B000FCJYE6 EBOK (20 page)

“Fuck
fuck,
” I concurred, happy that finally someone understood. I rocked awhile, watching him from the corner of my eye. I reached across him and tapped his wedding ring. He stopped drawing and looked at it.

“Little Miss Molly. Prettiest girl in town,” he said, smiling. “Prettiest girl in the world. See, and I been halfway around the world, and there are all manner of pretty girls, I will admit that, yessir, but there is no one like my Molly, nosiree.”

“MollyMolly. MollyandBeast,” I said. I liked the name Molly. I decided I would marry me a girl named Molly.

He laughed, throwing his head back. When he lifted it and stopped laughing, his face was wet from tears. I worried.

“Tried to kill myself,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, horrified. “Oh no oh no.”

“Yep. Broke that girl’s heart.”

“Oh, Beast Beast.” My left hand picked that moment to come alive, flying off in no direction until I sat on it. With my right hand, I started going through the cards, organizing them, aces low. “Beast Beast Beast. Can’t do that.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“What for’d you did that for?”

“Damned war. Got myself all crazy over there, I guess, that’s what the doctor says.”

“And then you had a dark.”

“Huh. Ain’t that the truth. Came home. Never saw such a dark in my life as over there, but when I came home, it was like cobwebs, couldn’t shake it. Poor girl, trying to make me happy. Telling me it was all right. Over and over. I swear I started to feel like I was going to have to kill her she told me it was all right one more time.”

“Allrightallright.”

“And then, I guess, I just couldn’t see my way out of the dark.”

I nodded. I got up and went to the snacks table and made myself and him some cocoa from packets. I took the Styrofoam cups over one at a time in my right hand.

“Molly Molly,” I said, sitting back down.

“Molly Molly,” he agreed.

“Out of the dark,” I explained. “Molly.”

He looked at me.

I picked up a black crayon and drew a long winding black line all over the page, up to the top-right corner. There I put a red X. To clarify, I put an arrow pointing to the X. MOLLY, I wrote. Around that, I put little yellow lines.

“Sunbeams,” I said, pleased with my work. “For Molly.”

He wiped his nose, nodding his head. “Okay,” he said. “That’s right. I guess that’s about right.”

I took a new piece of paper and drew him an apple tree. I drew it so he was looking through a window, with his hands on the window, he could see his hands. And out there the apple tree in spring, with all the white flowers. I drew it so he would have an apple tree to look at while he was here.

He drew me a horrible fire.

I drew him a bed of giant hydrangeas.

He drew me a gun. He labeled all the parts.

I drew him Kate.

“Who’s that?”

“Kate my sister Kate.”

“Miss her?”

I nodded and drew him the sunrise.

“Snowing,” he said, looking past me, out the window. I turned. I got up to stand by the window.

I heard him push back from the table and approach, but he still said, “Right behind you, buddy,” which was nice of him, he didn’t have to do that but he did and I appreciated it. We watched the snow slant down onto the brick-walled garden below, the buried garden covered in snow.

“Ask you a question?” he said.

“Okay.”

“You think I’m crazy?”

I thought it over. I tilted my head and butted his arm with it twice. Then I looked up at him and said, firmly, so he would know for sure, “Definitely definitely not.”

His face lit up. I got shy and looked away.

I took his hand and fit mine into it. His hand was rough and he didn’t know what to do at first but then he squeezed. We looked out the window.

“All right then,” he said. He shook my hand firmly, like we had won a race.

Out in the courtyard, a male cardinal lighted on a snow-heavy branch, shaking it so a small landslide of snow tumbled to the ground. The smells of hospital breakfast seeped down the hall.

Geronimo and I were playing cribbage when the prettiest girl in the world walked into the room.

Geronimo saw her first. He was in the middle of his turn, shuffling and reshuffling his hand, ordering it in some kind of way that made sense to him, and I was waiting to see what he’d put down because I was trying to figure out if there was any mathematical logic to Geronimo’s cribbage rules at all, but anyway, he looked up and stared, so I turned to look and there she was, the prettiest girl in the world.

I had so many feelings at once I pulled on my hair a few times and turned my chair a little so I could keep an eye on her.

“Your go,” I said.

“Who’s that?”

“Molly,” I said.

“Who’s she belong to?”

“Beast.”

“Hell and damn.”

The prettiest Molly ever in history smoothed her hands over her red skirt and looked around and sat down on the edge of a couch and picked up a magazine, which she held in her lap awhile.

Since everyone was staring at her, she looked a little uncomfortable. “Stop it,” I said to Geronimo. “It’s your go.”

He looked at his cards. “I can’t go.”

“Course you can. Here, let me see.”

“No.” He pulled his cards close to his chest. He was totally crazy but a nice old guy. His real name was Charlie but he said he was Geronimo in a past life, so he went by that now since no one was stopping him and he wouldn’t answer to anything else.

“Well, how’re you gonna make a play if you don’t let me see?”

“That’s cheating.”

“For Christmas sakes!” I yelled, pounding my leg. “How can it be cheating if you know I’m doing it, if I already just this second
told
you I was doing it?”

He stared at me. I was doing pretty good today. Staff said so. I made the choice to stop yelling.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It just is.”

“Well, I already know what you have anyway.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

“Why do you always just
know
shit? How in the
hell’s
a man supposed to play cards with you when you already know what’s what ’fore he even lays a card down, Je
zus
Mary Joseph! I ask you, where’s the
suspense
?”

I sat there arranging my cards. I made the choice to say nothing. Over the top of my cards, I watched Molly, who paged through the magazine but kept her eye on the door.

“He’ll be here in a minute,” I said.

She looked at me and I looked away.

“Statistically speaking, it won’t be more than
six
minutes,” I said to my cards.

Her eyes didn’t leave me. I turned my chair around so I could see her from the corner of my eye but she couldn’t see me. She wore a white blouse with her red skirt and had dark brown hair in a ponytail and bosoms. I wanted to go over and look at her bosoms closer up. They were round. They looked grabbable. I sat on my hand.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You are most very welcome,” I replied.

“What are you playing?” she asked after a minute.

“This young man,” Geronimo boomed, “is cheating at cribbage. He is a spy.”

I shook my head. “Not cheating.”

“You are a spy. You are a very small spy. That’s why they think they can get away with it.”

“I am
not
a spy.”

“You are a Red and a spy.”

“I am not a Red!” I shrieked, and slapped down my hand. “Give me your cards or make a play yourself or I quit.”

He laid down an ace and two twos.

I stared at his play. “You’re going by sevens and fives,” I said, delighted.

“See?” he thundered, smacking his hand on the table.

“And you’re collecting the queens!”

“That’s it! No more! I’ll have nothing more to do with this spy!” He poured a carton of milk all over the table, set the empty carton down, and stormed out of the room, shouting all the way down the hall.

Beast appeared in the doorway and stopped dead at the sight of the prettiest girl in the world. She stood up and the magazine fell off her lap and she didn’t even notice, that’s how much she loved him right then. And it took him only two giant steps over to her to pick her up and swing her around and sit down on the couch with her in his lap.

He had her smushed so close to his chest I started to worry he would crush her, but his face over her shoulder was smiling and he was talking softer than I could hear so I decided not to say anything. I made myself invisible and watched her pull herself back, look around quickly, and kiss him a million times all over his face.

“Here I am,” she said. She said it again and again, like she was teasing him about something, telling him a joke only he knew. Kissing his eyelids and his nose. “Here I am.”

He looked like a big dog basking in the sun, his two hands wrapped all the way around her waist.

I snuck off to my bedroom and jerked off in the closet, feeling sort of guilty but not too bad, thinking I would find me a girl named Molly with fat cheeks and soft bosoms and a whisper and a red skirt and when I was in the hospital or in a Dark she would come and kiss me all over my face with her soft bosoms pressed up against my chest.

I came in my sock. Then I curled up and took a nap.

I had a stack of books, and was drawing fish skeletons from memory, and Geronimo and Captain Sir Joe had started calling me Lieutenant Darwin, from the book I was reading. I had several fine rocks from the garden, from when we went on walks around the grounds.

And then one afternoon, when everyone else was having a nap because their meds made them fall asleep, I was lying on my bed staring at the ceiling when I felt someone looking at me. I turned my head on the pillow. Doris was standing in the doorway.

She looked at me, waiting for me to say something, but I didn’t know what and my words were all a mess that day anyway. So I just sat up with my feet sticking off the side of the bed. I straightened the covers.

Slowly, as if it was hard to move, she shuffled across the linoleum to the side of the bed. She handed me my new sketch pad. Doc Hammerstein had just given it to me, it was mine, and so far I had used five pages. I was saving them, I didn’t want to run out. I used only one page a day, the rest of the time I used regular paper from the stack.

I took it from her, along with the box of brand-new colored pencils, which were very sharp. Every time I used them I sharpened them with the sharpener that had its own compartment in the gray box so that they would be sharp every time I opened it because otherwise it was unlucky.

I sat there holding my things to my chest and looking at Doris from the corner of my eye. She gazed over my head, out the window.

Then she shuffled over to the chair and pushed it so it was facing me. She sat down. She smoothed her housedress over her knees. And then, in the swiftest motion I had ever seen her make, she reached up with both hands and unwound the thick bun of her hair.

It fell, a flood of silver, over her shoulders, over the sides of the chair, all the way to the dirty floor.

She stared directly at the wall behind me and waited, holding perfectly still.

I realized suddenly that she was not an old lady at all. She held her chin up and though I am embarrassed to say this, her bosoms were not old-lady bosoms when she sat up straight, and her feet were just narrow pretty white feet. Her hair was still a little damp, which meant she had taken a shower. I could smell soap.

I blinked, confused, waiting for her to go back to looking like she did before.

She glanced at me once, as if to say, Well?

So since I had not used a page yet today I drew her. I drew her all afternoon.

You start with the structure of the thing. Animal, vegetable, mineral. Same as if you’re drawing a machine. The construction of a thing, the underneath, implies the exterior. That is what it says in my book of medical illustrations. “The body’s blueprint is of utmost importance in every aspect of accurate representation; the interior will dictate the exterior. To overlook the structure is a grave, if regrettably common, error.”

Cheekbone, brow bone, nose: “A single line should suffice. The bones are not a jigsaw puzzle: The body is of a piece.”

Doris did not blink, or if she blinked, she did it so fast I did not notice.

Jawbone, line of throat.

Clavicle, shoulder, breast, ribs.

When the structure is completed—waist, hip, thigh, knee, calf, the complexity of ankle, foot—there is time for detail work. The shape of the eye socket, the eye. The line of the lips. Ears and fingers.

“The actuality of the thing will emerge if sufficient attention is given to
each layer
of the object as it is drawn. If done in haste, without consideration for variants and structural integrity, the drawing, far from being an accurate representation, will instead lie lifeless on the page.”

Rumple of housedress. Tiny blue flowers. Cornflowers. Petals of cornflowers. Breath beneath the dress, space between the dress and the belly. Slight hills of thighs.

The light faded, so I could only see the left side of her. She didn’t move. Her hands curved over the ends of the arms of the chair, cupped because the muscles of the hands, “in their state of full relaxation, do not extend, unlike most muscles, which gives the hand a natural curve, as if about to clench. Drawn without this, the hand will appear stiff. This is the mark of the amateur.”

Her hair coiled in thick ropes on the floor. I stood up and went over to the chair, bent in, and studied the color of her eyes. She stared at the wall. My breath ruffled the hairs on her temples. I sat back down and made her eyes the color of fresh mud: brown, green, orange, olive.

“To give the eyeball its natural light, shading will be necessary. The living eye is wet and curved, not dry and flat.”

It was dark in the room. From memory, I shaded in the shadows underneath her eyes and cheekbones. She sat there, a shadow in the chair. From the hall, a triangle of light fell on the floor and voices passed the doorway on their way to dinner.