The Black Painting

by Neil Olson

  Teresa did not see how a soul in this state of collapse could manage to create such a brilliant and devastating work. Sadness and compassion welled up in her, drowning out all other feeling. She was not afraid. Perhaps because the blood that protected her father protected her also. Or possibly because she had been immunized by her previous viewing. Fifteen years ago, the night before her grandmother’s funeral. When her father Ramón had taken her into the study and shown her the painting. She ran her hand across the slash mark her cousin had made hours later, trying valiantly to heal her. Teresa’s eyes filled again. She grasped his cold hand and looked up at him. His gaze had not moved from her face for an instant.

  “Thank you, James. Thank you for saving me.”

  His face showed confusion, then transformed into an expression of astonishment Teresa had never seen there.

  “Did we do it?” he asked thickly, his throat full. “Is it gone?”

  “Yes,” she assured him. “Yes, it’s gone.”

  He smiled. There was blood on his teeth. It dribbled over his lower lip, and then he pitched forward. Teresa caught him, but his weight pressed them both to the cold bed of leaves. She extracted herself from under him and, with great effort, rolled him onto his back. His eyes looked vacantly skyward. The bubbling blood at his mouth told her he was still breathing. It was only then she noticed the dark patch on his coat. She pulled it open gently to see the large red stain on the T-shirt underneath. One of Pete’s bullets had found its mark. Teresa tugged her phone out and dialed 911, squeezing James’ hand as she calmly reported shots fired, one victim and possibly more, and the address. Then she pulled her sweatshirt over her head and looked for a clean patch.

  “I’m not sorry,” James said weakly. “Some people never do anything important with their lives.”

  “This is going to hurt,” said Teresa, “but it’s necessary.”

  He grabbed her wrists before she could press the balled shirt to his wound. His hands were still remarkably strong.

  “I am sorry about Grandma.”

  “You didn’t hurt her.”

  “I did,” he gasped, the pain finally hitting. “I pushed her down the steps on the terrace. I didn’t mean to. I was misbehaving, and she said I had a devil in me. It made me so mad. I was fighting off the demon every day, like you were. He wanted us, but we were fighting him, and then she said that.”

  “It’s okay, let me stop the bleeding now.”

  “I didn’t know. I didn’t know children could hurt grown-ups. Grandpa saw.”

  “I’m sure he knew it was an accident.”

  “He never told, but he never forgave me. All those years, writing down my mistakes. He wanted me locked away.”

  A spasm of pain made him grab at the wound and kick his feet. When it backed off he no longer had strength to resist, and Teresa pressed the shirt to the wound.

  “It hurts,” James whimpered.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, not relieving the pressure. “I have to.”

  “I know. I know you would never hurt me for no reason. You’ve always tried to help, I know that.”

  “I’ve done nothing,” she cried, choking on the words. “I’ve been useless.”

  “You understood,” he whispered, closing his eyes. “You always understood me. That meant so much.”

  “Open your eyes, James. Talk to me.”

  “I’m not sorry about Grandpa,” he said defiantly. “I’m not sorry about him.”

  “He said that he wanted you locked up? Like, an institution?”

  “He was the one who needed locking up. Him. He said I would have to be there a long time. And Audrey. Audrey would have to be my guardian.”

  “To get the money,” Teresa said.

  “I was so proud of her when she burned the letter. So proud of us all.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I told him it was his fault. What I am, he made me. I tried to destroy it, but it went inside of me instead. Then when I tried to hide, when I tried to hide from what it had done to me, it was there. In our secret place, Tay. I climbed in and it was there, waiting for me.”

  “I know.” She could not tell him it was Audrey. That would be too cruel.

  “He didn’t believe. Grandpa. He waved his hand like I was...”

  A coughing fit took the rest, and he turned his face to spit a red wad. A gunshot sounded in the faraway woods. Then another. The fight had moved. God help them all. Teresa hoisted James’ head onto her leg so he could breathe, while keeping what pressure she could on the wound. The sweatshirt was nearly soaked. Too fast. Too much blood. Such a small gun and so much blood.

  “Okay,” she said, “don’t think about that. Just breathe.”

  “I had to show him,” James gasped, sounding exhausted. “I had to show him what he made. I let the demon appear.”

  “You got the canvas from the attic and put it on.”

  “I let it appear,” he repeated stubbornly. “Unlocked the window. Ilsa drove me to the train but I didn’t get on. I came back. I let the demon appear in the study. Grandpa would come there at night, when he couldn’t sleep. He walked in and saw it in his chair and...he believed then. Just for a minute, or half a minute, before it took his soul. But he believed it all then.”

  He clenched up again, but only briefly before he seemed to relax completely. Teresa thought she had lost him, but he was still there.

  “I shouldn’t have let it appear,” James said. “It’s had me ever since. I thought we might put it back inside, you know? Like Goya did, we might do it again. I don’t know how you... How did you defeat it?”

  “We did it together.”

  “Don’t let them lock me up, please.”

  “I won’t,” she promised. “I won’t let that happen.”

  “I’m tired. I’m going to stop now. You keep talking.”

  “What should I say?”

  “Anything. Say anything, I like your voice. Tell me a story.”

  So Teresa did. She told a long and rambling tale she would not remember later. About a boy who fought a demon and won. She spoke forcefully and without cease while pressing the shirt to his chest, until she heard the approaching wail of the ambulance. She went on talking, went on weaving the myth long after James had gone still.

  28

  It had struck Dave before that personal insights came during times of duress, and were usually fleeting. The night he found Ray Castro—or whatever his real name was—murdered in North Miami, the adrenal surge of fear and the relief at escaping alive rearranged his perspective. Driving away, he wanted desperately to call Luisa. Not to harangue her for being an emotional coward, nor to beg her to come back. But to thank her for sticking with him as long as she did, and apologize for everything he had put her through. He never made the call. Struggling now with a frantic Pete Mulhane, head screaming and blind in one eye, Dave remembered that old impulse, and wondered if he would live long enough to make good on it this time.

  Pete had punched him twice and was going for three when he inexplicably paused. Only then did Dave see Audrey’s arm on Pete’s throat, pulling him backward. Dave assisted with a kick in the stomach that sent the other two reeling, then looked around for the pistol. A little black nine-millimeter, Glock maybe. Dave didn’t know guns that well. There it was, near the base of the oak. No sooner did he start toward it than a foot struck his face. He could not say if it was Pete or Audrey, nor even what day of the week it was for a couple of seconds. Someone kicked the gun, which sailed past him into the weeds. He heard a few more thumps and grunts before his senses returned. As he sat up, Audrey was rushing away into the trees. Pete was nowhere in sight. Nor was Teresa, whom Dave had not seen since he tackled Pete. He crawled over to the crushed and fragrant weeds, but it was too much to hope the gun was still there. One of them had it, no knowing which.

  He rose slowl
y, glad that he had vomited already and did not need to again. Then he lumbered in the direction that Audrey had disappeared. Trees continually leaped in front of him, and Dave careened off these without falling. Stealth was not possible, and probably pointless. Pete, he guessed, had moved from fight to flight, and Audrey was pursuing, armed or not. He didn’t like any of their chances, but someone was bound to survive, and it could as easily be Dave as anyone else. He began to succumb to morbid laughter, but it hurt and he stopped. The woods. Oh, man, he hated the woods.

  Back in the sightless pines, a gunshot made him stop and crouch. Another followed it quickly, but there was no whirr of bullets passing. He was near the lawn, and pulled branches aside for a better look. Within moments, he spied two figures racing across the green. Dave stood warily, then bulled his way through to the grass.

  He saw Audrey first, in the dust-caked jeans and tank top, the pistol held out before her in both hands. Pete was thirty feet beyond, backing up slowly toward the sea ledge and talking fast. Dave shouted something a dog might understand; he sure as hell did not. But it got Audrey’s attention, and a moment later the pistol was pointed at him.

  “Jus, jus hoedon,” he heaved. “Youdawanna.”

  “What the fuck are you saying?” she demanded. The mad look was in her eyes. She did not know him right now, or knowing him would not matter.

  “You don’t want to shoot anyone today,” Dave translated for himself.

  “Oh yeah,” she said, eyeing him along the top of the black pistol. She had a bloody nose and brightly flushed cheeks. “I do.” She swung ninety degrees back toward Pete. “This son of a bitch right here.”

  “I was protecting all of us,” Pete insisted. “You saw that, that...”

  “All I see is some psycho ex-con, who beats up and shoots everyone he runs into. You don’t deserve to live.”

  “Nobody deserves to live,” Pete said savagely. “You can’t judge me. No one in your twisted family can judge me.”

  “Stay still.”

  “I ain’t moving. Shoot if you’ve got the nerve, little girl.”

  “Audrey,” Dave said sharply, approaching within a dozen feet. “You can’t do that.”

  “Watch me.”

  “You can’t take it back when you stop being angry. It’s permanent.”

  “Shut up,” she snarled. “You’re next.”

  “What do you got against him?” Pete asked.

  “He’s a thief.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, good for you, man. Steal everything you can from these cheap pricks. They don’t pay their debts.”

  “Pete,” Dave said, seeing the man was a yard from the ledge. “Don’t take another step.”

  Dave was now six feet from Audrey. Close enough to rush her. She noticed the same thing from the corner of her eye and took two quick steps forward. Dave saw her close one eye, saw her fingers go white and the muscles in her forearm clench. All the signs of someone a split second from pulling the trigger, and yet he knew she would not.

  “Stop,” Audrey commanded. Whether she was telling Pete to stand still, or warning him, or speaking to someone or something else entirely, Dave did not know. Pete only registered her quick advance and instinctively retreated. To where no ground supported him. He plunged backward over the ledge and was gone.

  Audrey made a confused noise as her arms fell to her sides. Dave’s gut dropped with the ex-Marine, ex-handyman, ex-con who had gotten the better of him three times. He pulled a quick breath and rushed to the edge. It was not so far a fall, thirty feet at most. But it was steep and rocky and Pete had landed badly. The water surging around him obscured any sign of blood, but he was completely still. A piece of ragged flotsam in the white surf.

  “How do we get down there?” Dave asked, turning back to Audrey. Only to find the pistol pointed at him again. Her expression had changed. She looked hurt and fragile, and sorry about what she had to do next.

  “You were supposed to protect us,” she said, her voice breaking. Dave felt the rebuke deep within his sore chest. God knew he had tried. There were so many lies and agendas. But he hated excuses and explanations himself, and could see Audrey wanted none. She intended to act this time, and he guessed he knew what she would do.

  “I failed, Audrey. We fail sometimes.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I let my brother die.”

  That took him a moment, but only a moment. The ghostly figure in the trees that Pete had shot at.

  “We don’t know. He may be all right.”

  “No. He died years ago. Everything since. Trying to protect him all this time, it was pointless.”

  Dave started toward her, slow and steady. She raised the weapon higher.

  “Just because I didn’t shoot Pete doesn’t mean I won’t shoot you.”

  “It’s not me you want to hurt.”

  Four steps, three steps, two. She turned the gun on herself as he reached her. He caught her wrist with his left hand and seized the top of the pistol with his right. She hit his shoulder with her free hand and the barrel swung back and forth, pointing briefly at each of them. But her finger never squeezed, and a moment later he had the gun away from her. She punched his chest a few more times, but there was no screaming or crying. Her face looked like someone who had just woken up.

  After a time, Audrey dropped her arms and stared past him to the water. The breeze off the Sound was cold. Dave waited half a minute longer and put his arms around her. She was stiff as a corpse at first, but eventually relaxed into his embrace. Not returning it.

  “Everything is so messed up.”

  “Yes,” he agreed.

  “What am I going to do, Davie?”

  “I don’t know. What would your brother want you to do?”

  She had no answer for that, but it occupied her mind as he walked her back toward the house.

  29

  In 1824 Francisco de Goya traded his internal exile for the truer kind, moving to Bordeaux, where he died four years later. Medical treatment was the official reason, but disaffection with the reactionary regime in Spain was the more likely cause. Or maybe, Teresa considered, he just needed to escape the house he had defaced with his misery. He never recorded his feelings about the Black Paintings. He never spoke of them. Leading many to assume that he had not made them, for how could work of such terrifying magnificence go unmentioned? Goya suffered the usual illnesses and regrets of old men, but as far as history could report, no demon haunted his last days.

  “You think it was all invented?” Dave asked, hunched over his coffee. He had a small reddish dent on his forehead that was likely permanent, but otherwise he was unbruised and unhampered by pain for the first time since Teresa had met him.

  “All what? There was a painting. We saw it.”

  “You know what I mean. The power to unhinge the mind. To kill.”

  “Art has power,” Teresa said, clutching her own coffee mug. The November chill on Amsterdam Avenue had gotten to her. “We’re moved to tears by poetry, or by music.”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “It is,” she insisted. “It’s a matter of degree. People walk out of disturbing plays, or have heart attacks during movies. There’s this bad boy author whose stuff is so provocative that audience members pass out at his readings.”

  “That’s, like, power of suggestion or something.”

  “Exactly. That’s exactly what it is. Grandpa Morse invites a nervous, overweight expert to see the portrait. The guy has already heard and read everything. He’s strung tight as a bow. The scene is set, the lights are dim, he’s left alone to pull off the cloth and...”

  “Kapow goes his heart,” said Dave, nodding. “You think Alfred meant to kill him?”

  “He couldn’t have planned on it, but I don’t think he was sorry.”

  “That’s what DeGross said.” Dave lean
ed back and glanced around the cramped Hungarian Pastry Shop. Students, visitors to Saint John the Divine Cathedral across the street, artists, the lost and lonely, all crowded in on this gray day to load up on caffeine and oversweet strudel. Despite being rested and healed, Dave was missing something vital, Teresa thought. He was like one of those working dogs—a border collie, maybe—when it did not have a job to do. Anxious and blue. “What about James?”

  “What about him?”

  “That wasn’t just fear. It sounds like he became someone else.”

  “You never knew him,” Teresa said sadly. “You relied on my portrayal, and I’ve come to understand that I didn’t know him either. Not everything. I heard more from Laurena about the incidents at school, going at Audrey with the knife. Apparently he could be violent, on small provocation. Look, he shoved my grandmother down the terrace steps before he had even seen the portrait. The sweet part of him, which was real, which is who he mostly was, couldn’t reconcile his own behavior. He needed an explanation. It was the painting making him do it. He fought and lost, and then it owned him. He was sweet, gentle James ninety percent of the time. And the demon when he was angry, when he wanted to harm. I don’t think it was put on. I think he believed it completely.”

  “That’s pretty extraordinary,” he said. Sounding either skeptical or disappointed, she could not tell which.

  “I’m sorry, Dave. Did you want it to be magic?”

  He looked briefly irritated, but then smiled.

  “Sure. Didn’t you?”

  “Once upon a time.”