Waiting for him outside the shop were two people. Man and a woman. Never failed. No customers for almost three hours, yet step out for only fifteen minutes and they came pouring in.
“Hey, man,” said the guy. Long greasy hair bracketing a twitchy face. “Where you been? Me and my girl have been waiting. You guys are twenty-four hours, right?”
“That’s right,” Max said. “Sorry about that. Was just out for a couple minutes.”
The guy placed his arm around the woman’s shoulders. She was expressionless, looking at Max and her twitchy boyfriend with equal indifference. A department store mannequin in a sad glow of skin. Max tried in vain to ignore the cigarette she was smoking. That smell. He wanted to rip it from her lips, shove it between his own.
“You’ll have to put that out,” Max told her. “Before coming inside.”
The woman never changed her expression, just dropped it and put it out with a black high heel. “You got it, soldier,” she said.
Max opened the door and led the couple in. He resumed his seat at the register as they loitered amongst the contraceptives, stocking up on condoms, then drifted toward the shop’s impressive selection of adult videos. From the radio droned more discussion of Rodney King. The beating. Whether the cops had bludgeoned his rights alongside his bones. Max didn’t want to hear it. The grainy video, glimpsed when his co-worker Tyler had been watching it on TV in the backroom, had been enough for him.
Max turned off the radio and took refuge in his sketchbook. Sucked more of the hot sauce packet. He flipped open to a sketch he’d been working on, a face drawn from a photo in the Baltimore Sun, that of a young woman labeled—as so many were—as missing.
The woman was of late high school or college age. The photo, Max assumed, was from her yearbook: sunny grin illuminating her face, a banner of white teeth hung below a sharp nose and two sparkling eyes. They often used yearbook photos for missing teenagers.
He perused the Sun article. The girl’s name was Karen Eisenlord. No history of problems, none they were disclosing, anyway. Apparently, she’d been quite the model student until the last year of high school, when her mother noticed in her an increasing disinterest “in everything.”
“She didn’t love as much,” the mother was quoted as saying. “Then, she just loved nothing.”
Max didn’t read much more. Normally he didn’t bother reading the articles. He used to, but had stopped once he’d begun selling paintings. Knowing too much about these people tended to taint his vision of them, muddy their clean-slate beginnings on his canvas.
What’s that Ritter guy going to write about?
No. Don’t think about that.
Max kept sketching, fleshing out the Karen-girl’s face from the eyes up. On his drawing pad, she looked to be drowning in white quicksand.
Twitchy man and his stoic girlfriend approached the counter, where he slapped down eight packs of condoms and a cassette entitled A Spankin’ Good Time.
“All set?” Max asked, rising.
“Indeed, my man.”
Max closed his sketchbook, placed it out of sight. The guy studied him as he rang up the purchases. His girlfriend remained silent.
“I seen you before?” the guy said. “You look familiar.”
“I don’t know.” Max whistled softly, drumming his fingers on the register. “That’ll be twenty-two fifty.”
The man fished a wallet from one of his cargo pockets.
“What about the beach?” he asked. “You ever been down at the beach?”
“This beach? Venice Beach?”
“Yeah.”
Max nodded. Since his Rheta days, he’d sold artwork at the coast. Good place for sales, not just for the amount of people but for the mentality of the people.
The register coughed up the receipt. Max tore it and handed it over.
“What is that, bro?” the guy asked, peering toward Max’s chest.
“What?”
“That.”
The guy pointed to the gold cross hanging from Max’s neck.
The guy snorted. “You religious?”
“Not really,” Max said. “I mean, I don’t know, kind of.”
“You sure this the best place to be to please Jesus?”
“I’ve worn it since I was a kid. Kind of a force of habit, I guess. Feels weird without it.”
“All right, bro, whatever floats your boat.”
The man took the cassette, glanced at it, then half-turned back toward Max. Devious look on his face.
“Hey, this was made at The Schoolhouse, right?” he asked. “This movie?”
“Yep,” Max said. “Pretty much all our movies are made there and sent here.”
“It’s around here, isn’t it?”
“Schoolhouse?”
“Yeah.”
The man betrayed a creepy juvenile enthusiasm that turned Max’s stomach.
“It’s in Los Angeles, yes,” Max said. “I couldn’t tell you any more specifics. They don’t particularly want to advertise themselves. Too much.”
“I’ll bet you know where it is, though, huh? C’mon, you can tell me. It’s nothing illegal, right?”
“I’m telling you, I don’t have the specific address. Call them. Their number’s on the cassette.”
“All right, all right.” The couple went on their way, the bell chiming with their exit.
The hours didn’t talk much after that. Thank God. It was why he’d opted for the graveyard shift. Max loved the solitary, quiet opaqueness of night, loved even more seeing the watercolor wash of daylight spill upon the celestial canvas, colors frenzied and experimental. The passionate zest of a young artist with new ideas and new designs for the new hours.
At six in the morning, Max Higgins made the hour-long bus journey home and collapsed onto his mattress, where he remained unconscious for the next four hours. Not long after noon, he crawled from his sleep and flipped open his sketchbook to the drawing of the girl once named Karen Eisenlord.
He had her face, he had her, the way he wanted it.
***
III
Norman Ritter ate at his desk. Lunch had grown far less luxurious in the past two years, whittled down from a wine-complemented hour at a cafe to wolfing crackers over his keyboard. He had to compete, as did Direct Canvas. The magazine had increasing company on the shelf. As a result, they’d taken to hiring a slew
