“What do you think?” Arabella said. There was no shade in the yard, and she squinted up at him amusedly.
“It gets your attention,” Eddie said.
At the far end was a kind of shed with an enormous amount of clutter, mostly of rusted metal car parts. Arabella led Eddie that way, past figures of brightly painted women made from manifolds or exhaust systems or fenders or what appeared to be small boilers. Each had a pedestal and a card, with names like EVERYBODY’S AUNT HILDA or KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. Some of the women had the heads of animals. One of these chillingly bore the face of a praying mantis.
As they approached the shed a shirtless man emerged from the shadowy piles of junk that filled it. He was short and squat and heavily muscled. When he came out into the light, Eddie could see that his forearms were covered with tattoos. He looked to be in his sixties and angry.
“Hello, Mr. Marcum,” Arabella said. “I’ve brought a friend.”
The man squinted at him suspiciously and then at her. “You’re the Weems lady. Did you find me a Heliarc?”
“No,” Arabella said, “I told you I couldn’t afford it. This is Ed Felson.”
Marcum, who was even shorter than Arabella, peered up at him. Then he held out a stubby and scarred hand. “She’s a good lady,” he said, nodding toward Arabella. “I can’t get nothing out of her, but she’s a good lady.”
“You make all these yourself?” Eddie looked back at the field full of metal women.
“Every goddamned one of them. You wouldn’t have a beer in that car of yours?”
“No.”
“Maybe you could get us some.”
“After a bit, Mr. Marcum,” Arabella said. “I want to show Eddie your sculptures.”
“What happened to that young man? I thought he was going to sell my things in Lexington.”
Arabella looked at him a moment and then spoke carefully. “You were asking for more money than Greg could pay. He said there would be no deal.”
“We were just haggling,” Marcum said. “He could have called me back.”
“Greg wasn’t able to invest anything near what you were asking. What I want to do, Mr. Marcum,” Arabella said clearly, “is interview you. I’ve brought a tape recorder.”
“They said I was going to be on television over a year ago but nobody came by. Maybe I wasn’t pretty enough.”
“This isn’t television. I want to do an article for Kentucky Arts magazine.”
“Is there money in it?”
“It might get some attention for you.”
“Shit,” Marcum said. “My neighbors give me all the attention I want. Money’s what I could use.” He turned to Eddie. “You can buy us some beer at the A&P. Just take a left and go two blocks.”
“Okay,” Eddie said. “What about Miller’s?”
“Get Molson’s, if they got it,” Marcum said. “Heineken’s is all right too.”
“I’ll get the recorder out of the car,” Arabella said.
As Eddie handed her the little Sony from the backseat, he said, “Who’s Greg?”
“An art dealer.”
Eddie put the key into the ignition. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“That’s right,” Arabella said. She put the strap over her shoulder and walked back into the junkyard. Eddie drove off, remembering the youthful face of the man in the newspaper. He could visualize the two of them—Arabella and the artistic young man—fussing over Marcum’s crazy cartoon “sculptures.” He got a six-pack of Molson’s and a bag of Cheetos at the supermarket and then drove away.
Eddie walked around the yard in sunshine, drinking a beer from the bottle and looking at the statues as though they were people at a party. The materials they were made of were appropriate to the looks on their faces, to the insolent way they stood and stared forward. He felt an affinity for the anger of the old bastard, banging and welding his gallery of bitches in this dead-end coal-mining town. Arabella was back in the shade sitting on a rusted boiler interviewing Marcum. It was one of those surprisingly warm November days when the odd gust of wind could chill you while the open sun made you perspire. Eddie finished his beer, stared for a while at a chromium woman with a chromium dog on a real leash, and then walked back to the shed.
Arabella stood up at he came near. Apparently she had finished. Marcum was opening another beer for himself. “I saw you looking at the woman with a dog,” Arabella said. “I’m trying to buy it from Deeley.”
For some reason this irritated him. “Where would you put it?”
“By the door to the bathroom. I like the New York Model, but she’s awfully heavy and big. What do you think?”
“Buy what you want,” Eddie said. “We can carry it in the backseat.” He walked over and got the last beer.
“I’m going to take another look,” Arabella said.
When she had left, Marcum spoke to him. “How do you like my girls?”
“I like mine better.”
The old man laughed. “She’s a peach, all right. She your wife?”
“I don’t have a wife.”
“That’s the best way. Why buy a cow when you can get milk free?”
“I don’t know anything about cows,” Eddie said. “It looks like you don’t care much for women.”
“People say that. I just call ’em the way I see ’em.”
“You must have seen some mean ones.”
The old man shrugged. “If I could get the right kind of welding equipment. A Heliarc.” He looked at Eddie thoughtfully. “That young man she was here with before you, when they came in on a motorcycle. He said you could buy a used Heliarc in Lexington.”
“I don’t know anything about welding either,” Eddie said. “What kind of man was that young man?”
Arabella was out in the yard, bending over to look at the legs of the chromium woman.
Marcum peered up at him thoughtfully. “I didn’t like him.” He indicated Arabella—now standing with her hands on her hips—with a forward motion of his bald head. “She liked him plenty, though.”
Eddie said nothing. He took a long drink from the beer bottle. Arabella came back over to them. “Look,” she said to Marcum, “I’d like to have the woman and dog, but I don’t have a lot of money.”
Marcum shrugged. “I couldn’t let it go for less than four thousand.”
“I just don’t have it, Deeley.”
“A fellow from Chicago offered me six.”
“You should have sold it,” Eddie said.
“It’s worth ten,” Marcum said. “That piece makes a statement and it’s got good, clean welds.”
Eddie nodded. He had seen the welds, and they were irregular and gapped. There was rust on the woman’s feet where they touched the ground. It would take no more than two days to make that thing, including the dog. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the cash he had brought for pool. He counted off ten fifties, holding the money so Marcum could see it, slipped the rest of the roll back in his pocket and set the five hundred on a grinder table beside them. “I’ll give you this for it,” he said.
“That’s a work of genuine American folk art,” Marcum said. “There’s thousands taken pictures of that piece and tried to buy it.” Marcum’s livelihood consisted of charging people a dollar to see his “museum” and take snapshots.
“You can make another in two days,” Eddie said. He looked hard at Marcum.
“It wouldn’t be the same.”
“Eddie,” Arabella said, “you don’t just…”
He kept looking at Marcum. “Maybe better.” He looked at the piles of scrap metal that virtually surrounded them. “You’ve got enough bumpers here to make forty.”