The Third Silence
The Third Silence By Nancy Springer
The Third Silence
By Nancy Springer
Copyright 2012 by Nancy Springer
Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass
and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in
Cicada
, Nov/Dec 2003.
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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
By Nancy Springer
So a bunch of us were walking downtown after school. Town, as in, Small Town, USA. Make that Small College Town. Which is lucky for me, because there are professors, who have brainy kids, so I actually have friends, which is not the usual fate of the school Nerd of the Arts. Which I am, despite my name. Hi, I’m Brad Litwack, and could somebody please explain me to my dad?
So it was May of junior year, my friends and I were heading toward the Emporium of Ice-Cream after another school day, and it was sunny and there should have been birds singing, but instead I heard car horns caroling. “What’s going on?”
One of the girls said, “It’s coming from the square.”
“Why do they call it a square? It’s a circle.”
Horns crescendoed, and ahead I could see traffic piling up. You would think people would be able to handle a rudimentary roundabout with a Dead General on Horse statue in the middle, but at least once a year… I grinned. “Some tourist went the wrong way again!” I broke into a trot. Wanted to see.
The circle was packed full of pissed-off horn honkers while more cars poured in from four directions like beans funneling into a jar. Cars tried to turn around, cars tried to cut across the grass island, cars drove on the sidewalks while my friends and I ran in the street. It was a wondrous mayhem. I laughed out loud.
“What if it’s an
accident
?” said one of the girls. “What if somebody
died
?”
“Nobody died!” I pointed at the epicenter of the mess, a muddle of heads around a woman who seemed to be standing on the hood of her car—
Painting?
I couldn’t be sure at first. I just saw her gestures, smooth and precise, as if she were conducting Tchaikovsky. And her face, grave and still, with long gray hair pulled back in a braid. I recognized her, kind of. I’d seen her around town, maybe walking a Welsh Corgi, maybe clerking at an antique shop? She was one of those older women you see without noticing, faded female in faded jeans blending into the campus environment.
I saw a flash of yellow, brighter than the petunias around the Dead General, tipping the sweep of a long-handled brush.
“Is she painting the
car
?” somebody exclaimed.
I barely heard. I was laughing again, like a child with a butterfly, and darting nearer, worming between cars and people. Yes, she was painting her car, a white junker angled to block traffic. On it and around it she had set out paint in big margarine buckets: crimson, caramel, lemon, sage, indigo, mauve, violet, each color with its own brand-new natural-wood-and-white-sable brushes. Moving as if she were choreographed, she finished the roof of her car and segued to the front left fender.
I stopped laughing and just watched. Three wide strokes, indigo, mauve, violet, and she had painted a night sky over a hint of ocean. With the tip of her brush handle she pulled out white spindrift in the billows, white twinkles in the sky. Then with a smaller brush she started lettering something. I read aloud as she wrote, “All…dishevelled…wandering…stars.” I exclaimed, “Yeats!”
She actually gave me a flicker of a glance over her shoulder as she moved on. She hadn’t spoken at all. Nobody spoke. Horns kept bawling, and some guy came storming over from his car yelling, “What the hell is…” But when he saw her painting, he shut up and just stood there, as quiet as everybody else. There was something so vehement about her silence that you forgot where you were going and just watched her.
On the driver’s side door in crimson she wrote, “For Dario Fuentes.”
Dario Fuentes? It was nobody I’d ever heard of, but I liked her lettering, arty and neat like origami.
Around the car windows she wrote, “Western wind, when wilt thou blow?” and “Second star to the right and straight on until morning,” and “The rain never gets wet.”
Like an operatic soprano soaring above the syncopated car horns, the yodel of a siren sounded. But I didn’t move. I didn’t even turn to see whether it was my father.
Sure and graceful, like a ballet, the woman with the gray braid turned to the rear door and fender, took a big brush and made three swoops of sage: hills. A quick splatter of yellow: buttercups. Caramel shadows. Indigo and violet: sky and sea. All down her braid, down the back of her denim jacket, she wore little bows of yarn that exactly matched the colors in her palette. She must have planned this escapade for months, maybe years. I pictured her in shadows with her head on her pillow, her hair in waves like a flowing gray ocean, asleep, dreaming of what she would paint on her car.
She wrote, “Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea.”
“Fern Hill!” I blurted. “Dylan Thomas.”
She gave me a glance again, like a Yeats horseman casting a cold eye, never breaking the rhythm of her brushwork.
Behind me a big cop voice said, “Okay, folks, show’s over. Move along. Back to your cars.”
I didn’t have to turn around to know that yeah, it was my dad. Officer Litwack.
His voice broke the spell. I heard a shuffle of feet, a woman giggling, and some man saying, “She never got over the sixties. Damned old hippie,” as he walked away.
Behind my ear, one of my friends said, “Come on, Brad.” Friends? I’d forgotten all about them and the Emporium of Ice-Cream. I shook my head.
“Well, we’re going.”
“So go. Bye.” I didn’t even look around. Instead, I walked closer to the gray-braid woman, who probably never heard my footsteps, she was so intent on swooshing yellow petals onto her gas cap cover, painting a Van Gogh sunflower there.
My father stood right behind her in his navy-blue army-booted uniform with his black guns-and-gadgets belt lugging heavy on his hips. He chuckled and said to himself, “Well, this is different.”
Gray Braid didn’t look up, just dabbed a garland of quick mauve daisies around her sunflower.
Dad switched over to his cop voice. “Ma’am,” he said, “I have to ask you to pack up your paints and move this car. Right now, please.”
She ignored him so well that I actually wondered whether she noticed him, and it was hard not to notice anything as big and strong as my father. I mean, he was born to be a cop. His father had been a cop, and Dad wants me to be a cop too. Me, in that uniform? Yeah, right. But Dad says if more people with ideals signed up, the force wouldn’t have such a bad name. He hasn’t given up on me yet, because I can’t help listening to him at least some. When Dad speaks, people generally listen.
Except the woman with the gray braid. She stood up, but only to start painting something in blue on her car’s trunk.
“Ma’am, I’d appreciate your cooperation. I don’t want to have to take you in,” my father warned her.
She didn’t even blink to show that she’d heard him.
“
Ma’am
—” he started to warn her again, but then he caught sight of me, and he kind of yelped, “Brad, what are you doing here?” Like he thought I was with her.
“Just walking home.”
For some reason Dad frowned at me. “You’d better get going, then.”
Huh? Why? But then I realized: Dad didn’t want me to see him arrest Gray Braid.
And I didn’t want him to arrest her at all. I stalled for time. “Who’s Dario Fuentes?”
“What?”
I pointed at the crimson name painted on the car door. “Dario Fuentes. Who is he?”
Dad stared at the name, and under the peak of his police hat his face went as still as snow. For just a moment. Then his brows bunched like thunderheads, and he glared at me. All of a sudden he was like a different person.
Like my grandfather. All nightstick.
Dad used his cop voice on me. “Brad, I told you to go home. Get moving.”
That voice could have muscled me home all by itself, it was so powerful. I backed off, but I managed to stop by the car’s rear bumper, watching as Dad reached for the “Dario Fuentes” door handle and yanked it. The door didn’t open for him. He peered inside and pressed his lips together. “Locked with the keys in the ignition,” he muttered. He walked around the car, trying each door. All locked. This car was not going anywhere soon. I’m sure Gray Braid had planned that too. She was still painting her trunk, lettering something—
My father strode to her and grasped her by the arm, pulling her away from the car. “All right, Ma’am, that’s enough.”
I yelped, “Dad, don’t!”
He turned on me, head down like he was a grizzly bear about to charge. “Bradford, go home.
Now
.”
“No.”
I had never said “No” to a direct order from him before. I still don’t know how I said it, or why, unless it was something about the long, virginal paintbrush in her hand still yearning blue toward the car. Or maybe something about all dishevelled wandering stars.
My father’s face went bloodless white, as white as first star on the right, then crimson red, like straight on till morning, sailor take warning.
I blurted the first thing I could think of. “Dad, she’s my friend!” Even though I’d never talked with her, this did not feel like a lie. “Don’t put her in jail. Please.”
My father breathed out with a windstorm noise between his teeth—like he didn’t trust himself to say anything to me. He turned away and headed toward his vehicle, hauling the woman with him.
All the time she had not said a word. But as he pulled her away, she looked me straight in the eye, gave me a Mona Lisa smile, and handed me her paintbrush, still wet with indigo.
* * *
I didn’t go home.
I wanted to, because I knew I was in trouble and hanging around there might only make it worse. But I couldn’t just leave. It was like she had passed me a baton.
Anyway, Dad didn’t come back. Another cop came to get traffic untangled. I stood behind the white car and looked at what the gray-braid lady had painted on the trunk. A poem:
These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow…the hour
Before the daw
It stopped there. Where my father had taken her away.
Damn, oh dammit, I’d seen that poem somewhere, but how did it go? The falling snow, and she had etched snowflakes into a blue-and-lemon-mauve dawn sky…the hour before the dawn…but what was the third silence?
If things went as usual, it would come to me sometime too late for me to help.
I saw a guy with a Nikon taking photos of the other side of the car, and with the long blue-tipped brush still in my hand I drifted around there. Oh, man, she must have painted that part before I got there. “Dream of pear empanadas,” it said around the windows. “Don’t cry over chihuahua pee. Penguin dust! Bring me penguin dust! Thank you for reading my car.” On the door, amid waves like flames, it said, “The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea.” On the fender, amid flames like waves, it said, “With a burning spear and a horse of air, to the wilderness I wander.” In odd spaces I saw a crimson dragonfly, a handprint in yellow and caramel, and a purple rectangle that said in curly letters, “Poetic License.”
I asked the photographer, “You from the newspaper?”
“Yeah.”
“Who’s Dario Fuentes?”
“Huh?”
I led him around and showed him the name on the driver’s side door. He took a picture of it.
“Rings a faint bell,” he said. “Somebody local.” For a minute I thought he said loco.
The cop directing traffic got things cleared out enough for a tow truck to back in. Another cop started working on the driver’s side door with a Slim Jim. “Run along, son,” he told me.
Standing on the hood of the car, the photographer laughed. I got up on the curb under the Dead General and looked. All over the roof she had painted a huge sunburst.