Our Napoleon in Rags. Kirby Gann
his dark moments even Haycraft admitted that, for the most part, they were right. Still he said: All the more reason. All the more reason to try again. And yet again, if need be.
—Victory to the persevering, Romeo Díaz gave as a mocking toast. Haycraft, we need to get your candle dipped, man. We need to get you laid.
—You guys have all the plans, added Beau, casting the line out to everyone in a row at the bar, setting hacking cackles among the rank of men.
Romeo Díaz still held that sex was liberation; Haycraft knew the act would never erase the effect of Beau’s discovery that long-ago morning. That one of the murderers was also first cousin to Mather Williams provided endless fascination to Haycraft. By nature, fascination came easily to him: His soft lips fell into their curious fold, as of a horse’s mouth, loose, parted in rapt concentration, his eyes open and unblinking at whatever matter required his attention.
Glenda Stiles had made herself a kind of patron to Mather, a gentle but damaged soul, touched (people said), a man of general incapabilities. She called him a Child of God. Haycraft watched thin black Mather shuffle-muttering about the Don Quixote’s rooms in a swaybacked, knock-kneed gait, singing to himself, his mop standing in for a microphone. Hay observed Mather helping Glenda with prep work in the kitchen, the soft dark face lengthened in concentrated scowl, fleshy cheeks loose and shifting, his white server’s jacket – a leftover from one of Beau’s previous jobs – and black pants splattered with sauces, dips, cleaning agents. Haycraft would watch and ruminate aloud, wondering at what Mather knew about that murderous cousin, about what memories did the two share in common, and how did these affect him now – or did they affect him at all? Did the guy understand anything? He knew right from wrong; Mather was all about blessings. What does one make of having a murderer in the family? And when Mather finished his jobs and sat with his shift drink (brandy) on a corner stool at the bar, Haycraft ventured to ask.
—Mather, please, he began. Your cousin....
Except dear damaged Mather declined to talk about it. Maybe he couldn’t talk about it. Moments such as these caused Haycraft to lament that anything he wanted to understand succeeded in escaping him. Here is Mather listening: he leans his cauliflowered ear to Hay and his globular eyes spring wide; he tilts backward and shakes his head, says, No no no, uh-uh, or dismisses the conversation entirely: That boy bad from the day he born, we got the devil everywhere you know. He cackles a discomfiting, high-pitched crow’s laugh, rolling those gelato eyes, a sight people found disturbing before they realized his harmlessness. Mather’s eyes bulged large, the lids folded back to expose the entire egglike eyeball, glistening white and greasy wet. His teeth were yellowed and gnarled as though he had grown up gnawing bicycle chains. The mouth spread strung with spittle, the pink tongue withdrew as he laughed and laughed.
Haycraft could not find the answer directly, so he took the more roundabout method of examining Mather’s posterboard paintings, which dotted the walls throughout the building. Haycraft could spend as much as an hour in front of a single picture, savoring its forms and colors, reading the scrawled texts, absorbing the most minute of details. Primitive, yes; wildly oilstick colorful; splatched in scrawl – the works depicted a psyche lost to the cityscape. Crudely drawn corporate-logo galaxies (Marathon Oil, McDonald’s arches, Shell) spun in orbit about cartoon street signs, roadway markers, cars and buses, the occasional train. Scenes from the city set off-kilter, floating on the paper with no concern for perspective. Brooking these images ran rivers of prose, estuaries of free-associative diatribes and rivulet declarations, seemingly transcribed unedited from Mather’s head:
THIS is tHe MarATHon, you GoT to run run run to tHe MarATHon serMon of MatHer WilliaMs EvrYtHiNG MusT GO! sale. How abOUT tHaT MoNeY, brotHErs and SISterS? TeLL ME hoW BoUT SOME HELP? I taKe eAcH BOTtoM DoLLaR.
Mather scratched out the sentences in ballpoint pen or drugstore magic marker, lines aslant at whatever angle struck him as most convenient at the time of composition. And there among intersection road lights and vaguely figurative passersby, Mather designed advertisements for himself: SonGs For SALE / OnE DoLLAr I SING my oWN SonGs!!!
A list of titles with recommendations:
1) BathTub Blues – GOOD for winter sorrow
2) ruiNATION day – no child under 6
i mean 7 allowed, this SonG is SCARY
3)Them Dead Rat Blues
4)Somewhere Out on LonGStand RoAD
The last about when he got lost on the bus lines and ended up stranded in the county’s far east end. Haycraft paid a dollar to hear him sing that one, once.
Don Q regulars often stumbled across Mather at work, sitting on a street corner singing, surrounded by his art supplies as a child in a romper room, oblivious to the pedestrians and working girls altering paths to put more space around him. When not puttering about as help for Glenda, all Mather did was take the bus to city parts known and unknown. Whatever image caught his eye, whatever thought crossed his mind, made its way into his medium.
Haycraft inspected the works for a sign, a symbol, a clue he could use toward understanding. Chesley Sutherland confessed he could find nothing in them but the distortions of a raving mind. Romeo Díaz could expound on their value as relics of folk art – but the most real thing about Romeo was that he believed all art a sham, a con his nature allowed him in on the game of. Beau admired their energy, thought they proved the man had soul. And Haycraft agreed, arguing that even if the works could not be regarded as Fine Art headed for future museums, they still displayed a specific vitality. He pegged Mather as a kind of warped antenna, channeling the energy from the streets and setting down messages from the collective, communal spirit of place.
—Because you can see nothing contrived in them, he said. Nothing fabricated. They feel urgent and necessary, and what better definition of art can you devise on your own?
Once Mather finished his single brandy he said his farewells: a process that took a great deal of time. He repeated his farewells with a string of Thank you Glenda’s, and Were you happy with me today’s, and Do you want me back tomorrow’s, all to which Glenda gently responded with Yes, Mather, thank you too, we’ ll see you here tomorrow. It was ritual, perfected over years. He took her hand into both of his, delivered a smile and some speech; and then it was Mather walking two steps before turning again with the Were you happy with me today?, a hesitation as he listened to her assurances, and then again a few more steps away before he returned to see if he should come back tomorrow, back and forth, again and again. Only after he passed the luckless bar line of regulars did he say goodbye to each. He navigated the six steps from the sunken bar using an unpleasant seesaw movement with his hips, a walk that looked like he carried a great weight, as if he struggled to carry some object larger than himself. At the top he met Chesley Sutherland, who leaned into the exposedbrick wall with arms crossed over a once-banded, now meaty chest.
—And how are you today, my brother? A good day? Chesley answered only with a smirk and tip of his head.
—You keep breathing right, now, Mather added, gesturing at the asthma inhaler Sutherland clutched in one hand. You got to be strong, you got to be strong to be blessed, you know what I’m saying? Be blessed with a breathe-right night now.
Mather raised one hand in gentle beneficence as a gesture of goodbye-good will. Then, his eyes and jaw swooping over a long arc back to the others:
—You all have yourselves a blessed night now.
And off he went into the city evening, alone, to wherever it was he lived or hid, or to take his seat on one of the Montreux buses going anywhere.
With Mather gone and the click of the door stays fitting one another behind him, a settling descended over the rooms as the regulars relaxed into their long-haul night.
Capture this: Hoagy Carmichael whispers through the overhead speakers of the main parlor (one rests near Beau’s cracked stand-up bass, a holdover from his bluegrass days), its light piano lilting through “I Get Along Without You Very Well” as Romeo’s no-filters sift blue smoke