mismatched silverware and a pretty good collection of old
McDonald's plastic glasses in a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids motif.
"Most of them had sex stuff in them."
"Oh no," Kinnell said.
"He did the worst ones after he got on drugs," Judy Diment
continued. "After he was dead-he hung himself down in the
basement, where he used to paint-they found over a hundred of
those little bottles they sell crack cocaine in. Aren't drugs awful,
Mr. Kinnell?"
"They sure are."
"Anyway, I guess he finally just got to the end of his rope, no pun
intended. He took all of his sketches and paintings out into the
back yard-except for that one, I guess - and burned them. Then he
hung himself down in the basement. He pinned a note to his shirt.
It said, 'I can't stand what's happening to me.' Isn't that awful, Mr.
Kinnell? Isn't that just the awfulest thing you ever heard?"
'Yes," Kinnell said, sincerely enough. "It just about is."
'Like I say, I think George would go right on living in the house if
he had his druthers, " Judy Diment said. She took the sheet of
paper with Michela's autograph on it, held it up next to Kinnell's
check, and shook her head, as if the similarity of the signatures
amazed her. "But men are different."
"Are they?"
"Oh, yes, much less sensitive. By the end of his life, Bobby
Hastings was just skin and bone, dirty all the time-you could smell
him - and he wore the same T-shirt, day in and day out. It had a
picture of the Led Zeppelins on it. His eyes were red, he had a
scraggle on his cheeks that you couldn't quite call a beard, and his
pimples were coming back, like he was a teenager again. But she
loved him, because a mother's love sees past all those things."
The woman who had been looking at the silverware and the glasses
came over with a set of Star Wars placemats. Mrs. Diment took
five I dollars for them, wrote the sale carefully down on her pad
below "ONE DOZ. ASSORTED POTHOLDERS & HOTPADS,"
then turned back to Kinnell.
They went out to Arizona," she said, "to stay with Iris's folks. I
know George is looking for work out there in Flagstaff-he's a
draftsman-but I don't know if he's found any yet. If he has, I
suppose we might not ever see them again here in Rosewood. She
marked out all the stuff she wanted me to sell-Iris did - and told me
I could keep twenty percent for my trouble. I'll send a check for the
rest. There won't be much." She sighed.
"The picture is great," Kinnell said.
"Yeah, too bad he burned the rest, because most of this other stuff
is your standard yard sale crap, pardon my French. What's that?"
Kinnell had turned the picture around. There was a length of
Dymotape pasted to the back.
"A tide, I think."
"What does it say?"
He grabbed the picture by the sides and held it up so she could read
it for herself This put the picture at eye level to him, and he studied
it eagerly, once again taken by the simpleminded weirdness of the
subject; kid behind the wheel of a muscle car, a kid with a nasty,
knowing grin that revealed the filed points of an even nastier set of
teeth.
It fits, he thought. If ever a title futted a painting, this one does.
" The Road Virus Heads North," she read. "I never noticed that
when my boys were lugging stuff out. Is it the tide, do you think?"
"Must be." Kinnell couldn't take his eyes off the blond kid's grin. I
know something, the grin said. I know something you never will.
"Well, I guess you'd have to believe the fella who did this was high
on drugs," she said, sounding upset - authentically upset, Kinnell
thought. "No wonder he could kill himself and break his mamma's
heart."
"I've got to be heading north myself," Kinnell said, tucking the
picture under his arm. "Thanks for-"
" Mr. Kinnell?"
"Yes?"
"Can I see your driver's license?" She apparently found nothing
ironic or even amusing in this request. "I ought to write the number
on the back of your check."
Kinnell put the picture down so he could dig for his wallet. "Sure.
You bet."
The woman who'd bought the Star Wars placemats had paused on
her way back to her car to watch some of the soap opera playing on
the lawn TV. Now she glanced at the picture, which Kinnell had
propped against his shins.
"Ag," she said. "Who'd want an ugly old thing like that? I'd think
about it every time I turned the lights out."
"What's wrong with that?" Kinnell asked.
Kinnell's Aunt Trudy lived in Wells, which is about six miles north
of the Maine - New Hampshire border. Kinnell pulled off at the
exit which circled the bright green Wells water tower, the one with
the comic sign on it (KEEP MAINE GREEN, BRING MONEY in
letters four feet high), and five minutes later he was turning into
the driveway of her neat little saltbox house. No TV sinking into
the lawn on paper ashtrays here, only Aunt Trudy's amiable masses
of flowers. Kinnell needed to pee and hadn't wanted to take care of
that in a roadside rest stop when he could come here, but he also
wanted an update on all the family gossip. Aunt Trudy retailed the
best; she was to gossip what Zabar's is to deli. Also, of course, he
wanted to show her his new acquisition.
She came out to meet him, gave him a hug, and covered his face
with her patented little birdy-kisses, the ones that had made him
shiver all over as a kid.
"Want to see something?" he asked her. "It'll blow your pantyhose
off."
"What a charming thought," Aunt Trudy said, clasping her elbows
in her palms and looking at him with amusement.
He opened the trunk and took out his new picture. It affected her,
all right, but not in the way he had expected. The color fell out of
her face in a sheet-he had never seen anything quite like it in his
entire life. "It's horrible," she said in a tight, controlled voice. "I
hate it. I suppose I can see what attracted you to it, Richie, but
what you play at, it does for, real. Put it back in your trunk, like a
good boy. And when you get to the Saco River, why don't you pull
over into the breakdown lane and throw it in?"
He gaped at her. Aunt Trudy's lips were pressed tightly together to
stop them trembling, and now her long, thin hands were not just
clasping her elbows but clutching them, as if to keep her from
flying away. At that moment she looked not sixty-one but ninety-
one.
" Auntie?" Kinnell spoke tentatively, not sure what was going on
here. "Auntie, what's wrong?"
"That." she said, unlocking her right hand and pointing at the
picture. "I'm surprised you don't feel it more strongly yourself, an
imaginative guy like you."
Well, he felt something, obviously he had, or he never would have
unlimbered his checkbook in the first place. Aunt Trudy was
feeling something else, though ... or something more. He turned
the picture around so he could see it (he had been holding it out for
her, so the side with the Dymotaped title faced him), and looked at
it again. What he saw hit him in the chest and belly like a one-two
punch.
The picture had changed, that was punch number one. Not much,
but it had dearly changed. The young blond man's smile was wider,
revealing more of those filed cannibal-teeth. His eyes were
squinted down more, too, giving his face a look which was more
knowing and nastier than ever.
The degree of a smile ... the vista of sharpened teeth widening
slightly ... the tilt and squint of the eyes ... all pretty subjective
stuff. A person could be mistaken about things like that, and of