Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (10 page)

A few blocks away, on Jefferson Street, we came upon a second mural, this one with another Ouachita stern-wheeler but dominated by a gowned vamp, the work clearly from the same hand. In fact, in one corner, the artist had effectively signed the mural by painting in himself painting the mural. Clever, we said. Then the artist’s hand moved, sweeping a brush of red acrylic across the bricks. The painter was not painted in — he was still painting, pausing long between strokes to evaluate his work. If the man wasn’t painted on the wall, that doesn’t mean the wall hadn’t painted him, for he wore evidence of his vivid palette from head bandanna to boots. I’m always reluctant to interrupt an artist working alfresco, but I was a moth drawn to his highlights. He, a wizard of quoz, was about to change the next twenty-four hours and the way I saw the Ouachita Valley.

10

A Fifty-Foot Femme Fatale

T
HE NUMBER OF AMERICANS
who profess to have been taken aboard craft from beyond this planet is not innumerable but neither is it inconsiderable. Although I lack the figures, my guess is those who have merely dreamed of being taken aboard are far fewer. That very rarity could account for the transformative power in such dreams. In fact, had it not been for his doze on a Ouachita River sandbar in 1954, Indigo Rocket would have a life — right down to his name — surely different from the one he was about to show us in and around Camden, Arkansas. Oh, the painting of murals would still be there, but his cabin out at Mustin Lake, an ancient oxbow of the Ouachita, that would be something else.

As Q and I stood a discreet distance to watch the muralist’s careful brushings, I eventually called up to him my admiration. To step inside a plein air painter’s circle of awareness and observe the work for a spell and then slip away without a brief word strikes me as either rude or ungrateful for demonstrated artistry. If it’s worth watching, it’s worth commendation. A simple “well done” is enough.

To those words the painter descended the scaffold and began cleaning a brush rather than brushing us off. “I’m always glad to get down from up there,” he said. In the unsequestered creation of exterior murals, an artist becomes used to everyone-a-commentator, especially so when a large portion of his painting is occupied by a languorous fifty-foot seductress. Other than her, the subjects in the mural were more traditional ones of local topography and history. Many citizens — of both genders — had not yet noticed a twenty-foot stern-wheeler steaming directly toward the vamp’s (to keep the nauticals) well-trimmed stern.

The artist, Indigo Rocket, didn’t really much like heights, in part because he’d recently fallen out of a tree. As he wiped the brush, he said, “For meeting people, I’ve never had a medium like street murals. But you can’t talk from a scaffold.”

He spoke of Camden seeing a small renaissance after some years of hard times brought on by changes in agriculture and the closures of the Camark Pottery factory and the kraft-paper mill, and there was even talk about remaking the town as a kind of creative colony where an artist could live cheaply. “Lots of new blood here,” he said. “Artists and young people who want to approach things in new ways. That’s how this mural happened.” He was to do one a year until he covered all unseemly exposed exterior walls. “It’s a way to paint the town and earn a little money from the fun.” He mentioned how communities across the country were answering the megalomaniacal supercenters rising on their fringes by giving new reasons to come downtown, and murals were part of the rebirth, a change assisted by the development of inexpensive acrylic paint. A few years ago, who’d have thought an emulsion of thermoplastic globules could be a weapon to use against behemoth sprawl*marts?

“I grew up here,” he said, “but I’d been gone for fifty years until I came back not long ago to be with my parents in their last days. Once I started that first mural, I was so exposed up on the scaffold, old friends began finding me. Now the murals help keep me here.”

He was born Terrell Mashaw, but at the turn of the millennium he decided his art required a name more fitted to its new directions. Trim and angular but not tall, with strong hands, he was youthful despite a certain facial erosion reminiscent of a carved limestone visage long exposed to weather; his profile — a nose with an almost imperceptible arc like a slightly drawn bow — might have been taken from a courthouse-lawn statue. His hair was dark and straight. He had tried engineering at Louisiana Polytechnic Institute in Ruston before changing to art and design, studies he continued at the old Art Center School in Los Angeles. Like most American males of that generation, he’d served the required military stint, his with the Army. He was sixty-six years old.

Rocket’s education — both engineering and art — led him to Detroit where he designed tire treads, unfulfilling work leading him to take up a sequence of jobs and a life as peripatetic as that of a nineteenth-century itinerant sign-painter, work he’d also done. In Dallas he illustrated annual reports but soon burned out on advertising, so he sold most of his belongings to continue hithering and yonning: San Diego, Port Townsend, Sonoma, Boston, Providence, Woods Hole, San Antonio.

He had a knack for finding distinctive habitations: the Nobska lighthouse in Massachusetts, a tent in Massasoit State Park, a winery cottage in California, and now the cabin on the Ouachita oxbow. For a while he and his girlfriend, Blue, painted trucks and carousel horses and kiddie rides for a carnival, and sea creatures on walls for a couple of marine wonderlands. He spoke in an unassuming manner, his gaze often directed toward his bespattered boots. I asked what it was like to walk past and look up at one of his own murals, and he said, “I’m glad I’m still alive.”

When Indigo learned we were following the valley of the Ouachita, he began a story about a dream he’d had on a river sandbar years ago, but decided the telling was too involved for a sidewalk conversation. I asked him to join us for supper, and he nodded and started back up the scaffold, pausing to call down, “Have you got a place to stay?” Not yet. “Come out to the cabin. There’s a four-poster for you.”

At seven, we met him at a little restaurant not far from the elegant slippers of the fifty-foot femme fatale, and it was she who led us into talk about the difficulties in painting large murals: heights, weather, public constraints, distortions caused by viewers looking from thirty feet below the painting.

“On that first mural,” he said, “I struggled longest with how I should represent the black community here and its history. Do I put them in overalls and field dresses? Kerchiefs and shoeless? Are they picking cotton and walking behind mules? Does the mural end up with blacks in torn dungarees and whites in suits and dresses? What part of the past do I put up on a wall forty-six feet wide and three storeys high? I couldn’t figure it out until one Sunday. That’s the day people dress up down here — everybody, black or white. That was my answer — put some of every group in their Sunday best. I mean, who wouldn’t get into their best bib and tucker for their portrait?”

Q said, “That made people happy?”

“Not everyone. Some guy drove past in an old truck one day when I was on the scaffold and yelled out, ‘Hey! Why don’t you paint another nigger up there!’” Indigo paused. “That’s going to happen when a street is the gallery.”

We talked about public murals in a democracy as being an art of inclusion, how art in a forum
demands
inclusion. I paraphrased José Orozco, the great muralist of Mexico, who said of all the arts, mural painting is (I quote him now) “the most disinterested, as it cannot be converted into an object of personal gain nor can it be concealed for the benefit of a few privileged people. It is for the people. It is for everybody.” Great mural artists understand the power of the forum and use their work to instruct, inspire, remind, maybe amuse, and sometimes provoke. I could see Indigo’s murals doing all those things.

“I’ve never had this much fun with art,” he said. “I’ve earned more money but never so much pleasure. It’s almost performance art. Rednecks in pickups, church ladies in Buicks, guys on Harleys — everybody wants to join in some way. One woman stopped to tell me I was using too much pink and purple. I told her enough murals in Arkansas are green and brown. Besides, bright colors fade.”

I said, speaking of purple, the only thing on the first mural that wasn’t generalized was the Grapette delivery truck. (I noticed it because I might have won a footrace in 1949 had I not drunk that second bottle of Grapette soda pop just before the competition.)

“It was invented here in Camden right about the time we were born,” Indigo said. “Benjamin Fooks. He started out by selling brooms, among other things. You’ll be sleeping in his former cabin tonight. He was my uncle.”

That detail seemed rationale enough for me to boast I’d once taken the company slogan, “Thirsty or not,” to heart and drunk six bottles in a day, and Indigo said, “I did thirteen one time between breakfast and going to bed.” Q asked what the slogan meant, and he said, “You don’t have a glass of wine because you’re thirsty. You don’t drink coffee for thirst.” We both, I assume, were looking proud because she said, “Are you boys bonding over guzzling purple sodas?”

After we ordered sandwiches, he said, “Above the Grapette truck I painted a bright-yellow Stearman biplane, but there was something about it that bothered me. But I couldn’t see what it was. I kept looking, and it still escaped me. One evening when I was up working on it, the bucket slipped out of my hand and fell thirty feet — yellow paint went everywhere. Something didn’t want the plane up there. Right after the accident I finally saw how the Stear-man was flying directly at the bank tower in the mural. Shades of Nine-Eleven in the brightest yellow. The next day I went up and painted clouds over it. In five months, that yellow plane was the only real accident.”

Our waitress came to the table, cast a sweet eye on Indigo, a man now of local renown, asked whether his (full) glass needed refilling, and sashayed herself off again. Q asked, “Are you married?” Not now. “Do you have children?” No children. “How about when
you
were one? Were you a little artist?”

“I liked toys that
worked,
” he said. “That
operated.
Things I could assemble and disassemble and reassemble in different ways — Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets. But those toys were all based on angles, and I wanted curves and circles. When I got older I built little flying things, but I always dreamed of machines that could be totally versatile to move in all the elements — land, water, and air. I guess I was more mechanical than artistic. A screwdriver instead of a crayon. Later, when I worked for the company that makes Transformers, I had to design instruction books, but I wanted to do the figures. I didn’t stay there long.”

The waitress brought our supper, simple fare, nothing to distract the conversation. Indigo said, “When I was about sixteen, I saw in a
Popular Mechanics
plans for a small boat. Eight-feet long with a nineteen thirties–style racing hull. I made it out of spruce and marine plywood. At my mother’s suggestion, I covered the bottom with fiberglass cloth, a new material then. I got an old Mercury outboard racing motor and rebuilt it. It’d do about forty miles an hour on the water, which is a little fast for the Ouachita. You know, bends and barges, snags. But I was a kid. One evening I was going full-bore up the river and hit an out-of-control ski boat which didn’t survive. But the fiberglass hull saved me. My mother’s idea. What did she know about boat construction?” We toasted his survival, and he said, “Maybe I should never have named that little racer
Miss Fit.
But I heard it’s still out there somewhere, running the river.”

Q said, “This afternoon you mentioned a dream you had about the Ouachita.”

“Not
about
the river — 
on
the river,” he said. “It happened in August. I’d gone up the Ouachita alone. Stopped on a sandbar to get a little sun. I was a teenager. Nineteen fifty-four, a time of lots of talk and books about UFOs. I fell asleep, I guess. For how long, I don’t know, but I dreamed a spacecraft came in above the water and hovered over me and blocked the sun. I can’t remember it all now, but I do remember the ship spotted me, and three beings — willowy females — came down and took me aboard. I was helpless. All I could do was look back and see my body sleeping on the sand. The airship was like a chameleon — it kept changing colors, according to mood, it seemed. Inside, a huge vertical-axis gyro was turning. I don’t remember what happened on the ship, except I can see now certain ideas got planted in me that began sprouting years after. The three females might have been expressions of yin principles — art, grace, and beauty. Who knows? Then I got returned to the sandbar. When I woke up in the hot sun, I had no sunburn, and my skin was aromatic. It was like I’d been under a big shadow the whole time.”

Did he ever dream of the ship again? “Once, about a year later, in a fever. That time the thing — or the dream — was scary, but I don’t know why. Something had changed.” He shook his head. “Now I don’t know whether the dreams were a blessing or curse.”

Q asked whether he dreamed much about flying — body flying without mechanical support, that wonderful free-floating stuff. Indigo said, “Not enough.”

11

Architect of Phantasmagoria

S
OON AFTER DUSK,
we followed Indigo Rocket across the river
and into the low backcountry to the Fooks cabin where he lived on the woods-fringed oxbow fed by cold springs he could feel rising when at night he swam the dark water. His uncle built the retreat in 1946 on proceeds from Grapette and its sister drinks: Orangette, Lemonette, Limette. I felt a kind of proprietary interest in the place: my boyhood nickels must have bought a shingle here and a nail there.

Benjamin Tyndle Fooks (rhymes illogically with Cokes), after many months of experimentation, created his signature drink with real grape juice and cane sugar, and the resulting excellence of his beverage caused it, over the following decade, to reach from little Camden across the nation. (An early slogan: “Particular Folks Drink Fooks Drinks.”) After the family sold the company, Grapette eventually ended up in the hands of a rival that let it decline until yet another group brought it back and returned it in a small way to certain areas, one of them its natal town where once again you can find it in the little clear bottles.