George Patniks was upset. George Patniks was shaking. He had sketched out the scene without thinking. Sketched it hi pencil directly onto the only piece of canvas he had stretched and ready-about three feet high and two feet wide. The kitchen, counters, phone, table, his own toolbox, and the figure of the man hi the white robe standing over the fallen, pleading woman, who tried to protect herself with a thin arm.
He had removed the painting of the sad, smoking woman from his easel and placed it against the wall near his dresser.
He paused for a spark of time and looked at what he was doing. He had not sketched hi the blood. Not yet. That would come later, when the color was right, when he felt it pulsing in his own veins.
But now he was nearly feverish. Above him his mother played the television, blaring, vibrating his ceiling like the top of a huge drum. Oprah, Donahue, Jenny Jones, Maury. George's mother was addicted and afflicted-addicted to television junk and afflicted with enormous diabetic legs.
Her furniture was fifty years old and the curlicue pattern was worn down to the hint of a memory from two generations of overweight Eupatniaks' bodies. George was an exception to the family rule. Maybe fat would suddenly spring on him when he wasn't prepared and he would wake up one morning looking like his mother, his Aunt Rosie, or his father until the cancer had chiseled him into a knotty stick, before it had taken him. George's room was a mess, a clutter of paintings leaning against one another on one wall-at least fifty paintings- paper on the floor, tubes of paint, capped but stained from previous bleedings of pigment, two palettes on the heavily and colorfully stained wooden table next to the easel near the window.
His bed, dresser, and a reasonably comfortable chair cramped themselves into a nook near die closet. He had his own bathroom with a toilet and shower. There were moments when it struck George mat he had arranged and furnished his room so that it would look like a slightly larger version of his cell in Stateville.
But now, now he had a problem. He couldn't get the blue right. He mixed colors on his pallet with an ancient spoon. Whites, blues, even a little yellow, but he couldn't get the hue of the table and matching countertop in the Rozier kitchen. He had to find it. He couldn't compromise. He wiped hair from his eyes, sure that he was accidentally and incidentally painting himself like a movie Indian about to go to war against Custer.
His hands were blue now. He looked at the sketch of death on canvas and felt the as-yet-unfinished dead woman in the painting calling to him to get it right, telling him mat he would be given no peace till he captured the scene in paint. It was worse than not remembering the tune of some song, the name of your first cell mate, the phone number of a woman you met at Unikle's Tap who wrote it down on something you stuck in your pocket and couldn't find.
'I'll get it. I'll get it I'll get it,' he muttered, competing with an angry, semiliterate skinhead on 'Oprah' audible from above. George had known skinheads, pinheads, and Steelhead, heard them coughing and cursing, threatening and sobbing from nightmares in the cell block. He had heard them pitty-pat barefoot early in the morning like caged tigers at the Lincoln Park Zoo.
'Close,' George said aloud. 'Very close. Maybe.'
He tried the blue he had mixed on the sketched tabletop. Decisions. Would it be just that little bit lighter on the canvas? Should the woman's eyes be open or closed? He had seen them both ways.
'All right,' he sighed, clenching his fists hi triumph. That's the blue.'
And he worked without knowing to words why. Ideas came and floated briefly, shimmering and flying away before he could examine them. Colors, shapes, and shadows demanded their place before him.
Maybe the painting would free him from the memory. He had offered a deal to whatever gods might be, but he was fast coming to the conclusion that there couldn't be any deals because there weren't any gods, though demons were a certainty. The deal had to be with the dead woman, a deal whereby the memory would be transferred from him to the canvas. Purged, clean. He would keep the painting, face to the wall, pay homage to it by looking at it from time to time, probably on a regular basis, same time each day or week. He could never sell it, probably never even show it to anyone.
'Can't keep you here,' he said to the painting. 'Not free, open, facing the fucking world. Can't show you. Can't sell you.'
The memory of the woman pleading, dying, and nun standing trapped, helpless inside the pantry had brought him awake four times in the short hours of the night before. He had fallen asleep quickly, easily as always, and slept lightly, as he had learned to do behind the walls and wire. George Patniks was not much of a dreamer, but last night…
The table was almost finished. He had slopped a bit over the lines that marked the edge of the table, but he would cover that when he painted the floor of the kitchen. The ter-razzo floor would be a challenge. He wasn't quite sure of the pattern. He dug for it in his memory, begged, coaxed, and pleaded it forward. He looked at the rough sketch of the woman. She pleaded with him. No, she insisted.
George had seen violence, death, blood, and horror, but it had always been desperate or crazy men doing desperate and crazy things to one another with sharpened spoons, recreation yard stones, pipes unscrewed from the sink near the shoe shop. Throats cut, faces bashed. George had seen the pain of sodomy and the ecstasy of bleeding-nosed death from a crack overdose. A black guy named Corren who had raped a ten-year-old girl had his penis whacked off by another black guy named Zed-Zed who had a nine-year-old daughter on the outside. George had heard Corren scream, had seen him writhing, hands on the bloody stump, as two trustees hurried him on a stretcher down to the infirmary, holding the mutilated man away from the accompanying guard, who didn't want to get blood on his uniform. Those memories had passed and maybe this one would too, but he was sure it needed help, a lot of help.
Blue to the countertop.
'If that's what women want, I give it to 'em is all,' a smug, insolent voice came from above, challenging Phil's, Oprah's, Bertice's, or Ricki's ready-for-battle and indignant audience.
He couldn't stand it, but he couldn't stop. He wanted to grab his jacket and run down to Unikle's, but the perfect blue had to go down on the canvas now. He would never be able to match it again. Fools and sinners laughed over his head. George knew that sound well. He painted thickly but in control and then and then and then the blue was down, finished, and George knew he was sweating through his floppy gray Mickey Mouse sweatshirt.
He wiped his brush on the stained chamois, rested it in the shell of thin turpentine, crossed the room, opened the door, and hurried up the narrow wooden steps.
When he hit the tiny kitchen, the voice of the insolent, shouting man was ricocheting off the walls. George stepped through the archway and moved past his mother, who sat half on her hip in her favorite chair. George turned the volume down on the TV and saw the face of a man who used to be a woman. Right under his face on the screen it said, 'Kyle Anther, Used to Be a Woman.' Kyle Anther was very young, crew cut, ring in one ear, tight jeans. He never did time, George thought, never saw, felt, or feared what should be feared.
'It was too loud?' his mother asked as George turned.
Wanda Eupatniaks Skutnik sat, a sad balloon of a woman in a purple sack dress and faded purple slippers decorated with wilting purple satin flowers clinging to the toes. Wanda's dyed red hair was pulled back in a bun tied with a purple ribbon. She was color coordinated but it looked off. Her round face showed concern. Her eyes met her son's. She looked like a dish of blueberry ice cream with a cherry on top.
'It was a little too loud, Ma,' he said. 'Hard for me to… I'm painting.'
She nodded.
'You look like a wild Indian,' she said.
It was George's turn to nod.
Her son's painting, which did not please her, was the source of his income. Her son was a moderately successful artist. She told her sisters and brother, her other children, the few friends she still had, and the people at St. Agnes's Church that her son Gregor was a painter-not houses, but pictures people paid for.
'You hungry?' she asked.
'Don't know.'
'I'll make you something,' she said, starting to grunt herself out of the chair.
'No, Ma. I'll make you something.'
But she was up and hobbling toward the kitchen. There was no stopping her, no point in argument. She would prepare scrambled eggs with onions and thick sausage. She had promised him this, a favorite.
'I'll turn the sound back up,' he said, following her into the kitchen.
