Dwayne kept his eyes on the road ahead. Max had a fleeting but terrible vision of him peeling out and leaving them stranded in this weird little burg.
“You’re not coming to the museum later?” Karen asked. She seemed bothered by the unexpected announcement, almost in a personal way.
“I will, there’s just...something I want to get over with.” Dwayne flicked his head back and forth. “As I said, it’s something I do when I come here. Why don’t you two take a stroll around town? There’s enough sketch fodder here for years, Maximo.”
There was an autumn in Dwayne’s eyes, and the usually humorous Maximo came out in melancholy breath.
“Okay....”
“You’ll be here?”
“Most likely,” Karen said.
“I don’t want to stay long,” Max said.
“I’ll be around, don’t worry. Errand shouldn’t take too long.”
“All right.”
“You have enough to get in?” Dwayne asked. “For the two of you?”
Both checked, nodded.
“Okay then. See you guys a little later.”
Max and Karen retrieved a few things and climbed out of the van, slamming the two doors in thunderous metallic synch.
Max had his sketchbook, while Karen had her cigarettes and something else she hadn’t told Max about. They decided to wait on visiting the Peters Museum, preferring to explore the town to distract themselves, to burn off impending anxiety.
They stopped often for Max to sketch, Karen to smoke.
***
Dwayne gripped the steering wheel, nerves taut.
He had begun to think the whole thing was futile, like so many of his paranormal pursuits. But he had to keep trying. While theirs was hardly the clearest era on record, it was understood, perhaps more anecdotally than he was willing to admit, that the Agra tribe once here had seen things, had heard things, had made things beyond the limits of what mainstream society was willing to accept, let alone explain.
Every human mind was a puzzle piece of God, so went the teaching. A funny mixture of Hinduism and Buddhism and pantheism and who knew what other of the millions of -isms flying around town. Every mind was a muscle of God, capable of God-like powers if flexed, if exercised, if honed, and, especially, if combined. What if we all shared in flexing such capabilities? What if we all shared a singular vision? Touchable, movable manifestation, maybe. Poof! And it’s there.
So went the teaching.
Here, dreams had been known to come true. Here, the imagination was rumored to have flesh.
Memories of Jenny were his thousand passengers as Dwayne rumbled on toward the outskirts of town.
***
The boy led him through the TwiFalls Inn’s main entrance, past the lobby and upstairs toward a stucco archway with tiled designs like those of a Mexican restaurant. The trek stopped at an airy lounge, its large windows like living murals of the town spread below, its furniture lit in the gray sunshine filtering through the glass.
A man in a raggedy t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops sat sipping cola in an armchair. Between his long hair and beard, his head was an auburn shrub.
“Mr. Norman Ritter,” said the boy, beaming, “it is my pleasure to introduce Bennett Wilson.”
Ritter stuck out his hand. Wilson stood, bowed quickly, then sat back down. Ritter’s hand remained unshaken.
“You’re from Los Angeles?” Wilson asked after a mouthful of cola.
“I am,” said Ritter. “My name is Norman Ritter. I’m from Direct Canvas magazine.”
“I know Direct Canvas,” he said. “You guys are growing, aren’t you?”
“Guess you could say that, yeah. We started out pretty local but we’re getting national distribution now.” All right, cut the stupid small talk, he thought. “I was just over at Peters...admiring some of your work—”
“No, you weren’t.”
“Excuse me?”
“Were you really admiring my work?”
“Well...I....”
“Because admiration should be left to students and inferiors. You look skyward. Sometimes it swallows you and you just can’t get over it. Everything just sucks. So you just start over. Clean slate. That’s what I’m doing.”
“I don’t think I follow—”
“Starting over—with art. I’m part of Neo-Naturalism because it’s a whole blank page to start on. The things I learned my first three semesters of art school—out. Any ‘anxiety of influence’—out. My old inhibitions—out. Blank page, man, I’m telling you.”
“Tell me exactly how you see this Neo-Naturalist style. Avant-garde?”
“I suppose one could. But it’s not. Avant-garde was a reaction, a way of breaking from the rut of portraits and landscapes and still lifes. This isn’t a statement or reaction. It just is. It’s its own organism. Part of the cycle. We’ve gone through our summers and falls and winters and are remerging once more into spring.”
“I see.”
“Like Feldman says, you should imagine art as a lost old man who can barely see, crazy with dementia. And we’re the ones to tap on his shoulder, and politely turn him around and in the right direction.”
“Then what is the right direction?”
“I shouldn’t be the one to tell you,” Wilson said. “Wait for Feldman. Although, truth be told, I have no idea what Feldman is gonna talk about tonight. Magicians almost never reveal their secrets.”
“Magician? You consider yourself a magician?”
“A magician is a creator. I consider myself a creator.”
“That brings to mind,” Ritter began, then cleared his throat and started over. “I have to ask...this whole Count thing of Feldman’s. What’s that all about?”
“Count thing?”
“Yeah, how he claims to be some count from three hundred years ago.”
“Oh.” Wilson polished off his cola and crumpled the can. “Yeah, that. No one really knows if that’s true or not. Of course, we all thought it was bull when we first heard about it, but you know....”
Wilson scrambled for the next sentence. Ritter tapped his pencil on the notepad. The boy stood, patient and waiting, with the same beaming bellhop smile.
“That guy knows everything, honestly, he’s a walking and breathing encyclopedia, and he talks like a page of literature. He’s been all over the place, seen so many things...it’s almost hard to believe now that there isn’t something strange about him....”
“He’s not just a world-class traveler?”
“He is. But he’s someone who can get
