Second Chance

by Chet Williamson

  The instant she saw Bridie Finch's face, she knew she had nothing to fear, and when she saw Bridie's quilts, she had everything to gain. There were seven of them that Bridie pulled out of a large, painted-grain chest, all stunners, capable of bringing $1500 each from browsers in her gallery, and far more from her regular clientele.

  When Judy asked if she had any more, Bridie said a flock of them, out in the shed in storage chests Arthur built to keep the squirrels from them, but they couldn't get to them right now because Arthur had a lot of farm equipment parts piled in front that he'd have to move first.

  Judy asked her how much she wanted for them, and Bridie told her a hundred and twenty-five each, except for the big one, which was a hundred and fifty.

  "My God," Judy said. "That's all? Where are you from, lady?"

  Bridie smiled, and gestured to the room they were in, the mountain they were on, her life. "I'm from right here," she said, and Judy understood.

  She told Bridie she would take all seven quilts and pay her three hundred dollars for each, and would pay another three hundred when each quilt sold. She also asked to represent her exclusively. Bridie was grateful, but not amazed. Judy told Frank it was as if she had always known the quality of her quilts, but had merely been waiting for someone else to come along and validate them.

  There were thirty-eight quilts in the bed of the truck Bridie drove to Atlanta. All were superbly crafted, with tiny quilting over nearly every inch. The colors varied from bold and brash to subtly rustic. Bridie had, thought Judy, the best eye for combining colors she had ever seen. She was quick to offer Bridie a handsome commission agreement which Bridie was as quick to accept.

  And now, four hours before the sampler's opening, Bridie was at the gallery, beaming at the five quilts she and Judy had chosen to show. Arthur, her husband, trailed behind her, head down, plainly uncomfortable in his suit. Frank noted with amusement that the tightness of Arthur's clothes, the narrow lapels, and the broad, colorfully figured tie made him look oddly in vogue, and he wouldn't have been at all surprised if Arthur was mistaken for one of the city's more quirky art critics. The sour expression of disapproval the man wore did nothing to dispel that image.

  Slowly the other featured artists and craftspeople came in, in differing states of tension. Rick Dodgson, who crafted intricate puzzles out of mahogany that sold north of $200 each; Bev Dickers, painter of American primitives; Tom Ricard, a hulking man who produced delicate folk dolls with cherubic, ceramic faces. There were a total of fourteen artists, all of whom had arrived by 3:30, a half hour before the gallery was due to open.

  Trish Wilson, the assistant manager, supervised the caterers with her usual lack of calm, leaping from table to table, picking up the occasional champagne glass with a hankie and examining it for finger marks, or leaning over the chafing dishes and sniffing with the suspicions of a Borgia.

  "Any mouse droppings in the cannelloni, Trish?" Frank couldn't help asking.

  She looked at him with a glare intended to melt lesser mortals. "I just want everything to be right, Frank."

  "Everything is as right as it can be," said Judy, coming up to them. Frank was pleased to see her smiling. She actually looked relaxed for a change. "The artists are here, the work is gorgeous, and our R.S.V.P.s have been overwhelming."

  "The TV people still coming?" Trish asked.

  "Yes. Don't be nervous, they won't bite. They'll be here at five."

  When Trish scurried away, Frank slipped an arm around Judy's waist and kissed her cheek. "Everything looks great, hon. And you seem very together."

  She smiled and shrugged. "I guess I figured you were right about that rest I need. I've been pushing too hard. This show is going to go great, and then I'm going to take a well-deserved break . . . before I have a nervous breakdown."

  "Not you, tough mama. Even if you do fade out in parking garages." Her smile slipped a little, and he was sorry he said it. “Just kidding. Everything's cool. You're cool. Did I mention you look just great today? The very model of the modern upscale galleria owner?"

  "Screw you too," she whispered, but kissed him. "And I will. Later." Then she looked at her watch. "Time," she said, and swept off to tell Trish to open the doors.

  No one was there, of course. But they began to come in at 4:15, and by 5:00 the gallery was packed with well-dressed Buckhead residents (or Buckhead Fuckheads, as Frank still thought of them). He found a few that he felt comfortable with and stayed in their company.

  He hated meeting Judy's new customers, because they always asked him what he did, and he had to tell these business execs or doctors or lawyers that he sold musical instruments and band uniforms to schools. And these rich people invariably looked as though they had just been called away by some mental beeper, and found some new piece of folk art to distract them.

  The thought, born of years of stifled liberalism, intruded into Frank's consciousness like a worm in a bright red apple. Sure, Judy's show was great. The food was great, the art was great, the response was great.

  But so fucking what?

  What did it do to make things better? All it really did was give rich people a new way to spend their money. Maybe the occasional deserving soul like Bridie Finch got a decent piece of change out of it, but what the hell did it do?

  In a way, he thought, the kind of folk art that Judy sold did more harm than good. It gave people the illusion of better and cleaner times, so that they could forget the ugly and filthy world they lived in. And because they were more easily able to ignore it, they did nothing about it, so it grew uglier and filthier every day.

  It was an unhappy, despairing thought, and he felt guilty for thinking it in his wife's moment of triumph. He tried to sigh it away, but it would not leave, and he thought that if he found Judy, exultant and proud, her own high spirits might rub off on him. So he grabbed a morsel of sushi, popped it in his mouth, and started to look for her.

  He was just pushing delicately past a jabbering foursome when he heard a loud crash that brought dead silence to the multi-leveled gallery, followed by the clatter of metal and wood. He tried to look past the crowd to the source of the sound, but could only tell that it came from the end of the room that held Rolf Anderssen's pieces. Anderssen's work was as close as Judy came to showing anything abstract, hulking masses of iron and timber, made from assemblages of old farm tools, scythes and sledges and axes and mauls and pitchforks wired into astonishing shapes, like arachnids bred for manual labor. Even the smallest, Judy complained, required twenty square feet of display space.

  As the crowd parted and a communal gasp of disbelief filled Frank's ears, he saw Judy, and, a second later, heard her shriek.

  "Bullshit! Reactionary jerkoff bullshit!"

  In her hands she held a scythe with a four foot long blade. One hand on the snath, the other on the handle, she looked as formidable as he had ever seen her. Even twenty yards away, he could hear her panting, see her shoulders rise and fall with every breath.

  "You call this fucking art?" She took a few steps toward the people near her, who backed away, bumping into each other, losing their balance, but never taking their eyes off her.

  "BULL! SHIT!"

  A woman fell, cried out, crawled away from Judy's advancing form.

  "Art instructs!"

  Judy swung the scythe at the wall, ripping into a Bev Dickers primitive of a wide eyed cat sitting by a stove, slashing the canvas to behead the beast. Frank wanted to run to her, to stop her, but found he couldn't move.

  "Art makes statements!"

  She swung again in a vast, wide arc, ripping the hand carved wooden figures of checker players off their polished base and sending the rustic missiles flying into the crowd.

  "Art warns! . . ."

  The glass framing a piece of antique patchwork shattered and rained like hail.

  ". . . and burns! . . ."

  She ripped again, skewering one of Tom Ricard's dolls through the chest and waving the sweet-faced cherub aloft before sha
king it off roughly and stamping on its ceramic head.

  ". . . and scars!" Another swipe, and a four foot landscape of a Victorian town at Christmas was slashed. The point caught on the frame, and Judy yanked it from the wall, tossing it against the TV cameraman so that the eyepiece of his videocam slammed against his face, he fell, and the machine, still whirring, dropped from his shoulder onto the boards of the gallery floor.

  "You shit!" she said, and kicked at him. "Get up! You want a story, then get up!" The cameraman staggered to his knees, picked up his camera, got to his feet, continued shooting. "So everybody knows!" Judy said. "So everybody knows what art is! Art is the servant of the people, a way to bring Amerika—and that's with a K, Mister Media Whore—Amerika to its senses and its knees! It isn't this backward looking bullshit! What the fuck is this crap anyway . . ."

  Through this tirade, Rolf Anderssen, undoubtedly annoyed at how his assemblage of tools had been disassembled and how one of the pieces was being used, had slowly maneuvered his way behind Judy. Most people's eyes were on her, but Frank noticed the furtive movement, and saw with horror that Anderssen was about to grab his wife from behind. It was for fear of what could happen to Anderssen that Frank began to raise his arms to warn him away. But by then it was too late, and his caution to Anderssen became a warning to Judy, who whirled around just as Anderssen closed in.

  The scythe whirled with her.

  Its point caught Anderssen just above his left hip, and sunk into his bowels with a dry rip of tearing cloth and the wet squelch of tearing flesh.

  Judy pulled it out immediately, straight out the way it had gone in, instead of across. If she had done that, Anderssen's viscera would have spewed onto the floor. As it was, blood and yellow fluid ran from the man's side like a fountain as he fell, and most people looked away in horror. But the cameraman and Frank and a few others kept watching, and saw Judy's amazed, wide-eyed face, as though realization of what she had said and done had suddenly come upon her.

  Then the concern passed over her as quickly as the shadow of a cloud in a strong breeze, and the hardness returned. Without another word she turned away from Anderssen and raised the scythe again, now dripping with blood, and swept it toward Bridie Finch's Feathered Stars quilt. The blood arrived first, marking a crimson path the blade followed into the reds and blues and browns. The scythe snatched the quilt from the wall, and Judy waved it like a flag, trying to extricate the blade from the mass of fabric.

  But before she could, Bridie Finch was on her.

  The woman moved with a swiftness that belied her girth. With a massive left arm, she batted aside the quilt wrapped scythe, and with her right, she caught Judy with an uppercut that snapped her teeth together and sent her eyes rolling upward so that only the whites showed. Bridie caught her as she fell, and lowered her gently to the floor.

  The gallery erupted. Voices cried out, people wept, some ran to help Anderssen, others to restrain Judy should she awake. The cameraman kept taping.

  Frank walked slowly to where Judy lay, pushed through the people surrounding her, heard Bridie say, "Let 'im through . . . let Frank through now." When he found himself standing next to her, Bridie put a hand on his arm. "Sorry, Frank," she said. "Couldn't let her keep that up."

  Judy's eyelids were fluttering, and he knelt next to her. Her jaw hung slackly, and blood trickled from the corner of her mouth. Frank saw that a front tooth was cracked. Her eyes opened, and he gave an involuntary moan at the horror in them.

  "Frank . . ." she said, sobs choking her. "Frank, what . . . what did I do?" She turned her neck stiffly and looked at the ruined walls of the gallery, the people trembling, and finally at Rolf Anderssen, lying in his blood, his chest rising and falling in stuttering jerks.

  "What did I do?"

  The cameraman kept taping.

  ~*~

  And Frank, hours later, waiting in the precinct house, kept hearing something Keith Aarons had said to Judy over twenty years before, but Frank had no idea whether it had been in this life or in the other he had known.

  You'll sell out someday, Jude.

  Bullshit I will.

  Yes you will. Because of things. You like things too much. Pretty things. Expensive things.

  Fuck you, Keith.

  And when you start painting family portraits of rich people, I'll come back and I'll haunt you, Jude.

  You gotta be dead first, moron.

  Oh, I'll be dead. And I'll haunt you and freak you out so much that instead of painting those rich bastards you'll stab them to death with the pointy end of your paintbrush.

  And Keith laughed, and Judy laughed and told Keith to fuck himself again, and they all laughed and drank their beer or smoked a joint and talked about something else.

  Stupid. Stupid, Frank thought. That was twenty-five years ago, and this is now, the nineties, and Judy was working too hard. First that blackout in the garage—god damn, but he should have taken that as a warning, had her see a doctor right away. It could be a brain tumor or half a dozen other things.

  But it wasn't, damn it, it wasn't. It was a breakdown, that's all. She went temporarily . . . insane. And she didn't mean to hurt Anderssen—she had turned at the wrong time, that's all. If he hadn't sneaked up behind her . . .

  They said he would live. That the scythe had cut through a lot, but nothing that couldn't be sewn up again. Thank God the ambulance had gotten there so quickly. If it hadn't, he would have bled to death. So they couldn't try her for murder.

  But for attempted murder . . .

  Oh Christ. He had called their attorney, and he had contacted the offices of a criminal lawyer (criminal, Frank thought with a bowel-churning sense of panic), but he had not yet arrived. Soon, Frank prayed, soon.

  Meanwhile he sat on an institutional green chair, unable to see Judy, who they had taken away in handcuffs, and he couldn't do a damned thing but sit in that chair and wait for the lawyer to show up or for some policeman to come out and talk to him. He couldn't do a thing but sit there and remember what had happened, and think about that look of bewilderment and realization on her face, as though she had done something awful without even knowing what or why.

  He couldn't do a thing but sit there and every few seconds remember Keith Aarons, dead Keith Aarons, saying Oh, I'll be dead with so many different meanings in so many different lives.

  Chapter 29

  When Sharla Jackson woke up that Monday morning, she felt no different than usual. A little tired, maybe. She hadn't slept too well the night before. Bad dreams, she thought, though she couldn't recall what they were about. There had been that other thing, too. That little blackout or whatever it was she had the evening before, walking back to her apartment from the pool after one last swim.

  It was the last weekend the pool was open, and she had wanted to spend as much time in the water as possible. Fortunately the air was still balmy, and she lay at poolside through most of Sunday, going inside only to eat and get a second Danielle Steel paperback when she finished the first one. Reading them made her feel guilty, since she knew she should be reading someone like Toni Morrison or Alice Walker, sisters who knew what the world was like, and not some rich white woman who made a helluva living out of sunsets and happy endings.

  The thing was that Sharla liked sunsets and happy endings. She had seen too many sad ones during the years she taught in the inner city. Children didn't die all the time, but it happened, and it happened a lot more often there than it did where she worked now, near Shaker Heights. There the children were relatively polite and well behaved, though there was the occasional problem kid. Hell, there was anywhere. But poverty and broken homes seemed to cause a lot more problems than affluence and family stability. Sharla liked being away from the battle zone, teaching behind the lines, working with kids who really wanted to be there in her class.

  But it didn't help the guilt. She had felt for the past dozen years that she had betrayed her people. She taught mostly white kids now, children who didn't need her lo
ve and understanding nearly as much as those she had tried to reach in the city schools. Sometimes she had helped, but most of the time she hadn't, and her frustrations grew as quickly as the virus of drugs spread, even in the lower grades. She had had no users at that early age, but there were plenty of little ones who held onto drugs for older siblings or friends, or who even sold packets at their elders' commands.

  What drove her out had been when a fifth grader she had in class three years earlier was found dead in a booth in the boy's rest room, a crack bowl beside him. His name was Martin, and as a second grader he had been very serious about his school work, looking at Sharla with big, solemn eyes. "Diligent. A hard worker," she had written in the comments space on his report card. More honestly, she could have said that he wasn't bright, but he tried. And he had given the other teachers that impression right up until the morning he died.

  So Sharla had moved from Grover Cleveland Elementary to Parkway Elementary, from Alice Walker to Danielle Steel (who she would only buy used, never new, to cheat the author out of more royalties). She moved from dreams of saving the children to the reality of saving her sanity. It was not as rewarding, but it was stable and non-threatening, and she worried less at night.

  But last night she had worried, just a little, before going to sleep. Dusk had come, and she had been walking back to her apartment, her beach bag in one hand. She was just entering a covered walkway between two of the complex's buildings, and the next thing she remembered she was standing by her front door, the key in her hand. She didn't remember taking the key out, didn't even remember leaving the walkway. But there she was.

  There was another thing too. It was darker, maybe ten or fifteen minutes darker, as though she had blacked out for that time. Still, other than feeling displaced in time for a while, she felt all right physically, except for a little bruise on her left thigh that she didn't know how she had gotten. Probably scraped it on the edge of the pool, she thought.

  Now, on another Monday morning, she showered, and as she did so she noticed the bruise was gone. Then she had a quick breakfast, gathered her plan book and the materials for the banner she planned to put over the blackboard before school started, left her apartment, walked to her car, and opened the door.