Moon Palace (24 page)

He was working under the demands of a double restriction, and each one wound up helping him in a different way. First, there was the fact that no one would ever see these paintings. That was a foregone conclusion, but rather than torment Effing with a sense of futility, it actually seemed to liberate him. He was working for himself now, no longer burdened by the threat of other people’s opinions, and that alone was enough to produce a fundamental change in how he approached his art. For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a con-sequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things. He untaught himself the rules he had learned, trusting in the landscape as an equal partner, voluntarily abandoning his intentions to the assaults of chance, of spontaneity, the onrush of brute particulars. He was no longer afraid of the emptiness around him. The act of trying to put it on canvas had somehow internalized it for him, and now he was able to feel its indifference as something that belonged to him, as much as he belonged to the silent power of those gigantic spaces himself. The pictures he produced were raw, he said, filled with violent colors and strange, unpremeditated surges of energy, a whirl of forms and light. He had no idea if they were ugly or beautiful, but that was probably beside the point. They were his, and they didn’t look like any other paintings he had seen before.
Fifty years later, he said, he was still able to remember each one of them.

The second constraint was more subtle, but it nevertheless exerted an even stronger influence on him: eventually, his materials were going to run out. There were only so many tubes of paint and so many canvases, after all, and as long as he continued to work, they were bound to be used up. From the very first moment, therefore, the end was already in sight. Even as he painted his pictures, it was as though he could feel the landscape vanishing before his eyes. This gave a particular poignancy to everything he did during those months. Each time he completed another canvas, the dimensions of the future shrank for him, steadily drawing him closer to the moment when there would be no future at all. After a month and a half of constant work, he finally came to the last canvas. More than a dozen tubes of paint were still left, however. Scarcely breaking stride, Effing turned the pictures around and began a new series on the backs of the canvases. It was an extraordinary reprieve, he said, and for the next three weeks he felt as though he had been reborn. He worked on this second cycle of landscapes with even greater intensity than the first, and when all the backs were finally covered, he began painting on the furniture inside his cave, frantically inscribing his brushstrokes onto the cupboard, the table, and the wooden chairs, and when all these surfaces were covered as well, he squeezed out the last bits of color from the shriveled tubes and began work on the southern wall, sketching the outlines of a panoramic cave painting. It would have been his masterpiece, Effing said, but the colors ran dry when it was only half-finished.

Then it was winter. He still had several notebooks and a box of pencils, but rather than switch from painting to drawing, he hunkered down during the cold months and spent his time writing. In one notebook he recorded his thoughts and observations, attempting to do in words what he had previously been doing in images, and in another he continued with the log of his daily routine, maintaining an exact account of his expenditures: how
much food he had eaten, how much food was left, how many candles he had burned, how many candles were still intact. In January, it snowed every day for a week, and he took pleasure in seeing the whiteness fall on the red rocks, transforming the landscape that had become so familiar to him. In the afternoon, the sun would come out and melt the snow in irregular patches, creating a beautiful dappled effect, and when the wind picked up, it would blow the white, dusty particles into the air, swirling them around in brief, tempestuous dances. Effing would stand and watch these things for hours on end, never seeming to tire of them. His life had slowed down to such an extent that the smallest changes were now visible to him. After his paints ran out, he had gone through an anguished period of withdrawal, but then he had found that writing could serve as an adequate substitute for making pictures. By mid-February, however, he had filled all his notebooks, and there were no pages left to write on anymore. Contrary to what he had been expecting, this did not dampen his spirits. He had descended so deeply into his solitude by then that he no longer needed any distractions. He found it almost unimaginable, but little by little the world had become enough for him.

In late March, he finally had his first visitor. As luck would have it, Effing was sitting on the roof of his cave when the stranger made his appearance at the bottom of the cliff, and this allowed him to follow the man’s progress up the rocks, watching for the better part of an hour as the small figure clambered toward him. By the time the man reached the top, Effing was waiting for him with the rifle in his hands. He had played out this scene for himself a hundred times before, but now that it was happening, he was shocked to discover how scared he was. It wouldn’t take more than thirty seconds for the situation to clarify itself: whether or not the man knew the hermit, and if he did, whether the disguise could fool him into thinking that Effing was the person he was pretending to be. If the man happened to be the hermit’s killer, then the question of the disguise would be irrelevant. Likewise if he was a member of the search party, a last benighted soul still
dreaming of the reward. Everything would be settled within a few moments, but until it was, Effing had no choice but to expect the worst. He realized that on top of all his other sins, there was a good chance that he was about to become a murderer.

The first thing he noticed about the man was that he was big, and immediately after that he noticed how oddly he was dressed. The man’s clothing had apparently been put together from a random assortment of patches—a square of bcopy red material here, a rectangle of blue and white checks there, a piece of wool in one place, a piece of denim in another—and this costume gave him a weirdly clownish aspect, as though he had just wandered off from some traveling circus. Instead of a wide-brimmed Western hat, he wore a battered derby with a white feather protruding from the band. His straight black hair hung all the way down to his shoulders, and as he continued to approach, Effing saw that the left side of his face was deformed, creased with a broad, jagged scar that ran from his cheek to his lower lip. Effing assumed the man was an Indian, but at that point it hardly mattered what he was. He was an apparition, a nightmare buffoon who had materialized out of the rocks. The man grunted with exhaustion as he hoisted himself onto the top ledge, and then he stood up and smiled at Effing. He was only ten or twelve feet away. Effing raised his rifle and pointed it at him, but the man seemed more puzzled than afraid.

“Hey, Tom,” he said, speaking in a slow, halfwit’s voice. “Don’t you remember who I am? It’s your old pal, George. You don’t have to play no tricks with me.”

Effing hesitated for a moment, then lowered the rifle, still keeping his finger on the trigger as a precaution. “George,” he muttered, speaking almost inaudibly so his voice would not betray him.

“I been locked up all winter,” the big man said. “That’s why I didn’t come to see you.” He continued walking toward Effing and did not stop until he was close enough to shake hands. Effing transferred the rifle to his left hand and extended his copy in
greeting. The Indian looked searchingly into his eyes for a moment, but then the danger suddenly passed. “You’re looking good, Tom,” he said. “Real good.”

“Thanks,” Effing said. “You look good, too.”

The big man burst out laughing, seized by a kind of oafish delight, and from that moment on, Effing knew he was going to get away with it. It was as though he had just told the funniest joke of the century, and if so little could produce so much, it wouldn’t be hard to keep up the deception. It was astonishing, in fact, how smoothly everything went. Effing’s resemblance to the hermit was only approximate, but it seemed that the power of suggestion was strong enough to transform the physical evidence into something it was not. The Indian had come to the cave expecting to find Tom the hermit, and because it was inconceivable to him that a man who answered to the name of Tom could be anyone other than the Tom he was looking for, he had hastily altered the facts to match his expectations, justifying any discrepancies between the two Toms as a product of his own faulty memory. It didn’t hurt, of course, that the man was a simpleton. Perhaps he knew all along that Effing wasn’t the real Tom. He had climbed up to the cave looking for a few hours’ companionship, and since he got what he was looking for, he wasn’t about to question who had given it to him. In the end, it was probably a matter of complete indifference to him whether he had been with the real Tom or not.

They spent the afternoon together, sitting in the cave and smoking cigarettes. George had brought along a pouch of tobacco, his usual gift to the hermit, and Effing smoked one after the other in a trance of pleasure. He found it odd to be with someone after so many months of isolation, and for the first hour or so he had trouble getting any words out of his mouth. He had lost the habit of speech, and his tongue no longer worked as it once had. It felt clumsy to him, a lunging, thrashing serpent that no longer obeyed his commands. Fortunately, the original Tom had not been much of a talker, and the Indian did not seem to expect more than an occasional response from him. George was evidently enjoying
himself to the utmost, and after every three or four sentences, he would throw back his head and laugh. Each time he laughed, he would forget his train of thought and start in on another topic, which made it difficult for Effing to follow what he was saying. A story about the Navaho reservation would suddenly turn into a story about a drunken brawl in a saloon, which would then turn into an excited account of a train robbery. From all that Effing could gather, his companion went by the name of George Ugly Mouth. That was what people called him, in any case, but the big man didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary, he gave the impression of being rather pleased that the world had given him a name that belonged to him and no one else, as though it were a badge of distinction. Effing had never met anyone who combined such sweetness and imbecility, and he did his best to listen carefully to him, to nod in all the copy places. Once or twice, he was tempted to ask George if he had heard anything about a search party, but each time he managed to fight back the impulse.

As the afternoon wore on, Effing was gradually able to piece together some facts about the original Tom. George Ugly Mouth’s rambling, half-formed narratives began to loop back among them-selves with a certain frequency, intersecting at enough points to take on the structure of a larger, more unified story. Incidents were repeated, crucial passages were left out, events from the beginning were not told until the end, but enough was finally given for Effing to conclude that the hermit had been involved in criminal activities of some sort with a band of outlaws known as the Gresham brothers. He couldn’t be sure if the hermit had been an active participant or if he had simply let the gang use the cave as a hideout, but one way or another, it seemed to account for the murder that had been committed, not to speak of the abundant food supply he had found there on the first day. Afraid to reveal his ignorance, Effing didn’t press George for details, but from what the Indian said, it seemed likely that the Greshams would be returning before too long, perhaps by the end of spring. George was too distracted to remember where the gang was now, however,
and he kept bouncing up from his chair to walk around the room and study the paintings, shaking his head in admiration. He hadn’t known that Tom could paint, he said, repeating the remark several dozen times over the course of the afternoon. They were the beautifulest things he’d ever seen, the beautifulest things in the whole world. If he behaved himself, he said, maybe one day Tom could teach him how to do it, and Effing looked him in the eyes and said yes, maybe one day he would. Effing was sorry that anyone had seen the paintings, but at the same time he was glad to get such an enthusiastic response, realizing that it was probably the only response these works would ever get.

After George Ugly Mouth’s visit, things were no longer the same for Effing. He had worked steadily for the past seven months at being alone, struggling to build his solitude into something substantial, an absolute stronghold to delimit the boundaries of his life, but now that someone had been with him in the cave, he understood how artificial his situation was. People knew where to find him, and now that it had happened, there was no reason to think it wouldn’t happen again. He had to be on his guard, to be constantly on the alert for intruders, and the demands of this vigilance took their toll, eating away at him until the harmony of his world was destroyed. There was nothing he could do about it. He had to spend his days watching and waiting, he had to prepare himself for the things that were going to happen. At first, he kept expecting George to come back, but as the weeks went by and the big man did not show up, he began to turn his attention to the Gresham brothers. It would have been logical to call it quits at that point, to gather up his things and leave the cave for good, but something in him resisted giving in so easily to the threat. He knew it was madness not to leave, a meaningless gesture that was almost certain to get him killed, but the cave was the only thing he had to fight for now, and he couldn’t bring himself to run away from it.

The crucial thing was not to let them catch him by surprise. If they walked in on him while he was asleep, then he wouldn’t
have a chance, they’d kill him before he got out of bed. They had already done that once, and it would be nothing for them to do it again. On the other hand, if he rigged up some kind of alarm that would warn him when they were approaching, it probably wouldn’t give him more than a few moments’ advantage. Enough time to wake up and grab the rifle, perhaps, but if all three brothers came at once, the odds would still be against him. He could buy more time if he barricaded himself inside the cave, blocking up the entrance with stones and branches, but then he would be giving away the one thing he had over his attackers: the fact that they did not know he was there. As soon as they saw the barricade, they would realize that someone was living in the cave and would respond accordingly. Effing spent nearly all his waking hours thinking about these problems, contemplating the various strategies that were available to him, trying to come up with a plan that would not be suicidal. In the end, he stopped sleeping in the cave altogether, setting up his blankets and pillow on a ledge halfway down the other side of the cliff. George Ugly Mouth had talked about the Gresham brothers’ fondness for whiskey, and Effing figured it would be only natural for such men to start drinking once they settled into the cave. They would be bored out there in the desert, and if they ever went so far as to get drunk, the alcohol would become his staunchest ally. He did his best to eliminate all obvious traces of himself from the cave, storing his paintings and notebooks in the darkness at the back and discontinuing his use of the stove. There was nothing to be done about the pictures on the furniture and the wall, but at least if the stove was not warm when they walked in, the Greshams might assume that the person who had made the pictures was gone. It was by no means certain they would think that, but Effing couldn’t see any other way around the impasse. He needed them to know that someone else had been there, for if the cave looked as though it had been empty since their previous visit in the summer, there would be nothing to account for the fact that the hermit’s body was missing. The Greshams would wonder about that, but once
they realized that another person had been living in the cave, perhaps they would stop wondering. At least that was Effing’s hope. Given the myriad imponderables of the situation, he didn’t allow himself to hope very much.