John Connolly - Bad Men

“Not around me.”

They had argued about this before, ever since Jack had fallen down and cut his head on the edge of the table and Danny had come running for her, the old man’s blood on his hands and shirt. His mother had thought that he had injured himself, and her relief when she discovered the truth quickly transformed into anger at the old man for putting her through such a shock, however briefly. Joe had come along and administered a little first aid, then spent a long time talking to Jack out on the old man’s porch, and since then Jack had been a lot more careful. If he drank now, he drank in the evenings. He was also turning out paintings with a vengeance, though Marianne didn’t think much of his art.

“He just paints the same view, over and over,” she said to her son shortly after she and Danny had visited the old man for the first time, paying a neighborly call with cookies.

“It’s not the same view,” the boy protested. “It’s different every time.”

But she had merely glanced at the small watercolor that the old man had presented to the boy on their departure, the rocks on either side of the inlet a bluish gray, the sea a dark, threatening green. It was an ugly picture, she thought. All of the old man’s pictures were ugly. It was as if he were unable to perceive anything but the most mundane, dreary aspects of the landscape before him. There were no people. Hell, he couldn’t even paint birds or clouds, or if he could, he sure never bothered to place them in his pictures. Grays and greens and washed-out blues, that seemed to be the sum total of shades on his palette.

But the boy had placed the painting above his bed and was prouder of it than any of the dozens of other posters and cards and notes that obscured the walls, even prouder of it than he was of his own work, which his mother thought was far better than anything the old drunk was ever likely to produce. Marianne was never going to say that to Jack’s face, though. The old painter might have his flaws, but an absence of generosity was not one of them. The house in which they now lived was rented from him and even by island standards he had asked little for it. She had that much for which to be grateful to him.

“Please, Mom,” said Danny.

If she did not relent, there would a tantrum and she would be distracted from the task at hand, and she could not afford to be distracted from it. She gave up and dismissed him with a wave.

“Go, go. But if you think that there’s even the slightest thing wrong with Jack, you come straight back home, you hear me?”

He nodded solemnly, then broke for the door. His mother stood and walked to the window, her bedroom looking down on the path that wound between their property and Jack’s house. In the beginning, she had led him along the way herself, either holding his hand or watching anxiously as he bounded ahead. After a while, she had started to let him make the short walk between the two houses alone. It wasn’t far, and she could follow his progress every step of the way. She felt that it was important to allow him a little independence, a little room in which to grow. She wanted him to be tougher, while simultaneously fearing the consequences of releasing him from her protection. It was the dilemma of every parent, she knew, but a mother without a man to share the raising of a male child felt it more acutely. Sometimes she sensed that she was being forced to make choices that were against her nature in order to compensate for someone who wasn’t there.

The boy trailed his way down, the soda can still clutched in his hand, like a small, bright fragment of canvas set adrift from the whole, his red windbreaker startlingly bright against the trees. Her eyes remained upon him until he reached the old man’s door. She saw him knock and wait patiently, and then the door opened and he was gone.

Vincent “Jack” Giacomelli had come to Dutch Island in the spring of ’67, after he had lost his job teaching at some fancy college on the East Coast. He was a walking history of art, even if his knowledge and appreciation had never enabled him to paint with even one iota of the talent and imagination of those of whom he spoke to others. Things had started to turn black in the summer of ’65, when his wife left him for a professor of physics who drove the kind of fancy sports car that physicists (who were, in Jack’s experience, so boring they made even mathematicians seem kind of entertaining) were not supposed to know existed. After she went away, Jack’s life began to fall apart, or maybe it had been falling apart anyway and that was why she left. Jack was never too sure, and most of that period of his life remained a blur. Truth be told, the blur extended up to a couple of months back, when he had fallen and bumped his head, and Joe Dupree had sat him down on the chair and spoken to him in that way of his, that quiet way that told you that if you didn’t shape up and take his advice, then you might as well pack your bags, lock your doors, and head for the mainland, because Joe Dupree wasn’t going to have any nonsense on his island.

What Jack couldn’t figure out was why he didn’t feel any resentment toward the policeman. After all, people had been telling him to shape up for the best part of forty years and he hadn’t given a red cent for their advice. But Joe Dupree was different. There was no other way to put it. When Joe Dupree looked at you in that strange, sad way of his, it was like being an onion beneath a knife held by a skilled hand, as layer after layer was exposed and discarded until only the very core remained.

Or until nothing at all remained, depending on how far he went, or the sort of onion you were. Jack had been kind of worried that if Joe Dupree kept peeling, he would find out some terrible truth about Jack that the old man himself had never even suspected existed or that he had somehow refused to face. It was the fear that he had nothing left to offer, nothing but bad art and broken promises, and that Joe Dupree was capable of revealing that truth. Once exposed, it could never again be hidden.

After that talk, Jack went on the wagon for a while. It didn’t last, of course. It never had before, and even Joe Dupree wasn’t likely to have that much of an impact on a hardened booze hound like Jack, but the old man was more careful now, drinking only in the evenings and never, ever, taking a bottle to bed with him as he used to do in the good old days. Instead, he began to paint at a faster pace than ever before.

He’d been dabbling with painting for a long time, of course. Jack made some money selling bad oil paintings and worse watercolors to tourists, sometimes from a little stand that he set up down by the waterfront in Portland on sunny weekends, laying on the old-salt act as thickly as he could, inventing the kind of family history that a lot of folks around here could claim for real but that in Jack’s case was as false as the bottom of a magician’s hat. But he earned enough to keep himself in reasonable comfort in a house long since paid for, which was now his to pass on to whomever he chose-a couple of cousins, a handful of nieces and nephews, or his sister, Kate, who, if Jack’s will was anything to go by, was likely to be one disappointed lady once he was cold in the ground.

The doorbell rang. He wandered down the hallway, his old sneakers making a slapping sound on the bare boards. Through the frosted glass of the door he could make out the shape of the boy, disintegrating into black and red shards like watercolors dropped on oil. He opened the door and stepped back in mock surprise.

“Hey, it’s the Danmonster.”

The boy stomped past him, not even waiting to be invited in. He walked quickly to the door of Jack’s studio and then looked back at the old man for the first time.