“Do you mind if I stand?” Schwartz said.
“Go right ahead.” Sheriff Lynch pressed his fingers again to the top folder, as if for luck or in valediction, look it from the stack, and opened it in front of Lloyd. Lloyd did not see at first what was there, because Schwartz had made a sudden movement toward the table, but Sheriff Lynch, with the slightest warning lift of his hand, checked him. He faced Schwartz a moment and then turned to Lloyd.
“Go ahead, son,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”
When Lloyd looked down, he was disappointed. It was another one of those crazy tests. He saw shapes of red and pink and green and black. It was the inkblot test, only in color. He studied more closely to try and make sense of it. He realized it was a picture of something. He realized what it was.
“I think I got it,” he said to the sheriff. The sheriff nodded to help him along. “It’s a sheep,” Lloyd said.
“Look at it a little more closely, son.” Lloyd saw Schwartz again move and the sheriff again check him while keeping his neutral blue eyes on Lloyd. Lloyd went back to the picture. He had missed some details.
“It’s a sheep gutted after slaughter,” he said.
“Turn the picture over, son,” the sheriff said. This time Schwartz did not move and the sheriff did not hold up his hand. Paper-clipped to the back of the picture Lloyd found a smaller photo of a young woman. She had straight brown hair, wore blue jeans and a red-and-white-checkered blouse, and sat in a lawn chair, smiling to please the person who held the camera.
“Now turn the picture over again,” the sheriff said, in his calm, steady voice. “What do you see?”
Lloyd tried to puzzle it out, but he couldn’t. There must be something he wasn’t seeing. He studied the picture. As he followed the shapes and colors of the sheep’s emptied body, a trickle of pity formed in him for all three of them — the woman, the sheep, and himself — and dropped somewhere inside him. The glaze over him tightened. He could only tell the sheriff that he saw a sheep.
After the sheriff left, gathering the folders under his arm, the room went back to its silence.
“If I’d known,” Schwartz said. “I would’ve had him testify.”
“What?” Lloyd said. “If you’d known what?”
“Never mind.” Shielding his face with his pale fingers, Schwartz laid his other hand on Lloyd’s shoulder. “Never mind, Lloyd. You’re perfect the way you are.”
They had sat there a long time, the sheriff opening a folder in front of him, asking him the same questions, and then putting it aside. And in each folder Lloyd had seen the same things: a gutted sheep and a pretty young woman. He knew that the sheriff was trying to do something to help him get right, but as the glaze thickened, that chance seemed ever more remote. Before he left, the sheriff had nodded to Lloyd, to acknowledge that he had found his answer, but his gesture was as distant as that of a receding figure waving a ship out to sea. With each drop of pity Lloyd felt himself borne away yet drowning, so that he knew the heart of the man in the execution chamber, suffocating and unable to move, and he wondered how he would survive in this new and airless world.
Martha Moffett
Dead Rock Singer
From The Chattahoochee Review
I didn’t believe it when someone pointed her out to me and told me she had once been married to Screwbosky. I was always surprised to learn something about him I didn’t already know. Like everybody who’s made it through the last ten years, I felt proprietary about the facts of his life. I could recite all the milestones, chapter and verse — and footnotes. The first concert at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, and right after it the all-night concert in Pittsburgh. The first gold record. The succession of brand names as he switched guitars, the motorcycle accident, the first time he snorted coke, the last time. Between what Screwbosky said to us and what he’d sung to us — and taking into consideration the books, the reviews, the interviews, and the newspaper stories — I thought I was in possession of pretty well everything about him that was public knowledge. At any rate, it was rare that anybody ever told me anything new. I also felt proprietary about his music. I lived it before he wrote it, surely I had a special right to feel that it was in some way mine, more meaningful to me than just any listener. Then this guy reaches over for a deviled egg and jerks his shoulder toward a woman at the end of the room. One wife I knew about, that was documented. So who was he talking about?
My disbelief must have registered on my face. “When she was younger, man,” my informant hissed as he pushed me along the table that was serving as a bar and pointed me in the direction of the far end of the split-level living room. Through the French windows at the other end of the room, Long Island Sound was a bright gray and the sky darker, as if the water was the source of light. The man beside me said something more, but the house was pounding with the worst kind of disco music and I couldn’t hear him. Some stored information was filtering into my conscious mind.
Yes. There had been an early marriage. Before Chicago, before the first album. A Sarah Lawrence type. There was something — a name, a label — that defined her. What had it been? A paragraph in one of those personality-cult magazines was coming back, something about her family or her background. What was it? I knew I’d get it in a minute. I remember stuff like that.
The people at the cocktail party Douglas had dragged me to formed such a classic suburban group that I had not bothered to make distinctions among the ones I had met so far. Doug’s new house was two streets over, one of some two dozen houses on a six-acre spit of land jutting away from the Connecticut shore. Local inhabitants like to think they live on an island, and in fact call the place Perth Island, although you won’t find it in an atlas. At one end of this piece of prime real estate, it’s true, the approach is over a bridge that lets the tide into a shallow bay. At that end, you could very well imagine you were on an island. But the other end is solid marshland, with a tidal creek trickling through. Perth Island could hardly be called a peninsula, much less an island. It’s a comma-shaped piece of land, firmly anchored at the head to the mainland, and attached at the other end by the bridge. I’d call it an aneurysm, in honor of the local death rate. Douglas says he waited for the overstressed executive who previously owned his house to drop dead, and finally he did.
Doug’s new house was not a new house, it was an old house newly purchased and now in the process of being modernized. “Nick, come and look it over,” he said to me after he’d signed the mortgage papers. I had come out to take a look. On the last day of the weekend, he insisted that we drop in at the party for a couple of drinks. It would give him an opportunity to meet some of his new neighbors. Knowing Douglas, I could bet he’d soon be on the board of the Perth Island Improvement Association, the group that made the rules on where people could park, what hours the two tiny scraps of communal beach could be used, how early one could put out the garbage, and other vital matters, WELCOME TO PERTH ISLAND. There was a sign at the little stone bridge that marked the causeway leading to the mainland. “Parking Rules Strictly Enforced P.I.I.A.” That was so that no strangers could come and use the beaches that the Perth Islanders raked and dredged and patrolled so possessively.