So Much Blue

by Percival Everett

  “I’m a photojournalist,” he repeated.

  I thought about the boy, Luis, and felt anger. I found the Bummer’s eyes and surprised him by not looking away.

  “What?” he said.

  “Tell me the name of that village?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Today. Where were we? What’s the name of that village?”

  “Who the fuck cares,” the Bummer said, waving me off. “Toledo. How about that? Toledo sounds Spanish, right?” He looked at Richard. “Is Toledo a Spanish word?”

  “What is it called?” I asked, my voice slightly louder. I could feel my voice in my head, my chest.

  “Keep your voice down,” the Bummer said to me.

  For the first time I felt I had some power over him, but even drunk I realized that to exploit it would be to my detriment.

  “Better yet,” he said, “just shut the fuck up.”

  I didn’t shut the fuck up. “Tell me,” I said, louder than I intended.

  The Bummer put his pistol on the table and rested his hand on it, the barrel pointed not at me but at Richard. He smiled. “I learned a long time ago that you don’t threaten the threat, you threaten the family.”

  I said nothing, but sank back into the bench. I looked at Richard’s face, apologized with my eyes. “I want to know the name of the village,” I said, softly. “Please.”

  “I said it doesn’t fucking matter. Now, sit back and shut the fuck up.”

  Carlos watched all of this calmly. “What happened today?” he asked. He put a cigarette into his mouth and offered one to the Bummer, not to either of us.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Doesn’t sound like nothing,” Carlos said.

  I looked at Richard. He was drunker than I was, looked ready to puke. “We dug a grave,” I said.

  “Were you in Las Salinas?” Carlos asked. “Tell me you weren’t there.”

  “Not all the way,” the Bummer said.

  “Is that the name?” I asked. “Las Salinas.”

  “Time to stop talking,” the Bummer said, glancing about the room. He leaned forward. “Maybe these soldiers were in that village today. Maybe they think that nobody knows what happened. Maybe they think that there are no witnesses.”

  That scared me close to death. I stared at my half-empty glass, didn’t consider even a furtive glance around the room.

  Richard leaned toward me and said, “This shit taste like earwax.” He threw it back, then out of a tight throat, “Definitely, earwax.”

  He and I laughed. Carlos swallowed his drink. I did the same.

  The Bummer watched us laughing. He held his glass up as if admiring the color of the whiskey. He slowly put the glass to his lips. “I like earwax,” he said and drank the contents of his glass very slowly.

  We laughed again, harder this time, but the Bummer did not. He just closed his eyes and settled into the corner as if for a nap.

  Paris

  At that moment of seeing Victoire childlike on that bench I could have caught myself, freed myself with even the mildest allusion to Lolita, but the fact of the matter was that it was not her youth that attracted me. In fact, I am not even certain that what charmed me was all that genuine, that being her guiltlessness, her irreproachability, either of which were constructions of mine or hers. It really wasn’t that I wanted her, but that I wanted what she had, a kind of freedom, a purity of spirit. It was a sort of integrity, something that I strived for but had lost through so many years, maybe never had. I wanted what she had the way I wanted to draw the way my daughter drew when she was four, when that tangle of lines was an elephant, an elephant that I could not see, but an elephant. I recalled how brokenhearted I was when one day she crumpled up her picture and complained that it didn’t look like an elephant at all. Victoire allowed me to see that simple bench as it was, as more than what it was, and I was happy for it. I loved her for it. I sat on it beside her and felt the smoothness of it under my palms, attended to the coolness of it.

  “Where shall we go now?” she asked.

  “The aquarium is not far away,” I said.

  “You’re afraid of us.”

  That she said us instead of me was not unnoticed and I was impressed because she was correct. “That’s probably true,” I said.

  “I have nice tea at my flat.”

  “Do you?”

  “It is Iranian tea,” she said.

  I looked across the room at a canvas and didn’t recognize the hand that had made it, but what was interesting was that I didn’t care and, more, I found the painting boring, flat, uninspired, and then I found the whole museum that way.

  “You know,” I said. “I’ve come to dislike museums.”

  “Why is that?” she asked.

  “It’s where art comes to die. Look at this place. It’s a crypt.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “Look at those people over there, nice people, smart people, viewing the dead in open caskets.”

  I could feel Victoire looking at me. “That’s the most you have ever said all at once.”

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”

  “My place?” she asked.

  “Okay.” I agreed because that was what I wanted.

  At this point there was no need or reason to resort to philosophical reflection. Waiting and suspense were predictable, perhaps necessary characteristics of the situation, situation being both an unfortunate and an extremely accurate term. Delay and anxious uncertainty, sine qua non. All the way to Victoire’s apartment, however, I did not think about how I might kiss her that second time. I instead wondered how we would talk, though that wonder did not manifest as some interior rehearsal. I simply wondered and that pleased me.

  As we entered her building I sensed if not doubt then at least some apprehension in Victoire. This seemed reasonable enough to me, but it didn’t come across as a function of her youth, but rather as a concern for me. I felt it and appreciated it, was actually impressed by it. By the time we were up the two flights and inside her apartment she had put her hand on my arm.

  “Ça va?”

  “I’m fine. You?”

  “I am very fine. I don’t have a wife.”

  “This, what we have here, is ours.” It sounded like such a line, but I had talked myself into believing that very thing. Just inside her door, I said, “Still, you understand this is what it is.”

  “You think too much,” she said.

  “And I talk too much.”

  She touched my face. I touched hers.

  What was wonderful was that the sex was tender, that we kissed, that we were slow, that we were a little clumsy, a lot clumsy when it came to the condom, my clumsiness and the object itself making me self-aware, embarrassed, a bit ashamed. But that faded when she kissed me. I imagined in the middle of it all that I would be less ungainly, a bit more graceful in bed the next time. I loved being inside her and somehow felt I was not experiencing it fully, that the moment was getting away from me, that it was all rushed, but it was not, time was what time is, its own pace. She moved and she didn’t move, every sound was sweet to me. I didn’t know where her hands were most of the time, but I did know they pleased me. She might have had an orgasm, but I didn’t care.

  “If you were to paint our sex, would it be a big canvas?” she asked. She stared at the ceiling.

  “Demandes-tu en français,” I said.

  “Si tu étais à peindre notre sexe, dirais-tu peindre une grande toile?”

  I rolled onto my back, laughed softly.

  “That was funny?” she said.

  “That was beautiful,” I told her. “Yes, it would be a large canvas. However, it would be part of a canvas.”

  “Will you paint it?”

  “Oui.”

  “Ton français est parfait.”

  I picked up my watch from the nightstand and checked the time.

  “Do you have to leave?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I will have t
o go back to my hotel.”

  “I know.”

  I sat up and started to get dressed even though I didn’t have to rush out. It just seemed like what I ought to do, realizing that the act of leaving was going to be awkward whenever it happened. At least I thought it would be awkward. Victoire subverted that expectation.

  “I will miss you,” she said. She cuddled up to my back. “Will I see you tomorrow?”

  “Would you like to see me tomorrow?”

  “That is a very silly question. Before you go, I would like you to tell me a secret.”

  “What kind of secret?”

  “A real secret. We will tell each other secrets.”

  “You first.”

  “Okay.” She kissed the back of my neck and pulled herself around to sit next to me. “My boyfriend does not know that you are here.”

  I was surprised by her secret and just a little amused at the fear that ran through me right then. “I guess I’m relieved to hear that. Where does he live? Does he like to just stop by?”

  “He’s not much of a boyfriend. He is, after all, just a boy. He is going to leave me. I know this.”

  “Why would he leave you?” My question was an honest one.

  “I don’t know. He worries too much.” She held my hand up to her face and looked at it.

  “Why do you think he’s going to leave you?”

  “I just know it.”

  “People tend to worry when they care.”

  “Perhaps. Now, your secret.”

  “You. You are my secret,” I said.

  She studied me for a few seconds. “Tomorrow night, after you fuck me, we will have tea and you will tell me a better secret.”

  House

  We lived at either the edge of the country or the edge of town, either way being equally unimpressive as the so-called country consisted of large houses with gigantic yards and a smattering of horses and the so-called town was little more than a hamlet, being made up mostly of large houses with smaller yards. Straddling the two, our house was enough town to have a smaller yard and enough country to have a large enough yard for the two outbuildings that served as my studios. It was all very arty and New Englandy.

  This to introduce what was called the Feedstore or more precisely Frazar’s Feedstore. It was a half mile from my house. On weekends upscale ruralites and weekend equestrian-garment wearers would park their mostly German cars on the gravel yard and rub well-heeled elbows while drinking coffee from paper cups on the wide porch. They would yawn, stretch, and breathe in the air and complain about city life, Boston or Providence, the latter though hardly a city had its share of city problems, while oblivious to the fact that the family who owned and worked the store fairly hated them. Perhaps hate is too strong a word, the Frazars being aware of their bread and which side the butter was on and all that, but still they did not like the crowd of patrons terribly much, if at all. The Frazars delivered timothy grass, alfalfa, and oat hay to the pristine and spotless barns and sold them overpriced bags of food for their Labradors and Weimaraners, and managed cordiality and courtesy, but I knew. They might have hated me, and perhaps they did and I just couldn’t tell, oblivious like the folks on the porch, but I wanted to believe that my relationship with them was somehow different. To the Frazars I was the crazy artist who lived down the lane. They liked that I walked to their place in paint-splattered work boots and overalls and drank their coffee and actually complained about it on occasion. My lunch every day was two of their pre-foil-wrapped hot dogs that they heated in some kind of oven; that alone should have given me the credibility I imagined. That I ate shit for lunch, walked, and was dirty from work, even if it was paint, should have made me more acceptable. I enjoyed at least the perception that they liked me.

  One weekday I made the trek there for my lunch. While I ate my second dog I perused a wall of horse bits. The bits themselves were interesting, beautiful, even the ones that looked so blatantly painful, like the one made from a segment of bicycle chain, it having been there since long before I moved into my house, but the wall of them was magnificent. I had no desire to paint likenesses of horse bits, but there was something about all of them there together, so alike and so different, so beautiful and cruel, circles and eggbutts and D-rings, so the yellowed labels told me. A few steps farther and I was facing a tangle of ocher-colored hoses and a very large white plastic barrel. The tag on it claimed it was a stable fly suppression system.

  The teenage Frazar was marking inventory on a clipboard just a couple of feet away. His name was Jason and I knew this because of his embroidered shirt, though I had seen him many times.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “That, Mr. Pace, is a stable fly suppression system,” he said cheerfully as if I couldn’t read.

  I bit off some hot dog. “Well, Jason, I can see that.” I pointed at the tag. “What does it do?”

  “It suppresses flies,” he said.

  “Suppress being euphemistic for kill. I don’t mind the idea of killing flies at all and we’re not in the CIA.”

  “You put fly spray in this drum here and you see it’s on this timer and every however-long-you-want it shoots the fly spray around the barn and …”

  “Suppresses the flies.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Suppresses them to death,” I said.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “How much does a suppressing thing like this cost?” I finished my dog and touched the tangle of hoses.

  “I think it’s around two fifty.” He looked at me. “You don’t have horses, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “You got a lot of flies around your place?”

  “Not especially. No more than anyone else, I guess.” I paused to study young Jason’s face. “You’re a friend of my daughter.”

  “Yes, sir.” He looked back down at his clipboard. “April and I went out a couple of times.”

  I felt like a bad father for not knowing that, but I recalled at that moment having heard the name Jason used in our kitchen. It then struck me that Jason Frazar might be the boy who had gotten my little girl pregnant. That of course would have occurred to me if any boy had told me he knew my daughter. It seemed like too much of a coincidence that this kid right now might be the one, but I couldn’t shake the notion. I stared at him.

  “That thing has been sitting around collecting dust for a while,” he said. “I bet my dad would give you a good deal on it.”

  I was still staring at him.

  “On the fly outfit,” he said.

  “Yeah, I’ll think about it.”

  I watched the boy walk away, but I was not thinking about him and his possible guilt so much as I was lamenting my situation. I needed to tell Linda, but every minute that passed without my telling her made it that much more difficult. Yes, April would hate me and for some reason, in spite of the fact that I believed she already hated me on some level, I couldn’t stomach the idea that I would have broken a promise to her. I wondered if our secret, my knowing while her mother did not, my helping with the doctor and all, would actually remain a secret or whether it might become an item for blackmail down the road or perhaps a weapon of mass destruction to pull out against her mother one day.

  I regarded the stable fly suppression system and imagined the drum full of sodium hydroxide and the yellowish tubing stretched along the top of my private painting. The opening of the door could flip the switch and the system could then apply the caustic soda over the canvas and thereby ruin and perhaps erase my painting before anyone could see it. I became excited by the idea, perhaps disproportionately excited, no doubt a deflection of the business that was so pressing and troubling.

  “Jason,” I called to the boy who was now making the silage forks neat in their bin. “Jason, where is your father?”

  “You really want that thing?”

  “I think so.”

  “He’s up in the office. I’ll go get him.”

  The elder Frazar was a
big man. I have big hands, but his mitt engulfed mine when we shook. I didn’t know him to be a wheeler-dealer, but then I hadn’t bought anything but coffee, hot dogs, and the occasional garden tool from him.

  “So, you got yourself a fly problem,” he said. “This here is a very nice little system.”

  “Do you think I might have a discount?” I asked right away.

  “It’s listed at two seventy.”

  That was more than Jason had said, but he was not being precise, I understood that. “Would you take two hundred?”

  Frazar smiled. “I don’t think so. Tell you what, let’s say two fifty and call it good. How’s that sound?”

  “Sounds like retail,” I said.

  “Two forty,” he said.

  I looked at Jason, who had come to stand behind his father, and the thought flashed again that he might be the father of my grandson and that would make old man Frazar related to me in whatever way those things worked. I wondered if he knew about April’s condition. I abandoned our negotiation and said to Jason, “When is the last time you saw April?”

  He was taken completely off guard, as well he should have been, my question coming out of left field like that. “I saw her about a week ago.”

  I nodded. They didn’t attend the same school.

  Father Frazar cleared his throat.

  I returned my attention to the older man. “Two forty is fine. Do you think you could deliver it?”

  “Today?”

  “That would be great.”

  “I can be there around four. You want me to fill the drum with insecticide?”

  “No, but I’d like ten gallons of sodium hydroxide.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Ten gallons of sodium hydroxide.”

  “We’ll have it there.” The man nodded to his son to start packing up the merchandise. “All we have is one-gallon jugs of the sodium hydroxide. I don’t know if we have ten of them.”

  “Whatever you have. I’ll pay you when you come over. I don’t have my wallet on me.”

  “No worries.”

  “Tell April I said hello,” Jason said.

  “I will,” I said.