Art's Blood (3 page)

“Boz, you crazy fucker!” Aidan’s anguished howl reverberated in the stunned silence as he dove for the sad little pile of broken components. “You’re destroying the show!”

“You got it, little buddy,” replied Boz. Satisfied that the cameras were ruined, he walked placidly over to the nearest wall and began pulling down the flimsy shelves. Kyra was crying helplessly and the woman who was standing behind Elizabeth whispered again, a little dubiously this time, “It’s all part of the art, isn’t it?”

A
ND THEN,”
E
LIZABETH SAID,
“B
OZ RAISED HIS
fist and shouted, ‘That’s the end of The 3!’ And he looked over at Kyra, who was sobbing her heart out by now, and he did this big wink and said, ‘I’ll be back,’ you know, like in that movie, and then he walked out while everyone just stood there. A few people started to clap but with Aidan looking so furious and Kyra so terribly upset, really, no one was sure
what
was going on.”

Elizabeth and Ben were sitting in her kitchen, sharing a late-night snack of rum-soaked peach slices and fresh blueberries. She had returned after the show to find her nephew sprawled on the sofa, watching a movie and obviously waiting to hear about the performance. Three years ago, Ben, her sister’s son, had graduated from college with a degree in philosophy. After a year of travel, financed by odd jobs of every description, he had come to live with her at Full Circle Farm, asking only room and board in exchange for his labor in the fields and drying sheds. Ben had spent many summers on the farm and had already proven himself a reliable worker. Furthermore, he had a relationship with the aging tractor that, in Elizabeth’s opinion, bordered on black magic. Whereas she was often baffled by its seemingly random breakdowns, Ben always knew exactly what fluid to add or which widget to replace in order to appease the sulky mechanical brute.

She had welcomed him, happy for the company, now that both of her girls had lives elsewhere, and grateful for his help. Ben had moved into the old cabin across the creek from her house, and within three months, he, with the help of Julio, a Mexican worker who lived in a house near the drying sheds, had taken over most of the day-to-day operations along with all the heavy lifting. His efforts had almost doubled the farm’s revenues, and Elizabeth had made him a partner in the business.

“Well, hell,” he said, staring gloomily into the empty bowl that sat on the table before him, “now I wish I’d gone. I was afraid it would be kind of lame and I had work to do here, so…you say Kyra was crying? Was she really upset? Or do you think it was just part of the act?”

Elizabeth studied Ben narrowly. For some time now she had suspected that her big, handsome, and unattached nephew was more than a little interested in their pretty new neighbor. Several times he had commented on “the way she lets those guys take advantage of her,” and his frequent visits “just to see how they’re getting along” had not gone unnoticed.

“Hard to say, Ben. You see…” and she told him what she had overheard just before the final scene. “I guess it was all planned but Kyra did look really…I guess the word would be ‘distraught.’ She ran off after Boz and then Aidan just stood there for a while. He didn’t say anything, just kept looking around at the mess Boz had made of their stuff. There was foam everywhere and the cameras were completely trashed. Then he just kind of stomped out of the gallery. There was a little applause again but that died out pretty quickly and everyone left— well, as soon as the champagne was gone, everyone left.”

“What did Laurel think?” Ben rose and stretched, then collected their bowls and carried them to the sink.

“She wouldn’t say anything…just looked smug and hummed a few bars of that old gospel song— you know the one, ‘Farther along we’ll know all about it,/Farther along we’ll understand why.’ ”

Twenty-one years,
Elizabeth thought, as she unpinned her long coil of dark hair, brushing it and plaiting it into a loose braid. She noted the white hairs that silvered the braid,
more every day,
and shrugged. Her deep blue eyes looked unseeing into the mirror.
Sam and I came to Full Circle Farm twenty-one years ago. And Rosemary is twenty-nine; Laurel, the baby, is a sophisticated twenty-five…and you, Elizabeth, are fifty-three. When did all this happen? It seems like forever…and it seems like yesterday.

It had been an idyllic life, raising their two daughters on this beautiful North Carolina mountainside. She and Sam had been fortunate in so many ways, not least in their shared love for the land and each other.

In the early years they had grown tobacco like their neighbors: plowing the steep hillsides with mules, growing the plants from seed, setting them in the long rows, hoeing the rocky soil to discourage the rampant weeds, topping the tall plants by cutting off the pink flowering shoot at the top to encourage the main leaves to grow larger, snapping off the useless suckers. They had been willing acolytes to the endless familiar ritual that bound the families of their rural community.
At one with our brothers in the Third World,
Sam had said one spring day as they set out plants using crooked sticks to dig holes in the muddy fields. But when the sprays— herbicides, fungicides, sucker control— needed to make a crop became ever more numerous and ever more toxic, Sam and Elizabeth had gone organic, turning their fields over to flowers and herbs.

Now, after some lean years, Full Circle Farm’s fresh herbs and edible flowers were in constant demand among Asheville’s growing number of trendy restaurants. And the luxuriant wreaths of dried flowers and herbs that Elizabeth designed and constructed in her workshop, with part-time help when big orders came in, sold briskly.

The work kept me going, the work and the girls…. It’ll be six years in December,
she thought, as she turned out the bathroom light and sought the comfort of the old brass bed.
Sam was whistling “Good King Wenceslas” as he headed out the door. And that was the last time I saw him.

Six years ago, Sam had died in the crash of a friend’s small plane. And she had gone on.

Monday morning came and with it a necessary trip into Asheville for various items unattainable in Ransom. Most of her errands accomplished, Elizabeth swung by her daughter’s studio, hoping to take her to lunch. Laurel’s mixed-media work, requiring ever larger canvases or wooden panels, as well as a flea market’s worth of odds and ends—
found objects, Mum, they’re called
objets trouvés— had overflowed her tiny Asheville apartment. Finally she had rented a space in the River District where a motley collection of old warehouses and mills had been reborn as studios for much of Asheville’s thriving art community.

The district was a bit of a mixed bag: spread over several miles along railroad tracks that ran near the French Broad River, it contained some carefully restored buildings, some that were minimally habitable, and some that were empty ruins; the majority, however, were simply aging structures that had been brought into compliance with code as cheaply as possible in order to be reborn as low-rent studios.

The space Laurel had taken was in The Wedge— a three-storied clump of buildings that housed potters, fiber artists, painters, a world dance studio, and four sculptors, including one whose raw material was steel. Elizabeth had visited briefly when Laurel had moved in and had come away with the impression of a busy, if assuredly eccentric, community.
It really gets you fired up, Mum, being around other artists,
Laurel had explained.
If you’re working hard, no one will bother you. But if you lose momentum, all you have to do is walk down the hall— there’s a communal kitchen where you can fix a cup of tea or something to eat— and you’ll always find someone to talk to.

She found her daughter in the parking lot behind The Wedge, standing beside her recently acquired secondhand VW van. Ragged overalls splattered with bright paint hung loosely on her spare frame. A greasy young man was deep in the tiny engine compartment, and as Elizabeth approached he withdrew his head and held up some unidentifiable engine part.
“Fahrvergnugen!”
he declared, and flashed a dazzling grin before plunging back into the bowels of the van.

“Oh, Mum, thank god you’re here!” Laurel scooped her knapsack from the cracked pavement and loped toward the jeep. “Can you give me a ride down to the junkyard? I promised Rafiq I’d be there at noon and Milo says he has to rebuild the engine before the van’ll move.”

Elizabeth forbore saying that she had warned Laurel that old VW vans were notoriously unreliable, that she and Sam had had one, possibly even this same one, twenty years ago, and it had given them nothing but grief. Like her parents before her, Laurel had been seduced by the cozy little camper setup, and, with visions of a cross-country trip luring her on, she had traded her aging but reliable Subaru for this hippie cliché.

“The junkyard?” Elizabeth frowned at her daughter. “I was thinking more along the lines of maybe going somewhere for sushi.”

“We can do that after.” Laurel settled herself in the passenger seat. “Let’s just get going and I’ll tell you about it on the way.”

During the drive to the junkyard, Laurel explained that Rafiq was a friend of hers, an artist who did sculpture from junk cars. “He’s crushing one today at noon— he always does them at noon or sunrise or sunset— he has this thing about portals— he, like, casts the car’s horoscope and when and where the car was built determines how he aligns it in the crusher and when— Oh, it’s totally hard to describe—” Laurel broke off. “But I wanted to go and take pictures. It’ll just take a few minutes and then we can go somewhere for lunch.”

As they pulled into the junkyard
— Hensleys Salvage,
according to the crudely painted sign— Elizabeth interrupted Laurel’s exhaustive analysis of the relation of time and place to the creation of art
— true art, Mum, not just commercial crap—
to ask, “What about The 3? Do you know if Boz is back? I didn’t see anyone at their house this morning. And what was the point of that whole—”

But Laurel had spotted her friend, a short, swarthy man in his forties, and was out of the jeep and bounding toward him. He began shouting and gesticulating wildly in response to her greeting, but Laurel simply looked amused. Elizabeth parked her car and hurried toward the pair.

“Mum, this is Rafiq. Rafiq, this is my mother, Elizabeth. I brought her to see the crushing. Or she brought me.”

Rafiq nodded briefly in Elizabeth’s general direction. “’Allo, Laurel’s mother.” His voice was mournful and his dark eyes tragic. He closed his eyes and hit his forehead with the back of his hand. “Laurel, I tell you…is already done. That Travis he do it already. Is ruined. No time portal.”

A young man with a substantial beer gut and a Caterpillar cap emerged from behind a pile of wrecked cars, wiping his hands on his grease-encrusted jeans. “I didn’t do no such thing, Ray-fiq. I thought you come durin’ the weekend and done it yoreself.” A massive rottweiler followed him, eyeing the strangers coldly.

“No matter, is ruined.” Rafiq flung up his hands, then folded his arms across his chest and turned his back.

“Let’s just go take a look at it.” Laurel touched his shoulder gently. “Did you set it up yourself and put it in the crusher?”

“Of course. Was all ready, waiting for noon. I get it ready Friday night but the stars say Monday noon is best for creation. So I go home, drink beer, wait for Monday. Travis never crush on Monday, so I think is okay. And now…”

He shrugged and began to walk toward the crusher, a strange-looking, iron, box-shaped affair. They followed him, picking their way around the carcasses of wrecked and rusting cars that littered the oil-soaked junkyard dirt. The harsh smell of burned motor oil mingled with the sickly-sweet scent of corruption.

“That dog of Travis, it kill the rats but do not eat them. They sometimes run under the cars to die. Is why such a stink,” Rafiq explained matter-of-factly.

The crusher was surrounded by hydraulic hoses and huge pistons and seemed to be leaking oil. Rafiq stood in front of it, hands on hips, his face a picture of disgust.

“Rafiq, why don’t you go on and take the piece out of the crusher and let us see it? I know Mum would be interested. And it’s going to look awesome, no matter who pushed the button or when they did it.”

“Okay.” The man’s voice was listless. “But without proper timing, is not art. Is just junk, a dead thing.” He pushed a button at one side of the contraption and with a series of mournful creaks and groans, the compressing walls drew back to reveal a rectangular crumple that was the end result of thousands of pounds of pressure on a metallic blue Pontiac. The planes of shiny blue and silver interspersed with rusty blacks and browns
were
rather attractive, Elizabeth thought, though she couldn’t quite see it sitting in her living room.

“I like that splotch of red down near the bottom.” Elizabeth’s Southern-lady upbringing compelled her to find some positive comment to make. “It…ah…really ties the whole thing together and sets off the…sets off the…”

She was saved from having to complete her sentence for, as they all drew closer to the block of crushed steel and chrome, it became obvious that the dark clots pooled beneath the “sculpture” weren’t just oil and brake fluid. The splotch of red that Elizabeth had admired was a cowboy boot— attached to a twisted black-clad leg that disappeared into the tangle of metal.

W
HEN THE POLICE HAD FINISHED THEIR QUESTIONS
and dismissed Elizabeth and Laurel, neither was in the mood for lunch. “I don’t want to go back to my studio, Mum.” Laurel paused with her hand on the jeep’s door. “At least not until they find out for sure who that is
— was—
in the car. All morning everyone in the building kept showing up in my studio to talk about The 3 and
Strike on Box
and they all think I know where Boz is. And now— oh, shit— I don’t even want to think about it.”