Falling Idols (9 page)

Leo gulped air, dousing the firepit in his chest to a dull glow. “Yeah. That’s me. I’m the painter.” Relaxing his grip.

The pale crescent showed in the kid’s face again, this time upturned. A step in the right direction. “I like your pictures.”

“Glad to hear it. You almost torched one.” Leo, relaxing even more. “So what’s your name, anyway?”

“Calvin.”

“Okay. Listen up, Calvin. I let you go, you promise not to run away? All I want to do is talk to you a minute. That’s all.”

Calvin’s luminous eyes rolled, mouth in a faint smirk. After a moment he nodded.

Yeah, and the second I let go he sets a new record for the hundred.
But he couldn’t hold the kid captive forever. He released Calvin’s bony shoulders, and wonders of wonders, the kid didn’t bolt. They turned together, began to walk toward the mouth of the alley, the street.

“You want something to eat?” Leo asked. A deli was still open down the block, one of the last streetside livelihoods that hadn’t yet scrolled down steel latticework to button up for the night.

“Got a cigarette?” said Calvin, and Leo gave him one.

As he lit up, a large rat scuttled along in the shadows of the building to the right. Waddling, even. Their neighborhood was bountiful, every day a feast. This one held a tin can in its twitching muzzle. It disappeared into complete darkness, progress marked only by the clinking can. Urban cowbell.

“So you working on a new picture, huh?” Calvin asked. He pronounced it
pitcher
.

“Uh huh. What’s the matter, you didn’t like that one?”

Calvin dragged, thin chest puffing. Volunteering nothing.

“Talk to me. How come you’re out trying to torch buildings in your own neighborhood?” Surely the kid had to realize that these rowhouses, with no airshafts between and sharing common walls, could act like dominoes in a fire. Set one off, they could all go.

Calvin chuckled. Too old, that sound. “You wouldn’t understand. You not from here.”

Calvin’s face in the streetlight, too old, like his laugh, too knowing. Too adult far too soon. In this part of town, make it to eight and you’re a combat veteran. Hit twelve and you’re qualified for squad leader.

“Try me anyway,” Leo said.

After a long moment of contemplation, “I done it for somebody.”

“Who’s that?”

An even longer pause, then, “Bricklord.”

The name was dimly familiar. Bricklord. Street gang, maybe. With his age obviously shy of double digits, Calvin probably wasn’t old enough to claim active honors: tote the blade, the gun, wear the colors, sell the crack. He probably had older brothers, or cousins, and most gang bangers had peewee chapters, training grounds for the up-and-comers, the new blood.

Bricklord. Maybe the street name of a gang leader.

“So how come Bricklord wants you to burn down your neighbors’ home?” Leo offered the bribe of a few more cigarettes to loosen his tongue, but all it bought was the shake of the kid’s head.

Leo gave him the pack.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Calvin said again. “You just not
from
here, okay, whitebread? And you never will be.” Spoken as a factual given, not prejudice. Prejudice might have hurt less, for prejudice could be overcome, in time. While truth did not fluctuate. Truth cut to the core. Truth sawed into bones and lodged in the marrow.

“Gotta go,” said Calvin, and Leo did not stop him when he took sudden flight. Tattered sneakers flapping across asphalt as he darted into the street, and by the time Leo hit the mouth of the alley, Calvin was nowhere to be seen.

Leo headed for his original post in a quick stroll. Passing darkened stoops where figures sat, sharing wine and spicy food and the free time born of unemployment. Passing cars lined bumper-to-bumper at curbside, some blasting music, others sprouting legs dangling from open windows, still others as permanent as planters in suburbia. In the air that lingering miasma of failure, longing, discontent, of chances lost and opportunities never arrived. It was worse than the reek of uncollected refuse, because it was everywhere.

White faces were a minority here, this neighborhood among the city’s forgotten. But hate his color or not, nobody messed with Leo. Six-six and two hundred seventy pounds, shaggy-headed and full-bearded. He walked with impunity, back to the spot where he had been painting.

His canvas satchel of spray cans was gone, of course. A moment’s flicker of self-reproach, no more. At least the thieves had left his latest work unscathed.

Leo stood on the inner edge of a lot once occupied by a building that for years had threatened self-destruction. The job had been safely finished by a demolition crew hired by an urban renewal commission, and the lot cleared. Only the scorched earth of inner city remained, naked and blighted. The adjacent wall had been left blank, devoid of windows, as sheer a face as the Eiger. Before the plug had been pulled on the whole program, the renewal commission had at least had the wall whitewashed. The newness had quickly faded into a dingy hue to match the gray sky, but it was still more agreeable than the endless expanses of grimy brick.

And it made a much better canvas.

This one was nearly finished. Twin roses graced the side of the building, each bloom a full fifteen feet across. Shades of red and pink blended and merged to create a startlingly detailed depiction of petals yawning in the fullness of bloom. Two thorny stems curved gracefully toward ground, intertwining along the bricks and reaching for asphalt. They’d get there before Leo was finished. He was close enough now to work with both feet on the ground. The higher work had necessitated the painstaking task of securing himself with nylon rope and harness, and rappelling from the building’s roof.

With his paints gone, he could only hang up his smock for the night.

His final act was to haul a battered trash can from the building’s stoop out to the curb. Pickup in a couple days. He had already dragged it outside after investigating a shattering of glass — Calvin accidentally dropping a large jar — and finding the can stuffed with gas-soaked rags. Wedged beneath wooden stairs as Calvin fumbled with matches. The can reeked and fumed, but better this hazard sit curbside than in the building.

Homeward, then, three blocks and no scenic changes. World without end, world without help, world too low on hope.

Leo lived in a narrow, three-story rowhouse, like a brick cracker box turned on end. After quadruple-locking the door behind him, he paced into the kitchen, flicked on the light, snatched a bottle of beer from the refrigerator. Then followed the creaking staircase up, to kick back on the unmade double bed.

That empty left side — he still thought he could see in it the depression from her final night here, smell her scent. There were still hairs on the other pillow, too long to be his own. But for the past month he had shared this house only with the schools of silverfish that channeled along the baseboards, and the troupe of roaches that tapdanced into hiding at the first mention of light.

That empty half of the bed, a minimalist monument to his own naivety. See how far my ideals have carried me?

He sat. He drank. He longed for more stupor than he would allow himself.

Soon, he slept.

And unbeknownst to Leo, four blocks away a building burned.

*

In times past, Leo had held down a drafting table and an Associate Art Director’s throne with AdWorks, Ltd., pulling down a cool $54 thou per annum, plus percs. Not too shabby.

Advertising was a strange breed in the white collar world, a peculiar hybrid of business and hands-on creativity that allowed for far more individual expression that did the average corporate cubbyhole. It mattered less that he was a shaggy-headed hulk who looked as if he should be battling the Sheriff of Nottingham, than it did that he delivered goods par excellence. A substantial portion of which was artwork intended to hype the latest in high-tech barbarian toys to all those little would-be twenty-first century Conans.

Tweak the kids’ interest, spark their imaginations, whet the latent healthy species aggression in us all, and the little tykes clamored for the newest Lord Avatar gadgetry. Power swords and guns, shields and beasts and helmets, action figures sold separately. All featured in the continuing adventures of Lord Avatar himself, as seen advertised in Sunday newspaper comics, and coming soon to a Saturday morning cartoon near you.

The manufacturer was happy. AdWorks was happy. Wife Natalie was happy. And while money may not buy peace of mind, it at least affords one plenty of places to rest a weary head, and so Leo managed to live with himself.

Until the day a six-year-old in Green Bay got hold of his grandfather’s prized World War Two vintage samurai sword and skewered a playmate. Because the Lord Avatar plastic just wasn’t real enough anymore, and anyway, it never seemed to hurt on TV.

Peace of mind, once elusive, now fled to parts unknown. There had to be a better way than this to make a living. The flames of fast-track career burnout were raging. After a month of miserable deliberation Leo resigned his post at AdWorks and talked Natalie into selling the suburban split-level.

He wasn’t sure why he wanted to move to the inner city. Perhaps a deep-seated desire to immerse himself into a locale with a genuine past, true personality, traits the mass-erected outlying clone dwellings had neatly managed to avoid. Whatever the reason, it felt as strong as a biological need. And at first Natalie was game for the idea. Change was healthy. Change was stimulating.

The inner city was not without hope, and better days ahead. The past years had seen the renaissance of restoration. Instead of the demolition of old buildings and sprouting of bland housing, the powers that be were finally getting it right: working with what was already there, leaving architectural personalities intact while rehabbing the buildings where they stood.

An area downtown, a racial stewpot of blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and whites, was slated for a double-barreled blast of benefits: federally funded renewal and private sector gentrification. Leo jumped on the bandwagon and bought their own urban homestead, a rowhouse in which he and Natalie could live, and out of which he could operate his own freelance commercial art studio. With no pressure to accept assignments that might offend his newly awakened sensibilities.

But for reasons never made satisfactorily public, the plug was pulled on the entire life support system. And the private sector — businesspeople with plans to relocate office and retail space in rehabbed art deco buildings — didn’t find the area nearly as attractive as before. There’s no bread, let them eat cake, and federal cuts had claimed another casualty before Leo’s eyes.

It wasn’t much longer before Natalie pulled the plug, as well. This slumming business had a certain trés chic appeal, but really, enough was quite enough.

Leo decided to tough it out awhile. If all others had lost interest in making the area look brighter, perhaps the job fell to him by default. The only way he knew how, with brick walls for canvas and spray cans for brushes. Not much, but it would at least be an honest effort.

It seemed a losing battle only when he let his eyes stray too far from those little oases of beauty he managed to create.

Or when he listened in the dead of night and sometimes thought he heard a low, thick laughter rumbling through the streets.

*

Leo had replaced his missing paints by the next night, and went back to work on the stems. This time, Calvin visited of his own free will, with no intent of arson. Nor was he alone.

“Told you I met the painter,” Calvin was saying. “That’s him, there, word up. I told you.”

The guy Calvin had brought along was older, perhaps twenty, with unsmiling flint eyes and skin a coffee-with-cream color. An X-insignia ballcap sat bass-ackwards on a high-top fade. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of loose black pants, with taut muscles sculpted behind his T and a hooded sweatshirt. Air Jordans anchored him to the asphalt.