Our Napoleon in Rags. Kirby Gann
Never miss the majestic villa hidden in the tight villanelle, he quipped. He would undertake his project with a monochrome aesthetic: all surfaces laminated in gold.
He swore the boys to not indulge in any momentarily inspired, improvisational creations. The plan throbbed with such promise that he took the worrisome step of adjusting his daily schedule: First he consulted his calendar for the upcoming moon phase (the success of new projects required getting started before the new moon); he took the bus to a suburban hypermarket and filled a rolling suitcase with materials; then he arranged three twenty-two-minute meetings with the small band of aerosol guerrillas in his apartment. There he presented the boys with targets marked on a district map hung over the chipped plaster of his apartment wall and disastrously hand-drawn by Hay himself. Boys he had come to like, even admire, despite the sharp chemical stench. He surged into the awaiting room like water rushing from a burst main, overwhelming the boys in seconds. He sat with them on the couch with one large leg crossed in front like a railroad gate, curling his arm over the back to clutch a boy’s shoulder, careful never to touch anyone above the knee for fear of alienating him. He drank water from the same glass of any boy he spoke to, thinking such earthiness persuasive. Over three short evenings Haycraft exulted in his hidden capabilities as a general, delineating missions for each group of three clad entirely in black, provoking them with fiery (but brief) motivational speeches before launching the lads out with his blessings, into the dark.
—It’s true I ask you to take grave risks, Haycraft admitted. But remember the hand that builds is better than that which is built. Better and nimbler than the hand is the thought which wrought through it, as Emerson so rightly remarked.
The boys hardly understood him and did not care. They liked the idea of their work being somehow sanctioned, and here was an adult with a place of his own, a place where any or all of them were welcome to crash. They thought him nuts but cool, an easy touch.
Meanwhile Haycraft continued his scheduled forays to the Don Quixote, as a cover.
—In order to retain a sense of normalcy, he explained. To delay suspicion. This mission is illegal, I want you all aware of that. It must be dispatched in total secrecy. You are to be artful terrorists; harbingers of an awful beauty.
Haycraft was not interested in the threat of arrest. He believed civic disobedience should be anonymous, so that a government could never be certain how large a wave of unrest they were dealing with, thus leading them to suspect the worst. He believed in covert coercion.
The boys launched themselves out his door in giggling glee. Each night, Haycraft inspected their handiwork as he walked home from the Don Q, humming his light Foster tunes and smiling to himself at three in the morning, on schedule, the full moon still some days away. And he was happy to open his door upon the splayed form of Lambret each time, asleep on the covered couch beneath a dusty sheet, among another boy or two on the floor. He stepped lightly over the wagging tails of curled dogs, trying hard not to be frightened, and ignored the soiled rag in Lambret’s hand.
Four nights’ work and the task was done. Mission accomplished: Immediately the new artworks entered the conversation of the city; citizens began to take note of the lengths of pipe and rolls of wire mesh resplendent in gold beneath radiant sunlight. Snap judgments occurred on the merit of the works as art – usually asserting the negative – but the point was that the debris was now noticed. With outrage and an inward shudder, in most cases, and in these instances the Board of Aldermen passed motions to have the works removed. As had been planned and hoped for all along.
Added, unforeseen benefits were of consequence, too. A handful of the works were left to stand in the forsaken corners where the boys had mounted the debris in a kind of foundobject sculpture, met with a puzzled shrug by the average Old Towne individual, few of whom claimed to have much insight into the baffling absurdities of Contemporary Art. High-res photographs appeared in Montreux Magazine and in the new color editions of the newspaper. There were discussions on the local talk radio, and brief investigations on the nightly news. Such small successes were only an added award in Haycraft’s view. What mattered in the end was that the debris was gone, and his neighborhood’s grand architectures now had the chance to breathe.
Haycraft was aware this achievement was due in large part to the abilities of the boy.
At the Don Quixote, the regulars fells into ripe discussion. An operation on such a large neighborhood scale overthrew even baseball as a topic of debate; the world could have been covered in gold for the intensity with which they evaluated the act. Romeo stuck to his indifference – he kept his 1968 BMW out of the alleyways and the debris had never bothered him. Beau Stiles said he liked the spirit of the thing, though he wasn’t sure he understood it. A grumbling Chesley Sutherland declared it still vandalism, and that if he were allowed to return to duty he would get the bastard kin who were at the bottom of it, rounding up all implicated by martial means. He said this with an eye cast at Haycraft, who everyone suspected had been secretly involved. Haycraft turned his palms upward, baffled by the attention.
—Always a crime somewhere, always some punk looking for an arrest, Sutherland muttered. And here I am stuck with you guys, making sure you don’t hurt yourselves.
Just then Romeo Díaz raised his glass and launched into a mocking toast, christening Keebler Our Napoleon in Rags, a moniker Haycraft disparaged haughtily among the other regulars as insulting, but one that at home he quietly cherished, using the title to sign his notebooks.
—Although I’ve never appreciated the warlike spirit of any man, I have always admired the figure of Napoleon in history, Haycraft explained once, alone with Lambret. Emerson wrote a laudable essay about him, you know. He spoke of the man as a figure created by the people, by the times. Europe gave birth to Napoleon out of necessity, and he rose to the demand. I cannot imagine a more noble call to heed.
Quietly the Don Q regulars came to tolerate the new presence of the boy in their cloistered world. Lambret’s profession in the park was something of an open confidence – not that he hid anything by his low-slung black jeans, the loose, dirty T-shirts that hung on his lithe, nearly frail frame, and the pouting, helpless stare that seemed the default expression of his face. They tolerated him by not beating him to a pulp any time he followed Haycraft into the bar. But their uneasiness was palpable: No one could see what the boy could possibly want with a man like Hay that did not imply manipulation. As a ward of the state, Haycraft did have consistent money coming, and his family had provided a very small trust – Beau and Glenda concerned themselves with that possibility. Romeo disliked Lambret because of his sexual ambiguity; he detested such confusions on principle. He thought boys should be all boy, playful and destructive and ready to goof until the age came to get serious. (Whenever that was.) Chesley Sutherland thought the kid a punk who had lured Haycraft into pedophilia – a crime. He did not want to be forced to tip off his contacts on the force, but Chesley believed he had to do what he had to do.
What bothered them all, strangely, was apparent affection. Haycraft’s hand calmly stroked the black, almost French curls of Lambret’s hair; his palm rested easily on the thin neck as they gazed together at the television behind the bar. They leaned into one another in all occasions. They worked together closely – unusual work, too, with Lambret reading aloud from Thoreau and Emerson, and Haycraft interrupting to make a gentle corrective of pronunciation or else expand upon the writer’s ideas. This sight eased Beau and Glenda’s concerns a notch on their inner dials, but the regulars did not know what to make of it: They felt forced to watch the two incline their heads toward one another over a table, sharing a smile, a gentle touch, the pleased pucker of Haycraft’s lips. Eccentricities of character were ably assimilated here; there is a kind of friendship where people appear ready to bare their teeth on the other’s throat, and they continue like that all their lives yet never part. The Don Quixote was filled with such friendships; as Sutherland said, Everyone here’s fucked up some way or other.
Now there they were, confronted by one of their own in the company of a fifteen-year-old boy.
—And not all boy at that, Romeo insisted. And he