While Mortals Sleep_ Unpublished Short Fiction - Kurt Vonnegut [86]
“I am painting an Indian,” said Lazarro, his nerves twanging.
“You—you mind if I ask a question?” said Sylvia.
Lazarro closed his eyes. “Not at all,” he said.
“Where’s the Indian?” she said.
Lazarro gritted his teeth, pointed to the middle of the canvas. “There’s your lousy Indian,” he said.
“A green Indian?” said Sylvia.
“That’s the underpainting,” said Lazarro.
Sylvia put her arms around him, babied him. “Honey,” she said, “please don’t underpaint. Just start right off with an Indian.” She picked up a tube of paint. “Here—this is a good color for an Indian. Just draw the Indian, then color him with this—like in a Mickey Mouse coloring book.”
Lazarro threw his brush across the room. “I couldn’t even color a picture of Mickey Mouse with somebody looking over my shoulder!” he yelled.
Sylvia backed away. “Sorry. I’m just trying to tell you how easy it should be,” she said.
“Go to bed!” said Lazarro. “You’ll get your stinking Indian! Just go to bed.”
Stedman heard Lazarro’s yell, mistook it for a yell of joy. Stedman thought that the yell could mean one of two things—that Lazarro had finished his painting, or that the painting had jelled and would very soon be done.
He imagined Lazarro’s painting—saw it now as a shimmering Tintoretto, now as a shadowy Caravaggio, now as a swirling Rubens.
Doggedly, not caring if he lived or died, Stedman began killing Indians with his palette knife again. His self-contempt was now at its peak.
He stopped working completely when he realized how profound his contempt for himself was. It was so profound that he could decide without shame to go across the street and buy a painting with soul from Lazarro. He would pay a great deal for a Lazarro painting, for the right to sign his own name to it, for Lazarro’s keeping quiet about the whole shabby deal.
Having come to this decision, Stedman began to paint again. He painted now in an orgy of being his good old, vulgar, soulless self.
He created a mountain range with a dozen saber strokes. He dragged his brush above the mountains, and his brush trailed clouds behind. He shook his brush at the mountainsides, and Indians tumbled out.
The Indians formed at once for an attack on some poor thing in the valley. Stedman knew what the poor thing was. They were going to attack his precious cottage. He stood to paint the cottage angrily. He painted the front door ajar. He painted himself inside. “There’s the essence of Stedman!” he sneered. He chuckled bitterly. “There the old fool is.”
Stedman went back to the trailer, made sure Cornelia was sound asleep. He counted the money in his billfold, then stole back through his studio and across the street.
Lazarro was exhausted. He didn’t feel that he had been painting for the past five hours. He felt that he had been trying to rescue a cigar-store Indian from quicksand. The quicksand was the paint on Lazarro’s canvas.
Lazarro had given up on pulling the Indian to the surface. He had let the Indian slip away at last to the Happy Hunting Ground.
The surface of the painting closed over the Indian, closed over Lazarro’s self-respect, too. Life had called Lazarro’s bluff, as he’d always known it would.
He smiled like a racketeer, hoped to feel that he had gotten away with a very funny swindle for a good number of years. But he couldn’t feel that way. He cared terribly about painting, wanted terribly to go on painting. If he was a racketeer, he was the racket’s most pathetic victim, too.
As Lazarro dropped his clumsy hands into his lap, he thought of what the deft hands of Stedman must now be doing. If Stedman told those magical hands to be worldly, like Picasso’s, they would be worldly. If he told those hands to be rigidly rectilinear, like Mondrian’s, they would be rigidly rectilinear. If he told those hands to be wickedly childish, like Klee’s, they would be wickedly childish. If he told those hands