mouth was slightly sprung.
Ah, Kinnell thought, looking around for the liquor box fined with
paperbacks that was sure to be here someplace, a fan.
He didn't see any paperbacks, but he saw the picture, leaning
against an ironing board and held in place by a couple of plastic
laundry baskets, and his breath stopped in his throat. He wanted it
at once.
He walked over with a casualness that felt exaggerated and
dropped to one knee in front of it. The painting was a watercolor,
and technically very good. Kinnell didn't care about that; technique
didn't interest him (a fact the critics of his own work had duly
noted). What he liked in works of art was content, and the more
unsettling the better. This picture scored high in that department.
He knelt between the two laundry baskets, which had been filled
with a jumble of small appliances, and let his fingers slip over the
glass facing of the picture. He glanced around briefly, looking for
others like it, and saw none - only the usual yard sale art collection
of Little Bo Peeps, praying hands, and gambling dogs.
He looked back at the framed watercolor, and in his mind he was
already moving his suitcase into the backseat of the Audi so he
could slip the picture comfortably into the trunk.
It showed a young man behind the wheel of a muscle car-maybe a
Grand Am, maybe a GTX, something with a T-top, anyway -
crossing the Tobin Bridge at sunset. The T-top was off, turning the
black car into a half-assed convertible. The young man's left arm.
was cocked on the door, his right wrist was draped casually over
the wheel. Behind him, the sky was a bruise-colored mass of
yellows and grays, streaked with veins of pink. The young man
had lank blond hair that spilled over his low forehead. He was
grinning, and his parted lips revealed teeth which were not teeth at
all but fangs.
Or maybe they're filed to points, Kinnell thought. Maybe he's
supposed to be a cannibal.
He liked that; liked the idea of a cannibal crossing the Tobin
Bridge at sunset. In a Grand Am. He knew what most of the
audience at the PEN panel discussion would have thought - Oh,
yes, great picture for Rich Kinnell he probably wants it for
inspiration, a feather to tickle his tired old gorge into one more fit
of projectile vomiting-but most of those folks were ignoramuses, at
least as far as his work went, and what was more, they treasured
their ignorance, cossetted it the way some people inexplicably
treasured and cossetted those stupid, mean-spirited little dogs that
yapped at visitors and sometimes bit the paperboy's ankles. He
hadn't been attracted to this painting because he wrote horror
stories; he wrote horror stories because he was attracted to things
like this painting. His fans sent him stuff - pictures, mostly - and he
threw most of them away, not because they were bad art but
because they were tiresome and predictable. One fan from Omaha
had sent him a little ceramic sculpture of a screaming, horrified
monkey's head poking out of a refrigerator door, however, and that
