Paintings from the Cave (4 page)

I walk along the fence on the side street, to the front of the iron-head man’s building. He’s there and he opens the door and holds out his hand.

“What’s that for?” I ask.

“To shake.”

“I told you: no touching.”

He nods and moves back so I can step through the door.

I slip past him. And I go into Bill’s world.

O
nce when I was still in school, they took us on a trip downtown to the library and a museum where a bunch of dead people’s things were laid out for us to look at.

Those places were like Bill’s world.

Quiet. Clean. Warm.

His hallway doesn’t smell of pee and worse, and the walls are clean, no gangbanger raps spray-painted everywhere.

He waits for me to go ahead of him, but I tip my head at him so that he’ll walk in front of me and I can keep an eye on him. I got to keep moving and I got to watch things. A person could get in trouble if he doesn’t do that.

The elevator works. The place doesn’t stink and the
elevator works. I shake my head. We go up to his floor and down the hall to his loft.

He’s got no real rooms like the apartments I know, it’s one big space. The kitchen is at one end and I see his bed, just a piece of foam and a blanket, in a corner. A couch that’s missing a cushion is under the windows and he’s got piles of books everywhere—so many that it looks like that library they took us to. I wonder how long it took this man to read all these books. No TV, but soft sounds coming from a radio. It’s not really music ’cause there isn’t any real punch to it. The wood floors are clean and shiny. Not like the torn carpets in my building, so old they aren’t even a color anymore.

His place smells funny. Like burned food from the oven, then paint, and something from the statues.

Statues.

From the windows I could only see three or four of them. Inside, I see that statues are all over, some small, some a little bigger. Not all of them are heads. One statue is a bird with open wings and there are a few small statues of girls dancing, little arms out like they’re spinning around so you think they’re moving.

I look at the pictures on all the walls and a wooden frame with a big white pad of paper in one corner of the big room.

Off to the side is a bathroom. I take a quick peek: clean. Just to make sure, I flush the toilet.

He’s watching me, so I say, “We don’t even have water half the time.”

He looks out the window, across the fence. “That’s not right.”

No shit, I think. That’s not right. There’s nothing right about the other side of the fence. Everything’s different over there. Even the air.

“You live here all the time?” I ask. “Is this your home, or just where you come to make heads?”

“A little of both, I guess. It’s just my place to go.”

“Yeah, I got one of those too. A man needs his place to go.”

He looks at me, frowning, and continues, “I won a small grant. It’s not much, but it’s enough so that I don’t have to worry about money and I was able to leave school for a while.”

“Yeah, me too.”

He raises an eyebrow so I say, “I left school too. Only”—I laugh through my nose—“I don’t think it’s for just a while.”

“But …” He starts to say something, stares at me for a second, then looks at a number on the wall, picks up the phone and punches the buttons. “What kind of pizza do you want?”

“A big one. With everything ’cept them little stinking fish.”

“Anchovies?”

“Yeah. They smell worse than the Dumpster in the summertime.”

I’m talking too much. It’s better to just listen. You can’t learn anything talking ’cause you’re just saying stuff you already know. You’ve got to be quiet to learn. And keep moving.

He orders pizza, then points at the stool in the corner, next to the big picture of the man. “Would you go sit on that stool, please?”

“With my coat on?”

“It’s up to you. But aren’t you too warm with it on?”

Cooking like a hot dog in a bun, that’s how warm I am. But I want to keep it on in case I have to run. This guy talks all right, but you never know. He could buy the pizza, then pull a knife.

But I want to see how he makes those heads and he doesn’t seem bad, so I take the coat off.

I keep it close, though.

“How do you want me to sit?”

“Anyway you like, as long as you’re comfortable.”

“Why are you making all these heads?” I sit, prop my feet on the crossbars of the stool, stay cool. “You sell them?”

He laughs. “Well, not so far. I have to find a gallery for them so that they can be shown and sold. That’s next, I guess.”

“You wanna know what you should do?”

He tips his head, smiles. “Sure.”

“Naked ladies. You make statues of naked ladies and they’ll sell a lot faster than a bunch of heads.”

He laughs again, a nice laugh. “You’re probably right.”

I know I’m right. I saw it on TV. Two hundred years ago some man did a painting of a naked lady and somebody just sold it for two million dollars.

“How come some of the heads are made out of iron?” I ask.

“It’s not iron; they’re bronze castings. All of them will be made into bronze later. If I can afford it.”

“Bronze. What’s that?”

“It’s a mixture of metals. Copper and tin. It’s quite hard.”

I shrug. “Same as iron to me. I dunno from copper and tin.”

He reaches into a cardboard box lined with a plastic bag and scoops handfuls of mud. He plops them on a table that’s covered in newspapers, makes a big lumpy ball.

“Where do you get the mud?” I point.

“It’s called clay. I order it from an art-supply store and they deliver it.”

I watch him work with his hands on the clay and pretty soon I see that the head is taking shape. I see eyes, see ears, see nose and lips.

It doesn’t look like me, but something makes me think of me. Like I’m in the clay somewhere. Like I’m waiting to come out.

“How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Make me come out of that clay.”

Another smile. This iron-head man smiles more than anyone I’ve ever seen. Nice, though, even if I’m not used to it. Usually, when I see someone’s teeth, it’s ’cause they’re yelling.

“I always wanted to draw or paint or do some kind of art with my hands. So I went to school to learn and then I—”

A knock on the door and I jump off the stool. Only the cops knock like that.

But it’s the pizza. In all my life, I never had food brought to me.

I can smell it across the room and my stomach grumbles so loud I bet Petey and Blade, wherever they are, can hear it.

Then we eat.

He takes one piece, but he’s still looking at the clay head. Chew, swallow, steady eyes.

He looks back at me, but not to talk. He tilts his head, looking hard. He sets down his pizza, goes over to the stand and starts again.

It’s been a long time since I had hot food and I eat one whole piece of pizza, then another. Tastes so good my jaws hurt.

Third piece, fourth, and I slow down.

I think of Layla.

“You going to eat more?” I ask him.

He shakes his head. “I’m not that hungry. Are you enjoying it?”

Am I enjoying it? Grease and cheese around my mouth, crumbs on my T-shirt, more food than I’ve had in six months. I’ve never had enough to eat—not so much that I wasn’t still a little hungry around the edges.

“It’s all right.”

“Then take the rest with you. I’ve never liked cold pizza.”

There’s still a little over half left for Layla and that baby inside that she’s feeding.

I nod. “My friend Layla likes pizza.”

“Do you think she’d come with you sometime and let me sculpt her head? I could pay her like I’m paying you. Ten dollars.”

I shake my head. “Hard for Layla to get around.”

“Is she sick?”

I’ve seen her puke her guts up in the mornings, but that’s just baby sick. “No. She’s going to have a baby.”

“Oh.” He stops pushing the clay and looks off like he’s studying that picture again. Only he’s not looking at anything but air. “So she’s much older than you?”

I nod. “She’s fifteen.”

“Fifteen …”

He stops talking then, and starts working the clay again, and I can see he has questions. I’m thinking: In his life, he doesn’t always have to be moving. In this
warm, soft place he has, he doesn’t know anything about how you’ve got to keep moving.

“She was too slow,” I say. “A man caught her in a stairwell.”

And I tell him about her. I don’t know why, but it all comes out. Layla and me and living in the building.

He looks like he’s about to cry even though it wasn’t him got caught in that stairwell.

He looks out the window. “Right there across that fence … I didn’t know.”

I laugh ’cept it isn’t funny. He doesn’t smile back at me this time, just stands there looking out the window like he’s never seen that view before. I guess he hasn’t. It’s not the kind of thing people notice. Not if they don’t have to.

He’d stopped working, but now he starts again, slow, like he’s not really paying attention. I do, though. I watch how he takes bumps and smooths them, adds bumps to where it’s smooth. He runs his fingers along the slopes of the head on the stand. I could watch forever.

A while later he stops to turn on some lights and I look outside. It’s dark. That’s not good. Layla’s alone and I’ve got to get back in the building. Without being seen. Carrying half a pizza. After I made Petey and Blade mad at me.

“It’s time for me to go,” I say.

“It’s not late; it’s not even six yet.”

“That doesn’t matter. It gets dark early in the winter. Things change when it’s dark.”

Bill looks out the window and then back at me, nodding. “You’ve got a point there.”

“The night people come out,” I say, because he has no idea about the dark. “And they’re always looking to get it over on someone.”

“I can walk you home,” he offers. Like he’d know what to do if Blade’s boys came up on him in the dark.

“You don’t belong over there,” I tell him, because I got enough to worry about getting me back to my building, without thinking about him on Blade’s side of the block.

“Be careful, J.”

My gut starts to tighten up around all that pizza I ate ’cause I’ll be lucky to make it back and I hate when I have to be lucky. Luck is nothing to count on.

I pick up the pizza.

“I gotta go now.”

And I leave.

T
here’s nowhere to go at night that’s safe. Night people with night eyes are in the alleys, in the halls. They’re watching and waiting.

They’ll hurt you for a dollar. They’ll kill you for ten dollars.

They say a woman in the building sold her baby to Blade for a seven-dollar bag of what he sells. He turned right around and sold that baby to some rich lawyer for nine hundred dollars.

Bill’s building is all lit up in front. On this side of the block, nobody breaks the bulbs so they can carry on in the dark. I hate the lights when it’s dark outside ’cause everybody can see you, you can’t move fast in the light.

I run back to the alley between the buildings and
then stop, listen. I stay out of sight, stop, then move, stop, then move.

A little sound. I stop again. Hold my breath, crouch down. Someone digging on the other side of the Dumpster. He doesn’t know I’m there, blown-out druggie doesn’t know anything. I hide, part of the dark two feet away, and he shuffles past me without knowing I’m there.

Now across to the basement window, to the furnace room. Warm, but stinking. Now that I’ve been in Bill’s room where it didn’t stink, I can smell things I didn’t before. I can smell myself.

I wait in back of the furnace. Then a new smell. A smell I know. A smell I love.

“Layla?”

I hear her soft breath. “That you, J?”

“Who else?”

“You smell like food.”

“Pizza. Leave the light out. Come to my voice.…”

“There’s nobody down here but us. I left the light off so nobody’d think I’m here. I’ve been here for over an hour, waiting for you. You didn’t come, I thought Blade had you.”

“Petey caught me but I got away.” I find her in the dark and put the pizza box in her hands. “Here.”