a cigar box, a pad of paper, and another handlettered sign on it.
This sign read ALL SALES CASH, ALL SALES FINAL. The TV
was on, turned to an afternoon soap opera where two beautiful
young people looked on the verge of having deeply unsafe sex.
The fat woman glanced at Kinnell, then back at the TV. She looked
at it for a moment, then looked back at him again. This time her
mouth was slightly sprung.
Ah, Kinnell thought, looking around for the liquor box fined with
paperbacks that was sure to be here someplace, a fan.
He didn't see any paperbacks, but he saw the picture, leaning
against an ironing board and held in place by a couple of plastic
laundry baskets, and his breath stopped in his throat. He wanted it
at once.
He walked over with a casualness that felt exaggerated and
dropped to one knee in front of it. The painting was a watercolor,
and technically very good. Kinnell didn't care about that; technique
didn't interest him (a fact the critics of his own work had duly
noted). What he liked in works of art was content, and the more
unsettling the better. This picture scored high in that department.
He knelt between the two laundry baskets, which had been filled
with a jumble of small appliances, and let his fingers slip over the
glass facing of the picture. He glanced around briefly, looking for
others like it, and saw none - only the usual yard sale art collection
of Little Bo Peeps, praying hands, and gambling dogs.
He looked back at the framed watercolor, and in his mind he was
already moving his suitcase into the backseat of the Audi so he
could slip the picture comfortably into the trunk.
It showed a young man behind the wheel of a muscle car-maybe a
Grand Am, maybe a GTX, something with a T-top, anyway -
crossing the Tobin Bridge at sunset. The T-top was off, turning the
black car into a half-assed convertible. The young man's left arm.
was cocked on the door, his right wrist was draped casually over
the wheel. Behind him, the sky was a bruise-colored mass of
yellows and grays, streaked with veins of pink. The young man
had lank blond hair that spilled over his low forehead. He was
grinning, and his parted lips revealed teeth which were not teeth at
all but fangs.
Or maybe they're filed to points, Kinnell thought. Maybe he's
supposed to be a cannibal.
He liked that; liked the idea of a cannibal crossing the Tobin
Bridge at sunset. In a Grand Am. He knew what most of the
audience at the PEN panel discussion would have thought - Oh,
yes, great picture for Rich Kinnell he probably wants it for
inspiration, a feather to tickle his tired old gorge into one more fit
of projectile vomiting-but most of those folks were ignoramuses, at
least as far as his work went, and what was more, they treasured
their ignorance, cossetted it the way some people inexplicably
treasured and cossetted those stupid, mean-spirited little dogs that
yapped at visitors and sometimes bit the paperboy's ankles. He
hadn't been attracted to this painting because he wrote horror
stories; he wrote horror stories because he was attracted to things
like this painting. His fans sent him stuff - pictures, mostly - and he
threw most of them away, not because they were bad art but
because they were tiresome and predictable. One fan from Omaha
had sent him a little ceramic sculpture of a screaming, horrified
monkey's head poking out of a refrigerator door, however, and that
one he had kept. It was unskillfully executed, but there was an
unexpected juxtaposition there that lit UP his dials. This painting
had some of the same quality, but it was even better. Much better.
As he was reaching for it, wanting to pick it up right now, this
second, wanting to tuck it under his arm and proclaim his
intentions, a voice spoke up behind him: "Aren't you Richard
Kinnell?"
He jumped, then turned. The fat woman was standing directly
behind him, blotting out most of the immediate landscape. She had
put on fresh lipstick before approaching, and now her mouth had
been transformed into a bleeding grin.
"Yes, I am," he said, smiling back.
Her eyes dropped to the picture. "I should have known you'd go
right to that," she said, simpering. "It's so You."
"It is, isn't it?" he said, and smiled his best celebrity smile. "How
much would you need for it?"
"Forty-five dollars," she said. "I'll be honest with you, I started it at
seventy, but nobody likes it, so now it's marked down. If you come
back tomorrow, you can probably have it for thirty." The simper
had grown to frightening proportions. Kinnell could see little gray
spit-buds in the dimples at the comers of her stretched mouth.
"I don't think I want to take that chance," he said. "I'll write you a
check right now."
The simper continued to stretch; the woman now looked like some
grotesque John Waters parody. Divine does Shirley Temple. "I'm
really not supposed to take checks, but all right," she said, her tone
that of a teenage girl finally consenting to have sex with her
boyfriend. "Only while you have your pen out, could you write an
autograph for my daughter? Her name is Michela?"
"What a beautiful name," Kinnell said automatically. He took the
picture and followed the fat woman back to the card table. On the
TV next to it, the lustful young people had been temporarily
displaced by an elderly woman gobbling bran flakes.
" Michela reads all your books," the fat woman said. "Where in the
world do you get all those crazy ideas?"
"I don't know," Kinnell said, smiling more widely than ever. "They
just come to me. Isn't that amazing?. "
The yard sale minder's name was Judy Diment, and she lived in the
house next door. When Kinnell asked her if she knew who the
artist happened to be, she said she certainly did; Bobby Hastings
had done it, and Bobby Hastings was the reason she was selling off
the Hastings' things. "That's the only painting he didn't bum," she
said. "Poor Iris! She's the one I really feel sorry for. I don't think
George cared much, really. And I know he didn't understand why
she wants to sell the house." She rolled her eyes in her large,
sweaty face - the old can-you-imagine-that look. She took
Kinnell's check when he tore it off, then gave him the pad where
she had written down all the items she'd sold and the prices she'd
obtained for them. "Just make it out to Michela," she said. "Pretty
please with sugar on it?" The simper reappeared, like an old
acquaintance you'd hoped was dead.
"Uh-huh," Kinnell said, and wrote his standard thanks-for-being-a-
fan message. He didn't have to watch his hands or even think about
it anymore, not after twenty-five years of writing autographs. "Tell
me about the picture, and the Hastingses."
Judy Diment folded her pudgy hands in the manner of a woman
about to recite a favorite story.
"Bobby was just twenty-three when he killed himself this spring.
Can you believe that? He was the tortured genius type, you know,
but still living at home." Her eyes rolled, again asking Kinnell if he
could imagine it. "He must have had seventy, eighty paintings, plus
all his sketchbooks. Down in the basement, they were." She
pointed her chin at the Cape Cod, then looked at the picture of the
fiendish young man driving across the Tobin Bridge at sunset.
"Iris-that's Bobby's mother - said most of them were real bad, lots
worse'n this. Stuff that'd curl your hair." She lowered her voice to a
whisper, glancing at a woman who was looking at the Hastings'