by Tom Drury
“Pensive,” said Tommy “Mirage” Maynard.
“Yes,” said Carlo. “Thank you, Tommy. Tommy has found the right word. Paul, as you know, I spoke up for you many times in our monthly meetings, and against considerable opposition. And you probably don’t know how painful it is for me to concede now that if you were half the man Tommy Maynard is, you would be twice the man that you are.”
“Let me get my calculator,” said Paul.
“Someone hit him,” said Carlo, and someone did, on the ear. “One night I even dreamed about her in my dreams. Together we walked on the sand in Little Compton, the woman in the painting and I. In this dream I was young, my legs were strong and limber. I was nineteen years old, with two strong arms, and we walked together like brother and sister. After that, I tore the page from the book and taped it on the wall of my cell. It seemed somehow that whatever was taking up her thoughts would be waiting for me when the doors opened and I walked into the light of freedom. And now, here is the picture. I brought it out with me.”
Bobby pushed the leather folder across the table and Paul opened it. The print was worn around the edges and had been twice folded.
“This is good,” said Paul.
“See the cloth of her skirt? Is it not amazing how you can almost feel it between your fingers?” Carlo raised his hand slowly and rubbed his thumb against his fingers. “And yet the girl could not care about that. Her mind is elsewhere. She is not looking at us. She is not thinking about the fine fabric of her skirt. We don’t even see her eyes.”
“Come to the point,” said Bobby
“Soon I will be dead, and you will have no more chance to learn manners,” said Carlo. “The point is the title. For what would we call a portrait painting if we were, as we surely must be, lesser artists than John Singer Sargent?”
“I don’t know,” said Paul.
“Answer him,” said Tommy Maynard.
Paul turned to look at him. “That is my answer. I don’t know what he’s getting at.”
“We might call it, oh, ‘A Picture of Dolores,’ or, perhaps, ‘Betsy by the Stream,’” said Carlo. “But is that what Sargent did?”
“No.”
“What did he do, Nash?”
“He called it The Black Brook.”
“Yes,” said Carlo. “Because the painting is not about the woman. Do you understand that? It’s about that part of her that we cannot reach, no matter how many times we look at the painting. The Black Brook is the stream of her troubled thoughts.”
“Well, your analysis is very good.”
“Get me this painting.”
“It wouldn’t be hard to find who has it,” Paul said. “But it would cost millions. And that’s if the owner wanted to sell, which seems unlikely.”
Carlo nodded. He took a cracker from the pocket of his robe and chewed it slowly. Everyone could hear the sound of his teeth breaking the cracker. Finally he said, “The painting is owned by the Tate Gallery in London. I have spoken to the people there, and they want to keep it.”
“As I say.”
“Well, the Tate Gallery is not invincible. I had Bobby do some research. There are people who could do it. Their price is on the high side, and Bobby doesn’t think the end justifies the means. And if I wanted to steal the painting, or for that matter if I wanted to buy the painting, I would not be talking to you.”
“Because you would be dead as a clam,” said Bobby.
“Oh,” said Paul. “I get it.”
“How soon can it be done?” said Carlo.
“God, I don’t know.” Now he began to really look at the painting. The rendering of the woman’s hands seemed inordinately complicated, and the water was composed of planes of black and purple and brown. “End of summer.”
“Do you know what Tommy has in the trunk of his car?” said Carlo. “I will give you a clue. He has a shotgun in the trunk of his car.”
‘And, I just cleaned it,” said Tommy.
“Labor Day is not as unreasonable as it may sound,” Paul said.
“You have until the end of May,” Carlo said.
“July first.”
“This is not your last chance, but your only chance. We know all about your little hotel in Australia.”
“Belgium,” said Ivan.
“Now give him the insurance and let him go,” said Carlo.
Tommy Maynard and Ivan drove Paul to a self-storage place near a row of black oil tanks.
“What’s the insurance?” said Paul.
“You’re a big brain,” said Tommy. “Ask yourself what would become of the slender thread of credibility this organization still has if we found you and got nothing out of the encounter but a painting.”
Ivan nodded with a thoughtful expression. “We have become somewhat laughable.”
“I retire in September,” said Tommy. “Otherwise I would not stay.”
In a room full of dusty mountain bicycles Tommy unrolled an orange cloth, took out an aluminum X-acto knife, and fitted a blade into it. Ivan crunched Paul’s arms behind him and said, “Don’t get his eyes.”
“I’ve done this a thousand times,” said Tommy. He took a pair of glasses from the pocket of his jacket, put them on, and tilted his head back patiently to see through the lenses. He began singing under his breath. “Call John the Boatman, call, call again . . .” Then he pushed the tip of the blade into the skin beside the bridge of Paul’s nose and flicked the knife diagonally across his face.
“O.K., that’s done,” said Tommy
Ivan let go and Paul staggered back into a row of bicycles. He tried to catch the falling blood in his hands.
“Be careful,” said Tommy. “Those bikes belong to Brown students.” He tossed Paul the orange cloth. “Use it as a compress. Get blood in my car and I’ll be angry.”
They let Paul off at Anne Hutchinson Hospital. In the emergency room, lying on a wheeled cot, Paul explained that he had broken a glass while doing the dishes, and a doctor prepared a needle and injected novocaine in the skin under his eye. The needle hurt more than the knife had, and a nurse let him squeeze her hand all during the stitching. Paul felt as if his face had turned to leather and someone tugged on it with hooks.
When the stitches were in, Paul thanked the nurse and she pointed to his clothes on the floor. “You’ll be needing new sneakers,” she said.
Once released from the hospital, Paul took a cab into Providence and got a room in an old hotel. He looked in the cloudy mirror above a sink. The doctor who did the stitching had said the cut would result in a scar that might fade over the years. He brushed his finger against the transparent stitches. That hurt a great deal. Then he lay down on the bed and fell into an unmoving sleep, dreaming of bicycles.
The next day he put a Band-Aid over the stitches and went looking for the house of one of his former painters. The painter and his wife had lived on Morris Avenue. Maybe he would not want to paint copies again but could be drawn in by the challenge of recreating Sargent. A man he had never seen answered the door and kept the chain on.
“Don’t know them,” he said. “Never heard of them. They must have moved away long ago.”
Paul walked back downtown. The stitches pounded and it began to rain. His separateness from others always seemed insurmountable on rainy Saturdays. He crossed new bridges, passed the park, skirted City Hall, and started up Hellespont Avenue to the hotel. Halfway between the park and the hotel a woman descended a set of steps and spoke to him.
“What is your religion?”
Paul thought a moment. “Well, if anything, I’m a Baptist. But I’m not really that, either.”
“Good — would you do me a favor? Would you turn off the lights in the sanctuary?”
The woman led Paul up the steps into a tall building with a facade consistin
g of panels of polished stone. They walked along a hallway and into a softly lit room where she knelt at the base of an altar.
“These are the light switches,” she said.
He knelt too, surprised by how many there were — nine, in a horizontal band — for the room’s illumination did not seem elaborate. The lights went out one by one, but for an oil lamp in a glass case suspended from the ceiling.
“Did you just get done?” said Paul.
‘About twenty minutes ago.”
“How did it go?”
“Well, you know, we read, we prayed . . . we sang.” She stroked her hair, which was silver, and seemed to search her mind. She smiled. “And you shut out the lights. Thank you.”
“I’m glad to be of service,” said Paul.
21
Back in Ashland, Paul found Scratch sitting forlornly in the rain on the black branch of a tree beside the cottage. He called her down, but she had rarely come when called and did not come now. He pointed quickly at the ground. “Look, it’s a vole.” No response. Then he went inside, opened a bag of cat food, poured some into a dish, and went back out. Scratch looked miserably at the food and then turned her face again to the sad rain. Her nose was the exact color of a pencil eraser.
Paul set the dish of food in the wet grass and climbed the tree. Rain dripped from the branches and ran in rivulets down the trunk. He gripped the big cat by the wet fur behind her ears, and when he lifted her from the branch she made no attempt to claw his arm. He called a veterinarian in Damascus and described the cat’s behavior. The man he spoke to asked after the cat’s temperature and described how it might be taken, and Paul said that instead he would bring her in.
But first he went into town to do his laundry. He always felt squalid doing his laundry until the moment when the first dryer load was done. Then a sense of warm and foldable industry took over, and the moral bankrupts slouching around the washers revealed themselves to be divinity students and honest clerks: his clothes were clean. There were not enough dryers, as there never are, and he wondered if this was a corporate strategy designed to force people to hang around looking at the obscure cleaning products in the vending machines.
The sun came out and kids began playing baseball in the street. Paul went outside and joined the game. They had a seamed plastic ball that broke wildly when pitched. He got hold of one and sent it arcing into the bed of a pickup, a ground-rule double. After a few innings he went back inside and finished his laundry and then drove home with baskets full of folded clothes. He left a towel in one of the baskets, put the cat in the basket, and drove to the veterinarian’s.
Damascus sat on a plateau west of Ashland, and the road climbed to it. The vet’s office was in a log cabin. Normally Scratch would have hissed and swatted at the curious dogs in the waiting room, but this time she scrambled up Paul’s left arm and dug her claws through his slicker and into his shoulder. With the cat shivering beside his ear, Paul got up to talk to a woman behind the counter.
“Well, I don’t know what’s wrong,” he said. “She’s definitely not being herself.”
The woman’s fingers brushed across the side of her face. “Did she do that?”
“A glass broke when I was doing dishes,” he said, and as he spoke, he heard the sound of water on plastic. A stream of cat urine ran down the front of his coat and into his pocket.
“Oh . . . she’s scared,” said the woman.
She came out from behind the counter with a paper towel and a bottle of disinfectant and scrubbed Paul’s jacket. His heart filled with sorrow for the old cat.
The veterinarian waited with hands folded as Paul spoke, and she seemed about to break in at three or four points but never quite did, making Paul’s description of Scratch’s behavior seem halting and exaggerated. Then she made an expressive gesture with her hands, waited a moment, and said, “Yes, older cats are susceptible . . . ,” and, later, “Some feel, though it’s not a universal belief . . .” Her voice was high but dense, and her diplomas showed that she had taken her degrees in Kentucky. She took samples of Scratch’s blood and gave Paul a vial of powder capsules to break open and sprinkle over the cat’s food.
There were no meetings to cover that night, and Jean Jones told Paul to make the police and fire calls and play it by ear. “All quiet,” said the dispatchers. He went out driving with a notepad and camera to see if anything newsworthy was going on, a random approach that had worked for him in the past, yielding curious stories such as New England’s Tallest Man handing out golf balls at the ice cream parlor and the model-rocket fair in which one of the rockets veered into the crowd, injuring a babysitter. This time he drove all over town before turning onto Knife Shop Road and seeing a tank lurching toward him. He pulled over and got out of his car waving his arms. The tank stopped and the hatch lifted.
“Hello!” said a man. He was exhilarated and red-faced, as if there were not enough air in the tank.
“What are you doing?” said Paul.
“Driving my tank,” said the man. “I have access to lots of scrap metal, so I thought, why not build a tank? My partner doesn’t mind. He figures it will keep me busy.”
“What kind of tank is it?”
“Just a generic tank,” said the man. “I’m having the time of my life. I could have worked from pictures, but I thought that would be cheating?’
“I’ve lived in Belgium,” said Paul. “There’s a tank in the square at Bastogne.”
“I can imagine,” said the man. “The Ardennes is one of the most evocative regions in history. I have a refrigerator in here. Want a beer or soda?”
“Do you have Royal Crown?”
“Well, I just might.” The man disappeared in the turret and then looked out. “The refrigerator doesn’t seem to be working?”
Paul walked around the tank, stopping now and then to take pictures. “Have you gotten any flack from Public Works?”
“The secret is, the treads aren’t real.”
Paul looked under the prow of the tank. “This is very clever,” he said.
“Thanks. Most people think I’m in the National Guard, but I’m not. I had a draft card for the Vietnam War, but it ended before I could be called up. Why are you writing when I talk?”
“I’m a reporter,” said Paul.
“That’s O.K.”
Jean Jones removed the stitches from Paul’s face. He sat on the velvet couch in her apartment and she cut the plastic threads with the surgical scissors she had used to scrape the bowl of her pipe on his last visit. She used tweezers to pull the stitches out, and they gave up his skin with a light breaking feeling.
“What happened?” she said.
“My real name is Paul Nash,” said Paul. “Seven years ago I testified against some people, and they just now caught up with me.”
“Hold still,” she said. She pulled out a stitch and brushed the wound with a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol. “I do know something about this. Rudy Bonner told me who you are. I had gone to see him about a lawsuit against the police. He asked me to give you something.”
She pulled a briefcase from under the couch and took out a map of Scotland. Paul unfolded it and found a town on the southwest coast circled in red marker.
“Are you going here?” she said.
“Eventually. But I’ll be leaving the paper any day.”
“Well, O.K., because I need to talk to you about that,” she said. “Pete wants your resignation. I fought him, but he’s the boss. I said if witness protection is going to work, then our institutions have to learn to live with the witnesses.”
“What’d he say?”
“That the Sun is a newspaper, not an institution.”
“That’s all right.”
“What did you do in the first place?”
“Killed my brother by tackl
ing him too hard,” said Paul.
“I thought it was mob-related.”
“That was in the second place.”
“People don’t die from hard tackles.”
“I know.”
“Are you going to the Revue?”
“What’s that?”
Every year, she explained, the newspaper put on a Spring Revue at the Pail Hotel. This was a dinner and musical show that made light of current events in the town. Money raised went to charity, and this year it would help the hospital buy a CAT scanner.
The Revue took place two nights later. Paul and Jean bought tickets and sat near the stage. Paul thought this would be a good farewell to the life of Ashland and that it might distance him from strange recent developments, such as how the dead could talk to him. He wondered again if he was losing his mind, but at the same time he had never felt better. Since his meeting with Carlo, his hearing had become keen. He could hear a clock ticking from across a room or hear the siren of an ambulance winding through Damascus. He could feel the blood going through his veins and arteries. And just before a phone rang, he would see waves in the air. He always knew. These phenomena seemed like personal enhancements but also took something out of him, and perhaps it was sentimental, but he felt that a night of drinking and obscure comedy in a provincial hotel might bring him back to the quiet existence that he had wanted when he came to Ashland — all that simplicity he had desired.
They shared a table with Will and Sharon Kiwi and Pete and Hope Lonborg. Across the room, Paul could see a table of stuffers and he wished that he had never left the stuffing floor. It took a lot of nerve to presume to tell other people’s stories. But the food lifted his spirits, and he went back for seconds, and the people at the table seemed to approve of his big appetite. They nudged one another and nodded, as if to say, “He’s right, of course. We should all eat more.” Then blue spotlights raked the stage and the show began. The players danced and sang with the manic enthusiasm that can be seen in all small-town productions and seems to express a common desire to escape to the big city and become a star. Paul understood the point of a few of the numbers, such as a horn-driven rendition of “Cry Me a River,” meant to commemorate the disappearance of the stream on Whiskers Lane.