Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (2 page)

There was a young woman standing in my drive. She was of medium height, a little heavy, her reddish hair in short curls. Gregory Lang?

I nodded.

My name is Meg Caro, she said. She stepped forward to shake my hand.

What can I do for you?

You’re the painter, right?

Some say.

I’m a painter, too. At least I want to be. I want to be your apprentice. She stood straighter.

This is not the Middle Ages, I said.

Your intern then.

I’ve never seen your work. I don’t know you. You might be dangerous. For all you know, I’m dangerous. I don’t take on apprentices or interns.

I have some photographs of my paintings, she said.

I don’t care. I’m flattered, but I don’t care.

Please, look at them.

I looked down the dirt lane and wished that my wife would drive in, but she wouldn’t be home for another couple of hours.

What will it hurt to look? she asked.

You say your name is Meg?

Meg Caro.

How old are you, Meg Caro?

Twenty-two, she said.

That’s old enough to know better than to visit a strange man all alone.

I know.

Where are you from, Meg Caro?

Miami.

Let me see the pictures.

She opened her backpack and handed me a ring binder.

I opened it but couldn’t see. I’ll have to get my glasses, I said.

They’re on your head.

Thanks. I looked at the pictures of her paintings. These are pretty good.

I studied at the Art Institute of Chicago.

That should help me like the paintings more?

No, I just thought.

I’d stepped on her a bit, so I said, I like the work. Of course, you can tell only so much from photos. The paintings were young, not uninteresting, and nice enough to look at. Photos are so flat.

Oh, I know, she said.

I studied her broad face for a second. Come in here, I said. I led her into my studio. See that big painting on the wall. I had a ten-bytwelve-foot canvas nailed up. Tell me what you think?

She breathed, then sighed. I like parts of it, she said. It reminds me of another of your paintings. That really big yellow one in Philadelphia. Somehow this seems like two paintings.

I stood next to her and stared at the work.

The underpainting seems somehow warmer on the left side. Is there some blue under there? Maybe some Indian yellow. She stepped back, leaned back. Her movements were confident, perhaps a little cocky.

Would you like some tea?

Please.

I went to the sink and put more water in my little battered electric pot. I glanced back to see that the woman was walking around the room, looking at drawings and notes and canvases.

What is this painting about?

I studied her young face and looked at the canvas until she turned to view it again with me. This painting is about blue and yellow. Sometimes yellow and blue. Do you think it’s about more than that?

She didn’t say anything.

Are you always so neat? she asked.

I didn’t know I was. I’d ask you what kind of tea you’d like, but I have only one kind.

That’s fine.

It’s Lipton.

That’s fine.

Are your parents still in Miami? I asked.

My mother is.

Does she know you’re here?

I’m twenty-two years old.

I forgot.

I poured water into a mug and dropped in a bag, handed it to her. She took it and blew on it. She told me she really loved my work. I thanked her and together we looked at what was on my walls and floor.

Like I said, I don’t have a need for an intern.

You wouldn’t have to pay me, she said.

I didn’t even think of that, I told her. There’s really nothing around here for you to help me with.

I just want to be around you while you work.

As flattering as that is, I find it a little weird. I looked at her and became nervous, if not a little frightened. Maybe you should leave now.

Okay. I didn’t mean to come off as a stalker.

All right, I believe you, but you still have to leave.

I understand. Will you think about it, though?

She put her mug on the table and started to the door.

Thanks for stopping by, I said. I walked out behind her and made sure she walked down the drive and past the house. She wasn’t the first person to make the walk from the road. Usually it was men looking for work and I gave it to them when there was something to do, but a young woman coming up seemed different. I could imagine my wife coming home to find that I had taken on an
apprentice.
I would tell Claire about her when she came up and she would listen and I would tell her that I had been uncomfortable and she would tell me I was employing a double standard, that I would not have had the same reaction if she had been he. I would agree with her and then say the only true thing left to say,
Nonetheless.

Is this supposed to be my story? The story I’m supposed to write or would write if I were a writer?

My, but you are dumb.

What is this? Who is Gregory Lang?

You’re Gregory Lang. This is what you would write or should write if you wrote. Like I said.

I don’t write. Who is Meg Caro?

I imagine she is the daughter you don’t know you have.

I see. Why don’t you just admit that you’re working again?

I don’t know. Maybe I am working again? Tell everybody I’m workin’ again. Doctor said it’ll kill me, but he didn’t say when. Lord, have mercy, I’m workin’ again. If I could, I’d get up and do a little jig to that. I love that line: Doctor said it’ll kill me, but he didn’t say when. Did you know that a camera is just a box with a little hole in it?

As a matter of fact, I did know that.

Dad, why all this writing for me? Why don’t you write it yourself ?

I’m an eighty-year-old man, almost eighty, anyway. What do I have to say to those assholes out there? And people my age, well, all they read is prescription labels and the obituaries.

That’s not quite true.

Nor is it quite false. Why do they print the obits so small?

Listen, you’ve got a sharp, a strong, mind.

Try wrapping your fist around that in the morning.

Dad, you realize that I’m dead.

Yes, son, I do. But I wasn’t aware that you knew it.

I’ll be Murphy. You be whoever. Or is it
whomever
? Murphy was asleep when he had the dream. He thought it was the best place to find it. In it he was not himself, whoever that might be. He was an older man, a smarter man, not the man who took all the small contracting jobs that people never took anymore because you couldn’t make a living doing it. He made a living, albeit a meager one, but he lived, job to job, house to house, argument to argument, as most people liked the idea of someone doing the jobs they could maybe do themselves, the jobs the larger contractors simply wouldn’t do. And more often than not, the clients did not pay. At least, not happily, never promptly. A client would ask for a cedar closet and then balk at the price of the cedar paneling, choose beautiful cabinet fixtures and act surprised to find out that beauty came with a price tag. Murphy kept immaculate records and would show the clients the cost of the materials, show them that he was making no profit on the materials and even show them where they had signed off on the purchase of the materials before the materials were in fact purchased. He’d managed somehow to remain content if not happy, calm if not relaxed. His hands remained reasonably soft and he felt a small twinge of pride about that. His wife had left him a few years earlier and he’d long ago stopped dreaming about her. She walked 15 out saying something about his lack of ambition, but he didn’t feel like pursuing any understanding of her complaint; this made him laugh. He didn’t agree with her but felt no compulsion to argue. Every hour he didn’t work, he read, and at night he read himself to sleep and eagerly searched out dreams where he was someone else. In this dream he was a writer, maybe, and like all of his dreams, it was narrated.

What did he dream? You want to know. You’d like to know. He dreamed that Nat Turner was getting to tell William Styron’s story.
The Confessions of Bill Styron
by Nat Turner. You could write that, then follow it with
The Truth about Natty
by Chingachgook.

I am the darkness visible. Would that my despair might be not only my preoccupation but my occupation, that my plight might be my profit, that my station, my suffering, might be my sustenance. I am the darkness visible. Maybe the darkie visible. Certainly, I am the darkest invisible. If I could have lived for another buck-fifty years, oh what compensation might I have realized for my decades in shackles, my years of ribbon-backed bondage. The question remains whether I would be made whole by some comfort. Probably not.

Murphy awoke with
nonetheless
on his lips. He wondered if
nevertheless
was better. Or perhaps simply,
however
or
regardless.
Be that as it may, he showered and ate breakfast with his dog, a red heeler named Squirt, not because of her size but because of her tendency to have diarrhea. It was gross and so he usually kept that story to himself. He sat on his porch and ate his whole-grain cereal and yogurt while he watched the house of his neighbors a quarter mile away. They were brothers who often played loud music, blues or Southern rock, late into the night. Murphy imagined their smoky parties, men playing poker, women dancing and lounging on couches, and he hated the noise. Still, they were always done before he was finished with his nightly reading and looking for the escape of a dream. Everyone strongly suspected there was a meth lab in the barn behind their house; its blowing up twice fueled the belief. It seemed the brothers were either related to or feared by the deputy who made the rounds through this part of Riverside County. This morning he watched as the red pickup of the fat brother kicked up dust as it headed toward Murphy’s place. In fact, both brothers were fat, and for that reason Murphy didn’t know whether this fat brother would be Donald or Douglas. Murphy was wondering what it would be like to be a painter right up until the time that Donald or Douglas was extracting himself from his vintage, but not well maintained, Chevy Luv pickup. The fact that one of the brothers always wore overalls didn’t help in identification, since he could not remember which one did. The fat man had skidded to a stop alongside the house and now ambled toward Murphy.

Hey, he said. That was all he said. It wasn’t particularly antagonistic or sarcastic, just a hey, but Murphy didn’t like it. Murphy remained seated while he approached, told Squirt to stay.

You do building work? the man asked.

I do. I do building work.

Want a job? He stopped and looked out across the valley, the brown smog hanging over it. He nodded at the view. “You got a nice spot here.”

I like it.

Like I said, you want some work? We got a leak in our roof. It’s pretty bad by now.

It can be really hard to find where a roof is leaking.

We pay pretty good, he said.

Murphy looked out across the landscape at the man’s house. Are you Donald or Douglas? he asked.

This is the part I knew you would like or you knew I would like.

Take a guess. We don’t look nothing alike.

Donald, Murphy said.

Bahhhhnnnn
. The fat man made an awful game show sound. I’m Douglas. I’m the pretty one.

Sorry.

We don’t look nothing alike.

I’m bad with faces and names, Murphy said. When can I come by and look at your roof ?

You can stop by anytime. I’m on my way out right now, but Donald will be around. Just tell him I talked to you. Blow your horn and wait in the yard, though. Don’t knock.

Okay. Why not?

Donald’s kind of paranoid.

If you go back and read the first paragraph and even the first page you will note that there is no mention of the Eiffel Tower or the fact that it is on the Seine, and you will not find the fact that between the Saint Cloud Gate and the Louvre there are twelve bridges, but yet you know it now. Don’t say I never told you anything.

Murphy wanted to tell the man to go fuck himself and his brother as well, but he needed the work and he didn’t really know why he disliked them so much. In fact, Murphy really needed the work. He wouldn’t shoot me, would he?

Yes.

How easily that
yes
comes and it makes you, me, wonder just why it would be so easy to not only say yes, but to shoot at a person. But I step outside myself here or at least outside the inside that I have established. There was apparently room here for little more than a monosyllabic, circumscribed utterance.

I won’t knock.

Yep, got yourself a nice view here. You got a nice big barn out back, too. Do you use it?

I keep my horse in it, Murphy said.

If you ever want to rent it out, Douglas or Donald said. Murphy had already forgotten which one he said he was. You know my memory. The funniest thing is I forget how bad my memory is.

I’ll keep you in mind.

So, go on over there whenever you want. The man walked back toward his little truck. He pulled out his cell phone and started yakking loudly, then drove away, kicking up rocks and dust.

Murphy watched him go. Squirt had moved to the edge of the porch to watch the fat man leave. Murphy looked at his soggy cereal and got out of his chair. He thought about the job he didn’t want and then about all the jobs he didn’t have and then about the bills he needed to pay. A much-needed job had fallen into his lap. What was bad about that?

Murphy had to wait awhile to go over and assess the job at the fat brothers’ house. The vet was coming to check out his horse. Trotsky was a twelve-year-old gelded leopard Appaloosa with a good attitude but not a lot of sense. Murphy tried to ride him every day in the hills behind his place. The horse was in need of his shots and he had been lethargic lately.

This business about vets. I could use a good vet. Vets have better medication to dispense than these quacks.

Maybe this is close to, but not what you want to write. Perhaps it’s just ever so different. Like when you come back to a restaurant a few weeks later and the leek soup is just a wee bit saltier or doesn’t have that hint of fennel that you recall, the very thing that made you come back, and yet, even though you’re disappointed, you have to admit that the soup is better this time and so you sit there, stroking your napkin, it’s kind of slick, and you wonder how it’s supposed to clean your mouth, stroking your napkin, thinking, This is not what I came in here for, but it’s better, it’s so much better, but still it’s not what I wanted, but it will no doubt be what I will want in the future, but how will I, in sound judgment, be able to return to this place with the notion that I can get what I got last time, my reason for returning? Fennel.

The paddock was set on a gentle slope, a big blue-gum eucalyptus on the uphill side. The drainage was generally pretty good, but with the horse constantly pacing the perimeter the sand would mound up under the metal corral pipes. When it rained the mounded sand served as a dam. And when the water was dammed, it just pooled there and then the gelding would stand like a fool, ankle deep, but pawing, digging himself into the muddy soup, courting thrush and lameness. When I could see the rain coming, and that was not often enough, I would go out and shovel gaps to drain the water. Sometimes I forgot or the storm developed quickly and I’d have to do the shoveling during the downpour. I was doing just that, at dusk, rain running over the brim of my hat into my face and down my collar, when I noticed the trickle of blood on the animal’s wet neck. The usually spooky horse was at once less nervous and more agitated than ever, an unfortunate combination in a twelvehundred-pound sack of dumb muscle. I put my hand to his nose and he snorted out a wet breath. I slowly moved my fingers up his jaw and to his neck, talking to him the while. I found a wound that had already begun to granulate over. He’d found a nail or something else to throw himself onto. The wound and the area around it were soft and angry and tender. I took away my hand and ducked through the corral pipes, looked at him and thought how it was always something. I grabbed a halter from a nail inside the barn, hooked him up, and led him to a stall. Then it was back through my foaling shed and into the house, where I called the vet.

The vet’s answering service delivered the message and she called me a few minutes later. I described the wound.

And as I deliver such facts, having assumed this status of firstperson narrator, not a distinction of honor, am I still in a position to dispatch such facts that might be about myself, standing away from and outside the persona of the narrator? Where did the fat drug brothers go? Where are we, son? Father? Father along. We’ll know all about it. And what about that dream? There was a dream speech. Or is that to come? Nat Turner and all that? Am I or is the story (stories) seeking to mesh racial formations or standards, and blech! What is your racial formation? Well, I start with a racial foundation and work my way up.

I’ll come over now, she said.

It is almost dark, I said. I listened to the rain pounding my roof, beating like fists instead of drops.

But I’m really not that far away. It will be better than driving three times as far tomorrow.

I couldn’t disagree with her, though I was feeling tired and probably lazy and didn’t really want to trudge back out into that downpour and all that mud and manure. And I didn’t want to lace up my boots once more.

Laura arrived pretty quickly. It was darker and the rain was falling, if possible, harder. I met her at her truck with a flashlight. I thanked her for coming out.

Probably not the swiftest of ideas, she said.

Well, he’s inside now.

Well, that’ll make things a little more pleasant. The doctor followed me through the long foaling shed and into the small barn. The rain was deafening on the old metal roof.

I switched on the light but nothing happened. Rain. I grabbed another battery-powered lantern from the wall and switched it on. It flickered. I hope this is bright enough. I held the light in the stall and caused the horse to start. He’s always spooky, I said.

He’s a horse.

I pointed to the gelding’s neck.

Ouch, she said, looks nasty. Laura walked into the stall, talked to the horse soothingly. Let me have the light. She took it from me and leaned close, studied the wound. I bet that hurts like the devil. And I think it’s in there, too.

What’s in there?

The bullet, she said. That’s my guess.

Bullet?

I think somebody shot this animal.

Well, that ain’t good, I said. What I meant was, Oh fuck. What do you mean by
shot this animal
?

You know, bang, bang. I’m going to give him some antibiotics and some phenylbutazone for the pain. Tomorrow morning I’ll sedate him and we’ll fish around in there and see what we can find. Can’t do it tonight. Too dark and messy out here. Boy, I bet that hurts.

Somebody shot my horse? It was less a question than a statement of fearful disbelief.

Somebody, she said. She shined the light on the wound and took another look. Yeah, we’ll numb him up real good and then get him dopey.

Somebody shot my horse, I said again.

Happens, she said. There’s a lot of muscle here to penetrate. That’s the good thing. It could have been somebody shooting way off at something else. Bullets travel for a ways, don’t they.

How often does this sort of thing happen?

She shrugged.

I looked out into the smoky darkness and the easing rain, over the pasture. I couldn’t see the distant hills, but I knew they were there. I also knew there was a stand of cottonwoods about a quarter mile away. I knew there was a house just beyond those trees. But I didn’t know what else was out there. The bullet could have come from a innocently fired rifle, if such a thing were possible. She was right, a bullet could fly for miles until something stopped it, gravity, a hillside, a barn wall, my horse. Me. Or some idiot could have drawn a bead on my horse and squeezed off a round. Either way a new dimension was added to just standing in my yard.

I can be here at eight fifteen, Laura said. She was washing her hands in Betadine. Will that work for you?

Yeah, that’ll work. Do I need to do anything tonight?