Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [161]
The policemen had spread around the parking lot, casting cluenets and staring back through time. But they all heard their cue, stopped what they were doing, and broke into a raucous cheer for Soma. He accepted their adulation graciously.
Then the Detective popped the soapbubble camera and plucked the film from the air before it could fall. It rolled up the film, chewed it up thoughtfully, then dismounted the policeman, who shuddered and fell against Soma. So Soma did not at first hear what the others had begun to chant, didn’t decipher it until he saw what they were encircling. Something was caught on the wispy thorns of a nodding thistle growing at the edge of the lot.
“Crow’s feather,” the policemen chanted. “Crow’s feather Crow’s feather Crow’s feather.”
And even Soma, licensed for art instead of justice, knew what the fluttering bit of black signified. His car had been assaulted by Kentuckians.
Soma had never, so far as he recalled, painted a self-portrait. But his disposition was melancholy, so he might have taken a few visual notes of his trudge back to Nashville if he’d thought he could have shielded the paper from the rain.
Soma Between the Sea and the City, he could call a painting like that. Or, if he’d decided to choose that one clear moment when the sun had shown through the towering slate clouds, Soma Between Storms.
Either image would have shown a tall young man in a broad-brimmed hat, black pants cut off at the calf, yellow jersey unsealed to show a thin chest. A young man, sure, but not a young man used to long walks. No helping that; his car would stay in the trailhead lot for at least three days.
The mechanic had arrived as the policemen were leaving, galloping up the gravel road on a white mare marked with red crosses. She’d swung from the saddle and made sympathetic clucking noises at the car even before she greeted Soma, endearing herself to auto and owner simultaneously.
Scratching the car at the base of its aerial, sussing out the very spot the car best liked attention, she’d introduced herself. “I am Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails,” she’d said, but didn’t seem to be worried about it because she ran her free hand through unfashionably short cropped blond hair as she spoke.
She’d whistled for her horse and began unpacking the saddlebags. “I have to build a larger garage than normal for your car, Soma Painter, for it must house me and my horse during the convalescence. But don’t worry, my licenses are in good order. I’m bonded by the city and the state. This is all at taxpayers’ expense.”
Which was a very great relief to Soma, poor as he was. With friends even poorer, none of them with cars, and so no one to hail out of the Alley to his rescue, and now this long, wet trudge back to the city.
Soma and his friends did not live uncomfortable lives, of course. They had dry spaces to sleep above their studios, warm or cool in response to the season and even clean if that was the proclivity of the individual artist, as was the case with Soma. A clean, warm or cool, dry space to sleep. A good space to work and a more than ample opportunity to sell his paintings and drawings, the Alley being one of the other things the provincials did when they visited Nashville. Before they went to the great vaulted Opera House or after.
All that and even a car, sure, freedom of the road. Even if it wasn’t so free because the car was not really his, gift of his family, product of their ranch. Both of them, car and artist, product of that ranching life Soma did his best to forget.
If he’d been a little closer in time to that ranching youth, his legs might not have ached so. He might not have been quite so miserable to be lurching down the gravel road toward the city, might have been sharp-eyed enough to still see a city so lost in the