaim how it was that some poor schlep had his kisser blown off, how we’d have to pack the skull with sawdust like a punching bag just to keep its shape, and cover it with a wig and more makeup than Carole Lombard so his mother could hang rosary beads over him one last time. We did good work and we earned respect. Every outfit came to us over the years: the North Siders, the South Siders, the Circus Cafe Gang, Egan’s Rats, the Forty-Two Gang...I could go on.

  Daddano & Co., that’s our signage, been there near a century. My father was in the funeral business for forty years until his heart went kaput while sitting on the crapper one mornin’. His father started the business in 1872. Grandfather Daddano apprenticed for an Irish prick who made him dig graves from sun up ’til sun down. Nothing but gravedigging, fourteen hours a day, earnin’ twenty-five cents a week.

  “Hell with that,” Grandfather said. He figured digging was the hardest part of the mortuary game, and he was doin’ it already on his own. The easy part was rolling in bodies. So he set up shop on Halstead, and his first service was for the Irish prick, if you catch my drift.

  “Simplest business in the world,” Grandfather said. “Everyone dies. Ain’t no shortage of that.”

  From day one, he never had to go seekin’ clients, either, and that goes for all us Daddanos. People got a way of knowin’ who to do business with, who they can trust, who can get the job done right, and in that way Grandfather’s name got passed around.

  But I’m runnin’ my mouth the wrong way. You don’t wanna hear about my family’s history. You wanna hear about the Massacre.

  It’s all people want to hear about these days. Thing is, everyone else died that morning, so who’s gonna buy the word of some old funeral man over what the coppers trumped up? Not even you, I bet...

  I was only fifteen at the time, my father still alive, running Daddano. Al Capone and Bugs Moran were warring all over Chicago, which meant a boon in business for us. I dropped outta school to work full time with Father, and that pleased him a lot.

  “Education is for the phonies,” he’d say.

  Anyway, I’d been helping him around the funeral home since I could toddle. As I grew, so too did my responsibilities, and while other kids in the neighborhood were playin’ ball or lifting pockets, I was doing autopsies, embalming, going out to pick up stiffs in our stake bed delivery truck or maybe the old hearse if it was someone important. Sometimes he’d go with me, sometimes one of the other help went.

  One of those help was a mortician named June whose hair was whiter than a snowstorm. June was maybe fifty, sixty years old though his hair had been colorless since birth, one of those pigmentation defects, I heard. June also carried a knife scar like a big crescent moon running under his right eye down to the corner of his mouth where a tooth was missing. My whole life, he’d been working for my father, but me and June barely ever said more words to each other than mornin’ and night.

  That day though we were together, taking the delivery truck to make a pick-up, and June outta nowhere says to me, “Johnny, you wanna know about death?”

  I’d been helping my father so long I could tell you where the renal artery ran through the major calyces and whether a hematoma expansion was two hours or six past its onset. I’d seen a thousand dead faces wearing every ghoulish expression that would cause your nightmares to wake up crying. So I answered, “What’s there to know? We’re livin’ now, and then we ain’t. We got it better than most, then someday it’s all over.”

  His voice lowered then, and he says quiet, “I mean real death, Johnny. Not just seeing the shell death leaves behind, but the act of dying. You never seen a man really die, have you?”

  And that was true, though I never thought about it before. Every mutilation, every disease, every murdered dame and run-over kid and suicide and accident had come to me after the fact. It never struck me that the moment of transition was important. Just like waking up, I thought. One moment you’re sleeping, then you’re awake, and in the end, it goes the other way.

  He nodded when I said nothin’.

  “You’re going to see it today,” June whispered. I remember his breath stank like wild onions left
in the ground two seasons too long, and when he paused between words, he chewed on the side of his tongue the way other men might roll a toothpick between their teeth. “You’re gonna find out plenty, Johnny.”

  Those few words sent a chill so far down my back I could’ve pissed an icicle. My father liked June ’cause he worked hard and never said ‘no,’ but that cinched it why I’d kept my distance in the past. The old man was creepy as a sewer bug. And, Christ, the way he had to say my name in every sentence!

  Though I had a thousand things I wanted to say, I kept ’em to myself. That was our business, remember? We didn’t ask questions. June closed his eyes and went silent, as if the exhaustion of talking to me called for a nap. Which was fine, since I was driving and preferred my own company. In those days it didn’t matter how old you were to operate a vehicle. If your feet could reach the pedals and you could see over the wheel, you could drive. And, friend, I started drivin’ fast.

  I probably looked like one of those little wind-up toys, my shoulders hunched and head craned over the wheel, arms jerking left and right as I veered around slow-poke traffic. There wasn’t no rush otherwise, but I was gettin’ edgy.

  Then outta nowhere, June’s eyes pop open, and he begins muttering some gibberish words I never heard in my life. I thought maybe he had Russian or Bulgarian family, and that’s the language he was speaking, on account it sounded almost lyrical, the way monks might chant down in the bowels of a relic monastery.

  I noticed too, while he mumbled, June kept looking behind us, his eyes darting from the rearview to the side mirror. I followed his gaze and thought I saw the flash of something darting in the street after us, flitting along the storefront walls where shadows were deepest, growing long when the street gutters ran into sewers, receding when the sunlight bounced off windows. Boarding houses and coffee shops blurred by as I sped, but that sense of something chasing after us kept pace just fine.