TWELVE
NIGHT MOVES
Kendall stopped at a liquor store and picked up a bottle of Jim Beam. It was the only way to get through the pages. A spasm shot along his spine remembering the old days when he couldn’t lay pencil to paper without a snort of blow and a shot of vodka. He didn’t blame Shirley for that. They were both cokeheads. God’s way of telling you you had too much money. Now the thought of blow made him shudder. Even in his dreams, it made him shudder.
But a little bourbon, hey. ’Murica. He was a freelancer. He could work any damned way he pleased. He could even smoke cigarettes. He’d never smoked. Never seen the appeal. Every time Shirley suffered a setback, real or imagined, she reached for a cigarette. Someone badmouthing her? Outside for a smoke. Bank overdraft? Nothing a cig couldn’t fix. Ran up and over the curb in a drunken haze, bashing in the front fender? It called for a smoke.
He parked on the street, opened the garage, turned on the lights, and peeled the tarp off the Corvette. Cherry. Metallic blue with the 427 and lakers. He leaned over the open cockpit and inhaled the scent of old leather and fiberglass. He opened the door and sat in the driver’s seat, hands at two and ten, hitting 5000 in third gear.
I was cruisin’ in my Sting Ray late one night when an XKE pulled up on the right . . .
He put the transmission in neutral, released the hand brake, got out and went outside, popped the Avalon’s trunk, and withdrew a hand pump with gauge. He returned to the garage and went methodically from tire to tire inflating each to 40 pounds per square inch. Goodyear blue dots. The rubber was unnaturally dark and supple. He went to the rear of the vehicle, planted his feet against the lip of the concrete opening, and pushed the Corvette deeper into the garage. It rolled without resistance. He pushed it thirty feet in, then went outside and moved his own car into the garage. He went to the back of the long garage and tried the basement door. It would not budge, as if there was something heavy on the other side. He shut the garage door, locked it, and headed up and around to the house.
He could unpack, or he could draw. He unpacked. It was too early in the day to start drinking. He finished with the bedroom and moved on to the library. He unpacked books and records for the next two hours, arranging his CDs alphabetically on the built-in wall shelves. The old-school giant cathode-ray TV was too big for him to move by himself. He thought about asking Tommy. He could pay the boy in comics.
His comic collection nearly filled one of the small bedrooms, the comics arranged by title in long rectangular boxes, the comics themselves sealed in individual plastic bags. He looked at the boxes stacked six deep and five wide. It could wait.
Back to the drawing board. He turned on the radio, poured two fingers in his classic Burger King Star Wars glass, and slugged it down. A nuclear device exploded in his gut. He concentrated on the details, nose six inches from the board. From time to time he pulled his head back.
WAVE played “So Pale and Precious” from the Dukes of Stratosphear record. When he pulled back, he saw the entirety of what he’d drawn, and there was no denying his ability with the nude female form. Some of his student sketches still adorned the walls at the Kubert School. His hard-on disturbed him. It wasn’t right. They weren’t even his own fantasies. They were the lurid quotidian fantasies enjoyed by serial killers and politicians.
Filled with self-loathing, he poured another shot and bent over the board. Sprint to the finish. But a sprint wouldn’t cut it. They were paying him the big bucks to imagine the scene in detail.
I vas only following orders.
Distracted and annoyed, he drew. The drums. The drums were all wrong for the song. Was that two stations he was getting? Kendall turned off the radio. The drums rolled with the surf. They were coming from next door. Tommy.
He finished the sequence. The next sequence involved the vacuum cleaner salesman coming to the door. The anvil lifted from his shoulders. He was finished with the filth . . . for the time being. He was incapable of doing a less than first-rate job. They would love it and ask him to illustrate further sequences which made this one look like Care Bears.
Tommy’s drumming washed over him like the surf. Hard to believe that he was a teenager, but Mozart had been five when he composed his first songs. Keith Moon joined his first band at sixteen.
Kendall stood, stretched, reeled. He’d been at it for three hours. It was dark out, but Tommy drummed on. The sound was not objectionable. He would not be able to hear it from the other side of the house where his bedroom was. It was ten thirty. Kendall decided to call it a night. He stumbled around the rectangular corridor: running into things, finding his bed, stripping, and tumbling in.
He fell into a shallow sleep with vivid dreams. He had a recurring nightmare where he came home, and Shirley was waiting for him. Oh no, he thought. Oh no. You died. This isn’t fair. In the dream, he swallowed his disappointment and rationalized. She’d turned him into her caretaker. That’s just the way it was.
Shirley cried out in her slurred demanding voice. He went to her door and found himself hanging five on a surfboard off the coast of Malibu. Catching a monster coming in fast, seeing a girl with raven hair on an inner tube directly in his path. He wanted to shout, wanted to jump, but instead, he hit her, and she cried out.
Kendall woke up, the echo of her scream still resonating in his head. He sat bolt upright in bed. The echo lingered in the house.
It was real.