Listen to Tobias Carroll read from 'Twenty Minutes' Road'
Exhale; he sang, exhale. The snow drifting to earth around him, the cryptic American sounds from the front porch, and the patterns and colors below. Exhale.
Geoff Mullen stood below the painting and heard the sound of scraping come through the window. A guttural ratcheting moved into his ears, sounding to Geoff like something low and clawed shuffling its way from the street. It would be years before he'd grow accustomed to this sound, and yet something was dimly familiar about it, echo-not-an-echo, something that reached back to the years when he had no control, the years before he began to understand control itself. He looked to his right and saw the cabinet and suddenly became aware of his hair and remembered his mother's warning, knew suddenly what he had to do, what he had to seek.
The cabinet was stout; once, to Geoff, it had been tall. He still needed both arms to pull the middle drawer out, the one they kept the gloves and scarves and hats in. He planted his feet on the floor, the way his father had taught him, and took a handle in each hand. He pulled and it opened. He took a red cotton cap from within and drew it over his ears. He needed to wait now: he was dressed, had dressed himself for the cold weather for the first time, and now he needed to wait for someone to come downstairs and say that it was okay to go outside. He closed the drawer and looked out the front windows and saw white, stingingly bright, in lumps and planes, a reduction of a view that had begun to feel familiar. Grey and green hovered, tacitly obscured, and further out from the windows was something red in motion. His father, he realized finally, his father clearing the driveway. And so Geoff waited for his mother.
He stood there in his cap and jacket and the boots that it had taken him ten minutes to tug onto his feet and looked up at the painting. His mother had explained it once to him, the story of it, and he'd forgotten. It hung like a window on the wall, even if the colors that lay within its frame looked somehow diminished. Around its edges was a doorway, and the painting was mostly the view through that door: a stream, the side of a mountain. Blue running through green circled by brown. In the center of it, two figures, a man and a woman, red shirt and yellow dress, overlapping.
The red now smudged with age. Green diluted by ash. Yellow and blue faded by chemistry.
It was a little over a foot high, this window of his, further bounded by a silver-edged black frame. Geoff was looking at a cluster of trees, squinting, walking closer and squinting even more, trying to isolate that tiny clutch, searching for that detail to make it more real to him, as real as the trees in back of the school, the trees that he saw when going past the county park. And then a creaking came on the stairs.
The creak came when anyone walked down it, regardless of size. For as long as he'd been walking, even he had triggered the creak. Their cat alone could navigate the stairs silently. Geoff looked up and up and saw his mother making her way down.
"Honey, why are you dressed like that?" she asked.
He beamed at her and said, "I dressed myself, Mom. I dressed to go outside and got my boots on all by myself..." and let his voice trail off as she came to a stop a few feet from him. She had a nervous look of pride on her face and she reached up to move some hair away from her forehead. She still towered over him. He'd beaten the bookcase and the cabinet in the past year, but his mother still won out for height. His mother and the sapling in the back garden, planted when he was four.
She said, "It's too cold right now. I'm sorry, but it's just too cold."
"But Dad's outside."
"Your father's a grown-up. He can handle it."
His cheeks were starting to get hot. "But I'm dressed for it!"
"I'm sorry. It's ten degrees out right now, and I don't want you to get frostbite. If it warms up later you can go."
His voice crackled, lost its dignity. "But I want to go now!"
She took a deep breath and fixed her eyes on him and said, "Don't shout". And he knew that look in her eyes, knew that it was the lead-in for a look that could make him cry even if she began to flash it at him, and didn't say anything. "You can watch TV if you want. School's closed today."
He shook his head and felt his nose starting to run and walked past his mother towards the stairs. He could still hear the scraping, the gritty sound of shovel on asphalt, but it grew distant as he ascended, and by the time he'd gotten to his room it had faded. He wondered if his mother had stayed there, next to the painting, herself lost in turn to the dress, the shirt, the brook; then the thought left his mind and he pulled off his boots.
Wednesday dinner, third Wednesday in the new year, Geoff asked the question. Or, more properly, Geoff made the request. "Tell me about the painting," he said.
"'Can you tell me about the painting?'" his father replied. "It's more polite."
Winter. An early dinner before his father would drive him to indoor soccer in the high school's gym, anticipating the sound of a thick plastic ball -- air pressed taut against rubberized skin -- colliding with the thin wooden walls, always threatening to crack them open. An early dinner so his stomach wouldn't turn when he played. Five forty-five brought chicken immersed in marinara sauce and a freshly tossed salad. The house was warm, an isolated beacon in a sea of beacons, a few holdouts of blue discernable in the sky.
"Okay," said Geoff. "Can you tell me about the painting?" He sat on adding "Please" to the end of it, as he knew how it would sound.
At angles to Geoff was Donna, not quite four. She grinned hugely and chanted, "The one with the boat?" She beamed; she couldn't help but beam. Donna shone and Geoff, by and large, glared.
"Not the one with the boat," their mother said. "Geoff's fond of the painting in the hall."
"The one with the boat!"
"No," she shook her head. "The one with the boat's downstairs."
From the head of the table, a quiet cough. Geoff looked towards his father. "The painting," he said. "The painting goes back two generations in the family, to my grandfather." Fragments echoed in Geoff's mind: he could see parts of the story coming as through ancestral memory, as though this story of his great-grandfather was something he carried within him, a hidden organ biding its time within his chest.
"My father's father. Born Welsh; came to Toronto when he was twenty. Lived there for a year, working at a bank. He'd walk the streets nightly, my father told me. He'd walk the streets and see artists at work sometimes. Bohemians. Sacrificing everything for their art.
"He himself had no talent for painting. But he'd sit with these men and befriend them -- they had things in common, a shared education, a fondness for certain writers. An appreciation of the same aesthetics. He came to call three or four of these men friends, and when it came time for him to leave the city--"
"Why'd he have to go?" said Donna.
"Work. He went south to Chicago and made his way further south from there, then west, and then north again. When he left Toronto, each of these men made him a gift of a painting, and he packed all four for the trip ahead, treasuring them.
"Five years later, he'd fallen into debt. My grandfather was a gambler in those days, and he woke up one morning to find that his life had gone to hell. 'I'd put my life in a broken suitcase,' he used to tell me, 'and one day I looked back and saw the pieces of it trailing behind'. And so he sold the first of the paintings, pulled himself out of debt, and took the railroad across the country.
"My grandfather swore he saw that painting thirty years later, ascendant on the wall of a museum.
"He settled in the east, fell in love and married my grandmother. And they came on hard times after they'd been married for a few years, just before my aunt was born. Their first child. And, though it hurt him to do it, he sold the second of the paintings. And with that money -- for the painting had caught the eye of a rich man with whom he'd become acquainted -- they bought a house." He paused for breath and looked his children in the eye.
"You've been to that house, you know. My father and mother live there now. Your grandparents.
"They raised three children there, a daughter and two sons. My uncle Jack died in the war -- you know that," and he faltered for a moment. "You know that, right? I've told you that?"
His children looked at him, Geoff aware of it and Donna largely uncomprehending -- died? war? -- and he continued.
"The two paintings that they still had outlived my grandparents. One came to my father, and one to my aunt.
"There was a break-in at her house. August of 1972. They took that and her television. Who knows how much it was worth? Periodically I'd look for it, in periodicals and art books at the libraries. I used to sketch it when we'd go there for holidays, when I was your age. That was another nautical one, Donna, like the one you like."
"What's nautical?"
"Boats," said Geoff. "Something to do with boats."
His father nodded. "In the attic somewhere or the basement, I have a sketch of it -- the prow, the figurehead cutting through the fog. A ship of war come back to port."
Geoff's father waited for the payoff, and knew that Donna would supply it. A second or two passed, brief hesitant moments where his wife and eldest looked at him, both knowing that he was poised, an actor in the wings listening for that critical cue.
It came from Donna: "And where's the fourth?"
"It's in the hallway," he said, and let the inevitable smile flow out onto his face. "Just behind you."
And with that, the family returned to their dinner and spoke not at all of the day just past or of the day to come. After dinner, Donna slept and her father read; Geoff was driven to soccer and, chasing down a ball that had spun into one corner of the echo-laden gymnasium, slipped and twisted his ankle. Screamed out in pain and was dimly aware of his own voice coming back in response. It would be the last game of that particular winter: the next month of Wednesdays were spent in the living room, leg swaddled, devouring books on history for no particular reason.
In college, Geoff is led to painting. With naked eyes he watches paint dry upon the canvas slowly, a perceptible quickening that becomes alchemy in his eyes. Mornings in Katherine's loft, a signet ring worn by her grandfather now part of the attire she calls her own. She sometimes speaks the years and archives of the Hadfield family, a thousand miles from Geoff's own kin. Geoff is led to painting and comes, on some level, to embrace it.
"You always liked green," she said one day. He had laid the canvas on the table in front of him and had his eyes inches above it. Geoff was washing the canvas in green, layers of deep green; he had heard her say color field one day. The image that formed in his mind came from an archetypal psych-rock record: waving pre-fractal fields and an overabundance of purple. Staring down at the canvas, he saw strokes and impressions that might have suggested grain to someone, someone other than him, but nothing else. "Field," he offered. And again, "Field," with a nod.
It was the afternoon, three on a Friday. Geoff arrived there after his class, today's session having to do with Guelfs. Katherine had left the lights off, and the late March sunlight drifted in and suffused the room. She sat in the corner sketching; fifteen minutes for a cheekbone; then the cheekbone discarded, starting again, half hour this time. Pencil and charcoal on grand sheets of off-white. He'd bought the canvases on the table himself, sampled supplies from her stockpile until he'd felt properly informed. Half campus thought he was in the art program, and the other half had thought so until they asked. You're in what? they said, never failing. No shit, voices trailing off, evaluating just how interesting this made him.
She worked at recalling anatomy; he simply arranged colors. It's coloring, she'd said to him one day. It's coloring the way a child would. He paused for breath and said carefully, Are you sure you mean that? And she'd said no. And later, apologized: I hadn't realized how that must have sounded.
Layers of acrylic atop canvas: sometimes a shell. Cover the other side, too; why not?
Eighteen months together as the sun shone through the dirty windows and they worked. He stopped for a beer and she stopped for a beer five minutes later. "Green fingers," she said to him. She had this wicked grin on her face: she pulled off the wit that he never could, spoke with a halting malice that made him smile instead of wince.
Geoff said, "Yeah" with a quick glance down at the digits in question. Katherine walked slowly to the couch, beer in hand, and slumped down in it. "Hell," she said. "I'm done for the day. I'm done."
"All right," he said. He took another sip from his beer. "I'm going to do a little more of this. I was thinking of maybe seeing Hal's thing play at nine."
She'd been looking down into her bottle. "Okay. Yeah, okay." She raised her eyebrows at him invitingly. "I'd like to see that, too." He sat back down at the table, the dropcloth and canvas entirely occupying his field of vision. Squeezed out a rich blue onto his pallet and transferred some of it to his brush, and began the work of irrigating the canvas. He stared at it, the loft's silence accompanied by the sound of Katherine's papers rustling, and his hand continued to move. Threadbare strands grew fortified; the blue was rendered bold and came to rest against the green, something like equals. He looked at the shore where one color came to sit against the other; his eyes wandered over the border he'd made. Finally, Katherine tapped his shoulder. We were getting worried, a warm look on her face. Could he read it? No; Geoff was an illiterate in the matter of faces, but he drew her close, or she did the same.
Later that night, or the next morning, hesitant. Moon and reflected streetlights now making corners of the loft glow. "I was thinking of something." What, she asked, her arm stretched across his back and down to his waist. "When you met my parents -- the painting near the front door. Remember?"
She shook her head. "The one downstairs, I remember. Why?"
He shook his head. "No reason. Remind me, though, the next time we're there. I want to show it to you."
"Okay", she said. "I will." And for a second, for three seconds, his mind filled with the image of her seeing it. I like it, she might say, studying its shapes, its colors, its mood. I do.
Katherine asked why he was smiling, and Geoff shook his head as best he could. "Never mind," he said.
"Never mind?"
"Never mind," a smile on his lips.
An office in a sub-basement, a cryptic after-hours elevator code, an oversaturated fluorescent glow: these were the hallmarks of Geoff's graduate program. He'd apparently won them over in the interview and through the letters: professors and associates of Katherine's who'd agreed to aid and abet him in something that would take him five hundred miles from her. Despite the wit and charm in the interview phase and the glowing letters, there was the small issue of his lack of relevant academic experience, leading to at least three outright rejections and one additional effort that, ultimately, proved futile.
He was here, two months in, the word madness still coming to mind, Jotted a reminder in his handheld, a hand-me-down from Donna -- call K. 8:45. Rubbed his chin and felt ten days' growth of beard, enough at least to convince his colleagues that he wasn't simply forgetting the essential elements of good grooming. He was playing chicken with the concept of a beard right now, which was fine with him. He'd ride his bike home that night; the rides helped him to shave off the fifteen pounds with which the previous year had gifted him.
The clock told him it was nearing six. Geoff wondered if the supply store off-campus was still open, and if not, how long it would be until it was closed. In other words, did he have enough time to get there and restock his supply of blue paint? He could come back here for his tiers of research afterwards, then break to call K. 8:45, then bike home.
Light danced brazenly across the surface of the concrete blocks in front of him, and he concluded: 6:30, and I can pull it off. He made for his bike outside, unlocked it and slung the chain into his backpack. Pulling on his helmet he went, chasing the sky's last glimpses of blue into an absent horizon. Passed six poplars, the wind remaking the contours of his face.
Art supply shop: a miniscule low rectangle fed by a parking lot that, viewed from above, was its inverse in shape. Hanging over it were another row of businesses; an insurance agent, dance studio, and gallery all called the second level home. Inside, rows of rescued display cases. Half the store bursting with paints in tubes and bottles; tools for those paints; material on which they could be applied. Another third occupied by the peripheral supplies, and in the rest, the fractional spaces, nestled odd fragmentary materials. He looked at figures to reference in lieu of live models; looked at the texture of something synthetic, let his eyes dart over framing supplies, the idea forming in his mind to isolate a favorite work of his--
Christ, he thought as the word hit home, was he calling it work now? This wasn't work, it was something to do in the idle hours, a complement, not work -- and the thought was washed back out, enveloped by his take on Katherine--
Geoff had ten minutes; this he knew from the sign outside. And he wandered over to smaller canvases, took three in his hand, and heard a voice. "Hey. Geoff. It's Geoff. Right?" Loose thin sweatshirt, hair akimbo -- the name formed in his mind -- Harry. Harry from Delaware; the other -- he put it together now -- eastern state expat in the program. They had mutual friends, to the extent that he had friends here. Harry had a generally open face, seemed sociable, seemed to know something about something, or at least gave that impression. "You dabble?" asked Harry.
Geoff gave him his best smile. Katherine aside, no one else from his world knew about this habit, this hobby, this distraction of his. "I dabble," he replied.
Harry nodded severely. "I know the look," and held up a block of some shapeless colorless material. "I do."
From behind the counter, the announcement of five minutes 'til closing came. Geoff indicated the cash register and Harry proceeded with the smooth choreography of longtime teammates. Harry flashed a twenty and a ten, while Geoff withdrew a scuffed debit card from his wallet. "Plastic, eh?" Harry said.
"Way the world's going," and Geoff took his canvases under his arm. They made for the glass door to the outside world.
"You got some time to kill?" Harry asked, and that was all it took for Geoff to conclude that his stack of work could wait a night. Meeting new people and all.
"Thinking beer? There's a couple of places within a few blocks."
"I'm thinking about -- craving, really -- a nice shot of whiskey, to be honest. But I think you can get beer at most of the places I'm thinking of, too."
"You drive?"
Harry shook his head. "I live five blocks from here. Makes the whiskey go down easier."
The place they found was a quiet sliver with a nearly bare front window. A splinter of a bar sat ten thin men; that bar was flanked by two booths in the front and four in the back. Neither Harry nor Geoff recognized any students there, but neither did they see any of the other barflies they'd come to recognize from their time in the town. The lights hung low and candles topped off tables; if you moved through the room, you moved through a porous amber that seemed lent to the air. On the stereo, the bartender conjured up a new homemade mix every hour or so: languorous beats, washed-out guitars, voices hollow and holy. Upon first settling in, Geoff and Harry traded stories of bars whose musical selections had mined a vein of cacophony. Traded stories of experiences at the airport ninety minutes north of them: that first flight in to have a look at the place in Harry's case; for Geoff, a trip there on vacation years before. Traded stories of conversations made blurry by an overextended set of speakers: Harry bluffing his way through a five-hour date, Geoff learning that he'd just agreed to pay fifty dollars for a small box of monocles. "To jukeboxes!" "Fuck jukeboxes," said Harry. "I'm getting old."
Then they traded impressions of the program; then they traded stories of parties they'd been to here and elsewhere, triangulating the ones at which they'd both been present. Six weeks back, loft thing. Reading a few blocks from here. Quiet subtle show, yeah; the one in the apartment with the brand-new floors and the chipped grey paint on the walls. The one at the collector of house music's one-story rental. The condo that smelled like whiskey. The place that reminded them both of a carnival. It was Geoff's turn to buy a round when the clock read 8:39. He stood and looked at Harry.
"You mind if this next round's a little late?" he asked. He tried his best to trace each word as it left his mouth, make sure it was clear, that he hadn't already taken on the telltale slurring he should have seen coming.
"What's up?" said Harry.
Geoff withdrew his phone from his pocket and pointed towards it. "Need to call my girlfriend. Told her I'd check in." His words came to an end and he remained standing, feeling like something should have followed that. Slowly, he detected a drunk beaming emanating from his face.
He could see Harry start to grin. "I'll be here when you get back," he said.
Geoff nodded, and the slow turn towards the door came. He walked outside and felt the air, suddenly cold against his forehead. Found a place to stand and dialed Katherine's number, carefully touching each key. Remembered as he pressed the penultimate 8 that it was stored in the phone, that he didn't need to dial from memory each time he wanted to reach her. Two rings and she had it, with an exhaled, "Hey". He nestled against the dark storefront next to the bar and took her greeting in and returned it. Within twenty seconds, she had picked up on his inebriation.
"You're drunk." It sounded good when she said it. Even now, years after she'd first said it to him, there was that tone of indignation, wholly false yet sharply delivered, and he loved it. She'd wear the Puritan role, almost; set herself up as the moral high ground, almost, and pull the changeup on him when she wanted to. Rarefied occasions, leaving him almost reeling. A recognition that there were sides to her that he hardly knew, that the potential existed of sides of her that he might never come to know.
"I suppose I am," he said. "I'm at a bar. Guy from the program and I are enjoying a beer or two." On most days, his enunciation wasn't this precise.
"You're making friends," she said. "I was getting worried."
He leaned his head forward, the pavement below it coming into focus, and shook out a laugh. "I'm a sociable gentleman," and the laughter flowed more once this'd been said. He couldn't quite say why. She joined in the laughter for a while; they shared that across the miles and beneath the common sky. And then she said, "You should call me tomorrow morning. We should figure this trip out, and I don't think you're in the best condition for travel planning right now. Go and drink with your friend; I'll get you up tomorrow."
He knew she couldn't see it, but he smiled at her anyway. "Awright. I love you."
He heard her say "I love you"; he smiled again and hung up the phone and paused a couple of seconds before walking back through the door of the bar. The urge caught him, the urge took him and told him that he should go to her then, that night, find a car and go. That that night in particular, he should be with her. No sense of danger there, no premonition of a coming menace; just that loneliness, that sense that something essential to him, something he needed, was far off. He inhaled and stepped back inside.
Two hours on. Crowds had passed through the bar while Geoff and Harry owned their booth, commanding round after round. Geoff wondered where this newfound ability to process the drink came from. Baffling. It was baffling. Barkeep'd already comped them twice, which was unheard of; they pondered an upgrade in the quality of beer, but nixed the idea: the cheap beer had gotten them this far and the cheap beer deserved to stay. The lights dimmed even further, the air rendered a flickering blue, and they started trading stories, and arrived on the critical one: how they'd come to be there.
Harry was a lifer. "I grew up loving art -- I'd always had great art classes growing up, and I was always the one who got the most out of it, who did the best drawings, the best watercolors, all that stuff. And one day I woke up to the fact that I loved it but I, you know, wasn't actually that good. Figure drawing did me in, shoulders particularly. I fought the fight as long as I could, denied the inevitable, and finally threw in the towel. But given that it was the only thing I enjoyed, I figured there had to be some sort of way to get close to it.
"Couple of years into it, I thought I hated the history part of things, too. Started coming around, though, when I got my hooks into some part of it I could inhabit. I'm a pocket expert, they tell me—"
"Who tells you?" asked Geoff. He hadn't intended to cut Harry off, and as those three words left his mouth he became murkily aware that Harry could quite possibly take serious offense.
Harry paused, processed, ran with it. "Smart people tell me this. I try to associate with geniuses. Geniuses who'll, you know, flatter me. Flattery works best when it comes from the intelligentsia." He paused, frozen in mid-gesture, and raised an eyebrow to Geoff. Geoff nodded. "Thank you. Anyway. These laudables, these notables tell me that when it comes to certain locales in certain decades, I am what some would call well-versed. Techniques, influences -- who had what teacher, who'd stolen what from whom. Very specialized – very, very specialized. Say, Vancouver in 1920. Philadelphia, 1890. East Lichtenstein, 1793." He drew the names and dates from mid-air, a magician conjuring handkerchiefs.
"Bullshit," said Geoff. "No such thing as East Lichtenstein."
"Hang on," said Harry. "I must excuse myself for a moment."
When Harry returned to sit down, he indicated Geoff. "Your turn. Cards on the table."
And Geoff said, "All right" and told him about the painting. Harry sipped his beer minimally throughout, and nodded. At the end, he prompted him for more details about the painting: the relative realism of it, the specific pigments of the colors. The sense of scale, the size of the canvas. The artist's signature.
"Toronto circa nineteen-hundred one of your periods?" asked Geoff.
Harry shook his head. "No. Not yet, at least. But maybe I know a guy..." He shook his head. "Nah," he said. "It's a blind spot for me." And the night continued, two more pints and that question of trying for the third comp, and then...no, no was the answer to that, and so each made his trip home.
The next morning, before Katherine's call could wake him, Geoff was rung awake by a call from Harry. "I've been thinking about your painting since last night," he said, "and something sounds weird about it."
Hung over, Geoff tried to say something like, "Define 'weird'." It emerged as a sopping string of vowels, his mouth dry and befouled by the beginnings of a hangover. He coughed.
"It's probably nothing. Jesus, you must have a hell of a headache. I'll call later," and with that Harry was off; Geoff staggered towards the shower. As the water cascaded across his head, he thought of blue and green and brown, and his headache subsided.
"It's good you got here when you did," he heard, and the snow continued its fall. The cross-country direct had taken him there, a seven PM arrival from which he'd caught a southbound train. Now he was in the car with his father, with Peter Mullen, on that familiar twenty minutes' road between the station and the place he still found himself calling home. "Much more of this and they'll start closing the airports. You're damn lucky. You were cutting it close." Geoff remembered sitting in the window seat as they taxied towards the terminal gate, of watching the first snow begin to fall.
"Where I live," said Geoff, "I don't have much choice." He and his father had run this conversation through a series of permutations in the past. Geoff expected that this wouldn't be the last time they spoke along these lines; some part of him suspected that his father might be thinking the same thing. "Was different when I was an undergrad -- more roads home from there."
Peter smiled but did not face him. "Maybe. Long roads, though."
"You know what I mean."
Peter let out an elongated "Yeah" and slowed the car. "Christ," he said. "Your mother will be livid. It'll take us at least an extra ten minutes to get home, probably fifteen. Slow going in weather like this." Geoff rested the top of his head against the passenger-side window and watched the interplay of snowflakes and light: their headlamps, streetlights, the handful of lit porches they passed. Virtually alone on the road, they were doing twenty-five where forty would have been adequate several hours before. Geoff biked nearly everywhere out west; he wondered if he'd need to drive in the three days he was back. Six days until he'd next see Katherine; one until he'd see Donna and this fellow of hers, about whom he'd heard much.
Seven minutes to the house now, accounting for weather. Geoff let out a cough. "Dad," he said.
"Yeah?"
"The painting in the hall. You mind if I take a picture of it before I go back west?"
"Why?"
"Guy in my department was curious about something. A friend of mine."
Peter drummed his right thumb against the top of the wheel. "Curious about what?"
"The style of it, I think. I told him the story of how we'd come to have it, and he..." Geoff stopped. He'd spent the flight east and the train ride south phrasing this out in his head, but the words nevertheless seemed flawed. Was there a right way, a proper way, to ask this question? He measured his father's terseness, the silences and the coursing of the wind above the car. "You've probably thought about this, too. You might have, at least. He said that someone on the avant-garde around those years, wouldn't have been doing that sort of work, that my description of it sounded too representational. It sounded too representational to him, at least. It could have been my description of it," and he felt himself losing control of his words, his line of reasoning losing traction and coming to rest somewhere unexpected. "I honestly don't know. We talked about it, figured a photograph would be the best measure of things." And then another, "I don't know." He hushed quickly, regretting this phantom retraction.
Peter grimaced and again knocked his thumb against the top of the steering wheel. He did this again a minute and a half later. The cabin of the car felt brittle, and Geoff wanted nothing more than to turn on the radio, to draw sound into this space. As they approached the development in which Geoff had grown up, Peter looked at him. "Practice," he said. "All it was." Geoff looked at him, his mouth half-open to demand more information, but his lips went silent, and Peter offered nothing else.
In silence, the car crossed the driveway, the snow already enveloping the asphalt below. "I'll shovel this after dinner," Geoff said.
"All right," said Peter. "You don't have to, you know."
"I know," said Geoff. "But I miss doing it. As strange as that sounds."
Peter shook his head. "Fair enough," he said. "I'll lend you my old jacket. Should fit you, right?"
There were days Peter could have passed for a much older brother of his son. Their frames were alike in all but their carriage. "Definitely," Geoff said, and they stepped out of the car, each reaching into the back for a suitcase.
The snow had tapered off by the time dinner was through, leaving a few inches to coat the yard. Geoff and his parents sat and talked for a while, the remnants of their meal congealing atop their plates. They spoke of neighbors, of the extended family, of work and school and the coasts. And then Geoff excused himself and, taking his father's worn jacket with him, walked to the garage. He caught sight of the painting out of the corner of his eye and smiled, knowing he'd return to it later in the evening.
He opened the garage door that led out to the driveway and chose work gloves and a shovel from the wall, the same one his father had used when Geoff was a boy and that he'd come to use after reaching a certain age, when snow days stopped being entirely for leisure. He stepped out into the cold, precise night and fell into the old movements after a few loads. He felt the skin beneath the work gloves shift, and knew he'd have blisters in the morning. He didn't mind: this repetition beneath a rose-blushed sky calmed him.
He cleared the path first for his mother's car, which he'd walked past in the garage, then carefully stepped back up to finish the work left by their tracks from earlier in the evening. His father's car, a rich brown color, sharply contrasted the blue of the house. He inhaled and exhaled and stood for a moment, mesmerized by the sight of his breath hovering above their front lawn. He came to the back of his father's car and dug under the snow next to it and threw it onto the lawn, then stepped slightly and repeated the motion. It wasn't his father's technique; Peter had in fact chided his son for the impracticality of it, but Geoff had timed himself once and compared it with his father's under what he believed were similar conditions. To Geoff's mind, the results of each were identical.
Half an hour later, he had come to the end of the shoveling. Most of the driveway's surface lay exposed, and he walked back to his father's car to rest and let the night sink in. He knew no one else back in the old hometown that night, and thought about how he'd spend the next few hours, before sleep could even be considered as an option. Curiosity took hold of him and he reached for the handle to the trunk. It was unlocked, and he raised it above his head slowly, gently, so as not to shake any excess snow loose. Inside he could make out the edges of a number of wooden frames. He lifted them and, in the dim light provided by the trunk's solitary bulb, shifted them so that their images became clear.
Eight paintings total, two copies each of a set of four: the painting from his childhood, the nautical scene he'd seen his father sketch and two others that he did not know. A ship's prow, crossing through mist, familiar in its outlines from sketchpads; a man and a woman standing in the distance, framed in a doorway, two sets of brushstrokes in his hands identical to the ones he could summon up at a moment's notice. Gently, he set the paintings down and touched the surface of one with his fingertips, felt the dried paint, felt the need to twist it, to wrench it somehow. He pulled his hand back. Geoff heard the front door open and halting footsteps on the path leading to the car, the paintings, him. Words fell to earth unspoken. He stood there, a light dust of snow newly falling, and sang to himself: exhale.
About the author:
Jersey-raised and Brooklyn-based, Tobias Carroll writes fiction and nonfiction. His short stories have appeared in THE2NDHAND, 3:AM, and Featherproof Books' "Light Reading" series. He has written about music and/or books for the Portland Mercury, Death + Taxes, Paper Thin Walls, Lit Mob, and others, and is presently at work on a novel. He maintains a website at www.thescowl.org.
© 2009 Word Riot
