“Good point.”
Alan opened his paint box, a sturdy wooden one that had belonged to his grandfather. He kept his brushes bristle up in a mason jar nearby and selected a hogs hair filbert and a hogs hair round to lay in the basic structure in thinned burnt sienna. He already had a primed canvas stapled to a lapboard. Proper stretchers were a sweet memory. The canvas, with its dry bluish-gray layer of wash, was on the smallish side but would have to do, like everything else in short supply. Alan never wanted to be a miniaturist, but so be it.
As Alan sketched Ellen’s basic form in small but confident strokes, he really studied her body. It was about 10:30 in the morning; the light in the room was somewhat diffuse as the sun was still at the east end of the apartment. By the time the sun hung over York, casting direct light into the room, he had the basic form blocked in. The light would be strong for a couple of hours. As the illumination grew stronger, so did the highlights on Ellen’s body, sweat glinting on each raised vertebra, each dorsal rib, her raised hipbone. Though emaciated, the essence of her former loveliness was still evident. Lighting made such a difference. Maybe this painting could be both flattering and honest.
“Can I have a glass of water?” Ellen asked, breaking what Alan realized had been several hours of total silence.
14
“Ooh! Ooh! There, across the street. Something’s happening over there at the Food City! I saw somebody go into the market. Someone’s stealing our food. Well, not our food, but you know what I mean!”
“It was bound to happen,” Ruth said.
“What? A food thief? You bet your sweet bippy! I keep vigil, nothing gets past me!”
“No, no, no, not the alleged food thief.”
“Alleged? Then what? What? What was bound to happen?” Abe turned away from his post at the window and glared at his wife.
“Losing your marbles. Senility. Dementia. Whatever you want to call it. You spend all day staring out the window and you’re bound to start seeing things.”
“I’m not seeing things,” Abe sputtered.
“Exactly. You’re not seeing things because there’s nothing to see. Like the lights in the sky the other night.”
“Not the sky, the ground.”
“Uh-huh.”
“There was some kind of fracas.”
“Fracas,” Ruth repeated.
“A brouhaha.”
Ruth just stared, her mouth pursed. Abe dabbed his sweaty forehead, wiping a trickle of stinging saltiness from the corner of his eye. He blinked a few times and looked back out the window. Nothing was any different than usual. The host of rotting cabbages was muddling en masse in perfect, unbroken harmony.
“I just thought I saw… Ah, nuts.”
Abe looked again, his eye drifting to Food City.
“Aha!” he shouted. “Aha! There!” He pointed at the doors, the glass of one was broken. “There! The door’s busted. I heard that. I heard a crash. So there!”
“So?” Ruth said, unmoved. “They broke a window. Wonderful. In addition to eating us they’re vandals now. I’m thrilled. And now the supermarket’s full of them. I can see why you’re cheering.”
“They just mill around,” Abe said. “They don’t break windows.”
“They did,” Ruth said.
“I don’t think so,” Abe said.
But didn’t know if he believed it.
“I wish I had me a gun,” Dabney said as he lobbed a half brick from his perch. “And bullets,” he added. “Lots of bullets. I don’t want this to be one of them tricky ‘Monkey’s Paw’ wishes where you get a little of this but none of that and it works out bad. A gun and lotsa bullets and maybe a scope for aiming. This brick throwing shit’s all well and good if you’re a fucking caveman, but damn.”
Karl, who had risked Dabney’s scorn and come up to the roof, sat nearby, handing chunks to Dabney, like an old-time cannoneer supplying his gunner. He’d mind his p’s and q’s today. No repetitions of the “Mean Joe Green” incident, as he’d come to think of it.
“Another thing would be nice about having a scope would be I could really see the damage I inflicted,” Dabney continued. “From up here it’s too small. I wanna see the heads pop. I wanna see the chunks spatter up, the bits of bone and brain. I wanna know that I’ve put ’em down for good. Sometimes I think I see ’em get up again and there’s no way I can hit the same ones twice. I don’t have that kind of aim, least not freehand. But with a nice rifle? Shit, heads would be poppin’, son.”
“Yeah, that’d be cool.”
“You humoring me?”
“No. I think it would be totally cool.”
Karl didn’t think it was that cool, but why make waves? Rifles and scopes reminded him too much of Big Manfred, who’d been as devout a hunter as he’d been a Christian. “Hey, Bambi, have a little of this,” had been his oft-repeated jibe when “thinning the herd.” “Hunting whitetail” sounded like one of the triple-X titles Karl had yearned to see on the marquees of the Deuce, but he’d kept that to himself. Big Manfred wouldn’t have seen the humor. The same went for “buck fever,” which sounded like gay porn. Big Manfred definitely wouldn’t have found that the least bit amusing. Guns. Bullets. A scope. The truth is, Karl thought if you’re going to make a wish, why not just wish none of this had ever happened in the first place?
Dabney lofted another hunk into the crowd and it dropped between bodies. He clucked in disapproval, then turned away from the cornice, massaging his bicep, sweat spilling off him. Above, the sky was clear and bright and in other circumstances would be lovely to behold. Dabney lay on his back on the tarp and closed his eyes, shielding them with a large hand, wishing for rain. The clouds that roved the sky from time to time were a sadistic tease. Karl studied the older-but not old-man. He was still, in relative terms, beefy. When Dabney had shown up he’d weighed in at close to three hundred pounds so even now he looked formidable.
Karl’s attention drifted over to Dabney’s smokehouse. Was there still meat inside? Karl wondered if he should ask. Didn’t he deserve a second chance? Could he risk sneaking up when Dabney was asleep? No, that would be a bad idea. Lined up along the low wall on the southern side of the roof were Ruth’s flowerboxes. With seeds she’d collected from the last fresh vegetables-cucumbers, green peppers, peas, and tomatoes-she’d attempted to grow food for the building; a noble effort that never made it. Small spindly tendrils had poked out of the soil, but the lack of rain and the oppressive heat baked them before they’d blossomed.
Dabney rolled back onto his belly, then hoisted himself to his knees, crawled to the edge of the roof and looked straight down.
“You know how frustrating it is looking down there every day and seeing the top of my truck taunting me?” Dabney said. “Every day. Least those motherfuckers could do is turn it over, but they got no strength it seems. Just numbers. Turn it all the way over, onto its back like a turtle. Then I wouldn’t see it no more.”
Jutting out into the street at a forty-five degree angle languished the van Dabney had plowed into the building seven months earlier. Painted on the pale blue roof in black was the legend, DABNEY LOCKSMITH & ALARM, then smaller, SERVING ALL FIVE BOROUGHS SINCE 1979, followed by his phone number in really big purple numerals. The front end was crumpled, the small hood popped open, revealing a blackened engine block. The back doors hung open, jostled every few moments by figures that passed by or through them. No doubt sun-shy zombies squatted within.