Joe said, “That’s my home!”
He stopped the truck at the bottom of a long, open draw and walked for almost an hour. At the end of that walk, he reached the gloomy, ruined, enormous house that he had long ago visited with his father, the mansion of the Silver King, a piece of discarded property no longer even attached to a remembered name. It was a heap out in a pasture and if you had never been inside it the way Joe had and felt in the design of its chambers the anger and assertion of the Silver King himself, the mansion didn’t look good enough to shelter slaughter cattle until sale day. Grackles jumped and showered in the lee of its discolored walls and the palisade of poplars that led from the remains of the gate seemed like the work of a comedian.
Joe walked to the far side of the building and sat down close to the wall out of the wind. The mud swallows had built their nests solidly up under the eaves and wild roses were banked and tangled wherever corruption of the wall’s surface gave them a grip. Concentric circles in the stucco surrounded black dots where stray gunfire had intercepted the building, adding to the impression that it was a fortress. Joe thought about how his father’s bank had repossessed the property. His father was gone — even the bank was gone! He was going to go in.
A piece of car spring in the yard made a good pry bar, and Joe used it to get the plywood off one of the windows, leaving a black violated gap in the wall. He made a leap to the sill, teetering sorely on his stomach, then poured himself inside. He raised his eyes to the painting of the white hills.
Joe walked across the ringing flags to get a view of the picture. He could feel the stride the room induced and imagined the demands of spirit the Silver King made on everything. Such people, he thought, attacked death headlong with their insistence on comfort and social leverage. It was absolutely fascinating that it didn’t work.
But the painting was still mysterious; it had not changed. “The only painting I’ve ever understood,” said Joe’s father after he had showed it to his son. “Too bad it’s fading.” The delicacy of shading in the overlapping white hills, rescued from vagueness by the cheap pine frame, seemed beyond the studied coarseness Joe’s father leveled at everything else.
It was a matter of dragging an old davenport across the room and bracing it against one corner of the fireplace. He stepped up onto one arm, then to its back and then up onto the mantel. He turned around very slowly and faced the wall, to the left of the painting. By shuffling in slow motion down the length of the mantel he was able to move himself to its center.
There was no picture. There was a frame hanging there and it outlined the spoiled plaster behind it. It could have been anything. It was nothing, really. Close up, it really didn’t even look like white hills. This of course explained why it had never been stolen. Joe concluded that no amount of experience would make him smart.
His father must always have known there was nothing there. The rage Joe felt quickly ebbed. In his imaginary parenthood, he had begun to see what caused the encouragement of belief. It was eternal playfulness toward one’s child; and it explained the absence of the painting. It wasn’t an empty frame; it was his father telling him that somewhere in the abyss something shone.
34
He was driving a little too fast for a dirt road, tools jumping around on the seat of the truck and a shovel in the bed beating out a tattoo. He was going to see Ellen, sweeping toward her on a euphoric zephyr. He knew how intense he must look; and he began doing facial exercises as a preparation for feigning indifference. The flatbed hopped across the potholes. Antelope watched from afar. “Hi, kiddo,” he said. “Thought I’d see how you were getting along.” He cleared his throat and frowned. “Good afternoon, Ellen. Lovely day. I hope this isn’t a bad time.” He craned over so he could watch himself in the rearview mirror. “Hiya Ellen-baby, guess what? I’m gonna lose that fucking ranch this week. YAAGH!” A sudden and vast deflation befell him and he slumped in the front of the truck and slowed down. When he got to the schoolyard, the children were gone and Ellen was walking toward her old sedan in her coat.
She saw Joe and walked over toward him. She said, “Well, what do you know about that?”
“I wanted to see you,” said Joe.
“Here I am.”
“Have you been thinking?”
“About what? My phone bill? My cholesterol?”
“Your phone bill.”
“I think about it every time I lift the Princess Touchtone to my ear. Incidentally, my husband and I are anxious for you to know how happy we are to have worked everything out. I realize I’m kind of repeating myself. But it seems we have to do that with you. Joe, I don’t want to be this way.”
“Can we take a short drive?” Joe asked.
“How short?”
“Five minutes.”
“I guess it can be arranged,” said Ellen and climbed in. Joe noticed how closely she followed the rural convention of going from an amorous interest to a display of loathing; in the country, no one broke off an affair amicably. Ellen looked out at the beautiful fall day, directing a kind of all-purpose disgust at falling aspen leaves. This was the sort of thing Astrid never put him through.
Joe drove back toward town and quickly approached its single stoplight; he was heading for the open country to show her the white hills, both the painting and the ones beyond, and explain enough about his life that he could, if necessary, close this chapter too.
“Where are we going?” Ellen asked in alarm. “Stop at this light and let me out.” The light began to turn red. Ellen tried the door handle. Some pedestrians had stopped to look on. Joe ran the light. Ellen pushed the door open and shouted, “Help!” and Joe hit the gas. The bystanders fluttered into their wake. He watched in the rearview mirror as they started to go into action.
“We’ll just take a little loop out toward the Crazies and I’ll drop you back at the school. What in God’s name caused you to yell that?”
“I wanted to be dropped off. Joe, you have to learn to take hints a little better than you do.”
“I’m going to show you something and we’re going to talk.”
“About what? My husband and I are back together. We have resolved our differences. We’re happy again. We’re a goddamn couple, got it?”
“Why did you lie to me about Clara?”
She studied him for a moment in a shocked way. Then he saw she wouldn’t argue.
“Billy and I had hit this rough spot in the road.”
“I still don’t follow you.”
“It was Daddy’s idea actually. He had worked it out on the calendar. I have to admit, it wasn’t that far-fetched. But he’s got that big bite missing from his ranch and he kind of put two and two together.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“Whatever.” She turned to him suddenly. She made little fists and rolled her eyes upward. “You don’t need to understand me. Billy knows everything there is to know about me, and he loves me.”
Joe wished he had time to think about this. She had a point. It was about lives that were specific to each other. It wasn’t about generalities. It wasn’t about “love.” “Love” was like “home.” It was basic chin music.