A beat, in which only the distant sounds of the rides and riders could be heard.
“Mixville! Mixville, New Jersey!” And as the band ripped into the air with a ragged vaudevillian vamp, the mayor yelled, drowned out by the sound, “Welcome, one and all, to Mixville, New Jersey!”
I looked around, at my new town, the one named after my family. People were clapping, infected by Francobolli’s manic exuberance. I was unsurprised to spy Ken Dorn hunkered among them, looking vaguely Teutonic in a gratuitous leather vest and khaki hiking shorts, and he eyed me from twenty yards away with a knowing smirk, as if he could read my mind. But I was just as sure that he couldn’t. Try your damnedest, Ken, I told him silently. You will never know me. And I turned to my editor and accepted my great, ironic handshake that for the moment I thought I deserved.
nineteen
Monday morning was relentless in the wake of my undone cartooning work, with the curve of the pen itching away at my bones, Wurster hanging over my shoulder, barking instructions, the house’s oily cold clinging to my skin and clothes. By the time I got out, the early clouds that had been massing on the horizon had arrived and gushed forth their rain, and the heat wave had finally broken. I blinked in the bright gray light, listening to water dripping off trees.
When I got home I asked Pierce for money. I hadn’t wanted to do this, but I had been letting him pay for groceries and gas for weeks now, and he hadn’t appeared put off by it.
“Oh, yeah, okay,” he said. We were in his bedroom, where he had been playing solitaire and smoking cigarettes. He got up and went to the closet. I heard some clunking around from there. When he came out, he had a neat handful of twenty-dollar bills, which he handed to me.
“You’ve got cash in there?”
He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Where from?”
“The account Dad left me. I got a lot out at once.” He sat down on the bed, reluctant to meet my eyes. “Banks make me nervous.”
I glanced at the money. It was a thick little pile, and I had to restrain myself from counting it. “Jesus, Pierce, thanks.”
He shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s a lot.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
His tone was dismissive. But I lingered, letting my eyes navigate the room, wondering if he had other things stashed here: drugs, old photos, letters. “Speaking of banks,” I said, and felt the temperature in the room drop half a degree. “That key.”
He bent farther over his game, emphatically flipping cards into piles.
“Are you going to look and see what’s in it? Aren’t you curious?”
“Nope,” he said.
“Not even a little bit?”
He placed a club onto the pile slowly, his hand shaking. He straightened but didn’t look at me. “It’s just the title. Or something.”
“Or something?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t go back to his game, either. He just sat there, staring at the closet doors as if into a deep darkness, where the ominous outlines of things were barely visible. After a while I looked down at the money in my hand and felt like a thief. Not long after, I left.
* * *
I was running out of certain supplies, so I decided to go to the art store. Nobody was around now that FunnyFest was over with, and the streets were empty of cars. Shopkeepers propped their doors open, letting in the cool summer air. A woman sat cross-legged on the floor of a clothing boutique, painting her fingernails.
The art store was in a small converted town house just off Main Street that was also home to a music studio. I’d often gone there with Dad, and while I poked through the dusty rows of art supplies I could hear the muffled sound of scales artlessly played on a variety of instruments. Occasionally an instructor would grow bored with one of her students and begin playing something beautiful, and I would stand transfixed, listening.
When I got there I found that little had changed. The proprietor, a barrel-shaped man in his sixties, was standing on a ladder, repainting the hanging sign that had read “Riverbank Art Supply.” He had finished the first few letters of “Mixville.” When I approached he looked down and called to me. “Timmy Mix!”
“Hi,” I said.
“You remember me? I used to sell your daddy his pens and paper.”
“Sure do,” I said. “I’m here for the same stuff.”
“Yeah, yeah!” he said. “Hear you’re taking over!”
“Looks that way.” I pointed to the sign. “How’s it going?”
He shook his head. “No offense,” he said. “But I’m not voting for that Francobolli next time around. This here’s a pain in my ass. I gotta send out change of address cards, for Chrissake. All of a sudden I’m living in a different town.”
Inside, I noticed one other customer. He looked familiar to me — a fiftyish man, thin hair, wearing khaki shorts and a blue chambray shirt — but I couldn’t place him. We passed in an aisle and he smiled at me in a comradely way. I gathered a few items — pens and pencils, fresh paper, all from the list my father had included with his letter, which I kept in my wallet. Overhead, something that sounded like a cello grunted through something that sounded like Bach. I went to the counter, where the familiar-looking man was already waiting for the proprietor. “Hello, Tim,” he said.
We shook hands. “Hey, uh…”
“It’s Father Loomis,” he said. “You didn’t recognize me.”
“Oh! No, you know, your clothes…”
“Not very priestly.”
“Uh-uh, no.” I smiled at him. There was the ecumenical collar, tucked discreetly under the work shirt. He looked weirdly like his Family Funnies counterpart, who almost invariably was depicted at a great distance: behind his pulpit, in the background of one or another whispered misunderstanding over matters ecclesiastic. I’d been having a lot of trouble drawing him. He had spread out his purchases on the counter: red sable brushes, cadmium red and cerulean blue oil paint, turpentine. I said, “You paint?”
He blushed. “Oh, yes, a little bit here and there…”
“What sort of thing?”
“Landscapes, mostly. You know, glory of God and all that.” He said this with more than a little irony. I liked him. “So,” he said, “I hear you’re in the driver’s seat now.”
“That’s the rumor.”
“How’s it going?”
I told him briefly about my lessons, how easy it all seemed at first, and how hard it turned out to be. “I have new respect for my father,” I managed to say, “as an artist.”
He nodded expansively. “Your dad was a strange man, Tim.” His face froze a little at this; he thought he had gone too far. “I mean, he was complex, very complex. A troubled man. There was more to him than people know.”
“I’ve guessed that.”
“Pardon me, I’ve said too much.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m very interested. He seemed so…covert, I guess.”
Father Loomis wagged his finger in the air, and nodded faster now. This had obviously been on his mind. “Yes, yes! At our last confession…” But then he stopped himself. “Well, he had a lot of guilt, Tim, a lot of pain. He made his mistakes, you know, but…” He reached out and touched my shoulder. “He was a good man. I truly believe that. He was a friend. I think there will be a place for him in God’s Kingdom.”
“Great!” I said moronically.
The proprietor appeared, red-faced and paint-spattered, and rung us both up. When I went outside with my purchases, Father Loomis was standing on the sidewalk, gazing up into the sky. “Yes,” he said. “A lovely day indeed,” as if this had been the subject of our conversation.