Collected Short Stories: Volume II

by Barry Rachin

Angie fingered a paper that was tissue thin and covered with dried leaves and stems. One of the gossamer leaves, which extended above the surface of the paper, broke off in her hand. Carl immediately grabbed a similar sheet off the rack and placed it to one side. “You can’t replace wood with paper.”

  “Why not?” Carl shot back. “Artists experiment with new techniques all the time. Some mixed media work. Some don’t. Until you actually take the leap of faith, you’ll never know.”

  “But,” Grace said hesitantly, “that paper’s much too thin. I can see right through it.”

  Carl seemed momentarily stymied. A pad of writing paper was sitting abandoned on a shelf. He grabbed the pad and held it underneath the decorative, handmade offering. “You’re going to use plain white paper for a background?” Angie said incredulously.

  “Substrate not background,” Carl countered with a defiant smirk. “It’s sounds more professional.”

  “You know,” Grace observed, “against the pale, eggshell white, it’s really quite attractive. But how do you protect it from stains?”

  Carl was pulling other sheets off the rack. “Don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead.” He bought five sheets of paper plus an assortment of acrylic paints and sable brushes. When asked about the paint supplies, he shrugged and changed the subject.

  The following Tuesday afternoon when Angie arrived, Carl had already glued up a half dozen pieces of scrap wood with an assortment handmade papers. “You do the honors.” He handed her a block of wood with the transparent tissue glued to a white background. Angie loaded a carbide round-over bit into the chuck and tightened the collar on the router with a wrench. Turning the motor on, she eased the bearing snugly up against the wood. A blur of wood chips flew up in the air. The engine grew louder as she navigated the cutter freehand around the perimeter. Finishing a second pass, Angie pulled the router away from the wood and killed the motor. “Nice,” she murmured, surveying her work. “Except over here on the far side where the blade was cutting across the grain.”

  Carl glanced over her shoulder. The cut was clean and silky smooth. “Where the cutter pulled the paper up a little, we can tack it down with glue.”

  After the success of the leafy tissue, the next offering was a bust. The paper was far too thick and pulpy. The whirling blade threw puffs of cottony fiber all over the room. To strengthen the sheet, Carl sprayed the surface with lacquer, but the chemicals bled through to the front creating a series of ugly blotches and stains.

  Angie wagged her head from side to side. “Think wonders, shit blunders. It’s hopeless.” She flung the soggy mess into the trash.

  The next sheet boasted delicate magenta flower petals along with flecks of dark green leaf stems peppering the deckled, ivory surface. The blade bit into the wood trimming away the topmost edge but the spongy paper tore at a jagged angle as she negotiated the final corner moving against the grain. A patch the size of a grain of rice had ripped away. “What a shame!” Angie set the router aside.

  Carl stared at the damaged surface for the longest time then foraged about in a drawer and removed several tubes of paint he had bought at the RISD store. “Can you paint?”

  Angie scrunched up her face. “Had a paint-by-numbers kit when I was in fifth grade.”

  “Which is all the skills you’ll need.” He handed her a magnifying headset. “Here, put this on.”

  Angie placed the device over her forehead and tightened the band. Carl squirted a glob of reddish paint onto a scrap of wood. “It’s too bright,” Angie protested. “The colors don’t match.”

  Handing her a fine sable brush, Carl placed a dab of gray paint next to the red. “If you look closely, the flower petals are two, separate colors. Mix a little of the gray in with the red, but let both colors show.”

  Angie lifted a gooey drop of gray paint and deposited it in the center of the red. Both colors melded together in a streaked, purplish glaze. “Don’t mix the paints. That’s the look you want.” Carl reached up, grabbed the visor and lowered the magnifying lens over her eyes. “Now paint a tiny petal over the torn paper and hide the defect.”

  Angie pulled away from the table. “What if I screw up and ruin everything.”

  “For cripes sakes! It’s not the Mona Lisa; it’s just a piece of scrap wood.” Carl nudged her forward. “Don’t agonize. Put your brain on automatic pilot. Just do it.”

  Angie took a deep breath and blew all the air out of her lungs. Propping her left arm on the table for added support, she lowered the feathery bristles. The girl ran the brush over the paper. Three quick strokes. The ersatz, magenta petal was indistinguishable from the rest. Perfection. Angie removed the magnifier, and dabbed the salty moistness from her eyes with a paper towel.

  “Was it something I said?”

  “Shut up!” She muttered gruffly, the tone more benediction than reprimand.

  ******

  Grace hadn't noticed the police sirens blaring in the distance. Even when the first cruiser pulled onto Bovey Street the noise made no impression on her.

  “Something’s wrong.” The urgency in her daughter’s voice finally hit home. An ambulance careened onto the street trailed by two more police cars, their red lights and sirens turning the quiet evening upside down. Grace threw on her coat and ran outside. A shrill caterwauling arose from the far end of the street. Like the death throes of a mortally injured animal, the sound rippled through the cold night air, died away to nothing before repeating with renewed intensity. Grace could see the ambulance, doors ajar, abandoned in the middle of the street at an odd angle. Now another sound, a woman’s shrill voice joined the first in a chorus of bedlam.

  Grace edged down the darkened street. A policeman was methodically scouring the shrubs on a neighbor’s front lawn with a flashlight” What happened?”

  “Local kid got beaten up. Real bad.”

  The medics suddenly emerged from a wooded area in back of the property with a body on a stretcher. “My baby! My darling baby boy!” Dwight Goober’s mother fought her way through the crowd of onlookers and threw herself on the stretcher, smothering the boy’s blotchy face with kisses. An officer had to physically restrain the woman while the medics loaded Dwight into the rear of the ambulance. The distraught mother collapsed on the ground, moaning loudly. “Who could do such a thing to my darling baby boy!”

  The swirling strobe lights on the roof of the cruisers illuminated the street with an eerie glow. Another officer approached from the woods balancing a soggy bag of potato chips between a thumb and index finger. It was the same policeman who had responded when Grace’s house was egged. “Dwight Goober’s last solid meal,” he said with an inscrutable poker face.

  “What’s that?”

  “In addition to other injuries, he’s got a broken jaw,” the officer stomped his shoes, which were caked with mud, on the ground. “Did you call Hubert Fenton?”

  “Yes I did. He stopped by on Wednesday to give me an estimate.”

  The officer crumpled the bag - Lays Sour Cream and Onion - in his fist before stuffing it in a pocket. “Hope you didn’t sign a contract.”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Good. Keep the money you were going to give Hubert in the bank and let it collect interest. Judging by the extent of injuries, Mr. Goober is going to be out of circulation for a very long time.” He scraped the heel of his shoe against the curb.

  “What’s that awful smell?” Grace felt nauseous, sick to her stomach.

  “We had to haul his waterlogged carcass out of that filthy swamp back in the woods. My shoes and sock are covered with muck.” The wooded area the officer was referring to lay at the end of the cul-de-sac. The builder who owned the land originally wanted to put up new housing units, but the environmental protection agency objected. They claimed the fifty acre plot was wetlands and vital habitat for migrating birds and other indigenous animal. The EPA insisted that the swampy wooded area be left in its pristine, natural state.

  “Any idea who did th
is,” Grace asked.

  “No, not a clue.” the officer didn’t seem overly concerned at the prospect of an unsolved crime. He pointed to a spot in the snow where several plain clothes detectives were huddled together making notes. “Someone jumped Dwight over there and knocked him to the ground. The assailant dragged him through the snow down to the wetlands.”

  “Maybe it was a gang.”

  The officer shook his head vehemently and rubbed more crud off the sides off his shoe. Acrid clay was mixed in with the dirt. “There’s only the trail of Dwight’s body being hauled, feet first, down to the swamp. The attacker left no prints, because the body obliterated his own tracks. Only one set of footprints emerges from the woods. Just one.” The officer blew into his clenched fist to warm the frozen fingers. “The assailant threw him in the middle of the swamp, face down in a foot of freezing water. It’s a miracle the creep survived.”

  Dwight Goober just got beaten within an inch of his life and I feel … pleasantly surprised. Exhilarated. Relieved!

  And Grace didn’t feel even a smidgeon of sympathy for the slobbering shrew of a mother. Retribution provided a sense of completeness. It balanced every offense with an appropriate punishment. Dwight Goober had vandalized and terrorized the community for years. Now some community-minded bounty hunter had broken his jaw and left the youth for dead in a pool of frigid water. That seemed fair enough. It balanced the ledger books. Maybe Father Callahan or the enlightened yogi with the silly chalkboard wouldn’t agree, but rich people and God-crazed holy men didn’t generally have to contend with the likes of Dwight Goober. Case closed.

  Grace rushed home and found Angie cuddled on the sofa. The lights were off. A chill slithered through Grace’s belly, the same numbing fear that she felt when confronting Dwight on the backyard swing. “I told Carl,” Angie confessed in a faltering voice.

  “Told him what?”

  “The Village Idiot followed me home from school Tuesday. He said, ‘You and your scumbag mother better grow eyes in the back of your heads. ’”

  “He threatened you?”

  Angie pulled her legs up under her chin and began to whimper softly. “I was scared. I told Carl what Dwight said.” Her chest heaved spasmodically. “We were working on one of those large black walnut chests with the beveled sides and paneled lid. We drilled pilot holes for the hinge pins.” The commotion in the street had died away as the last cruiser pulled onto the main high­way. Everyone, even Dwight Goober’s hysterical mother, had gone home. “The lid was too tight so we brought it over to the belt sander and trimmed a sixteenth of an inch off the right side. Then Carl muttered something so soft I hardly couldn’t make it out.”

  “What did he say?”

  Angie slid down and dropped her cheek into her mother’s lap. “Eyes in the back of his head.”

  Five minutes later her daughter was sleeping peacefully. Grace placed a blanket over Angie’s shoulders and raised the thermostat. Then she went to the phone and dialed a number. “Hello, Mrs. Shapiro, this is Grace. Is Carl there?”

  “He hasn’t come home yet.”

  “Perhaps he’s working late.”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Grace hung up the phone. Dwight Goober had a dislocated shoulder, smashed jaw and a broken leg. The cartilage in his nose had been reconfigured and several teeth chipped. She had learned this from one of the neighbors. The woman was walking her dog and heard someone hollering for help. Dwight told the medics that he was half a block from home, minding his own business and woke up in frigid water three hours later.

  The doorbell rang. Grace peered through the peephole. Carl was standing on the front stoop. “Where’s Angie?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “Give this to her.” He handed her a black walnut jewelry chest with beveled sides. The pearly textured lid medallion was cut from ice curl maple. “Tell her I used the micropolymer wax instead of tung oil so the maple wouldn’t take on an amber tint.”

  “Did you want to come in?”

  “No, not tonight.” He turned and started to walked leisurely toward his truck but turned back. “How was your night?”

  Grace turned the question over in her mind for the better part of half a minute. “Uneventful.”

  ******

  Grace and Angie arrived at the Hynes Auditorium in Boston around eleven o’clock in the morning. They drove in on the Southeast Expressway, took the Mass Ave exit and, with Symphony Hall directly ahead, veered left onto Huntington. The juried craft fair was open to the public from late morning, but Carl opted to set up his booth the night before and stay over at a nearby hotel.

  Grace made a quick tour of the show.” Quite a difference!” The Salsa lady with her twenty varieties of homemade dip was nowhere to be found. No Mary Kay cosmetics; the fair-skinned couple with the cochineal-dyed socks was a no-show.

  Traffic was thin but buyers appeared upscale, cosmopolitan. A portly fellow wearing a badge and a blue uniform with gold trim approached. “Fire Marshall. I’ll need a cloth sample.” Carl rummaged in a cardboard box and produced a piece of material the same color and texture as his booth display. While an assistant stood by with a fire extinguisher, the marshal struck a match and held it under the cloth. The fabric scorched, then turned black but never burst into flames. “All set.” He handed the blackened piece back to Carl and proceeded on to the next booth.

  “Got to wash up.” His hands were covered with soot from the charred cloth. “Be back in a second. Don’t talk to anyone while I’m gone.” He rushed off down the hallway in search of a bathroom.

  Diagonally across from their display was a young oriental couple. Earlier, Carl wandered over to introduce himself and trade business cards. The husband spun bowls and urn-shaped vessels on a wood lathe, while the wife embellished the hardwoods with intricate, oriental motifs. Several of the larger pieces were spun from green, fresh-cut lumber. As the moist wood cured, it bowed, twisted, cupped and curled into fanciful shapes enhancing the overall effect. The larger bowls, some decorated with sumptuous, filigree patterns, were cleverly arranged on separate display pedestals and bathed in a soft sheen from banks of overhead track lighting.

  Grace tapped her daughter on the shoulder. “I know that fellow.” An elegant looking man in a pinstriped suit was standing on the opposite side of the aisle, staring at Carl’s booth. He was medium height with thinning hair. “But where do I know him from?”

  Yes,” Angie agreed, “he does look awfully familiar.”

  “Nice craftsmanship.” The man, who had closed the distance, was standing in front of them. “I’ve never seen free-form marquetry patterns on jewelry boxes. Meticulous workmanship!” The man extended a well-manicured hand toward a box but didn’t touch the surface. “The finish,... is that catalyzed lacquer?”

  Don’t talk to anyone while I’m gone.

  “Well, yes. Lacquer over tung oil. When the finish cures, a protective coat of beeswax is applied with a buffing wheel.” That was safe. Grace hadn’t done anything wrong. Carl always preferred a natural finish. He boasted how oil resins always showed wood tones to best advantage.

  Rubbing his chin, the man looked slightly confused. “My mistake,” he apologized, “Lacquer finishes are generally sprayed over bare wood. I should have known better.”

  Grace felt her legs go wobbly.

  “Can I help you?” Drying his hands with a paper towel, Carl came up the aisle.

  “I had a question about your merchandise, but your assistant was quite helpful.” The man smiled genteelly and meandered over to the next booth.

  “I think,” Grace grabbed her daughter by the arm, “we’ll do some window shopping at the Prudential Center and stop back later in the afternoon.”

  ******

  The lobby of the Hynes Auditorium had been turned over exclusively to painters and a handful of sculptures with oversized piece that wouldn’t show well in the main ballroom. Where the Mansfield show felt like a raucous, three-ring circus, the juried fair was
low-keyed and dignified. Well-dressed people strolled about, lingering to talk in courteous monotones with artisans before moving on.

  Earlier in the week, Grace asked Carl how the organizers of the Boston event weeded out cheap imports. “At high-end shows, the judges frequently requested digital photos of projects in various stages of completion. Let’s say Blondie tries to pass off a pair of bogus, imported earrings as handmade.” “New earrings are always hung on smooth, straight wire before it’s bent to the pendant’s final shape. An earring that’s been tampered with - taken apart to create the illusion of a work-in-progress - would be easy to spot, even for a novice jewelry maker. It’s a no brainer!”

  Grace stopped in front of a portrait done in metallic tones. The artist, a black woman dressed in a fashionable dashiki smiled pleasantly. All of the woman’s paintings had the same limited tonal range but the effect was mesmerizing. Angie tugged on her mother’s sleeve. “Cape Cod,... Hyannis.” The girl had a crazed, slightly hysterical look plastered across her face. Grace peered at her daughter trying to decipher what she was saying. “Wire sculptures, Kennedy Compound, catalyzed lacquer.”

  “Oh God!” Grace moaned and bent double placing a hand over her eyes. The man in the pin striped suit was the owner of the Cape Cod Collectibles Art Gallery. She hadn’t recognized him earlier because he had dressed casually in the store. She spun around, heading back to the main ballroom.

  “You’ll only make things worse!” Angie yelled, but Grace had already barreled through the double doors and was gone from sight. She scanned the entire room only to discover that Donald Carrington had returned to Carl’s booth.

  “I’ve a confession,” Grace stumbled over her words, her voice breaking.

  “Catalyzed lacquer,” Mr. Carrington interrupted, anticipating her thoughts, “is the Rolls Royce of finishes, but it’s harmful to the environment and terribly wasteful. Natural oils and resins are a far more practical choice, don’t you agree?”

  “Well, I don’t really know,” Grace blustered. “Truth is, I don’t understand the first thing about woodworking.”

  “No harm done.” Mr. Carrington shook hands with both of them and nodded amicably. “I’ll be in touch, Carl.” Folding a slip of paper in thirds, he slipped it into a pocket and wandered off.