I tried to divert my mind to a new track and got thinking about how I had wanted to paint Brent Norton yesterday. No, nothing as important as a painting, but… just sit him on a log with my beer in his hand and sketch his sweaty, tired face and the two wings of his carefully processed hair sticking up untidily in the back. it could have been a good picture. It took me twenty years of living with my father to accept the idea that being good could be good enough.
You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. if you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think—I did—that God put you on earth to blow your father away.
It turned out I wasn’t as good as he was. I kept trying to be for longer than I should have, maybe. I had a show in New York and it did poorly—the art critics beat me over the head with my father. A year later I was supporting myself and Steff with the commercial stuff. She was pregnant and I sat down and talked to myself about it. The result of that conversation was a belief that serious art was always going to be a hobby for me, no more.
I did Golden Girl Shampoo ads-the one where the Girl is standing astride her bike, the one where she’s playing Frisbee on the beach, the one where she’s standing on the balcony of her apartment with a drink in her hand. I’ve done short-story illustrations for most of the big slicks, but I broke into that field doing fast illustrations for the stories in the sleazier men’s magazines. I’ve done some movie posters. The money comes in. We keep our heads nicely above water.
I had one final show in Bridgton, just last summer. I showed nine canvases that I had painted in five years, and I sold six of them. The one I absolutely would not sell showed the Federal market, by some queer coincidence. The perspective was from the far end of the parking lot. in my picture, the parking lot was empty except for a line of Campbell’s Beans and Franks cans, each one larger than the last as they marched toward the viewer’s eye. The last one appeared to be about eight feet tall. The picture was titled Beans and False Perspective. A man from California who was a top exec in some company that makes tennis balls and rackets and who knows what other sports equipment seemed to want that picture very badly, and would not take no for an answer in spite of the NFS card tucked into the bottom left-hand corner of the spare wooden frame. He began at six hundred dollars and worked his way up to four thousand. He said he wanted it for his study. I would not let him have it, and he went away sorely puzzled. Even so, he didn’t give up; he left his card in case I changed my mind.
I could have used the money-that was the year we put the addition on the house and bought the four-wheeldrive-but I just couldn’t sell it. I couldn’t sell it because I felt it was the best painting I had ever done and I wanted it to look at after someone would ask me, with totally unconscious cruelty, when I was going to do something serious.
Then I happened to show it to Ollie Weeks one day last fall. He asked me if he could photograph it and run it as an ad one week, and that was the end of my own false perspective. Ollie had recognized my painting for what it was, and by doing so, he forced me to recognize it, too. A perfectly good piece of slick commercial art. No more. And, thank God, no less.
I let him do it, and then I called the exec at his home in San Luis Obispo and told him he could have the painting for twenty-five hundred if he still wanted it. He did, and I shipped it UPS to the coast. And since then that voice of disappointed expectation-that cheated child’s voice that can never be satisfied with such a mild superlative as good-has fallen pretty much silent. And except for a few rumbles-like the sounds of those unseen creatures somewhere out in the foggy night-it has been pretty much silent ever since. Maybe you can tell me-why should the silencing of that childish, demanding voice seem so much like dying?
Around four o’clock Billy woke up-partially, at least-and looked around with bleary, uncomprehending eyes. “Are we still here?”
“Yeah, honey,” I said. “We are.” He started to cry with a weak helplessness that was horrible. Amanda woke up and looked at us.
“Hey, kid,” she said, and pulled him gently to her. “Everything is going to look a little better come morning.
“No,” Billy said. “No it won’t. It won’t. It won’t.”
“Shh,” she said. Her eyes met mine over his head. “Shh, it’s past your bedtime.”
“I want my mother!”
“Yeah, you do,” Amanda said. “Of course you do.” Billy squirmed around in her lap until he could look at me. Which he did for some time. And then slept again.
“Thanks,” I said. “He needed you.”
“He doesn’t even know me.”
“That doesn’t change it.”
“So what do you think?” she asked. Her green eyes held mine steadily. “What do you really think?”
“Ask me in the morning.”
“I’m asking you now.” I opened my mouth to answer and then Ollie Weeks materialized out of the gloom like something from a horror tale. He had a flashlight with one of the ladies’ blouses over the lens, and he was pointing it toward the ceiling. It made strange shadows on his haggard face. “David,” be whispered.
Amanda looked at him, first startled, then scared again,
“Ollie, what is it?” I asked.
“David,” he whispered again. Then: “Come on. Please.”
“I don’t want to leave Billy, He just went to sleep.”
“I’ll be with him,” Amanda said. “You better go. Then, in a lower voice: “Jesus, this is never going to end.”
VIII. What Happened to the Soldiers.
With Amanda.
A Conversation with Dan Miller.
I went with Ollie. He was headed for the storage area. As we passed the cooler, he grabbed a beer.
“Ollie, what is it?”
“I want you to see it?” He pushed through the double doors. They slipped shut behind us with a little backwash of air. it was cold. I didn’t like this place, not after what had happened to Norm.
A part of my mind insisted on reminding me that there was still a small scrap of dead tentacle lying around someplace.
Ollie led the blouse drop from the lens of his light. He trained it overhead. At first I had an idea that someone had hung a couple of mannequins from one of the heating pipes below the ceiling. That they had hung them on piano wire or something, a kid’s Halloween trick.
Then I noticed the feet, dangling about seven inches off the cement floor. There were two piles of kicked-over cartons. I looked up at the faces and a scream began to rise in my throat because they were not the faces of department- store dummies. Both heads were cocked to the side, as if appreciating some horribly funny joke, a joke that had made them laugh until they turned purple.
Their shadows. Their shadows thrown long on the wall behind them. Their tongues. Their protruding tongues.
They were both wearing uniforms. They were the kids I had noticed earlier and had lost track of along the way, The army brats from- The scream. I could hear it starting in my throat as a moan, rising like a police siren, and then Ollie gripped my arm just above the elbow. “Don’t scream, David. No one knows about this but you and me. And that’s how I want to keep it.” Somehow I bit it back.
“Those army kids,” I managed.
“From the Arrowhead Project,” Ollie said. “Sure” Something cold was thrust into my hand. The beer can. “Drink this. You need it.” I drained the can completely dry.
Ollie said, “I came back to see if we had any extra cartridges for that gas grill Mr. McVey has been using. I saw these guys. The way I figure, they must have gotten the nooses ready and stood on top of those two piles of cartons. They must have tied their hands for each other and then balanced each other while they stepped through the length of rope between their wrists. So… so that their hands would be behind them, you know.
Then-this is the way I figure-they stuck their heads into the nooses and pulled them tight by jerking their heads to one side. Maybe one of them counted to three and they jumped together. I don’t know.”