“How are you doin’?” Dwayne asked through a yawn.
“Other than the fact that two people I’m on a road trip with drugged me? I think I’m pretty damned all right.”
“Look, Max, I’m sorry about that.”
“Whose idea was it, anyway?”
“It was an impulse. I’ve had those cookies for a while now. My friend in Tennessee knows a guy who bakes ‘em. I just figured it’d be a good opportunity, with us in the van. And for you to get, I don’t know, inspiration or something.”
“Don’t need any.”
“Finding it on the page there?”
“Yes and no.” Max drew a few loose lines.
Dwayne didn’t say anything. He wanted to tell Max to let out whatever was behind those eyes, but held back out of fear of the result. He sensed thousands of sleeping vipers in Max Higgins.
“You get a good rest?”
“Yeah, I did,” Dwayne said. “I’m ready to hit the road if you are. I’d say we got about another hour before we hit TwiFalls. I should stop and get gas, too. Pup’s thirsty.”
Dwayne started the engine and pulled back onto the highway.
***
Max rubbed his forehead. Like a gluttonous eater unable to entertain more food, he now looked at his sketchbook with similar disgust. Dozens of drawings and gesture-sketches crowding the white space, having whipped through his mind, burst from his fingers, struck the page in a stillborn thud. Not a word. No music. No song. He’d short-circuited something in himself.
Dr. Farmer had said his artistic output was a way to flush out the demons, ironically using the same terminology as his mother. An exorcising. A healthy notion, sure, but, as Farmer had said, ultimately no good if Max were just relaying this darkness into the world uncritically, without self-reflection, the lack of which might corrode him surely as running water might eventually corrode metal.
You don’t want to drive it away.
Eyes stinging, he closed the sketchbook. He shivered under his sweatshirt and so reached over and cranked up the heat.
“Hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” Dwayne said, eyes fixed on the road.
The dawn fanned out across the sky, a shining pink aura for the forest. As the van sped along, the dusk gave way to a harsh yellow light, the newborn sun pushing up from the horizon.
***
Fifteen miles from Twilight Falls, they pulled into a rustic gas station at the base of a small mountain.
“Grey’s Peak,” Dwayne said. “Think that’s the name of this place. It’s haunted by a Bigfoot-type creature who apparently guards a door to another dimension.”
Karen snorted. “Find the door yet?”
“Oh, I already found it,” Dwayne said, grinning, “just gotta find my way back now.”
Max climbed out and visited the restroom. Karen got out to stretch, popping her back. Near the restroom, two men in straw hats and flannel shirts sat in plastic lawn chairs, soil-born spectators. One pot-bellied and one skinny, almost like an old-time comic duo.
Dwayne filled up the tank and went in to pay, the clerk uttering robotic gratitude. He turned to leave when something caught his eye on the nearby bulletin board. Through a shrub of flyers and cards stared a pair of familiar eyes. He lifted the papers to get a better look.
Back from the bathroom, Max waited now in the passenger seat, door open as he sketched the two men in the chairs. Karen climbed into the middle seat.
“Making us look good?” the larger man said to Max.
Max gave a quick salute, a weak smile on his lips.
“All right then. You sell that and become Piccasser and you send us a little something, right?”
Max just nodded. Dwayne came out of the station and gave a thumbs-up that everything was good to go.
Max closed his sketchbook and shut his door.
As Dwayne climbed into the driver’s seat, he pulled a folded piece of paper from his breast pocket and handed it to Max.
“Thought you might get a kick out of this,” Dwayne said. “Found it hanging up in there.”
The paper featured a long-faced, black-and-white portrait of Christ, similar to the many that used to hang in Cynthia Higgins’ household. Above the picture sat a bold, familiar word: Missing.
“Kind of amusing, huh?”
Max stared at it. The portrait was one that used to unsettle him, not fill him with any sort of divine comfort. The Wood Christ, as he’d come to call it. The eyes slanted and melancholic, mouth agape, the stiff rigidity of the pose so...well, wooden.
Max folded the paper and slipped it into his sketchbook.
The drive was beginning to wear on him. This van had been his home for the last three weeks, it seemed. He was shackled to it, enslaved to this diesel destiny, chugging headlong into uncertainty. Insanity. It had been centuries since his last shower and skin felt like a prickly dance floor for mites and bugs.
On the first leg up Grey’s Peak no one said anything.
Soon the trees parted, unveiling a town miles below on the other side. Nestled in a small valley, it was a splash of society, dropped into the wilderness. It did not appear the conquering host of the surrounding woods so much as a guest, well acclimated, even welcomed. Max was struck by a palpable energy, a sensation that, to his mind’s eye, resembled heatwaves shimmering off a desert.
“There we are,” Dwayne said. “Twilight Falls.”
Chapter 5
I
Patronage of the Feldman show was impressive, the Peters Museum swollen with suits and dresses, people moving in currents of mumbling gossip, a miasma of opinion. Norman Ritter moved among them. He’d forgone the earlier VIP press-only showing, preferring not to have the stink of media on him. He’d report from the trenches.
On an odyssey around the exhibit, Ritter found these so-called “Neo-Naturalist” works warranting mere licks, not bites. To him, art shows were psycho-spiritual buffets. Most pieces, his eyes would just lick—a fleeting sample of flavor. Others would warrant a bite, a more considerable taste. Something you could sink your teeth into.
Yet here, he found little meat in which to dig his critical canines. Stick figures, chalky eyes, squiggles. Art’s sparse
