His father never heard another word about it, and all of David’s thoughts were kept hidden, in his sketchbook and on his canvas. Painting was a way of making his thoughts known, though he cast those thoughts safely over his father’s head.
Therefore, painting the flag black would be too obvious. Even his dad, an uneducated graduate of T. Walter High, would recognize it. He had to be smarter, more subtle. That was the way they had made it between him and his father. Secretly, and in his sketchbook, he confessed that he’d begun to hate people. He wanted to see them suffer.
* * *
David worked at his canvas while his thoughts wandered from Julia, to last year, to the party. He was growing nervous. He kept thinking about the coming September, as if it were a prison sentence he couldn’t escape. David was never fond of light brush strokes, so at least the torment didn’t detract from his style as he jabbed and smeared his brush down the canvas.
He worked in relative quiet for an hour or so, blocking out the rainfall that battered his door. His father had returned home sometime during the night, and was no doubt forced to park his car out in the driveway because of David’s still life and easel. David could imagine him already complaining about it. Could hear him banging about in the kitchen, fixing his lunch. David knew he would be pacing around all day until the rain stopped, because he was an anxious person, always busy “doing.” Another characteristic David didn’t have, to his father’s lasting disappointment. He heard heavy footfalls, and a shard of shadow appeared under the door leading into the house. The door opened, and his father stood there with a sandwich in his hand. He glanced around the garage, as if checking to make sure his son was alone. David sat there, almost dumbfounded.
“Time you get up this morning?” his father asked.
“I don’t know. What time did you get up?”
“I didn’t get home till almost five. I was out earning a living so I can put a roof over your head.” The two remained silent for a brief moment. “Did you eat lunch yet?”
David shook his head.
His father nodded, and looked around the garage again. “There’s cold cuts in the kitchen if you want.”
David pretended to work on his canvas, but was really just toying with it, slapping at it with phantom strokes and then looking back at his father. He was inspecting David’s work. For the first time, David grew self-conscious in front of his father. His eyes wandered over to the still life, and back to the canvas. David could sense he was going to make a comment about it, and they both silently recognized it to the point that his father smirked slightly before he spoke.
“That’s just the outside of it, right? You just got the shapes down for now?”
“Yeah,” David answered, and cleared his throat.
His father nodded, as if he was proud of himself for knowing something about art. “Got to fix the shape of that soup can, no? It’s bigger than the skull. Paint in all the shadows and stuff?”
“I guess, sort of.”
Again his father nodded, and seemed to be making his retreat. He began to close the door as he backed into the house. “Okay, good chat,” he said. Just as he was about to close the door, he took one last glance at the still life, and noticed the American flag. “That goes back up when you’re done with it.”
David turned to look at what he was talking about, though he knew damn well. He rolled his eyes. “Whatever. What for?”
“What do you mean, what for?” his father barked.
“It’s ugly and stupid looking,” David said. “We look like all the rest of the idiots around here with that thing hanging off the house.”
“Hey, some of the people around here ain’t so bad. What’s wrong with Hopkins over there?” His father pointed. “Guy talks to you all the time. Used to let you swim in his pool. Besides, that ugly, stupid-looking thing keeps my grass nice and green all through the summer.”
David frowned at the obvious dig. “It’s not my fault there’s ignorant people running around.”
“No, it’s not. No, it’s not,” his father agreed. “But you can help keep ’em away from my grass, that’s all I need to worry about. And you can stop antagonizing them.”
“Why do you want to hang that thing outside, when you don’t even care about what it represents?”
“David, there’s no discussion. That flag goes back up on the house when you’re done with it.”
David’s father closed the door, as if to flee from the argument, and David returned to his canvas, fuming. There was never a discussion. With anyone, David thought.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BITTER, THIRSTING IVAN ILLWORTH poured his fifth drink of the day, holding it up in the weak light that bled through the dusty window of his horse barn. The mix of heat and rain outside hung fog on them the color of old curtains. After Clover died, Ivan hadn’t the heart to completely revamp the barn into something more useful. Instead he’d built imself a small work bench with leftover planks from the split-rail fence, and used the horse’s old grain barrel for the legs. It came up to Ivan’s chest, and was just big enough for his newspaper, an old-fashioned vise he’d used to fix his horse’s shoes, and his daily bottle of whiskey. He inspected the glass for a moment, and poured half of it into his mouth. He grimaced; it was not expensive whiskey, his desire having long ago outlasted his budget. Ivan was just a step above drinking Wild Irish Rose, claiming only hobos and welfare cases drank that rotgut.
He was still seething over his wife’s demand for James to apologize to that preacher. As if he’d done something wrong to him personally! As if it were his son who came home with a welt the size of Texas on his neck. It pained Ivan to think of his boy, that frail skinny kid, withering under some preacher’s hellfire stare. To him, the world had been a simpler place before people came around telling others how to live.
Ivan took another sip of whiskey. He was delighted, glad that it was never his calling to go save souls, that he was born a horse man—that he had, all his life, left everybody alone and hardly ever questioned another man’s motives. All that nonsense Janet was spewing in the kitchen was pure pie-in-the-sky. He was happy to not waste time hoping for a future that might or might not happen. He was content to just take his life as a series of moments. Bold laughter. A little meanness sometimes. He knew that the good and peaceable, the noble and mighty Michael Darwin, had it all wrong, and Ivan glowed in the idea that the man was over there forever wasting his time; him and that pale, medieval wife of his. But he didn’t understand why his own wife had bought into it so heavily. Unless of course she wanted to know Michael in the biblical sense.
Bathsheba, he thought.
He opened his daily newspaper and read about some group’s attempt to preserve a plot of land further east, a plot that was once a sacred Indian burial ground and now threatened to become a stretch of condominiums. He scoffed. Not that it was being fought over, or that the burial site was bound to lose to the developers, but at a deeper notion—that the debate should even have to take place. He was horrified at the way the world could so easily pave over its past. Park their cars atop sacred bones. The idea of it made him wonder if it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to bury everything he loved in the backyard, where the family plot could never be disturbed. He took another swill of whiskey and read on.
It was not long before his thoughts returned to the preacher, and how he was probably at that very moment frightening his son with doom and damnation, and pinning the whole thing on his little shoulders.
* * *
Janet Illworth looked out the kitchen window and saw the soft yellow glow of light from Ivan’s barn. As long as he was out there it was peaceful. It was a gray day. So dark. She was heating water for tea, alone in the house. Kevin was off doing whatever Kevin did.
She sat down on her small kitchen chair. Ivan had woken her up early in the morning, blathering like an old man. She had turned on her side, but he sat at the edge of the bed and went on and on about the senselessness of people who buy house
s and build fences around them, or something. She had tried to shut him out so she could fall back asleep, but his voice had lost its soothing quality years ago, and it grated on her—making it nearly impossible to block out.
He was talking about Indian trails, and although she’d told him to shut up and go to sleep, he went right on talking. He was constantly bothered by something, so much so that she now hardly paid attention. She knew when it was coming too, because he had that annoying preface. Not for nothing, he would always say, before he assailed her ears with all the things in the world that vexed him.
Janet yawned in the still afternoon, as the tea kettle began to rumble on the stove. She remembered when his temper was a blessing. That was many years ago, when they first met, in fact.
She was at a high school party, the last of her senior year. Buddy Hawkins was a football player and scholar, a business major heading off to Yale in the fall. Buddy talked to everybody, including teachers, so it was no surprise to young Janet Ulrich that standing by the makeshift bar, mixing a drink, was Mr. Stewart, her history teacher. Buddy must have stopped by his classroom to announce the party to the students, and invited him as well.
Mr. Stewart was a man who wandered the hallways looking down at his shoes, and rarely spoke when he wasn’t teaching about history. Janet thought he was a bit strange, until someone had explained to her that Mr. Stewart had gotten very close to Lionel Lambert, one of his graduating seniors, the year before. They were nearly best friends by the time Lambert graduated in June of ’64 and joined the army. Seven months after graduation Lionel Lambert was dead. Killed in action in some hotel barracks in a place called Qui Nho’n. It was north of Saigon, that’s all they knew, for who could possibly make heads or tails of all those foreign places? His body had been incinerated, they’d heard. His boots and dog tags, all that was left of him, were shipped home. There was a quiet funeral for him, but Mr. Stewart had stayed away. He went out walking—to the Sands Point Bridge at the southern tip of Turnbull. He’d climbed to the edge of the bridge and stared down at the death plunge below, until a car full of his students happened to be out joyriding and noticed him. They stopped and asked him what he was doing, but he simply hopped down and walked away without saying a word.
Perhaps it was Lambert’s death that fortified Mr. Stewart’s resolve to know his students better. Perhaps it was because he realized their time could be cut short. Perhaps that was the reason he’d been standing there, alone at the liquor cabinet in Buddy’s house, watching his students smoke and curse and make plans for the coming summer. Janet didn’t exactly know why she had approached him. She vaguely remembered being drawn to his broken spirit, the way one would approach a person lying in the street.
Mr. Stewart spoke for hours with pudgy little Janet Ulrich, supplying her with all the details of his life. Never married. An only child. He loved baseball, and his knowledge of history made him very much afraid that America was repeating it. Meanwhile, every time Janet retreated to mix another drink, the older class of ’63 graduate, Ivan Illworth, would ask her what her pretty name was. He shouted many times over the music, before Janet finally told him. He nodded as if he was right about her name being pretty, and went back to quietly drinking his beer. Janet was immediately intrigued by his behavior. Drunk, yet oddly in control of himself. She’d heard stories about him, but there wasn’t a soul who passed through high school that didn’t have stories—half-baked in the bleachers at football games, or inside the stalls of the girls’ bathroom. She thought about Ivan every time she rejoined Mr. Stewart in the hall. He had urged her to escape with him there, where they could get away from the loud music and talk.
Leaning against the wall beside a hanging picture frame, Mr. Stewart started to reminisce about his youth, all the cruel and painful tricks.
“I was always scared,” he said. “Always playing by the rules. Ah, yes, you know about playing by the rules, you’re in high school, but you may shed all that when you graduate, and I hope you do. There’s not enough time in life to stay so damned civil all the time. Especially now, for your generation. No, life expectancy is very short, very short.”
His eyes were glazed in tears, like porcelain. All the while Janet Ulrich stood silent, as if he could be having this conversation with or without her. But she knew he was keenly aware of her, for after every new thought, and every pause, he’d look at her, red-eyed, and focus on her face with a familiar sort of prom-night stare. Janet straightened her clothes, and offered to refill his glass, anything to get away from him.
In the next room, tall, drunk, and wide-grinning Ivan Illworth watched her. He shook his head.
“What?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest as if she knew he was undressing her.
“I know you,” he said, smiling. “You’re scared of me, aren’t you?”
She didn’t deny it, but stood dumbly, allowing him to take another step, so he loomed over her. He shoved a hand toward her and introduced himself, shaking her trembling fingers.
Suddenly Mr. Stewart emerged from the hall. He squeezed between them and grabbed Janet’s arm. “Come with me,” he said, pulling on her. “I know what you’re thinking, but don’t. Just come with me.”
Janet’s mouth dropped open. She looked at Ivan, who was staring at Mr. Stewart as if he’d been insulted. Janet pulled her arm back.
“No, Mr. Stewart,” she said. He reached for her arm again, but she snatched it away.
“Come home with me tonight, before it’s all over,” he urged.
“Hey, the girl said no. I think you ought to get lost!” barked Ivan, removing his hand from his back pocket. Mr. Stewart didn’t look at him, a fact that Ivan certainly noticed.
“Don’t go home with this loser,” said Mr. Stewart, merely pointing in Ivan’s direction. “Don’t make yourself a whore by going home with him. Come . . . come with me now. Escape!” he exclaimed, and reached once more for Janet’s arm.
Ivan saw his opportunity. He reeled back his massive left fist and let fly. The punch echoed sharply through the music, as if a balloon had popped, and Mr. Stewart fell hard against the wall behind him. Ivan grabbed Janet’s arm and pulled her away, into the night.
She was stunned, and remained that way for days—oddly aroused, too, by the lingering sensation of Ivan’s powerful hand gripping hers. As though gravity itself couldn’t pull her down. And when she recovered from all the whispers and rumors and half-truths that were told in the days that followed, she found she had herself a boyfriend.
But years later, what she would remember most was poor Lionel Lambert, and the sound of that punch, and Mr. Stewart’s eyes. The tea kettle screaming in the gray kitchen was the only thing that stopped her from sobbing.
As she took the kettle off the range, she heard the back door pop open and then, moments later, slam closed. She shut her eyes and drew a deep breath. Her husband’s voice boomed behind her.
“Not for nothing, but it should be him . . . that rat bastard, who should be apologizing to us.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
BENEATH THE SOFFIT David could see the rain falling, absent its usual rhythm. Who thinks like this? David wondered. But he couldn’t deny his senses. One could smell dryness blowing in—one could see the leaves rising to look upward like a boxer released from the corner, and one could notice in the puddles how the rings were able to spread farther apart before another falling drop destroyed them—how the puddles no longer rattled, electrified by raindrops.
But he still remained tightly pressed against the house, beneath the soffit and the rusted gutter punched with decayed holes, dripping. He gripped the flag he had stashed beneath his shirt and pulled it out to arrange it quickly. If the weather had permitted, he might have succumbed to his rebellious heart and hung the flag upside down to set his father off. Instead he clipped the top left corner to the top hook on the flagpole and secured the bottom with a tight pull of the string. He wrapped the excess tie around a cleat fastened to the side of the house.
Across the street a mailbox squeaked closed. David peered over his shoulder and saw Mr. Hopkins thumbing through his mail. To David, his body looked as though he’d surrendered to the brutality of everything—a gust of wind, a rainstorm, cracked sidewalks. But as he watched Mr. Hopkins flip defiantly through the letters, he felt something like hope swell inside him. Old age had melted off the man’s armor. But he was somehow still armed.
He liked the old man, as much as he didn’t want to cede the point to his father. To David, Hopkins lived the encyclopedias he himself read in the library. He knew even now that the moment Mr. Hopkins saw him he’d quiz him on a fact, or invite him over to watch a show his grandson had taped for him on the Phoenicians, or the history of denim. David liked that he could still sometimes surprise the old man—liked that there was an infinite number of facts to know, and nobody could live long enough to know everything.
David cleared his throat, though there was nothing in it, and it was enough to grab Mr. Hopkins’s attention. He turned and held up a trembling yellow hand in the diminished light. David waved back.
“The largest organ on the human body is the skin,” Mr. Hopkins called across the street.
“Everyone knows that,” David answered. The old man was slipping.
“Unfortunately it’s not always the thickest,” Mr. Hopkins added. “Come over here; I have something I want to show you.”
“I got to get ready for this thing I’m going to,” David said, jerking a thumb toward his house.
“It will haunt you, when you get to my age, the things you refused to witness.” He was already turning back toward his house, waving David over, knowing he’d come.
* * *
Mr. Hopkins had a basement he’d turned into a smoking lounge. The sweet smell of pipe smoke seemed to coat the wooden paneling. Standing alone on a small table stood a statue of Buddha’s head with an elongated left ear that served ginger ale out of the pierced lobe. Duck decoys lined a shelf on the far end of the room. A deck of cards collected dust on the nightstand beside Mr. Hopkins’s orange recliner. There was a bar fully stocked just behind the recliner and Mr. Hopkins led David to it.
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