So Much Blue

by Percival Everett

  Outside a hotel that we imagined we could afford, only because of its state of disrepair, I passed coins to Richard as he tried to place a call to the number he had been given in the embassy. The word written by the number was bummer in all lower case letters. It might have been a name or a comment, so instead of asking for someone by that name, Richard merely said the word as if it were a password. Richard covered the mouthpiece and said, “His name is Bummer.” It didn’t take much imagination to see this as a bad sign.

  “Some guy at the embassy gave me your number. He said you might be able to help me.” Before Richard could begin to describe the situation with his brother, “Wait, let me get a pencil.” I handed him a pen and he wrote on the piece of paper, was still writing after he hung up. To me he said, “We need to rent a car.”

  “Bummer?” I asked.

  “Guy sounded scary.” Richard made his voice scratchy and tried to mimic the man. “Yeah, I’m the Bummer.”

  “The Bummer?”

  “The Bummer.” He continued in his Bummer voice, “Don’t say nothing, just come to this address. Bring me some mangoes.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  In the hotel we were told of a car rental a few blocks away. A few blocks away turned out to be a short trail into an even rougher section of the city. Trash was piled without conscience against walls and into the street. A woman who might have been a prostitute leaned against a derelict car and eyed us as possible clients, though I doubt it in retrospect. It’s ever more likely that she saw us as casualties. There was no sign, but a small gravel lot with four cars and an office with a screen door. A man sat at a steel desk, his feet up, and nodded as we entered. He was dressed in a long-sleeved flannel shirt and cowboy boots in spite of the heat and ate from a box of Cracker Jack. “Welcome, gringos,” he said in a rehearsed voice and expended what turned out to be the extent of his English. “Quieres alquilar un auto?”

  “Auto, sí,” Richard said.

  “Tengo cuatro que hay.”

  Richard and I looked out at the late-fifties Ford pickup, the battered Bel Air, the Willys Commando, and the ’63 Caddy. “Lleve a su selección.”

  Richard looked at me. “I think he said to pick one.”

  “The Willys,” I said.

  “Pero sólo el Cadillac corre,” the man said.

  “Qué?” I said. “What did he say?”

  “El azul,” Richard said.

  The man shook his head. “No run. Only Cadillac.”

  “Then why did you—” Richard stopped, shook his head.

  He looked at me and I said, “If we had some bacon we could have eggs and bacon, if we had some eggs.”

  “Cuánto por el Caddy?” Richard asked.

  “Ciento,” the man said. “Un día.”

  “A hundred a day. That’s not bad,” Richard said.

  “Dólares Americanos.”

  “A hundred dollars a day? We don’t have that kind of money. No tenemos mucho.” Richard sighed.

  “Podemos darle diez,” I said. The man frowned at me. I pulled out my pockets to show him that I was poor.

  “Por favor,” Richard said.

  “Quince,” he said.

  “Okay,” Richard said and put fifteen dollars on the table.

  “Deposit,” the man said. “Ciento.”

  Richard put a hundred dollars on the desk.

  The man did not thank him.

  “Las llaves están adentro.”

  “Gracias,” Richard said.

  I thanked him also and we walked out before he could change his mind. He didn’t ask for our passports or licenses, just scooped up the money and shoved it in his breast pocket and continued to eat his Cracker Jack.

  The blue one, the ’63 Caddy Coupe de Ville, was a finned beast that screamed in American English when Richard cranked the engine. There was a hole in the muffler that somehow seemed necessary. Our right turn out of the lot fishtailed a cloud of dust behind us and when I looked through it I saw Cracker Jack watching us from the doorway. We wended our way northeast and out of the city into a rural suburb consisting of clapboard shacks and trailer homes. The Bummer’s trailer stood out as the nicest on the block; it had a door. Neighbors, chickens, and a donkey studied us as we knocked on that door.

  “Come.”

  We entered and found a man seated elbows on knees on a built-in sofa against the facing wall. He might have been thirty, but he was worn, his blond hair thin on top, his face oddly clean-shaven. The place smelled of salami and Aqua Velva. The dirty floral cushions curved up around his ass.

  “Are you Bummer?” Richard asked.

  “I’m the Bummer. Where are my mangoes?”

  “We didn’t bring them,” Richard said.

  “I ask these motherfuckers to do one thing and they fuckin’ forget,” he said as if to someone else. “One motherfuckin’ thing.”

  “Sorry about that,” Richard said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Richard Scott. I’m trying to find my brother.”

  “Who’s he?” The Bummer nodded toward me without actually looking at me. “He your driver?”

  “My friend.”

  “Kevin,” I said.

  “I don’t give half a fuck what your name is,” the Bummer said.

  “I suppose not,” I said.

  The Bummer glared at me until I looked away.

  “Like I said, I’m trying to find my brother,” Richard repeated, his voice high with fear.

  “So tell me, Richard Scott, why do you think this brother of yours is here in El Salvador?”

  “This is where he said he was headed.”

  “And just why might he be headed here?” The Bummer lit a filter-less Camel and blew the smoke up at the ceiling. “You see, I can’t think of any good reason for an American young man to come down here to this goddamn motherfucking asshole of a country.”

  “You’re here,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” he said without looking at me. “I’m here because I’m a goddamn motherfucking asshole. I’m here because I love to sweat year round. I’m here because I hate faggots like you up in the good ole U.S. of A. I’m here because I miss motherfucking Viet-fucking-nam.”

  “You’re a mercenary,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” the Bummer said and blew smoke at me. “So, tell me about this brother. This brother got a name?”

  “Tad.”

  “Sweet name. Is he a hippie faggot like you two motherfuckers? What does he look like? Tall? Short? Bald?”

  “He’s thirty-one, about my size. His hair is shorter.” Richard looked at me. “He’s got a tattoo on the left arm, a tiger and some Chinese ideograms.”

  “Ideograms,” the Bummer repeated and sneered. “What kind of drugs is he into? Does he sell guns?”

  “What?” Richard said.

  “Come on, stupid. He ain’t no missionary come down here to the third world to save greaser souls, so he’s either buying drugs or selling guns. My money’s on the drugs.”

  “It probably is drugs,” I said.

  “Probably.” The Bummer chuckled.

  Richard began to grow impatient. He bounced on the balls of his feet. “The guy at the embassy said you would be able to help me.”

  “He’s his brother,” I said, trying to appeal to some inkling of decency in the man. “He just wants to find his brother.” Even though I didn’t say it, I left the word asshole hanging in the air.

  “You got a picture?”

  Richard pulled a folded photo from his jacket pocket and handed it to the man. The Bummer didn’t examine it, but placed it facedown on the coffee table in front of him.

  “What kind of drugs?” the Bummer asked. “What does he like?”

  “Cocaine and weed,” Richard responded immediately. “That’s what he was into before.”

  “Are you college boys?” the Bummer asked.

  We said nothing. I was confused.

  “Do you boys go to c
ollege?

  “Yes,” I said.

  The Bummer smiled. “What do you take?” He paused. “In college, what do you take?”

  “I study art,” I said.

  His smile broadened. “You’re telling me that while I was sweating and pulling rat-sized leeches off my big white dick in shittin’ Vietnam you were sketching naked girls in a sunny room?”

  “Every chance I got,” I said.

  My response took him by surprise and his smile changed in quality. It was oddly less threatening, but it was clear he didn’t hate me less. “You know how many gooks I killed over there? Want me to tell you?”

  Richard looked at me and I turned and studied the scene outside the window. An older woman was hanging clothes on a line. A young, stocky boy was pushing a small rocking chair across the yard.

  “I killed me around a thousand of them. Every fuckin’ slant I saw, I killed. What do you girls think about that? About a thousand, give or take a family.”

  “I think we’re in the wrong place,” Richard said.

  I was proud of Richard in that moment and I was more than ready to leave with him.

  “Calm the fuck down,” the Bummer said. “Don’t get your skivvies all bunched up. I can find your brother. I need to know if you got any money. How much money you got?”

  “About a thousand dollars,” Richard said.

  “Do you have a grand or not?”

  “He has a thousand dollars,” I said.

  The Bummer looked out the window behind Richard and me. “I’ll do it for a grand, but only because I like you college boys.”

  Richard gave me a glance. I shrugged or suggested a shrug.

  “You pay me when the job is done,” the Bummer said. “How does that sound? Come back here tomorrow morning at seven and we’ll get started. You girls know how to wake up early?”

  “We’ll manage it,” I said.

  “About you,” the Bummer said, pointing his cigarette hand at me.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Don’t think I didn’t notice that you’re a nigger.”

  “I was afraid you missed that fact?”

  “I’m just saying,” he said. “I killed some of you over in Nam, too. You know, when nobody was looking. A lot of you motherfuckers over there.” He smiled.

  “Of course you did. I doubt you could kill anything while somebody was looking.”

  “We’ll be back in the morning,” Richard said. He grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me toward the door.

  “Good. Now go on. Squeeze out that morning wood and be here on fucking time.”

  House

  My children had little use for their father beyond the usual business of daily familial maintenance, that much was clear. It was apparent that they were not the best at loving. Since their mother seemed pretty good at it I am afraid that the blame for this deficiency fell squarely on my shoulders, even if I cannot articulate why it was so. My daughter and I were close when she was younger. Then the hormones. My general failure as a father.

  Once upon visiting Picasso’s museum in Antibes, Matisse stood staring at the Reclining Woman. Apparently the odalisque bothered him. He studied the long plywood panel for a while and then said that Picasso had done something odd with her bottom, that the two parts of it turned in a strange way. They don’t follow the other planes of her body, he said. He then took out a notebook and made a sketch of the painting which he no doubt took home to study.

  It was the same house every summer on Martha’s Vineyard. It was not our house, but it was enough ours that it wore marks that were our own, a burned spot on the kitchen counter, a chipped tile on the floor of the shower. One year I was dismayed to find a cracked board of the outdoor shower floor replaced. There were books that we had left there, that had been perused by the other people who rented the house during the other months. A small canvas of mine hung on the wall of the tiny living room. Back before the children were teenagers, the place was happy and full of light. However, as they grew older, tearing them from their friends and their world to be stranded on that island with their mother and father turned out to be difficult for everyone.

  Every morning Will and I would canoe out into the middle of the tidal pond behind the house and sit and watch the ospreys hunt and return to their nests. Once we even got to see a young one fledge. Will was twelve at the time. He became so excited that he jumped up in the canoe and capsized us. My feet sank into the deep silt of the bottom. I grabbed Will by his belt and hoisted him to the shell of the canoe. We were never in any danger and once we were both latched onto the boat we began to laugh hysterically. I righted the canoe, pushed him in, and managed to haul myself in as well. We were soaked but didn’t care. Will cared about the osprey only insofar as it was a necessary piece in the story of our capsize. When he got back to the house, he told the story in great detail, laughing harder than before, describing the look on my face, how cold the water felt. April laughed with him at first then she faded into the background. I watched her recession.

  There was an old barn on the property, not large, nearly ready to fall over, and I used it for painting. I have to say that I was very happy every month we spent there and yet I had never made a single painting there that I liked even a little bit. Not until that day, that day when I watched my daughter’s quiet insecurity, perhaps jealousy, reveal itself. That night I didn’t sleep, but opened my notes and composed a small painting, Fledgling Blue, that would become the seminal image of my large private painting. My daughter’s reaction, as brief, as fleeting, as little revisited as it was, was, I believed, my first actual glimpse of her love for me. I recognized the vanity of my thinking immediately, but that wasn’t sufficient to dismiss it. I wanted her to love me as I loved her. I wanted her to love me the way I imagined she loved me when she was little.

  On that little canvas, everything I had ever tried to make came together. My desire to understand something about submergence— that was the word I used, thinking it was clear enough to me and knowing that it was completely baffling to others—was replaced with an attempt to create a metaphor for the biological. The edges of my shapes, my lines, they all softened, my colors became less metal, less earth, and became, for lack of a better word, cellular.

  The next morning, I awoke before Will, but found April pushing around her cereal at the kitchen table. I sat across from her and poured cereal into my own bowl. Her mother was in the shower.

  “Hey, kiddo, I was wondering if you might like to go out in the canoe with me this morning.”

  “Will is still asleep.”

  “Will can stay here this morning. You never go out with me. Alone, that is. I thought it would be nice for a change.”

  “Okay.”

  We finished breakfast and walked across the wet lawn to the beach and the canoe. April sat down in the front and I pushed us out into the pond. We paddled with the tide out into the middle. Easy going. We stopped out there and just drifted. The ospreys came and went and were as beautiful as ever. We said little, usually, “Look at that one.” We never saw the baby. The day grew hot, the sun intense.

  “Can we go back now?” April asked.

  “Of course.”

  But paddling back was against the current. I paddled and paddled but could make no headway. April would paddle a few strokes and then become inattentive, willfully distracted, which would have been fine if she hadn’t left her idle paddle in the water and so turned us every time. It took three times as long to fight the current and get us back to our beach.

  Will met us as we approached the house. He was excited that we had been out. “Did you see the baby?” he asked.

  April walked by without looking at him, said in flat, hollow voice just loud enough to be heard, “Fuck you.”

  Apparently the aging Monet lost confidence in his late works and wanted to set fire to them. What patience he must have had to wait until he was old to feel that. And oh the differences in our problems, Monet and I. He was struggling with how to make th
e paint render clear water with grass moving beneath the surface. I struggled to understand why the fuck I was painting. I recalled my grandfather seeing one of my early paintings just before his death. It was a medium-sized canvas, perhaps three by four feet, with lots of greens and blues, the colors applied beside each other in rough, quick strokes, a sphere of ocher and Indian yellow loosely mixed with white trying to erupt near the center. Stenciled across the bottom of the canvas in a fairly straight line was the word depiction in lower case letters. My grandfather smiled at me, said, “I like it. But Kevin, do any roads lead home from irony?”

  Years earlier, when the children had a bedtime, Linda and I found our way to the porch once they were put down. I was still smoking at the time and also still drinking and I might have been a little drunk. I lit my cigar in the dark. The red-orange glow of it made me want to paint. Linda was wearing her hair tied tightly back, the way I’d told her I liked. Long ago when I’d asked her to marry me I think it was my deep sadness and melancholy that made her say yes. She was a romantic and I suspect she thought she could save me. I suppose I thought the same.

  “Look at the fireflies,” Linda said.

  I watched the insects. “There are far fewer than there used to be. What do you think that means?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “End of the world maybe,” I said.

  And suddenly, as if to prove me wrong, nature put a riot of fireflies in front of us. They were marvelous and I felt small. “Or maybe we’ll live forever,” I said.

  “Cool,” Linda said.

  “Cool?”

  “Too much time with Will.”

  “So, tell me, when did you know you loved me?” I asked.

  “I know exactly the moment I fell in love with you. We were in that little bar, the one that burned, and we were talking about painting and I asked you why you loved it so much.”