“Thanks.” On the wall of his office hung an oil on canvas piece that I’d made nearly a decade ago. It was a Christmas gift—a way of saying thanks. I’d painted it from the perspective of someone just poking their head up through the water, looking up. Gus was sitting in a kayak, smiling, paddle in hand, mid-stroke. He was at home there. I suppose we both were. The picture depicted movement and the creases in his cheeks suggested a deep-down easiness that came with a paddle. I had named it The Paddler’s High.
He nodded at the picture of himself. “People ask me about that all the time. Want to know if I’ll sell it.”
“What do you tell them?”
“Not yet.”
“What’re they offering you?”
“Let’s just say I could pay cash for one of those new Ford diesels.”
“Take the money.”
He stared into the painting. “No. I think I’ll hold on to it awhile.”
Arms full, I tucked the holstered pistol behind my back, threw everything into the back of the Jeep, then made one last pass through the store. Gus’s computer homepage had been set to the local Doppler radar screen of the Weather Channel. He did this to keep an eye on river conditions for his clients and people wishing to rent equipment. It showed everything from the Okefenokee Swamp to the Cumberland Sound. At the bottom of the screen, like a running stock ticker, ran double-digit numbers depicting river level heights sent by automatic sensors placed along the river’s 130-plus-mile length. Between the two I had a pretty good picture of river conditions. He pointed at the ticker. “If the storm turns this way, that will change a good bit.”
“I remember.”
Several sizes of waterproof map cases hung along the checkout counter. Guides use them to keep the maps dry until their minds knew the river better than the map—which occurred after a few seasons on the river. I needed the map less than I needed the bag, but it had been a while so I took both. The map would confirm the GPS readings and vice versa. I pulled the newspaper article from my shirt pocket, slid it into the map case and sealed it shut.
With the car loaded, I turned to Gus. I owed him a bit of an explanation. “How you been?”
“Well, I’d prefer to be standing in an eighteen-foot Hewes flats boat somewhere in the Keys where cell phone reception was nonexistent, but”—he waved his hands across the store—“stores don’t tend themselves.”
“Sell the painting. Buy the boat. Take a vacation.”
He nodded. “Maybe one day.” He shook a pebble out of his Teva. “You sure you don’t want to talk about it?”
“The doctors sent us home.” I pulled a paddle tether off a hook on the wall and began playing with the slipknot. “Whatever you hear in the coming week, it’s probably only half true.”
I tore a sheet of paper off a pad I kept in the car, listed everything I’d just loaded into the Jeep and wrote my credit card number on the bottom. “It’d be better—for me—if you’d wait a week or so to run my card.”
“You need some money?”
“No, it’s just that there will be some people paying attention and I don’t want them to know where I am yet. They’ll know soon enough.”
“You in trouble?”
“Not the kind you’re talking about. Least, not yet.”
He folded the invoice and tucked it in his shirt pocket. “Next month.”
“Thanks, Gus.”
I stepped into the Jeep and buckled my belt. Gus hung on the door and stared down the highway. “I was thinking about your mother the other day.”
“Oh yeah?”
“That was one lovely lady. I ever tell you I asked her to marry me?”
I shook my head and laughed. “No.”
“Said she’d been married and it didn’t take. Besides, she liked me too much. Said once I got to know her, I’d take off.” He was quiet a minute. “I think she done right by you.”
“She tried.”
Gus used the parking lot as a staging area for all the folks that rented from him. After outfitting everyone with life jacket, paddle and kayak, we’d load the kayaks and canoes into the river from the side of the parking lot. A short walk downhill to the beach and put in. It was shallow enough to launch but not so deep that if someone tumped or capsized they couldn’t stand up. He stared down over the water. “She loved this river. Thought it was something special.”
“That, she did.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. “It is, you know.”
“Some would say it’s nothing but a low spot in the earth’s crust—where all the junk drains out.”
He slipped his hands in his pockets. “That’s one way of looking at it.”
“You got another?”
He nodded. “Yup, but you’ll remember soon enough. She can remind you far better than I.” He shook his head. “The river never changes. It may alter its path a bit, but it never changes. It’s us who change. We come back here and we’re different. Not it.”
“When I was a kid, Mom told me that God lived in the river. I used to lay on the bank, real still, waiting for him to surface.”
“And when he did?”
I laughed. “Jump on his back and choke him until he answered a few questions.”
“Careful what you wish for.”
A breeze rattled through the treetops bringing a coolness with it. “Gus, I’m sorry to come to you like this.”
He shook his head and picked at his teeth with a toothpick. “This river’s taught me a good bit. Probably why I don’t leave here. It winds, weaves, snakes around. Rarely goes the same way twice. But, in the end, it always ends up in the same place and the gift is never the same.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s the journey that matters.”
5
One of the great things about growing up in the sticks was the ignorance. Country people aren’t dumb and certainly not stupid. We pride ourselves on common sense and more than one of us have aced the SAT, but there are certain things we know very little about and, admittedly, some of that comes from a prideful unwillingness to either ask a few questions or want to know. Don’t worry, it’s not a regional disease. I’ve found it exists in New York, too. They just call it by another name.
In my education, art was one of those things. For most of my friends, art was a class you took or something you made when you spray-painted your girlfriend’s name on the side of a water tower. It wasn’t that we didn’t appreciate human achievement. We did and do. It was more the high-browed conversation that surrounded it. We didn’t have time for all that foolishness. We just saw beauty in different places and forms and then we surrounded it with a different conversation and language.
So when others saw what I could do with a pencil or brush, they immediately thought I was Picasso—although they had no idea who he was or why they said I was like him. They just liked his name and it made them sound important. I knew better and wanted nothing to do with Picasso. Maybe I “saw” differently. I don’t know. I suppose fish think the same thing of swimming and breathing water. They don’t think they’re anything special until you pitch them up on land.
Before my mom left this world, she made it a practice of taking me to the library. We went two or three times a week. It was air-conditioned, smoking was not allowed, admission was free and they stayed open late. We spent hours looking at art books and talking about what we liked or didn’t. Our conversations were not educated. We said things like, I like his smile, I like those colors, That makes me laugh, or That looks like it hurts.
I would learn later that what we were really saying was, That speaks to me. Because that’s what art does. It speaks to us, and if we speak the same language—and if we’ve learned how to listen—we either hear it or we don’t.
We “studied” the classics of Greece and Rome and then wondered what in the world happened during the medieval period. I didn’t know much but I at least knew that the world had taken a step backward if we were judging it by its art. Mom would spread the book
in front of me, lay a clean sheet of paper across the table and I’d draw what I saw.
I never tried to make sense of the whole of the world of art. I took only what I wanted. Only what I needed. My purpose was rather singular. Unlike some artists who could transition seamlessly between various forms, subjects and styles, I couldn’t. Still can’t. So I concentrated on what I thought I was good at—and what I needed. That meant faces. Specifically, emotions. Those library visits taught me that emotions included the angle of the shoulders, the height of the chin, the interweaving of fingers, the extent to which a chest was expanded with air, how legs were crossed, angled or spread, how a toe curled up or down, how much light reflected off the eyes.
While my mouth had a hard time getting out what was on the inside of me, my hands knew instinctively how, when I got up close and saw how the masters did it, I intrinsically understood. I just knew, I can’t explain that.
Most were total screwups. Few, if any, had it together. They painted out of brokenness, out of despair, and often out of poverty. Hence, the skinny artist.
But I learned something. Something I’d need later. Fallen, broken men can make great art.
When I got older, I learned that I was attracted to realism, not idealism. Had no use for expressionism that sought to increase the impact of images on the viewer by distortion or over-simplification. I had no use for modernism, cubism or surrealism. Picasso did nothing for me. That’s not to say he won’t one day, but he didn’t then and doesn’t now.
I wanted to touch the viewer. Deeply. No tricks. With what is real, not with what isn’t. I cared nothing for sleight of hand.
I made it through high school with little competition. My advisor placed some of my pieces in a regional art show and, by chance, I caught the eye of an art teacher and won an art scholarship to the College of Charleston. That’s when life opened my eyes. I elected to double in Art and Art History. I knew my craft needed work, but I also wanted to understand the lives of those who made it. Not only how but why. The craft without the reason didn’t mean as much. The reason added context to the gift. None of us create ex nihilo.
I read biographies of artists, studying their lives as much as their work. Most led tormented, broken lives. Many of them brought it on themselves. I never could understand why the most screwed-up people make some of the best artists. Time and time again, great art rose out of a cauldron of torment, fueled by eccentrics who lived on the fringe of society, who seemed to care little for that which society cares greatly about and vice versa. Of course, there are exceptions, but they are just that—exceptions.
Most operated on the periphery. One foot in their world, one foot in ours. Wealthy nobles sought their talent, bringing them out of their world and into this one.
Fortunately, my wealthy noble had been the good people at the College of Charleston, which meant my classes were half paid for. The other half I scrounged together from tips or loans.
My apartment in Charleston was basically a one-room studio with a loft where I slept. Showers were cold more often than not, wharf rats were common attic perusers and I kept a list on the bathroom wall naming the biggest roaches I’d captured in a clear plastic Solo cup. I named them much like hurricanes, one for each letter, and I’d been through the alphabet twice. The biggest to date was Merlin. Once I trapped him, it took twenty-seven days to go belly-up. But other than that, it was cozy, clean and the perfect place to work when I wasn’t working.
It was a two-story storefront on King Street wedged in between Beaufain and Market. My display window was ten feet wide, as was my entire studio. Fifty years ago, someone had bricked in the grassy space between two buildings and sold the space to a dentist. He used to park his chair right up front where everybody could see him working. Problem was, his patients didn’t like being on parade for all of King Street, so he sold out to a printer who spent thirty years printing and when he lost his business market to the Internet, he rented it to me. I had hoped that location would give me a chance at selling something. Anything. So I leaned what I thought were my three best pieces up against the window. Not real sexy but I’d been eating Ramen noodles for three weeks and couldn’t quite afford easels. I seriously considered stealing a few from the art lab, but deep down, I had a feeling that presentation was not my problem. Even the Christmas rush didn’t bring a sale.
There was an exception to this. About once a month, sometimes more, and usually at night, a woman would stand at my window and stare. She was tall, wore a scarf or baseball cap, jeans and something long-sleeved, and big round sunglasses that covered half her face. Once she stood there for an hour, leaning against the glass, studying the three pieces in the display and then trying to see past them at my other work leaning against the wall. Several times I motioned her in, even opened the door once and invited her, but she turned and disappeared without a word. From then on when she appeared, I just waved. Once, she waved back. I figured she liked looking so I let her look.
LIKE AN IDIOT, I had enrolled in early-morning classes thinking it would give me all day and night to work or paint. Mostly paint. When I wasn’t tending bar, chances were good I was covered in paint, charcoal, or slipping along the Battery in my running shoes.
Having pitched my asthma medication years ago, I did something the doctors told me I couldn’t. I grew my lungs. Maybe stretched is a better word. It had become my escape, helping me stay on a relatively even keel. Gone were the hacking, sputtering, passing-out days. Somewhere in the past fifteen years, it had morphed. What I have is called EIB. Exercise-induced bronchospasm. Put my lungs under duress, without adequate warm-up, and they actually clamp down, causing more duress, causing more clamping, and so on. A downward spiral. Add to that dry, cold air and I’m a basket case. But let me warm up, ease into the idea that I might need to eat mass amounts of oxygen and my lungs loosen up nicely. Further, warm damp air acts like a lubricant. I love running in a summer rain. I’ve even known moments of relative speed when I can run a long time. Hours. I’m not setting any land-speed records, but I’ve known the runner’s high.
Usually, when I clocked out at work, I’d grab a tea bag or two, either Constant Comment or Earl Grey—kind of like you do when you’re checking out of a hotel and you grab the individual bottles of soap and conditioner. You’ve got a hundred at home, but for some reason, you take two more because you never know when you might actually use it. In my case, the caffeine helped fend off the hunger. The restaurant was pretty good about turning a blind eye when it came to eating leftovers once the kitchen had closed.
One night I clocked out and then sucked down a bowl of French onion soup, some clam chowder, a few chicken strips and an entire loaf of French bread. I was full for the first time in a few days so I ambled out onto King Street and, for reasons I cannot to this day make sense of, turned hard left onto Market, en route to Waterfront Park. It was a clear night, or morning, and I wanted to smell the water and stare out over Fort Sumter.
I strolled along, angry over my tips, complaining about my inability to sell anything even remotely resembling art and sick and tired of Chinese noodles. In truth, I was having a pity-party—and those are always better alone. All I was missing was a bottle, but I couldn’t afford one.
I reached the park, and strolled around the fountain to one of four granite platforms placed along the waterfront. Their bases were constructed with the idea that statues would be placed on them in the future. At the moment, they looked like miniature helicopter landing pads, three feet off the ground and half surrounded in semicircle walls of granite. The locals called them echo chambers, because if you stood in the center and spoke exactly at twelve o’clock you could hear your own echo. Quite loudly, actually.
I hopped up on the base, whispered and heard something clank against metal, then a muffled scream followed by a painful grunt. I looked up, saw nothing and then looked again. Along the walkway, I saw the outline of a man’s back. He was leaning over something or someone and was raising his hand as if to
hit them. I’m no hero and there’s no S on my chest, but next thing I knew I found myself running across the grass. I glided off the granite wall, sprung myself airborne and caught the man in the chest. He was enormous. Broad-shouldered, as thick as he was wide, bearded and reeking like the Dumpster outside the hotel along with a pretty heavy dose of alcohol. My chest collided with his shoulder and I thought I’d just been hit by a Mack truck. The person beneath him scurried off to one side as he turned his attention to me. I stepped backward in between him and whoever he was beating. The perfume told me it was either a girl or a guy who wanted to be. I held out both hands. “Wait, sir—”
He laughed, lunged like a cat, grabbed me by the throat, cut off my air and threw me backward like a rag doll. He looked like the guy in The Green Mile, only meaner. I hopped up, hands shaking like stop signs, heard somebody crying behind me, felt a hand shaking as it was pressed against my back, and then I smelled that smell again.
I stuffed my hand in my pocket and pulled out $67 in one-dollar bills. His teeth shone white as his hand wrapped around the money. His other hand tightened around my throat. I reached into my back pocket and handed him my wallet, which held my license, student ID and two maxed-out credit cards. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. He palmed the wallet and stuffed it in his back pocket. Unfortunately, neither of those two had any effect on his grip on me or his advance on the girl. He pushed me—therefore us—back into one of the granite semicircles and backhanded me hard across the mouth. The world went squirrelly, and the streetlights hazed over then reappeared. When I could focus, I saw him back on top of her, one hand around her neck, the other up her shirt. This had gone from bad to worse, so I tried the only thing I had left. I reached into my front pocket, pulled out the pocketwatch I’d carried since my uncle gave it to me at my mother’s funeral and held it out. He eyed the dangling gold thing in front of him and then held it to his ear. “Keep it. It’s yours. All of it…just please don’t hurt the girl.”