Categories
Crayon Barn Chris

June 22: Art’s Barn

By Dylan Smith

Spitgum sprawled down the hillside like the shadow of a falling tree. Telescope in their one hand, my walking stick in the other. All along the way they stopped in bright clearings to peer out at the shapes of distant leaves and at the bodies of darting birds, and they asked me a lot of questions. What’s that bird’s name? What tree’s this? My fever blazed and flared in the late morning light, yet I couldn’t believe how clearly I could see. To reveal, to uncover, to unveil, I thought. I put my sunglasses on. Did my best to answer Spitgum’s questions. Dragging the heels of their boots down the hill they had kicked up trail dust and now it settled into hollows of woodbine ivy and wine berry brambles, the air all aswirl through streams of sheer light. That’s when I noticed for the first time how the leaves of certain trees had curled inward, burning a yellowish red. Drought-sick, I thought. Or like a kind of blight. I touched the trunk of a rock oak tree. Identified the call of a wren. Spitgum babbled on and on about nothing. I felt drought-sick too. I could feel the birdsong vibrating in my hair. 

Arriving at a ridge halfway down the hill I noticed what looked like a ribbon of wood-smoke rising up from a field just south of the farmhouse. Art was walking slowly down the freshly mowed slope, a five gallon bucket full of tools in his hand. In the other was a plastic gallon jug of water. Alma’s garden gate gently opened in a gust of wind and I scanned the landscape searching for her, tracing the tangle of wisteria vines along the winding road, the tall swaths of summer flowers leaning over stone paths as they dove down and snaked around the farmhouse and woodshed and the garden. A rain cloud had gathered above the sloping fields. Art took off his hat and stopped to rest at the stump of the lightning struck black locust tree, his body no bigger than my thumbnail. I could picture the tree even though it wasn’t there. Apple. Purple. Fountain. Paint. The rain cloud came apart. Art looked up into the absence where the tree had once provided shade. Saw us at the edge of the wood, waved, and walked on. Spitgum led me down into the field and we met Art standing by his van in the shade of the barn. 

“Didn’t Hippie just mention something about a fire ban?”

Art looked up from the messages on his phone. His phone is a Samsung Galaxy. It looked like a tiny stone tablet in his hand. 

“That’s not a fire, Sunshine. What you see up there is worter.” 

“Water? Up out of what, the well?”

Art set his phone on the dashboard with some dark green gloves, then he opened the van’s side door to unload his bucket of tools. “Just west of that well’s a quick-coupler. Like for hoses. Found this cap shot way out into the field. I guess the pipe must’ve burst once I got the water back on.” Art turned to show us the metal cap. It said Rain Bird on it. Spitgum snickered. “First thought was maybe I’d run something over with my mower. But the situation seems more mysterious than that. Look at all that pressure, Sunshine. Never seen anything like it. Must be something to do with the hydrostatic pressure of the ground. Like at Yellowstone, you ever been to Yellowstone? I hear springs out there bubble up all scalding hot from magma. At least in our case the farm water’s cold. Cool clear worter. Just mysterious is all. A mysterious mist. Looks like we won’t be needing the telescope, Spit.”

“I’m so grateful for the mystery,” they said. 

Spitgum and Chris have the same exact smile. 

Art looked at them and laughed.  

“Anyway, Sunshine — I’ve got to get going in a hurry. Emergency call just came from up on the mountain.”

The van with all its black and blue graffiti shone purple in the barn shade glow. Art slammed the side door shut and handed me the empty bucket. It took me a moment to remember which mansion he meant when he said up on the mountain. Art looked at the sun. Nearly noon. Then he ducked into the dark of the barn. 

Spitgum kicked a rock and followed it out into the road. Picked at a runover snake with their stick. I took my dead phone from out of my pocket. The screen was cracked badly, but I thought it should still work. I plugged it into the charger I leave in Art’s van and noticed a giant book on the passenger seat. It was Lumbersweeney’s copy of Capital Volume 1 by Karl Marx. I had no memory of stealing the book. It still had his highlighter in it. Art emerged again with the jug of fresh well water and a plate of microwaved pizza from the night before. The two inverted phases of the movement which makes up the metamorphosis of a commodity constitute a circuit: commodity-form, shedding off of this form, and a return to it. Grease threatened holes in Art’s paper plate already. Spitgum’s shoulder blades rose up into the light like demon wings, or maybe angel wings, and I felt increasingly sick.

“The wren came back,” Art declared. He handed me the jug of water. I took a long drink, and then I pointed up toward the well with Lumbersweeney’s book. 

“You’re saying that call is more of an emergency than this?”

“Correct. It’s their furnace, Sunshine. Bad oil leak. And there’s nothing to be done here for now. Those fields will happily soak up all the worter. Let me show you the work I have planned for you at Diane’s.”

Spitgum and I followed Art to the north side of the barn where the truck and tractor had been parked in the sun. I looked up the hill through the field toward the well. The fountain spray looked like a kind of endless explosion outside the farmhouse. Art had leaned several shovels against the truck along with two iron prybars for rocks and two posthole diggers. I loaded the tools into the truck while Art stood there eating pizza. Spitgum had already wandered off again and was looking into the back of  my Volvo, their pink skull pressed against Chris’s in the glass. I sighed loudly and wiped the sweat off my face with my shirt. 

“I went to Diane’s this morning and marked out where I want these holes.” Art lowered the tailgate and flattened out a piece of paper. A drawing in red pencil of Diane’s yard and house. “About a half dozen holes. You’ll see the red paint in the grass. I also marked the handles of these shovels here for your height. You’ve got concrete form tubes too. Those are in the barn. For the footings of the deck. Just do your best, Sunshine. There will be rocks.”

 “Yo, Billy—what’s up with this CitiBike back here? You steal this thing or what?”

I locked eyes with Art through my sunglasses. He shrugged as if to say, What the hell’d you want me to do about it? I’d forgotten all about that bike, the city. The Tarot Card Guy named Calder and all the things I’d taken from Chris. 

Daylight glanced off the body of Art’s truck. I went to pick at some rust at the bottom of the tailgate where it joined with the busted light, but stopped myself. Art saw me stop and smiled. The truck was essentially disintegrating, falling apart. Everything was. I almost said so, but I couldn’t bear to repeat the same old endless conversation about chaos and entropy and the truck, its low mileage in spite of the rust, all that salt they spray on the roads in winter and on and on and on and on. My fever deepened like a cave. Entered the bones of my back. I folded Art’s drawing into Lumbersweeney’s book. Art had fixed the busted taillight with some see-through packing tape and red spray paint. I could still see the rock Spitgum kicked into the middle of the road. It was the size of a little dove. 

I ran a cold hand trembling through my long wet red dirty hair and decided it was time to lay down in the grass. 

Art turned over the empty bucket and took a seat above me. 

He chewed on his last bite of pizza. Wiped his beard with a rag. 

“You drank too much again last night.”

“You’re the one whose eyes are all bloodshot,” I said. 

“That’s just the dust. You don’t see me coiled up under no tailgate.”

“I was fine an hour ago, man. That kid did something weird to me.”

Art looked back across the lawn, chewing. 

“I did nothing weird,” Spitgum yelled over my Volvo by the road. “All I did was fix the hater’s eye.”

“I have this fever now, Art. I can’t shake it. The breeze cuts through like November and all the leaves look red. You didn’t even ask if I wanted it fixed,” I yelled at Spitgum. 

“You just feel sick because you’re scared,” Spitgum yelled back. “Bill went and betrayed his only brother and now he’s blaming me for the fact that he’s scared and lost and probably just sick from the guilt. Who would our Billy Willy be if not his brother’s half-brother? That’s a scary thought. Enough to make anybody sick. No — I’d come over and unfix your eye right now if it’s what you really wanted. But I don’t think it is, Bill. Pretty sure that would just hurt.”

“Come out from under there and let me see, Sunshine.” 

Art nudged my busted rib with the toe of his boot until I came out from under the shade of the tailgate, groaning. 

I took my sunglasses off. 

“Jesus Christ — it’s an actual miracle. Barely a scar, Sunshine. Did you see your eye turned blue? The right eye’s still green, but the other one went fully blue.”

Art handed me the jug of water again. There was pizza sauce on his dark green shirt. I thought it looked like a blood mark. I drank the fresh water and poured some on my head and then I struggled to my feet to look at myself in the driver’s side mirror. Art was right. My left eye was blue. I immediately new that I liked it. Somewhere in the distance someone stopped shoving tree branches into a wood chipper. I hadn’t noticed the sound, but now I noticed the silence. Spitgum came up from behind me and I jumped. They had Calder’s wizard hat in one hand and a big chunk of green chalk in the other. 

“And now, for my third trick, I will make a horse appear out of thin air.”

“Third? What the hell was your second trick?” I demanded. 

But Spitgum stepped toward the side of the barn, fit Calder’s hat onto their shaved pink head, and with the green chalk against the red barn they drew another weirder, smaller barn, and inside that barn they drew a large strange green animal and a big green circle with wavy rays of green falling down on the animal like the sun. 

“Horse,” Spitgum said, pointing at the horse and writing out the word. Art laughed and clapped. I was going to ask why the green sun had been drawn inside the barn with the horse — but out of the corner of my new blue eye I noticed a flutter of paper pinned under the windshield wiper of my Volvo. 

I went toward it. 

A letter from Alma. 

Her handwriting wide and open and blue:

Hi — I want to write down these things which feel like the harder things before we see each other again in person… 

Two black lumber trucks boomed passed the barn. The first swerved violently to avoid Spitgum’s rock, its six tires screeching as it burned marks onto the wavy blacktop road — but the other truck floored it right up over the rock and drove on as if it had been nothing. 

I walked out into the road through a whirlpool of dust. 

….hesitancy or space coming from my side is most likely a reflection of where I am in the circle shape, and not a difference in care… 

Unthinkingly I picked up Spitgum’s rock. 

but my heart is still craving time to untangle myself from him so I can rebuild… 

And that’s when I stopped myself. Folded the letter back up. I needed to be alone to read it. I took Spitgum’s rock back toward the barn where their picture had been wiped away already, and in its place Art was drawing a giant green illustration of the light spectrum while lecturing Spitgum with the telescope in his hand. 

The diagram looked like this:

dylan smith crayon barn chris art barn june 22

“Take this light inside Bill’s telescope for instance — we’re talking about just a sliver of what’s actually expanding beyond the visible eye. Infrared light, ultraviolet light. You want to talk about the mystery, Spitgum? Let’s talk dark energy, dark matter. Almost everything in our observable universe is invisible. Not to even mention space time or the speed of light or how with a serious-enough telescope, these scientists have seen all the way back through the fabric of earth time already. Right straight through to the very beginning of. I just heard it on the radio again today — I’m talking James Webb again, Bill — it’s happening as we speak. A telescope that can capture pictures of First Light.”

Spitgum took the telescope back from Art. 

“But that would just be God,” Spitgum said. “You’re saying they took a picture of God?”

“Correct,” Art said. “Widen out far enough and we’re nothing but tiny particles in an unspeakable pattern of light that is everything. Particles of dust. I’ve seen videos of it on my computer.”

From where I stood I could see Chris’s two favorite trees. A pair of sugar maples which always merged into one great giant-looking tree in the window of Alma’s kitchen. 

In that moment I wanted nothing more than to know what Chris was reading. 

“You know Cain killed Abel with a rock,” Spitgum said, pointing at the rock with my telescope. 

“Excuse me?” I said. 

Just then Art’s wren landed in a barren patch of grass at our feet. 

“Wow — there she is,” Art whispered. “Spitgum, look — she comes back every summer to nest on the sill above my saws. How was winter down in Florida little birdy? Bring us back any plastic from the beach?”

“I wonder, Bill — Do you think bodies decompose more slowly during drought years?” 

“What kind of fucking question is that, Spitgum? What, are you threatening me?”

“No, I meant it from a scientific perspective. Seeing as all the worms are probably dried up.”

I experienced a sudden and confusing urge to injure Spitgum physically. 

Fugitive. Mountain. Flower. Fist. 

Instead I set the rock down slowly, picked up Lumbersweeney’s book, and then I started for the farmhouse. 

“Sunshine, wait — I figured you would give Spitgum a ride to the church on your way to Diane’s. My oil leak is in the opposite direction. It’s coming up on noon. ”

“I’m not taking that kid anywhere,” I said. “First of all, Art, I already told you I’m sick. Second of all, just make the kid drive their goddamn self.”

“Ain’t allowed to drive no more, hater. Hence the whole reason why my meeting’s inside a church.”

Barn swallows swooped in and out of the barn, spiraling in the shape of an eight. 

The wren wrangled up a living worm. Looked me in the eye. Flew away. 

“Sorry, Art. But I need to go find Alma.” 

I started for the farmhouse again. 

“Wait — I have a deal for you, Billy Willy. Lend me that CitiBike, just this once, and I’ll get your Volvo running again for free.”

I turned back around. 

“No,” I said. 

“Look, Billy — Art says all your Volvo needs is a starter. That’s kid stuff. Let’s make this happen like a barter. You pay for the part and I’ll be your mechanic. Free labor for free rides on the CitiBike this summer. I’m desperate for a way into town. It’s a win-win-win for all three of us. Just like Marx.”

Spitgum presented their pale hand as if I’d shake it just like that. 

“What do you know about fixing cars?” I asked.

“My best friend back in the desert’s a mechanic. Name’s Ever. I helped him here and there, could easily call if I run into trouble.”

I looked over at the Volvo. It looked like a bottomless pit of black dead moon water. 

“Consider it fixed, Bill. Seriously. Let’s shake on it. Fair and square.”

Art laughed. Shook his head. Shrugged. 

“Deal?”

“Whatever, man. Fine. Deal.” 

After shaking my hand Spitgum said, “Ready to see what my second trick was?”

“No,” I said. 

They reached out toward my face again and before I could get my hands up to defend myself they’d pulled a ring out from behind my ear. “Tadaaaaa,” Spitgum said. They dropped Alma’s engagement ring into my hand and broke off into a run toward the Volvo. Before Art could bend down to pick up his empty bucket they had already pulled out the CitiBike onto the grass, Calder’s wizard hat like two hands clasped into prayer atop their wild pink head. 

“Kid’s a total trip, Art.”

“You got that right. Like the drum major of some kind of fucked up parade.”

“Battery’s still some life in it!” Spitgum shrieked. 

Art had leaned over to look at the cover of Lumbersweeney’s book, his head almost upside-down to see it. It’s a dark painting on the cover. I showed it to him. Three men working in an old iron factory, a kind of spiraling white fire burning at the center of it. 

“The Forge (A Modern Cyclops),” I read. “By Adolph von Menzel.” 

“Looks like they’re working an old rolling mill,” Art said. “I’m guessing for the railroad tracks. See how they don’t have any eye protection? All they did back then was squint. No gloves either. That poor bastard doesn’t even have shoes. I guess some things never change, Sunshine. Reminds me of this old timer I knew back out in—”

“Shouldn’t you be heading up toward that oil leak?”

“Oh, shit. Yes. Thanks.”

I handed Art the water jug. He took a long, slow drink, then sighed. 

“Everything returns to chaos, Sunshine.”

“I know, Art. I know.”

“Tell Alma I’ll be back down tonight to fix her worter.”

“Is anything reaching the house?”

“Nope.”

“Alright.”

After shaking my hand Art patted me on the back in a paternal way that actually made me feel a little better. Turning to go I heard the familiar quiet vroom of the CitiBike taking off toward the south, and turned in time to see Spitgum speed off shrieking for the church with my walking stick. 

I walked up the slope through the field toward Alma’s well. 

A storm had established itself above the mountains to the west, and that fountain beside the well looked like a tower endlessly falling.

Dylan Smith works at Brooklyn Botanic Garden and lives in a shared house with nine people and a Steinway piano the size of a boat. 

Categories
Crayon Barn Chris

The Letter

By Dylan Smith

Read by Ana Ratner 

June 22

Hi — I want to write down these things that feel like the harder things before we see each other in person. They are things I want to be transparent about before anything more happens between us, things I know to be true for myself but that might affect you if we continue down this road together. I think writing them down will help me understand them and clarify them and even though they are somewhat future-oriented they feel like a future I feel really sure about. I’ll write them out as a list even though they are a little looser than that and tie into each other more than a list format would make it seem.


1. The biggest one of the moment
is where I am around heartbreak. I have been seeing heartbreak as this kind of cyclical circle shape and I worry maybe we are on opposite sides of it. One of the most confusing things about Chris being gone is that his hands once felt like extensions of my hands and I don’t understand where they will go now that we’ve broken up. I feel like I am still untangling our bodies. Rationally I understand the absence of his presence but my heart is still craving time to untangle my body from his so that I can rebuild.  New love for me would have to be like faint music. But I still want you to experience all you are experiencing from your side and am writing this just so you know that any hesitancy or space coming from my side is most likely a reflection of where I am in the circle shape and not a difference in care.


2. Future Thing #1: Something that started coming up for me with Chris was realizing an excitement I have around exploring non-traditional relationship dynamics. Something I do know about the future is that when I feel untangled from Chris and have found some of those parts of myself I lost I will want to put romantic dating energy toward exploring these different relationship structures and communities. This is in part why things didn’t work between me and Chris. I think non-monogamy really freaked him out and threatened him and made him crazy controlling and jealous which is probably why he cheated on me and now I just feel like I have a lot of healing and exploring to do in this area of my life and have really no interest in falling into another monogamous relationship for the time being.

3. Future Thing #2: This thing is in the intense future and probably doesn’t need to be discussed or thought about too much, which is that after understanding what I want to incorporate from Future Thing #1 I want to experience the stability and excitement that comes from having a more traditional relationship and family. I am talking about kids. I do feel like because God hates women my timeline for figuring this out is short, which is why it feels worth mentioning. Like if I were 27 instead of 33 this would not be in this letter.


That’s all! You now have all the information that I have. I just wanted to set everything out on the table for both of us because I have no interest in having a hint of sneakiness or dishonesty between us now or ever.

Alma

Dylan Smith works at Brooklyn Botanic Garden and lives in a shared house with nine people and a Steinway piano the size of a boat. 

Categories
Crayon Barn Chris

Spitgum

By Dylan Smith

June 22

Dawn comes late in these woods, the sun slow to rise up over the hill behind my shack. From bed I dreamt about one of the opening passages from the Bible. That bit about dividing the darkness from the light. I woke to a word. The word was Water. Then it was one word followed by another, language like a slow constellation of lightning strikes in my head. I felt graced by the presence of something new and wild in the dark outside my shack. A family of deer in the window, maybe. Or maybe a new word. I rose slowly. A calm flow of light fell through my naked body and I laughed without the language for knowing why. I drank a little water. Built a fire to boil water in the purple morning rocks. Even without any rain, the trees swayed gratefully. I must have still been drunk. I pulled on some jeans. Lit a candle at my desk. And then I realized what had really divided the darkness from the light. It was the word Darkness. The word Light. Coffee brewed in a giant glass jar and some white coals hummed brightly in the gentle summer dark outside. Language had divided me from Alma. Shaped this distance between me and Chris. I went to work on a poem. Words would emerge and I would arrange them. Words with significance in and of themselves. Sculptural words. Words with a visual meaning. I tumbled them onto the paper. Creation. Bicycle. Dancing. Myth. I typed them and I retyped them repeatedly into the typewriter, banging on the keys, the keys making music. Alphabet. Wildfire. Apocalypse. Water. A passageway opened between the poem and my hand and an infinite unity unfolded beyond the body. A structure formed. An archway within. Slowly the windows got more blue. 

When I looked up again I saw seven dark deer hiking down the hill toward the barn. I read the poem back to myself. I hadn’t quite captured it yet. I blew out the candle and dug up Alma’s engagement ring from the sawdust and dirt at the bottom of my pocket. I didn’t know why I had the ring. I hadn’t had it for long — I shouldn’t have taken it. I’d been meaning to return it to that red unfired bowl beside Alma’s bed. I held it up to some blue sky between the trees in my window. Something startled one of the deer out there. Its head lurched up from the low swaying ferns, its dark body rearing as it turned — then it leapt out arching into the golden gray blue green. The others followed in slow motion, their thrumping bodies loping up the hill toward the light, and then I heard a deck board groan outside my shack. Somebody was here. My first thought, of course, was Chris. I swung around as the door drifted open and a silhouetted figure darkened the daylight in the doorway. A wordless shadow. An eclipse. I tried to scream as I stood, working Alma’s ring back into my pocket. The figure’s back was turned to me and it was hooded and tall and draped all in black. I couldn’t scream. Nothing came out. My brother, I thought. My killer. And in that moment I thought about the word nightmare in a new way. Like one of the horsemen, I thought. Mare of the night. I closed my eyes. Wasn’t drunk anymore. In fact I felt very hungover. When I opened them again the shadow was still there, only now it was up on its tippy-toes, peering up into the bird’s nest that had been built between the rafters above my deck. Impossibly tall. Weirdly elongate. The figure looked like a thin opening in the air. 

“Take me down into the field,” I whispered hoarsely, weakly. It wasn’t what I’d meant to say. The figure ignored me. Though I thought I heard it whispering something too. Hissing these strange little bird sounds. 

A pale hand emerged from the blackness, and finally I gathered my courage to cry out:

“Come and get me, Chris! I know what you’re here to do. Let’s go down into the field.”

The figure fell back onto its bootheels and, turning toward me, removed its hood to reveal a head of closely shaved hot-pink hair. The unveiled face was horse-like in its length and yet still sort of moonish – like a sickly androgynous vision of Chris – but it wasn’t him. I thought the kid looked profoundly malnourished, not nearly as plump or stately as Chris, and as they passed over the threshold and into my shack I saw for the first time their eyes: they were pale eyes, burning eyes – they were dazzling violet lavender eyes, and like a strange ghostly doppelganger of my brother, they looked about my shack with a smile. 

“What the hell are you?” 

They looked into my eyes without judgment. 

 “Nothing. Huh? I dunno.”

 “Nothing? You’re not some kind of death vision of Chris?”

“Oh, nope. Nothing like that. Name’s Spitgum. Who’s Chis?”

“Wait — Spitgum?”

“In the flesh, hater. First and last. Don’t hate.”

“Holy shit — I’m so sorry, man. You’re Art’s — wait, I’m sorry — here,” I said, pulling over my fallen chair so they could sit. But as I carried the chair toward Spitgum and the summer light outside my shack they swayed their way straight through me, and toward the poem I’d left lying beside the window. 

 “Don’t be sorry.” They picked up the page and started to read the poem. “What is this? Art told me you’re a poet, but this is just a list of words.”

“It’s a sonnet, man. But look, Spitgum — I’m sorry I yelled at you like that. I thought you were my brother.”

“I understand. You were afraid. It’s okay.”

Spitgum set down the sonnet. My new telescope stood upright on the windowsill beside the poem. They picked it up and looked out the window through it. 

“Woah,” Spitgum said, jerking away from the glass. “Woah — that sun nearly burnt my eye out. Whose telescope was this? A sailor’s?”

I poured myself some coffee and took a seat in the chair. The summer air filled my shack through the open doorway behind me as I took a sip. I set the cup down on a floorboard. The coffee had gone cold. I noticed the imprint of a bent roofing nail in the darkly stained wood. Bird shit on the window screen. I put my face into my hands. Wrangled up a painful breath. 

“Probably a pirate’s,” I said. 

“Woah. You think so? Can you see Art’s barn from up here?”

“Not now. The leaves block pretty much everything. But definitely in winter.”

“You’ll have a hell of a view of it then.”

“A hell of a view of what?”

I opened my eyes. Spitgum had the telescope trained on me now. The lens magnified the lavender color of their eye. Blown up all wonky and brightly wide open. They looked like Chris’s thin sickly twin.

I could barely fucking breathe.

“Spitgum, put that telescope down. You’re freaking me out. Here. You want some coffee?”

I held out the cup.
“Thanks. But this telescope is the only reason why I’m up here.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Art sent me up here to get it.”

“What for?”

“We can’t get the new well pump to work and now it’s stuck down in the hole. Art thinks with your telescope and his flashlight we might be able to see what’s blocking the way, but whenever I look down into it all I see is stars. A whole night sky’s worth of stars. All the constellations look inverted — or reflected — and there’s this slight trembling of the ground. I also see red lights. Red blinking lights.”

I did my best to process this. Spitgum’s fingernails were painted black and they had sky blue earplugs pressed inside their ears. I wasn’t doing very well. 

“Does Art seem alright?”

“Not nearly as bewildered as you. Haven’t seen him since I was a kid though. So how should I know.”

“How did you get up here?”

“Hiked.”

“No — I mean how did you get upstate? I thought you weren’t supposed to be here until the Fourth.”

“Bus. Well, I walked. Walked to the barn from the bus. The fourth of what?”

“What? Of fucking July, man. How did you find the barn?”

“It’s called an iPhone, hater. Google Maps. I saw you holding that wedding ring up to the light.”

“How old are you, man?”

“I don’t have to answer that. Time is fake. Magic is real. I got refried.”

“Refried.” 

“Yeah. I’m out there, Billy Willy. My brain got deep fried twice.”

I could hear the baby phoebes chirping in the hopeless rainless godless heat behind me. 

There was a quivering quality to the air.

I felt like I was going to cry. 

“Please, Spitgum,” I said. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“One time in a blackout I took a megadose of LSD. Got myself stuck in what they call the infinite time space continuum. Fried the holy crap out of my brain. Then a couple weekends later I did it all again. That time I was only brownedout though, so I suppose it was sort of on purpose. All my life. All my life all at once. Part of me’s stuck in that loop. Beginning, middle, end — it’s all happening at the same time for me. Big time. Forever. All at once. Refried.”

“Jesus,” I said. 

Spitgum took the cup from my hand. I looked up at them. They’d been smiling down at me and my busted eye. My vision was still cloudy and throbbing. They really did look a lot like Chris. 

“Spitgum, why are you dressed like that? All in black robes. It’s summer.”

“I burn too easy. But enough of this talk radio bull shit, Bill. I have to be somewhere by noon. So close your eyes.”

“What?” I said. 

“Just do it. Shut the good one first, then slowly the left one.”

What the hell. Why not? I did what they said. 

Spitgum held the coffee cup and telescope in their right hand and, with their left, they slowly reached out toward my eye. 

“Shut the bad eye now.”

“Seriously, man?”

“Shut up. Slowly. Just do it.”

I did. 

“And now, with your eyes closed, Bill, close your eyes…”

I swatted the little freak’s hand away from my face. 

“Fixed,” Spitgum said.

“Oh come on, man. Fixed?” 

I was blinking a lot. It started to feel like something had happened.

 “Yeah. Fixed. Now I need to get back down to the barn. There’s only one meeting at the church today and legally I’m not allowed to miss it. Are you coming?”

“I don’t know. I’m having a hard time accepting the way things are today,” I said.

Spitgum nodded and took a sip of coffee. Slowly though, turning their shaved pink Chris head toward the light, they spit the coffee back up into the cup. 

“Spitgum, man. Are you serious?”

It all splashed out onto the floor and all over my feet. But I didn’t care — I didn’t even flinch. Suddenly I could see. 

“This coffee tastes like piss dirt.” Spitgum wiped the darkness off their chin. “You shouldn’t be drinking this.”

“Look—” I said. 

“No you look, Billy Willy. Spitgum spits the truth. Be grateful. Don’t hate.”

I put my face back down into my hands. Was this what a nervous breakdown looks like? I must be cracking up, I thought. I looked back up at Spitgum. My eye had stopped throbbing completely. The veil over everything had been lifted. Spitgum was honestly the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen. 

 “I think you should come with me,” Spitgum said softly. “Let’s go down into the field, like you said. It’s better than you just sitting up here alone all day doing nothing.”

I looked around my shack. Spitgum was probably right. I thought about Alma. Alma would be down there. 

The power must have come from the palm of Spitgum’s hand. 

“Alright,” I said. I closed my eyes again. “Alright. Just give me a couple more minutes.”

Spitgum walked over to the book of Word Roots lying open on the floor beside my cot. 

“You really don’t have any electricity in here?” 

I didn’t answer. I heard them pick up the book. 

“Give me a word from the list. I mean, from your sonnet.”

“Not now, man. My eye feels better but I think I’m still having a panic attack.”

“I’m a poet of sorts too, you know. We’ll end up being good friends before the end. Now don’t be a hater. Give me your favorite from the list.”

I peeked over at my unfinished poem. 

 “Apocalypse,” I said. 

“Excellent.”

They flopped the book back over toward the A’s. Ran a long bony finger down the page.

Some time passed. Spitgum seemed to be studying the root. I heard them whispering and clicking their tongue, but they never did read anything aloud. 

I started to feel a fever coming on. 

Spitgum tossed the book back onto my cot. I watched them discover the postcard of Saint Francis I’d pinned to the wooden wall. They took six steps back and looked at the painting through my telescope. Light glistened in the basin of creek water I keep on the ground for washing up. Spitgum giggled. Then they returned to just hanging over me in my chair. 

More time passed. I looked up at them again. They really were just standing there. Leaning on my walking stick. Draped all in black. Smiling down like some silent shining saintly idiot. 

“Sometimes it’s like a big shadow on my brain,” Spitgum said. 

“What? Jesus Christ. What is?”

“The truth.” 

Dylan Smith is looking for a job if anyone knows of any jobs in Brooklyn.

Categories
Crayon Barn Chris

More June

By Dylan Smith

June 21

Catalpa flowers fell like thwack outside the lumberyard. Burnt to brown mush on the pavement. Mountain laurels blooming too, starlike pink flowers streaming all along the road into town. While Art paid for the wood I played fetch with the lumberyard dog. A giant black shepherd named Blue. I threw catalpa sticks for her at first, then rocks. Blue loved rocks. I had the birthday card from Chris in my pocket and decided to sit against the catalpa tree to open it. Low dark rolling sky. Blue there beside me panting happy in the grass. We both needed water. All the trees in town did too. On the card was that painting Chris mentioned from his museum, the portrait of Saint Francis by Bellini. We’d talked about going there together to see it. In the painting a barefoot Saint Francis has just stepped out of his cave and into a holy light. It’s a divine light, a metaphysical light, and Saint Francis is in ecstasy because of it. Eyes rolled back into his dirty balding head. Saint Francis has accepted the light, become the light, he is spreading the light around—and now the landscape is illuminated too. There’s a walled off city up above him on a hill and in the valley between this city and Saint Francis there’s a heron, a donkey, some barren trees and a spring. Thwack. A tiny amphora to gather the water. I strained my swollen eye to see it. Behind Saint Francis there’s a poetry desk with a red holy book on it and a skull—and reproduced so small you can barely see it thunk thwack, there were dashes of red paint on his palms. I looked up. Leaves as big as bibles dangled in the heavy air. Thwack. Man, I love that little donkey. Heat lightning in the distance. The mountains looked like paintings of lakes.

I turned the card over. Chris had written this: 

Bill— There’s this sticky note I found the night you helped me move out of Alma’s. It reads: FROM DANGER GROWS WHAT SAVES. I can’t remember where that quote came from. Do you? I don’t even know which one of us wrote it. I’ve been thinking about that night a lot. You talked about getting older. How the edges of things have gotten rigid. Crystallized, you said. Static. I remember the days when your birthday meant it might as well have been mine too, when the borders between us were blurry and weird. I’ve been grieving those days lately. It feels like one of us is dead. I think this sticky note has something to do with it. I wonder which one of us wrote it. —Chris 

Blue pawed at a waterless rock. Looked blissfully out at the mountains. Wisps of smoke rose up from the fallen flowers, dispersed like spirits above the pavement. Hair of the dog would’ve been good about then. Good dog, Blue. Flowers like heaps of dog shit steaming. A shiny new red truck pulled into the lumberyard lot. Parked beside Art’s van. A man jumped down, went into the store. Red neck left his red truck running. I walked over. Looked inside. Another dog sat there, smiling, the AC blasting through his wavy grizzled coat. I opened the truck door just to feel the cool air. Stench of stale beer, carnivorous farts, cigarettes. The seat covers said God Bless America right where you would sit and the radio was on. I turned the voices up. Cattle dropping dead across America for the heat. The dog looked at me kindly, knowingly, trusting, a sage. I hoisted myself up into the driver’s seat. God Bless America. I just wanted to pet the guy’s dog. 

Cell phone in one cup holder. Bottle of water in the other. A firefighter radio had been mounted to the dashboard, and the guy’s cell phone background was of him knelt down beside a giant dead antlered deer. 

First water I’d had all day. I unscrewed the plastic bottle. Took a long drink. 

That’s when Art appeared in the truck windshield, grinning. Sheets of yellow inventory paper in his hand. He pointed at the van. I said goodbye to the dog and jumped down. 

“I know Blue, I know, you’re a horse, I know, go find yourself a rock,” Art said. 

Art’s van is like a mobile barn. Piles of spare plumbing parts, chords and rope and saws, screws everywhere, random scraps of dry wall and wood. The white paint is all tagged up from when Chris and I took it into the city for a job. Now Art rarely drives it to town anymore, only when we need to load it with lumber. The van must be a little longer than the truck. I climbed in. We’d already gone to the hardware store and Alma’s new well pump sat in a box at my feet. A marked light fell in through the spraypainted porthole window. I started to turn through the radio stations. 

“That took forever,” I said. 

“Kid working the register wouldn’t know a hawk from a handsaw.” 

Art dug around behind himself and pulled up a box of Beck’s. 

“I think you just quoted Shakespeare,” I said. 

“No shit? My old foreman used to say that all the time. You sure that’s Shakespeare?”

The red neck came out of the store with a drooping plastic bag. Nodding and waving at Art. 

“Pretty sure it’s from Hamlet,” I said. 

“Wow—I guess that’s what happens when your apprentice is a poet. Quoting Shakespeare is so boojswhaaa, Sunshine. I feel like a weekender.”

“These beers are going to be hot as shit.”

“Hot beer is better than no beer.”

Art sawed the air with his hand to let the red truck back out first. The guy waved again. Gave us a thumb’s up. I thought he looked like a cop. But Art was holding his beer out above the dashboard now, cradling the bottle before him like a skull. 

To Beck’s, or not to Beck’s,” Art yelled, laughing. “That, Sunshine, has always been the question.”

Art drove us up the dirt path toward the lumber. 

“Goddamn,” I said. 

“Yes. ’Tis the Devil’s Temperature.”

Blue was up there howling at us. I poured the rest of the red neck’s water into a bowl for her as Art backed the van into one of the outbuildings. Loading the lumber took a long time. Art talked about wood grain being growth rings. The lighter wood grows in spring, Art said. The darker part through the fall. Tighter rings mean drought years.  Metaphase. Anaphase. Telophase. Less water means less growth. When we finished loading the lumber Art threw a couple rocks up the hill for Blue. Lightning, nearer, split the sky apart—then thunder. Blue galloped back down toward the store. Goodbye, Blue. It was getting pretty late in the day. Nearly night. The lumber was longer than the van by a foot, so Art strapped the back doors to the boards with some rope. 

“What’s this wood even for?” I asked. 

“I’ll buy thee a pitcher of beer if you help me unload it tonight.” 

“Unload it where?”

“Property back up toward the farm. You’ll know it. We’d be going in for pizza and beer at the Country Inn first.”

“Yes, Art,” I said. “God, please, yes.”

Art stomped the fallen flowers off his boots as we entered the Country Inn. Chainsawed black bear sculptures by the staircase. Peonies in glass jars opening softly wild in the lamplight. In the mirror above the mantel Art removed his dirty hat and waved it at the two locals drinking wine by the dining room window. Lily pads on the dark pond water. Purple yellow mountain flowers muted in the murky light. Beyond the pond I could see Diane’s house tucked up into the darkness between some trees, the faintest red fluorescent smear of her electric car, and the local women waved back warmly as Art and I maneuvered our way around empty tables toward the heavenly lavender light of the bar. My comfort forever in that lavender light, the red and blue neon entwining. Even if it was Chris’s drug dealing theater friend Lumbersweeney behind the wooden doors, a book between his knees, highlighting something in the high and silent holy. I put my sunglasses on. Conrad was hunched in his usual corner spot against the wall, staring another knot into the bartop. Behind him a beer sign burned with wild horses and there was an empty stage framed by red curtains beyond the red booths—and now kicking through the kitchen doors to our left entered Donna with a tray of pasta and salad and fish. 

“Eyes up, Sweeney,” Donna hollered down the bar. “Anywhere you want, fellas.”

Lumbersweeney dropped the highlighter into his book and stood, smiling. 

“It smells like a chainsaw in here,” Art said. 

“My Hippy’s trying to fix a broken toilet,” said Donna, smiling too, and then she disappeared back behind us with the food.

Lumbersweeney placed a cold Beck’s on a coaster for Art as he put back on his hat. 

“A Sloop for you Sweet William, our poet, my long lost friend?”

“Thanks Sweeney,” I said. 

Lumbersweeney brought down a pint glass from above and poured me the needed golden nectar. Lean arms smeared dark with old sailor tattoos, his mustache black as two raven feathers. Poor old Conrad had just noticed we were there and, frowning, he was struggling to get a surgical mask onto his face. The sounds coming from his mouth made me think of a reptile’s eyes wetly blinking. 

“What book you got there, Sweeney?” Art said. 

With one hand Lumbersweeney set down my pint and with the other he lifted up from below a brand-new-looking copy of Capital Volume 1 by Karl Marx. 

“Jesus Christ,” Art said. 

“Either of you ever read it?”

“I tried to once in college,” I said. 

“Well let me tell you, Bill—the dude’s critique is clicking for me on every level. I know our Anarchy Book Club went to hell as soon as Chris left but I’ve stuck it out through the first three chapters and now I’m finally seeing the shape of it. Funny you two should walk in on such a night—I literally just got off the phone about it with Chris.”

“You talked to Chris?”

“Not an hour ago, Bill—you should know he’s been trying to get ahold of you. Sounds like you two had a hell of a night in the city. I’m sorry I missed it. Chris seemed awfully concerned about where things stand with you considering what with all the drinking and drugging and the sneaking away with all of Chris’s stuff and such. Classic fucking Bill, I said. But you should call him up, settle the score—you can use my phone if you need it. Anyway, I convinced him to come back up here for the party we’re throwing on the Fourth.”

“Wait, Sweeney, what? Come back up where?”

Art chuckled. 

“Up here, Ol’ Bill. To the upstate country. Of course taking into consideration the unfortunate location of your shack, I mean seeing as it’s on your almost-sister’s land and all well I offered Chris my futon down the road—and then of course Hippy being Hippy, he offered Chris a room upstairs for the night, and that was that. 

My eye throbbed badly with all the blood that had rushed to my head. I looked down at my hands. They were vibrating like the prongs of a tuning fork. 

“I’d like a shot of something,” I said. 

Lumbersweeney poured out three shots of whiskey and we took them. Conrad didn’t get one. He made more noises with his mouth. 

Lumbersweeney went on:

“Art—I’ve actually been looking to run into you. Day after the party here I’m hoping to throw another Hangover Wake for myself—Hippy agreed to help refurbish the old Coffin, but I’ll be in need of your and Bill’s tractorial assistance beforehand what with all the digging and lifting and of course with the ceremonious lowering day of and such. Have you time for that?”

“You got it, Sweeney,” Art said. 

I chased the shot by drinking slowly and intently my entire pint of Sloop. Then I lifted my sunglasses up into my hair. 

“Christ, Bill—what the hell happened to that eye?”

But barreling out from behind Conrad’s back came Hippy Quick careening out of the bathrooms with his bare summer arms outstretched and that tremendous dirty wizard’s beard yelling, “Saint Art! Speak of the Devil himself! The very man! Hallelujah!”

“Heya Hip,” Art said. 

Hippy rounded the bar like a bear and swung an arm around Art’s neck in a kind of giant violent loving hug. Sawdust and pitch in his beard, the sleeves ripped off his ruined flannel shirt. That’s when I noticed the pipe wrench in his hand. In the mirror behind the bar Hippy set down the pipe wrench and reaching over Art’s beer he took the bones of my hands so tiny into his, and he shook them. “Does me damn good to see you two drinking beer in here tonight,” Hippy said. Glasses goggled the sea glass green of his eyes. I looked away. Saw myself. My nose had turned bright red from the whiskey. If all of Art is supposed to be a mirror held up to Nature, and Nature a mirror to the Divine, then why do I always look so fucked up and broken?

Blood, I thought. Bloody blood blood, blood. 

I lifted up my empty glass. Hippy really did smell like a chainsaw. 

“Get these men more drinks, Sweeney, and some pizzas—you fellas want some pizza?”

“Have a whiskey with us Hip,” Art said. 

“No, no.”

Lumbersweeney poured a few out. 

“Come on Hip,” Art said. 

“Unfortunately it’s been deemed Dry Weekdays around here, Art. Donna’s orders, unfortunately.”

“Trouble again?”

“Trouble? Me? No, look—I’m a grown man. A grown man must consent to being in trouble, Art. I’ve consented to no such thing. Trouble, no—nothing like that. It’s more like. Well. Yes. Yes, I suppose you could say I’m in some kind of trouble—but anyway, look—it’s no matter fellas. You came in on a perfect night. Sweeney here was just giving Ol’ Conrad and myself a lecture on what was it again, Sweeney? Hegel’s goddamn what?”

“Dialectic,” Sweeney said. 

“Jesus Christ,” I said. 

“Just give them the quick of it, Sweeney—get a load of this, Art, it’s fascinating stuff—Sweeney, start with what you were saying about The Absolute.”

“I need another goddamn drink,” Conrad said. 

I took my shot. Sweeney took his too. 

“I’m trying to remember when the last funeral for you was, Sweeney,” Art said. 

“Going on three years now, Art. That was the Halloween Wake. A lifetime ago, it seems to me.”

And all at once I remembered Chris at the bottom of Alma’s stairs smiling up at me in the morning three years ago hungover. Our first time visiting Alma’s farm upstate from the city—The Inn’s infamous Happy Birthday Art But It’s Also Halloween Party. All I remember from that night was Alma dressed up like the Holy Ghost, her two eye holes cut from a clean white sheet and on her head a nearly invisible wire crown holding aloft a golden glow stick halo, the way she lifted the sheet up to scream I’M THE HOLY GHOST at the locals with her perfect black eye paint streaming in the hot packed bar, and then it was the next morning waking up hungover and alone in Alma’s attic and the film guy who she’d eventually leave for Chris was there, I think his name was Sebastian or something, he was down there making breakfast for Alma and failing to build a fire and Chris was at the bottom of the stairs smiling up at me in his Evel Knievel cape saying Bill—we’re late for Lumbersweeney’s Burial—should we go?—and then it was the fresh wet mountain smell through the window of Alma’s car and a blur of dark blue fog through the gentle drift of morning—and I remembered the way Lumbersweeney had prepared people ad naseum the night before handing out pamphlets and explaining in all seriousness that his Coffin had been built to Divinely Inspired Dimensions, taking into consideration of course Celestial Mechanics through which the Coffin would by way of its decomposition Transfigure, transcending of course the limits of linear time and undergoing as it were a kind of Interstellar Odyssey through which it would gather its collection of Galactic Artifacts and bring back up from Below new forms of Interdimensional Residue, Lumbersweeney said—and it was explained at length how Lumbersweeney could not himself be in the Coffin per se but would as it were remain Above in order to attend the Wake and eulogize himself and in this way it would be Art—it was supposed to be some kind of Art—and I remembered the way Art himself was already working the tractor when Chris and I arrived, dumping cascades of beautiful black dirt into Lumbersweeney’s grave in that field above the pond with a small crowd of hungover mourners huddled over the hole in dark clothes and Hippy Quick was there in bright robes holding out a lantern which hung from his walking stick and Lumbersweeney with his hands raised on high in the not quite rain quoting Quod set supers set sick quod infers and looking wild, totally wild. 

“I already made my plans for the Fourth,” I said. 

Art laughed. Took his shot. Wiped his mouth.

“Plans, Sunshine? What plans.”

“You suppose there’ll be a fire ban by then?” Hippy said. 

Lumbersweeney opened another Beck’s for Art.

“Absolutely. At this rate? I’m surprised there’s not one in place already, Hip.”

Conrad mumbled something jumbled to himself in the corner. Blue mask down around his chin. Legend has it that Conrad’s son died leaving The Country in a decade ago drunk. Last seen leaving with no headlights on. A deer. A tree. Dead son dead and gone. 

Lumbersweeney poured me another Sloop.

“Conrad needs another too,” I said. 

“I heard him, Bill. Will you free up by morning for my Burial at least?”

“Sorry, Sweeney, but these plans of mine extend out into the unforeseeable morning. You can send Chris my best though. I’m sure he’ll enjoy your grave little play.”

Sweeney slammed my beer onto the bar. 

“Is there a problem between me and you, Bill?”

“Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis,” Hippy said. 

The pipe wrench was there on the bar beside his hand. 

“Easy does it, Sunshine,” Art said. 

I was staring at myself in the mirror. 

“Won’t somebody please just get me a goddamn drink,” Conrad said. 

But like an angel on my shoulder in the mirror behind the bar Donna entered again with an empty tray.  

“Hippy, darling—run up and get that smart thermostat from off my desk.” 

“Gentlemen,” Hippy said—the saloon doors singing shut behind him. 

“Beers are on me if you can fix whatever’s wrong with our toilet, Art. The beautiful bastard’s been in there all afternoon. What might take him another day could probably be done in an Artful moment from you.”

“You got it, Donna,” Art said. 

Lumbersweeney had subtly sidestepped to the other side of the taps and was lighting a tray of tea candles. I put my sunglasses on. Art entered the bathroom with Hippy’s pipe wrench and the beer. 

“Alma called today, Bill. She wants to buy my kiln.”

I was unable to process that information. Donna came around the bar to wipe some glasses dry, but then she was there before me with her hands on her waist. Looking at me. She picked a piece of hay off my shirt. 

“Take those goddamn sunglasses off and let me see,” Donna said. 

“Oh come on, Donna,” I said. 

“Let me see.”

She leaned in close to look. 

“Have you had it looked at yet?”

“Just by you and the person who glued it.”

“Can you see out of it fine?”

“Of course I can, Donna. It just itches is all. And throbs a little. Like there’s dust in it.”

“Looks more to me like a plank,” Sweeney said. 

My stool fell loudly behind me as I stood. 

“Oh fuck you Lumbersweeney,” I said. “You’re nothing but a sidekick, man—a fucking clown. I’ve seen Chris leave behind a hundred of you. You’re an unpainted fucking clown.”

“Outside,” Donna said. 

“What, Donna—you’re kicking me out?”

Donna had taken a few steps back against the mirror. She was pointing at the door. 

“Yes,” Donna said. “Out. Go. Now.”

A half hour later Art came out with Hippy’s walking stick and some pizza. I’d made a big fire in the pit by the pond and was drinking a Beck’s from Art’s van. He set the pizza box on a rock by the fire. Handed me the stick. “Hippy wants you to have it for your limp.” Art sat beside me on the log. I handed him a beer. We looked into the fire for a long time together. Lights came on at Diane’s. Somewhere nearby Hippy’s dog had been buried. A starless night. The fire kept changing.

“Where are we unloading that lumber, Art?”

“Your therapist’s house.” 

“I knew it,” I said. 

“Is that going to be a problem?”

“No. It’s alright. Maybe I’ll make an appointment.”

“That’s probably a good idea.” Art opened the beer with his knife. “She wants a new deck.”

“That’s good,” I said. 

“Lumbersweeney thinks you’ve cracked up.”

“Who cares,” I said. “Everything I said I could have said about myself. I wasn’t even really talking to him.” 

Art laughed. Shook his head. 

“I think I’m in love with Alma, man,” I said. 

Art looked out into the night. I could hear Diane’s son screaming, playing, laughing. 

“I don’t get what you’re so hung up about,” Art said. “That’s supposed to be a good thing, love.”

“I’m afraid Chris will never talk to me again. That’s best case scenario. Worst case scenario is—”

“They say when you bury a feeling you bury it alive, Sunshine. The same is true for love. You can’t decide who you love.”

“Sure you can,” I said. 

“Well then do it already. Make your decision. Fear is stupid. You need to live your life.”

Art led us back up the hill through the dark. I liked the feel of Hippy’s walking stick in my hand. At Diane’s we unloaded the lumber loudly, board after board, thunk thunk thunk. Lights were strung from tree to tree and every window in the house was lit. But nobody came out. I tried to eat a slice of pizza but got the red sauce everywhere. 

Art drove us back to the barn. 

There were lights on in the farmhouse too. 

“Wow,” I said. “Alma’s back.”

The van engine clicked as it cooled. 

My Volvo looked like a coffin of itself in the dark.

“What’s this,” Art said. 

I had tossed the birthday card onto Art’s yellow lumberyard papers. 

“From Chris. It’s Saint Francis receiving the stigmata.” 

Art leaned in closer to look, frowning, then he sank back into the driver’s seat. 

“A stigmata is when—”

“No, no—I know about that,” Art said. “I thought you said stomata.”

Art got out of the van. I did too. The sky had cleared. The stars were out. It never did rain. 

Alma’s body brightened the frame as she moved to and fro through her kitchen. 

“You going over there tonight?” Art asked. “She still doesn’t have any water.”

“I’m too drunk,” I said. 

Something hit hard against the hood of Art’s van with a thwack. We both jumped in the dark. 

“It’s flowers,” I said. “Alma’s catalpa must be blooming too.” 

“I know. I keep thinking I stepped in dog shit whenever I cross the road.” 

I started for the hill with the help of Hippy’s walking stick. 

“One thing before you hike up,” Art said. “My brother’s kid. Down in Arizona. Got into a little trouble.”

I had stopped in the middle of the street. 

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” I said. 

“I’m taking the kid in for the summer. Teaching ‘em how to work.”

“When?”

“Probably be here for the Fourth.”

“Jesus Christ. Okay. What’s his name?”

“Pretty strange kid,” Art said. “Name changes a lot. Right now they go by Spitgum.”

“Spitgum.”

“That’s right.”

“Alright, Art.”

“Nighty night, Sunshine.”

“Alright, Art. Goodnight.”

Dylan Smith is looking for a job if anyone knows of any jobs in Brooklyn.

Categories
Crayon Barn Chris

June

By Dylan Smith

For the last three days I’ve been alone up here in my shack. Drying out, coming down, recovering. It’s been hell since I took the last of Chris’s pills but I’m through the worst of it at least. No more mirages on the edges of imagined things. No more violent voices in the night—no visions. Just a gentle breeze through the midnight leaves, a soft gust swirling through the eye of the storm of my life. My shack is like a hole in the side of this mountain. I’m holed up inside it like a vagabond, a fugitive, a thief. Nothing left but bandit rations now. Shitty coffee, cans of beans, blahblahblah—I’m hungry. Dawn fires built to boil water brought up in buckets from the muddy creek and this mountain wind moves through me tonight—I am no man, a ghost. My outhouse hole is almost full. Subterranean snowcapped mountain. Winter’s ashes and sawdust sprinkled down on decades upon decades of human shit. I wonder if Alma ever took one in there. God, I hope so. Then a part of her would be near. Art certainly has—that I know for sure. Still no sign of him yet. Nightmare from last night: Art mowing lawns in denim short-shorts and a wizard hat. Chris coming up behind him on horseback in the dark. Come and see. The barn down below both black and brightly burning. 

No rain. No moon. No beer. 

Still no word from Alma either.

June 16

Today I woke early and limped up to the Glasshouse to find some food. A freezer in the basement full of bags of fruit and fish. I let the fish thaw bare on the bluestone poolside while I floated in the salty blue water. From the pool ledge I looked out over familiar trailers and trees and in through the windows of giant empty mansions, and through my telescope I spotted Alma’s greenhouse, the creek, her kitchen. My Volvo looked like a grave newly dug in the grass beside Art’s barn, the dusty dead black of it reflecting no light. Let the dead bury the dead. No light. I thought about my poems as I floated. My narrowing path. My secrets. My vision’s been blurry in the left eye still, but back in the city Chris’s new girlfriend, Sarah, she super-glued the cut. I never should have buzzed up to that apartment. I had holes in my socks, no boots, so I had to—it was a necessary mistake. Sarah noticed the cut above my eye right away. Asked a lot of questions, reasonable ones I had no honest answers to. She looked me up and down a lot. Said she thought I was crying blood. The place was incredible though. Windows overlooking the park. Sarah told me the apartment had once been her grandpa’s. Apparently her grandpa was dead. I’d taken the last of Chris’s pills on the elevator up and was stealing a lot of paranoid glances out the windows: the cathedral, my Volvo, the torn up city street. I think it freaked Sarah out. The cathedral bells rang out at random with the rise and fall of the playground down below. I have to be sure I’m not getting towed, I told her. Sarah had bright eyes. Paint covered pajama bottoms. Green crocs. I thought I recognized her from somewhere, I still don’t know where from yet. I asked if I could take a shower. Sarah hesitated. I offered up more lies and she laughed and led me into her room. This is where I work, she said. Left me alone with her paintings for a while. They were big. I loved them. Each seemed to be throwing a birthday party for itself. I found a bag of Chris’s stuff in the closet. Some clean underwear and socks, Chris’s boots. The disco ball from our first apartment in the city, and this new journal. I stuffed it all into my duffle bag. Got cleaned up. That’s when Sarah knocked. She had a tube of super glue for the cut. Okay, I said. She sat me on a stool in front of my favorite painting. It had an umbrella in it, an actual umbrella. I asked about the painting. Up top and to the left she had flattened the black umbrella and underneath that was a row of upside-down yellow inventory paper. A perfectly balanced composition. Powerful work. Purple glitter paint swirled and smeared and Sarah pointed to a splatter of shining confetti letters. That’s the alphabet, she said. And some numbers. Right. And this white stuff on the umbrella here is Glass Balloons. I looked up at her. Glass Balloons? Yeah, Sarah said. She was looking at the picture. I just find this stuff, you know. The umbrella I found in Chinatown, the yellow paper I think came from a friend. I looked closer. Glass Balloons! The white stuff seemed to be what glued the umbrella down over blurry streaks of dayglo blue and orange buildings and glitter and the picture looked like a curb in the city to me now—like a birthday party had blown up downtown and this was the perfect happy rubble of it, the colors streaming in a kind of easy crayon rain, and the graph paper even formed a grid. 

Sarah had pink and blue paint on her wrist. Even her smell was a little familiar. First she cleaned the cut with alcohol. Q-tips and gauze were involved. My hair still dripped wet from the shower and I asked how she knew how to do this. I grew up with a lot of brothers, she said. Sarah squeezed the cut. Applied the glue. She did it all gently though, gently. You’re going to have a gnarly scar, she said. That’s okay. I don’t care. Your hands smell just like flowers. 

The Glasshouse refracted the daylight into rainbows and spangled them across the pool water at dusk. I washed the bird shit and blood from my jeans, then flung the legs over a tree branch to dry them. I could have ironed my clothes with a rock. That’s how hot it’s been. Birds soared up into the sun-shot air and dove back down in whirling black circles through the heat. I made a fire. Ate the fish. The sun went down behind the smoke drift and mountains. I wonder where the wind comes from?

I’ve been avoiding the inevitable, the unfolding calamity of my life. 

Alma. The city. Everything I’ve taken from Chris. 

It’s midnight now. Starlight shining through the pines. 

I can still feel the sunshine in my jeans. Glass Balloons.

Every time a tree creaks I think it’s Chris hiking up to kill me.

June 17

This morning I found Art standing over a hole in one of the barren hay fields behind Alma’s garden. His hands were on his hips, his hat pulled down low against the sun. We waved as I approached but he didn’t smile at me or nod or speak. I watched him notice my new boots, my limp. He made a show of shaking his head. I stood beside him and put my hands on my hips too, kind of mocking him, trying to get a laugh. It didn’t work. I looked down into the hole. The hole looked deep. I didn’t know what was going on. Art knelt down and pulled up a tangle of red and blue wire from within it. The back of his sky blue shirt had been bleached from the sun and a length of rope led down deep into the narrow dark. The rope was attached to a back plastic pipe. The hole was as wide as the middle of a sunflower and it was lined with thick black metal pipe and the wind sounded like water rushing down through the trees. 

Art looked up. 

“It’s like the Endless Hole.”

“What?”

“You never heard of that guy? This guy from back in the day. On the radio. He’d always call in about having an Endless Hole in his yard.”

“Never heard of that.”

“Figures.”

Art stood. A red car came struggling around the corner. An old lady from up the road named Ruth. Art and I had done some work on her cottage. We waved as she went slowly by. 

I took off my sunglasses. Art noticed the cut above my eye. 

I hadn’t been to work in over a week. 

Finally Art smiled. 

“Somebody sure kicked your ass.” 

“Yeah.”

“How’d you get ahold of new boots?”

“Chris gave me these,” I said. “Hand-me-down boots.”

Art laughed. Shook his head, scratched his beard. He laughed and laughed. 

“What? I’m serious.”

“Sure you are, Sunshine.”

“No, seriously. What? They’re steel-toed. He gave me these as a gift.”

“Guy kicks your ass and gives you the boots to remember him by? You can’t bullshit me, Sunshine. I know Chris didn’t give you any free boots.”

I looked down at a burn hole in the right tongue of my boot. From when Chris left them leaning against the wood stove to dry. That was just last winter. Stepped straight through some ice as we walked across the creek. 

The air all around us felt huge and hot and still. My rib still hurts whenever I laugh or cry or scream, so I tried to hold everything in. A bird cried out. I didn’t know what kind it was. I took shallow breaths. Another rush of wind came down from high up on the mountain and it flattened out along the tops of trees and banged open the gate to Alma’s garden. All around us the leaves turned inside out, sparkled a thousand shades of Beck’s. Art’s favorite beer. The gate slapped shut—then it flew open again. Now the air was still. 

“Is she home?”

“Is who home?”

“Alma, man.”

“No—nobody’s home. Not anywhere. It’s been a ghost town.”

“Have you heard from her at all?”

“Heard from who—from Alma? Why would I?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her either.”

“Says the guy who’s never had his phone charged for as long as I’ve known him alive. You expecting her to write you a letter?”

“I don’t know.”

“You see that’s your problem, Sunshine. You’re even worse than I was. At first I thought she might be up there with you. Like a honeymoon kind of thing. But then I saw your sorry broken tracks limping up the trail alone.”

“You could have come up and checked on me at least. I was pretty sick.”

“Yeah, well. Seemed natural enough to me. You and that lonely poet life. Even lone wolves come down from the hills when they’re hungry.”

It was hard work pulling up the well pump. A hundred feet of water line and rope. The water line was slick and dark with earth and mud and it got lighter and more clay-colored the farther it went down. I didn’t have any gloves and my newly cleaned jeans got immediately muddy. Art walked the line out across the drought clenched field, holding it above his head as he went, and I struggled to pull the last of it up by the rope. The pump was fancier than I imagined it would be. Stainless steel cylinder. Somehow pretty shiny still. Art came back through the field, heat waves shimmering above the swaying burnt hay. More like something you’d shoot into space, I said. But the connections were all rusted and shitty above the pump, and I noticed the rope had frayed. Art examined the wiring. Said the thing had burnt itself out. 

Art pointed at the date imprinted on the metal. 

“I was your age when this went down.”

His shirt was soaked with sweat. 

I looked closer. The date said 1991.

“That’s the year I was born,” I said. 

Another car came around the corner quick—“Cop,” I said, standing. 

Art looked up. No sirens or lights. The sheriff just waved as he hauled ass past the barn. Art waved back. I did not. The sheriff disappeared into the trees. 

Art cut the well pump wire with his knife. 

I knelt down again. 

“You make everything we do look suspicious,” Art said.

“Weren’t you about my age when you found work up here?” 

“Something like that.”

“Then wouldn’t you have been here when this well pump was put in?”

“It’s possible,” Art said. He looked up at the cop dust being blown away by the wind, then back down into the hole, frowning. “Yes—I guess anything’s possible. Maybe I helped the last guy do it. I don’t know—probably not. Long time now. Don’t really remember either way.”

Back up at the barn Art offered me a beer. I told him I’d been dry since my cathedral experience in the city. Something strange must have happened in there. Spiritual maybe. Art just shrugged. Alma’s well pump dead in his hands. Like a caveman carrying some kind of futuristic bone. He ducked into the dark of the barn. 

I walked over to where my Volvo was parked in the grass. The Citibike was in there still. That was not good. My stomach rolled. I saw my duffle bag there too and remembered hiding Calder’s wizard hat under the seat. That was also not good. Shame. Fear. Guilt. I sat in a shady spot where the grass meets the gravel. 

The grass was dry from no rain and my arms felt tired from the work. It felt good to be tired in that way again. It must have been right around noon, the shadows of the trees all coiled up and black. Art lunged back out of the barn with a beer and took a seat on a stone slab by my car. He had mowed all around the car and the grass underneath it looked greener than the rest. Tall and healthy to the bumper. Art looked down at the grass now too. The bottle in his hand was green and dewy and it dripped in a wonderful way. Beck’s. A beer did sound pretty good. I didn’t know what day it was. Not that it mattered. Art opened the bottle with his knife. 

“I need you to move this car off my grass.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“Why not.”

“It’s broken.”

“Broken how.”

“I don’t know. It broke down. I had to get it towed up here.”

“You had this vehicle toward up here from New York City?”

“Yeah.”

“Sunshine—”

“Somebody down there would have charged me money. I figured we could fix it up here for cheap.”

“Cheap? You make no sense, Sunshine. You’re out of your goddamn mind.”

“Chris pays for whatever it’s called—roadside assistance. I happened to have his card. Free tows for the first ninety-something miles. The lady charged me an extra eighty bucks for the Citibike. But it was still pretty cheap.”

“And did Chris hand-you-down that bicycle too?”

“Look. The tow truck lady tried to jump it. The radio comes on but it wouldn’t start. Nothing happened.”

“Okay.”

“Will you help me fix it?”

Art shook his head and laughed. My jeans were heavy with sweat and muddy water. I looked up the hill. The air was so hot that it rippled, and Alma’s farmhouse flapped like a flag in the heat. 

I heard another screech from that unfamiliar bird. I couldn’t figure out what it was.

“Next time you’d better taper off instead of cold turkey,” Art said. “It’s supposed to be safer that way. They say cold turkey like that could kill you.”

“Okay. But will you help me fix the car? I’m out of water.”

“Fine, Sunshine. A lack of power. I’ll try to take a look at it tomorrow.”

The bird call came from high up in the woods. I felt relief. I wanted to ask Art what kind of bird it was, but suddenly a silence had settled in all around us. The air felt still like the surface of calm water. I didn’t want to disrupt it. I closed my eyes. Some time passed. Art went back and forth to the barn for Beck’s but I stayed still, and soon there was a kind of opening, and a door, and beyond that everything was wonderful—the moment I entered upon was everywhere, it was perfect—something had separated me from my senses and now there was no space and no time and no language (so no me) and it was all spiraling up and up and down into one formless edgeless endless red door way deep down within me opening, opening in me where the light and dark had never been divided. 

“This stone has a sparkle to it,” Art said. 

His words sounded distant, lovely, alien, strange.

I opened my eyes. Art had three empty bottles beside him on the rock and his hat was hanging from his knee. We’d left Alma’s water line out in the field and it unfurled down below like a hundred foot snake. I took a deep breath. My rib didn’t hurt so bad anymore. The shadows of the trees had lengthened back out. I wondered how much time had gone by. 

“Wow—Sunshine, look up—it’s the hawk.”

The hawk looked dark against the blue sky soaring, hanging as high as the well went deep.

“You ever read any Homer, Old Man?” 

“Hey, easy. I’m not that old.”

“ that hawk is an omen,” I said. “It’s a drifter, no mission—floating just for us. How wonderful.”

“Speak for yourself, Sunshine. You sound like a dirty hippie. We’ve got missions—go look inside that barn. We’ve got plenty of missions.” 

Art finished his Beck’s. The hawk’s shadow spun counter-clockwise over the roof of the barn and a blurry truck passed by blackly. Still not Alma. Art got up to get another. 

“What the hell,” I said. “I’ll take one.” 

Art came back with four and handed me his knife.

“Plenty of missions, Sunshine—too many missions. The only thing we lacked today was a little bit of, whatever—whatever it is—wait, what was it?”

The hawk cried out—it screeched. 

I laughed. Beck’s. Pop-pop. The logo is a key. 

I always figured I knew what a hawk sounded like. 

I guess I was always wrong. 

Dylan Smith is looking for a job if anyone knows of any jobs in Brooklyn.

Categories
Crayon Barn Chris

VI

By Dylan Smith

When I woke again my left eye wouldn’t open and through the one that would I saw the spire of a cathedral through the sunroof of my car. It hung over me at an arced angle curving wobbly in the glass, its pitch a wave of vertigo and the whirling made me sick. The Arch. The Tarot Guy. The Square. My left knee ached badly and my face ached all around my left eye where something new and terrible had happened. A moon-colored cloud up high on the wind and water, I needed water. I tried to open both eyes again slowly this time and with intent but the left eye stayed caked shut and I winced because my busted rib. That piece of shit Chris. The spire was a towering swirl of sandstone and lime and it reeled, it lurched. I tried to stare it still by studying its stained glass dormers and the dark spaces between its salt-streaked shutters stained green from bird shit and rain—but on it spun, and I felt sick. Sunday bells soon to toll through the morning. I brought my hand up to my left eye and felt the swelling there and a cut and the dried blood below my brow from I still didn’t know what yet. Bereft. Barefoot. Bewildered. A train screeched somewhere down far below and tore along like underground thunder and a toy-sized plane full of real-sized people inched through the far away blue high above. I’d left the key to my Volvo in the ignition overnight and when I went to turn it, nothing. Dead. The Sunday bells started. A whirlpool of wounded pigeons. I opened the car door and vomited onto the street. 

I wondered whether Chris would come looking for me before work and figured he probably would. His security shift started at nine. A stack of orange parking ticket paper fluttered beyond the bird shit covered glass and I cursed Chris and the spire bells tolled eight times after a long ominous song. I found an old water bottle on the floor and drank from it like something dead come alive again. My head ached. I needed to hurry. My duffle bag lay upturned on the passenger seat beside me and I dumped it out, emptied my pockets, took an inventory of what remained. I found eighty five dollars and my credit card and the bottle of Chris’s pills and one pair of socks. No driver’s license. Half of a red crayon. Art’s flask was missing. I found the telescope Chris gave me and the red unopened card and Sarah’s address scrawled on a scrap piece of napkin in red pen. I’d hidden my cell phone in the duffle bag but the screen had cracked bad and it was dead, and I found my passport in the glove box along with a pair of dark sunglasses and a toothbrush and a packet of blue gum. Thank God. I brushed my teeth while chewing on the gum and I put on the socks. I poured a little water on my head and pulled down the rear view mirror to take a first look at my eye—but that’s when I noticed the CitiBike behind me. The back seats had been pushed down and the bike lay back there like the body of a broken dead blue horse. Vaguely the features of the film guy’s face formed in a violent blurry fluorescent vision. I opened the car door again to spit out the whiskey colored red, and I had Calder’s wizard hat in my lap. His ring of mysterious keys. I had no time for wonder. I poured the last bit of water onto my dirty work shirt and brought it up to the dried blood below my eye. Objects in the mirror may appear closer than they appear. What? I hid Calder’s hat underneath my seat. I felt very paranoid. 

With my duffle bag packed I limped barefoot and carefully toward the deli on the corner. I needed to quiet the hammering in my head. My left leg felt like a peg below my knee and now I’d probably need an eye patch. Shipwrecked. Seasick. Stuck. Sarah’s street crossed an avenue which had been torn up to be repaved and the glass doors to the deli were covered in a haze of construction dust. You could barely see inside. Across the street was a playground wherein children screamed constant bloody murder and parents stood around staring into cell phones and ignoring their leashed barking captive dogs—but inside the deli things were dirty and silent and perfect. An old woman behind the register gestured toward laminated pictures of Mexican breakfast specials and then down the long narrow linoleum tile toward the newspaper stands and the beer. I could have kissed her. A blue countertop with barstools against the window where another customer looked out drinking coffee. Curled on a stack of dusty boxes slept a deeply purring cat. I brought a tall cold yellow can of beer to the counter along with a coconut water and The Sunday Times to hide behind. The old deli owner smiled at me and blinked. She had understanding eyes. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. I pointed at the picture of Mexican eggs and coffee. The shop owner wrote down the price and put my beer in a paper bag and I took a stool hidden from the unpaved avenue by a pillar. I opened the beer and took a long important drink. The world arranged itself accordingly. Edges softened. The hammering stopped. Through the window dust I could see the cathedral and my car and according to Chris’s note, Sarah’s apartment was in the building right above me. The best place to hide is beneath your enemy’s bed. Or better yet—a church. I took another drink. The customer next to me stirred his coffee and looked me over. I watched him pull down on his mustache and notice my shoeless feet. He looked back out at my Volvo and nodded. I could have reached out and taken his hand. He smelled like old broken cowboy leather. 

“Pay mind to your vehicle out there, son.”

I didn’t think I could talk correctly yet so I didn’t. 

“They’ll tow ‘er today if you don’t wake up and move it.” 

“Tow,” I said. My tongue felt strange against my teeth. “Tow.”

“That’s right. See you’re the only one out on the street? Think they won’t fuck you on a Sunday boy, but they will. Warning signs nailed up to all the trees. Like wanted posters in some old western.”

The shop owner rang a little bell to announce my eggs and the cat woke up and did a fluorescent downward dog. I came back to the window with a tray of steaming eggs and green peppers and then I limped to the fridge for another beer to go with my coffee. 

When I sat down again the old man had risen to leave. 

“What year is she?”

“What year is who?”

“The station wagon, son.”

“Oh, man—I mean. Shit.”

The guy pulled on his mustache again and looked out. A starry eyed look. He seemed from another time. 

“I could really use a jump,” I told him. 

“Can’t help you there, son. Been out here visiting my daughter. My grandson. Newborn just yesterday.”

“Right,” I said. 

“You know, son. I recognize something in you.”

“In me?”

“You ever heard it said: from Danger grows what Saves?”

I thought about that for a while. 

“I’ve got some friends in that church there. Good ones. Passengers of the same wrecked vessel as you. Why not make your way over with me after breakfast. Get you cleaned up. Find you that jump.”

Trees alive with birds and leaves waved like painted hands in the window. 

Under the deli door, a low wind hissing Chrisssss.  

Eventually I just didn’t respond. 

“Well. Easy does it, son. You know where to find me. I’ll pray you get the help you need.”

The man put his hand on my shoulder and left. I watched him cross the street and walk into the basement of the cathedral. I took a couple bites of the eggs, covered my head with the front page of the paper, and when I woke again the cathedral bells clanged out their thunderous song. Somebody had drawn a little heart deep in the dust on the window by my beer and my eye bled brand new blood. The vision in it looked all fucked up and cloudy. Smeared. I counted ten tolls of the bell and the eggs and coffee were cold. I wolfed down the eggs and drank up the coffee and I stuffed the beer into my bag with the Times. People poured out of the cathedral and I felt alright knowing Chris was at work. I stood outside the Volvo holding jumper cables. Like the soft roar of some far off surf, those kids on the corner howled from within the wind and my puke stunk. Nobody stopped. I needed to get cleaned up. The bathroom was in the basement of the cathedral. I checked under the stall for cowboy boots and locked the door. My eye looked bad. Black hole in my visions. Like I’d stared too deep into the sun. The lid flapped like the belly of a gutted fish and I marveled at the miracle of running water. Gently I cleaned the cut and ran wet fingers through my hair and then I snuck back up through the barn-like dark to a space in the back where I wouldn’t be spotted without shoes. I admired the cathedral’s hammer beam roof and the pillars of the nave were ancient hand carved wood. People were still leaving. I needed a shower and some shoes and I needed to get back on the road before Chris got off of work. The panes of a rose shaped window sparkled like a kaleidoscope of crayon-colored pixels and others showed scenes from the Bible. Like giant stained glass figures from the Tarot, I thought—and then I remembered the door in the west side of the Arch. Calder sitting there crosslegged and shirtless, showing me his keys. Oh God. I remembered entering the Arch through that little door and a staircase spiraled up into the dark brick dirt-floored room where Calder kept his things and slept. Squatted. A long wooden table full of broken cups and dried flowers, candelabras, skulls and swords and mirrors. In the corner a loud cage of doves and a cot and a bottle of whiskey shining red. I must’ve eaten mushrooms or something. Leaky skylights. A snake. I remembered the way Calder fanned his cards before he tabled them. It felt like a bad dark dream. The Devil. Lovers. The Tower. Strength. The sun blasted through the stained glass walls of the cathedral and I felt alive again. I opened a Bible. Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. What a word, I thought. Firmament. I read a page or two from Judges. Delilah and the lion. Soon the bells tolled once for ten thirty and Chris had my poems, my secrets, that snake, but so what. I’d rewrite them. Rewrite them better than ever, I thought, for I knew them all by heart—and I knew that somewhere deep down within my life’s unholy mountain of fears and wounds and lies I’d kept alive a little cave of light, a little candle on an altar luminous and alive with my heartbeat and breath still burning fire for Alma, Alma, Alma. I closed the Book. Put it back in the pew. The cathedral was empty now. Silently I opened my beer, took a drink, and I wondered what it would take for me to change.

Dylan Smith is looking for a job if anyone knows of any jobs in Brooklyn.

Categories
Crayon Barn Chris

V

By Dylan Smith

And so stumbling out through that bookstore drunk I had only the vaguest idea of where I might have left my bag. The grounds of the city’s biggest cemetery rose up on a hill across the street, with its gas lamps lit and its tall stone graves and these ancient trees edged in light as the path doubled back down along the hill, and I could see all the CitiBike baskets empty in a line. No bag. The bells above the bookstore door jingled as it shut and I worked to manifest my bag’s place inside my head. To envision it shimmering there behind our empty bottles in the Square—but I was also immediately suspicious of that motherfucker Chris.

Every bender we’d ever endured together had ended in me losing something like this. Whether it be my keys or shoes or pants or my bag, it never mattered—it always drove Chris crazy. Yet there he was, so perfectly serene. Stopping in the poetry section, even. So cooly detached. I watched him through the glass door with increasing suspicion. Flipping through some tiny pink book. Taking a wallet out of his tote bag to pay. I may not have known exactly how yet, but I knew. Chris was up to something—hiding something—and that something had something to do with my bag.

My Chris Book.

My journal. My secrets.

I walked across the street.

Chris came out of the bookstore smiling. Bells. I stood beneath a streetlamp in the lowly lit night. The cemetery’s perimeter wall was behind me and Chris had his tote bag open. He placed the new pink book inside it with the wallet, then his hand came out with a small point and shoot camera with a flash.

“Stay just like that,” Chris said.

He stood there behind the parked cars. A bright flash of light with a click.

Upstate it was pianos, I thought. Chris’s constant music. Now pictures. He squeezed between two parked cars coming closer. I rolled my eyes. Chris took another picture.

Click.

The flash was blindingly bright.

Click.

“That’s great, Bill. You really look like shit. That one’s going to be great.”

Click.

That horrible high-pitched sound after each flash.

Click.

I hit the camera out of his hand and went for his bag, thinking I’d run with whatever money was still inside it with his books, but I couldn’t see much because of the flash and before I could get my hands up to protect myself Chris slapped my face hard and hit me in the chest and then I was on my back with his palm on my head against the stone. Chris got right up on top of my body and now he was on me with his knee down hard against my upper rib, the rib right above my heart. I heard the rib go pop and I lost my air to the weight of him. I spit up at him and growled and told him to Fuck off man stop it come on man stop, and I was wheezing. Chris stared down at me cold and calculated and quiet. The sidewalk felt cold too and as hard as the frozen path up to my shack in winter. A moment’s pause while Chris figured out what to do, his palm in my face. If there’d been a rock nearby I think he might’ve done it. He shushed me. I wriggled around. Then his phone rang.

Hallelujah. Haha. Church bells. I laughed into the palm of his hand.

Chris got up and spit into the roots of a sycamore tree. Took out his phone. The little bells inside there rang and rang and he took in a full breath. It hurt me to laugh, but I was laughing.

“Sarah—Wow—Hey, man. What’s up?”

Chris stepped over me. Walked up the street.

I had hit the back of my head pretty hard and so I just lay there some more trying to think. Up high in the sycamore tree I saw a blue tarp caught in the tree’s lamplit canopy of leaves. I tried to concentrate but I couldn’t. I gently elbowed myself back up against the stone wall of the cemetery and dragged my way back down toward the tree. Still wheezing. The roots of the tree had really wrecked the bluestone slabs of the sidewalk and the slabs rose and fell in the shadows like a prank. Art once told me how the city’s sidewalks had all come from bluestone quarries in the mountains around Alma’s farm. A hundred and thirty years ago. Each slab of bluestone seemed so heavy, I thought. The incredible slow strength of that sycamore tree and its roots. I wondered how many people it took to lift the slab I lay on. The blue tarp must have blown up into the tree in winter, I thought. Some poor bastard’s blue shelter. I could hear Chris speaking lowly into his phone up the street. Some poor bastard’s blue tarp house. The maple looking leaves of the sycamore tree had grown and greened all around the blue tarp but I pictured the sycamore bare of its leaves in winter. I closed my eyes. The night was hot and still and the air was wet and heavy. I could barely breathe. I imagined the tarp flapping up there in the wind in winter and the thin trembling branches. It was a cold blue wind and the tarp flapped and flapped up high and the flapping was the sound of my fate, my defeat.

Chris came back down the street nodding and listening to whatever Sarah said. He stood over me looking crazy. All wild-eyed and high. He walked over to the camera and picked it up. Looked it over. Put it back in his bag.  In the sky I saw isolated stars, distant and apart. Not a single constellation. We were down there way below the graves. I hadn’t noticed before, but Chris was wearing these fancy reddish brown leather shoes.

“Right,” Chis said. “I know—Yeah he’s right here. Right. We’re having a blast. Bill’s little birthday party. I know. Yeah. Right. Exactly.”

That’s when I finally got up. My breath had come back a bit but not fully because of the rib and I started to walk up the hill toward I didn’t even know where. The subway, maybe. The Square. Chris followed a little ways down the hill until he hung up and then I heard him running up the hill behind me in those shoes.

I stopped and turned and pointed at him.

“Get away from me you crazy piece of shit.”

“Oh come on, man. You’re who came after me. We overreacted. We were high. Let me buy you a drink.”

I kept on walking. Chris followed, but not too close. The shoes made him sound like a horse trotting up along on the stone. I wheezed a little as I laughed and walked and I was still pretty high and then a beer started to sound pretty good. The bar was a dive we’d never been to together. A place with ripped red leather booths and a jukebox and mirrors. Chris ordered two cans of cheap beer with shots and then he told me, “Put out your hand.” Four blue pills fell into it. I kept my hand out. “Fine,” he said, and then it was five pills and then six and I said, “Hand me that pink book.”

The bathroom was as dark as a cave and the walls were thick with language. I smashed two pills on the hardcover book and there were layers and layers of stickers on the wall, stickers thick as stalactites, and a big green tag above the toilet looked like this:

visual of the green tag above the toilet. Crayon Barn Chris Chapter V by Dylan Smith

Which forced me back into contact with my dilemma. Which was that Alma had made me whole. Before her I hadn’t even known I wasn’t. I’d fallen in love with her wildly, madly, and I’d lied about it all to Chris. I cut two blue lines on the tiny pink book. Love poems by like Neruda or somebody. Alma with that film guy and all my own poems gone missing. My Chris Book. My secrets. I snorted up the lines off that tiny pink book and when I came back out Chris had scribbled an address for me on a napkin. “Sarah’s,” Chris said. I could barely read it. The ink was pinkish red and his camera and wallet were there on the bar and his tote bag hung below him from a hook.

I stared at Chris’s scar.

“You’re who came after me.”

“I know, Chris. Go fuck yourself.”

“I have to be at work in the morning.”

“Okay.”

“You left it in the Square right?”

“That’s what I thought too. But by now somebody probably took it.”

“Where’s your car key?”

“My pocket.’

“What about a phone?”

“It’s been dead a long time in the duffle bag.”

“Well I’ll be asleep by the time you get back. Just ring the buzzer until I wake up. We’re meeting up with Sarah tomorrow, man. Uptown at this address when I get off from work—it’s where your Volvo’s parked. I figured you can drive it back upstate from there. Just please come back to my place tonight to shower before you meet her, Bill. I’ll have the couch made up for you. Some clean clothes set out. You need to try to get some sleep.”

“Okay.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No. Just my rib.”

“What about your head?”

“That’s fine.”

“Alright.”

“Okay.”

We took the shots without a cheers and I handed Chris the book and then he wobbled his way back past the jukebox toward the bathroom. The bar music blared yellow white red and the bar itself felt hot and wet and red. Chris had taken his tote bag with him but he left the bottle of pills on the bar with his wallet and camera like an idiot. I folded Sarah’s address and stuffed it into my pocket. I thought about the green tag in the bathroom again and about the blue tarp flapping in the wind—and then I thought about the first load of firewood I ever helped Art deliver to Alma’s farm. A big blue truck bed full of red and white oak. I helped Art unload it into a pile in the autumn grass and we covered the pile with a big blue tarp. I heard Art tell Chris we should stack it all in the woodshed, but nobody ever did. Every morning all winter long I’d wake up at dawn and walk out hungover through the frozen field toward the small stable barn where Chris once kept his chickens. Four roosters and fifty spent hens from some guy Chris found on Craigslist—I had to feed them as one of my chores. Usually I’d find only two or three eggs and on the hike back up I’d fill the blue wheelbarrow with wood from under the tarp and wheel it all up toward Alma’s farmhouse to make a fire. I’d put on a pot of coffee and sit at the kitchen table alone by the window writing poems. Alma would wake up. Come out with a cute wave and make herself some tea. We’d sit together by the fire in the bright silence and she’d be reading. One morning I watched her paint the wood pile. A small abstract kind of thing on a piece of scrap cardboard I’d ripped up for kindling. Four or five woody red wiggles and a blue line up above like a wave of water for the tarp. I loved that picture. I hung it up in the attic above my cot. But that winter one of Chris’s heat lamps got knocked into the hay because of the wind and when I walked out into the field at dawn the stable barn was burning. Hundred year old chestnut. Ancient hand hewn beams. All fifty of Chris’s chickens in it, and nothing to be done. The frost had thawed in a ring around the fire and the flames rose up with the sun like a silent red hand and I just stood there by the wood pile watching the morning burn.

At the very last second I decided I should leave. Fuck Chris. I grabbed the bottle of pills and Chris’s camera and the wallet and I ran out into the heat—I ran and ran and ran into the night and I didn’t want the bastard to catch me so I held my busted rib and I ignored my throbbing head and I was in love and I ran and ran and then I was underground, and at the far end of the platform hidden under the stairs I waited for the train in that long white yellow blinding miserable airless summer heat.

A little time passed.

A lot of shallow breaths.

The subway tile pulsed with my throbbing head and glistened. Red rust trickled between the tracks in a little creek and everywhere the trash and stink and the rats. This kid came down the stairs in a paper birthday hat tugging at a big bouquet of rainbowy balloons. I stepped out from under the stairs and yelled, “It’s my birthday too,” but I must have scared the kid’s mom because they rushed away and down to the other end of the station.

That’s when I saw this guy standing alone and staring up into the light. He looked as if he’d just seen something horrific, or maybe holy. The guy was draped in white robes which time had darkened with grime and in that underground air he held out a Dunk’n Donuts cup as if it were filling with the light. I took out Chris’s wallet. Almost a hundred bucks. I removed two twenties, balled them up as I approached, and I dropped them into the guy’s holy cup. Unmoved. I put Chris’s driver’s license in the cup and one of his credit cards in there too. The guy’s dry lips quivered. He muttered something under his breath—not a thank you, but more of like an underground prayer. A manifestation of everything dirty and divine. The fluorescent light filled him as it flickered but the man remained true. Unmoved. Then the train came and I got on it and it was like the gates of hell clanged shut behind me. The gates opened and shut and they opened again and opened and opened and opened again and it was like that all the way until the bridge—and then soaring through the air again clanging and clanging and there was the city and the dark black water and the night again, and the Statue of Liberty like some holy golden light out there in her money-colored robes and the city pulsed and sparked and each window replaced a star in the night, and then I was up in the Square and I was searching for my bag alone in the dark and broken.

It wasn’t there. Simple as that. I checked under the chiseled rock bench and kicked around at the empty bottles Chris and I had left behind—but nothing. I checked trash cans and inside tree holes. No bag. No bag anywhere. By now it was getting late and the Square had emptied except for the people who lived in there under tarps and a dozen or so drunk college kids stumbled around being idiots. Anybody could’ve taken it. I couldn’t even find the moon. I walked around the fountain looking for the guy who’d been painted to look like a statue but I didn’t see him. I sat back down on my bench to think and listened to the sound of the fountain. I had a little moonshine left, but not much. I drank it down. A drunk piano player played sloppy drunk songs in the bottom left corner of the Square but I could barely hear him over the water. A newspaper blew by like tumbleweed. Moved by some mysterious gust in the strangeness. There was the red chalk again. CURRENT. I chewed on one of Chris’s pills.

And that’s when I saw the Tarot Guy sitting there crosslegged under the Arch. He’d set up a squat foldable table at knee height. He sat there shirtless and he was staring at me in this tall gray wizard’s hat. I waved, but he didn’t move. He really freaked me out. We eyed each other. The wizard hat was the size of a traffic cone on his tiny bald super-tan head but there was a lot of calm air around him as I approached. He seemed to be looking out at me from within a deep meditation.

A hand drawn sign taped to the table read: FORTUNE TELLER. CALDER. TAROT. TEN DOLLARS.

I waved again. Nothing.

“Hey man—you know that statue guy? That guy painted silver and gold who stands over there like a statue?”

“The man you speak of has a name. It is Gary. Gary is a good friend of mine. So yes, I have seen him, but he is gone.”

“Well have you seen a duffle bag? I’m looking for my duffle bag. I left it over there under the bench.”

“Oh. Ha. Yes. It’s you. Of course. I’ve been waiting.”

Calder pulled my duffle bag out from underneath his tiny table.

Holy shit. I dropped to my knees and held my busted rib. Magic. My broken heart. I opened the bag right there on the spot and dumped its contents onto Calder’s tiny shitty table. I tried to say thank you but I could barely breath. There were the socks and the underwear and the long red birthday box Chris had given me and the card. All of it was there in a pile on the table. I dug through the bag some more and found some loose flattened papers and some trash and a dirty broken toothbrush and two pens. I pushed through the two pairs of socks and the underwear on the table, and I pushed everything off the table and onto the bluestone slab and looked through it again. I ripped opened the red box. Inside it was a telescope. A golden telescope with a leather strap like the kind a sailor would use to find land. I picked up the box and dropped it again and I opened the bag again and all its side pockets and I held it upside-down over the table and I shook it out. Saw dust fell out over everything and some small rocks and a gum wrapper and a couple bottle caps. I picked up the long red box again and I threw it off to the side at the Arch.

Calder watched closely.

“I’m fucked,” I told him.

“Yes.”

My Chris Book. My journal.

Calder nodded calmly. Knowingly.

I couldn’t figure out how exactly yet—but I knew it too.

Chris had stolen my secrets.

Dylan Smith is looking for a job if anyone knows of any jobs in Brooklyn.

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 2

Leaky Boat

By Dylan Smith

They put a perfect

Cathedral in my phone 

an endless Barn

gets Spiritual inside 

Wordy Mountain 

Brand New Bible

for every War 

and all its Trees

like an Ark 

Take that apocalypse

out of your pocket  

Google the Word 

Tevah—haha

why not, Put an-

other Endless War

in it, Put all of 

Moby Dick 

in it and

every Name 

of every Tree 

and all that Math 

My phone is a

leak in the Alphabet 

Proof of Space 

I loved your name 

absorbing Light

and Water and

this is the Way

we’ll be told 

our Mothers

are dead

Dylan Smith is serializing a novella-length fiction thing called Crayon Barn Chris and plants flowers for money in Brooklyn, NY.

Categories
Crayon Barn Chris

IV

By Dylan Smith

If only on a cellular or like nuclear level I could embody my love for Alma in every moment through all of time while making love with her literally everywhere forever, I thought, maybe then in my body I might feel alright—but that’s when I came barreling out of a blackout, and I was sitting on a barstool next to Chris. Uh-oh, I thought. Haha. Holy shit. The length of the old oak bartop trembled with the energy of a newly felled tree and in my body, spirit, in my mind, I felt like a finger painting. Or like a piece of birthday cake mushed in barn dirt and glitter, with like alphabet confetti and crayons for candles burning purple pink black and red—like something smoldering, deformed, smeared. 

I’m here to get my car back, I thought. My mission, my purpose. To confess my love for Alma to Chris. 

A new beer shone in Chris’s hands, in those carefully washed immaculate hands, but I could tell from his eyes that we must have taken drugs. My glass, of course, was empty. Smudged. I had a sneaky look around. Last thing I remember I was upstate, taping Art’s taillight back together with Diane—so what happened? Art’s moonshine, maybe. Definitely. I felt Art’s flask in my paint-stained pocket. Now it felt like morning. Chris’s uppers were what woke me up. Those famous little blue ones. Thank God, I thought. I worshiped them. I found the only window in the bar, a basement window way high up with the sunlight shining through. Long, golden rays of it. The bar was dark wood. Pressed suits. It was happy hour. Golden hour. Somewhere in Manhattan—and it was evening. I felt like a hollow bone, the air-conditioned air like faint music moving through me. Humming, humming—what happened? Chris was waiting on something. The molecules around his head whirled in the mirror behind the bar. Keys to my Volvo on the bartop. My cash and credit card too. But I sensed a serious tension. The bartender came back around. A halo lit his loose silk shirt. I ordered another beer. Chris had our father’s eyes, eyes like boiling water. I looked down at the duffle bag at my feet. Hallelujah, I whispered. My notebook was in there. My Chris poems—my secrets. I felt his eyes on the side of my neck. Chris’s eyes were wild, trembling, whirlpooling, blue. 

“I’m pretty high right now,” I said. 

“No shit, man. I’m daunted too. But you were right in the middle of something.”

“Right. I was. I remember.”

“Mid-story, man. Like mid-sentence. Something about Art’s glasses.”

“Right. Sorry—I spaced out. Must have lost my trail of thought.”

At this Chris laughed. Or sort of scoffed. “We’ve got a thing called trains now, mountain man. You’ve been in the woods too long.”

I wasn’t getting it. 

“It’s train of thought, man. Not trail.”

The bartender came back with my beer. An angel lit by a loop of light. My brain throbbed loud blood, nervous fear-pumped blood. Chris’s pills had scraped at my eyes, my skull, it’s sockets. I clasped my hands in a pious way. Closed my eyes. Pictured Alma’s. 

Honey-colored moons. Depths of golden light. 

The bartender placed a candle between me and Chris. The yellow flame wiggled. Soon it would be dark, I thought. The city would come alive in the dark. Maybe I could too. Alma had completed the shape of my dreams, my future, my face. I looked at my reflection in the mirror. Oh God. I’d walked this city like a thin miracle once, I thought. Poems and paintings and people. Fearless. Alive. A part. What happened? I looked dislocated, incomplete, depleted. I had to come clean to Chris. I knew it was the right thing to do. I downed three quarters of my beer in one go, reaching for an ancient effect—but it was gone. Nothing worked. I was destined for disastrous, disgusting things. Dirty. Disconnected. I longed to go back home to my cave, my shack. To return to the beginning of time. To the center, the candle—Alma’s eyes. The cave. 

“Art’s glasses, man,” Chris said. 

“Okay, right. Sorry. I remember. It was probably just that I wore them. Wore Art’s glasses as a joke. The joke being that I’ve started to sort of absorb him. That I’m training to become the newer better, younger Art.”

“You’re not bored of it yet. You still have fun following him around.”

Chris asked questions as if they were statements. It annoyed me. 

“Definitely not bored, Chris. No.”

“What are you working on then, man. Tell me something specific.”

“Well we’re mowing lawns right now, mostly. But a lot of trees fell this spring from the rain. We handled that. Now at night we work on Alma’s doors. I mean those farmhouse doors—we took them up to the barn where the beer is. To patch the rot holes. Remember? Same red paint as the barn. Huge rot holes in the wood from the rain.”

Chris sipped his beer. The tiniest little sip.

“That’s when I started wearing Art’s glasses,” I said. “Drunk at night in the barn. But Art’s glasses are destroyed, is the point. Totally chipped up, chipped thin. Just like Alma’s doors. I bet that’s what I meant to say. Art told me it’s been a decade since he got new lenses. Ten years of carpentry work and trees, and sometimes metal shavings shoot up off the saws and chip away at his lenses. Little by little bit. Point is, it’s a miracle the old man can see.”

A long pause. Another tiny sip of his beer. Long pauses were common with Chris. Alma called them pregnant pauses. They annoyed me. If he’d only just take a bigger sip of his beer. I picked up the key to my car. Held it to the light. It reminded me of Chris’s scar—I looked for it in the mirror behind the bar. Barely noticeable in the candlelight, but it was there. The width of a key. Right in the center of his head. Chris’s mother, April, she’d left him up on the kitchen counter, playing with a ring of keys. In one of those plastic car seat things. Bottle of vodka under the sink. Chris rocked himself off the counter with the keys—and thwack. White tile. Blue face. Blood red blood. This was how our father told it. Chris was too young to remember. The key almost got to his brain, our father said. Swollen eyes. Fractured skull. That’s when my mom came into the picture. Quick divorce—quicker marriage—quickest me, etc. 

Later April died in a desert motel alone. Alcohol and pills. Chris had just turned ten. 

I wrestled a half-breath up out of my chest, and put the key to my car in my pocket. The bar had grown more crowded, and the window had started to darken. The bar felt like an airplane taking off, the way it was shaking and shaking—but now it lifted. Chris cleared his long thin throat. I felt the question come before he formed it. Here it comes, I thought. Hold on, Bill. Strap in. Here it comes. 

I felt like a little bird. 

“So have you spent any time with Alma?”

Chris’s eyes became two black circles in the mirror behind the bar. I looked away, down, and deep into the flame of that candle. A darkness opened in the center of it, and my life unfurled in there for a while. Black thoughts like a road tumbled out. My fugitive love for Alma. I had every intention of telling Chris the truth. Of coming clean. The road opened onto my future, I thought. Nothing in my way. Nothing to hide—I rode it right up onto a bright horizon. The sky inside me sparkled, it was my future. To tell the truth. And at the end of the truth was my freedom. 

“No,” I lied. “No—I mean, I see her up there in the garden a lot. You know, alone. But no. We don’t really ever spend that much time together.”

I finished the rest of my beer. Haha. My future folded right back up. 

“I saw her yesterday,” Chris said.

“Wait—what?” My reaction was not nearly calm enough. “Hold on—when? Saw her like how?”

Chris looked at me for a long time. 

Like a really, really long time. 

All Chris said was, “Yesterday, man. In Brooklyn.”

“But saw her like how?”

“Do you remember that guy she was seeing before me?”

“Not really,” I said. “The film guy?”

“Right. We went to his documentary together. The one about the old fisherman living alone on that island. Alone in that church. You remember. That film guy.”

“But what about him?”

“I saw Alma walk into a movie with him.”

“Where, though—are you sure?”

“Just a glimpse. But yeah, man. It was her.”

I felt sick. My vision shook. I thought about going to the bathroom, but I didn’t trust myself to stand up right. I was blowing it. Chris could see straight through me. Betrayal. Calamity. Death and doom and all that. I could still change my mind, I thought. There was still time, like right now—I still had time to surrender. To the moment. To confess my betrayal—no, my love—my love for Alma was pure. Just come clean, Bill. Right now. Come on, man. You have nothing to hide. Just do it. Come clean, Bill, this is your last chance—but then we were up on the street. 

Bury me, I thought. God, bury me directly underground. 

Above the bar Chris turned to face me, and I flinched. The last bit of daylight beamed off a tower, and cast him in this strange green secondary light. Chris laughed. He pulled something out of his tote bag, then the light was gone. A regular summer night. We stood there staring at each other for a while. Two stones in a stream of people. A current. The two of us totally still. 

I thought Chris would be holding a knife or gun or like some kind of crowbar or something, but it was a gift. A long box wrapped in red paper. Red bow. Red card. Chris pulled me in for a hug.

“Happy Birthday, Bill. Thank you for everything, man.”

My birthday. Haha. Holy shit. Chris was right. Somehow I’d forgotten all about it. 

“Just put this box straight into your duffle bag, man. Open it later. Let’s try and have ourselves a night.”

Chris made me buy us both CitiBikes, two of those crazy gray electric ones with the engines that go quietly vroom through the city like cars. I stuffed the red box into my duffle bag. Noticed my poems and notebook were still there, my secrets, then I nestled my bag into the bike’s plastic basket. Chris led us downtown. Second Avenue. Toward the fountain. Young rich drunk couples leapt into the street like deer and whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, Chris and I curved and swerved all around them. We stopped in front of a deli for beer. Chris said he’d watch my bike. I picked up two six packs, paid with cash, then came back out. A dark blue night in New York. Back on the bikes. Back on the street. Chris howled up at the half-moon, a liquid neon rainbow blur. I howled too—and we were laughing. 

We walked our bikes across the square, beers clinking around in my basket. There was the arch. The fountain. I hadn’t ever noticed these trees before. Chris passed out more pills. Beyond the fountain was a catalpa tree the same size and shape as Diane’s. Its leaves looked blue and fleshy and wet. We sat on a bench made of chiseled rock. Washed the pills down with beer and more beer. Chris told me about the job he’d landed at a museum uptown. An old professor of his was the director. Chris got paid to guard the art. 

“And I’m seeing somebody new,” Chris said. 

I passed him Art’s flask. Opened him another beer. 

“I’m happy to hear that, Chris. Really. You have no idea.”

“Sarah’s her name, man. She’s uptown. Near the museum. This great big building a couple blocks from the park. You just wait, man. You’ll love her.”

The half-moon hung high above the fountain. A kid in a star-spangled cape wrote CURRENT on the ground in red chalk, and I started to feel a little better. The pills, the moonshine, the beer. Sarah. Suddenly my secret felt totally manageable. Maybe Chris had already moved on. My innocent love for Alma—maybe he wouldn’t even care. Chris talked about at the museum. How he planned to work his way up to a more powerful position. To be in charge of the parties, Chris said. Fundraisers. Events. Money to acquire more art. CURRENT. What a wonderful word! The fountain unfolded like a flower. Electricity. Water. The moment. I tried hard not to think of the film guy. I pushed the film guy violently out of my mind. I was really starting to feel much better. People sat around in the fountain spray, spun circles around it laughing, singing, dancing. The square had its own rhythm. Its own pulse, like a body, I thought. Everybody growing up said Chris had Vision. Always looking up ahead. Radiating light. Making new things happen. I followed him around wherever he went. Hung back behind him, watching. My teachers said I liked to reflect. A man in a suit painted silver and gold sat on a bench beside us, smoking. No longer a sculpture of himself, I thought. He looked so loose and breezy. Chris told me about his favorite painting at the museum. This portrait of St. Francis by Bellini. “I’ll take you back uptown tomorrow to see it,” Chris said. “We can meet Sarah up there too—the Volvo’s parked out in front of her apartment.”

Chris followed my eyes. The statue guy smiled. Exhaled smoke. Chris waved. “Poor dude’s covered in bird shit,” Chris said. I touched my own bird shit stain, the one from my blue bird upstate. My blessing, I thought. My gift. I was glad hadn’t come clean to Chris. I felt wave after wave of drug-fueled relief. Moonshine. Haha. Fuck this film guy, I thought. I would win Alma back. I would stop doing drugs. Stop drinking. Whatever Alma wanted, I thought, I would do it. I had Power. Divinity. Control. I felt like a miracle again. I’ve been blessed, I thought. Alma’s grace. Our love. My secret. 

Chris and I biked over the bridge into Brooklyn. Orange blue sky. Purple black blue water. We shot through the air like shooting stars. I felt just like Evil Knievel. Our father’s favorite. I looked down at the birds flying home, the sail boats sailing on the surface of the river. Moonlight is reflected light, I thought. The city lights rippled in the water. 

We re-docked the bikes, like boats. 

A bookstore not far from Chris’s place. 

Rainbow lights. A courtyard. A tall brick wall. 

A couple poets, Chris whispered. A reading.

But I couldn’t pay attention to anything at all. I felt very very, very high. I got hooked into staring at the bones of the poets’ hands, got fixated on the fact that there were cells that made up the bones in hands and that each poet had cells deep within the center of the bones of their bodies, their hands, and I looked around. Everybody had bones. And I fixated on the fact that there was marrow or something in the bones of this one particular poet’s hands, and I concentrated on the nuclei of the cells that made up the marrow of her bones and her poem was boring and looking at the brick wall behind the poet and her reading of this boring poem, I became conscious of the density of the bricks, and of the atoms at the center of each thick brick, and I thought of a thin yellow falling maple leaf twirling up out of a tree in late autumn. Then the red of Art’s barn at dawn in winter. A shard of his busted taillight, shining. The poet finished her poem and then read another, better poem about muddy water. About all the colors of the rainbow mushed together to make a muddy wet brown, about the cold wet density of the wind above a creek in the morning, and I realized there were probably pipes full of blue water behind the bricks that made the wall behind the poet, reading. Why can we see through clear blue water, I wondered. Through glass? I remembered my reflection in the blue sloshing water of the toilet on the bus ride down. The only thing I remembered. Art says mirrors reflect back the colors we see in the light, and I thought back to the mirror behind the bar where earlier I lied to Chris. Moonlight is reflected light. And I thought about Chris’s scar.  

Chris looked drunk. Haha. He turned to look at me too. Like looking into a mirror, I thought. Everything was fine. I laughed. Chris laughed too. He patted my knee with the bones of his hand. He had no idea, I thought. No clue. I was going to turn my whole life around. Alma loved me back. I knew she did. And now I had a secret. Something to keep. That’s what I was going to do, I thought. I would do anything. My love for Alma. I would keep it. 

“Where’s your duffle bag, man?” Chris whispered. 

The rainbow lights swayed, then flickered. 

I looked down and around at my feet. 

Uh-oh, I thought. Haha. Holy shit. 

Dylan Smith is looking for a job if anyone knows of any jobs in Brooklyn.

Categories
Crayon Barn Chris

III

By Dylan Smith

This day last year a blue bird blessed my desk and now every new moment opens awake within me like a poem. Today I keep the bird shit desk pushed up against my porthole window in the city. Poems scribbled everywhere. The same shit-stained pages of my manuscript, my Chris Book: Red Crayon // Blue Crayon // Green Crayon // Spring. The Statue of Liberty with its twenty-foot flame is just a pinky-sized shadow out there on the harbor—and now here comes the sun, it’s rising up out of the river. All the clouds above the city burn bright orange sea-blue pink along their bottoms at first, edges shining like the pages of a Holy book, and then it’s the tops of those close, barn-sized clouds that come alive with color again as they burn, and I see the familiar silhouettes of those horse-shaped cranes and the dark buildings beyond them that tower, and with my candle lit and the coffee brewed, I’ll just sit on the ground for a while. Close my eyes. Criss-cross my legs. Take it all in with my breath. My therapist taught me the importance of this routine, how to meditate immediately upon waking. Diane says it’s important that I right-size myself, and that I do so right away—she suggests I even say a sort of prayer as I start. Let go of my will. Try to let the light shine through me. Sometimes I do. But other times what I do is, I just close my eyes and picture Alma. Imagine her waking up behind me in bed, eyes burning golden candles—or like two struck matches as they open perfect fires in her head—and other times I picture her farmhouse on the hill, and above that her forever spring blue woods are always greening, and I pretend to hike up that path toward my candlelit shack where every new morning opens completely new in my head, like a poem, and it’s spring. 

Halfway up that path through the mountain woods to my shack was a memorial rock for Alma’s father. Everybody called it Michael’s Rock. A mossy slab of bluestone as impressive as the side of a ship. Art installed these two green benches up there, and I like to hike to them in my head. Take along my notebook and a coffee to listen to the birdsong and sit. An embedded steel engraving holds Michael’s picture. A proper monument with his name and his dates. 

Kind eyes. Sky blue shirt. Big smile dappled in the leafy darkness and light. 

Today I brought Michael an imaginary flower and was reminded of an early summer session with Diane. What I remember most from those days is the daily rainbow hanging above Art’s barn and the way the new June dew warmed and rose up from the fields all blurry-gray-blue in a thick fog thinning slowly every morning into mist, and how on the long drive to Diane’s therapy office in town, Art told me those rainbows were because of the barn’s position to the sun. 

“The sun’s got to be behind you for rainbows,” Art said. Canopies of green leaves created a kind of green tunnel as he drove, and Art threw his thumb back behind us to the east. “Water droplets bend the light. It’s a miracle if you think about it. Try to imagine the mist as trillions of tiny pyramids. They used to be the dew. You have the sunlight shining through each drop and each drop is like a tiny pyramid projecting color out onto the sky. It’s called refraction, Sunshine. Visible light. Every new rainbow is a miracle.”

The landscape widened as we turned onto the painted county road into town. I had a duffle bag at my feet. A pair of underwear, my notebook, some socks. The plan was that Art would take me into town for therapy, then drop me off at the bus station. I’d spend a night or two in the city with Chris. Come back up the next morning with my car. Now the sky opened again all blue and big and roomy, fields and farms rolling greenly into mountains, and the sudden shift in scale made me feel like I’d shrunk. Which made me think of Chris. In the side mirror my eyes looked all puffy. Swollen. Nearly shut. I couldn’t tell if it was from early summer allergies, or from all the beers I’d downed the night before, or what. 

Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

I took out my notebook. Wrote down the word Calamity.

Calamity. 

Calamity. 

I wrote and rewrote it about a hundred times.

“Speaking of rainbows, Sunshine—ever been to Niagara Falls?”

I struggled to clear my throat.  

“No. Not yet. But Alma told me she went up there once with Michael.”

“Well talk about miracles. This side of the falls is even named after rainbows. Any sunny day of the year and you will see one. Guaranteed. All that falling worter. You should make a trip of it one day, Sunshine. Especially now that you’ll have a car again. Was starting to wonder when you’d ever get the balls to talk to Chris.”

I rolled my window down. Tried to wash away Art’s laugh with the mountain air, the morning light. 

Diane lived on an old dairy farm two or three miles out of town. Her office was just a bedroom in her house. Art’s truck rocked along her long wide driveway in reverse, stopping just before this big catalpa tree flowering before the deck. Diane stood up there in the shade, waving. Art watched her in the rear view mirror. Rolled his window down. Laughed. Waved back. He picked a piece of straw out of my hair and another off my shirt, then handed me a week’s pay in cash. 

It must have been like three hundred bucks. A session with Diane cost fifty. I also had a credit card in my pocket. Art watched me stuff the money into my jeans, which were covered in red and white paint, and the knees of the jeans were caked in dried mud. 

“If cleanliness is next to Godliness you’re heading to the city with a pitchfork, Sunshine. If it were me I’d try to bribe Diane with an extra twenty or two for a shower.”

Diane’s office walls were all bookshelves full of textbooks and spiritual books and coloring books and crystals. Tall ceilings. One green couch. She kept this rocking chair in the corner for herself and I sat—well, sometimes I’d lie there with my boots off, staring out at the catalpa tree in the window. I really liked Diane. Her voice was like the silhouette of some far off mountain. 

Hillsides for eyes. Wavy gray brown hair. A seven-year-old son named Jacob. 

Diane was still getting settled into to her chair. Blue pen in hand. Yellow legal pad in her lap. At the other end of the room, this low red plastic table had a bunch of art supplies all over it. 

“Well,” she said. “Tell me. Bill. What is happening up in your world?”

I just stared at my hands for a while. Duffle bag at my feet. My hands looked filthy. 

“Alma went away for a while,” I said. 

“Went away?”

“To the city. To visit Karen.”

“Karen.”

“Her mom. I’m going down today too. To get my car back from Chris.”

“Will you see Alma down there too?”

“No. Well, I don’t know. She didn’t say. She says we need to make some distance.”

“Distance.”

“Well. Just for now she said.”

Diane scribbled something blue on her pad, nodding. 

“And what do you say?”

“What do you mean,” I said.

“What do you say? About needing to make some distance.

I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat there. Like my hands, my boots looked all busted up and dirty. I unlaced them, pulled them off. Swung my dirty socks up onto the leathery green. I had a good view of the window now, but I just stared at my hands some more. The ends of my nails were ten black lines and the callouses on my palms were eight brown circles. I knew it was only a matter of time with Diane, though. Just a matter of which way to enter the session together—and before I knew it we were in, and I told Diane about how I’d fallen for Alma completely the way we rolled about in my bed together with the thunder and the close dark green clouds and the rain, and how when finally that last spring storm had stopped and day by day the mountain had been greening it was June again, and Chris was gone—and how for that first week of summer, everything in my window had been rainbows. Because Alma was there. I told Diane how the moon was close at night and clean from the rain and full, and how up in my shack these fireflies twirled up in bright splashes of electric sudden neon green like stars, and Alma was there on a blanket on the floor and the radio tumbled out its song and we were dancing screaming naked love and I was sober for a while and we were laughing. Because Alma called them lightning bugs. Haha. I just loved that. I told Diane how the lightning bugs formed brief constellations above my bed, and how Alma named them these non-Latin-sounding names, names like Bird God and Horse Skull Mountain and Love Lamp, and how tattooed to her foot in the candlelight, the phases of the moon were fading. 

Then I told Diane about Alma’s shrinking dreams. How I’d never heard of anyone else having those before. 

First night after the storm. Purple blue moonlight on the mountain in my window. By now the radio’s batteries had started losing power. Its song just a whisper, faint and wobbly and low.

The shrinking dreams started after Michael died. Made death a kind of shrinking.

Diane nodded. Wrote it down. 

I can still remember the smell of coconuts in Alma’s hair. Her chin on my chest. My heart thumping raw. 

I told her I suffer from shrinking dreams too. 

Lightning bugs burst above us. Alma leapt up.

“Well in my first one I went to the bathroom upstairs in the farmhouse and heard this peeping,” Alma said. “I found these eggs and two ducklings, a brown one and a yellow one. But Michael came in and filled up the bath with water. I didn’t realize really what had happened until the eggs bobbed and shrunk in the water and the two ducks struggled to stay up on top.”

“Did they go under?”

“Of course—the current pushed them under. One at a time by the faucet. I didn’t act quick enough to grab them out and the second duck—that’s the yellow one, it went under. By the time I pulled them up they had shrunk down to bug sizes with like these terrible thin delicate wings. I placed each one on a towel as delicate as I could but they were wet. They stuck to my fingers. I lost the brown one somewhere in the blue towel and woke up screaming because I’d squished it.”

“Exactly,” I said. “But mine are always shrinking horses. Not ducks.”

“No—no it’s not always ducks. I’ve had shrinking dreams about nearly every farm animal there’s ever been. Horses yes, but also Art kept these goats in the barn when I was little, and I’ve even had a couple about Chris’s stupid chickens—,” but that’s when Diane cut me off. 

“Why don’t you tell me more about this, how did Alma phrase it, making distance.”

So I contemplated the catalpa tree in Diane’s window for a while. Leaves were as big as bibles. Clean white flowers the size of your fist. 

“Well, I guess reality kind of crept in.”

“Reality.”

“The reality of what we were doing. Like the fear of it. Love. The reality of it.”

“Tell me more.” 

“All the sudden it was, What are we doing? Oh God. Oh no. Suddenly it was, What do we do about Chris?”

“And?”

“And so we tried to kind of avoid each other. For the last few days before she left. But it’s impossible. Like some outside energy won’t let us part. I feel powerless against it. Absorbed by it. I couldn’t even get to work until she left.”

That’s when Diane’s son started jumping up and down in a nearby room. I heard his babysitter shush him. I thought about Chris. Those catalpa flowers rubbed against the window and Diane’s face might as well have melted off her head, the way I felt. My vision sort of shook. Heart thumping high up in my neck.

I closed my puffy eyes. Took in a deep breath. That morning I’d looked up the word calamity in my book. Some say it comes from the Latin word calamus, meaning straw, as in a damaged crop. But others think it’s origin is something more obscure. 

“How do you feel right now?” Diane asked. 

“Hungover,” I admitted. 

“So you picked back up.”

“As soon as Alma left.”

“And how have things been in your cabin? In your shack. How have you managed without running water?”

“I’ve been sleeping in Art’s barn again.”

“Where in the barn have you been sleeping?”

“Like down at that bottom bay again. In the bales of hay. Where Chris used to keep all his chickens.”

Diane stayed quiet for a really long time. 

Then she said, “I suggest you tell Chris the truth.” 

Man, I hated Diane. The titles of her books fell from their spines in pure colorful alphabetic arcs, their letters splashing like confetti all over the floor as I fell deeper and deeper in through her green couch like that forever. 

“When you see Chris I suggest you tell him exactly everything you’ve just told me. That you’ve fallen in love with Alma. That it happened completely organic-like, and that you meant no harm by it. Chris can’t hurt you, Bill. Not mentally. Not spiritually. Maybe he can hurt you physically a little, but you aren’t kids anymore. You’ve grown up, Bill. You are strong.” 

I looked down at my hands. Jacob screamed and screamed and I wondered what Alma might have looked like as a kid. I decided my hands looked dirtier than usual. Covered in something, like some sickly bluish film. I pictured Alma holding Michael’s hand by a waterfall. A red ribbon in her hair. A rainbow bending bands of light—and then I remembered the job I’d done the day before with Art. Alma’s basement doors had rotted through in patches at your ankles from all the years of rainwater and splashing. These two huge wooden doors painted red. Art and I took the doors to the barn and mixed this two-part epoxy. Art told me they use the same epoxy to patch up holes in boats. Entropy. You mixed the tan putty with the blue putty and like magic, the two come together making wood. 

Art called the stuff Bondo. That’s what was all over my hands. 

“Art taught me something cool yesterday,” I said. 

“Yes?”

“He taught me about nuclear fusion. Energy in one nucleus fusing with another. Art says that’s what happens inside stars—like inside the sun. He says scientists are trying to make it happen in their labs now, but that it takes an incredible amount of heat. Art told me it’s really dangerous. The most dangerous thing a human could do. But he said if scientists can make it green, the fusion could save the earth.”

A blue bird landed on a catalpa branch in the window. Diane smiled. 

“And what do you think?”

“Well, it made me think of what I like about poems.”

“Which is what?”

“The energy between the letters. The letters forming words. Art’s Bondo made me think of that. The power of the alphabet. The ABC’s. I’ve had that song stuck in my head.”

“And?”

“And I guess it makes me even more scared to talk to Chris.”

That’s when Diane invited me to close my eyes. We ended every session with the same guided meditation. Diane led me out of the office, down the stairs, then out through a field of overflowing wildflowers in my head. Set out this red blanket in the grass. Invited me to take a seat on it in my head. Together we were to absorb the day’s divine energy. Worship the healing spiritual power of the sun inside us—but instead of doing all that, I just fell asleep. 

The next thing I remember is the big kaboom-boom sound of a crash outside. I opened my eyes. Leapt up. The blue bird in Diane’s window was gone. The catalpa tree was shaking. I thought maybe something had exploded, but Diane was at her window, and she was laughing. 

Art had backed his truck right up against the catalpa trunk. 

His hat in his hands. Taillight smashed to pieces. 

Yet somehow Art seemed totally serene. A picture of perfect calm. 

Art lifted the largest shard of plastic up from out of the grass. Held it to the light. Like a big rare rock, the shard shone and sparkled as he turned it. His face cast in this wonderful, rainbowy light. Diane and I laughed. You could tell it really amazed him.

“Art is insane,” I said. 

“Yes he is,” Diane said. “But insane in the most beautiful way.”

Dylan Smith is looking for a job if anyone knows of any jobs in Brooklyn.