Keeping the gun in his right fist (even if he stuck it in his waistband his intentions would seem hostile, so why not go all the way?), down along his thigh as if in a gunfighter’s holster, Ray pushed open his glass storm door and stepped out into the night air.
A distant mournful train rattled; phantom express. With each night, more and more chirps of crickets and/or frogs were heard distantly, and he heard them now off in the swamp somewhere within the dense woods. This was all that greeted Ray. There was no one at the head of his driveway.
Why had he expected this? Why wasn’t he really surprised? But now a more alarming concept than if he had found his audience still present there—what if the audience had simply moved? There were pews and pews of shadows about his house in which to sit and mock him. Clamping his teeth, Ray glanced about him into the dark. Behind a bush? Further back from his yard, in the endless woods? Behind the old chestnut tree at the head of the drive? Ray wished he’d brought a flashlight…even more, he wished he’d left Kelly out. He didn’t step down from the single cement door stoop.
I hope you can see this gun in my hand, if you’re out there, he thought. I hope you’ve seen enough movies to tell by the distinctive ejector shroud under the barrel and the bulk that it’s a Magnum. It could blow your head off, punk. Or punkette.
His body hummed. His adrenalin surged into the revolver and made it shine and flash as if with electric sparks. He wanted badly—he ached—
to discharge it into the air. Split the night. An atom bomb in this stillness.
Even if someone heard it, and if they did it would only be as a distant echo-pop, he couldn’t get in trouble for firing a weapon close to a residence unless his own residence counted, and wouldn’t that be funny? But as if out of respect for some law which required him to remain quiet and humble, he didn’t fire his gun into the air. Maybe it was some lingering hope that the person hadn’t meant any harm, and he didn’t want to terrify some innocent person, for then who was the monster?
Ray tucked the gun in his front waistband, went back inside for a flashlight and to clip a short leash onto Kelly’s collar. Kelly bounded and leaped with mindless, irritating delight when she saw him get the leash.
“Cool it,” he snapped. Once again he ventured outside, and this time dared to step off the door stoop. He let Kelly lead the way.
Kelly sniffed anxiously across the mine field of shit. Ray followed obediently. Kelly located her destination—a good spot to squat and tinkle.
“Oh for Christ’s sakes,” hissed Ray, jerking her toward the driveway.
Kelly had apparently forgotten her growling of not ten minutes ago.
She didn’t even sniff the spot where the figure had apparently stood. Ray expected a body to lunge out at him from behind the chestnut tree. Nothing.
From the vantage point of the figure, Ray looked at his house as if to imagine how he and Kelly had appeared to the shadowy spy at the time.
Good: distant. Small.
He urged Kelly fully around his house and yard. She never reacted adversely. Finally Ray gave up, admittedly relieved though still unsettled, and took Kelly and himself back into the house.
He made sure to lock up thoroughly.
Inside his house, the house he had inherited from his father like he had inherited his father’s artistic gift, Ray made coffee. He paced with it in hand in circles around his sparsely furnished livingroom. A squeaky-skinned, tacky black sofa bridged across the mouth of the bay windows with their filmy curtains. A cheap stereo, a nineteen-inch TV and an old wicker rocking chair in front of it. A secondhand circular rug in the center of the floor helped. He was proud of the display of books in the bookshelf built into the wall: Man and his Symbols and Flying Saucers by Carl G.
Jung. Death in Midsummer and Other Stories by Yukio Mishima. TheDistracted Preacher and Other Tales by Thomas Hardy, and the complete collection of poetry by Hardy. William Burroughs, Emanuel Swedenborg, Dante, Gray’s Anatomy, Devils and Demons by J. Tondriau and R.
Villeneuve, a giant book on Bosch and the infamous collection of medical anomalies by G.M. Gould and W.L. Pyle. He read a lot, but he hadn’t read any of these books mentioned all the way through. That was rare these days, mostly three or so novels a year. He browsed, scanned, picked at random. Also, it simply made for an impressive exhibit, as if he expected Hugh Hefner to come by with some friends one night. At least it impressed himself.
A neon beer sign he had eagerly snatched up at a flea market for twenty-five bucks glowed orange and blue across one wall and buzzed.
He sat in front of the TV and pulled out the Atari and selected a video game from his impressive library of video games. He shot down flying saucers, battled demons and Bosch-spawned space invaders.
He paced again. Another coffee? No, he was bad enough. He paced along the outer rim of the rug as if to blend the edge into the floor. Tonight had reminded him of another night. Another disturbance. He let the memory flow back in…
Before he moved here; January. He was standing outside with one of his aunt’s dogs on a pulley line like his. They had never left the dogs out alone since the day Ray had come out and found one dog had snapped its collar and escaped. Fortunately, they had found it. But the line pulled down sometimes, and what too of sick people you read about in the papers who stole dogs—one repulsive individual just German shep-herds—and tortured them to death, like sacrifices to some devil-good?
Someone had poisoned his grandmother’s Doberman puppy, and the town’s very own “animal control” officer had been brought forward on charges after shooting some dogs he had collected up that very day and left to die, though one had survived. So Ray’s aunt and uncle had taught him to watch over the dogs, and he was doing this one night when he noticed a silhouetted figure at the end of their dirt drive. A teenage boy, it appeared. Actually, he was down in the drive a few steps. And it was his planted stance that made Ray’s heart roll over sickishly. There was challenge in that stance, an arrogant firmness in the posing. Like a gunfighter.
Ray had played nonchalant for a moment or two, but then had turned his face to the figure and had stared hard at it. Exposed in the stark back door light like this, he felt queasy. He fought not to call out, not to walk up the drive and ask what the punk wanted in his driveway, why he was arrogantly staring at him like this.
Why was Ray so afraid? He had guns. He had studied martial arts.
Blood and gore didn’t sicken him (in itself). He was older, he had some rough friends. Why was Ray sick to his stomach afraid?: No face. No word. Just that black figure in his driveway, in it, inside his aura, standing in a confident planted fashion. Challenging him.
Something even worse developed. Dream imagery. It took Ray by surprise and disoriented him. Before his eyes, the teenage figure slowly sank down in a crouch, flopped on its side on the ground and rolled, like a slow motion log, three times down Ray’s uncle’s drive. Then came to a stop on its belly like a soldier. Weird fear and outrage washed through Ray. He was outwardly numbed.
He felt this reaction was what the challenger wanted—to freak him out with weird behavior. To torment him. Mock him. How could this kid know him so well?
Then a car came by, and as it passed things clicked to light in Ray’s mind, and he flushed the fear down its toilet as quickly as possible so he wouldn’t have to smell it. The kid had been hiding in his drive waiting for the car, which had come from a house down the street, to pass and be gone—for as soon as it was, the kid got up from the drive, clapped himself off and walked down the sidewalk out of view without so much as a glance back at Ray. The kid’s father, maybe, something like that. It was around ten and he probably wasn’t supposed to go out and meet his buddies. An eccentric thing to do, roll down someone’s drive, and he probably knew that Ray was outside, but not a wholly unmotivated or impractical action. Ray even believed he knew who the kid was, now—a local boy who had lived down the street years ago and had popped up recently, apparently to live with his divo
rced mother again. The kid used to sneak into his aunt’s back shed, which was reached through the back hall, and steal food out of their big meat freezer, then take it to the parents of a friend as a gift and ask if he could eat over. Sad, pathetic. Though angered, his aunt and uncle had never taken action, but Ray and his cousin Paul had talked loudly about sticking a gun in the kid’s mouth or slapping him hard across the face if they caught him sneaking into their back hall.
Ray then realized that the kid hadn’t been planed staring at him, but in the opposite direction. That had been the kid’s back.
Yeah, okay, his back, Ray thought. But what was this tonight? Was this a misinterpretation also? Not a challenge? Something to shrug off?
Had to be, he tried to calm himself. Why would a girl stand at the end of his driveway and challenge him? If she wanted to mock him, wouldn’t she have called out? What was she, an escaped mental patient?
A ghost, some part of his mind stated.
That statement came so abruptly and was so confident that it frightened him. A ghost?
For some reason, though the possibility did terrify him, it was a more comforting thought than having a corporal being challenging him. The motivations of ghosts were usually more benign than those of live people.
That had to be the reason. The motivations of a ghost would be easier for him to relate to. Yeah—this consideration nearly soothed him.
He was able to quit pacing, to feed his dog and brush his teeth and go into his bedroom to watch TV and fall asleep.
Still, he slept with the loaded Magnum on his bedside table like a crucifix.
««—»»
While Ray slept, eyes watched him.
Stevie Nicks of the group Fleetwood Mac stared wistfully at him with sheepish loveliness from under her bangs. Marlon Brando contemplated him with dark eyes cynically amused and dourly wise. Robert DeNiro frowned at him silently but was distracted by his own troubled musings.
Eyes he had created. He was surrounded by them, an audience of celebrities, and he on his stage dream-performing. A jury of eyes sizing him up, measuring the value of his existence. Sometimes in his room Ray would mouth along with a song he listened to on headphones to bring the music all the closer, fantasizing that he was the performer, the Springsteen or Sting or Elvis (Costello), that their brilliance was his, the stunned audience (of celebrities) was his, and his eyes would fall on the audience, focus on Brando’s wise amusement, and it would be like catching himself doing something stupid in the mirror. He might not stop, but he’d have to look away.
Brando was an oil he’d done in 75. DeNiro was a blue ballpoint pen from 77 or 78, Stevie a black ballpoint pen from 82. There was also a variety of favorite female movie stars, pastel or pen, colored pencil or marker or combinations of these. A painting, his first oil at the age of fifteen, of Maurice Evans in ape guise from Planet of the Apes. Little else but his art hung on the walls: a poster of John Belushi as a sword-wielding samurai (comically like an oil painting he was planning of another self-destructed artist, Yukio Mishima, which was still just a sketch on canvas as it had been for a year and a half) and a paper rifle target which actually had eleven targets on it, ten around the edges and one in the center: the NRA’s official fifty foot small bore rifle target. He thought it made an interesting decoration and wished he’d get around to shooting it to make it more interesting. He could leave it on the wall and shoot it if he wanted, no one would hear, but he was too proud of his house to destroy it. At his uncle and aunt’s house there were holes in the walls where he and Paul had thrown shurikens, martial arts throwing stars, and on the ceiling of Paul’s bedroom three punctures where Paul had shot at a spider with a BB gun. These days Ray and Paul couldn’t believe they could’ve acted like that, and laughed at themselves.
Still, one wall in Ray’s new adjacent garage, which was actually more like a rickety junk-strewn shed, was a backdrop for boards he leaned there and hurled shurikens into. Knives, too. Sometimes he would tack a photo there of some inhumanly beautiful model or some obnoxious TV star from a magazine. Sometimes he’d miss the board and stick the wall itself, which he didn’t like. He wanted to preserve this place. It was his—it was him.
Elsewhere in his house was more of his framed art, though not in such a concentration as in the bedroom of his early childhood.
It was mostly of a different nature as well. Monsters, mutations, fantasy. Surreal, more often than not symbolic, a message present. Ray was known more for the portraits of people and animals he had done many times for people he worked with; his cousin Paul was better known for his monsters. Actually, Ray was better at realism, at portraits, and Paul had a vastly better imagination for weird imagery. But Ray liked to draws monsters, too. Even then, however, his monsters were more related to reality, to people and animals. A deformed stillborn infant from his book on medical anomalies made for a good monster subject, whereas Paul’s beasts were more extravagant, less likely to exist even on the farthest planet.
On one livingroom wall was the only piece of his father’s artwork that Ray owned. It was a remarkably detailed pen and ink gazelle gazing over its shoulder. The paper was ivory-tinted with age. Ray’s aunt and uncle, other relatives, owned oil paintings by his father—mostly seascapes, clipper ships and lighthouses, covered bridges. No portraits, no monsters. Ray’s favorite was this little, very old gazelle. It served as a warning to him not to neglect his art as his father had, not to die and be appreciated only by a handful of relatives. Ray wanted to leave his art in books, on museum walls. This was his purpose in existing. He would rather be dead this instant if this were not to be fulfilled.
In his mother’s bedroom, where he had escaped from death, where he had looked back and seen his mother dragged out of the room, he had made his studio. The room smelled of linseed oil and turpentine, oil paint—delicious scents. He had never learned to paint on an easel, so atop an old Formica-topped metal-legged kitchen table lay the painting he was currently working on. Beside it lay a book on Van Gogh. And a mirror was propped on the table. On the canvas was a pencil sketch of himself patterned after Van Gogh’s last self-portrait, perhaps Ray’s favorite single work of art. So far the swirling background was nothing more than a few pencil strokes, but this time Ray was determined not to let the picture sit and gather dust, unstarted like Mishima, or get halfway and abandon it as he had with paintings before. Everything was set and ready to happen, the skeleton of pencil waiting to be fleshed out with oil, the swirling background to become a bright whirlpool of color energy.
He had gotten the idea for this from a self-portrait he had seen patterned after the very same piece—rendered by Joseph “Crazy Joe” Gallo, a New York mobster who had been shot inside a clam house but had died in Rasputin-like defiance on the sidewalk outside. Besides Van Gogh, Ray read that Gallo had favored Camus and Sartre. Gallo had owned an impressive library, too; primarily while in prison. Ray had collected four individual books about Gallo.
Where Gallo hadn’t resembled Van Gogh except that his face was bony and gaunt, Ray resembled an Americanized version of Van Gogh.
His hair was dark reddish with a brassy, glinting undertone, he wore a mustache and sometimes mustered up enough scruffy whiskers to approximate Van Gogh’s red beard. The face glowered, as did Van Gogh’s last portrait. People mistook the glower for arrogance or anger at them.
His features were blunter, though, cruder, less artistically European. He was rather better looking than Van Gogh, in a corrupted All-American Boy sense. Some people said he resembled the actor Ron Howard a bit.
Van Gogh meets Opie.
While Ray slept, his portrait watched the night, waiting to come to life.
««—»»
It was more than a half hour’s ride from Ray’s house to his job in one of Massachusetts’s small, dreary cities. Ray found Boston beautiful and exciting, and especially found the small country towns quaint and lovely, but this kind of dismal half city was a wretched purgatory to him. Even Worcester
was exciting to him, though it had its dangerous mood. This placed seemed all danger and no excitement. Just recently someone had broken through a skylight at work and vandalized the place, setting fire to a box of sample leathers he had been working with lately, on a table next to the cutting machine he used. Only minor vandalism was done elsewhere. Crazy town. Ray was a leather cutter for a small pocketbook company. He had been here since September but he had experience as a leather cutter from having worked in a well-known shoe factory for over five years before the place shut down.
He was late, he knew, from the quiet of this little industrial road. No one getting out of their cars to go in, the coffee truck gone. He found one parking lot full so drove on down past a company that made salad dressing and found plenty of room in a larger dirt lot. He got out, lunch bag in hand, and crossed to the plant.
Inside, he climbed stairs to his floor. The lower floor was rented by another company. Ray nodded to a young black man who sat near the door operating a machine. He couldn’t figure this kid out—sometimes he acted glowering and tough, sometimes he was open and warm, like split personalities. Today the kid grinned and said, “Hey, Ray.”
Ray punched in. Ouch—ten minutes late. He’d thought five at the most. Oh well, it didn’t matter. They needed Ray here badly, as an experienced cutter, though they didn’t pay him like they did. Five an house compared to the piece work at his old place where a fast cutter could make eleven, though Ray had averaged six-fifty to seven, being overly conscientious. But they tolerated his tardiness and excessive absenteeism without ever saying a word. Too often he exploited this condition out of some rebellious arrogance.
He went directly to his cutting machine. It had been repaired so he didn’t have to use the old, outdated “clicker” machine next to which the fire had been set. There were only two other leather cutters: a small cocky Portugese in his twenties and an old man who wore a leather gambler’s visor and only worked Tuesday through Thursday, as he was retired. The rest of the cutting department crew consisted of a big black guy who cut the pocketbook handles from cow hides at a table with some sort of guillotine blade hinged to it, and a short pudgy white guy who incessantly wore a baseball cap and acted nineteen though he was thirty, who cut the pocketbooks’ fabric linings. Ray liked them all, but was especially fond of the cutting room foreman, Joe. Joe had also been Ray’s cutting room foreman for those five years at the shoe plant. A jovial old-timer with an often dry sense of humor, Joe mostly sorted the incoming leather, putting the hides away in the many wooden racks of the leather room, and “setting up jobs” for cutters.
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