The Squared Circle

by JAMES W. BENNETT

  “Why can’t it just stay where it is?”

  “Because it’s in an old lodge building that’s no longer in use. It’s going to be torn down to make room for parking. The lodge was built by WPA workers during the Depression, and presumably it was a WPA worker who painted the mural. But whoever he was, his identity isn’t known.”

  If he asked her what the WPA was, it would probably make him seem stupid. He said, “The mural has to be transported in sections; that’s what the packing crates are for.”

  “Yes. Next semester, the seminar group will try and restore it. In addition to its age, it has water damage from flooding.”

  “Where will it go when it’s restored?”

  “That isn’t finalized yet. The new art building has a wing on it that may have an Egyptian emphasis; if the restoration is successful, it might end up there.”

  The fallen timber on the ridges near the entrance to Pyramid State Park was evidence of recent bulldozer activity. The hills were scraped back along the uneven gravel road that led the way along the marshy string of lakes. There was a bottom-level strip of measly corn stubble. The lodge itself, built of limestone and native timber, was dark, and smaller than Sonny expected.

  No sooner did Sissy turn on the lights than she started bitching: “Goddamnit, the heat’s out again.” She flung down the folded dropcloth she was carrying.

  Sonny set both toolboxes down. It was cold for sure.

  “I have to talk to Smith about this,” she announced. She left in a hurry.

  Sonny looked around at the clutter of dropcloths, tools, and lumber. There was an appliance dolly and some five-gallon cans of solutions that were unfamiliar. No furniture other than a large worktable and some metal folding chairs. He had no idea who Smith was or where Sissy might go to find him, but he could see that the room’s only heat would come from a large gas space heater.

  He tried to light the pilot with the propane torch but the flame wouldn’t hold. There were box wrenches in one of the toolboxes, so Sonny took off the thermocouple; he cleaned it with some thin wire and by blowing through it. When he reconnected, the burner came on full blaze and shortly after that, the fan kicked on.

  Still waiting for Sissy, he checked out the mural. Cracked and fading, it covered a 30-foot wall from floor to ceiling. It seemed to tell a story. In addition to the river that reached clear across, there were recurrent scenes of the same man and woman in Egyptian costume, a coffin, and a shallow boat. To Sonny it looked clumsy, the way the junior class used to paint the storefront windows in downtown Abydos at homecoming. A small refrigerator concealed one of the scenes at the end.

  When Sissy returned, she was still agitated. “I couldn’t find him,” she declared. Then she put her hands out, as if testing for rain. “There’s heat. What happened?”

  “I fixed the furnace. It was just a dirty thermocouple.”

  “A dirty what? Never mind. Sonny Youngblood, you’re already an asset to the project.”

  “I told you I got As in shop.”

  “So you did. Have you been examining the fresco?”

  “Yeah, but what does it mean?”

  “It tells the story of Isis and Osiris,” she answered. “Part of it, at any rate.”

  “Who are they?”

  “They were Egyptian deities. Gods. After Osiris was betrayed and dismembered, Isis wandered the world to rescue and restore him.”

  “That’s weird,” said Sonny.

  Sissy turned to him. “Is it? Is it more difficult to comprehend than the parting of a sea or a god who sends plagues of locusts?”

  Now she was talking about the Bible, but it was the sarcastic kind of question. Sonny didn’t answer. She went on, “The myth has other parts. If you want to find out more, we have a very good library on campus. It’s called Morris.”

  Sonny didn’t appreciate the patronizing, especially right after he’d fixed the furnace. He’d been to Morris Library plenty of times. “What’s next?” he asked tersely.

  “We need more crates. I want each panel to have its own crate so we can keep it packed for storage until it’s time to work on it.”

  “Let’s try and get them all today,” said Sonny. “I’ve got practice tomorrow.”

  It took two additional trips because the Bronco could only accommodate three or four crates at a time, depending on their size. On the last trip, they bought a pizza at LaRoma’s on the way through Carbondale. “This is going to be cold by the time we eat it,” said Sissy.

  “Who cares?” Sonny flipped the rearview mirror down to the night mode.

  Sissy sliced out the pizza while Sonny unloaded. The room was so warm by this time they had to turn back the thermostat. Holding open the refrigerator door, Sissy told him, “All that’s in here is wild berry wine cooler. Will that be okay?”

  Sonny’s experience with alcoholic beverages was almost nil. “I guess it has to be.”

  On a spread-out canvas dropcloth, eating the pizza and drinking the wine cooler, she asked him: “Do you suppose boozing it up will get you kicked off the team?”

  Sonny took a long swallow of the fruity, effervescent drink. “Who’s going to know? Will it get you kicked off the faculty?”

  Sissy laughed. “I have tenure. Much as some people might like to kick me off, they won’t have an easy time doing it.”

  Sonny ate a second and a third slice rapidly. Because the mural seemed amateurish to him he asked her, “How good is this painting anyway?”

  “In an art contest, it wouldn’t get far; it probably wouldn’t even make the finals. It’s the unusual combination of elements associated with it that makes it worth preserving.”

  “Oh.”

  “In the first place, it’s a true, or buon, fresco, which is remarkable in and of itself. In the second place, it may have been painted with two- or three-inch brushes instead of conventional artists’ materials. I’m talking about the kind of brush used for painting woodwork or the siding on a house.”

  Even without knowledge of art, Sonny could see how difficult it would be to make a painting with a house brush. “So who was the guy who painted it?”

  “Probably one of the workers who helped construct this building. He might have done it after work or in his spare time. He had to have at least one co-worker, someone who could lay on the wet plaster ahead of him.”

  “He might have painted it while he was drunk,” laughed Sonny.

  “Or at least fatigued,” Sissy said. “It’s also very unusual for its choice of subject matter. Most of the artwork done by WPA painters had a social or political theme such as workers’ rights. This one deals with Egyptian mythology.” She went to the refrigerator to get them each another bottle.

  “You know what I used to wonder?” asked Sonny. “Whenever we went to play in towns like Karnak, or Dongola, or Cairo, I used to wonder, why all the Egyptian names? How did we ever get to be Little Egypt?”

  Sissy clucked her tongue. “Goodness me, Cousin, were you speculating on namesakes when your mind needed to be on the game? I can only hope your coach never found out.”

  “My head was always in the game. I wondered about it on the bus.”

  “How reassuring. Still, it shows us that reflection is part of your makeup.”

  “You really think I’m stupid, don’t you?”

  “Of course not. The most common theory is that the tip of the state, located between two major rivers, reminded early residents of the Nile delta. Major flooding every spring produced a bottomland effect of fertile cropland. The same river that destroyed was also a preserver.”

  The more she talked about it, the more remote her words seemed to become. Sonny didn’t mind, though; he felt full and mellow, leaning against one of the support posts and peeling his second Bartles & Jaymes label.

  Sissy closed the empty pizza box. “You really should take some interest in ancient cultures, Sonny. That’s where the game of basketball has its origins.”

  “You keep telling me you don’t know m
uch about basketball.”

  “I don’t. But I do know something about ancient cultures. A game similar to modern basketball goes back thousands of years, at least as far as ancient Mayan civilization.”

  “I think you’re mistaken. Basketball goes back a hundred years to Springfield, Massachusetts.”

  Sissy ignored the attempt at humor. “The Mayans played the game in an outdoor amphitheatre. The baskets were rings set high in stone walls. They were positioned vertically, though. A player would have to pitch the ball through the ring from the side.”

  “In basketball you don’t pitch the ball, you shoot it.”

  “Whatever.” Sissy was lying on her back, using her hands to prop her head. Sonny could see that she didn’t shave her underarms, which might have seemed gross except he was mellowed out by the wine cooler. He felt peaceful inside all of a sudden, like bolts were loosened.

  Everything with Sissy seemed to go so deep, but he could remember talks something like this with Barbara Bonds, the only girl he ever went steady with. Improving his mind talks. He peeled labels with her, too, usually at Goldie’s Cafe, the labels on the large bottles of orange Gatorade.

  In his mellowed condition, instead of the low-lit room with the crude but valuable mural and his prone, sleepy professor cousin, Sonny seemed to be looking at the downtown gazebo where they often stopped when he walked Barb home. The gazebo, which was in the center of the Abydos town square, had wooden benches built into its perimeter. Barb was asking him about the algebra again.

  “I don’t want to think about it,” Sonny declared. “I must have a mental block or something.”

  “I could help you if you want. We could study it together.” It was March, but the sun was so warm she took off her coat. With her arms raised, Sonny couldn’t resist a long stare at her major profile of tit, thrusting forward like an artillery shell. He wondered if the actual details of her body matched the ones that characterized his fantasies and his sticky dreams.

  She found a clean spot on the weathered wooden bench to sit down, but he was still standing. “I don’t want to study algebra,” he reminded her.

  “I don’t mean now, I mean some night after supper. You could come over.” She was smiling at him with her teeth so white and straight. He wondered if anything was ever hard for her. At home, or at school, or making friends. One Gram said that all girls liked to masturbate; for the briefest moment, Sonny tried to imagine Barbara doing it. It didn’t fit.

  He looked at the woodrot along the eaves of the gazebo, the flaking paint, and the broken bottle litter. “This was probably a nice place at one time,” he said.

  “It used to be real nice. My parents brought me here for concerts in the summertime when I was little. You’re changing the subject, though.”

  It wasn’t easy with her. “That’s what happens when people talk.”

  “I’m just asking if you’d like to study together.”

  It was so frustrating because he would do almost anything to be with her, but if they had to study math, he would freeze up and seem so stupid. Restlessly, he prowled the perimeter of the gazebo. It was a round structure, but the benches made straight lines that formed an eventual octagon. “I’ll think about it. I’m real dumb when it comes to math. Maybe I didn’t inherit any math brains from my parents.”

  “You never talk about your father,” said Barbara.

  “He left.”

  “I know, but what was he like?”

  “He was big.”

  “Was he really big or did it just seem like it because you were small?”

  “No, he was big.”

  After a moment Barbara said, “Would you stand still, Sonny? Your mother is tall, maybe you’ll be real tall when you stop growing. That would be good for basketball, wouldn’t it?”

  He didn’t want to talk about growing up, either. Not when she was such a finished woman and he felt like such a boy. He said, “I don’t remember that much about him.”

  “You must remember something though.”

  Sonny looked her in the eye. “He was big and he liked sports. He was a salesman some of the time.”

  “What did he sell?”

  “I can’t remember. Different things, I guess. He must not have been very good at it, though, because we were always poor. He was gone a lot. Eventually, he was gone so much of the time it was like he didn’t even live with us anymore. That’s when Uncle Seth and Aunt Jane took us in.”

  “I’m sorry, Sonny, I really am.”

  “I try not to think about him because he screwed us over; he’s gone now and he’s not coming back.”

  “I’m really sorry,” she repeated. “I don’t mean to pry about things that are private.”

  Sonny felt two dollars in his pocket. “You don’t have to be sorry, you didn’t do anything wrong. I’ll buy you a Pepsi at Goldie’s.”

  At Goldie’s, there were flies. The elderly waitress who stalked them with her flyswatter wore a hairnet and dangled a cigarette from her lips. Goldie’s special of the day, chicken fried steak, was written in chalk on a blackboard behind the counter.

  Back on the sidewalk with the Pepsis in hand, they walked north. Sonny was nervous as always about keeping up his end of the conversation; he thought about offering to carry her coat for her, but that seemed too geeky.

  As they approached St. Mary’s Church, they could hear organ music. Some of the windows, the ones that weren’t stained glass, were open, clearing the way for fortissimo strains of “O For a Thousand Tongues.” Sonny wanted to keep right on walking, but Barb wanted to stop at the church steps because she thought the music was so beautiful.

  Sonny felt his stomach tighten up; he knew it was his mother playing the music. To make it worse, she was supposed to be at work. “Maybe we should just keep on going.”

  “Let’s wait just a minute. It’s kind of neat, don’t you think?”

  “What’s neat?”

  “Just the weather and the music. Don’t you like to stop and smell the roses every once in a while?”

  Sonny shrugged. “If you like church music.”

  “It must be Protestant music,” she said.

  “It’s Baptist music,” said Sonny glumly.

  “Do you and your mother go to church?”

  “We used to.” He longed for a way to change the subject.

  Unexpectedly, Father Breen did it for him when he came out through the wooden doors of the church. Sonny remembered the time he came to visit at their apartment. The priest greeted the two of them: “How about if an old man passes a few minutes with the two of you? I think these ancient bones can still make it down here.” He groaned himself into a seated position on one of the stone steps. He asked Barb for help to remember her last name.

  “Bonds,” she told him.

  “Bonds, that’s it.” said the priest. “Barbara Bonds, B.B., that’s very nice. Do you remember your catechism, Barbara Bonds?”

  Smiling, she said, “I hope so.”

  Father Breen smiled, but all that did was show his rotten teeth. “If I asked you a few basic questions right now, you could answer them successfully?”

  “Maybe, but we were just listening to the music.”

  “Just to humor an old priest, hmmm? You were always so exceptional in CCD class.”

  Barbara didn’t say anything and Sonny felt sorry for her because Father Breen was going to put her on the spot. You couldn’t miss the booze on his breath, either.

  “Why are we put here on earth, Barbara Bonds?”

  “We are here on earth to learn to know God, to love and serve Him, and one day to live with Him forever.”

  “Excellent. Why do we say God is truthful?”

  “We say that God is truthful because He always speaks the truth. He can’t be mistaken or tell lies.”

  “Excellent again. And why do we say that God is faithful?”

  “Our Father is faithful because He always does what He has promised.”

  This quizzing made Sonny e
dgy. He looked at the stone facade of the church, which was old and gray. There were weeds sprouting up through the cracks of the sloped stone steps. His mother was now playing “And He Walks with Me.”

  “Are you as solid on the Blessed Virgin as you seem to be on God the Father?” asked the priest.

  “I’m not sure.” Now she sounded annoyed and looked away.

  “Let’s find out. One of the prayers to the Holy Mother perhaps?”

  “I’d rather not, Father.” She was looking him straight in the eye. Sonny was impressed by her swift answers, but even more so the way it seemed like she was standing up to him.

  “So be it, then.” agreed the father. He gave Barbara a chummy clap on the shoulder. “If we did it all over again, you would still stand at the head of the class.”

  Then he said to Sonny, “Your mother plays a spirited repertoire of sacred music, young man.”

  Sonny looked down. “She likes to play the organ,” he murmured.

  Father Breen said, “Not only likes it, but excels at it, I would say.”

  “It’s your mother who’s playing the organ, Sonny?” asked Barbara.

  While she belongs at work, Sonny thought. Why did this priest have to butt in anyway?

  “If only we could get her to come to Mass,” said the priest, “and bring her son with her.”

  Sonny avoided his eyes. “She tries sometimes, but she usually can’t get her hair right.” It sounded stupid, but it was true.

  Father Breen was lurching to his feet. It took a while, and a while longer before he looked steady. “Maybe the son will lead the mother, then. Speak to him about the spring retreat, Barbara Bonds. Remember what the church teaches about ministry to scattered Christians.”

  “I remember.” But no enthusiasm in her voice.

  Father Breen was gone then, heading slowly south on the sidewalk, watching his steps carefully.

  “Oh, I’m so glad he’s gone!” said Barbara, when the priest reached the corner. “He can be so irritating sometimes.”

  Sonny was glad, too. He hoped she was ready to go now.