White Oleander - Janet Fitch [123]
THE NEXT DAY I met a boy in the art room, Paul Trout. He had lank hair and bad skin, and his hands moved without him. He was like me, he couldn’t sit without drawing something. When I passed him on my way to the sink, I looked over his shoulder. His black pen and felt-tip drawings were like something you’d see in a comic book. Women in black leather with big breasts and high heels, brandishing guns the size of fire hoses. Men with bulging crotches and knives. Weird graffiti-like mandalas with yin-yangs and dragons, and finned cars from the fifties.
He stared at me all the time. I felt his eyes while I painted. But it didn’t bother me, Paul Trout’s intense, blinkless stare. It wasn’t like the boys in the senior classroom, their stares like a raid, moist, groping, more than a little hostile. This was an artist’s stare, attentive to detail, taking in the truth without preconceptions. It was a stare that didn’t turn away when I stared back, but was startled to find itself returned.
When he came around behind me to use the wastebasket, he watched me paint. I didn’t try to cover up. Let him look. It was Claire on the bed in her mauve sweater, the dark figure of Ron in the doorway. The whole thing bathed in red ambulance lights. Lots of diagonals. It was hard to paint well, the brushes were plastic, the poster paint dried fast and powdery. I mixed colors on the back of a pie pan.
“That’s really good,” he said.
I didn’t need him to tell me it was good. I’d been making art all my life, before I could talk, and after, when I could, but didn’t choose to.
“Nobody here can paint,” he said. “I hate jungles.”
He meant the hallways. All the hallways at Mac were painted with murals of jungles, elephants and palm trees, acres of foliage, African villages with conelike thatched huts. The rendering was naive, Rousseau with none of the menace or mystery, but it wasn’t done by the kids. We weren’t allowed to paint the halls. Instead, they’d hired some kind of children’s book illustrator, some wallpaper designer. They probably thought our art would be too ugly, too upsetting. They didn’t know, most of the kids would have done exactly what the hall artist did. Peaceable kingdoms in which nothing bad ever happened. Soaring eagles and playful lions and African nymphs carrying water, flowers without sexual parts.
“This is the fourth time I’ve been here,” Paul Trout said.
It was why I’d never seen him except in the art room. If you came back on purpose, ran away from your placement, you lost your privileges, your coed nights. But I understood why they came back. It wasn’t that bad here at Mac. If it weren’t for the violence, the other kids, I could understand how someone could see it almost as paradise. But you couldn’t have this many damaged people in one place without it becoming like any other cell-block or psych ward. They could paint the halls all they wanted, the nightmare was still real. No matter how green the lawn or bright the hallway murals or how good the art was on the twelve-foot perimeter wall, no matter how kind the cottage teams and the caseworkers were, how many celebrity barbecues they had or swimming pools they put in, it was still the last resort for children damaged in so many ways, it was miraculous we could still sit down to dinner, laugh at TV, drop into sleep.
Paul Trout wasn’t the only returnee. There were lots of them. It was safer in here, there were rules and regular meals, professional care. Mac was a floor you could