Falling Idols (10 page)

“That’s good work, cuz,” the new arrival said quietly. “You not bad, that’s for damn sure, you know what I’m saying?”

“Told you he good,” Calvin whispered. Eyes taking in the huge pair of roses trellised up the wall.

Leo’s breath, which had momentarily hitched, came easier now. And if he wasn’t yet sure of the new guy’s intentions, he still seemed civil enough.

The two walked closer, this stranger coolly appraising Leo’s work as if a prospective buyer in a gallery. Calvin asked Leo if he had any more cigarettes, so he parted with a few more. Calvin grinned, put them all in a frayed shirt pocket.

“Don’t be looking at me that way, ain’t nobody come here to pop a cap in your ass.” The older guy’s eyes met Leo’s for the first time. “So why you do this, cuz?”

Leo shrugged blocky shoulders, green paint still in hand. “I just want to, is all. Makes me feel good. Feel better.”

The stranger looked to one side, considering this. Grinning faintly at some private joke. He gently shook his head.

“Then you some kinda fool.”

Leo’s heart sank.

“Who are you, anyway?” Leo asked. “Are you the one they call Bricklord?”

“Who,
me
?” His eyes widened, then he burst into rich laughter. Until now, Leo hadn’t even believed him capable of it. “Shit, that’s a good one. Bricklord. Shit.” His mirth died to chuckles while Leo felt about as tall as the aerosol can in hand. “If it matters, my name’s Willy. But no, cuz, I ain’t Bricklord. You’d know that if you’s from here. But you not.”

That singular accusation again, which he could not argue. He was here by choice, they by circumstance. No bridge in the world could span that gulf.

“You think you doing us a favor, slapping this shit on the walls? The rainbows and clouds and stars and flowers and shit? Think you doing a favor for all us niggers and spics and slopes and poor white trash?” Willy didn’t speak so much out of anger as perceived fact. When Leo didn’t answer he went on. “Well you
not
. You can paint up a garbage can real pretty, and all you got’s still a garbage can. You didn’t change shit. I don’t know where
you
from, but that ain’t the way it works here.”

Calvin had been staring at his feet while this went on, a sad twist in the corner of his mouth. The boy disagreed, apparently, but knew better than to contradict. Not now, not here.

“What if it’s not for you in the first place?” Leo said. “What if it’s just for me?”

Willy shook his head again, as if he’d been pounding his skull against the wall rather than looking at it. “Just give it up, painter. You beat by something you won’t never understand. You beat before you even started.”

Leo stood mutely, watching as Willy tossed a friendly arm around Calvin’s shoulders and steered him away. Calvin managed one more quick glance at the wall, at the sweat and paint and hopes that brightened it, at Leo’s eyes. And then they were gone.

Along with whatever impetus Leo had to keep working.

He packed up and called it an early night.

*

Leo finished two nights later. It took him scarcely an hour, blending lighter and darker shades of green with touches of black until the second rose’s stem swept down to the foundation of the building. With neither run nor stray dribble to mar, to detract.

Then the calm appraisal of elation, standing in the presence of a work brought to completion. Brainchild’s maturity, left to stand on its own. There was no other feeling like that in all the world.

Still stung by Willy’s words from two nights ago, at heart Leo had to suspect Willy may have been right. But sense of duty was greater still, to contribute something to this blighted cityscape. If beauty was in the eye of the beholder, perhaps hopelessness was, as well. Even a fool had to start somewhere.

Leo returned the spray cans to his new nylon bag, then backed up for a broader view of the roses. Magnificent, his master work so far. Dawn was too far away, that first kiss of sunlight when this completed work might shine, and he wanted to be back here for the moment, so he could see, so they all could see.

Except…

They all were seeing right now. From the streets. From the sidewalk. From a scant few feet away, he noticed as he turned. Talk about losing yourself in your work — dozens of them had approached and he’d never heard. Standing motionless, staring. Young and ancient, black and white, Asian and Hispanic. Junkies. Winos. Mothers. Whores. A cop. Children. Dealers. Gangbangers. All of them half-lit by streetlights too few and weak to cut through much darkness on this edge of town.

Leo gave them a queasy, gentle smile, feeling sick within because no one seemed to appreciate his efforts. Feeling sicker still when the faces did not change.

Silence, except for the distant master mix of traffic and sirens, wailing babies and TVs blaring from open windows.

Someone in the street hit the play button on a monstrous boom box, speakers blasting gangsta rap, here’s life as we know and live it, brutal and dirty. The savage four-four rhythm prompted many, those who could, to dance. Whirling, contorting, letting themselves go with abandon, circling around a teenage girl who swayed and knelt beside a squirming cloth bag.

Leo, not liking this, not at all, saw no joy in the display. There was nothing of celebration in the movement, no release. It was darker, somehow, more elemental, obligatory. People in chains would dance this way.

From the comfort of shadows, Willy came forward to meet him. He looked much the same as the other night, gray sweats for black the only difference. The sad shake of his head was the same.

“Warned you once, cuz,” he said. “I told you you’s messing with shit you don’t understand.”

“I can’t understand what nobody’ll talk about!” Leo shouted. His only defense.

“Sometimes you got to take things on faith. I know you mean well, but you past the point of no return now, you know what I’m saying?”

Leo looked past him to the nightmare conga line out in the street. Dancers still caught in a frenzy of muscle and bones. The girl in the circle, still kneeling, swayed with lithe serpentine fluidity. Wild hair tossing to and fro about her shoulders, head thrown back in an act of perfect supplication. She reached into the bag beside her, drawing out its source of erratic movement: one of those plump rats so prevalent in the neighborhood. She lifted it to arm’s length above her head, and it squirmed like a worm on a fishhook, fat pink tail lashing at her wrist and forearm like a tiny whip.

Leo thought of films that he’d seen — strange rites born of Africa, of the Caribbean. Priestesses doing much the same thing with live chickens. Only now, rats were so much more in keeping with the locale.

“There’s a way things run around here,” Willy said. “We may not like it, but we understand it, and so we know how to live with it, you see what I’m saying? And we get by. Bricklord wants a building burned out? We give it to him. He wants to smell some food rot in the street? We give that to him too. He don’t never ask for life so long’s we keep him happy with all the other shit. Sacrifices, cuz. That’s what it’s all about. Keeping the place the way he likes it.”

Leo, shaking his head in numb refusal,
Just who the hell is this Bricklord guy that’s got these people so beaten down?

“And then you come along with your spray cans,” Willy said.

Out in the street, the girl pulled a dagger from the folds of her dress. Within a tightening circle of dancers, she slashed at the rat with a deceptively gentle arc of the blade, then bucked beneath its all-but-severed head, catching the sudden dark drizzle on breasts and throat, forehead and tongue.

And everyone fell motionless. Waiting.

“Me, I think you do fine work,” said Willy. “But my opinion don’t mean shit. And Bricklord? Cuz, you done pissed him off good.”

Leo at first thought it was an earthquake. But it was too centralized. A low, subsonic rumble emanating from within the four-story building across the street, shock waves vibrating asphalt underfoot. Noise swelling like the approach of a subway train.

The maelstrom of sound reaching zenith, every window in the building blew outward with sudden fury, a rain of glass circling the foundation. Bricks rattled loose, tumbled free, hit ground in puffs of red dust. The entire structure sagged, like a balloon deflating of a few breaths of life. As Leo watched, the side of the building broke out in creeping webs of mold that filled in the cracks between the bricks…

And then the shape began to bleed through the wall.

It was gargantuan, immense. An amorphous, three-dimensional blackness taking form from the building’s structure like fog pouring through a screen. Its head reached midway between the third and fourth floors, featureless except for twin globes of eyes like harvest moons. Its hide reeked of rot, of despair. When its lower face split to reveal rusted metal teeth, its methane breath stank of the sewers.

Bricklord, behold his great and terrible majesty.

“Probably don’t mean much to say I’m sorry,” Willy said. “But you know it ain’t nothing personal.”

Even if Leo had been able to move his feet, it would have done little good. Bricklord crossed over to where he stood with three thunderous steps. As Leo stared aghast, numbly trying to fathom this apparition, its enormity and origins, it reached for him with one tree-trunk arm—

Then closed its hand around him. For something that had materialized through brick, it had gelled into something awfully solid.

He was lifted up, up, legs flailing and arms straining, and Bricklord aimed him at his own creation. Leo’s head was but a yard away from the roses, the only things in his field of vision, and with overwhelming sorrow he knew they would be the last things he ever saw.

Pressure.

The hand tightened around his middle, an encircling vise-grip, tighter, tighter, and Bricklord’s forefinger began to grind down upon his shaggy head. Much as Leo’s own finger had sought the nozzles of countless spray cans. His ribs caved in with a wet splintering.

Just before the huge finger pressed his head down into his shoulders, Leo could feel the unbearable pressure boiling like a volcano, then could feel no more, see no more, hear no more.

As Leo’s mouth and nostrils and eye sockets erupted into a red, unidirectional spray, Bricklord held him before the wall. And with bold, sure strokes, began to create.

*

Another gray day, a day like all the rest. Infinity before, infinity behind.

The status quo maintained.

Out in the street, home away from home, Calvin sat curbside and studied his own feet. Getting too big for his shoes to contain. Such fast feet.

He remembered seeing something on TV once, called the Olympics. Just exactly what they were he didn’t know, but he’d gotten into watching them just the same. Eagerly awaiting the moment when the runners would explode from their marks, looking so fast and free. Unchained.

I can do that,
he’d thought at the time. And still believed it. Wondering who you talked to to sign up for the Olympics. Hoping that someday he would find out, get his chance to prove himself. Show them all what he was made of.

Maybe someday. Maybe. Find another kid and do some practice races, and for the relays, instead of a baton they could pass each other this dented can of spray paint that he’d found in the gutter this morning.

And had used once already.

Calvin was a far better runner than artist, but what he’d sprayed on the whitewashed wall, mere feet from where the painter had died, was still easy to discern: a tombstone shape, set in between the bottom of the flower stems.

The wall had become a regular montage of group effort. Calvin’s crude tombstone, the painter’s extraordinary flowers…