He was muttering to himself, more real curses: goddam, fuck it, son of a bitch. The next words he aimed directly at her. “I did not break in here.” He flicked his ashes toward the mouth of a dented Bud Light can. “I have a key.”
A key? Was that what he’d said? She moved a few steps toward him to hear better, but everything was still too dark and she tripped over the sleeping bag, exposing the clothing and other items he’d tried to hide under it as she entered. Getting up from her knees, she watched him kick a Red Wings baseball cap back under the pile, then tried too late to pretend she hadn’t seen it, as bile soured in her throat.
“You know who I am,” he said. Not asking a question, but accusing her.
With an abrupt surge of clarity she had not felt in months, she understood her immediate situation like a conditional case from the logic portion of the SATs. If he is living here, then he does not have the money to pay for the scrip pad I brought to sell to him. She remembered the tip from the book of practice tests: Conditionals are false only when the first condition (if) is true and the second condition (then) is false. All other cases are true.
She hesitated, unsure what to say. Was he asking if she recognized him as one of her father’s employees? Or was he trying to tell if she knew that the baseball cap meant he was the ATM robber? Or was he referring to both? In the end she settled on half of the truth. “You’re the new guy, the last one my father hired. So you stole the key when he was still working here, right?”
“Well, shit.” He rubbed his face, and at first she thought he might be crying. Then she remembered the red eyes running, the way he kept wiping them with his bandanna when he came over for the barbecue on Labor Day. “I wouldn’t have had to steal anything if I still had a job, now would I?” His face twitched, and he looked not directly at her but down at the empty chip and candy bar wrappers that lay in a pile beside his feet. “Was the new guy. Was,” he repeated, his voice containing a fresh level of hostility. “Your father shit-canned me.”
She’d never heard the term before, and absurdly, through the dismay mounting in her throat, it struck her as funny. Shit-canned. She figured out its meaning from the context, something Mrs. Carbone always urged them to do.
“If he did that, he didn’t have a choice,” she said, thinking of the conversations she’d overhead at the dinner table after being excused to do her homework, when they hadn’t known she was listening. Listening was how she learned the meanings of “underwater” and “equity,” too. “He was going bankrupt. Is going. Didn’t you know that? The economy.”
“‘The economy.’” He repeated her words in a mocking tone. “That’s bullshit. People still need their cat doors, don’t they?”
“I don’t know.” She faltered. No, she wanted to say. Not cat doors, which was the type of thing her father seemed to be doing—when he did get called—after the condos went belly-up and before the more general meltdown. His work had dried up even before Wall Street went south; after the crash, the burst bubble, the global financial crisis, she heard him say he should have seen it all coming, it was like the rumbles that happen in the farthest underground, before the earthquake hits.
Then she remembered where she’d seen this man since the day of the barbecue. “But you have that job at the shack, right?”
“Jesus, that shithole.” Then he began muttering, another thing she remembered from when he was at her house. “Why does this kind of thing always happen to me? All I’m trying to do is make some money to get the hell out of here. Head south, whatever. But then you show up—it had to be you, right? Of course it did—and give me another goddam problem to deal with.” He moved closer and she stepped back, reaching behind her for the doorknob. “What do you need to be doing this for? You got enough money for those fancy boots.” He gestured down at her feet.
“They’re fakes,” she said, the muscles in her legs growing mossy beneath her. “Really. They’re not waterproof, they leak. My feet are so cold they’re numb.” She yanked at the knob and it came off in her hand.
The man—whose name she remembered now, irrelevantly, was Cliff Ott (not Pete, that was only his nickname)—began to laugh, so hard he had to bend over. “Oh, that’s beautiful,” he said. “Perfect! Nice job, Gil. Way to be a craftsman.” Craftsman—it was a word she’d heard her father use over and over to describe the people he most admired and what he aspired to be. From the time she was little and showed him her first drawings, he talked about her craft, and it made her feel she was doing something important, even as she struggled to understand what he meant.
She knew she should fling open the door and run, but her legs had turned from moss to water. I have got to figure a way out of this, she thought. Until now she’d imagined that all of it could be undone or at least recovered, maybe even redeemed. Yet the statement If you have gone too far, then you cannot go back again had to be true.
Somehow, the busted knob—its failure to perform the function it was designed for—appeared to energize him, and he moved behind her to lean against the door. Blocking the only exit, she realized, unless she were to run into the bedroom, throw open a window, and scramble out, assuming he didn’t follow and catch her. It would not be smart, she understood, to attempt such a thing, and anyway, she did not trust her body to do as she commanded.
“You’re not going to hurt me or anything, right?” How much she would have given for him to reassure her of this.
“Why would I hurt you?” But it wasn’t an answer to her question.
“Because I can leave right now and not say a word to anybody.” Her voice trembled, but that could work in her favor, she thought. Nothing wrong with letting him know she was scared, that she understood he had power over her. “I’m already in trouble, there’s no reason for me to let them know I was trespassing here.”
He sucked so hard on his cigarette that her own lungs hurt, watching. “So you remember me coming to your house?”
“Of course.” Duh, she might have said in a different circumstance. How else would I know who you are? Instead she said, “Why wouldn’t I?” wondering how he would respond if she tried to flatter him.
“Well, you spent all your time with that black guy. I figured you must be doing him, all that whispering in the hall. Then you brought him into your bedroom.”
Doing him. It took her a few stunned moments to understand what he meant. Then, without planning to, she gave a bitter bleat. “I wasn’t doing him.” Could it possibly be worth appealing to his sympathy? “My mother was.”
She was ashamed to feel gratified by the interested flash she saw in his face as he took this in. Regretting her revelation, wanting to move his attention away from it, she added, “He’s an artist; we were talking about art. He’s working on this big piece, people on a plane right before it goes down. His father died that way. He does this kind of art called hyperreal, trying to show everything realer than it actually is.”
Hearing this rush of words come out of her mouth, she thought of the story Mrs. Carbone had taught them about the queen telling tales to the king who intended to kill her, managing to keep him so interested in hearing the next one that he continued to spare her. Talking to keep herself alive.
Babbling, Delaney would have called it. You’re babbling, dude.
Cliff said, “That’s bullshit. ‘Realer than it actually is.’ Art, fart,” he added, making himself laugh. Momentarily distracted by the sight of his rotted teeth, she failed to notice that he’d been gradually pushing her without touching her, directing her with his own movement away from the door and toward the center of the room.
“They’d find you, you know. If something happened to me.” Something has already happened to me. “They’d figure out I was coming to meet you.”
“No, they wouldn’t.” When he exhaled with impatient certainty, she told herself not to turn her head at the smell of his breath. “The kid at the nursing home, your partner there, doesn’t know who I am. And the phone I used to call him is at the bottom of t
hat pond.” He gestured out the window, toward the woods and the safety she now craved on the other side. “Everybody thinks I’m so stupid, but they’re the ones who haven’t figured it out yet, right?” His voice held a tinge of triumph.
“Here,” she said, reaching into her jacket and pulling out the blank pad Delaney had given her. “Just make sure you take it across the state line, to Vermont or something, so you don’t set off the flag at the pharmacies around here.” Though she knew it was a desperate wish, she thought wildly that maybe if she just gave him what he wanted, along with advice that could be useful, he would let her go out of appreciation.
He took it from her, squinted, and recited “Geoffrey Stowell, M.D.” “Where’d you get it?”
“This friend of mine. Her father’s a shrink.”
“So, what, you and the nursing home guy split it with her?”
“No. She owes me.” She remembered the Facebook message Delaney sent her when she got her SAT scores: Almost 2 good, dude. My mother sez they musta sent the wrong ones—jeez tks Mom! “Well, she doesn’t really owe me,” Joy amended. If she confessed to being a criminal herself, would he feel a kinship between them? “She paid me for it. But then I kind of blackmailed her.”
Blackmail was not how she had thought of it, of course; she just considered it a bonus, on top of what she charged Delaney originally for a job well done. But “blackmail” was the word the police chief had used, when Joy worked up the courage to tell him that she knew what he’d done to cover up Mrs. Carbone’s arrest. “Bullshit,” Mr. Armstrong had said, after demanding to know how she’d found his private cell number. (She refused to say she’d gotten it from Delaney, who’d taken it off her father’s phone when he wasn’t looking.) “I already had your charges dropped—that’s all you’re getting.” When she remained quiet at the other end of the line, he swore again and asked what she wanted. She faltered; was she really doing this? Blackmailing a police officer? She sputtered out ten thousand and he complied within an hour, but not before calling her a little twat.
How she wished she had her phone now. Her fingers twitched at the thought of it.
Keeping his eyes on the scorched wall behind her, Cliff showed his teeth again, though the sound he made was something other than amusement. “Gil Enright’s kid blackmailing somebody. Guy won’t pay anyone under the table, even for just moving a fucking fridge. What’d he do when he found out?”
She shook her head and shivered at the image. “He doesn’t know.” Then, as if it mattered to the man who stood in front of her, barring her escape, she said, “I’m not really the kind of person who does those kinds of things.”
Now he did laugh. “Yes, you are. You just told me you did them. That makes you that kind of person.” He lit a new cigarette, crushing the spent one into the carpet under his boot. “If you aren’t ‘that kind of person,’ then who is?”
“Okay.” What was he, some kind of a philosopher all of a sudden? If she weren’t so terrified, she would have scoffed. “You’re right.”
She had said it only to appease him, but a second later she realized it was true. Hadn’t she been the kind of person to do this kind of thing as far back as second grade, when she only pretended to call her mother from the mall that day to ask if it would be okay to adopt a cat?
No, she told herself. That’s not fair. I was only a little kid who wanted a kitten. It was another thing she would confess to her parents tonight.
But Cliff appeared not to be listening. “There were a whole lot of things I always said I’d never be, either. Now I’m pretty much all of them.”
Watching him as he spoke, she saw suddenly how she would draw his face if she ever got out of this. A mere sketch of the features themselves, with some shadowed nuance to the rheumy eyes and perpetual scowl. Her pictures were not the kind that would ever help the police catch anyone. That was for realists, like Martin. Hers were portraits of what she felt when she looked at someone, or at a scene. If she were to draw Cliff Ott, it would be an attempt to capture her own fear as she stood before him—along with (she realized) his.
She was in a hole she had dug herself, she understood then, remembering what Mrs. Carbone had taught them about the value of literature. When people get themselves into a hole, other people like to watch them try to get out.
“I just want to go home,” she said, knowing it wouldn’t do any good but unable to hold back the wish. Home—how fully it hurt saying the word out loud now, as if someone were pulling a jagged rag up her throat and out. In the past few months, she’d thought of home as the place her mother had poisoned. She could barely bring herself to remember the suspicion she confirmed, by reading her mother’s texts back in September, that she was having sex with her teaching assistant. Joy’s disillusionment in Martin had been profound—she’d felt so inspired talking to him about art—but it was nothing compared to the anger she felt toward her mother.
But now it occurred to her, as it had not before, that she herself had been a source of the poison, too. Resolve surged within her: starting tonight, they would reclaim their life as a family. The three of them: Team Us.
Now Cliff looked directly at her, and everything inside her dropped and turned sour. He focused on her face as if it were the first one he’d seen since emerging from a cave he’d been trapped in for years, and she tried but failed to avoid understanding what this might mean. “If you go around blackmailing people,” he said, “that means you have money somewhere, right?”
But maybe, instead, this was another chance. Feeling the words rise and spout like a hose gushing, she said, “Yes! I do have money. If you let me go, I’ll bring it to you. Sixty thousand, give or take, in cash.” Exaggerating the amount so he’d jump at it.
“Where?”
“In my bedroom. Hidden behind my drawings, inside the frames.” As soon as the words were out and she read his expression, she understood her mistake. Gasped on the enormity of it. Here she was supposed to be so smart, and she’d just said the stupidest possible thing.
She thought, I’m not going to see my mother again.
At the nursing home the cat had jumped into her lap, and instinctively, exclaiming, she shot up to dump him out. But it was too late; she’d already been marked. “I guess that means you’re next,” her father said, trying to make her laugh.
Cliff stepped closer and whispered, “It would’ve been better for both of us if you hadn’t recognized me. When I asked if you knew who I was. It would’ve been better if you just lied and said no.”
The jagged rag started to strangle her from within. Choking, she cried out, “I won’t tell anybody. Nobody has to know,” and without planning it, she reached up to touch his face. He yelped as if a snake had bitten him, then lunged to grab at the scarf around her neck. She backed up, but she’d run out of room.
“I told you I’m not going to hurt you,” he whispered, and in the last moment because it was what they both needed, she let herself believe him.
After—The Last
June 9, 2014
ArtLife
The New York Report
Martin Willett’s new installation Souls on Board at the Mirage Gallery is a breathtaking visual and visceral experience, but not for the faint of heart. Measuring 144 square feet and occupying an entire wall, the mural depicts passengers on an airliner moments before a lightning strike plunges them all to their deaths.
The piece launches Willett—who made his debut at Mirage in 2010 with the deservedly lauded American Commonplace series, and who received a substantial Cusk Foundation grant for emerging artists the following year—firmly into the ranks of the most intriguing high realists working in the country today.
Willett derived his inspiration for Souls on Board from the 1997 airliner crash that killed his father and 148 others. “Originally, I conceived of the piece as a grid of panels, each one a self-contained portrait,” he says. “But then I realized that these aren’t separate stories—they’re separate experiences of the same sto
ry.”
It is a considerable challenge to describe what Willett manages to convey. The grim nature of the mural’s subject matter is offset in part by his choice of vibrant color, which emphasizes aspects of the passengers’ faces even more than the impasto technique he employs with judiciousness and nerve. Only stepping back, considering, does the viewer realize that these colors are far brighter than in “real life.”
In the context of the passengers’ plight (which we know but they do not, yet), the hyperintensity feels perfectly apt, and true. Approaching the mural, we realize that all we may have taken for granted at first glance bears a closer look, revealing crucial details we didn’t originally notice.
A teenage boy wears earbuds and an expression no doubt aiming at nonchalance, but we can tell that in fact he feels moved by whatever he’s hearing through that private sound system; his lips, parted in a tremble, give him away. A woman in a severely cut business suit has slipped her socks and shoes under the seat in front of her and seems almost giddy at the sensation of flexing her naughtily naked feet.
The most prominent and compelling portrait is that of the man in a window seat who appears to be reading, but who is in fact holding the book upside-down, his attention obviously elsewhere. The subject of this portrait is Willett’s father, James. Though Willett says he has an idea of what may have been distracting his father (who died when the artist was twelve), he declines to discuss it.
The racial distribution among the passengers in the piece reflects that of the actual flight manifest: mostly white, along with a few subjects of African-American, Hispanic or Latino, and Asian ethnicity. Though Willett prefers to avoid addressing the social politics of race in his art, he is no stranger to it in his own life. As a student at Genesee Valley Academy of Fine Arts in upstate New York five years ago, he was arrested in the murder case of Joy Enright, the teenage daughter of one of Willett’s teachers. Originally believed drowned, the girl was later discovered strangled. The charges against Willett were dropped when police focused on another suspect. But in the aftermath of his release, the Rochester home he had inherited from his grandmother, and in which he was raised, burned to the ground in what police believe was arson with racial motivations.
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