“W’hell yes. I did do something like that. I didn’t mess around with no school, learning other people’s ideas. Once I seen the lay of the land, I quit and went straight over to old T. W. Mosier’s. He’s the first man out around Midland to know anythang ’bout the oil bidness. I was twelve years old. I went over and I told him, ‘Mr. Mosier,’ I said, ‘I come over here to go to work for you. When do we start?’ Well, Mr. Mosier, he told me, said, ‘Boy, you get your skinny ass on outta here.’ But I tell you, I didn’t pay ’im no mind. No, sir. Follered him around all day. That night about dark, he come outta the house with a rope and give me a whuppin’ with it. Yes-sir-ree. A whuppin’. I slept out behind the toolshed that night, but next morning when he come outta the house I was sittin’ on the porch waitin’ for ’im. I told him, ‘By god,’ I said, ‘I’m ready to go to work anytime you are.’ Well, sir, that old man, he whupped the scabs off me three days runnin’ before he finally got the idee.”
Whitehead smiled bitterly, but his eyes were full of light, and his craggy face had a touch of softness about it. “Old man Mosier. Yes-sir-ree. Know what kinda job he gimme? Taking care of the damn dogs, that’s what. The damn dogs. Had about fifteen or twenty of them greyhounds. Used to run jackrabbits with ’em, and he give me the job of feedin’ ’em and cleanin’ up after ’em. Ugliest damn stinkin’ dog in the world—look like something rotten squeezed out of a grape. But I done it, and by god, I seen lots a deals going down. And boy, I had a knack for it. A real knack. First thing you know, old Mosier, he’s takin’ me inta his confidence, asking my opinion. And boy, Harley Jay, that’s how you get where you wanna be, by bein’ there.” Whitehead waved his hand through the air. “Get yerself right on up to the top and jump in it flatfooted.”
Whitehead was kind of bigger-than-life, unlike anybody he had ever known. It was plain enough that he had quit school, but there might be something in what he was saying, too.
They slowed considerably through Fort Worth, cruising through the traffic outside Arlington at about eighty. Harley glimpsed big-eyed faces framed in car windows as they blurred past.
He was wondering what Mr. Whitehead would think of the drawings packed in the bottom of his suitcase when all at once Whitehead craned forward over the wheel, squinting toward the Dallas skyline sitting on the prairie horizon ahead like a painted stage prop. A boil of black smoke rolled up in the distance.
“Hot damn,” Whitehead said, a slow grin, light fanning from his eyes. “That looks like old R.T.’s Caddy.”
The hood was up, a man standing alongside, his head in the engine well, a hat in his hand. He looked up, then went rigid for about two blinks before turning in his tracks toward the big green “Dallas City Limits” sign not a hundred yards away, and he took off running in his cowboy boots on the dirt shoulder with his chest thrown out, and he wasn’t fifty yards from that sign, clomp-stomping it off to beat the band, and Whitehead sat down on the horn and they blew past like a screaming jet.
Harley looked back and saw the man stop and kick up a cloud of dirt, then he threw his Stetson on the ground and stomped it. Black smoke whipped and rolled from under the white Cadillac in Whitehead’s wake. Then the whole business dwindled into the distance, and Whitehead was laughing and laughing, like he must be having the best day of his life. “Har-a-har-har! You see that little birddog run? Hobble-de-bop, knee-pump, sockin’ ’em down, wasn’t he? A-har-har-a-har!”
“We’re not gonna stop and help him?”
“Hell, no. Old R.T.’ll get along. A-har-har-har!”
Then they were going down Commerce Street, but not so fast now because of the traffic, and there was the Adolphus Hotel, and Whitehead sprawled behind the wheel just like he owned all of Dallas as well.
The car heaved to a stop before the hotel, and Harley dragged his suitcase over the seat. “I sure ’preciate the ride. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.”
“Boy, Harley Jay, you let this be a lesson to you.”
“A lesson?”
“Keep your foot on it, son. Even if them lead dogs got a head start, keep your foot on it, ’cause who knows, they maybe gonna blow a head gasket. See, you ain’t never whipped till you give up.”
“Yes sir,” Harley said. “I’m gonna do it. Keep my foot on it.”
Whitehead took a card out of a little leather envelope in his jacket pocket and handed it to him. “You ever want a job, boy, Harley Jay, you look me up, hear?”
“Thank you.” Harley put the card in his wallet in the window behind his drivers license, then got out with the cardboard suitcase. He watched Whitehead strut up the steps to the entrance. Whitehead handed his car keys to the parking attendant. Turning, he waved once to Harley, and then disappeared inside behind the potted rubber plants.
Harley stood in the heat, the hazy smell of burning oil and brakes drifting out from under Whitehead’s Cadillac, the metal making little ticking sounds, cooling, the parking attendant coming to get it.
Harley blotted his forehead on his shirtsleeve. He gazed about at the buildings towering around him. Well, the first thing would be to get a newspaper and see if he could find a room. Or maybe he should look for a job first. Or maybe he should ask somebody if there really were any art schools in Dallas.
He picked up his suitcase and started off down the street, Whitehead echoing in his head: And by god a’mighty, if there aren’t any art schools in Dallas, I’ll track it right on up there to New York City! Yes-sir-ree. Park it right on that Rashin-what’s-his-name’s doorstep.
He wondered if Darlene knew he was gone yet.
Chapter 6
—Dallas—
Crump
AT SUNUP HARLEY and the other grunts pitched the last scoops of sand up into the bed of the pickup truck and tossed the shovels in the bins along either side. Berry climbed up into the driver’s seat. Tommy Pellerd came around and jerked the door open. “I’m driving this sonofabitchin’ pickup.” Pellerd, a weight lifter and an amateur wrestler, had a long thick body and short stubby legs. His chin ran out about a foot and turned up to meet his nose.
“Like hell,” said Berry. “You drove yesterday.”
Pellerd caught Berry by the shirtfront, hauled him from behind the wheel and hit him in the nose. Berry went sprawling in the sand and rolled over, cupping his face in his hands. Pellerd slid in behind the wheel.
Moon stood looking at Berry on the ground. He looked at Tommy Pellerd in the truck. “You drove yesterday,” Moon said.
“I’m driving today, too.”
Berry got up holding his bloodied nose. He crawled up in back under the tarp, cursing Pellerd under his breath. Moon followed.
Harley climbed into the back. He didn’t care who drove. To him it was just another day of setting utility poles for Dallas Power & Light.
LATE THAT AFTERNOON Berry dropped Harley off on Gaston Avenue, and he walked the five blocks down to Aunt Grace’s boardinghouse. He had been in Dallas three months—three months with Dallas Power & Light and three months at Aunt Grace’s, and it seemed like forever. He still wasn’t used to the noise, the constant roar of cars and trucks, the wail of sirens screaming down Gaston Avenue day and night to Baylor Hospital. As it turned out, there really weren’t any art schools in Dallas. This wasn’t what he had left Separation for, so he decided to save all the money he could and then head up to New York.
He turned up the driveway, past the bay windows protruding from the old Victorian into the shrubbery, and around to the back door, work boots crunching on the gravel. He looked out toward the women’s quarters above the four-car garage. There were four women housed there, all of them nurses at the hospital. They weren’t allowed in the main house except for the evening meal, and the men weren’t allowed in the women’s quarters, period. Aunt Grace ran a tight ship.
Harley entered through the kitchen, said hello to Mattie, the Negro cook washing vegetables at the sink. He went on through the living room, past all the old furniture—tasseled lamps, brocaded chairs and
curtains—and up the curved staircase. The emptiness of the house and Aunt Grace’s frowning ancestors in their oval frames made him feel like an intruder. The old house smelled of disinfectant, furniture polish, ammonia, mothballs and other people’s lives, past and present.
His upstairs room had its own smell of oil paint and turpentine. Several paintings stood propped against the walls, resting on newspapers. Art books and drawings were stacked on the floor. Mattie complained that his room was impossible to clean.
He set his hard hat on the dresser near a pile of books then took a change of clothes and a towel across the hall to the bathroom.
After a shower he returned to his room, lay on the bed and leafed through a recent issue of Art News. There was an article on Diebenkorn, a West Coast painter he was interested in—all that space, the big simplified shapes. And the colors, the rich blues and greens. A lot of Matisse there. Between the art magazines and museums on the weekends, he was soaking up art, past and present. Heady stuff.
Vague images struggled in the periphery of his imagination—large planes of silvery blue, yellow ocher, a dense rusty red…and space…something he couldn’t quite get a handle on, just out of reach.
A DOZEN OR so tripod easels stood like a small geometric forest in Crump’s studio above a funeral parlor on Ackard Street. The air inside felt heavy, pungent with the smell of turpentine and formaldehyde. The model, an old man in khakis with sharp angular elbows and jutting knees, sat like a pile of loose boards in a chair on the model stand.
While there were no art schools in Dallas, he had found Crump. At one time, Crump had been a background artist for Disney, but now made his living teaching and copying photos out of National Geographic and Arizona Highways.
Crump wandered among his students, eyes aglitter on the works in progress. The overhead fluorescent lights glistened on his oily black hair, combed straight back over a long head. His mustache curled up Salvador Dalí–style. He had about him the smell of perfume and the ever-present formaldehyde. A clean denim apron covered his necktie.
“Squint your eyes and look for the big patterns of light and dark,” Crump was saying to the group. “Lay in the large masses with the premixed number-five value, and the light areas with the number three. Establish the simple patterns of light and dark first.”
Harley had the form lightly sketched in on an eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch canvas. He had been studying the work of Degas and Vuillard, and more recently Diebenkorn, the odd way they sometimes composed their picture elements, and, taking a cue from these artists, he had roughed in the figure in the lower left-hand corner of the canvas—an old man collapsing in on himself, small and alone under the weight of empty space pushing him down and out of the picture plane. Harley exaggerated the skeletal angularity of the arms and legs, made the knees and elbows larger and sharper, caved in the chest cavity. He hung the head between the shoulders, attempting to emphasize the skull’s fragile eggshell quality. The old man had gone to sleep and his chest rose and fell under the large folds of his khaki shirt, skin stretched like a filigreed web over his skull.
Harley ignored the jars of premixed flesh tones. Instead, he squeezed an inch each of several colors around the perimeter of the palette, then selected a bristle brush the width of his thumb. The larger brush forced him to see in terms of mass rather than detail. He thinned the paint from clip-on cups of copal and turpentine, and laid a middle tone over the sketch. Then the figure began to take on definition as he established the areas of light and dark. Surprising how little detail was needed when those masses were right. If nothing else, he had learned that from Crump.
Harley’s concentration was broken by a sudden silence and he realized Crump was standing at his elbow, pointing with his brush.
“Class,” Crump began, “see the light on the eyebrow here, the frontalis where it joins the superciliary arch? That should be a number three value, not quite light enough here you’ll notice. Always a number three.”
Crump gestured delicately with the brush as the other students gathered around. Crump carried the brush like a riding crop and never used it except as a pointer. On occasions when he found the need for an actual demonstration, he used the student’s brush, taking it in hand with a kind of airy distaste, and when he had finished, went straight to the sink and scrubbed his hands.
“Now class, you’ll notice how the shadow under the eyebrow changes abruptly from a number three on the superciliary arch to a number eight where the superciliary cuts back under, above the eyelid—the orbicularis oculi muscle, if you will.” Crump prided himself on knowing the Latin names of every bone and muscle in the entire human body.
“That’s where the strongest contrast of light and dark will be most evident,” he continued, “where the form turns under and away from the light. Under the eyebrows, under the nose, the lips, the chin. These shadows give mass and form to the head. That’s because the figure is customarily lit from above, the sun, overhead lights. Look at your fellow artists, squint, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Of course, lighting can be used successfully from other angles with dramatic effect, but this is usually found in illustration and theatrical works. Natural lighting is from above. Always.”
Crump stopped suddenly, peering at Harley’s canvas. “What is this?”
Harley looked at the painting, at Crump.
“That color,” Crump said. “Those shadows. You didn’t make that with viridian green.”
“Well, no…”
Crump looked at him sharply. “You don’t care to follow the premise, Mr. Buchanan?”
“I was just—”
“What is that color?” Crump demanded.
“Uh, that shadow? I used cobalt blue.”
“And why, may I ask, are you using cobalt blue rather than viridian?”
“Well, the other day I did this little sketch using cobalt instead of viridian, and it looked pretty good. The flesh had a kind of translucent porcelain look, like those little Japanese ceramics. You know?”
“Aha!” Crump threw his head back. “So! Now you know more than the masters, eh?”
“Uh, well, no. I was just experimenting.”
Crump turned to the others. “Ex-per-i-menting. Ex-per-i-menting, he says.”
The other students shuffled in place, arched their necks, blinked.
Crump went on. “Do you not believe something as basic as the color of flesh hasn’t been established and reestablished down through the ages?”
“Yessir. I’m sure it has.”
Crump narrowed his eyes. “Don’t you realize that the finest minds of the ages have worked all this out a million times over?”
“Well…”
“Do you feel it necessary to reinvent the wheel? Century upon century of study and experimentation?”
“I sorta like that blue there.”
Crump’s mouth snapped shut. Then: “Mr. Buchanan, any flesh tone of any race in the world can be duplicated with yellow ocher, cadmium red, viridian green, and white and black. Any hue, any value, any intensity.”
“Even that translucent blue shadow there?”
“That blue shadow is abnormal.”
“What about the Impressionists?”
Crump’s eyes flickered.
“They used a lot a that color,” Harley offered.
“We’re not studying the Impressionists,” Crump said, a flush creeping over his ears. He held the pointer brush before him in both hands, as though he might break it.
Harley wanted to ask about Matisse and Picasso, not to mention the Abstract Expressionists and some of the newer people. He had discovered that there was a lot more going on in the world of art than Crump was making them privy to. Nevertheless, this was a long way from Separation, Texas, and, all said and done, Crump was his only link with any kind of real art. And he had learned a lot from him.
“I guess you’re right,” he mumbled.
Mr. Crump straightened, nodding triumphantly to the others. “You’d do well, M
r. Buchanan, to follow the premise, to work with the premixed colors and values.” He took a starched white handkerchief from his apron pocket and blotted the oily shine on his forehead. “With discipline and attention to application, you might eventually become a decent enough painter.” He walked away, slapping the brush against his leg.
THE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY, Harley got a letter from his mother, a part of which read: Darlene and Billy Wayne Hinchley got married last weekend. Of course, Doris and Russell are all tore up about it….
Harley wasn’t present at the boardinghouse meal that evening, and he wasn’t at work the next day. Neither was he at Crump’s studio Thursday night.
Friday morning he showed up at the DP&L lot.
“You look like hell,” Pellerd said. “Where you been, anyway?”
“Minding my own business. That’s where I’ve been.”
Berry and Moon stood back, glancing from one to the other.
Harley set about shoveling sand into the back of the pickup. He was aware of Pellerd watching him.
Pellerd turned on Berry and Moon: “Okay, dickheads, let’s hit it!” Pellerd stabbed his own shovel into the sand.
Chapter 7
Sidney
ONE SATURDAY IN November, he was selecting tubes of oil paint in Flagg's Color Mart on Lemmon Avenue in North Dallas when he became aware of a commotion over in the paint and wallpaper department. He turned to see a man in white paint-splattered overalls, the pant legs cuffed several inches above his bare ankles. The man wore a pair of worn-out black-and-white wingtip shoes without laces or socks. He waved his arms over his head, gesturing with a handful of money at Mr. Flagg, the owner. Flagg leaned his soft frame against the counter by the cash register, shook his head.
The man making all the noise looked to be in his mid-fifties. He had a shock of defiant white hair standing straight up from a high forehead, and a gray Vandyke beard that jumped out belligerently when he shouted at Flagg.
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