Small Town

“Do they call you Reginald or Reggie?”

“Mostly Reginald.”

If you has, if you have a computer. Just the slightest stress on have. He was careful to speak correctly, but care was required. She found it charming.

“Reginald,” she said, and looked at him. He was several inches taller than she was, say an inch or so over six feet. Slender but well muscled, with broad shoulders, and muscles in his arms that stretched the sleeves of his red polo shirt. She kept her eyes away from his crotch, but couldn’t stop her mind from going there.

She said, “Tell me about your uncle. When did he start making art?”

“About five years ago. No, that’s not exactly right. Five years ago he stopped paying much mind to people, and then a year or so after that he started making these things.”

“First he withdrew.”

“He stopped answering,” he said. “Took less and less notice of people. He’d be staring, and there wouldn’t be anything there for him to stare at.”

“I understand.”

“What I think, he was going inside.”

“Yes.”

“And he’d go in the street like a junk picker and come home with all this trash, and my mom was worried, like he’d have to, you know, go away or something, but it turned out he was bringing all this shit—”

He winced, and she was touched. Gently she said, “I’ve heard the word before, Reginald.”

“Well.”

“I may even have said it once or twice.”

“Well, what I was saying. He was bringing these things home for a reason, to use them in what he was making. But we didn’t know that until one day he showed my mom what he was working on, and that made it better. The junk-picking and all.”

“Because he had a reason.”

“Right, and so it wasn’t so crazy.”

“Did he talk about his work?”

“He, uh, pretty much stopped talking. I don’t know what you’d call him, if he’s crazy or what. He’s not scary, except the way any old man’s scary who keeps to himself and doesn’t say nothing, anything, and just stares off into space. But he never makes trouble or disturbs anybody, and there’s people who know what he does and bring him things, empty spools of thread and bottle caps and pieces of wire and, well, you seen, saw, the kind of things he uses.”

“Yes.”

“So this man on the next block said there’s people who pay attention to this type of art, and I got some pictures taken, and I went around different people until somebody sent me to Mr. Andriani, and he said you were the person to come see.”

“And here you are.”

He nodded.

She said, “They call it outsider art, Reginald, because it’s produced by artists who are outside the mainstream, generally self-taught, and often entirely unaware of the art world. But it seems to me you could just as easily call it insider art. You were just looking at Aleesha MacReady’s painting of Moses. Could any work of art be more internal than hers? She’s communicating a wholly private vision. It’s outside as far as the New York art scene is concerned, but it comes from deep inside of Aleesha MacReady.”

“And my uncle’s work’s like that?”

“Very much so.” She walked around him, careful not to touch him, but passing close enough so that she fancied she could feel his body heat. “I don’t know much about Aleesha,” she went on. “I’ve never met her, she’s never come to New York. I’d be surprised if she’s ever been out of West Virginia. But I gather she’s quite normal in her day-to-day life. When she picks up a paintbrush, though, she accesses whatever it is we see in her paintings.”

She moved to stand in front of another work, painted in Day-Glo colors on a Masonite panel that had been primed in black. Like all the artist’s work, it showed a monster — this one was rather dragonlike — devouring a child.

“Jeffcoate Walker,” she said. “Nice, huh? How’d you like this hanging on your living room wall?”

“Uh...”

“Of course you wouldn’t. His work’s impossible to live with, and my guess is that he creates it so he won’t have to live with it inside him. But it’s only a guess, because Mr. Walker’s been institutionalized for the past thirty-some years. I believe the diagnosis is some form of schizophrenia, and it’s severe enough to keep him permanently locked up.”

“My uncle’s nowhere near that bad.”

“What he has in common with both of these artists, and with just about everyone whose work I show, is an internal vision, a very personal vision, along with the ability to communicate that vision. I find that very exciting.”

“I see.”

She had, suddenly and entirely unbidden, a personal vision of her own. Reginald Barron, stripped naked, all done up in a complicated leather harness suspended from a nasty-looking meat hook mounted in the ceiling. His muscles strained against the leather straps that cut into his glistening teak-colored skin, and more leather girded his loins, painfully tight on his balls and the base of his engorged penis, and—