Tumbledown

by Robert Boswell

  “At least there’s no box score for strippers in the paper,” Billy pointed out. “Nothing saying she went oh for five or whatever a stripper would go oh for. Not the paper we get, anyway. Maybe we subscribe to the wrong paper.”

  “I used to do that, you know, dance in a club,” she said, terrified by her own boldness, but with only forty-eight—forty-seven now—hours left, what did she have to lose? “This was when I was kid, of course. A dumb kid.”

  “I had no idea,” Candler said at the same moment Billy Atlas said, “Marry me.”

  There was no point now in not being brave. “I moved to California after high school. It wasn’t the only work I could get, but it paid more than anything else, and . . . I don’t look back on it with pride, but I don’t blame that stupid girl I was for doing it.” She was making it sound like it was ages ago, but otherwise she was telling the truth. “You think I’m some skank now?”

  “Of course not,” Candler said.

  “No wisecracks?”

  “I could come up with some if you want, but—”

  “No,” she said, and took his arm. She added scotch to their cups. “I like this better.”

  “I always wanted to date a stripper,” Billy said. “Or any other woman.”

  “Some men get ugly about it,” she said, “and I keep it a secret. But sooner or later, it feels like there’s this dark patch that I have to avoid, have to work my way around. Unless I fess up about it. And the timing, you know. If I mention it right off, that sends the wrong signal too.”

  Candler put his arm around her and pointed to the Astros’ right fielder. “That guy throws like a girl,” he said. “I mean, he can throw farther and with more accuracy than nine out of ten men, but watch him warm up. It’s like his arms are webbed and he can’t fully extend.”

  “Some girls throw perfectly well,” she said slapping at his chest.

  “And he’s one of them. He’s a helluva player or will be. In a year or two.”

  “Remember that game,” Billy began.

  “You know I do,” Candler replied. “I was just thinking of it.”

  “What game?” Lise asked.

  “Just a ballgame played in a dirt lot,” Candler said. “Maybe twenty years ago.”

  “For some reason we both remember it perfectly,” Billy said, “as if it happened last week.”

  “Did something bad go on?”

  The both shook their heads. “It was a good game, close score, a few nice plays, though nothing spectacular.”

  “We both had hits,” Billy said. “Just singles, but still.”

  “We played after school, and it was fall weather, dusk by the late innings.”

  “I was the first baseman,” Billy said. “Jimmy was shortstop. It was just a pickup game but we managed to get seventeen kids to play, eight on a team, and this kid Pumper caught for both teams.”

  “Any girls playing?”

  “Three or four girls,” Candler said. “Vi played, my sister.”

  “Three girls.” Billy counted with his fingers. “Vi, Bobby Orton’s little sister Meg, and that beautiful Mexican girl you dated in junior high.”

  “Delia Almadova,” Candler said. “Isn’t that the most musical name?”

  “She was a terrible left fielder.”

  “Not in that game.”

  Billy shrugged and nodded simultaneously. “Caught that fly all the way out by the mesquite bush. I remember.”

  “I don’t get it,” Lise said. “Why do you guys always think about this one game?”

  “Hard to say,” Candler said. “It was just one of those days when you loved playing ball.”

  “When there wasn’t any fight,” Billy said, “or argument over a call, and no sad plays.”

  “Sad plays?” Lise asked. “What are sad plays?”

  “Sometimes even if you hit the ball hard, the way it’s caught makes you happy,” Billy said. “Other times there’s a collision, bleeding elbows, and temper. Or the game’s so sloppy it’s no fun. You know, we lost that game—Jimmy and I were on the same team. We lost by a run on a ninth-inning rally, but it’s still the game we always think about.”

  “That’s why you remember it, because you were teammates.”

  “We almost always were,” Candler said. “We didn’t like competing against each other.”

  “Too intense,” Billy agreed.

  A foul ball lifted from the bat of the Padres’ center fielder and came flying their way. They all three stood, but it fell several seats short of them. The person who retrieved the ball—after it bounced off several hands—waved it grandly above his head, and he was cheered. He had spilled beer down his shirt.

  “My dad used to take me to the ballpark,” Lise said. “We listened to games together on the radio when I was really young, and he had these funny things he’d say.”

  “Like what?” one of them asked.

  “A player would get a hit against a good pitcher, and he’d shake his head and say, You could shoot that ball out of a cannon and some of these boys’d hit it.”

  Her boys laughed.

  “I remember the shortstop for the Cubs,” she said, “Sean something.”

  “Shawon Dunston,” Billy said, spelling his name. “Arm like a catapult.”

  “He fell down going after a grounder, and my dad said, He fields ’bout like a pig on ice.”

  Her boys laughed again.

  “Bobby Orton was the shortstop on the other team,” Billy said, and she understood they were talking again about the sandlot game. “I hit a grounder past the third baseman, and Bobby ran over, gloved it, spun around, and threw without bracing himself. I wasn’t super fast or anything, but I could not believe that wasn’t a hit. It was amazing.”

  “It doesn’t exactly sound amazing,” Lise said.

  “Bobby Orton wasn’t all that good,” Candler explained. “It was one of those times when you play better than you’re capable of playing.”

  “I would’ve had a rare multi hit game,” Billy said. “Rare for me, anyway, but for that play.”

  “Bobby wasn’t even close to being good enough to make that play.”

  “It was the third out,” Billy said, “and I shook his hand when he ran in.”

  An Astros batter connected, making that distinctive sound, bat and ball in perfect alignment, an almost metallic snap, and the ball arced into the bleachers in left-center. They all watched the flight. He

  hit that one so hard, it put a dent in the sky, her father would have said. By the time that one comes down, it’ll have a white beard. She could hear his voice so clearly it brought tears to her eyes.

  “I love baseball,” Candler said, his arm around her, his breath rich with the decaying sweetness of scotch, and she could almost believe he was saying that he loved her. “I don’t know why. It’s the only sport I watch anymore.”

  “We could get season tickets,” she said.

  And then no one said anything for a long while.

  DAY 14:

  Frederick Candler set up an easel for Pook in the yard, and Pook, to everyone’s surprise, decided to paint. The Candler children had all grown up painting, but Pook had not picked up a brush in years. After a week or so of dilatory work, he painted five canvases in a single day, one after another. He would not look at a painting after he finished it. The capacity for revision never had any place in his personality.

  Pook’s interest in painting marked the end of the comic book, though Jimmy and Billy failed to understand this. At first Jimmy thought his brother could simply paint the images they needed, but the paintings were stranger than the drawings, and Pook didn’t seem capable of doing the scenes they requested, as if this new work was beyond his control. The boys approached Violet, and she drew a few panels for them. But her people all looked different from one another, and they didn’t have the same authority as Pook’s characters, and t
he comic book project drifted away. Yet Same Man was not gone. He appeared now on canvas.

  The paintings were hard to describe. They were not good, but they were undeniably great. Pook’s sense of perspective was funny, as if there was a ripple in his vision that skewed the relationship of one thing to another. His colors were bold, and he covered every inch of the canvas with several coats of paint, creating shapes by adding new colors to define the old: he’d paint over a brown background except for a section in the center, and the brown would turn out to be shaped like a man’s pants. These uneven coats contributed to the weirdness, the earliest layers evident in the gaps like something that flashes by when you’re not quite looking.

  His subject matter was always the same: they were all self-portraits. He would set up the easel outside, sometimes facing the house and other times facing the yard, but he was always painting himself. Frederick propped up a mirror for him, but Pook turned his back to it. His paintings were about representing not the exterior world but his interior vision—and it was this that made the paintings great. Even Jimmy understood that Pook’s paintings were better than his drawings, and he speculated that this had to do with the size of the canvas. The more space he had, the more extraordinary the paintings would become. That was just logical. Jimmy discussed this insight with Billy, which led them to stretch a canvas themselves—Jimmy had known how to stretch a canvas since he was ten—three times the size of the canvases their father supplied.

  “Can’t leave well enough alone,” Mr. Candler said when he saw it. “You’re just like your mother.” He and Pook had set up in the shade of a mesquite tree at the far end of the property. Frederick was painting the living ocotillo fence. Pook had painted a canvas entirely green, except for one oddly shaped patch where the previous coat of pink showed through. The pink, Jimmy understood, was the sun, an oddly shaped blister in the green sky. Frederick sent the boys away, and when they thought to look in on the painters again, the big, blank canvas was gone.

  Like his drawings for the comic book, Pook’s paintings had strange shadows. Often the shadows were up to something slightly at odds with the figures casting them, and sometimes the shadows seemed to have volition while the humans were merely attached at the heel. One of Frederick Candler’s most famous paintings was a portrait in which the shadow and figure traded places, set in the backyard near the cistern, and Jimmy understood that this idea had come from Pook’s work, and perhaps that was why the figure in the painting was Pook himself—not Pook as he appeared in his own paintings and not Pook as he appeared in real life, but a version of the real Pook, in which he looked much the same but with squared shoulders and an expression one might associate with ordinary life, the way Pook might look if he were just anybody. When Pook saw the painting, he gave no indication of recognition, but he never saw himself in Frederick’s or May’s paintings or even in photographs, though once he had pointed at himself in a family picture and said, “My shirt.” Only in his own drawings and paintings did he seem to recognize himself, and these, while clearly of him, did not exactly look like him but rather captured something about him—they captured precisely what Frederick’s painting missed, the utterly unique quality of being Pook.

  By noon Pook had moved his easel to the front porch, and Jimmy understood, at last, why his brother did not like to venture out at midday. At noon, the blister cast no shadows, making the earth, for his big brother, unbearable.

  Besides his own image, Pook’s paintings included two recurring elements: flowers and cats. The flowers sometimes resembled a daisy but no petal was the same size or quite the same shape and the parts had no visible center, as if the pieces were a flower in the process of being rebuilt or reborn and the receptacle that might hold them did not yet exist. The cats had heads like deflating soccer balls, and their features were not feline but almost human, insane heads of no recognizable creature and yet identifiably cats. Their bodies were large, sometime stretching across the canvas. Their bodies were nations, hemispheres, worlds. Along the continents of their bodies, the cats were often missing territory, fur scraped loose or ripped out in fights, which Pook represented by some previous coat of paint—and this process amazed Jimmy.

  “He’s a sedimentary artist,” Billy had said, referring to their sixth-grade geology lessons. “You know, how sedimentary rocks can have layers of stuff. But he’s also kind of volcanic.” There was one other type of rock, but they couldn’t remember it.

  Jimmy thought Pook’s method of composition had to reveal something about him. Why did he have to paint the whole canvas pink in order to have that pink sun emerge when he failed to paint over it? It was like having a hundred guitars each playing a different note, and then mixing and silencing them sequentially to create a song. Or if you were writing a book, you’d have to write a single word over and over and over, and then cover most of the words with new words, and then cover most of the new words with newer words, until a story emerged. He got out the typewriter and Wite-Out from his dad’s study.

  He gave up. He shouldn’t have started with THE. Pook always started with the deepest thing, and there was no way THE could be very deep. That meant you had to know what was deep before you knew anything else, which Jimmy didn’t know how to do.

  Many paintings hung on the walls of the Candlers’ house, but not the paintings of Frederick and May. It was a point of honor not to hang their own work. They traded with other artists. Periodically, some came down and others went up. When Pook painted from the porch, the inside of the house became the setting for the portraits, and the paintings on the living room wall appeared in the background but they were transformed. Abstract paintings became representational, portraits became landscapes, and landscapes became flowers or wallpaper or slabs of meat. Pook painted everything from memory and each item was not merely altered but remade. Even the objects that were identifiable—the piano, for example—were made unspeakably odd, and Jimmy had not been able to say why.

  “There’re no black keys,” Billy pointed out.

  Frederick and May did not immediately trust their estimation of Pook’s work. They knew art and they had both taught for years, but this was their son and he was damaged. They were prone to compliment his few successes excessively. And this time it mattered in an entirely different way. If Pook was as talented as he seemed to be, the question of how he might spend his life was finally answered.

  Frederick placed a few of Pook’s canvases in the station wagon and drove to Phoenix. He was acquainted with an art dealer who had connections to galleries in New York, Santa Fe, and Los Angeles. Frederick did not tell the dealer that the artist was his son but claimed the paintings were the work of a student. The dealer flipped for them. He sent slides to the owner of a New York gallery. Plans were made. The gallery wanted to stack the paintings three high on its walls and augment them with paintings on easels. Fifty versions of Pook staring at the customers. They set a date that gave Pook several months to finish the remaining portraits.

  Pook was told nothing of the plans, and for days all he did was situate and re situate his easel, paint canvases brown, set up and take down his easel. Then one day he painted four canvases, and the next day, he painted three more. The following week, he had a day of seven completed pieces. He had more than fifty paintings by the time of the opening.

  And still, Pook knew nothing. As long as he had a window seat, he liked to fly in airplanes. It was easy to convince him to fly to New York with his parents. They planned to stay at an inexpensive hotel in New Jersey that Frederick and May often used, but the gallery owner lived in the high-rise across the street from the gallery, and the three Candlers stayed in an apartment on the fifteenth floor owned by a family spending the year in Europe.

  Violet was seventeen by that time, and she remained home to look after Jimmy and, of course, Billy Atlas, who was spending the night despite Violet’s protests. “Couldn’t you two spend one weekend apart?” It would be years before they would see
pictures of the show, the paintings stacked like windows, one upon another, all of the images of Pook staring out, staring back. In every painting, the figure peered out directly, as if to look the observer in the eye. They were unnerving and powerful. It was impossible, one art critic would argue, to say that one of Paul Candler’s pieces was better than another.

  Some had background objects—trees, the house, a car, Pook’s idea of a horse or goat or pumpkin. There were never other people. In most, Pook was standing, but he squatted in some, reclined against a fantastically polka-dotted chaise, stood on tiptoes. There were no nudes, but his clothing changed, and most of it was either imaginary or based on his memory of actual clothing. For one shirt he painted dark blue trains against a yellow background, and Jimmy realized the shirt was modeled after a pajama top he wore, which had no trains but cowboys with lariats. He asked Pook about it, taking the pajama top to show him. Pook pointed to the raised lariat and its perfect circle of rope. “I remembered smoke,” he said. “That made a train.”

  Frederick and May dressed up for the opening, but they saw no reason to ask Pook to change from his habitual jeans and T-shirt. He was the artist and eccentricity was expected. They ate first, bringing food to the room since Pook did not like restaurants. After the first few bites, he took his plate to the bathroom and finished eating there. They timed their entrance, as the gallery owner requested, to coincide with the height of the crowd.

  “We have a surprise for you,” his mother said to him. “I know you don’t much care for surprises, but this is one you’ll like, I promise.”

  At first, it did seem that he liked it. He ran in a quick circle around the room, his head turned up at the paintings. He knocked one patron to the floor and splashed wine on another. “This is the artist,” the gallery owner told them, and even the knocked-down man laughed it off. This part of the story, Jimmy and Violet pieced together from their parents’ accounts, and they had not thought to wonder about the detail of the man laughing until later when they discovered how the paintings had been marketed. Pook had been offered up as something of an idiot savant.