The Monument (9 page)

The painting. There would always be the painting.

PYTHON WAS WAITING for me when I came out in the morning, but not sitting the way he usually did. He was standing by the door, waiting, and as soon as we reached the sidewalk he started leading me.

“What are you doing?” He was taking me toward the center of town and I wanted to go to
Carlson’s bed and breakfast, the opposite direction, so I let him go.

He stopped.

“You’re going the wrong way.”

He waited, watching me, his tail flopping.

“We’re going this way.”

But he didn’t turn. He had never done this before, fought me this way, so I decided there must be a reason. I went to him and grabbed the fur on his shoulder and followed the way he wanted to go.

Toward downtown, but off to the side, into an alley and then another alley, and we came to the back of Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium.

He was there looking sort of the same as the first morning when I saw him.

His behind was sticking up in the air, his front end was jammed down in some boxes and garbage so that I couldn’t see his face, and there was no movement.

Mick.

He looked like he’d been thrown in the trash and for a minute I thought he was dead. I let go
of Python and walked up to where he was crumpled.

“Mick?”

There was a sound—like air coming out of a tire—and I saw the rear end move.

“Are you all right it?”

“No.” The voice was muffled, coming from inside the garbage. “Do I look all right?” He rolled sideways—fell over—and brushed napkins and coffee grounds and beer cans and worse out of his face. “Tell me, do you have a gun?”

“Gun?” I shook my head. “No, why?”

“I was hoping somebody could come along and shoot me and end this.”

His face was all puffed and smashed and bloody, both eyes swollen almost shut, the lips cracked.

“What happened?” I asked, but I knew the answer.

“I’m not quite certain. It may have been something I said or something they said. One thing has a way of leading to another, doesn’t it? We were all beyond reason and there was a fight and I wound up here.”

“They always fight in Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium,” I said. “You shouldn’t have gone there.”

“Nonsense—it’s a very nice pub. Much nicer than many I’ve been in. I remember one in Sydney—my God, they had ball bats in Sydney. They very nearly killed me for talking about one of their dogs—I think they were collies.” He rose to his feet, staggering and wobbling, his clothes half torn off.

“You look awful.”

“In the name of art,” he said. “All in the name of art.” He looked up at the sun where it was starting to show above the roof edge of Lyle’s and spit out what looked like a tooth. “What time is it?”

“I don’t have a watch—I think just after seven thirty. Close to eight.”

“Ahh—eleven hours until the presentation tonight. Good, right on schedule. Everything moving right along as the plan dictates.”

“Plan? You mean all this”—I pointed to the garbage and the way he looked—“is part of a plan?”

“Well—I meant to win the fight, or at least do better.”

“You knew there would be a fight?”

He smiled, and I was right, there was a gap where a tooth had been. “It was as sure as that little grave in the bushes, my dear. There had to be a fight, didn’t there? Because there was a Lyle’s and there was a me and there was that herd of animals who drink in there—of course there would be a fight.”

“And you did it anyway?”

He looked at me—or tried to look at me. It was really more of a squint through the puffy eyes. “All of it, all of everything here was to be in the monument—what I like or don’t like, what happens to me or doesn’t happen to me doesn’t matter. The art is all of it, isn’t it? Don’t you know that already?”

I didn’t say anything but I knew he was right. I thought of the painting the night before, sitting there crying because the painting made me cry, and I knew he was right. I nodded.

“Well, then—it’s all going according to plan.
Now you go on with your sketchbook and pencils and work—draw. And I’ll get to business.”

“What are you going to do?”

“The same as you, my dear. I’m going to draw. I’ll see you at the courthouse tonight.”

THE
M
ONUMENT

SEVEN O’CLOCK even in late summer in Bolton is still day, nowhere near night—it doesn’t get dark for two more hours—and most people in the summer work until it’s really dark. Except for the downtown people. They close up about five.

Fred usually works into the night but early that day the trucks stopped coming. I was helping
Fred—I’d gone around and just about drawn everything there was to draw in Bolton and needed to talk to Mick some more to know what to do next, or how to draw better. So I’d gone to help Fred because I couldn’t talk to Mick, and about five o’clock the trucks stopped. I looked out and there were no more. Fred came out of the machinery room that drove the augers to take grain into the storage bins.

He was covered with dust—half an inch thick—and he sneezed and shook it off.

“There are no more trucks,” I said.

He nodded. “They’re stopping for the day.”

“They are?” I’d never heard of them stopping early for anything. Not unless it rained. Then they had to wait for the grain to dry out. “Why?”

“To get cleaned up for the meeting.”

“Are they all coming?”

He nodded again. “Everybody I talked to will be there. Come on, let’s get home and clean up and eat.”

We walked home—four blocks—and you could feel something. Almost a hum. People
waved and said hello and asked if we were going to the courthouse and Fred would say:

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

And the next person would wave and ask if we were going. Nobody knew quite what to expect, but everybody, everybody was going.

We showered and I put on clean jeans and a T-shirt with the name of a hard-rock place on it even though Emma wanted me to wear a dress. We left about six forty-five to walk down to the courthouse. Fred had a car, an old Chrysler that he baby-talked to when he drove, but he didn’t use it unless we went for a special drive or had to go somewhere out of Bolton to go shopping.

It took us about five minutes to walk downtown and it’s just as well we didn’t try to drive. There were cars parked and jammed the whole way and crowds of people walking, all clean and neat and dressed in their Sunday clothes.

“I didn’t know there were this many people who cared about art in Bolton County,” I said.

“It isn’t just art,” Emma said. “This monument thing is more than just art. Not everybody
will come, but I’d bet there will be close to a thousand.”

A thousand was a lot for the courthouse.

They were packed on the steps going in so I had trouble making room for Python by the concrete lions. I kind of had to let Python look at a couple of smart-aleck boys the way he looks at chickens before they made a place for him.

The hallways were jammed and the courtroom—the biggest room in the building—was full. Men and women were trying to get in the doorway. I heard sound, voices, some saying things—it sounded angry—some just rumbling.

Fred and Emma were stopped but I was smaller and by moving sideways I worked past the blocked doorway into the courtroom. By standing on one of the benches at the rear I could see all around the room over the heads of the people.

Mick stood in the front, up on the raised platform next to the judge’s bench. He was cleaner, had his hair slicked back on the sides, and looked fresh in a pair of gray pants and an almost-white shirt rolled up at the sleeves.

He stood quietly, his elbow on the judge’s bench, leaning sideways and watching with a small smile on his face—which still looked like it was made of hamburger. His eyes were still swollen almost shut and his lips were thicker than normal.

The crowd was jammed into every square foot of space, and near as I could see, not one of them was looking at Mick.

All around the walls, in two rows, one above the other, were drawings. Many of them were in the colored chalk—some I had seen him do, like the one of the small grave and drawings at the elevator, but most of them I had not seen before. Some were in pencil, some in charcoal, some just a few lines to show an idea, a few lines that showed everything, and many of them in more detail.

They were all of Bolton and for a second I just stared without seeing—there were so many. Dozens of them. And he had done them all in just two days and one night. One after the other, and they were all taped to the walls in the courthouse, and it didn’t seem possible that he could
have done it. Not in such a short time. But then I remembered that I had seen him do some of them in three, four minutes, his arm swooping with the chalk.

Then I started to look at the drawings, really look.

They were more than just drawings—they were pictures of Bolton, pictures of the inside of Bolton, pictures of everything.

“Look,” somebody near me said, “look at Mrs. Langdon.”

They meant the drawing. I saw it to the left of the bench on the wall. It was a chalk drawing in a partially lighted room, almost dim, and she was standing near a window looking back over her shoulder at the person looking at the picture.

She was nude.

Her hair was down and she was nude and it was one of those things you had to believe because of the things around it. There was the drawing of Jennings’s dog, and there was Mrs. Langdon, and the drawing of the old car up on blocks, and there was Mrs. Langdon, and there were the sparrows at the elevator, and there was
Mrs. Langdon, and even if it weren’t true, even if Mick hadn’t seen Mrs. Langdon nude, it didn’t matter.

The drawing made it true.

And more—more drawings of all the inside of the town. Drawings of the men in Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium that made them look coarse and ugly and thick-necked and drunk and red. Drawings of Mrs. Carlson holding a dollar in her hand and it was her, just exactly her, and she looked greedy and like she could hold on to the dollar forever and ever.

And me.

There was a drawing of me.

I was walking down the street with Python, holding on to his shoulder and the leg was there, the leg I didn’t like to think about was there, and I could see it now, see it as others saw it, and I felt tears coming to my eyes. Not because I was sad or upset, but because I felt like I did when I saw the painting by Degas with the ballet dancers in it and I wanted to know them and they were gone.

And there was me and I wanted to know me,
to talk to me and ask me all about the leg and the dog, and I couldn’t because it was me. I think in all the time of my life, in the long nights in the orphanage when we used to sneak into the bathroom and talk at night and bring cans of fruit cocktail and pretend to have picnics in there, in all the times of dreaming for somebody to come along and adopt me, in all the time of my life, I never saw me. Just me.

And there I was.

I started to choke up and saw that some others were crying and some—like Mrs. Langdon—were mad. She was standing in the middle of the crowded room staring, first at the drawing of her and then at Mick, who was not looking at her, and then back at the drawing and then to Mick. If she’d had a gun, I think he would have been dead.