Yellow Mesquite (37 page)

Harley was both grateful and humiliated. “Thank you,” he managed. “Just had a bit of a shock is all.” He paused again. “I don’t think I’d be much good to you this afternoon. So, yes, I’ll take you up on that offer. I ’preciate it.”

THAT EVENING HE
looked the petition over. There was a “Waiver of Service” form included, a part of which read, “I waive the making of a record of testimony in this case,” and “I agree that the case may be decided by the presiding Judge or the Court or by a duly appointed Associate Judge of the Court.”
 

He put the papers aside and called Whitehead.

“Son, what’s got into you, anyway?”

“What’s got into me?”

“I never took you for one to abuse a woman.”

“What? She tell you that?”

“Said she was afraid to stay in the same room with you, her and the baby both.”

Harley didn’t know if Whitehead was lying, or if Sherylynne had really told him such a thing.
 

“Let me talk to her,” he said.

“She ain’t here, livin’ in that little house of y’all’s.”

“She have a phone?”

“She said if you called, she didn’t want to talk to you.”

“Well, one of us is crazy as hell, that’s for sure.”

“She sez so. Sez it’s you.”

“What’s she living on? You giving her money?”

“I’m gonna pay her a little bit to come over twice a week, clean and cook up a little something. She said you wouldn’t give her any money.”

“She really tell you I was abusive? You know me better’n that.”

“Well, that ain’t for me to say. I ’spect that’s what she’s tellin’ the court.”

THE NEXT MORNING
he called the Midland Child Support Services. They refused to tell him where Leah was. He threatened not to pay if they didn’t, and was informed that Sherylynne had gotten an injunction against him: he wasn’t allowed within fifty yards of her or Leah. Furthermore, a warrant for his arrest would be issued if he ceased payments.

“Are you crazy!” he shouted.

He hung up and wrote a hand-written letter to the court in Midland, explaining that he didn’t have money to make the trip for the court hearing. He enclosed a copy of his weekly check stub, and asked for visiting rights to see Leah.
 

Love, he decided, was like the chicken pox, or measles; it slipped up on you when you weren’t looking, and sometimes you got over it and sometimes it left you with pockmarks and atrophied testicles.

HE STILL WORKED
Monday through Friday at JCPenney, but had to drop the two classes at SVA for lack of money.
 

At night he listened to WBAI, or Jean Shepard and Long John Silver on WOR. He often lay awake, stomach knotted, longing for Sherylynne. He missed Leah, missed his own family, and determined he’d make a trip home to Separation if Martin ever sold another painting.
 

HE TOOK REFUGE
in work at JCPenney, lapsing often into stupors in which he shut everything out, and for a time was aware of nothing other than organizing the car batteries, tires, and golf clubs on the pre-printed layout sheets. As long as he could focus on the job at hand, he did okay. His coworkers were curious, of course, but considerate. The more he withdrew, the more they left him alone.
 

Back in the loft, his paintings darkened. His forms became fragmented and more abstract, and began to interlock in peculiar juxtaposition. Sharp angular shapes with violent undertones found their way into gridlike compositions. A painting was finished when he found he could live with it a while and still find it interesting.

He stood back from the wall now and studied a piece he had been working on:
My Mother’s Kitchen.
He recalled his mother’s kitchen as clean and bare: sunlight shimmering on the fields, reflecting back through the screen door, dazzling off the scrubbed countertops and floors. He recalled an old crock mixing bowl—Naples yellow with two bands of cobalt blue; the smell of yeasty bread: the happy humming of his mother’s voice as she kneaded dough on the enamel-topped table: the clink and clatter as she mixed and stirred and baked. It wasn’t the
appearance
of the kitchen he was after, but its
essence,
the way it
felt
in memory.
He had struggled with the elegant feminine shapes, the spare purity, the high-keyed silvery light, until finally the juxtaposed elements were almost entirely abstract. The result was distilled emotion. Emotion without sentimentality. He felt it was his most successful work to date.
 

And there was no one to discuss it with.
 

He thought of van Gogh who sold only one painting in his short, tormented life, unappreciated and misunderstood by almost everyone other than his brother. But how much did anyone ever fully understand anyone else? Ultimately, everyone went through their life alone, with their own thoughts and feelings, and if they ever connected with anyone on any level at all, they were the exception. Blessed.
 

He cleaned the brushes with mineral spirits, dipped them in linseed oil, wiped the excess off, and dropped them upright in coffee cans. He disposed of the oily paint rags in a metal garbage can he kept behind a folding screen. Well, for the moment, anyway, he was pleased. Now he would see if he could live with it.
 

HE RECEIVED A
registered letter from the 318th District Court in Midland, Texas, stating that due to his neglect in returning a formal response, Sherylynne Buchanan had been granted a divorce in absentia. Child support was almost one-third of his take-home; he was to make the payments to Midland County Child Support Services. He had been granted alternating weekend visiting privileges, and alternating Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays with approved supervision. He would be responsible for any and all travel expenses.

Chapter 40

Texas Bank & Trust

N
OVEMBER CAME
. He had been in New York one year. Sherylynne and Leah had been gone seven months. His bank account was exhausted each month after rent and child support. No longer was he able to afford quality art supplies. He took peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to work instead of going out with Steve and Fred. At home he cooked pinto beans and rice, and made potato soup.

The smell of roasting chestnuts on the cool air replaced the soured heat of summer. He turned off the ceiling fans and the Vernado shop fan which he carried back and forth between the work area and loft where he slept. Some nights now, he dug out an extra blanket.

He sometimes thought of Frankie—that kiss on Christmas Eve, the emotional parting before Sherylynne arrived two weeks later. He hadn’t heard from Frankie since. They had only been friends, but close friends.
Too
close, he realized now, and that was why she had dropped from sight.
 

He returned form work one evening, unlocked his mailbox on the ground floor, removed a new issue of
Art International
and an envelope from the Texas Bank & Trust in Midland, Texas.
 

He pitched both the magazine and the envelope on the table inside his door. At the far end of the loft, a newly primed Masonite panel stared back in blank indifference. He had given up linen canvas and Old Holland oils, painting now on Masonite with commercial grade acrylics. He meant to call this next work
My Father Is a Farmer,
and to approach it with the same mindset he had applied to
My Mother’s Kitchen.
Only here he intended to use bold line and sharp angular shapes related to farm equipment, but more violent, more primal, more masculine—blood, bone, earth—arrowed plowshares imbedded phallic-like in mother earth; the harrow’s disks evocative of testicles. Robert Motherwell’s series,
Elegy to the Spanish Republic,
came to mind; but
My Father Is a Farmer
would exhibit less obvious, more complex associations.
 

He changed into paint-spattered overalls, put a Swanson’s frozen dinner in the oven and set the timer. He thumbed through the magazine before starting to work. An article on Noguchi and one on Antoni Tåpies. But the bulk was advertising—flashy full-page ads to show off hacks like LeRoy Neiman, Simbari, and Leonardo Nierman—painters whose work looked in turn like a sugary dessert, a slaughterhouse and a nuclear meltdown of the solar system. In spite of the ads, the articles were informative, and he regretted that he was having to let his subscription lapse.
 

He pitched the magazine aside, slit open the envelope from the Texas Bank & Trust, and fished out a sheet of paper. It had both his and Sherylynne’s name on it, with both his New York address and his old address on Chaparral back in Midland. The Chaparral address was marked “Primary Contact.” There was an account number in a box. In red ink, the sheet stated that his account had been charged ten dollars because of a fourteen-dollar-and-twelve-cent overdraft. He pitched the notice on the table, then poured himself a glass of water, and stood looking out at the evening shadows sliding down the wall across the street.
 

It was a mistake. He had never had an account at Texas Bank & Trust. Not even when he lived there. Probably Sherylynne’s account, now that she was back in Texas. Overdrawn. That figured.
 

THE NEXT DAY
at noon he went down to the pay phones in the lobby of the JCPenney building and placed a call to the Texas Bank & Trust. He asked to speak to someone in charge of overdrafts. A Mr. Lincoln picked up.

“Harley Jay Buchanan calling you from New York. I got a notice yesterday that I’m overdrawn at your bank.”

“Oh?” Mr. Lincoln laughed easily. “We do get those sometimes.”

“Not from me you don’t. I don’t even have an account there.”

“Well, now. That doesn’t sound right, does it. May I have your account number, please?”

“That’s just it. I don’t have an account there.”

Mr. Lincoln hesitated, laughed again. “Is there an account number on the notice? Should be just below your name on the left.”

“Let’s see…yeah, there’s a number, all right. But, like I said, I don’t have an account there.”

“Could be a mistake. May I have the number, please?”

He read off the number.

“Hold on a sec. Um, yep. Harley Jay Buchanan; twenty-three Chaparral, and one-fifty Franklin Street, New York City. That correct?”
 

“Well…yes, but…”

“Did you remember to allow for the annual bank charges? Maybe that’s the reason for the overdraft.”

“Bank charges?”

“The handling fee.”

“What handling fee?”

A moment of silence. Then: “Well, as we explained at the outset, the handling fee is one hundred and, uh, let’s see here…yep, a hundred and twenty-two fifty a year. You have to deduct that from the total amount, January of each year.”

“Deduct it from what total amount?”

“Why, the ten thousand, of course.”

Harley was silent, at a loss.
 

“Hello?” Mr. Lincoln said after a moment.

“Yes. I’m here. Tell me about this ten thousand.”
 

“Tell you about— You
are
Harley Jay Buchanan?”

“Yes. I’m him.”

 
“Would you please give me your social security number? Just for verification.”

Harley read off the numbers.

“Right,” said Mr. Lincoln. “You were left a certain amount of money, a stipend, from Mavis Whitehead of Midland. Correct?”

A distant noise, a faint rush of blood, began to replace the silence in his head.

“Hello? Mr. Buchanan?”

“A stipend you say? When was this?”

“When— I don’t understand?”

“Well, that makes two of us.”

“Let’s see here. The first deposit was made the third of October, nineteen-sixty-four. Ten thousand, minus the bank’s fee, of course.”

“Wait a minute. You’re saying Mavis left me some money? Ten thousand dollars?”

“Well…yes…”

“How come I never heard of it?”

It was Mr. Lincoln’s silence that filled the space now.

“Hello? Mr. Lincoln?”

“Mr. Buchanan…”

“I don’t have the faintest idea of what you’re talking about.”

“You, uh… This is highly irregular. Let me have you talk to Mr. Gonzales, the executor in charge of your account. Can you hold, please?”

“I’m calling from a pay phone. I’m almost out of quarters.”

“Let me have the number, please. We’ll get right back to you.”

Harley hooked his fingers in the cradle and kept the phone to his ear so people would think he was still talking. It
had
to be a mistake… Or was it possible that Mavis really had left him ten thousand dollars? October of nineteen-sixty four—the same month he left for New York. Was that what Mavis had meant to tell him that time in the hospital? Had Sherylynne… But it couldn’t be… Or could it? It
had
to be a mistake. He let out a long breath.

The phone rang.
 

“Hello.”

“Mr. Buchanan?”

“Speaking.”

“Mr. Gonzales here at Texas Bank and Trust in Midland. Mr. Buchanan, am I to understand that you’re unaware of this account?”
 

“This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

“Sherylynne Buchanan is your wife? A joint account?”

His pulse picked up even more.

“Mr. Buchanan?”

“Like I told the other fellow, I didn’t even know there was an account.”

“But we have your signature. Witnessed and notarized.”
 

“Not my signature, you don’t.”

 
“Now, just a minute here. Witness: Wendell L. Whitehead, notarized by…a notary public from Duval County, looks like.”

 
“I haven’t signed anything. I can tell you that.”

“You’re suggesting…forgery?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m saying that if I had ten thousand dollars in your bank, I’ve never seen so much as a damn dime of it. You tell me.”

“I’m sure there’s an explanation.” Mr. Gonzales of the Texas Bank & Trust chose his words carefully. “After all, Mr. Whitehead is a prominent citizen and an influential member of the banking community himself.”