The Lock Artist (9 page)

I was through the open door. Into the cold air. That’s when something came swinging at me from out of view. The arm of the other gray-jacketed man, hitting me across the neck like a branch from one of those trees I could see in the distance.

I was on the ground now. Looking up at the sky, which seemed to be spinning counterclockwise. It made me think back to the only other time in my life I had been captured like this. Only I had no reason to fear for my life
then. I had no reason to wonder if they’d stand me up against a wall and rip me apart with a shotgun.

I felt myself being turned over, the handcuffs being slapped tight on my wrists.

“We’ve got you now,” a voice said. “You ain’t going nowhere.”

There was an antique store a few blocks down from the liquor store. They had a few old locks there, and the old man who owned the place seemed to already know about me, so I didn’t have to break him in with the whole pantomime routine. I found the locks, some with keys, some without, took them all to the counter, and the owner looked them over and charged me five dollars total.

I took the locks apart and put them back together again. I practiced using my makeshift tools to open them. I had four picks now, and two tension bars, all of them just thin strips of metal I had filed down into different sizes, all of them stuck into rubber erasers that I could use as handles. I was learning by trial and error, and it didn’t take me long to figure out it was all a matter of touch. How much tension you put on the lock, and how you lift each tumbler, one by one, until the whole thing turns free.

I got damned good at it. I really did. That was my summer. Me and a pile of rusty old scrap metal.

Then the day came. The Wednesday after Labor Day. They were just about to start fixing up the high school around then, so you’re going to have to trust me to paint the right picture here. Start with a main building that hadn’t been touched in forty or fifty years. Tired gray bricks, windows that were too few and too small. Surround the whole thing with concrete and fencing and tall light poles. Then spread a dozen trailers all over the place, as if dropped at random. Those were the temporary classrooms to handle the overflow of students.

Or let me put it another way. The day I came to this prison I’m sitting in right now, the day I stepped out of the Corrections Department van and took my place in line at the processing center—I was ready for it. I was
ready because I had been through something pretty similar once before. The way it looked that day, the soul-crushing
grayness
of the place. Above everything else, the way my stomach turned inside out at the thought of spending so much time there, unable to leave.

Yeah, I’d been there. All on that Wednesday after Labor Day, when I stepped off the bus and took my place as a member of the incoming freshman class at Milford High School.

The first thing I noticed was the noise. After those five years at the institute, to suddenly find myself surrounded by over two thousand kids with healthy, normal voices. That main hallway was as loud as a jet engine, everyone talking and shouting on that first day of school, some of the boys chasing each other, pushing each other into the lockers, aiming sharp-knuckled punches at each other’s shoulders. I felt like I was walking into an insane asylum.

There were a lot of other new freshmen, of course. Most of them probably looked as overwhelmed as I was, and probably didn’t say much more than I did, either. Even so, it didn’t take long for me to stand out. Every class I was in, the teacher would make a big deal about introducing me and telling everyone else about my “unique circumstances.” The “challenge” I was bravely facing. Everybody welcome Mike, eh? Just don’t expect him to say thank you in return. Ha ha.

I’m not sure how I got through that first day. It’s all a blur now, looking back on it. I didn’t eat lunch, I remember that much. I kept walking through the hallways, eventually finding myself back at my locker. I felt utterly lost and alone as I stood there, just spinning the dial on my locker, over and over.

The next morning, as I was getting ready to go back to that school again, I admit it . . . I started thinking about suicide. I rode on the bus in my own little cocoon of silence among the roar of the other kids.

The next day, when I got home I actually started looking around to see if I could find any pills. Uncle Lito had his own bathroom. I usually didn’t have any reason to go in there, but that evening, while he was minding the store, I took inventory of his medicine cabinet. There was aspirin and cough syrup and hangover medicine and jock-itch cream and a thousand other things, but nothing strong enough to do what I had in mind.

I wasn’t driving yet, but still, I thought maybe I could take his car, get up some speed, and then aim right for a tree. Or hell, for those concrete embankments under the railroad bridge. Talk about a proven death trap. My biggest worry about that was that I wouldn’t get the car going fast enough,
or that I’d hit something else first and end up just wounded and fucked up and in huge trouble but still very much alive.

What a cheerful turn my little story has taken here, I know, but this was pretty much a running theme for that whole first semester at the high school. Nobody talked to me. I mean nobody. As that first semester went on, it got colder, and darker. I was getting up at six in the morning, in total darkness, to catch the bus at six forty to get to school by seven fifteen, not just going to this place I hated so much, but doing it before the sun even started thinking about coming up.

It makes my heart ache, just thinking back on that time in my life. How lonely I was. How out of place I felt every single minute of every day.

When I went back to school for the second semester, there were new classrooms to find, a new set of kids to get used to me sitting in the back of the room, never making a sound. And right off the bat, a new class for me. Freshman art, or, excuse me, Art Foundations. The teacher was a man named Mr. Martie. He was younger than most of the other teachers in the school. He had a beard and permanently red eyes, and he spent most of that first class mumbling to himself about the size, shape, and color of his headache.

“Let’s not get too excited on the first day, eh?” He walked among the art tables, ripping off sheets of drawing paper from a large pad. When he came to me, he ripped off a sheet and I got maybe eighty percent of it, most of one corner still on the pad. “Just draw something today. I don’t care what.”

He passed by me, not giving me a second look. Not pausing to single me out like most of the other teachers did. So he had that going for him already. With any luck, this would be one class where I could really disappear into the wallpaper.

He went back to his desk and tilted his head back. “I would murder for a cigarette right now,” he said, his eyes closed.

There was a small basket of art supplies on each table. Mine had a few broken pieces of charcoal-looking crayon things and a couple of pencils. I took out one of the pencils and stared at the blank piece of paper. Three square corners of nothing, and one jagged edge.

“You’ve got to give us a subject,” a girl in the front row said, apparently with the authority to speak for all of us. “We don’t know what to draw.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mr. Martie said. “Draw a landscape.”

“A landscape?”

Mr. Martie looked up at the girl. There was a lifetime of regret in his face, that the years spent studying art would lead him to be here in this
classroom on this January morning, the windows still dark, sunrise a half hour away. “Yes,” he said. “A landscape. A place, you know? Draw a place. Draw your favorite place in the world.”

“In my last school, the art teacher always gave us something specific to draw. Something that we could see, right in front of us. We never just drew from memory.”

He let out a sigh, got to his feet and went to a cupboard, and pulled out the first two things he put his hands on. A gray cylinder, about one foot high, and a gray wedge about the same height. He went to the empty table at the front of the room and put the cylinder down, then the wedge down right next to it.

“For those of you who wish to do a still life . . .” He sat back down and closed his eyes again. “The rest of you are on your own.”

The girl in the front row raised her hand again, but he wasn’t about to make the same mistake and notice her this time. Finally, she just gave up and started drawing, presumably tackling the challenge of the cylinder next to the wedge.

Meanwhile, the kid sitting next to me had already started on drawing a house. It was a rectangle with smaller rectangles inside, windows and doors. Then he drew a chimney on top with a curl of smoke coming out.

I picked up a pencil and thought about what to draw. I had this fascinating still life up there I could try. But no, instead I started sketching in the railroad bridge in the center of town. I imagined myself standing on the other side of it, away from the liquor store. From there I’d see the restaurant, the big sign,
THE FLAME
in block letters,
24 HOURS
just below that in smaller letters. More details coming to me as I pictured it in my mind. The flashing lights on the bridge embankments, the door to the liquor store barely visible through the archway. The iron bars on the front window.

This certainly didn’t qualify as my favorite place in the world, as my fine teacher had suggested, but it felt so familiar to me. It felt more like home than anywhere else, this one particular bend in the road with a beaten-down liquor store waiting on the other side of a beaten-down railroad bridge. I started to shade in some of the darker areas, the way the bridge would cast a shadow on the door to the restaurant. The newspaper boxes lined up outside. It needed some trash now, some random cans and bottles rattling around in the parking lot. It needed dirt and dust and stains and misery. I didn’t think I could ever capture the whole thing, if I spent the rest of my day here, using up every pencil in the basket.

Then, in my reverie, lost in the picture and not aware of what was going on around me . . . Mr. Martie had stood up. He had asked everyone in the class not to commit any actual felonies while he stepped out of the room for a moment. It didn’t register until later, until after he had passed behind me on his way out the door. Then he reappeared behind me. He was looking over my shoulder now as I struggled to make my drawing look just like the picture in my head. It took me a moment to realize that he was standing there.

He didn’t say anything. He put one hand on my shoulder and gently moved me away so he could get a better look at the drawing.

So began the only good and decent chapter in my life.

Two and a half years, that’s how long it lasted. It’s funny how your life can turn on one thing like that. One talent that you don’t even know you’ve been given.

By the end of the week my schedule had been rearranged. Instead of going to that first period freshman class, I was doing a double period of Advanced Independent Study in Art in the afternoon, right after lunch. It became an oasis in the day for me. The one chance all day I had to stop holding my breath.

I even made a friend. Yes, an actual, living human friend. His name was Griffin King. He was one of the other twelve students in the advanced art class. I was the only freshman, and he was the only sophomore. He had long hair, and he acted like he didn’t care much about anything in this world except being an artist one day. It was a tough way to think in Milford, Michigan, believe me. On my second day in the class, he came over and sat next to me. He looked at the drawing I was working on. It was one of my first attempts at a portrait. My Uncle Lito. Griffin kept watching me struggle with it until I finally stopped.

“Not bad,” he said. “Have you done a lot of this?”

I shook my head.

“Who’s the model? Did he sit for this?”

I shook my head.

“What, you’re doing it from memory?”

I nodded.

“That is freaky, man.”

He bent down to look more closely.

“Still, it’s kind of flat,” he said. “You need more shading to bring out the features.”

I looked up at him.

“I’m just saying. I mean, I know it’s not easy.”

I put my pencil down.

“How’s this school treating you, anyway?”

I looked at him again, lifting both hands as if to say, do you not know anything about me?

“I know you can’t talk,” he said. “I think that’s totally cool, by the way.”

What?

“I’m serious. I talk way too much. I wish I could just . . . stop. Like you.”

I shook my head. I looked up at the clock to see how much time we had left until the class was over.

“I’m Griffin, by the way.” He extended his right hand. I shook it.

“How do you say hello, anyway?”

I looked at him.

“I mean, you must know sign language, right? How do you say hello?”

I slowly raised my right hand and waved at him.

“Ah, okay. Yeah, that makes sense.”

I put my hand down.

“How do you say, ‘I hate this town and everything in it. And I wish everyone would just die’?”