All the fun was happening downtown, five minutes from Pinche Taco, five minutes from Cerebral Brewing, about two minutes from Über Dog. There were scarecrows and Wonder Women and Cookie Monsters marauding through the early dark. Med students and waitresses, guised as Amelia Earhart, as swan-Björk, swung arms overhead to taxis, to the songs of passing cars, to friends stepping out of corner liquor stores across the street. A quartet of speeding Harleys ripped a seam in the night. A foam Hulk fist fell from a balcony and bounced into the road. Everyone was hidden in the clamor, welcomed and exalted by it. The clown felt simultaneous with himself. It couldn’t be explained.
The clown and Lauren waited at the crosswalk with two scanty pirates. They eyed him. He was suspiciously uncostumed. The clown wore just his blazer and slacks, his graying temples, but beside him Lauren was to the nines. The happy tatters ill-fit her even better than they ill-fit him. He’d whited her face and drawn a great big ripping smile, almost to her eyes. Her forehead was smaller than his and the charred eyebrows reached up and tangled in the frizz of the wig. The teeth bulged her lips into a psychopathic grin. The tinsel nails made a little music as they walked.
Seamus and Eliza’s apartment complex was exactly what he’d imagined, a high cube of condos with mountain bikes on the balconies, fake brick on Tyvek, banners over the office. He could picture the police tape, the office phone ringing, the men encamped in the alley shooing off the sirens and lights.
What he’d tell Owen, if Owen wanted to hear him, was that it was the scariest thing in the world to let yourself be known. You might not be liked. In fact, you wouldn’t be. There’s plenty in each of us that’s unforgivable, he’d say. In a political world, it would always make a kind of sense to hide yourself away. But, he’d say, I want you to know me, even if sometimes you hate what you see. And I hope you’ll find a way to let me know you too.
He led Lauren up the courtyard stairs and along the balcony past potted cactuses and airing yoga mats. He gestured for her to listen. Behind the door, Seamus was making original commentary on the Clintons. Lauren seemed nervous. She kept whispering, was she supposed to say something or do something scary? “Do I say trick or treat?” The clown took a deep breath and let it all imbue his smile. He told her to relax. It was going to be great. The knife was in his blazer, his heart was in his smile. He knocked and said, “Don’t worry. Just keep your eyes on me.”
Rebecca McKanna
Interpreting American Gothic
from Colorado Review
Chloe received the first letter in December. She worked at the American Gothic House in Eldon, Iowa, and spent that afternoon helping a middle-aged couple put their golden retrievers into two of the museum’s many replicas of the clothes the couple in Grant Wood’s painting wore — a black dress and colonial-print apron for the woman; denim overalls and a black jacket for the man. Both dogs endured this stoically, much more stoically than Chloe thought she would have been able to do.
The house looked salmon colored in the fading winter light. It was only four thirty, but with the time change the sun would set soon. She walked toward the visitors center next to the house. Her hands ached from the cold. As she walked, carrying the pitchfork and costumes, she thought about Grant Wood. Was there any way he could have predicted the bastardization of his creation? Bougie people driving from suburbs of Chicago to pose their dogs for an insipid picture they would probably frame and hang above a piano no one played.
Inside the visitors center, Mark was behind the front desk, listening to someone on the phone. He was in his mid-twenties, a few years older than Chloe, and had worked at the museum longer than she had. He was tall and skinny with pale skin, wire-rimmed glasses, and hair the same color as Van Gogh in Self-Portrait with Palette — hair that was a golden red and seemed to be lit from within. Mark usually answered phone calls from people with questions about the house and its history or teachers who wanted to schedule field trips; he sometimes, however, talked to elderly people who called under the pretense of sharing their story about Grant Wood or the painting but who just wanted someone to talk to. He was always kinder and more patient with those people than Chloe thought she would be, making active-listening statements like I’m sorry. That must have been difficult. I see. Good for you.
The museum was closing soon, and one visitor remained — a man in his late fifties with graying hair and a long black coat. Chloe left him in front of an exhibit about Grant Wood’s childhood and went into the break room, where she propped the pitchfork against the wall, took off her coat, and grabbed a pile of mail from the counter to sort.
She heard the documentary about American Gothic playing on repeat in the media room. She always found the name “media room” a little too ambitious for the tiny space with a few wooden chairs and a TV and DVD player. She almost had the documentary memorized: “It is one of the most familiar images in American art, and its story starts here, in Eldon, Iowa, in the year 1930, when a young artist named Grant Wood saw a small white house built in the Carpenter Gothic style.” She found the narrator’s deep voice comforting.
She threw away a lot of junk mail — magazine-subscription ads and coupons mostly — and then sorted through the remaining letters. One was a thank-you card from a fifth-grade class that had visited the house a month before. Another was a clipping about the house that was in some art magazine recently.
Finally she got to the last letter. Its Daffy Duck postage was out of step with what was stamped across the back of the envelope in red: NOTICE! This correspondence was mailed by an inmate confined in a facility operated by the Kentucky Department of Corrections. Its contents are uncensored.
When she ripped it open she found creamy paper, the surface covered with neat, old-fashioned cursive from a pencil. The letter was formal, polite. A man asking what the painting was truly about. Was it a parody of Iowans? Or a tribute? Or something more serious — possibly a mourning portrait? He said he’d read a variety of different interpretations, and he was curious what the “official” interpretation was.
This may seem silly, he wrote. But as you can understand, I have nothing but time on my hands to ponder these things. I want to understand what Grant Wood’s intentions were. He signed the letter: Peace, Jon Allan Blue.
The name nagged at her. It seemed familiar, but wouldn’t she remember someone with the last name Blue? She looked up “Jon Allan Blue” on her phone. The number of results surprised her. The media had dubbed him “The Midwest Mangler.” His victims were young women in Iowa, Kentucky, and Nebraska, bodies mutilated beyond recognition, skulls bashed in, bodies stabbed repeatedly. He had been on death row at the Kentucky State Penitentiary for over a decade, since Chloe was ten years old.
There were photos of him online. He was handsome — even the media commented on his “all-American good looks.” His eyes were gray, his lips full. His forehead was heavily lined, and there were tributaries of wrinkles fanning out from his eyes. There was something appealing and youthful about his smile. He looked more like a CEO than a serial killer, although Chloe had read once that people in both occupations often had psychopathic traits.
Chloe held a letter written by someone who had stabbed several women to death, and this was terrifying — and the most exciting thing to happen to her. She was desperate to understand how someone who did so many horrific things could write such a polite, reasonable-sounding letter in perfect Palmer script.