Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [73]
Abbie tapped me on the shoulder. “And him?”
“Those people who sat for portraits…they didn’t pose. Motionless, yes; but they nonetheless moved. They lived.” I wanted to quit. To give up. Burn everything I’d ever done.
Abbie nodded. “What you see is human greatness. This is as good as it gets, as it’s ever been, maybe as it ever will be.” I saw what he’d done and I knew that I could not do that. Abbie wrapped her arm inside mind and said, “Come on, he’s just a man. You can do that.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“You already do.”
“But…he’s Rembrandt.”
She nodded. “And you’re Doss.”
“You’re still nuts.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I believe.”
Our trip was an education unlike anything I’d ever known. It was as if Abbie knew my incompleteness. My deficiencies. To combat them, she mapped out a course filled with precisely the art I needed to take in, proving that she knew instinctively which works I needed to see to become the artist I could be. To become the artist she knew I could.
I remember leaving the hall where David stands. Walking out, we passed by all the friezes he created. Nothing but huge chunks of granite with these forms of half-people climbing out of the rocks. It’s like they’re breaking free. Escaping. And when I walk back down that hallway in my mind, I realize that Abbie had done that for me.
Abbie led me to her river, and I drank deeply.
We returned home and I discovered that Abbie had given me a gift I had not anticipated. I stood before my easel and found that I saw beauty in the not-so-beautiful, even in the grotesque. What she had birthed with Rosalia, she had now shaped and matured. I looked at the paints piled in a bucket at my feet. Where before I had seen a few dozen, now I saw ten thousand.
24
JUNE 4, MIDDAY
The same railroad that runs through Moniac, just twelve crow miles away, passes along the south side of St. George. The A.E. Bell Bridge spans the river at St. George and is a favorite canvas for lovers with spray paint. Purple martins nest beneath the bridge by the hundreds on their return trek north after spending the winter in Brazil. Seldom stopping to rest, they eat and drink while flying. Each one cuts the air above and below the bridge like an F-16 in search of their daily quota of horseflies, dragonflies or june beetles. Then they drop to the surface and cut the glassy water with their beaks.
Compared to Moniac, St. George is a thriving metropolis. Population might top a hundred. Grammar school, restaurant, gas station with grocery store and butcher, auto repair shop, a four-way stop marked by a flashing caution light and a burger joint called the Shack by the Track.
I cut the paddle, pulled against the stern and steered us toward the bank. We swung around the skeleton of an old wooden boat. The keel and a few stubborn ribs were all that remained. I helped her from the boat and led her around the spare tires and the ten thousand shards of green glass. Up north, people spray paint boxcars or the back of billboards. Down here, we paint water towers or the underside of bridges. Abbie walked amongst the concrete pilings and read aloud, “Pie says hie.” And, “Donna likes Robert.” She reached down and pulled a discarded can from the rocks. She shook and mashed her thumb against the stuck depressor. It sputtered then sprayed green. She walked to an empty piling, reached above her and began spraying: “Abbie loves Doss.”
She dropped the can to her feet. “You know, if you can’t say it with Krylon, then you just can’t say it.”
She stood beside me, hanging her arm inside mine. She whispered, “Remember the Guadalquivir?”
THE GUADALQUIVIR RIVER in Spain is famous for several reasons. Columbus sailed it, as did Cortés, and in 1992 the World’s Fair occurred on its banks. Huge, empty buildings—once the rave of the day that promised to attract tourists the world over—now sit empty, rotting and colored with mildew and cracked paint. A monument to stupidity.