He would be more confident if he had some feeling in his hands.
The desert was pink, except where the rocks and alluvial fans cast shadows. Patterson knew where to look, but even so he couldn’t see them, the couple on the camping trip there by the dead lake.
He had expected this, but it was still a surprise: You really couldn’t see them from the air. The lost campers out by the dry lake had been just sitting there while we went on with our lives. We suffered disappointment and saw harm come to people we loved, regained hope and planned a future and, eventually lost it, in a world where to be immortal is to be gone.
Maybe he could see just a little wink of light off a side mirror or a window, although Patterson wasn’t even sure of that as he pulled up the aircraft’s nose, letting the altimeter’s hands spin, that little clock face that told you how high you were, as though altitude and time were the same thing.
He let the altitude ride up to eight thousand feet. And then higher. It was cool up here, so far from the desert. When he was over ten thousand he could feel the thin air, the light-headed joy of the oxygen-poor sky.
The painting still existed. The fact that it was cut now—ripped, gashed—made it all the more authentic. Only important art was attacked, just as only important people were assassinated. And the painting was beautiful. The only thing in his life that mattered.
He’d get to Burbank, call Bruno Kraft, and the word would be out. Margaret Darcy Newns has just slashed the new, Patterson/Newns Skyscape.
Why did she do that, people would ask. Jealousy? Hysteria? She always was a little headstrong, wasn’t she? Marrying the famous artist, insisting on forcing her way into Owl Springs, trespassing on the infinite patience of Red Patterson.
After all he tried to do. People would kill her. Absolutely destroy the poor girl. She didn’t know what she was up against.
It was getting colder. Morning was a red sore, not a presence, an absence, a wound where something has been cut out. Patterson aimed into the rising sun.
47
Curtis was trying to open his eyes. That should have been easy, but it was like erasing the darkness. Light was imperfect, and the natural appearance of an hour was black. Color was added to the world, cosmetic, extra, like a radio left on in an empty room.
Margaret was not happy, but he could not tell what she was saying. He wanted to call out to her, like a man crying from an anchored raft in the middle of a lake.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” he wanted to say.
But on waking, when Curtis tried to call out, he could not make a sound.
He could only think her name, and after awhile he knew he must have dreamed. The oak beams above him were all he would ever see, and they were handsome. He only wished that he could show them to Margaret, the way someone had hewn the stout timbers and how hands had hoisted them, lifted them as far as they remained to this day, keeping out the sky.
When he was a boy, staying with the woman who sold greeting cards by mail, he would go into Woolworth’s and look at the goldfish. The fish lived in plastic bags, bags no bigger than sandwich wrappers. The individual fish, one in each bag, were each confined in a pouch of water so small every time they turned they stroked the side of the plastic container with their mouths.
The fish had fascinated him, so much that he felt somehow guilty about visiting the five-and-dime so often, and took to buying things he did not really want, a small multicolored tablet of scratch paper, or a miniature globe that was also a pencil sharpener. Curtis felt now how it would feel to stroke the plastic, turn after turn, the touch of dead confinement the only remaining pleasure.
He was working on a painting in his mind. Not a version of the painting that had burned. He no longer enjoyed the memory of that work, the famous “masterpiece,” painted by a young man who had never fully understood that he shared life with other souls.
This new painting, the one he created in his mind, was a painting of Margaret, nude, looking out of the canvas with an expression of recognition. It was the way she acted when he came home early, and she was sitting at her desk. His first thought was that he was interrupting her. But she had always given him this look of unmistakable welcome, surprise linked with happiness.
Ruskin had written that if you could draw a sphere you could draw anything. Curtis knew that a sphere was easy to render, charcoal on paper. What was difficult was absence, drawing a portrait so that the city outside the studio was implied, its sounds, the traffic, the laughter of children.
He dreamed again. There was a boy’s toy, an airplane with a propeller driven by a rubber band. You wound the rubber band by turning the prop, and when the rubber band was twisted and knotted with tension, the thing was ready to fly.
When he woke, he wondered if he could hear an airplane. Eventually he would sleep and not awaken. That was how far this path led. And it was a path, as definite as the heart-line in a palm, as clear as lace, as the living mapwork of ivy.
He wanted to see her once more.
It was cold, and he could not move his arms to pull up a blanket.
He fought against what held him, puzzled as before at how far he had fallen from a height he could no longer recall.
“What’s he doing?” said Loretta Lee.
Margaret lay still on the airstrip. There was the sound of an airplane, a metal mosquito. The noise was getting louder.
“Bishop, what’s he doing?” said Loretta Lee.
There was no answer. Maybe I’m hurt, thought Margaret, maybe I’m not.
The airplane noise was very loud.
Loretta Lee fell over Margaret, holding on to her, saying she was sorry but she had to.
The airplane was on top of them. There was shadow when the aircraft blocked the light. There was a whisk of wind. The engine noise filled her body. Then the sound of the motor receded, climbing.
Loretta Lee got to her feet. Margaret stayed where she was, sprawled on the asphalt. It had a smell, this plain of sandpaper. It was clean and sun-cured. She was not sure where she was, only that shadows stretched from the palm trees almost all the way to where she lay.
There was a comic strip in her head, one of those episodic narratives, talking faces, frowns, urgent calls. She had hung from the airplane, clinging, and when it rebounded off the airstrip she had let go.
“He’s coming back,” said Loretta Lee.
Margaret’s mind was full of color. She was on her feet. She left blood on the asphalt. There was the sound of the airplane, sweeping back, around, approaching again.
They hobbled to the shelter of the trees.
Bishop touched Loretta Lee on the arm to get her attention, and gave her a canteen. Loretta Lee drank, water flowing down the corners of her mouth, dripping onto the asphalt. Margaret drank, too.
Margaret leaned against the stone wall. She was conscious and she was breathing. She sniffed and she tasted blood, her sinus cavities, her throat, full of fluid. She spat and there was blood on the sun-bleached surface.
Margaret’s vision was still bleary from the spray that had crippled. The sound of the airplane swung wide, diminished. Loretta Lee left her side, and stood gazing upward. Margaret limped out of the shadow to look upward, too. The silver aircraft looked bright and innocent, something a child would delight in.
The plane faded into silence.
“He’s going to come back, and I’m going to have to shoot him,” said Loretta Lee. She began to weep. “He shouldn’t have done that.” Her voice was torn. “He shouldn’t have put me out in the desert.”
“He’s cut pretty bad,” said Bishop. “When he gets a chance to think about it he’ll come back here.” He spoke like someone who did not so much understand things as balance them out.
Loretta Lee drank from the canteen again, and then let it drop.
“I’ll pack the wound,” Bishop was saying. “And I’ll fly him out myself. To Palm Springs. They have the best hospital.”
“You’re basically just a boy, aren’t you
Bishop?” said Loretta Lee. “Just a boy, forty-eight years old.”
Bishop did not answer.
“He doesn’t need you anymore,” said Loretta Lee.
Bishop rubbed one arm thoughtfully. Loretta Lee, dark and blistered, looked up at the empty sky.
Margaret found her way to the gate. Her legs were only partially under her control, wobbly, unsteady.
Her left arm was weak. She kept it close to her body as she tried to run. The pool was calm in the morning light, several fronds lying at the bottom of the pool like large black feathers.
Margaret was in the house. Bishop followed her.
“I didn’t take her all the way out into the desert,” Bishop was saying. “Because I wanted her to survive. If I took her all the way out where Paul Angevin was, she wouldn’t have made it.”
Margaret only partly understood what Bishop was saying. She turned and took hold of the man’s shoulder with her good hand.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“People don’t understand what it’s like out there,” said Bishop.
“Where is Curtis?”
“The doctor’ll be back in a couple of minutes,” he said. “He’s got so many people who’d do anything for him.”
She grabbed the man’s shirt, tearing the pocket.
They were in the studio, at the end of the room. There was still an eye-smarting trace of Mace in the air. Bishop tried the door. “The keys are with Dr. Patterson,” said Bishop, as though that settled it.
“We’ll break it down,” said Margaret.
Bishop made a calming gesture. “We don’t want to rush into anything,” he said. His face was still a mask, but the look of pleasant competence had been replaced by one of doubt. “A door like this—we shouldn’t do anything we might regret later on.”
“Open it.”
“We will,” he said. “We’ll get the door open.” His eyes looked hurt, as though surprised that she would doubt his ability. “But Dr. Patterson is going to want to know why we didn’t just wait for him.”
Margaret grabbed him again, the fabric of the shirt making another tearing sound.
“What are you going to tell him when he comes back?” Bishop was saying. There was no anger in his voice, only a need.
“Do what she tells you,” said Loretta Lee from across the room.
Loretta Lee stood still. The gun in her hand gave her a certain authority, although she gave no indication that she knew it was there.
Bishop’s eyes narrowed. He considered Margaret. He considered Loretta Lee. “I’ll tell him I had no choice,” he said.
“That’s true,” said Loretta Lee.
Bishop and Loretta Lee left. They were not gone long, but Margaret was alone with the barrier, the door that would not open. She pressed against it, listening, telling Curtis that she was there.
There was no sound from inside. The room might be empty. The place could be filled with things long lost but, for the moment, useless, dusty furniture, blank canvas.
Bishop and Loretta Lee returned with a long crowbar, a crowbar longer than he was tall, a classic lever out of a physics lesson.
“Found this in the desert,” Bishop said, inserting the curved end of the iron into the crack in the door. “Maybe a year ago. Out near Trona, near the dry lake. Belonged to the railroad, I would imagine,” he said. “No telling how old.”
Margaret wanted to take the iron in her own hands, because there was something deliberate and at the same time thoughtless in the man’s behavior, a person so baffled by events that he clung to empty fact.
Or perhaps it was Bishop’s way of consoling himself that although he did the bidding of two women, he did it in his own way, at his own pace. The door did not splinter, but the lines between the boards that made up the door began to show white against the walnut-stained oak. Bishop grunted, and the door did not move or shiver, except to part where the door met the jamb.
The muscles in his arms were taut. He planted his feet, and pulled again, saying, as he worked, “Iron like this doesn’t get old. You keep it from rusting—”
The door burst. Something metal, part of the lock, Margaret surmised, sang off the ceiling.
The smell of the room was vaguely medicinal. The place was like a hospital room, a room that had been thoughtfully decorated with Mexican wool rugs and palm leaves and art books stacked, with hopeful disorder, beside the hospital bed.
In the bed was an unshaven figure, a person she nearly could not recognize. The man was asleep, his lips moving like someone suffering a bad dream.
Margaret held Curtis, weeping, calling to him.
“I couldn’t do it anymore,” said Curtis. His voice was an urgent whisper, sometimes breaking into a rasp. “I couldn’t work.”
Margaret told him not to talk. She would take care of everything.
But he continued, “I saw the paints go transparent. All I could see was the empty canvas behind the colors.” The emptiness, he thought, that is always there. “So I had to quit, and there was nothing he could do to help me.”
He held her as though he was afraid that she was not real.
“You know what I have to do,” she said.
As though it were alive, he thought. As though the work of art had become a thing that could take life.
He met her eyes.
Loretta Lee watched Margaret gather in the torn, color-splashed sail of the painting.
“What’s she doing?” asked Bishop.
“Don’t move,” said Loretta Lee. “Stay where you are.”
Her voice was calm, and Margaret looked up, expecting to see the gun pointing at her. But it was pointing at Bishop, and Bishop turned like a man in pain, and felt his way toward a chair.
He sat. “I won’t let you do this,” he said in a voice without strength.
Margaret made her way quickly down the stairs. Her fingers were glazed with a substance like dried cocoa, her own blood. She found old sheets of newspaper in a wicker basket, yellowed classified ads. The match heads were pastel colors, pink, mint green. She broke one match, and then another. At last one of the matches was alight.
The canvas beside her on the floor, she worked carefully, touching the white flame to a wad of newspaper. The paper began to burn. As it burned the wad of paper began to loosen, opening, an ugly blossom.
She let the fire grow, fed by kindling and lengths of sweet-smelling wood, wood so dense with sap that it glistened. When she tried to roll up the canvas, crumbs of paint fell onto the floor. The painting was bulky, heavy, and it shifted in her grasp.
Patterson might be here now, she knew—climbing from the aircraft, running through the heat.
It was an effort, the thing buckling, fighting back. The canvas threw itself open in the big fireplace, suffocating the flame. The fire was out.
You didn’t want to let it burn, something in her said. Look at it, how seductive it is, wanting you to reach in and pull it free. Go ahead—it’s not too late. The splashes of color were distorted by their position in the fireplace. This new painting was a semblance, a disguise, but even a disguise can flow, pleasing the eye. It wasn’t going to burn. Flame couldn’t harm a thing like this.
She thrust an iron poker into the middle of the canvas, and kept it there.
A single trellis of smoke rose in one corner of the blackened fireplace. Where Margaret had gashed the painting there was a curl of flame. A folded-over corner straightened, flaring. Fire ate a further hole. The painting made a sound, a whisper, a sputtering whistle. She stepped back, letting the poker fall.
The full conflagration was so sudden it shook the air in the room. There was a flash, and the painting was gone.
48
Before the sheriff’s deputies arrived, when it was not clear what was going to happen next, Margaret heard the sound of a car from outside, beyond the trees. She thought it must be help, but when she looked up at the sound of a footstep it was only Loretta Lee with some knowledge quiet in her eyes.
�
�Bishop’s gone,” said Loretta Lee.
Margaret was sitting beside Curtis, helping him eat. Tomato juice and crackers had seemed easiest in his condition, and she held the glass of juice so he could take another drink. The Saltines made crumbs and she brushed the flakes of flour and the salt from the pillow.
“Bishop loves Dr. Patterson so much,” said Loretta Lee.
Margaret was the authority now. There was power in the house, and it belonged to her. Loretta Lee waited for her response. “What harm can he do?” asked Margaret.
“A lot of harm,” said Loretta Lee, in a voice that sounded unafraid. “To all of us.”
All the way there Margaret was by his side. Deputy sheriffs in their pea-green uniforms and cowboy hats did not try to separate them. Medics did their work, apologizing to both of them for interrupting.
They flew together, under the thudding prop of a helicopter, the desert falling away from them. It was replaced by a different sort of desert, empty river beds and golf courses, with shaved patches for sand traps and white plumes where sprinklers plied water. There were streets of houses among green lawns.
Curtis wanted to have a view, and so they gave him one.
There was a strip of Palm Springs grass. There was a parking lot, a range of mountains, and sky.
But, having been given a view, Curtis ignored it. He followed Margaret with his eyes as she brought him water, a cloth to moisten his lips. There was talk of pneumonia, and blood clots in his legs from injuries that were slow to heal.
But more than one doctor commented that he was not doing so badly, considering what he had been through.
She stayed with him through a cavalcade of doctors and nurses, the white smocks of technicians and the green smocks of orderlies. Margaret did not want to leave his side, but she had to.
She had unfinished work.
The room was filled with men and women in a hurry, medical personnel, guards, administrators.
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