The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [80]
Hobart would recover. He would become one of the most talked-about artists of the decade. He would win an NEA grant the following year. The university, desperate to compete with UCLA, would present him with a distinguished chair. He would get to live off the infamy of this piece for years to come, and Caleb did not begrudge him this windfall. He had received an apprenticeship from Hobart, had learned the almost magical skills necessary to make the world reconfigure itself in order to fit your own desires. Hobart had taught him what was important. Art, if you loved it, was worth any amount of unhappiness and pain. If you had to hurt someone to achieve those ends, so be it. If the outcome was beautiful enough, strange enough, memorable enough, it did not matter. It was worth it.
Chapter Nine
Annie and Buster stepped off the plane and walked into the terminal, safely arrived in San Francisco. There had been much discussion in regards to attire before they had begun their trip. Buster had suggested fedoras and rumpled suits, unfiltered cigarettes, tie clips. Annie thought perhaps matching black suits and Lone Ranger masks, crushed-up amphetamines, manicured fingernails. Buster, it seemed, wanted to be a detective and Annie wanted to be a superhero. They finally agreed that they needed something that would not draw attention to them, understated but still uniform in some way. Buster donned a white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows, a pair of dark blue jeans, and black leather sneakers. Annie wore a white V-neck T-shirt, dark blue jeans, and black leather flats. On their wrists, they wore the kind of watches that scuba divers swear by, heavy and solid and waterproof, synchronized and precise. In their pockets, a heavy wad of cash, pens that were half the size of regular pens—for surreptitious note-taking—a handful of Red Hots to keep them sharp, and the address for Hobart Waxman, their best, their only, chance at finding their missing parents.
Their baggage claimed, rental-car key in hand, Annie and Buster began the trip to Hobart’s house in Sebastopol, praying that the old man, nearing ninety, was sharp enough to give them the answers they needed, but dulled enough by age that he would be incapable of giving them a bum steer. While Buster navigated and Annie drove, they discussed the different ways to go about getting Hobart to give up their parents’ location.
“Do we rush in, all angry and threatening, try to scare it out of him?” Buster asked, but Annie quickly vetoed that idea.
“We don’t want to give him a heart attack. I say we play it cool, pretend we’re just here to learn more about our parents, now that they have probably passed away. We get him talking and then, slowly, we shift the conversation to where they might be if they aren’t really dead.”
“But if he really knows where they are,” Buster countered, “he’ll be suspicious of us showing up out of the blue. I’ve never met him and you haven’t seen him in twenty years or so. He’ll know we’re after our parents. That’s why we have to rough him up a little.”
“No,” Annie said emphatically. “We cannot beat up a ninety-year-old man.”
“Rough him up,” Buster said, correcting her. “Just get up in his business and make him see that we’re not playing around.”
“Just, okay, just try to think of something else,” Annie said. “How about this? One of us talks to him, keeps him busy. The other one pretends to use the restroom and then starts searching the house for clues. If we find something, then we’ve got him nailed. He’ll have to play ball with us.”
“That’s not bad,” Buster admitted. “I like that.”
“Poor guy won’t even know what hit him,” Annie said.
Two weeks of brainstorming and all that Annie and Buster had come up with was Hobart Waxman, all the while they were hoping for the telephone to ring and offer them even the smallest of clues. Right after the news of their parents’ disappearance had been revealed, there was