The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of (11 page)

“We don’t have a misunderstanding,” Dave said.

“You were at Mona’s gallery. You think I’m some dirty old drunk that goes around molesting women.”

“I think you’re a good painter,” Dave said.

Smith closed an eye. It wasn’t a wink. It was an attempt to focus. “Thank you. But you mean ‘was.’” He thought about that and shook his head. “‘Were,’” he said. “‘Were’ a good painter.”

“Those aren’t old pictures,” Dave said.

“Just finished,” Smith said. “But the last. No use—you understand me? Best I could do—best I ever did. But too late. Time ran out. Ground shifted on me.”

The bartender’s heels gonged on the metal stairs. His head and shoulders appeared. He threw Smith a look of disgust and raised his eyebrows at Dave. Dave shook his head and the bartender brought into sight a pair of drinks on a black-lacquer tray painted with floppy cerise flowers. He set the drinks down and Smith struggled in a pocket. When he drew out his fist, coins rattled to the floor, crumpled bills fell. But he held on to one, smoothed it on the table, eyed the man in the red vest with the insolence of wealth. The man in the red vest grunted, made change, picked up Smith’s empty glass, and went off down the clanging stairs.

Smith studied his new drink morosely. “You don’t know what it is to live so long. Seventy-one years. You keep finishing with things and you say, ‘That’s it.’ But it never is. There’s always something else. You keep having to start over. Well, I have news. Finally you just get too tired. No more. No bleeding more.”

“Maybe one?” Dave said. “The crab shell on the rocks. Could you do it again? I’d like to own that.”

But Smith didn’t hear him. He was listening to his past. He said, “Got out of art school 1925. Began illustrating—books, magazines. Money wouldn’t sound like anything today but it bought more then. Hell, I even got married.” With a wry, remembering smile, he picked up the fresh glass. The smile faded and he drank. “Depression put an end to that. I painted WPA murals. All scraped off by now.

Married somebody else. She had a lot of wild ideas and just money enough to get us to Hollywood. She was going to be a movie star.” He showed the loose teeth in a dingy, sad laugh. “She never even got a screen test. All she got was some kind of kidney infection that killed her. And me? I became head of a studio art department. Kids today are writing books about Hollywood in the thirties. Crazy, they call it. They don’t know the half.” He drank, set down the glass, squinted one-eyed at Dave again. “You watch much television? I sure as hell do. Don’t always turn up the sound. It’s the pictures I want. I have to
see
—understand?”

Dave said he thought he did.

“I doubt it,” Smith said, “but you watch television sometime. Old movies. You’ll catch my name on the credits.” He lettered the air with a fragile, dirty white hand. “‘Art Direction, Tyree Smith.’” The hand fell with the slow uncertainty of a scrap of wind-blown paper. “Then came the war. I painted camouflage. Nets to cover whole factories. England mostly. Arms factories. To make them look like enchanted woodlands.” He drank again, larynx moving like a knife point in his withered throat. “Enchanted woodlands filled with death.” He spoke the tired irony as if he’d lost faith in it. “When it was over, I went back to the studio, but it felt wrong. No fun in it anymore. Or maybe just no fun in me.”

“It happened to a lot of us,” Dave said.

“You were younger,” Smith said. “I was already forty. I told myself, ‘I have to do what I want to do. It’s now or never. I’m going to paint.’”

“Good for you,” Dave said.

“Bad for me,” Smith said. “You don’t choose painting. Painting chooses you.” The new drink was hitting him hard.
Choose
came out
shoes.
And he was teetery on the nail-keg stool. “I didn’t know that simple and profound fact. And my ignorance cost me everything—wife, kids, savings, house, car, health, everything.” He gripped the edge of the tabletop and leaned at Dave. “And for what? One-man shows in backstreet galleries in towns like Santa Maria, Laguna, Flagstaff. At first. Then a few paintings hanging up to fade in tourist shops. Marked down, marked down again. Lessons to bored housewives without talent.” He lifted his glass again and smiled at it wanly. “And booze. No, it didn’t help me figure out what was wrong. It helped make figuring out what was wrong unnecessary.”

He drank, this time thirstily, and when he set the glass down all that was left in it were ice cubes. He peered at Dave in the deepening shadows under the low rafters.

“But it cost too much. I’d had apartments, then rooms, then rooms in the houses of friends who didn’t stay friends long. Then I was sleeping on the beach. And then I was too sick to get up. Hospitals after that. Out sometimes but too sick to work and there was only one cure for the frustration. Booze. Then hospitals again. Veterans’ hospitals. Free. Nothing free in this world worth a damn having, my friend. Remember that.”

Smith belched. His eyes fell shut. Past him, the sinking sun cast the shadows of the gulls on the window glass. Dave finished his own drink. When he looked up from it, Smith was watching him. Smith looked at the drink Dave hadn’t tasted. Dave pushed it across to him.

“Thank you,” Smith said. “There was a period when I took fright. I quit drinking. I did my work. Taught at an art institute in Pasadena. There was an article in a national magazine that praises every rotten artist they write about anyway. It sold enough prints of my stuff to buy me a house trailer to keep out the wintry winds. Place to sleep dry. Wheels to wander on. I quit the institute and wandered, painting boring pictures of boring subjects in a boring style. And knew it and couldn’t help it and bought a case of vodka and nearly killed myself.”

He drank half of Dave’s drink.

“Not ropes and knives and bullets. Unintentionally. Starvation, dehydration, old age.” The teeth rattled like dead men’s bones. “On the beach at Monterey. When Mona found me. Knew who I was, had been. Took me in, fed me, got me on my feet again. Gave me a little room at the back of her gallery, let me work for my keep. Hell, it wasn’t much. Sweep every day, put up a nail now and then, screw in a light bulb, water the plants out front, frame some tourist’s lousy seascape once in a while.

“She said if I’d paint when I was strong again, she’d give me a show. Place did a middling business. Pretty setting—not heaven, but more than I deserved. I knew that. I pulled myself together and tried to work again. Shook too much. Had to drink to get the shakes down to where I could draw a line, hold a brush. But there was some point to working now—to pay Mona back. She kept the bottle, doled out the drinks, and slowly the pictures got done. Best I ever did. Can’t account for it.” Smith shook his head in wonderment. “I started seeing things like I’d never seen them before. I got them down on paper that way. All I needed was time.” He scowled. “Then that big bullneck cop blundered in and wrecked it. Love!” He choked on the word. “The woman is almost forty. Love is a swindle. Grown man is supposed to know that. Not him. Gray-haired, overweight, father of grown children, for God’s sake. But from that first minute, it was candlelight and gypsy violins all the way. Sickening.”

“Ben Orton,” Dave said.

“I raise my glass”—Smith had trouble locating it and getting his fingers around it but he managed at last to hoist it at a dangerous tilt, ice cubes rattling—“to the little woman that killed that loudmouth yahoo. With only one reservation.” He drank from the glass, set it down with a bang that didn’t mean anything except bad aim, brushed at his mouth with a limp hand. “She waited too long.”

“Who?” Dave asked.

But Smith’s attention had slipped. He had lowered his chin to tabletop level and was sliding his hands toward the glass like a kid trying to catch a sitting toad. He sighted on the glass one-eyed. He smiled. The hands closed—but next to the glass, not on it. He made a noise, sat straight, and with no trouble at all picked up the glass and drank from it. And fell off the stool. It was a noisy fall. The stool went over too and the glass broke.

“What the hell?” the bartender said.

“It’s all right,” Dave said. He knelt beside the rickety old man. He had hit his head. The teeth had jumped out and lay glistening pink on the planks. He didn’t seem any more alive than they were. Dave felt for the beat of life in the crooked blue vein of his scraggy neck. It was there. He lifted the old head. It felt eggshell-fragile in his hand. Smith opened his eyes.

“His wife,” he said, “plump little blond.”

“Never mind that now,” Dave said. “Are you all right?”

“Drunk as hell.” Smith grinned, looked panicked, covered his mouth. “Teeth. Where my teeth?” He pushed at Dave feebly, rolling his eyes at the planks. He snatched up the teeth, rubbed them on his jacket, made a horrible, gaping face and set them back in place. He struggled to get up. Dave helped him. Smith stared down at the shattered glass, the clean curved edges glittering in the ruddy light “Shame,” he said. “Awful waste.”

“You’ve had enough. Let’s get you out of here.” Dave began to help Smith down the stairs. He was light to manage, bones like sticks, no flesh on them to speak of. And he didn’t quarrel with being helped. He let it happen. The twisted stairs were narrow and both of them jarred the rails and got their legs tangled but Smith went on talking.

“She had a little revolver. Hoo, was she mad!”

“What revolver?” The bartender put a foot on the steps and reached up to help. “Who’s got a revolver?”

“No one here,” Dave said. “It’s all right. I have him.” They reached floor level. Smith pulled free of him, poking into pockets again, muttering. “Tip the man.”

“All I want from you,” the bartender said, “is for you to get lost.” He waved a puff-sleeved arm at windows that showed the sunset people at the candlelit tables. “Go fall off the deck over there.”

“Where does he live?” Dave asked. “Do you know?”

The bartender squinted. “What are you—a Boy Scout?”

“It’s a small town,” Dave said. “Wherever it is can’t be far out of my way.”

The bartender went back to his bottles. “Take the road that cuts off at the school. You’ll hit a big stand of eucalyptus. Other side of that, he’s got a trailer. Goddam eyesore. Ought to be a law.”

Mumbling, Smith fell toward the bar, waving a twenty-dollar bill. Dave caught him in mid-fall, swung him around, steered him toward the door, taking the bill out of his hand and tucking it back into his pocket. Outside, diners looked up briefly, looked down again embarrassed. Except for two. They stared. One was Mona Windrow in a white knitted shawl, the other was Al Franklin in a new denim leisure suit, beard trimmed, long hair clubbed back, nails showing no trace of motor grease. Mona Windrow pushed back her chair and started to rise, distress in her eyes, pity. He reached across and stopped her. Then they both recognized Dave. He nodded to them. Mona Windrow didn’t return the nod. She was looking reproach at Franklin. But Franklin nodded. As Dave guided the unseeing Smith past them, Franklin even spoke. “Evening.” It didn’t mean much but it didn’t quite mean nothing.

In the rental car, slumped askew in the bucket seat, safety strap bunching up the linen jacket, head bumping the window glass, hands fallen to his lap palms-up in a gesture of emptiness, eyes shut, Smith still couldn’t stop talking. “She’d really worked herself up, shaky hands, squeaky voice. Told him she’d kill him if he didn’t leave Mona alone.” Smith made a sour sound, opened blurry eyes, turned his head to wince at the flicker of hard red light through the ragged tree trunks. “Wasted her chance with words. She should have pulled that trigger. He knew her better than she knew herself, walked up to her, took away the gun, told her he’d do as he damn pleased and if she didn’t like it, she could leave him.” Smith snorted. “He knew she never would.”

The bartender had been right. The trailer was an eyesore. Dented aluminum, spattered with dried mud, a square of rain-stained cardboard where a window had been, it hung on a weedy point of land above jagged black rocks the tide was backing away from. Three respectable-looking campers kept their distance, sheltering at the edge of the trees. There was a lone telephone booth. From wooden poles with tin meter boxes limp wires fed electricity to the campers and trailer. Smith had passed out. Dave opened the old man’s door, undid the safety strap, and hauled him to his feet.

The inside of the trailer was a shambles of crumpled drawings, pizza tins, wrappers. Dave lowered Smith onto a bunk heaped with dirty clothes and dirtier blankets. Museum prints of Cézanne apples and Hokusai insects were pinned up over it, faded, flyspecked. Smith began to snore. Turning away, Dave bumped a portable television set. About to shut the trailer door after him, he saw Smith struggle up to switch the machine on. Color splashed the soiled white suit before he collapsed on the bunk again. No sound came from the set. The sound came from Smith.

“Long as his wife knew anyway, Orton wanted his mistress someplace he didn’t have to drive half the night to get to. He paid for the move, lease on the patio place. Nothing too good for Mona. And that so-called brother of hers.” Smith chuckled. Lecherously. “Brother! I emptied the wastebaskets. I saw letters he wrote to her. Those weren’t from any brother. Hottest stuff you ever read. Worth keeping.”

“Franklin?” Dave asked.

He didn’t get an answer. He heard a clinking sound he didn’t understand. Then Smith began to snore again. Loud and steady. Dave stepped in and shook him. He didn’t wake. From a glass of green water on the floor the teeth grinned. Dave went out and shut the door.

S
ANDBAR ROAD TOOK HIM
into marshes. The planks of a wooden bridge rumbled under the hard little car wheels. The bridge crossed an inlet edged and islanded with reeds. The water lay calm and glossed with red from the last light of the sun. Far out on it a rowboat looked lonely. A sign at the end of the bridge read
LA CALETA STATE PARK
—
U.S. WILDFOWL REFUGE
. The blacktop veered and went among old live oaks hung with moss. Houses clustered there, half a dozen of them, stucco, low-roofed, bristly with TV antennas, economy cars in the driveways. He parked at the mailbox numbered 310.