The Painting of Porcupine City (26 page)

“Good idea. You never know, right? Maybe
you
write them.”

Mako looked at him intently, narrowing his dark eyes, trying to decide whether Mateo was being serious or poking fun. He shrugged. “All right, I’m out.”

“Later.”

The kid started walking back up the slope, slipped down hard on his knees, got up, wiped his legs, said “Dedinhooos!” when he saw Mateo had seen him fall, and continued up past the flickering trees.

Mateo put some finishing touches on the decoy and pressed the cap back on his can. The Fact would have to wait again—he’d come back to it another night. He was done for today. Two close calls in one day was a record he wasn’t thrilled with setting.

He walked slowly back to my place, climbed the stairs, and had already undone his belt when he found me not in the bed but sitting on the edge of it, tying my shoes.

“Oh,” he said.

I stood up.

P A R T

T H R E E

The Writing On the Wall

His fingers went: blue, orange,

red, purple, blue, green, yellow (a bright lemon, not the honey of his humans), red, pink, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, yellow, orange, green, green, lime, purple, red, blue.

As his fingers changed colors so did the trees, and soon at night we were spotting lumbering trucks and teams of men sucking up piles of dead leaves off the sidewalks with vacuum hoses as big around as barrels.

“Do you think people ever get sucked up into those?” I said.

“Definitely.”

The night workers were like wild animals, like something you’d spot while fishing, something coming down to the edge of a lake for a drink. And like woodsmen we walked among them in an unstated truce. Surely they knew what we were doing but it wasn’t their concern what walls got graffitied that night—they had a job to do—so the leaf-blowers, the street-sweepers, the electricians coming up out of holes in the street, they left us alone.

Sometimes being out in the wee hours doing what we did was exhilarating. Often it was. When he was suddenly grabbing me to run, when he most had that intoxicating, contagious thrill in his eyes. When we slipped into Cook in the morning and no one knew we’d spent the last hours of the night in his car, making space-constrained love in the backseat or just holding on to each other to keep warm.

But the weeks were creeping by and it was getting colder. One night in mid-November I noticed his typewriter-ribbon–dark hair collecting grains of white crystal. The first snow.

“
Brrr
,” I murmured, suddenly feeling colder. I looked up and saw snowflakes shivering in the glowing air around a streetlight. I could feel them on my face too, pricks of cold on my eyelids and nose. I stopped in the middle of an ARROWMAN, leaving ARRO, and capped my can.

“Not going to finish?” he said.

“I’ll come back to it.”

“OK.” He dragged a spray of paint across his fingers to mark a finished Fact. “Let’s go. You’re freezing.”

Winter that year had a premature climax, day after day in November burying the frosty city in wave after wave of snow. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs I started shivering at the first chimes of Mateo’s pitch-dark alarm-clock reveille. But by early December the winter was spent. Christmas decorations went up in lukewarm weather and lots of breath was expended on the subject of climate change.

The weather was killer for painting, though, that’s what Mateo said. But my nose was always runny, my lips were always chapped, my eyes always felt tired, and the days always began too soon. Too many afternoons I was falling asleep at my desk, slumped backward like a drunk or falling forward onto my keyboard like a dead drunk. One afternoon I woke up to find seventy pages of Y’s on my screen. An unrelenting question.

Why was I doing this every night? Why was I going out spraying paint on things that weren’t mine? It was true that since college, since my
Porcupine City
awakening, I’d fancied myself a bit of a bad boy—but why? Because I banged a lot of guys? Because I slept with people who wanted to be slept with? When I was out at night with a can in my hand defacing people’s property all my previous bad-boy escapades seemed as morally questionable as returning an old lady’s lost purse. Meanwhile Mateo painted away. Bad boy. Sometimes it was exhilarating, yes. When he was really in the zone there was no more beautiful sight on Earth. But other times it left me full of guilt, made me want to turn myself in. The rest of the long winter still loomed, and maybe I didn’t really
want
to be a bad boy. Maybe all I’d ever wanted was to be warm.

“Relationships are all about compromise,” Cara would often tell me, her advice seeming more legit and persuasive the more pregnant and Buddha-like she became. “You shouldn’t feel like you have to go out with him
every single night
.”

So I started to think of a tactful reason to limit my nights out with Mateo, to stay in bed when he got up. It wasn’t long before I got one. Unfortunately it happened by accident. And it was anything but tactful.

Outside a post office hub,

in a fenced-in lot where they keep the postal trucks parked at night, we were doing the back doors of two trucks side by side. He’d gone over the tall chain-link fence with an ease that was always a pleasure to watch—the sight of his nimble acrobatics was worth a few hours of runny nose—and from the other side opened a gate for me to slip in with his backpack. But when he headed for the trucks I felt queasy. I already had more of a problem with vehicles, for reasons he couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. Vehicles felt to me more tangibly property than a wall or a bridge did, more owned by some particular person who wouldn’t be happy to discover our handiwork, even if it was a public vehicle like a bus or a T car or these postal trucks.

“I don’t like how it makes me feel to paint on stuff like this,” I told him, lowering my can after just a couple of strokes, the metal rim clinking like a reholstered gun against a rivet in my jeans. “It makes me feel like a vandal.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s all the same. You don’t like to paint on private property, so we try to stick to public. Now you want to cut out half the public stuff too?”

“But what gives us the right to—”

“We’ve talked about this. No one
gives
us the right. We
take
it.”

“OK. But this is a public thing. Consensus demands this truck be white, not covered with”— I looked at his work— “yellow people in postal caps.”

“Consensus is bullshit,” he said without looking at me. White clouds of his breath billowed out from his hood. The angle, which revealed only his lips and the tip of his nose against the black fabric of his hood, made him look sinister in a way that would never actually suit him—but perhaps it was my glimpse of him that way, however unfortunately wraith-like, that made me realize the level of his dedication. In the face of it I felt lonely, second-rate. “If everything was decided by consensus,” he went on, “everything would be white because no one could agree on any other color. Every building would be a cube and have X number of windows with X type of awnings. The world would be fucking boring, Arrowman. There’s no reason or need for anything to be uninter—”

In a split second we knew we were spotted and had to run. And we were moving. The sudden jingle of keys, the bouncing flashlight beam playing over us—these were familiar and at first we reacted on instinct, on that old refrain:
Don’t get caught.
I’d gotten pretty good at not getting caught.

But this time things happened differently, because things went wrong. I’d entered the parking lot carrying Mateo’s backpack, had put it down somewhere, and the black of it on black pavement in the dark made it practically invisible. We wasted valuable seconds looking for it.

“It was right around—” I was saying, right before my hand snagged one of the straps. I flung it on and Mateo stuffed his cans in. Just then a second flashlight beam lit up a truck near my face before searing my eyes—there were two guards. And then three. Had they seen us on a camera? Had they rounded up a fucking army?

“It
is
them!” I heard one of them say, one who must’ve seen Mateo’s work on the truck and recognized the yellow people. “Shit, it
is
them!”

And I thought,
It’s them?
And not,
It’s
him
and some other guy?
As in, the guards thought we were a crew? As in, they thought I was equally responsible for the Facts? I didn’t know how that made me feel, and now wasn’t the time to think it over.

They gave chase with a lot more doggedness than guards and cops and citizen vigilantes usually did, because they knew we were
them!
(
Them!
) And we ran, weaving between boxy postal trucks—I didn’t know to where, not in the direction we came—and I followed Mateo hoping he had a plan. Because it was closer and because they were on us, he brought us to plain fence. No door. Just plain fence.

“I can’t make that!” I blurted.

“Yes,” he said, and he was grabbing my jacket and was beginning to scramble up the fence, as though his plan was to haul me up along with him. Hands were laid on his hip and his leg by the first guard, and a moment later by the second.

“Stop, we want to talk to— Stop!”

“Hey— You guys are— Wait—”

I didn’t even know where the third guard was.

Mateo’s sneakers, despite the pull of the guards, were going up the fence as though it were stairs, while mine slid off as though it were greased. I heard my jacket rip and then Mateo was pulling my backpack strap instead.

If he’d been doing a Dedinhos rather than a Fact, I think he might’ve stopped and faced the music; Dedinhos was a small-beans writer. But he’d been doing a Fact and the Facts were big-time. These guards knew it too. They’d gathered an army.

“Go,” I told Mateo.

“You can do it.” Pulling me harder.

“You guys are—
Stop!
—”

Adrenaline surging, I saw Mateo’s panicked eyes the moment he knew they’d gotten a hold on his belt and started pulling him down off the fence. I saw one of the guards readying a zip-tie. I saw the many opportunities Mateo didn’t take to land his heels in the guards’ teeth. And I saw the hands on him that were not my hands and that didn’t belong there, trying to get Mateo’s second wrist into the zip-tie.

“
Don’t you fucking touch him!
” I screamed at the guards, probably the only time in my life I full-on screamed. And then like a thug I shoved the son-of-a-bitch zip-tie guard hard, his belly and shoulder soft beneath my hands. “
Fuck off!
” He was older than I thought at first, less steady—my decision to fight him dropped a curtain in my mind that revealed him to be an old man, a desk-jockey night watchman with a loop of ribbed plastic. I pushed him again as he was going down, and he collided with the other guard hard enough to make the other guard stumble backward and lose his grip on Mateo. Before I knew it Mateo had me by the sleeve and we were running again. With a rattle of chain-link he got the gate open and we escaped through it, chased only by a single flashlight beam (the third guard?) that bobbed around at our feet, then faded, then disappeared.

Mateo walked with wide eyes afterward, running his hands through his hair again and again.

“I have my wallet,” he said, feeling himself over. “Nothing fell out. I have my wallet.” He clutched at his pants and it made me think of the key-touching guy, who was probably in bed right now asleep, warm and dry. “I have my keys. I have my phone.”

“I have your backpack,” I murmured, slipping it off and holding it out to him by its worn nylon straps. But I knew and he knew that my ultimate success in locating it barely made up for misplacing it in the first place.

The near-miss could’ve happened anywhere—
had
happened a lot of places—but usually it was just unlucky timing. And although we had to run all the time, we’d never had to fight until tonight. And that was my fault because, first, I’d been yammering on, forcing him to mount defenses of street art that distracted his special danger sense until it was almost too late—and then all the seconds we spent looking for his backpack, full of items covered in his fingerprints. So I said nothing, even when we were many blocks away and my heartbeat was back to normal and we were sure the sirens in the distance were not for us.

I couldn’t stop thinking of that guard, though, and of the way he yelped when first his knee and then his shoulder hit the pavement. I still had a can in my pocket and I took it out and set it down on the curb.

Mateo leaned against a parking meter, tapping a clump of frozen snow with his sneaker. “That sucked,” he said matter-of-factly.

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.” But he didn’t look at me when he said it.

A close call, the stuff of nightmares—but it was a good excuse to limit my nights out with him. A few days later I told him it was too much, too often, that I was too cold and too tired to keep going out every night. Fridays and Saturdays were the best I could do. He didn’t try very hard to talk me out of it.

And he didn’t tell me so, but he’d been thinking that one of the reasons for the close call, and for the near-miss with Mako in September, was that graffiti had grown too comfortable. With me along it had come to feel more like hanging out than robbing a bank, and the second it stopped feeling like robbing a bank—the second that sense of danger and hyperawareness mellowed to chillin’—he was in trouble. He could never be at ease doing this, could never get sloppy. That was Rule #1. He’d figured that out with Vinicius years ago. So it was OK that I didn’t come out every night anymore. He needed no crew.

Thanks to his electric blanket

his bed was always warm when I climbed in. Although I was feeling increasingly alienated from him out-there, being in bed with him always felt like a reboot, a recalibration of my feelings to their most tender and affectionate and confident. I always knew what to do in-here. We still fit into each other perfectly and when we were done I could tell he was satisfied.