The Best New Horror 2 (18 page)

“The Man Who Drew Cats” was the first story he has had published (other tales are forthcoming in
Darklands
and
Fantasy Tales
). He got the idea from watching a pavement chalk artist at work and seeing a child crying nearby. The original setting was Edinburgh, but he transferred the action to the Midwest and wrote the story in a day. It’s a stunning debut of a promising new talent . . .

O
LD TOM WAS A VERY TALL MAN
. He was so tall he didn’t even have a nickname for it. Ned Black, who was at least a head shorter, had been “Tower Block” since the sixth grade, and Jack, the owner of the Hog’s Head Bar, had a sign up over the door saying “Mind Your Head, Ned”. But Tom was just Tom. It was like he was so tall it didn’t bear mentioning even for a joke: be a bit like ragging someone for breathing.

Course there were other reasons too for not ragging Tom about his height or anything else. The guys you’ll find perched on stools round Jack’s bar watching the ball game and buying beers, they’ve known each other for ever. Gone to Miss Stadler’s school together, got under each other’s Mom’s feet, and double-dated together right up to giving each other’s best man’s speech. Kingstown is a small place, you understand, and the old boys who come regular to Jack’s mostly spent their childhoods in the same tree-house. Course they’d gone their separate ways, up to a point: Pete was an accountant now, had a small office down Union Street just off the square and did pretty good, whereas Ned, well he was still pumping gas and changing oil and after forty years he did that pretty good too. Comes a time when men have known each other so long they forget what they do for a living most of the time because it just don’t matter: when you talk there’s a little bit of skimming stones down the quarry in second grade, a bit of dolling up to go to that first dance, and going to the housewarming when they moved ten years back. There’s all that and more than you can say so none of it’s important ’cept for having happened.

So we’ll stop by and have a couple of beers and talk about the town and the playoffs and rag each other and the pleasure’s just in shooting the breeze and it don’t really matter what’s said, just the fact that we’re all still there to say it.

But Tom, he was different. We all remember the first time we saw him. It was a long hot summer like we haven’t seen in the ten years since and we were lolling under the fans at Jack’s and complaining about the tourists. And believe me, Kingstown gets its share in the summer even though it’s not near the sea and we don’t have a McDonald’s and I’ll be damned if I can figure out why folk’ll go out of their way to see what’s just a peaceful little town near some mountains. It was as hot as hell that afternoon and as much as a man could do to sit in his shirt-sleeves and drink the coolest beer he could find, and Jack’s is the coolest for us, and always will be, I guess.

And then Tom walked in. His hair was already pretty white back then, and long, and his face was brown and tough with grey eyes like diamonds set in leather. He was dressed mainly in black with a long coat that made you hot just to look at it, but he looked comfortable like he carried his very own weather around with him and he was just
fine. He got a beer and sat down at a table and read the town
Bugle
and that was that.

It was special because there wasn’t anything special about it. Jack’s Bar isn’t exactly exclusive and we don’t all turn round and stare at anyone new if they come in, but that place is like a monument to shared times and if a tourist couple comes in out of the heat and sits down nobody says anything and maybe nobody even notices at the front of their mind, but it’s like there’s a little island of the alien in the water and the currents don’t just ebb and flow the way they usually do, if you get what I mean. But Tom he just walked in and sat down and it was all right because it was like he was there just like we were, and could’ve been for thirty years. He just sat and read his paper like part of the same river and everyone just carried on downstream the way they were.

Pretty soon he goes up for another beer and a few of us got talking to him. We got his name and what he did. Painting, he said, and after that it was just shooting the breeze. That quick. He came in that summer afternoon and just fell into the conversation like he’d been there all his life, and sometimes it was hard to imagine he hadn’t been. Nobody knew where he came from, or where he’d been, and there was something very quiet about him, a real stillness. Open enough to have the best part of friendship but still somehow a man in a slightly different world. But he showed enough to get along real well with us, and a bunch of old friends don’t often let someone in like that.

Anyway, he stayed that whole summer. Hired himself a place just round the corner from the square. Or so he said: I never saw it, I guess no one did. He was a private man, private like a steel door with four bars and a couple of six-inch padlocks, and when he left the square at the end of the day he could have vanished into thin air as soon as he turned the corner for all we knew. But he always came from that direction in the morning, with his easel on his back and paintbox under his arm. And he always wore that black coat like it was a part of him, but he always looked cool, and the funny thing was when you stood near him you could swear you felt cooler yourself. I remember Pete saying over a beer that it wouldn’t surprise him none if, if it ever rained again, Tom walked round in his own column of dryness. Just foolish talk, but Tom made you think things like that.

Jack’s bar looks right out onto the square, the kind of square towns don’t have much anymore: big and dusty with old roads out at each corner, tall shops and houses on all the sides and some stone paving in the middle round a fountain that ain’t worked in living memory. Well in the summer that old square is just full of out-of-towners in pink towelling jumpsuits and nasty jackets standing round saying “Wow” and taking pictures of our quaint old hall and our quaint old stores and even our quaint old selves if we stand still too long. And that year Tom
would sit out near the fountain and paint and those people would stand and watch for hours.

But he didn’t paint the houses or the square or the old Picture House. He painted animals, and painted them like you’ve never seen. Birds with huge blue speckled wings and cats with cutting green eyes and whatever he painted it looked like it was just coiled up on the canvas ready to fly away. He didn’t do them in their normal colours, they were all reds and purples and deep blues and greens and yet they fair sparkled with life. It was a wonder to watch: he’d put up a fresh paper, sit looking at nothing in particular, then dip his brush into his paint and just draw a line, maybe red, maybe blue. Stroke by stroke you could see the animal build up in front of your eyes and yet when it was finished you couldn’t believe it hadn’t always been there. And when he’d finished he’d spray it with some stuff to fix the paints and put a price on it and you can believe me those paintings were sold before they hit the ground. Spreading businessmen from New Jersey or somesuch and their bored wives would come alive for maybe the first time in years and walk away with one of those paintings and their arms round each other, looking like they’d found a bit of something they’d forgotten they’d lost.

Come about six o’clock Tom would finish up and walk across to Jack’s, looking like a sailing ship amongst rowing boats and saying yes, he’d be back again tomorrow and yes, he’d be happy to do a painting for them. And he’d get a beer and sit with us and watch the game and there’d be no paint on his fingers or his clothes, not a spot. I guess he’d got so much control over that paint it went where it was told and nowhere else.

I asked him once how he could bear to let those paintings go. I know if I’d been able to make anything that right in my whole life I couldn’t let it go, I’d want to keep it to look at sometimes. He thought for a moment and then he said he believed it depends how much of yourself you’ve put into it. If you’ve gone deep down into yourself and pulled up what’s inside and put it down, then you don’t want to let it go: you want to check sometimes that it’s still safely tied down. Comes a time when a painting’s so right and so good that it’s private, and no one’ll understand it except the man who put it down. Only he is going to know what he’s talking about. But the everyday paintings, well they were mainly just because he liked to paint animals, and liked for people to have them. He could only put a piece of himself into something he was going to sell, but they paid for the beers and I guess it’s like the old boys in Jack’s Bar: if you just like talking you don’t always have to say something important.

Why animals? Well if you’d seen him with them I guess you wouldn’t have to ask. He loved them, is all, and they loved him
right back. The cats were always his favourites. My old Pa used to say that cats weren’t nothing but sleeping machines put on the earth to do some of the human’s sleeping for them, and whenever Tom worked in the square there’d always be a couple curled up near his feet. And whenever he did a chalk drawing he’d always do a cat.

Once in a while, you see, Tom seemed to get tired of painting on paper, and he’d get out some chalks and sit down on the baking flagstones and just do a drawing right there on the dusty rock. Now I’ve told you about his paintings, but these drawings were something else again. It was like because they couldn’t be bought, but would just be washed away, he was putting more of himself into it, doing more than just shooting the breeze. They were just chalk on dusty stone and they were still in these weird colours but I tell you children wouldn’t walk near them because they looked so real, and they weren’t the only ones, either. People would just stand a few feet back and stare and you could see the wonder in their eyes and their open mouths. If they could’ve been bought there were people who would have sold their houses. And it’s a funny thing but a couple of times when I walked over to open the store up in the mornings I saw a dead bird or two on top of those drawings, almost like they had landed on it and been so terrified to find themselves right on top of a cat they’d dropped dead of fright. But they must have been dumped there by some real cat, of course, because some of those birds looked like they’d been mauled a bit. I used to throw them in the bushes to tidy up and some of them were pretty broken up.

Old Tom was a godsend to a lot of mothers that summer who found they could leave their little ones by him, do their shopping in peace and maybe have a soda with their friends and come back to find the kids still sitting quietly watching Tom paint. He didn’t mind them at all and would talk to them and make them laugh, and kids of that age laughing is one of the nicest sounds there is. They’re young and curious and the world just spins round them and when they laugh the world seems a brighter place because it takes you back to the time when you knew no evil and everything was good, or if it wasn’t, it would be over by tomorrow.

And here I guess I’ve finally come down to it, because there was one little boy who didn’t laugh much, but just sat quiet and watchful, and I guess he probably understands more of what happened that summer than any of us, though maybe not in words he could tell.

His name was Billy McNeill, and he was Jim Valentine’s kid. Jim used to be a mechanic, worked with Ned up at the gas station and did a bit of beat-up car racing after hours. Which is why his kid is called McNeill now: one Sunday Jim took a corner a mite too fast and the car rolled and the gas tank caught and they never did find all the
wheels. A year later his Mary married again. God alone knows why, her folks warned her, her friends warned her, but I guess love must just have been blind. Sam McNeill’s work schedule was at best pretty empty, and mostly he just drank and hung out with friends who maybe weren’t always this side of the law. And I guess Mary had her own sad little miracle and got her sight back pretty soon because it wasn’t long before Sam got a bit too free with his fists when the evenings got too long and he’d had a lot too many. You didn’t see Mary around much anymore. In these parts people tend to stare at black eyes on a woman, and a deaf man could hear the whisperings of “We Told Her So” on the wind.

One morning Tom was sitting painting as usual and little Billy was sitting watching him. Usually he just wandered off after a while but this morning Mary was at the doctor’s and she came over to collect him, walking quickly with her face lowered. But not low enough. I was watching from the store, it was kind of a slow morning. Tom’s face never showed much, he was a man for a quiet smile and a raised eyebrow, but he looked shocked that morning, just for a moment. Mary’s eyes were puffed and purple and there was a cut on her cheek an inch long. I guess we’d sort of gotten used to seeing her like that and if the truth be known some of the wives thought she’d got remarried a bit on the soon side and I suppose we may all have been a bit cold towards her, Jim Valentine having been so well-liked and all.

Tom looked from the little boy who never laughed as much as the others to his mom with her tired unhappy eyes and her beat-up face and his face went from shocked to stony and I can’t describe any other way than that I seemed to feel a cold chill across my heart from right across the square. But then he smiled and ruffled Billy’s hair and Mary took Billy’s hand and they went off. They looked back once and Tom was still looking after them and he gave Billy a little wave and he waved back and mother and child smiled together.

That night in Jack’s Tom put a quiet question about Mary and we told him the story and as he listened his face seemed to harden from within, his bright eyes becoming flat and dead. We told him that old Lou Lachance who lived next door to the McNeill’s said that sometimes you could hear him shouting and her pleading till three in the morning and on still nights the sound of Billy crying for much longer still. Told him it was a shame, but what could you do? Folks keep themselves out of other people’s faces round here, and I guess Sam and his roughneck drinking buddies didn’t have much to fear from nearly-retireders like us anyhow. Told him it was a terrible thing, and none of us liked it, but these things happened.