“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 Hastingses’ things. “That’s the only painting he didn’t burn,” 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 291
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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 Robin,” 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 Hastingses’ mis-matched 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 backyard—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 292
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said, ‘I can’t stand what’s happening to me.’ Isn’t that awful, Mr. Kinnell? Isn’t that just the horriblest 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 Robin’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 Tee-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 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 per cent 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 title, I think.”
“What does it say?”
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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 fitted 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 title, 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 294
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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 panty-hose 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.