“I mean it this time.”
He tore up the contents of file drawers, hammered his answering machine to bits with a marble paperweight, pulled the pharmaceutical bulletins down from the walls, the color photos of a Jamaican ganja field. He stormed through the equipment closet, laying waste rolls of plastic bags, boxes of gelatin capsules, tools for cutting and measuring. As a finale he filled a roasting pan with ten-dollar bills from his personal bank and threw in a match.
They watched smoke plume toward the ceiling and Christo said, “I’d be a lot more impressed if I thought it was only me you were trying to convince.”
Pierce was exhausted. “There’s no pleasing you,” he grunted, and threw open a window. Smoke drifted out to the airshaft and swirled up.
“It just seems ludicrous to burn money.” Christo pushed hair out of his eyes and sighed. “When you could give it to me instead.”
“Is that it? You want me to keep the business alive so you won’t lose a meal ticket, huh?”
“Maybe you are getting a little paranoid.” Pulling fingers down the sides of the desk with the sadly resigned bearing of someone rowing to an island funeraclass="underline" “I’m planning to quit this evil town within twenty-four hours.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything. I was just going to do it.”
“Well. That does alter the landscape some. Where to, jazzbo?”
“South.”
“Just South. Back to that hit and run stuff, eh?”
“More or less.”
“Why move backward where you’ve already been? I don’t want to jinx you, but …”
“That’s good. I don’t want you to either.”
“But don’t you worry about falling into the grinder this time around? You’re way overdue.”
Christo rotated the desk chair, reached down and placed his hand over the edge of the roasting pan. “See that? I know how to burn my fingers. I’ll be all right.”
From the desk’s bottom drawer Pierce removed a tape player, slapped in a cassette he’d been carrying in his pocket. “This came in yesterday’s mail.”
Looie’s voice was harsh and excited: “Start. Initial draft, A Guide to Automotive Landscape Painting. Introduction … The magic kinship of man and earth is at the core of all visual art. Period. In adapting this principle to a mechanized age, comma, the depiction of landscapes has become the province of photography. Period. But we are a species in constant motion, comma, madly covering ground in a world of blurred image formations, semicolon, thus there is no fixed moment in which the shutter can close.
“New paragraph … Imagine all elements in the heat of our motion. Period. Trees are made of butter. Period. Buildings are soft cakes. Period. Only the roadway is solid and continuous …”
“Bloody maniac.” Pierce hit the “fast-forward” button.
“I kind of like it so far.”
“But he’s like a kid who never learned to read. He doesn’t know where the boundaries are. Wheeling along the Richmond Parkway, for Christ’s sake, with a canvas tied to the dashboard and a brush in one hand … Just listen. It’s coming up.”
Looie again, over varying traffic sounds: “At forty-five miles per hour I make my first stroke outlining the hills. Not the hills I am passing now, not the hills from two miles back or those two miles ahead, but all of them together. All motion/time images distilled to an essence of hills … Keep the wrist loose as you work, move the brush smoothly. As you grow used to these operations you will begin to see yourself as in a film, moving with grace and ease … Accelerating through a curve now, I mix a lighter shade of green …”
It began with a single small cry, the bleat of a surprised sheep, then clustered thuds and clatters as the machine sheered off to become part of the landscape, a final implosion of metal meshing with itself.
Christo, standing now, leaned horrified over the speaker. “Did he make it?”
“Barely.” Pierce extinguished and ejected the cassette. “He’s off the critical list now, but there was a lot of internal bleeding and they still haven’t assessed the damage completely.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Nobody has. He won’t allow visitors.”
“The rites of spring … Jesus, this has been a bad year.” Splaying his burned fingers, holding them away from his body like spoiled sausages, Christo made for the door. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Yeah, let’s move to the conference room upstairs. It’s time for more drinks.”
“You’re not hearing me, man. I’ll repeat it. We’ve got to get out of here.”
And Christo, with curved arms, made a gesture so wide that it seemed to encompass not just the city, but the hemisphere itself.
15
AMONG THE SEMINOLES OF south Florida there was respect for the rattlesnake, a respect based on fear; they believed that the soul of a dead snake would incite its brothers to take revenge on men. By the late 1970s, while there were places in Tampa that would pay four dollars apiece for dead rattlers in order to remove their poison sacs for research, fear (according to popular psychology experts) was a major obstacle to personal fulfillment. But some people began to find that just as they ceased to be frightened and their lives appeared to smooth out, they lost a kind of invisible protection: Events took on a monstrous finality and snowballed out of all control.
The air was so thick and heavy it felt like clothing, the kind of atmosphere that caused fruit to swell and sea worms to rise. Tildy, in a straw bonnet, made shallow grooves with her finger in a corner of the garden plot and planted cucumber seeds. Suspended between two trees in a canvas hammock he’d made himself, Karl leafed through a history of the Hispañola pirates, making notes in the margin with a pencil. A serene little scene, two dolls happily posed. When the telephone rang, it felt like a gunshot.
Tildy ran out from under her bonnet as she went to answer. Joby Daigle was calling from Ville Platte, too excited to bother with hello.
“Don’t like to disturb a person out of the clear blue but here it’s been so many months with the old place just standin’ there all empty and sad when you drive by. There’s that For Sale sign still up and it keeps prodding a spot in an old woman’s brain….”
“Mrs. Daigle? You’re calling about my father’s place?”
“That’s it exactly, hon. See I met some new folks down here, some of ’em your age, and they’re real interested in what we call the healin’ arts. We been talkin’ about why not start up a clinic that would be for all the people, but where to put it with costs so high. It dawned on me there’s Lucy’s place, God bless him and keep him, so I got up my nerve to call you.”
“You’d like to know my price?”
“Oh my, but you’re makin’ this so easy on me. I want you to know how hard we’d work to do it up as a fittin’ memorial to Lucy. We been goin’ out after the contributions to make you at least a little downpayment and there’s a fella in town says he can draw up the legal papers….”
“Fine. However you want to do it. Send whatever you like.”
Tildy stood stiff for some time, metallic bubblings from the receiver that dangled against her skirt, before she hung up. From a rag-lined shoebox at the bottom of the closet she removed the bronze canister and held it to her ear. It made a sound like sand in a gourd when she shook it. God bless him and keep him.
The treasure trunk sat uselessly under the bed, not one mumbling word from Sparn on fencing the contents. A cruel kind of wealth that wouldn’t buy a thing, another devil’s prank on Karl. So this new windfall — however small — came just in time. Karl’s teeth were bothering him and the Galaxie needed new brakes.