The Painting of Porcupine City (13 page)

Not Old Ironsides, and not Bunker Hill—Mateo had something simpler in mind. A house on a street with houses so close together they looked like one long building. A house at the end of the row, made semi-private by a big leafy tree and a curve in the street. It was under construction heavy enough to warrant an entire temporary façade, complete with a wide, garage-like door—a façade of the type seen on coming-soon stores in malls. Blank plywood begged for paint.

Although the street was sleepy it was much more out in the open than anything we’d done so far, and not until Mateo clapped a can into my hand did I realize I was shivering.

The element of possibly being caught made it more authentic, though—that was obvious just from watching Mateo. He was going a lot faster than he had before, and he kept glancing side to side to make sure the coast was still clear. He dashed out a quick, gorgeous mural of the Bunker Hill Monument. Although he seemed barely to be paying attention to his work, I sensed that he was in tune with everything, perfectly harmonized with the city around him, one eye on his wall and the other on everything else. Since this felt so serious I tried to put an extra something in my Arrowman to push it from simple tag to decoration, if not quite art.

When we were done he snapped some pictures with his Polaroid and we were walking. Not toward my car, really, just strolling away in that
Whatever do you mean, officer?
kind of way. Whenever we left a scene after painting it always took me a long time to lose that charged-up, fight-or-flight feeling I had when the paint was streaming. But it seemed to melt off him immediately. He could be standing ten feet from a finished piece and appear as though he had nothing to do with it. In the beginning I thought this was him being cocky; only later would I understand it was because painting made him feel no guilt.

“When you do pictures instead

of tags,” I said as we walked, not to break our silence—which wasn’t an uncomfortable one—but because I wanted to hear his voice again and the subtle stresses of its Portuguese tint, “you don’t sign them as Dedinhos or anything.”

“No.”

“So how will people know they’re yours?”

“Hmm. Why do they need to know?”

“I don’t know. So you get credit?”

He laughed. “Why would I want credit? I work hard to avoid getting credit. Credit means cuffs, Arrowman.” He shifted his backpack and the cans clinked inside.

“I don’t mean credit to Mateo Amaral. I mean, like, so Dedinhos gets credit. So people will know all your stuff is done by one guy. So then you could make a smudge on a trashcan or something with a marker and people would say,
Ooh, that’s his
.” I wiggled my fingers and made that heavenly chorus sound,
aaaooouuh
.

He laughed again and looked at me. “Why?”

“I don’t know, so— If we didn’t know Michelangelo painted the Mona Lisa—”

“Arrowman. Leonardo!”

“Sorry—Leonardo. I always got the Ninja Turtles mixed up too. I mean if we didn’t know Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, it would be getting passed around at yard sales rather than worshiped at the Louvre.”

“Maybe. I like to believe it’d still be in the Louvre even if it was anonymous.”

“But the name assigns value.”

“Monetary value. Not artistic value. The two things are completely separate. I’m only interested in one.”

We walked for a while in silence. The idea of a graffiti artist who didn’t want credit seemed to go against all of what little I knew about graffiti artists—artists whose art
was
their name.

“When I was putting out
Porcupine City
,” I said, “I thought a lot about using a pen name.”

“Heh. A novelist’s tag.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. I think it was a reluctance to be truly associated with it.”

“A gay thing?”

“No. No, I couldn’t give a shit about that. I’ve been out since puberty. It just goes back to me realizing on the precipice of publication that I didn’t like my main character. And he was so obviously me.”

“I don’t think so. I mean, if you say he’s you, then he’s you. You would know. But I don’t think he’s
obviously
you.”

“Well, that’s cool I guess.”

“The main character was with a lot of guys.”

“Yeah. A lot of villains.”

“So you’ve been with a lot of guys too, then?”

“Some would think it’s a lot. Some would think it’s hardly any.”

“How many?”

I wondered why he was asking, why he cared. I wondered what I wanted to tell him, since I felt no obligation to tell the truth. And I wondered whether I even
knew
the number. How many other guys, besides the one with the slip-on Vans, had I forgotten?

“It doesn’t matter. I look at the number different now. It makes me happy now,” I told him, telling myself too. “It makes me feel like I have a little something with each one of them. The guy I had plans with tonight? Mike. He’s a nice guy, you know? That’s all that matters.”

“You sleep with him?” He turned to look at me with those green eyes.

Out of the blue I felt very embarrassed. It wasn’t anything to do with his tone, which had no particular emphasis, and his eyes weren’t judgmental. I just felt embarrassed. And I wasn’t used to feeling that way.

“I mean I
have
slept with him. But it’s not like we do it every time.”

I wanted to change the subject, swing myself out of this position where I suddenly felt vulnerable. I wanted to turn the tables. I almost asked him how many girls/guys/people he’d slept with, but I hesitated long enough to regroup and to realize I didn’t want to ask that question. Especially since I was more and more sure he was straight. Asking it would forfeit the mystery. And without this mystery between us, we had... what, exactly? Spraypaint? A mutual employer?

“Is the Navy Yard over there?” I asked instead.

“Right down there,” he said, pointing.

“We’re not going to— Are we?”

I half expected him to run into the entranceway and somersault over the gate. But he smirked and kept walking. If we were going to tag Old Ironsides it was going to be on another night.

We just walked. I didn’t care where we were going, but I wanted to put some distance behind the sex talk. I asked him if he’d ever been to Honduras.

“Honduras,” he said. “Nope. Why?”

“No reason. My mom lives there. She’s always asking me to visit and I always avoid it. I have this recurring nightmare about forgetting English—forgetting
language
—and I think being surrounded by Spanish would basically be the same thing. I don’t know Spanish.”

“Your mom lives in Honduras? Why?”

“She’s an agricultural anthropologist.”

“Uh. Cool.” He laughed. “I’ll pretend I know what that is.”

“There’s this tree there called the noni tree. Ever hear of it? It makes this fruit that’s pretty nasty tasting but has about a million pounds of antioxidants in every ounce. Like a pomegranate mixed with Godzilla.”

“Haha. No, can’t say I’ve heard of a noni tree.”

“She’s trying to show the people who live in this particular area of Honduras how to cultivate it so they can sell the fruit to health-food yuppies in America and get rich.”

“Cool. But you say it tastes nasty?”

“It won’t make your eyes water or anything, but it’s not pleasant.”

“You have some?”

“She sends me boxes of it from time to time. The juice. But I’m like never sick, so make of that what you will. You’ll have to come over some time and try it.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Maybe you will?”

“Maybe I will.”

The night air grew humid

and I thought it might rain, but really it was just the wind changing direction and blowing ocean air in from the Harbor. It felt steamy. Mateo’s bare arms glistened when we walked under streetlights, and when we passed the neon signs of shuttered storefronts the moisture on his skin caught the colored light and made it look like he was glowing.

I stole glances, stepped wide around potholes in the sidewalk and slowly up curbs to let him get a half-step ahead of me as we walked, just far enough so I could freely take in the sight of his glowing arms and tall black socks. And then he would turn and slow down to let me catch up. His backpack clinked and every so often he’d dip into some nook or cranny and write DEDINHOS. Little Fingers. I had no idea where we were going.

When he stood up after

markering a hand on a mailbox he saw me rubbing my calves and he asked if I was tired.

“No way. Just breaking myself in.”

He laughed.

“Where are we going to, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” he said, clicking the cap back onto the marker. “I was just following you.”

“But
I
was following
you
.”

“Hah. Then we’re fucked.”

“My car’s way back that way. You seemed like you had someplace in mind. More business?”

“No. Guess I just like to walk. I like how the city sounds at night. Why, you have somewhere to be? Mike waiting for ya?”

“No. No one’s waiting.”

We passed a group of college kids on their way home from somewhere, probably a bar. Among them it felt more special to be with Mateo. Our reason for being out at this time of night was so much more secret and cooler than theirs. I thumbed the can in my pocket and smiled.

“How about your parents?” I asked Mateo when their voices had faded down the street. “Any noni trees in their lives?”

“Mine? They’re in Brazil.”

“You mentioned. There’s a weird John Updike novel by that name, by the way.”

“...”

“So what are they doing in Brazil?”

“Living. They’re Brazilian.”

“Oh. Yeah, of course. Ha. But you’re American?”

He nodded. “Just like
you
.”

He announced this similarity with enough of a
something
in his voice to send a charge through me. As though this point of commonality made him see me entirely anew. But I could tell he was playing.

“You were born here, I mean.”

“Yup. My parents got married and moved here. To Framingham, Massachusetts. Their only child was born—that’s yours truly. They got here just in time.”

“You mean they moved here to have you?”

“Yeah.”

“How come?”

“Land of the free, etc.? I don’t know. Wasn’t great there. Military dictatorships and what-not. Economy was fucked. My mom used to tell about how inflation was so bad, buying groceries she’d try to run ahead of the guy with the sticker-gun to grab the stuff before he jacked up the prices.”

“Wow.”

“It’s beautiful too, though, some of it. The kind of beautiful it’s hard to know what to do with sometimes.”

“I bet.”

“But my mom was intent on having an American baby.”

“An American baby,” I mused. Up to that point I’d rarely considered that there were any other kind.

“My mom was in love with America,” he said. “Still is, though it’s a more mature, bittersweet love now, I think. Not the school-girl crush it started out as.” We came to an intersection with a car going through too fast. He put his arm out to keep me from stepping off the curb—it was unnecessary but I liked his glowing skin so close to me. “She wants to be an astronaut,” he said as we crossed.

“An astronaut? Your mom?”

“Believe it. When I was a kid she wouldn’t shut up about astronauts. Told me a million times about how when she was a girl she watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon. All the people in her neighborhood gathered around this TV in someone’s house. The Americans were walking on the fucking Moon, she’d say! Well she wouldn’t say fucking, but it was that kind of excitement. She’d say,
the Americans are walking on the Moon. They’re crazy and amazing. They have left the Earth and they’re walking on the Moon.
” He did his mother’s voice in an accent much thicker than his own. It made me smile. “So she wanted to be an astronaut too. But that wasn’t possible because Brazil had no space program. The road to the Moon went straight through America. But still. She was a nurse, training to be a nurse. Not exactly the right résumé, you know? So the next best thing was to be the mother of an astronaut. To get postcards from the Moon.”

“One small step for Mateo,” I whispered, “one giant leap for the Brazilian people.”

“She used to even use it as a threat, right? Like other parents use the Tooth Fairy or something. Be good or the Tooth Fairy won’t come. With my mom it was like, Finish your homework or you’ll never get to the Moon, filhinho.”

I smiled. I was doing a lot of smiling tonight.

“I don’t know how much that was really figuring into her insistence that they come here to have me. Probably more than she’d let on. Somehow she got my dad to agree. And they moved.”

“Why Framingham, though? That’s so random.”

“Why anywhere? They must’ve had some connection there.”

“So you were born.”

“Haha. Yes.”

“Did they buy you tons of like rocket-ship baby clothes and stuff?”

“Oh yeah. What they couldn’t afford, my mom made.”

“I need to see pictures of that someday.”

“Haha. There are plenty.”

He went quiet. I didn’t want him to stop talking. “Did you go back to Brazil a lot to visit and stuff when you were a kid?” I wondered how he’d caught the touch of accent.

“We couldn’t ever go, no.”

“Never?”

“My parents were illegal quickly. Overstayed their visas. Immigration is hard, you know? It’s not all drive up to Ellis Island any more, if it ever really was.”

“Oh.” Immigration. Military dictatorships. This was so far outside my experience. It made me feel ashamed, though I’m not sure why.

“We went back for good when I was about ten.”

“What happened when you were ten?”

“...”

“I mean why’d you go back?”

“My pai.... Hmm. My father had an affair with my landlady.”

“Yikes. Wait, the landlady you have now?”

He nodded.

“You all lived in that house?”