Bad Men

He’d been dabbling with painting for a long time, of course. Jack made some money selling bad oil paintings and worse watercolors to tourists, sometimes from a little stand that he set up down by the waterfront in Portland on sunny weekends, laying on the old-salt act as thickly as he could, inventing the kind of family history that a lot of folks around here could claim for real but that in Jack’s case was as false as the bottom of a magician’s hat. But he earned enough to keep himself in reasonable comfort in a house long since paid for, which was now his to pass on to whomever he chose-a couple of cousins, a handful of nieces and nephews, or his sister, Kate, who, if Jack’s will was anything to go by, was likely to be one disappointed lady once he was cold in the ground.

The doorbell rang. He wandered down the hallway, his old sneakers making a slapping sound on the bare boards. Through the frosted glass of the door he could make out the shape of the boy, disintegrating into black and red shards like watercolors dropped on oil. He opened the door and stepped back in mock surprise.

“Hey, it’s the Danmonster.”

The boy stomped past him, not even waiting to be invited in. He walked quickly to the door of Jack’s studio and then looked back at the old man for the first time.

“Is it okay?”

“Sure, sure. You go right ahead. I’ll follow you in soon as I get my coffee.”

Outside, daylight was already beginning to fade, igniting lights in the windows of distant houses. Jack retrieved his coffee cup from the kitchen, adding a little hot water to it to heat it up, then followed the boy into his studio. It was a small space, formerly a spare room, but Jack had transformed it by replacing one wall with sliding glass doors, so that the floor became grass that rolled slowly down until it eventually reached the trees that bordered the low cliff edge, the water beyond a dark, threatening blue. The boy was standing before the easel, looking at Jack’s latest work in progress. It was another oil, and another attempt to capture the view over the water. Another unsuccessful attempt, Jack thought. It was the uncertainty principle in action: the damn thing kept on changing, developing, and the instant he attempted to capture it, he became complicit in a lie. Still, there was something calming about the exercise, even as it drew closer and closer to failure with every movement of his hand, every stroke of his brush.

“This isn’t like the others,” said the boy.

“Hmm?” said Jack, momentarily distracted by his own failings. “What did you say?”

“I said this isn’t like the others. It’s different.”

“Different how?”

Jack joined the boy, then frowned and leaned closer to the canvas. There were marks upon it, like black streaks on the waves. He looked up at the ceiling and tried to determine if dirty water had somehow leaked down through a previously undiscovered crack, but there was nothing. The ceiling was white and unblemished.

Carefully, he reached out with a finger and touched the canvas, then drew his hand back slowly. The marks looked like paint, yet he couldn’t feel the texture of the brush strokes beneath his touch. He looked closer and saw that the black marks were under some of his own strokes, the horizontals that he sometimes used in an effort to capture the movement of the sea. Somehow, it seemed that he had managed to paint over the blemishes without noticing.

But that was impossible. There was no way that he could have failed to notice the flaws in the canvas.

He took a couple of steps back and tried to understand what the marks represented, tilting his head as he went, then pausing as he reached the threshold of the hallway. Before him, the shapes became distinguishable as forms, and he knew what they represented. He knew also that there was no way that Jack Giacomelli had been responsible for the marks on the canvas, for Jack Giacomelli never added anything to the natural landscape that was his sole inspiration.

“They’re people,” said the boy. “You’ve put people in your painting.”

The boy was right.

There were two bodies floating in the oiled waters of his painting.

The bodies of men.

The island had been quiet for so very long.

Its past slumbered gently beneath the surface, its exhalations causing the trees to sway, the waters to ripple, the dead leaves to chase one another across the grass like small brown birds in flight. It slept the way one who has endured great pain might sleep, its rest both escape and recuperation. The memory of those who had suffered and died upon it in years gone by drifted through its consciousness, so bound up with the land and the trees and the sea that it was impossible to tell if they had ever truly existed as separate entities.