the finger pointing at tomorrow
Trevor refused to become a recluse, unlike the others. He wore shades, a long, tattered raincoat, a woolen knit cap, and a very odd-looking pair of boots which he'd ordered by mail from one of the few specialty catalogs tending to his kind. He wore this outfit all year round. Heat had ceased to be a nuisance. So had cold.He was putting the finishing touches on a painting. He had cross-hatched the outer edges with a fine sable brush, using very wet paint, and was blow-drying the streaks out into waffle-like swirls that grew larger and lost their shape as they neared the rim of the canvas. He barely heard the phone ringing under the drone of the blowdrying.
"You all right?" That was the first thing Meredith said.
"Fine," Trevor said. "Better, anyway. I'm doing some good work down here."
"Probably the weather," she said.
"Yeah," he said.
"Some people down here are interested in a show." Meredith had chucked her buddy persona; she was now his agent. "Glossy catalog. Lotsa space. Fifty percent from what they make in prints."
"I don't really have that much right now."
"It wouldn't be till December. That should give you plenty of time."
"Let me think about it."
"Trevor, there's heaps of support groups now," she said. "You could fly down and talk to these people. You're not alone, you know."
"That's not me, babe," said Trevor, looking at the web pattern on the painting. "You should know that by know."
He hung up.
He had learned where to walk, where to stop, what to avoid. He never ventured too far north, where the rich that ran Colombia lived. He had learned to avoid the deep south, where there were people desperate enough to rob you no matter how ghastly you looked. There was a cafe on forty-nine, just under the Septima, where you could go and have a beer at ten in the morning and people wouldn't mind. They knew him. He had once sketched a portrait of the owner, Jimmy, on a napkin. They had it posted on the wall. He had done it with a ballpoint -- first time in a long while since he'd worked with that sort of tool. It didn't feel right. The portrait was stiff, wooden, much like the tedious exercises he worked on in art school, but they seemed to like it fine.
He took one of the three stools facing the bar. Jimmy's waitress, Marcela, sat on the other, playing solitaire. A paunchy man in glasses came in and sat on the other one. It was Alfredo. Trevor had met him twice. The man still insisted on shaking hands with him.
"Hiya," he said. His English was thickly accented and had a tad of Brit in it somehow -- Trevor had never bothered to inquire.
"Hi," said Trevor, then turned to Marcela. "Jimmy in yet?"
"No," she said, and asked, after flashing a smile, "Rummy?"
They played fourteen rounds and chattered in Spanish. His Spanish had gotten much better in the three years he'd been here, and he was even more fluent when he had too many beers. He took off his knit cap.
Marcela had seen him before already, this after she made a polite inquiry about his hands and he had obliged her. She stared at him. She wasn't pretending not to look -- never was -- and Trevor always thanked her for that. The interest she placed on his features was naive and clinical. She wasn't out for the freak show; he believed she wasn't attracted to him in any way except as the odd-looking customer who forgot to tip once in a while. She asked if she could touch one of the horns. She said yes. She did -- said it was leathery and really, really dry. Trevor told her to touch his pupil, settling the shades just above the eyebrows. She did. "Like sand," she said.
( . . . )