'It is, isn't it?' he said, and smiled his best celebrity smile. 'How much would you need for it?'
'Forty-five dollars,' she said. 'I'll be honest with you, I started it at seventy, but nobody likes it, so now it's marked down. If you come back tomorrow, you can probably have it for thirty.' The simper had grown to frightening proportions. Kinnell could see little gray spit-buds in the dimples at the comers of her stretched mouth.
'I don't think I want to take that chance,' he said. 'I'll write you a check right now.'
The simper continued to stretch; the woman now looked like some grotesque John Waters parody. Divine does Shirley Temple. 'I'm really not supposed to take checks, but all right,' she said, her tone that of a teenage girl finally consenting to have sex with her boyfriend. 'Only while you have your pen out, could you write an autograph for my daughter? Her name is Michela?'
'What a beautiful name,' Kinnell said automatically. He took the picture and followed the fat woman back to the card table. On the TV next to it, the lustful young people had been temporarily displaced by an elderly woman gobbling bran flakes.
' Michela reads all your books,' the fat woman said. 'Where in the world do you get all those crazy ideas?'
'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 Hastings' things. 'That's the only painting he didn't bum,' 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 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 Michela,' 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 Hastings' mismatched 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 back yard-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 said, 'I can't stand what's happening to me.' Isn't that awful, Mr. Kinnell? Isn't that just the awfulest 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 Michela'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 T-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 I 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 percent 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 tide, I think.'
'What does it say?'
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 futted a painting, this one does.
