Face on the Wall (7 page)

Mary read the part of the article that had been missing from the scrap on Annie's table.

… It is rumored that

real estate is involved, a large parcel

of land upon which Frederick Small

intends to build a gold-plated housing

development of million-dollar homes.

The deal awaits the signature of the

missing Mrs. Small.

“Mr. Jackson,” said Mary, “where did you get this story?”

“What?” He turned away from the map and looked vaguely at the folded page Mary held under his nose. “God, I don't know. Somebody phoned it in. I've got these people out there”—he waved his arm at Washington Street, and, out of sight beyond the girlie theater across the way, the rest of the world, beginning with Boston Common and the Charles River—“they send in stuff.”

“I see. Well, thank you.” Mary went out and closed the door gently, feeling sorry for George Jackson. The poor kid had aspirations for higher things. He wanted to interview heads of state. He wanted to race down a bomb-cratered road in an armored Jeep. Instead, he was here in Boston, on Washington Street above a joke-goods store, mired in shameless voyeurism and subpornograpbic trash, neck-deep in shucked sheiks and sizzling flings. Poor wretch.

Mary glanced in the window of the joke-goods store on her way out. The gruesome drooping eye of the monster ogled her. Its ghastliness was exactly what she had expected to find upstairs in the office of the
Courier.
And perhaps she really had. Perhaps that pink-cheeked would-be foreign correspondent was actually a monster in the flesh.

She turned away, shuddering. It was beginning to rain. On the way home the heavens opened. Lightning flashed. Mary had to pull the car to the side of the road, because the windshield wipers couldn't handle the water sheeting down the glass.

Chapter 11

Brave soldier, here is danger!

Brave soldier, here is death!

Hans Christian Andersen,

“The Steadfast Tin Soldier”

“I
'm afraid,” said Eddy. His hair was drenched. Rivulets of water poured down his cheeks. He struggled after his father up the difficult ascent behind the house. It was a long walk in the downpour to the top of Pine Hill.

“It's just a little rain.” Bob Gast had to shout to be heard above the thunder, which rumbled and crashed like lumber falling downstairs. The lightning was simultaneous. “We've come out to watch. I really want you to see this, Eddy.” There was a sharp splintering noise behind them, and Bob Gast jumped. Turning, he saw a split tree fall slowly, crashing through other trees, snapping the trunk of a big white pine.

Eddy cowered against his father. He had to be dragged up the steep side of the underground reservoir at the top of the hill.

“Here we are. Now we can see everything, Eddy. See? We can see
everything
from up here.” Gast gripped his son's hand and braced himself on the battered grass, while the trees below them lashed to and fro, their branches snapping and crashing heavily to the forest floor.

He did not look down at his terrified son. Clearing his throat, he shouted the words he had been rehearsing in his head. “Okay, Eddy, now I want you to go over there and bring me my knife. I lost it right over there. See it over there, lying on the ground? Just go over there and get it for me, okay, Eddy? Just go get it and bring it here.”

Eddy gaped up at his father. Gast had to give him a little shove. “Now, Eddy, you've got to be brave. Go ahead.”

Eddy started forward toward the clearing at the crest of the hill. Around it the lightning struck down in a ring, once, twice, thrice. Soon it was a perpetual circle of white fire. Running on his short legs, Eddy stopped in the center and gazed around, turning to see it all, his small figure dwarfed by the broad landscape and the surrounding forest of storm-tossed trees. Thunder fell out of the sky and lightning danced in a ring of searing white light. Eddy was enchanted. He was no longer afraid. He could see that the thunder and lightning meant him no harm.

“Eddy,” shouted his father. He was crying. “Eddy, come back.”

The lightning dimmed and moved away. The thunder grumbled softly. The rain diminished and stopped. Slowly Eddy trotted back out of the ring of fire, his mind alight. Water streamed from his wet hair, it poured down his cheeks and ran into his open mouth. It tasted of tears and the pure water of heaven.

Next day Eddy knocked on the south door of Annie's house. Flimnap, who had been staining Annie's cabinets, let him in. He greeted Eddy cheerfully and helped him take off his jacket.

Annie turned away from painting Scheherazade on the first division of her wall and greeted him warmly. “Well, hello there, Eddy.”

Eddy said nothing. He stared up at the wall, gazing at the big figure of Aesop and the little ship on the horizon, and in the foreground the hare and the tortoise. He was suddenly excited. “Whassat?” he said, pointing at the wall.

Annie explained. She told him about the race between the hare and the tortoise, and about the ship full of men who were trying to get home after winning a war. It was not enough. He wanted to know about the boy with the sword. “Whassat? Whassat?”

Annie was pleased. Here at last was someone who appreciated her wall. She sat down beside Eddy on the sofa and told him about the sword that was stuck in a rock until the future king of England came along and pulled it out. He wanted more. She showed him her own picture book of
Jack and the Beanstalk
, and he was charmed. “Whassat?” he said, putting his finger on the speaking harp. “Whassat?” He stared wide-eyed at the giant, towering over jack, and Annie growled, “Fee, fi, fo, fum!”

“Fee, fi, fo, fum!” echoed Flimnap, grinning at Eddy.

“Fee, fi, fo, fum!” shouted Eddy.

Flimnap was finished with Annie's cabinets, and he went away. But Annie went on and on. She couldn't stop. There was so much to tell Eddy, so much to show him—all of Hans Christian Andersen and Edward Lear and Beatrix Potter and Babar and Dr. Seuss. The boy was hungry for stories. But then Annie looked at her watch and called a halt. No more today. She had to get back to work.

She tried a diversion. “Here, Eddy, why don't you draw too?” She made a place for him at her table with sheets of drawing paper and a collection of colored pens. “Look, aren't they pretty? Red and blue, and, see here, silver and gold.”

At once he grasped the pens and, without hesitation, began to draw. Annie watched him bend his small bullet head over the paper and pick up the silver pen. He seemed content.

For the next two hours she sketched the story of Scheherazade, and forgot about Eddy. When she finally came down the ladder, stiff and sore, he was still working on the same piece of paper.

She looked at it in surprise. “Why, Eddy, that's really good. Where did you learn to draw like that?” It was a portrait of yesterday's storm, with silvery spears of rain and golden shafts of lightning.

“For you,” said Eddy, thrusting it at her.

“Oh, thank you,” said Annie, really meaning it. After Eddy went home she tacked it up on the kitchen wall, where it shimmered and glowed.

When Flimnap came in, he admired it too. “My God,” he said, “did you do that?”

“I wish I had. It's Eddy's. Isn't it wonderful?”

After that Eddy came every day. No one came with him. No one came to get him. There was no sign of his parents, or of his sister Charlene.

“Whassat?” he wanted to know. “Whassat, Annie, whassat?” One day he was the first to notice a blotch on the far right end of the wall. “Hey,” he said, “lookit, whassat?”

Annie looked. On the blank white plaster beneath the fifth arched opening of her painted gallery there was another orange stain, with two greenish blobs like cartoon eyes, surrounded by a smear of sulphur yellow.

“It's a stain,” said Annie doubtfully. “It's just a stain.” But she was alarmed. Would her whole wall be spoiled by damp and mildew? Where was Flimnap? Once again he would know what to do.

By this time Flimnap was a fixture at Annie's house. He slept in the gypsy caravan mounted on the back of his truck, and he took his meals there too, using whatever cooking apparatus was connected to the stovepipe that stuck out of the roof.

Annie was grateful for his readiness to turn his hand to anything.
Do this,
she said,
do that,
and he did it. What if she were to say,
Kiss me, Flimnap!
Would he obey like a good servant? Sometimes Annie imagined it, but she wasn't about to try. Nevertheless, she couldn't help noticing the nimble grace of Flimnap's lanky body and the deftness of his narrow hands. What, she wondered, did he think of Annie Swann? Most of the time he was respectful and amusing, but a little remote. Perhaps he liked pretty cuties who sat with their legs crossed coyly, not big busty women who laughed loudly and sat with their legs wide apart and their feet planted firmly on the floor.

So it was probably just kindness, the way he took such care of her safety. Her ladder, he said, was shaky. He would make a scaffolding with a platform on top and wheels underneath, so she could roll the whole thing easily from left to right.

“But won't it be unsteady?” said Annie. “Won't it roll out from under me?”

“No, no. There'll be locks on the wheels.” On the next sunny morning, he set up a rented table saw and drill press on the lawn, along with a pile of four-by-fours from the lumberyard and a set of wheels. The saw screamed, the drill press buzzed and whined. Then Flimnap took the pieces indoors and bolted them together, attaching the wheels and fastening the ladder to a rail so she could move it from side to side.

“Show me how the brakes work,” said Annie.

“You just flip down these tabs,” he said. “See? It won't budge. And then, when you want to move it, you flip them up again.”

Annie flipped the wheel tabs up and trundled the scaffolding sideways. “That's great,” she said, beaming at him. “It rolls like anything.”

From then on her work was much more comfortable. Sitting on the edge of the platform, she was at just the right height to work on the middle level of the wall. For the top there was a clever second platform near the ceiling, twelve feet above the floor.

Now, when she showed Flimnap the second appearance of an ugly blotch on her wall, he was not dismayed. “I'll use sealer this time,” he said. And within the hour the stain was gone.

Chapter 12