The Painted Man

by Stevan Allred

part 4 of 5

The next day, while Michael and Mumsy dealt with the funeral arrangements, I was at the house with a list of things to get. His blue suit. A white shirt and a tie. His address book. His wallet. I was to check in with Arnie Gossard about feeding the cattle, and about how much feed was left in the barn. Michael thought we should secure the house, maybe change the locks, look for valuables to remove. He told me to pick up Dad’s mail so we could keep up with the bills.

I opened the drawer in his night stand, thinking I might find his wallet or his address book there. There was a copy of The Pulse inside. That was odd, The Pulse was a weekly alternative newspaper aimed at twenty-somethings who couldn’t be bothered to read the daily paper. They covered the local news, sort of, but everything was an enormous joke to them, except for which new band was the most cutting edge.

I set the paper aside. There were condoms in the drawer, and a bottle of lube. Not that this was news, given what we’d all seen of Danielle at the dinner party, but I gathered them up and took them to the kitchen. There was still garbage from the other night in there, and it was starting to stink. I pulled the wastebasket out from under the sink, and dropped the condoms and the lube in there. Even dead, my father was flaunting things. We all had to know what a stud he was.

I took the garbage out to the can on the back porch and headed back to the bedroom. Maybe his wallet was in his pants pocket. It was strange standing in that room that was not a part of the house I grew up in. It made the old part of the house into a dowdy little stepsister. The carpet was plush, the walls were a stylish dove gray, he had a plasma screen mounted on the wall so he could watch it from the bed or while he rode his stationary bike.

I went over to the nightstand. There was The Pulse. I’d already read this one, it was a month old, but I thumbed threw it anyway, trying to find whatever it was that had made my father pick it up. The cover story was about some cop who had an affair on company time, and wrote all these x-rated e-mails to the woman he was bonking, also on company time, all of it reported with The Pulse’s typical relish in all things salacious. No big whoop, and not at all the kind of thing my father would go in for. There was no way on God’s green earth he was into any of the music, or the bar scene for twenty-somethings. Unless maybe Danielle was the one who brought The Pulse into his life. And then I thought of the personals, and I flipped to the back, to “Women Seeking Men.”

A regular private eye I was, putting the pieces together. I was sure I’d find an ad circled, maybe several, and that one of those ads would lead back to Danielle. Mystery solved. Mutual friends my ass.

But there was nothing circled in the personals. I flipped over the next page, more classifieds, mostly musicians trying to hook up with other musicians, Garage/punk band seeks drummer for summer tour. Van=you get the gig and the next page, which is all big ads for chat lines on one side and ads for escorts on the other.

And there she was. “Danielle,” in a thin italic script, and then “Sexy, Discreet, Gentlemen Preferred” in regular typeface. Her hair was different in the picture, longer and looser and hiding half her face, the very picture of a coyly sexual come on.

The last person to see my father alive was a hooker. I felt, for a moment, as if I were inside a kaleidoscope, and all the complicated bits of my life, of Mike’s life, were shifting, aligning themselves in a new pattern. But I was lost in the prismed mirrors amongst all the other bits of colored glass. I couldn’t see what that pattern was, and my puzzlement took on a new shape.

* * *

Arnie Gossard showed up about the time I finished folding Mike’s laundry. He knocked but he was already in the house before I could make it to the front door, wearing a cap that said Titebond on the front. The shoulders of his jacket were wet with rain.

“I saw your car,” he said. “Thought I’d see if you needed anything.”

We sat in the kitchen, in the newly built-in breakfast nook, part of Mike’s hundred-thousand dollar remodel. The new cabinets and the nook and all the trim in the kitchen were done in a light toned wood streaked with darker gray, very dramatic. “Hickory,” Arnie told me when I asked. “It’s what them as has to have the latest fashion gets.” The nook had a view of the pasture, where the cattle were munching away on the grass even though there was a light rain falling.

“Jimmy and me spent all day yesterday fixing the fence,” Arnie said. “It ain’t pretty, but it’ll keep them steers from wandering off. There’s a couple that got away from us. They wandered on down into Scheele’s place.”

“Do we need to go get them?” I said.

Arnie was running his fingers along the edge of the molding at the end of the bench, stroking it as if it were a Stradivarius. “Not today,” he said. “They’ll be all right. Joe said he’d coax them into his corral if he got the chance.”

Arnie’s always been kind of a lump, a man with a body shaped like a fire hydrant and a face like a mole’s, dark eyes set close together and big front teeth crowded into a narrow mouth. Mumsy likes him, but then Mumsy likes everybody. He got up and pulled open a drawer, and he bent himself over it and studied the way the front corner was put together.

“I could’ve built these for half what your dad paid,” he said.

“Why didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t asked,” he said. Not a hint of how he felt about Mike snubbing him that way passed across his face. He opened a cupboard and took his glasses off, studying the hinge with those myopic little eyes of his. “Your dad had to have that fancypants outfit in the city do the work. They do nice work. I’m not saying they don’t, but they’re spendy as all get-out.”

One of Mike’s steers stared at me from out in the pasture, chewing his cud, impervious to the rain. Where the pond had been was nothing but a stretch of mud. The creek took a turn it had never taken before when it got to the far corner of the pasture. There was a gap in the dike as wide as the county road, and the creek flowed right through it.

“It must’ve been hard,” I said, “finding Mike out there.”

Arnie closed the cupboard and put his glasses back on his face, “How you holding up, Ray?”

“So far so good,” I said. I followed the creek upstream from the gap in the dike all the way to the county road, where it came out of a culvert. A big piece of my childhood flowed through that culvert, the Gossard boys racing sticks down the creek with Michael and me, or making boats out of zucchinis from the garden when they got too big to eat. I always made up a story about what we were doing, the Spanish Armada, Lewis and Clark, German U-boats and American destroyers.

“Tell me what it was like,” I said. “Finding him I mean.

Arnie opened up another cupboard, and then another, and another. “Goddammit,” he said, “I used to know where everything was in this kitchen.” He worked his way around until he got to a cupboard next to where the fridge was built in. “Bingo,” he said. “I knew this’d be here someplace.” He had a bottle of bourbon in his hand. He got a couple of glasses out. “You want ice?” he said.

“Sure.”

The fridge was the kind where ice rattled right out of a dispenser built into the door. Arnie brought the glasses and the bourbon over to the nook and sat down. “Woodford’s Reserve,” he said. “This is top shelf stuff.” He poured the glasses full, the ice crackling and settling into the bourbon. We raised our glasses and clinked them together.

“To your old man,” Arnie said. The bourbon was smooth going down. “He may’ve been a son of a bitch,” Arnie said, “but he always bought the best.”

“You didn’t like him much, did you,” I said.

Arnie lifted up his cap and scratched the top of his head. His hair was so thin I could’ve counted them one by one. He looked at me over the tops of his glasses, trying to figure out if I was accusing him of something.

“It’s okay,” I said, “I didn’t like him much either.” Arnie put his cap back on and grunted. He took a big sip from his drink and gave a little shiver that made him smile.

“It was raining hard yesterday morning,” he said. “I was in my shop, and the rain on the roof was pretty loud, but I could still hear all those steers making a ruckus like they hadn’t been fed yet. I hadn’t spoken a word to your dad in the last six months so I let it go on for quite a while. Wasn’t none of my business if your dad didn’t get his chores done.”

The second sip of bourbon went down even easier than the first. I don’t usually drink in the afternoon, and I don’t usually drink bourbon, but there were a lot of things I was doing that day that I don’t usually do.

“When I come out of my shop,” Arnie said, “I looked over to your dad’s place to see if his truck was there, which it was. The cattle were all bunched up by the barn, mooing their fool heads off. Then I saw that the dike had collapsed, and I knew right then what the trouble was. So I hustled on over. Cut straight through the pasture calling out your dad’s name the whole way. I figured I’d see him stuck in mud up to his ass.”

Arnie drained half his glass in one long swallow, and then he set it down on the table and started turning it from the top like it was the dial on a washing machine.

“When I got to the dike,” he said, “all I could see was mud. Looked like the water in the pond had worked its way underneath the dike, and with all this rain, the whole thing was just saturated top to bottom. You been over there to look?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”

“The mud carried him down the hill head first,” Arnie said. “He was about two thirds of the way from the top. On his back. Buried in a couple feet of mud, but all I could see was the tip of one boot sticking out. I figure he was on Scheele’s side of the fence when it happened. The whole thing must’ve give way at once. The paramedics said he’d hit his head and probably knocked himself out.”

You are supposed to feel something at a moment like that. Horror, Grief. A big sad lump in your throat. If you love your father, your body is supposed to be overcome, and if you hate him, shouldn’t you feel some relief when he dies? Some respite? Instead, water kept flowing down the creek through the pasture. The cattle kept on grazing. Arnie poured himself another drink, a short one this time. He tipped the bottle my way, but I shook my head no.

“At least if he was unconscious,” I said, “he wouldn’t have suffered much.”

Arnie took out a pocket knife and used it to scrape underneath his fingernails. “Look at that,” he said. He held the knife out to me, showing me the tiny bit of dirt on the tip of the blade. “I’ve still got it under my fingernails,” he said. He wiped the blade clean on his pants, and folded it back up. “Hell of a thing finding him that way,” he said. “His mouth was full of mud.”

Something stirred underneath my sternum then, an inkling of the price I would pay for losing my father this way. Not the price I was supposed to pay, not the tears of the bereaved nor the grief of a son who survives. No, this was something oily, something fetid and slick I would slip around in until I was covered in it like a second skin.

Arnie tossed down the rest of the bourbon in his glass, and he got up to leave. “Tell your mom to call me if she needs help with anything,” he said. “I’ll feed the cows until you figure out what to do with them. If you’re going to sell the herd you might give Kurmaskie a call.”

“Is there enough feed in the barn?”

“You’re good for maybe another month.”

On his way out Arnie stopped in the living room and looked at that enormous TV. His face was flushed, and he was swaying a little bit, and I had the feeling that the bourbon I drank with him wasn’t his first that day. He pointed at the TV with his thumb. “You folks decide to sell that,” he said, “You let me know.”

“All right.”

It struck me then, seeing Arnie in the doorway, his Titebond cap shoved back on his head, and the pouches of flesh under his eyes wrinkled and puffy, how old he was getting, and that he was getting old not slowly and evenly, but all at once, as if finding my father dead, with his mouth full of mud, had aged him far more than the mere minutes of actual time involved. We have spurts of growth when we’re children, after all, so why not a spurt of aging on the other end of our lives?

Arnie’s lips were pushed together under those tired eyes, such a rueful face, and he shook his head back and forth in a gesture of surrender.

“I’m going to miss the old son of a bitch,” he said. “I truly am.”

* * *

Proceed to part 5...