“I don’t know what you want, Maud,” George said in a defeated voice.
I was silent. Apologies, by then, had dubious value.
“You know, I want you to be happy, Maud.” More Sesame Street therapy. “I want you to be the best you can be.”
That was the attitude that got me in my present predicament.
George the patron saint of the arts was 150 percent behind Odie Dorfmann’s reelection plans. They plotted the entire campaign together during an Expos game in our living room. Odie was always at our house either talking or watching baseball. He was the pitcher of the Round Corners Royals softball team; George was the third baseman.
One night while the Montreal Expos were kicking butt Odie announced his campaign plans for reelection. He leaned forward, looking us in the eyes, and whispered: “Culture.” That was Odie’s campaign strategy. He was going to bring not only leadership, but culture to Round Corners. This was about the time The Burlington Free Press ran an article on the explosion of the arts scene in Vermont.
When I told Freda, the next day after work, she couldn’t take it. She laughed so hard she almost fell out of the booth, where we were sprawled, tired and dirty. The doors were locked, and we smelled of hamburgers. There were two sodas on the table and an ashtray. “Culture,” Freda sighed, wiping the tears from the corners of her eyes and lighting a cigarette, “It’s good Odie is sticking to something he knows.”
George died shortly before Odie was elected. Odie took it hard. He and George had met in Vietnam, two scared, green kids with faces full of pimples and a shared love of baseball. At night as they listened to bombs in the distance, they whispered baseball statistics to each other. George had been visiting his old Army buddy Odie the day I met him.
In the aftermath of losing his best friend and winning his second term, Odie forgot about his cultural mission. Until now. Our period of mourning was over, as was half of Odie’s second term. Even Odie can figure out a calendar. And the issue of the Round Corners mural was heating up. People liked the idea. When they talked about the painting—what it would look like and who would be in it—they discovered they felt closer to each other. “What about that painting” became the popular greeting, comparable to sports salutations such as “What about those Bosox” or “What about those Expos” (depending on your baseball persuasion). The concept of the painting grew in the town’s mind. Odie envisioned something the size of a city block while the last thing I had done with any confidence—the greeting cards—was no bigger than a brick. You could say I was feeling the pressure.
George had been oblivious to pressure. “A person can do anything he wants to or can afford,” he said, straightening his tie and heading out the door for the closing of a house. I remember the day because it was the biggest house George had sold yet. He was extremely proud of that transaction. “Maud,” he said, “this is a Renoir of a real estate deal.”
The irony of the situation was that Odie wouldn’t lose the election if he didn’t produce a town mural. My spiteful side was denied even that satisfaction. The voters weren’t irate. They wouldn’t feel cheated if their cultural consciousness wasn’t raised another notch. And if they did, what choice do they have? Odie was running unopposed, again.
So I should have been able to tell Odie to stick that painting where the sun doesn’t shine—in his L.L. Bean thermal underwear.
What’s stopping me, George? I’ll tell you what’s stopping me… it’s the look of excitement everyone gets in their eyes when they talk about the mural… it’s this sense of bonding that has begun to permeate the town… it isn’t my mural… it’s theirs.
Everyone wants a piece of this dream. They say it will put Round Corners on the map again. For once, people will stop here for more than a hamburger between downhill ski runs or for a break from heavy-duty leafpeaking. They’ll come to see the mural.
Just like once they came to see my house.
I leaned back and studied the painting in front of me. I had put away the Hatteras Holstein and started again. The new painting was beginning to look suspiciously like another cow, only this one had two heads.
What does it look like I’m doing, George? You’re dead, not blind.
Of course, it’s not right. I don’t know how to fix it, George; if I did, I would. Yes. It’s a good thing I still have those cute little greeting cards. The tourists love them just as you said they would. Now, go away. Please? What do you mean what is that red glob in the middle? George… George? George come back here and explain. Damn, you always do this to me. If you weren’t already dead, I’d probably kill you.
T-Bone once told me his dancing was like a thing clawing inside him to get out. If he didn’t listen to it, he said, it would destroy him. There was something inside me lately, tearing, mad, slashing through arteries, muscle, and organ. I studied the softly forming cow and gave in to all the despair and heartache and frustration. I hurt inside and cried from the pain. Little sniffles at first. Then mighty sobs. I couldn’t watch another cow birth. I raised my hand to my eyes. It was dripping with blood.
Great.
On the floor was a shattered jar and on the table where I had slammed my hand through the glass was the red imprint of my palm.
Downstairs someone was pounding on the front door. I wrapped paper towels around my hand until it looked like a huge paper paw and answered the door. “I don’t want any.”
The man standing on the porch smiled.
“Look, I’ve got my hands full right now and…”
He glanced at the paw, which was reddening, soaking up blood faster than spilt coffee in a television commercial. The smile slipped. The man promptly turned green, folded into a pretzel, and threw up.
5. A Picture of Thomas Looking for Pictures
His name was Thomas. And he came here looking for the pictures.
“What happened to the house?” he asked, driving back from the doctor’s office.
“The house?” I said.
He thrust a photograph under my nose. Unthinkingly, I took it with my bandaged hand and winced. The local anesthesia was wearing off. I needed a Rolling Rock; make that six.
The photograph was a picture of my house taken years ago when it had been swimming in scenes and portraits. A man stood in front of the house, smiling. He had blonde hair, down to his shoulders, scraped back from his face with a leather headband. He wore scruffy jeans, a work shirt, and love beads. I knew by the composition that the photo had been taken by my father; it was shot from a slightly skewed angle, making the man in the picture seem to tilt like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
I didn’t remember that particular photo session. It was one of hundreds in my childhood, especially in my teen years when the house really began to rock. By then, I was running out of space. Scenes crowded the surface of the house, impressionism rubbing elbows with realism, realism back-to-back with abstract expressionism. The house reflected me, my moods, the mile-a-minute changes going on inside my teen-age mind. It seemed I changed styles weekly. And so, the house changed, too.
I smiled at the photo and thought of cameras and Papa. My father loved cameras but was a photography klutz. When people asked him to take their picture, he fumbled with the cameras, searching for the right buttons. He would frown and scratch his head and someone would offer to help. But he would say, no, he’d figure it out. He loved to tinker. Then came the day he worked his first Polaroid. When the film rolled out of the camera like a tongue, he almost jumped out of his overalls. He watched the picture materialize with incredulity. He asked if he could do it again. That one looked a bit off center, he said. He thought he could do better. Thereafter, he always was a bit disappointed when folks shoved an instamatic or 35mm camera in his hand. They could have given him the world’s most expensive Leica and he would have looked at it with chagrin. Papa was hooked on Polaroid.
George hated living in a point of interest. He was lousy at PR. At first he was proud of the house: “I never thought I’d live inside a Niagara
Falls or a Lincoln Memorial.” For awhile he even enjoyed talking to “our tourists.” But soon he grew bored with the Clydes and Sallys from Missouri and the Moniques and Todds from Manhattan. It got to the point where he ran in the opposite direction when someone even said the word “camera.” Finally, George shot his own photograph of the house, printed it up on postcards, and displayed the postcards next to a locked, slotted box on the porch. On the box was a sign:
POSTCARDS 50 CENTS
HONOR SYSTEM
NO NEED TO RING THE BELL
WE TRUST YOU
During my George Period, as Wynn the art expert calls it, the house took a turn for the worse. I wasn’t painting like I once did. The painting I did while living with George somehow didn’t seem to fit the house. The house stopped changing. Scenes began to fade. Fewer people came. And then George made that lethal suggestion at the dinner table: the Whitewash Proposal. When the pictures were gone, no one was interested in pulling out their Polaroids.
My father never owned a camera. It never occurred to him to buy one. I captured all the likenesses around our house—on our house. I realize now we should have bought a camera. We never planned for the future, for the contingency of meeting a man named George who had a fondness for white paint and a disregard for dreams. I sniffed, wiped the back of my nose with my hurt hand, and cursed at the pain.
“Are you all right?” Thomas asked, glancing nervously at me.
“Medication,” I lied, “It works like a sad movie on me.” I pointed to the picture. “You look like him,” I said. The man in the photograph was Thomas’s father. Thomas, too, had blonde hair. Not as long as the man in the photograph but just as sun streaked and thick. Thomas’s hair was short and spiky. He had a body that, as Freda would say, looks good in jeans. The license plate on his van was issued by the state of California. He had a smile you expected to see all over San Diego, a surfer’s smile, teeth white as foam and Hollywood straight. How did they get teeth like that, I wondered. It must be all the fresh fruit they eat.
“What’s your last name?” I asked.
“Mellon,” he said. It figures.
I have always had the worst teeth. Just looking at a piece of chocolate cake could make them crumble. Dr. Willard, my dentist, said decay could find my mouth blindfolded. Thomas smiled at me. I squinted into those bright, plastic-perfect teeth. He was all of the great age of nineteen. I was married at nineteen. I’d lived a whole life since then. We had nothing in common. He was just beginning.
Thomas was skipping college that semester. Sure, his parents were disappointed, but they understood. I didn’t. From what I could make out, Thomas was traveling as his father, the man in the picture, had: to find himself. It was an old-fashioned Sixties thing to do in a time when business schools were murdering the other disciplines. It seemed everyone in the world wanted to learn about account receivables. Except Thomas. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. What do you like to do? I asked.
“I enjoy looking at the stars,” he said.
That led me to the obvious career choices—shepherd and astronaut. Thomas said he’d tried Space Camp when he was in high school but found the whole experience “too technical.” Now shepherd was something he hadn’t considered. “I’ll give it some thought,” he said.
In the meantime, he planned to continue his search. He drove the same vehicle, a yellow Volkswagen van, that his father had steered more than twenty years ago. It was not keen on exploring America with another yearning, searching, stoned cowboy. It demanded new tires in Denver, a fan belt in Kansas City, a quart of oil in Ohio. It threw a fit until someone cleaned its spark plugs in Boston.
I am familiar with the temperament of vans. T-Bone and I found my olive eyesore in a field five years ago. It was decorating some guy’s back forty. The moment I flung open the doors I knew I wanted it. The insides had been gutted. It was a great green metal shell. My footsteps echoed as I climbed in and paced off the distance from end to end. The owner said he could get it running, and even threw in a passenger seat, scrounged from the adjacent pasture, for free. What a bargain, I said to T-Bone.
What a mess, George said. He wanted to know how T-Bone could let me buy such a thing. T-Bone said, he kind of liked it. George fumed. I smiled and T-Bone smiled. The van started pinging three days later and hasn’t stopped since. I listen to the talk shows on the radio where drivers call in with questions about their cars. From those shows, you’d think America was one big automotive anomaly, full of cars that you’d rather put up with than give up. That’s the way I feel about my van. Mechanics from all over the world could look at my van—the way it pings on uphills some days and downhills others, how it starts on cold mornings without a hitch but won’t even roll over on warm summer days that seem like a Bahamas vacation— and not figure it out. But I don’t care.
We took Thomas’s van to the doctor. I hunched in the back, out of sight, amid a sleeping bag, a huge backpack, a cardboard box of books and cassette tapes, a pair of binoculars, several posters of stars and celestial systems taped to the wall, two dumbbells, a computer, and a half bushel of apples.
The doctor pronounced Thomas fit despite his queasiness, but insisted on putting nine stitches in my palm. I was afraid of that. I hate needles, hypodermic, sewing, knitting. The last time I had to be stitched up was when I was seven. Odie Dorfmann was the king and I was about to be his new knight. He lifted the snow shovel to tap my shoulder, missed, and knighted my head. Ten stitches and a new hairdo. My father was frantic, turned to Jell-O by my tears and the sight of blood pouring down my face. He held me all night, rocking in the rocking chair, watching over me as I slept off the painkillers. My hand pulsed with pain. Suddenly I was sad that there was no one to hold me that night.
When we pulled in the drive, I saw T-Bone waiting for us, tilling the front yard with his nervous feet. He rushed to the van as Thomas parked, pulled my door open, and helped me out.
“Why didn’t you call me?” he said, walking me toward the house. Thomas followed us. “I walked right into the house—you’ve got to start locking your door, Maud, anyone could walk in. I found the blood upstairs and nearly went out of my mind. Your van was here but you weren’t. I called Odie, Freda, Wynn, even Reverend Swan. He suggested the doctor. The nurse said you were already on the way home. She said you’re all right. Are you?”
“Thomas drove me to the doctor after we wrapped my hand up so he couldn’t see it.”
“I never could stand blood,” Thomas smiled.
“The doctor said Thomas would be fine as long as he stayed away from automobile accidents, wars, and sharp knives.”
“Sound advice,“ T-Bone said, his arms crossed over his chest now.
“Even after my hand was wrapped, Thomas made me sit in the back of the van. He wasn’t taking any chances. He didn’t look in his rearview mirror once the whole way.”
“So much for defensive driving,” Thomas said sheepishly.
T-Bone turned white. I knew what T-Bone was thinking: that Thomas could have killed us both, could have pulled out to pass when the guy behind him already was passing; that, from the looks of the van, he’d been in a few wrecks; and that he probably didn’t even have a license.
“Show T-Bone your license,” I told Thomas, leading them into the house. I headed for the refrigerator. Thomas complied with a big white smile and T-Bone frowned.
“You’re growling,” I said, passing T-Bone a beer. He took it and downed half in a gulp.
“You should have called me.”
“T-Bone, nine stitches, for gawdsake! It was nothing.”
“Did the doctor give you a tetanus shot?”
“Yes, dear T-Bone.” I turned to Thomas. “T-Bone worries about me.”
Thomas smiled. “He’s a good friend.”
Eventually, after two beers, T-Bone began to relax. We talked of other things, the weather and vans and apples. Thomas said he bought the bushel in the back of the van at a roadside stand. Apples for bre
akfast, lunch, and dinner. When he was a child, he said, his father told him he could brush his teeth by eating apples. But only on camping trips.
It was growing dark when T-Bone stood to leave. He looked pointedly at Thomas. I told Thomas he was welcome to stay the night. He accepted the invitation with a flash of teeth. T-Bone grunted.
Without comment, he walked outside. I left Thomas nursing a soda at the kitchen table. T-Bone’s hands were shoved in his pockets and his head was turtle-sunken into his jacket. We waded through the leaves to his truck. At the truck, he faced me.
“Are you going to be all right? Did the doctor give you some painkillers?” I nodded. “Eat some supper, okay? Promise.” I promised and he sighed. I touched his arm.
“You know there isn’t a motel room to be found this time of year,” I said. “They’re probably already putting up people in the National Guard Armory. It’s only for one night.”
“I know.“
I watched him out of sight. I stood in the twilight, trying to see him clearly, long after he’d gone. Finally, I noticed the night chill and my throbbing palm. I turned back toward the house and Thomas.
6. The Crime Wave Begins
The day went down in Odie Dorfmann’s case book as the beginning. The note read in the typically dramatic style of the books he reads: Someone is stealing Round Corners’ art.
If it smacked too much of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, you had to remember that Odie the lawman sees everything through the grimy pane of crime. His nose constantly sniffs for the smell of gunpowder. His ears are perpetually perked, like a cat’s, for the sound of the hammer of a gun being stealthily cocked behind him. Except for when he’s building birdhouses, he hardly ever relaxes.
Odie was on the alert that morning, sitting beside me on my porch step, scraping the label off an old beer bottle. (Odie wouldn’t think of drinking on duty.) He snapped the bubble gum in his mouth. Odie is a long-time bubble gum fan, probably something to do with all those baseball cards he used to buy. When he quit smoking last year, he became a certifiable addict. Giving up cigarettes had been George’s idea. When he died, George was pestering Odie to launch a regular running program.
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