It was the Irish cop who answered. “Over to the precinct to fingerprint him and fill out a charge sheet. He’ll probably get a desk summons after that.”
I’d kept my head so far down in New York that I didn’t have a clue what a desk summons was. I tried to think of the words for bajo fianza in English and actually remembered them. “He don’t get bail?” I asked, and was proud of myself for an instant until I remembered that the grammar books I’d borrowed from Lydia said you were supposed to say “he doesn’t” and started feeling stupid and scared again.
The cop snorted. “For painting a wall in Harlem? You get a ticket saying you’re responsible for making him show up in Family Court.”
I still wasn’t sure if a desk summons was worse or better than bail, but I was relieved to know we weren’t actually heading down to the Tombs. Johnny relaxed a little too. He stopped trembling at any rate, and a moment later, when we turned the corner and the rising sun flashed on his window he pointed. “Look, lindo, right?”
I nodded. I’ve never liked the dawn, but sunrises are pretty if you have to be up for them. “Muy lindo.”
“How long’ve you been here that you people can’t speak English?” snapped the Irishman in the front seat. That kind of put an end to conversation.
It was a long wait at the precinct for so early in the day. They were still processing last night’s drunk and disorderlies. I hoped I looked better than the drunks. Maybe it was a good thing I’d put on a clean shirt to impress Lydia. Johnny started to fidget in his seat. Finally he nudged me. “Hey, Mr. Llorente?”
“Yes?”
“We didn’t mean nothing by it. No disrespect to Mr. Ortiz or nothing. It’s just he got nice clean shutters and we thought it would look nicer there.”
I sighed, and tried to think of the English words for “defacing property.” I couldn’t. “You can’t go around writing on other people’s walls,” I said instead. “It’s a crime.”
“Yeah.” Johnny hung his head. “Yeah, I’m sorry I let all the other guys go first. But I wanted to see what I was doing properly in the light, you know.” He brightened. “The palma look hot though, don’t it?”
It was hard for me to keep a straight face. The kid’s the only one in the gang stupid enough to get himself arrested for vandalism, and he’s telling me that he hung around to get caught so he could do the palm tree better. But I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for him too. Nowadays, with the spray cans, all that stuff is common, and you see flags and faces and bubble letters everywhere, but in the forties it was mostly just scribbled tags. Johnny actually seemed to care about making a design. And he had worked some pretty elaborate calligraphy into that “Toa Alta Boys” sign too. “Why don’t you paint in art class?” I asked him.
“We don’t got art class,” Johnny explained. “Well, the fifth graders do, but I got left back last year.”
That figures. I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying the words out loud. Johnny was talking again. “See, the guys all said I should use colors for the tree, to make it look like a palma de verdá, right, but I thought it’d be better like this. Like the white make it show up better, the outline like that.”
That was the seed of my brilliant idea. I had just enough brains to not spill it to Johnny then and there, but I made some conversation, asked him if he liked to draw and what comics he read and this and that. It took us about four hours to get out of the police station. Johnny kind of liked getting finger-printed actually, and he cheered up amazingly when he realized he had an iron-clad alibi for missing school that morning. He got a desk summons to appear before a judge in Family Court in a couple of weeks time, and I agreed to be responsible for bringing him down. I took him back to school, and warned him that I was going to pick him up that afternoon. Then I went back to the bodega and talked Mr. Ortiz into painting over the shutters, instead of trying to scrub them clean. Then I went out and bought a few gallons of paint, and made a phone call.
When I picked up Johnny after school I could tell that he had told the story of his brush with the law in a way that made him a hero to his classmates. In his version he had probably proudly owned up to painting the shutters, had talked back to old man Ortiz, had been practically willing to take on the cops, and had bravely kept silent about the names of his companions. Even my presence as the lurking reminder of his punishment gave him a certain prestige. He went with me pretty willingly, and we started out to repaint the bodega’s shutters. Mr. Ortiz sat on the sidewalk and played dominoes with a couple of his friends, and glared at us.
I kept a pretty close eye on Johnny for the next week or so. He finally confronted me about it one afternoon when I was hanging out on the stoop, watching him play stickball with a couple of his less delinquent friends. “Say, what’s the big idea, Mister? I ain’t no baby!” He was pretty annoyed. I told him that I’d never been in trouble with the law in this country, and didn’t plan to be, and that I was going to drag him down to family court to make his appearance by the ear if I had to.
I’d hoped to make a kind of man to man appeal to him, but it didn’t work out quite the way I planned. Johnny’s mother had given him plenty of experience quizzing prospective step-fathers, so he picked up on what I said right away. “What you mean you’ve never been in trouble in this country?” he wanted to know. “You been in trouble somewhere else?”
The question kind of threw me. I didn’t want to talk about Spain, or losing the war, or why my back still hurt when I twisted a certain way to clean the shutters. Especially not with some punk kid who hadn’t even been born when I’d left. “I’ve never committed any crime,” I said after a moment. “But I’ve had the police after me.”
Johnny was impressed. “Like a frame-up by gangsters?” he asked.
I told him it was something like that. After that the problem wasn’t watching him, it was getting him to stop watching me.
Johnny got another day off of school for his court appearance, and his mother bought him a new suit and fussed over him as if it were his first communion, so he was pretty happy on the subway ride downtown. Mr. Ortiz saw Johnny as my problem by this time, because he told me that he couldn’t leave the bodega, but that I should go down and be a witness. So we all waited around for a few hours, and Johnny got unhappy enough to make people feel sorry for him by the time we saw a judge, and I testified as to what I’d seen (I didn’t mention Mr. Ortiz hitting the kid, and oddly neither did his mother). The judge read Johnny a little lecture about defacing property (that was how I learned the English words for it), and then told him he’d have to clean up the mess he’d made, and have an officer report on his progress in school and at home for the next six months. I told the judge that Johnny had cleaned the bodega to the owner’s satisfaction (and that was the whole truth, because if Mr. Ortiz hadn’t been satisfied we would have heard about it), and the court social worker came over and introduced herself to me afterwards, and said she’d be responsible for checking on his progress, and would I be willing to help. I said I would, and she gave me her card, and that was that. A career made, you might say.
After we left Family Court I went back up to the bodega to go to work. Johnny’s mother took him out for ice cream because he was such a good boy and had gone through such a horrible ordeal and she was hungry. That Sunday when the Ortizes were at church and Johnny and his friends were playing stickball in the traffic I came out on the stoop and gestured to him. “Hey.”
“Hey, Mr. Llorente.” Johnny walked away from the game without so much as saying goodbye and came over, probably hoping to hear about my adventures on the run from the law. The two boys he’d been playing with tagged along after him.
“Have you got homework to do?” I asked him.
Of course he said that he didn’t. He was probably lying, but I didn’t care. “Good,” I said. “Then you’re free for the day. Come on. I want to show you something. You can bring your friends too, if you want.”
Johnny looked a little alarmed. “
Where we going?”
“You know what a mural is, Johnny?” I asked.
“Uh-uh.”
“It’s a big painting on a wall,” I told him. “Bigger than your palm tree, even. And we’re going to go see one.”
I’d expected him to start whining that he didn’t want to look at paintings. It was what ninety-five percent of the neighborhood kids would have done. And his friends sure as hell lost interest when they heard the word. But all Johnny said was. “Ok. Where?”
“Downtown, to the Museum of Modern Art,” I said. “We can take the train.”
We took the local down to 59th Street, and walked from there. I don’t remember talking much. But I remember Johnny’s eyes getting like saucers as he looked up at the skyscrapers in midtown. This kid had lived in New York all his life, and he was gaping like a tourist. It was mostly deserted on a Sunday, and a nice day for walking, with the trees in flower and all those wide sidewalks empty, but Johnny kept walking closer and closer to me. I remember him saying that mostly gringos must live here, and I remember asking him if he’d ever been in that part of town before. When we got to the museum he was practically holding onto my coat. I wanted to tell him that he could come here anytime, on his own, but the admission fee was pretty steep, and even then I didn’t kid myself that a boy like Johnny would be able to save his nickels for the subway plus a ticket. I paid, and we headed up the stairs to the first floor, where the impressionists are.
I’d planned to take Johnny straight on through without stopping, but he planted himself in front of a couple of paintings -- one of them was a Munch, I think -- on the first floor, and stared until his eyes bugged out. Then he started patting his pockets. “Mr. Llorente,” he pulled out a pencil end. “Mr. Llorente, you got paper? That painting look hot.”
I didn’t have paper, because I was an idiot, but I promised I’d buy him a picture postcard of the painting if we could find one. He walked around, and I’ll tell you, I don’t know what all the tourists thought of this skinny little moreno standing up by the railings to get as close as he could to the paintings, with his mouth open like a fly trap. He went through the first floor in about three quarters of an hour. Then he turned to me. “So, where’s the big wall painting you wanted to show me?”
I took him up to the third floor, feeling a little awkward. I wanted to explain to him about what the painting meant, and where it was from, and all the reasons it mattered to me. But then we came out into the gallery, and Johnny saw the Guernica and stopped dead, and I realized he didn’t give a damn about all the reasons I cared about it. He just stood there, for about ten minutes, deaf and blind to everything but that canvas.
Finally, when I couldn’t stand looking at the Guernica any longer, I touched his shoulder. I wanted to tell him something personal, something that would expand his knowledge. “I thought of it because you painted the palm tree white, without colors,” I said, to get his attention.
He looked up at me. “That’s real sad,” he said. “I mean real sad. Like triste, you know?” It wasn’t what he meant, but I understood him. I didn’t say anything else. I just let him look, until he was ready to go.
We stopped in the gift shop, and it didn’t surprise me that he picked out a postcard of Guernica. I offered to take him out to the Automat when we left the museum, but he said he wasn’t hungry kind of impatiently. When we got back to the barrio he disappeared into his apartment without saying goodbye, and I went back to sitting on the stoop, trying to figure out if this had been such a good idea after all.
That Monday afternoon I was in the bodega when Johnny came in after school. “Hey,” he said, coming right up to the counter. “I made this for you.” He held out a roll of white construction paper, the kind that elementary schools use for art projects. Printed around the cylinder in pencil were the words “Pa Mr. Jorente.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem.” He was out the door before I could get the rubber band off the paper. I unrolled it. It was a damn near perfect copy of the Guernica, in miniature, in number 2 pencil.
I stared at it for a while, feeling kind of odd and light. It was the way I’d felt dancing with Lydia, when I’d suddenly realized that I wasn’t as angry and sad as I thought I was. But I’d felt guilty then. Now I wanted to dance again. Not a slow dance, but a lindy or jota, or something that would let me jump around the room. I kept sneaking little glances at the paper. I was scared that if I put any thoughts into words this feeling would go away, but I couldn’t help thinking; Ten years is as long as Johnny’s been alive. That’s a long time.
Finally, around five, I asked Mr. Ortiz if I could take a quick break. Just five minutes. He looked suspicious, but he agreed. I grabbed the paper, slipped out of the bodega, waited until his back was turned, and ran up the stairs to the Ortizes’ apartment. Running up stairs felt good. I pounded on the door until Lydia opened it. “Is your mother home?” I asked, still feeling that weird high.
She shook her head, but she was smiling. “No, she took Tito to the dentist and they’re not back yet. Why?”
“Oh, well.” I must have been grinning like a maniac. “I’ll have to ask your father then. Get your things, and meet me on the stoop at seven, guapa. I’m taking you out to dinner to celebrate.”
I don’t know if I even gave her time to answer before I went bounding down the stairs again, but she was waiting on the stoop, wearing her best dress, when Mr. Ortiz and I closed the bodega. And he let me take her out to dinner…
A happy ending? I guess you could say so, for Lydia and me anyway. It taught me what I wanted to do with my life, at any rate. But it wasn’t really a happy ending for Johnny. I stayed in touch with him, kept him from painting walls and what not, for the next couple of years. He started junior high school the same year I started my BA. But I was married by then, and then there were the kids, and Lydia and I moved away from the barrio. I tried to keep in touch, but when he started getting into trouble he started avoiding me. It was just stupid stuff, snapping car antennas, smoking weed, the usual. But he always was too dumb to run away. So he ended up with a list of priors as long as his arm. And of course when he turned sixteen they started treating him as an adult. They finally sent him upstate. So like I said, you shouldn’t feel too badly about Chris. None of us have perfect results.
You don’t know that you’ve done nothing. There’s a postscript to the story about Johnny, you know. A guy I took a policy course with my final year of my Masters got a job working for the Department of Corrections after we graduated. We stayed in touch, and he told me a little about working in the jails. He ran into Johnny as a client. He told me he looked really bad. Grown into a real thug. Jail does that, you know. But he said that Johnny was always drawing, would take any art class the prison offered, and that he was good at it too. He had a picture Johnny’d made for him framed on his desk for years. So I knew the kid was still alive and drawing. The funny thing was, back in the mid sixties, Lydia and I went back to the barrio to visit her parents. I was walking down 116th Street, and I passed under the train tracks on Park Avenue. Of course they were all spray painted a zillion colors, but in one of the little secondary pedestrian arches, there was a drawing -- it looked like it had been done with a brush but I can’t tell about these things -- all in white and black paint. Those arches are brown stone and a pretty rough surface for painting on, but on that arch clear as day was the neighing horse from the Guernica, and the arm holding a torch. And down in the lower corner was a signature in white paint: TOA ALTA BOY
*****
Notes on “The Big Picture”
This story was written second to last in the collection, although it is chronologically closest to the novels. I actually created it in response to a request from Kevin Wignall, who was trying to put together a mystery anthology called “But is it art?” of “art related crimes.” Ironically, it ended up being published in a Spanish-language anthology this one created by the Semana Negra called Guernica variaciones Gernika,
translated by John Kurta.
Having already settled something of Gonzalo’s later life in “The New World,” I became interested in the process of his transformation. I was interested in writing a truly “noir” story, and so I settled on the golden age of noir, the 1940s, and gave Gonzalo a chance to shine as the perfect noir hero: a man with secret griefs and defeats in his past, who faces the future with honor and hope.
The character of Johnny was based on a student of mine, a boy far below grade level, who finally started to read when I brought him children’s illustrated biographies of great artists, and would draw imitations of Chagall and Leonardo on pieces of crumpled notebook paper to show that he was really reading. To my great joy, this was one of the few stories where life was actually happier than art. The young man in question graduated from high school, and is currently gainfully employed, although not as a professional artist.
*****
Hostages
The February wind bowled along the avenues, with no respect for speed limits or traffic lights. It whipped garbage along the gutters of the Calle Mauricio de Ravel, and hassled the pedestrians hurrying home from Chamartín station with their heads bent, and their hands buried in their pockets against the cold. It howled into the doorway of number 24, and spilled sleet onto the lobby’s mosaic floor as an elderly gentleman nudged the building’s door open with his back, and wrestled his way inside, lugging a green and white plastic bag with the repetitive logo of the Corte Inglés on it.
“Can I get that for you, Captain?” the rush of cold air had alerted the concierge.
“Thanks, José. It’s really more bulky than heavy,” in spite of his words, the gentleman surrendered the bag gratefully, and followed José towards the elevator without protest.
The concierge set the package down, hit the elevator’s call button, and watched with solicitude as the older man began to unwind his scarf, and pull off his gloves. “You didn’t drag that all the way from the station in this weather, Captain?” he demanded.
What Happened When the War Was Over; further stories of Gonzalo Llorente and Carlos Tejada Alonso y Leon Page 2