Radiant Days (10 page)

“Want a taste?”

I hesitated, then took the bottle, which wasn’t a bottle at all but some kind of old leather canteen. Not very hygienic-looking, but
seeing as how I’d spent the last few weeks living without running water, I wasn’t going to complain. I took a big swallow, immediately choked and doubled over, fighting to catch my breath. Whatever I’d drunk was slightly viscous, and so strong I felt like I’d gulped down butane that had been set alight.

Ted grabbed the canteen from me. “Jesus Q. Murphy, you’re a flyweight.” He popped the cork back in, shoved it into the paper bag, and lit another cigarette.

“Smoke?” He squinted at me and scowled. “Nah, I forgot. Flyweight.”

He was unshaven, his face grizzled gray, his eyes so bloodshot there seemed to be no white surrounding the topaz iris, only red.

“I’m Ted Kampfert from the Deadly Rays.” He said it all in a rush, as though that was his entire name.

“Yeah, I know.” I spit to get the bad taste from my mouth. “Can I have a cigarette?”

He closed one eye, staring at me like I was the bull’s-eye in a target, finally held out his pack. His fingers were cracked, the fingertips scarred and calloused. Some of the nails were black; not with dirt, but as though they’d been slammed with a hammer.

I took a cigarette. Ted drew his scarred fingers together and made a quick motion as though flicking water; held a scant, gas-blue flame to the cigarette’s tip, then slapped his palm against his jeans.

“How’d you do that?” I’d seen no sign of a match or lighter.

“Get to be my age, you learn some shit. You cutting high school?”

“No. I’m in college. Was. I got kicked out.”

“College? You don’t look like a college girl.” He shot me that one-eyed marksman’s gaze and shook his head. “I woulda pegged you for, what, sixteen? Actually, I might not’ve pegged you for a girl at all—that hair.”

He settled back onto the bucket, picked up the plastic container and popped the lid. He stuck in a finger and poked around, held up a worm as long as a shoelace. “Hungry?”

“No thanks.”

I peered into the second bucket. It was half full of water, and in it was a single carp, its scales shimmering from dull gold to gray to bloodred. Its fins fanned slowly as its head broke the surface.

I stepped back, startled. Its eyes were a liquid black and gazed at me with a skin-crawling intensity, utterly unlike the eyes of any fish I’d ever seen. I looked away quickly, trying to regain my composure. “Do you—do you eat them?”

“Eat them?” Ted snorted, amused. “Nah. Too many bones.”

“What will you do with it?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m still thinking.”

The wind blew off the water, the sun obscured by cindery clouds. I shivered. Even in my bomber jacket I felt cold.

“Getting nippy.” Ted finished baiting his hook. He glanced at me and held the rod out. “Here, hang on to this.” I took it while he pulled on his flannel shirt, then handed back the rod. “Where you from? Charlottesville?”

“No. Greene County, not too far from there.”

“Bob Dylan lived in a group house in Charlottesville, you
know that? I lived there with him, same house, this was in the early sixties. Taught him everything he knows. How come you got booted from college?”

“I was in art school. They didn’t like what I do.”

“Yeah?” He cast a long way out. The worm sailed through the air, then sank beneath dark water. “So what do you do?”

“Different stuff. A lot of graffiti.”

I stubbed out my cigarette and pulled the spray can from my pocket, walked to the weathered bench a few feet away. I squatted in front of it and shook the can, carefully began to paint on the slats: a sun glimpsed through Venetian blinds, the pupil of the rayed eye exploding in the middle of one narrow plank, all of it surmounted by my tag. Ted turned to watch me, the pole loose in one hand.

“‘Radiant Days,’” he read when I was done. “Hey, I’ve seen that around. That’s you?”

I capped the spray can and scrutinized my work. A shaft of sunlight burst through the clouds, momentarily igniting the bench, and the still-damp paint shone as though molten. I walked to the other side of the bench, stooped, and left my tag there as well, making the letters as big as I could, so they’d be visible from the road. When I was finished, I dropped the spray can into my pocket and walked back over to Ted.

“That’s me,” I said.

“It’s good. Is all your stuff like that?”

“Not all. Some. I like to try different things.”

“Got anything I can see?”

“No.” I sank onto the brittle grass. A desolate wave overtook me as I remembered my stolen bag, the pictures that Clea had taken. “Someone ripped me off just a couple hours ago. I was squatting at this house in Northeast, there was nothing in it, but these kids broke in and stole my bag. There was no money or anything—all it had was my sketchbooks, a bunch of drawings, stuff like that. Everything else, my girlfriend took.”

“Friend girlfriend or girlfriend girlfriend?”

“Girlfriend girlfriend. Well, ex-girlfriend. We just broke up this afternoon.”

“Man, you had a worse day than I did, Little Fly.” He reeled in his line, grimacing at the empty hook, opened his bait container, and picked through the worms until he found one he liked. After baiting the hook he removed the cork from his canteen and took another swig, then passed it to me. “Here. You could probably use that.”

I took a more careful mouthful this time, swallowing it slowly. “What
is
this stuff?”

“Secret recipe. What, you don’t like it?”

“No, it’s okay. It’s just … weird.”

Ted shrugged. “Tastes fine to me.” He took a long pull and handed it to me again. “How come you’re squatting?”

I told him about the Perry Street house, and meeting Clea, about going to New York and discovering SAMO and everything that came after: my “Radiant Days” tag, getting kicked out of school, the fights with Clea, and then the final scene at the National Gallery cafeteria.

And maybe it was whatever came out of that canteen, but I
also ended up telling him about growing up in Greene County, my parents screaming at each other while I drew on the floor beneath my brothers’ bunk bed, how pissed my father would be if he ever found out I’d dropped out of school—everything. I even told him about the bizarre painting I’d seen before I returned to Perry Street, just in time to watch Errol and his friend run out the door with my satchel.

“That painting was, I dunno.” I stared at the river, trying to describe how the image had made me feel. “Spooky. Because it was so old but it also looked kind of like it could have been painted now. Like those prehistoric cave paintings, have you ever seen those? In a weird way they don’t seem that old to me.”

“That’s because you’re doing the same thing.” Ted cast out, watched the bait plonk into the water, and tugged gently at his rod. “Right? Painting on walls in the dark.”

I’d never thought of that. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Huh.”

Ted continued to reel his line in and cast out, pausing to light a cigarette from that same odd flicker of blue flame. I stared at inky gray water, the unsettled October sky. Now and then he’d thrust his leather canteen at me and I’d drink and hand it back. The taste never got better—it was like drinking something that had dirt and leaves mixed into it, with a fierce burn like cheap brandy—but I got used to it.

I don’t know how long I sat there. An hour, maybe. The memory of the day’s events blurred into the image of that strange painting, overlaid upon the scene in front of me: the ragged old man fishing, the twilit river, gold-threaded clouds above the spires and towers of Rosslyn on the other side of the Potomac.

After a while Ted glanced at me and said, “You still here?”

I smiled woozily. “Yeah. Is that okay?”

“Quiet company’s good company.”

He tied off a new hook and bit the line, spit a curl of monofilament onto the grass. “You thinking about your girlfriend?”

“A little.”

He shook his head. “You can’t look back, Little Fly. You lose everything if you look back.”

“I’m not looking back.”

“Yeah, well, that’s good. Because it’s fucking deadly. Trust me, Little Fly. Hand me that bottle, would you?” He glanced over his shoulder at K Street. “Uh-oh.”

A police car was in the outbound lane. As we watched, it slowed, then did a quick U-turn.

“Whaddya know,” said Ted. “Company. Officer Friendly don’t like me drinking with kids.”

I lurched to my feet. For the first time I felt really drunk, and Ted grabbed my arm to steady me.

“Okay, listen.” He fixed me with that topaz stare. “You know where the canal is?”

I nodded, and he dug into his pocket. “Here. Don’t say I never gave you nothing. Look for the lockhouse.”

He tossed me something. I caught it and he pushed me away. “G’wan, Little Fly! And don’t lose that—it’s the only one.”

I glanced over and saw the police car stuck behind an eighteen-wheeler.

“Thanks!” I gasped, and took off.

I sprinted across K Street and raced up the side road. When I reached a spot where a mulberry tree hung over the sidewalk, I pushed my way through tangled limbs until I was safely out of sight, and peered out toward the river.

The police car had stopped at the pull-off beside the abandoned park. I watched the cop step out and walk to where Ted stood with his back to the world, fishing rod in hand. He turned as the cop strode over, and the two of them began talking. I waited a minute, extricated myself from the mulberry’s branches, and began to walk. When I reached the canal path, I opened my hand to see what Ted had tossed to me.

It was a key. Not an ordinary door key but an ornate, old-fashioned skeleton key. The metal prongs were grimy and nearly black with tarnish, surprisingly heavy for something so small, and extremely sharp. I wondered if they could be silver. The rest of the key was a dull mottled brown, so that at first I thought it was carved from wood. When I held it up to the light, I saw it was a bone. Not a human bone; a fish bone.

I glanced around for a lockhouse. All I saw from the towpath were the backs of brick houses and older, wood-framed buildings, all well-tended: typical Georgetown. None of them seemed remotely like a place where Ted might live.

I kept going, passing a jogger and a group of girls from Sidwell Friends School. After several minutes I stopped to get my bearings.

There was still no sign of a lockhouse. A tall stone wall, overgrown with moss and ferns, hid the streets and buildings of
Georgetown. The land beside the towpath dropped down to a grove of birches. I edged down the slope, my feet sliding on loose gravel and dead leaves, until I reached the bottom.

The air smelled fresher here, wet stone and the spicy scent of bracken. The ground felt springy, the way it does in deep woods. Something brushed my cheek, and for a second I thought it was raining.

It wasn’t rain: I’d walked beneath a weeping willow. Branches drooped around me, silver and gold and green in the waning light, so that it seemed as though I stood within a waterfall. The ground sucked at my sneakers, and clear water puddled up out of the moss underfoot.

Next thing I knew, I almost walked into the canal. I swore and staggered back. My sneaker was soaked. I shook my foot, then stopped.

Around me the air grew dark. Leaves faded into a haze like black smoke, but there was no smell of burning. Then, as quickly as the darkness appeared, sunset streaked the willow leaves. Yet something was still wrong.

The canal was in the wrong place.

I turned, frowning. East was where the canal should be, thirty feet from where I stood. And it wasn’t just that the canal wasn’t where it should have been. Normally the grass around it was neatly trimmed, the banks clear. There might be tossed bottles or trash, fallen leaves and dead weeds; but none of it would build up. The C&O is part of a national park, and the park police patrol it frequently, picking up litter.

It didn’t look like the park police had been here in a while.
It didn’t look like anyone had. Bushes grew down to the water’s edge, and there were moss-covered spaces along the bank where paving stones or bricks had fallen away. Willow leaves floated on the surface, and even that seemed strange, because the water was darker than it usually was, and greener. Not clouded with algae or rotting vegetation but a deep, clear green like the pigments used in watercolors, chrome oxide or viridian. Through the leaves I barely made out a rusty smear of brick, the glint of sun on glass.

I held my breath, and heard the drone and honk of traffic. I was still in Georgetown. Or near it, anyway—the same place I’d been a hundred times, with the same stores and buildings, the same crowded sidewalks and tourists and Metro buses.

Abruptly I wanted to be there again, surrounded by strangers and cement and far away from this strange green place. I pushed my way through the scrim of willow leaves, and saw the stone house.

It was tucked beneath another willow, a tree so huge and gnarled the house appeared trapped in its knobby roots, as though the tree had grown around it. A building not much bigger than a toolshed, its stone walls blotched with moss and lichen, perched precariously on the canal’s edge. As I approached, I saw a block of granite wedged between the building and the canal: a stone dock with a rusted iron stanchion for tying up a boat.

Ivy covered the granite, dark-green leaves and tiny yellow flowers. The same vines covered the lockhouse’s walls and roof, and the single window that overlooked the water; everything except the wooden door. Paint flaked from the wood, and
feathery black mold. In the center was a doorknob with a face on it, eyes and nose rusted away so only the mouth remained. The same face gazed from a metal plate beneath the knob, with a hole in its mouth where a key could fit.

I turned the knob, but it didn’t budge. I ran my hand across the doorplate, pressing my fingertip into the tiny metal mouth, then dug in my pocket for the fish-bone key, hesitating before I thrust it into the keyhole.

There are locks everywhere on the C&O, where the water level can be raised or lowered so boats can get through. But I’d never seen a lockhouse in Georgetown before. Maybe it was so decrepit the park police kept it hidden, so people wouldn’t break in. It seemed highly unlikely they would give someone like Ted a key. He must have stolen it.