by Walter Tevis
She was looking at him. “You’re nowhere near burned out. Even if this fails you’ll find things to do.”
He looked at her. “Name two.”
“Eddie,” she said, “I’m going to bed.”
After she had left the room he got out the blue-covered journal that he used for business expenses and began going over the figures: the cost of installing lights, the money in quilts and metal sculptures, the two-months’ rent deposit on the gallery, the cost of operating the car. He had about five thousand left in the bank. It was all that was left from twenty years of running the poolroom. It was less than he had made several times in his twenties from a single night of shooting straights.
He set the book on the table and lit another cigarette. On Saturday they would go to Madison County to see that druggist and his wood panels. Arabella had written the man up two years before for the magazine when Greg was running it; she had shown Eddie the article, with photographs. They were Biblical things, forceful and direct, like Betty Jo’s quilts. He went to the closet and took one of the plastic bags from a shelf, and got the quilt out. He spread it over the couch and adjusted the lamp shade so the light fell brightest on the center, where the Hebrew children were ready to be put into the fiery furnace.
He would never have found the quilts without Arabella, nor the metal sculptures that stood against the living-room wall now like an audience. There were plenty of people in Kentucky who called themselves craftsmen and folk artists, but most of them were second-rate. It was only through Arabella’s experience with the magazine, the fact that she had already gone around the state with Greg and seen dozens of the people who tried to make a living from work like this, that he was able to avoid wasting time with junk. She had provided the judgment and knowledge; he had only contributed money and nerve. Desperation, maybe. He looked at the bright applique flames under the light—red, orange and yellow, coming from the furnace door. For days the picture had been in his mind at odd times, as persistent as an advertising jingle or the desire for money. The three dark children were strapped by a red surcingle to a broad shovel, like the thing bakers used. They lay rigid, their wide cartoon eyes open in fright, their mouths little dark lines. A huge hand gripped one end of the shovel, ready to push them in. Of all the things he had looked at in the past week, this was the one that held his attention the most.
He made up his mind. He would take the quilt to the shop tomorrow, but it would not be for sale. He would keep it for himself.
***
He spent the afternoon installing wooden brackets and rods for hanging the quilts—three along one white wall and two along the other; it was dark outside by the time he hung Betty Jo’s Fiery Furnace in the middle of one wall. He climbed the ladder and aimed two floodlights directly at it. Against the white, the colors of the quilt were brilliant, and its five pictures, centered by the Hebrew children, were like a mystical comic strip.
He had the two smaller metal statues in the trunk of the car, which was parked outside. The Little Bo Peep was about three feet high; it was the shortest of the five pieces he had bought. He got it out of the trunk and carried it in his arms like a sleeping child. Little Bo Peep was made from bumper parts welded together, partially covered with a blue cloth pinafore; her head was two small hemispherical hubcaps fastened together and painted with a pouting face. She carried a shepherd’s crook made from a tailpipe.
He positioned her on a wooden pedestal to the right of the quilt and adjusted the track lights to spotlight her. When he came down from the ladder, he stood at the far wall and looked at them together. The effect was striking. He seated himself on an empty pedestal and began to decide which quilts he would display and which keep folded on shelves. He knew them all by now.
***
He did not like the wooden carvings at first, and the old black man who made them was difficult; but he had to admit a lot of work had gone into them. There was a series of eight panels called THE EMERGENCE OF AMERICA INTO THE WORLD OF MEN that must have taken years to do. The wood was dark, close-grained walnut. Each of the panels was roughly a yard square and each was carved with figures in relief in the manner of the drawings of a precocious child. The man who had done them was lean, very old, and so black that he was nearly purple. Like Marcum, he had a song and dance about museums and galleries in Louisville and Chicago; when Eddie questioned him about his claims of being an important artist, he began pulling newspapers and magazines out of an old metal cabinet in his shop behind the pharmacy. There were columns in old newspapers—several with pictures of him and of one or another of his wooden panels—but the clippings were old and yellowed. His real triumph was a two-page spread from the Sunday Courier-Journal showing several of the panels in color and a picture of the artist in a white smock at the counter of his drugstore. The caption read, “A KENTUCKY WOODCARVER INTERPRETS HISTORY.” The date on the paper was September 1961.
“The university has displayed that set,” the man said. His name was Touissant Newby and his demeanor was grave. “People arrive from Chicago and want to buy. But I don’t make my prophecies to hang in somebody’s apartment.”
Eddie nodded and said nothing. The panels were fastened to the wall and poorly lighted. He put on his glasses and started with the one on the left, studying them one at a time. The first showed a sailing ship on a bright blue ocean, with a cluster of what were probably Pilgrims lined up on deck, their wide-open eyes heavenward. Over them a dark cloud hovered with streaks of yellow lightning in deep relief. The faces of the people were childishly drawn but carved vigorously. The sea had painted whitecaps and the yellow of the lightning was paint; everything else was natural wood. The whole thing had a crazy, urgent force to it, but it made Eddie uneasy.
The next panel showed Indians bowing before a stern white man on a rocky shore. The ship was in a cove in the distance. Carved in relief into the sky were the words MAN’S MISUSE OF MAN. In the next panel a dozen Indians were shooting arrows into the Pilgrims while a Pilgrim baby looked on, its face distorted in fright. The final panel showed a conventionalized city skyline, with dark skyscrapers and the wasted bodies of children lying in the street at the foot of them, their eyes shut and their faces twisted. This one had a wooden frame carved around it; on the frame were painted the words AMERICA AS WE HAVE MADE IT. The idea was clear enough and Eddie did not exactly disagree with it. He had seen this final panel reproduced as a photograph in Arabella’s journal article. The anger was unsettling, and he wasn’t sure you could sell things this grim—not for the kind of prices they would require. Deeley Marcum’s work was so blunt as to be nearly comical, but there was nothing comical about these panels. They were like dark, spiritual graffiti. They reminded Eddie of bag ladies on the street who hated whatever they saw.
“If you’re going to sell, I suppose it’ll be only the whole set,” Eddie said.
“I didn’t say I wanted to sell,” Newby said.
Arabella said nothing; she looked from one of their faces to the other and jammed her hands into the pockets of her coat.
“If I’d made those I wouldn’t want to sell them,” Eddie said. “Maybe one like this.” He pointed to a single panel that showed a church with the devil seated—horns and trident painted red—on its front steps. “Or The Three Graces.” That had been the first one Touissant Newby showed them; it had three fat black women on their backs asleep on a brass bed with three chamber pots under it.
Newby looked at the floor. “Five hundred dollars.”
“For both.”
“Apiece.”
Eddie said nothing and walked out of the shop. It was a raw March day and there was ice on the sidewalk. A minute later Arabella came out. She was wearing a knit cap pulled down over her ears. Eddie had his scarf over his chin and his own cap pulled down.
“I don’t think we should buy anything more,” she said as she came up to him.
“I didn’t like that set at first, but I like it now.”
“He’ll want thousands for
it, Eddie, and we haven’t even opened the shop yet.”
“Those titles grab you after a while.” Eddie jammed his hands deeper into his pockets. “The old son of a bitch.”
“Once we begin selling the quilts, and Deeley’s women—”
“I don’t want to wait,” Eddie said. “If we put that eight-piece set on the wall facing the quilts—and get the old man to lend us that newspaper article. Somebody’s going to want to buy it.”
“Eddie,” Arabella said, “I’m scared to risk any more money. What if the business doesn’t go and nobody wants to buy anything?”
He looked up at the dead white sky, feeling the deep chill. “I don’t want to play it safe. I’ve never won anything playing it safe.”
Arabella looked at him a moment as if she were going to say something, but she didn’t speak.
“Let’s go back inside,” Eddie said. “It’s too damned cold out here.”
He paid with a combination of a check and cash. It left him less than two thousand in the bank. Arabella had twenty-three hundred in savings and the alimony on the first of each month. That was it. He felt all right. In his twenties, playing against Fats in Chicago, he had put every penny he had on one game, doubling the bet in the face of losses. They had shot straight pool for five thousand dollars and Eddie had never played better in his life, amazing even himself with what he could do with that much money riding on a single game—while Bert and Charlie, the cautious ones, had watched as he pocketed the balls one after another.
Now, with the eight panels of the set and three others with them in the backseat and trunk, he felt the old sense of control. Going back to Lexington it had begun to snow and the road was white with fresh powder over ice patches. Eddie drove like a dream, handling the little car effortlessly, his whole nervous system relaxed and precise, spiritually enhanced by the presence of risk.
It was almost midnight when they arrived in Lexington. Eddie drove them to the shop and they carried the panels in. He wanted to see them under the floodlights. And he was too wide awake to go to bed yet.
While Arabella made coffee with the hot plate on the countertop, he measured off the right-hand wall with his tape, marking it into eight equidistant sections, and then drilled holes with his quarter-inch drill and put in Molly bolts. Each of the panels had a heavy ring screwed to the back; he hung them in order across the wall. He climbed the ladder and re-aimed the lamps, dividing them between the two walls. Against the fresh white, the colors seemed incandescent. The Levolor blinds had been installed the day before; he went over, lowered and then tilted them, to make the window wall now white. He walked back to the center of the room; his footsteps on the bare floor were shockingly loud.
“It’s spooky in here,” she said. “I feel frightened.”
“Look at the things on the walls,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, it looks good.”
She raised her head and looked around herself. She faced Touissant Newby’s walnut panels for a long time. Then she turned to Eddie and smiled. “Yes, they do. They really do.”
***
Arabella went to bed as soon as they got home, but Eddie stayed up for an hour in the living room, surrounded by his quilts and wooden panels, with the row of insolent metal women—like a small, angry choir—against the wall facing him. It was three o’clock before he turned in, and even then he had difficulty getting to sleep. He kept seeing the gallery as it would be with all the stock in place. They had nothing small or cheap for sale; if they could sell only one piece a week, it would pay the rent and support them. Everything beyond that would be profit.
***
On Saturday morning Arabella had coffee and croissants ready to serve to as many as forty people, but no one came in. She had sent out announcements and made phone calls. Several professors had promised to drop by, but they did not. Eddie put a simple notice in the window saying “OPEN” and his ads had run in the evening paper on Thursday and Friday, but no one came in the doors. People passing looked in, and some stopped to stare for a while at the Las Vegas Model and the Olive Oyl that stood there facing out, with the REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR quilt behind them. It would take a while. If a week passed and no one came in, that would be the time to panic. He left the shop for a while in midmorning to go up Main to Alexander’s Photo and get the black-and-white blowups he had ordered to be mounted on plastic. He brought them back and fastened them to the walls with brass round-headed screws. They were big grainy pictures, copies from old photographs, and they looked properly artistic on the walls: Betty Jo Merser, unsmiling, with her gray hair in a bun; Deeley Marcum, bald and squinting, from one of his old newspaper clippings; and the double-page spread on Newby from the Courier-Journal enlarged to twice its original size. It was eleven-thirty by the time he had them all up.
At one-thirty a couple came in. He was from the university, from one of the science departments. Arabella did not know him. He and his wife looked around in that silent, respectful way of middle-class people in museums. He held his hands behind his enormous camel-hair overcoat and she kept her arms folded in front of her, placing her weight on one foot while studying the quilts and the metal sculptures and then going from one wooden plaque to the next. Both of them were self-conscious; both more interested in looking at things in the right sort of way than in the things themselves. At one particular moment when the woman was studying the middle panel of Newby’s set, she held her fingers to her chin and pursed her lips in an exaggeration of discriminating thought.
“You certainly have some interesting pieces here,” the man said. “Unusual.”
“If they weren’t so…” the woman said, “…so exaggerated.”
Eddie looked at her. He knew how Deeley Marcum felt about women and he felt that way now. “That’s folk art for you,” he said.
“I guess so…” the woman said. Then she smiled with forced brightness. “We’ll be back. Thank you so much.” The man nodded apologetically and they left.
“Deeley could make her out of bumpers,” Eddie said when they had gone.
But the couple had started something, for other people began to come in. Arabella had reheated the coffee, and she served it in plain white mugs and gave them croissants with butter on plastic plates. It was while there were six or seven strangers in the gallery that Roy and Pat Skammer came in, both in puffy down coats and heavy scarves.
“Fast Eddie,” Roy said, “your talents never cease to amaze me.”
“It’s easier than nine-ball.”
“How’s it going?” Pat said. “Have you sold anything yet?”
“Not yet.”
“The cheapest thing we have,” Arabella said, “is four hundred dollars.”
“I’ll take it,” Roy said. “What is it?”
“The quilt next to the bathroom, with the flowers.”
“We don’t have enough money to pay the heating bill,” Pat said.
Roy smiled benignly. “We can sleep under the quilt.”
“You’re being an idiot,” Pat said in exasperation. Then she looked at Eddie and smiled. “We just dropped by to look you over and wish you luck.”
***
It wasn’t until five-thirty that a dean from the college of education came in, studied the Marcum sculptures for several minutes and then said to Eddie, “I’d like to buy the Las Vegas Model if you’ll take a check.”
It was as simple as that. Eddie figured the sales tax, took the man’s check and helped him load the piece into the back of his Volvo across the street. The price Eddie had put on the sticker at the base of the sculpture was nine hundred fifty dollars; he had bought it from Marcum for less than four hundred. Their profit was well over five hundred dollars.
On Monday and Tuesday there were no buyers, although several people seemed interested. On Tuesday morning, a woman from Channel Three called; and at two in the afternoon, while a few customers were looking over the things, she came by with a camera crew and spent a half hour making a tape for the Monday-morning talk show. She h
ad her cameraman pan the room and then do close-ups of the quilts and sculptures while she did a commentary into the microphone. Her manner varied from earnestness to superciliousness. She called the quilts “items of Americana” but raised her eyebrows helplessly when the camera was on her and Olive Oyl together. Then she had the camera make a quick pan of the eight wooden plaques and did an interview with Arabella. Arabella was pleasant but reserved; her British accent seemed more pronounced than usual. When the woman asked her about Marcum’s pieces, she said they were indigenous American folk art; that they were comic, satirical and original. Eddie stayed out of it, liking the way Arabella handled the woman. He did not want to be asked questions about how a pool player could become an art dealer.
Eddie had seen the kid hanging around. The day before they opened, he stood in front of the window a long time, staring at the display. Another time he stood across the street for nearly half a day. But he had never come in the shop before. A gloomy-looking young man with fiercely black hair and eyebrows, he had the pale skin and hairy forearms of a certain Appalachian type. You saw them at country gas stations, with the sleeves of their green workman’s shirts rolled to the elbow and the black hair on their arms distinct against the white skin. They drank Orange Crush and R. C. Cola.
Eddie had just come back from lunch and was parking the car when the kid came bursting out of the shop and slammed the door behind him hard enough to break the glass. Eddie watched him head down the street, turn and go from sight.
Eddie went on in and hung his coat up. Arabella was standing by the cash register, her face cloudy. He walked over and put his hand over the back of hers. “Something wrong?”
“That damned kid.”
“I saw him stomping off. What happened?”