The Painting of Porcupine City (45 page)

“Jamar,” I said, my heart

pounding. “Come here. Come look at this.”

“OK.” He sipped the last of his morning coffee and slowly rinsed the mug in the sink. “Have you seen my keys?”

“Now, Jamar! My god!”

I pushed the laptop over so he could see. On the
Boston
Globe
website I’d followed a link to a gallery of photos about the biggest story of the day, the story that had pushed the blackout way off the front page: the sudden, overnight appearance, or
reappearance
, all over Boston and beyond, of a vast number of graffiti paintings.

Jamar leaned down and looked over my shoulder at the photo on the screen.

“This was him,” I said. “This was his heaven spot. His ultimate goal. He did this one yesterday.”

“Well I’ll be. How’d he get all the way up there?”

“I don’t know. Patience.”

“What’d he write?”

“I can’t see. It’s too small.”

“Drag it to your desktop and enlarge it.”

I did and the image was still too pixelated to read, so I paid a visit to the Zakim later that day to confirm it. From where I stood on the shore of the river the sun was too bright and the obelisk too tall for me to make out anything clearly. As I was walking along the shore to put the sun behind the obelisk, I spotted, lying in the gravel, a thin leather band the circumference of an ankle. It was covered in dry colors, and it was still tied. I picked it up, squeezed it in my fist. With the sun out of my eyes now I looked up at the obelisk. In blue letters outlined with yellow, tall and proud because they were true, were the words CALEB IS LOVE. And beside those words on the white granite was a series of colorful footprints that seemed to lead right into the sky.

It took me a week

to find the gray Civic, driving around all the places I thought he might’ve parked it. I finally found it shackled on its front driver’s-side wheel with a bright yellow boot. I was lucky—it was in the kind of neighborhood where the sidewalks glitter with window glass and when someone sees a car being broken into, they keep walking or close the curtains.

I went back that night with Jamar. He paced on the sidewalk while I peered in.

“Come on, Jamar,” I whispered. “You’re black, don’t you know how to break into a car?”

“Bradford, why don’t you stuff the car up your homo butt and we’ll take it home and deal with it later?”

“Heh.”

“Heh.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “You’re positive this is his?”

“Yeah.”

“Then let’s get this going. If we get arrested we’re going to owe Marcy a fortune.” Marcy was our babysitter, a highschooler who lived below us.

“OK, here goes—
Ow!
” My elbow bounced painfully off the window.

“Oh goddammit, Bradford. You’re sure it’s not alarmed?”

“He never had one when I was—”

“OK.” He pulled loose from the broken retaining wall behind us a crumbling piece of concrete the size of a softball and thumped it against the window once, twice. And coughed to mask the sound of tinkling glass.

“You
do
know how to break into a car!”

“Hurry up. I’ll be at the car.”

There were two blankets on the backseat. I shook them to knock off the glass, climbed in, sat down and closed the door.

The Zakim had gotten some attention because, of all the paintings that appeared that day, the one on the Zakim was the only one people saw being done. At and around the bridge the authorities found a complete set of men’s clothes—t-shirt, hoodie, jeans, boxers—belonging, they said, to someone around five feet ten inches tall—all stiff with dried colors. A pair of size-ten sneakers. A backpack containing six cans of spraypaint, none of which were empty and which did not appear to have contributed to the condition of the clothes. And pieces of a phone so smashed to smithereens in the 270-foot fall and further decimated by traffic, they could barely tell the brand.

Thank god that was all they found.

Me, I pulled his wallet out of the glove compartment. Opened it, gazed at his license photo, pushed it into my pocket. Ran my hands under the driver’s seat and then under the passenger seat, crinkling PowerBar wrappers and water bottles. I turned up his sketch book and his black book, a new volume—there were only a few pages filled with what must’ve been recent stuff. But no laptop yet, and I had come for the laptop. My worry was that it would be in the trunk, and that was looking more likely.

There was nothing under the backseat among the snaking seatbelts except his winter jacket and snow pants and boots. I pulled them out and balled them up.

The laptop must be in the trunk. How would I get it?

Think, Fletcher. Think.

I spread one of the blankets open on the seat and started piling things on it—the black book, the clothes. If I was taking some stuff, where did I draw the line? If I took some I had to take it all. There would never be anything more. I leaned forward to the glove compartment and pulled out its entire contents—registration, insurance info, phone charger, napkins and ketchup packets—and added that to the pile. I gathered up the clothes on the floor and added those too. Then I pulled the corners of the blanket together and tied them like a hobo’s luggage. I shook open the other one for the rest.

Still thinking,
How can I get in the trunk?

With bundles on either side of me I slunk down in the seat and opened my phone.

“Jamar,” I said. I asked him.

“Minus a crowbar or something?”

“Yeah, minus a crowbar. Unless you have a crowbar on you.”

“Um. No. But you can— Jeez, Bradford. Hold on.”

Moments later we were both in the back of the Civic, ripping off the back cushion. It came apart with ease but the fabric behind it was thick. Three kicks and a push was what it took to get through. The tearing and the clink of a staple sounded loud in the car.

Jamar twisted around. “Are we taking these—parcels?”

“Yes.”

He grabbed the sacks off the front seat and pulled them onto his lap.

“Be careful with it,” I said.

“I know. I hope you find what you’re looking for. I’ll be in the car. I’m cramping up.”

I hadn’t wanted to turn on the ceiling light but I couldn’t see into the trunk without it. The light was bright; the car battery was pretty new. I thought of that first day and had to stop for a minute with my hand over my mouth. My shadow covered the plywood shelves and the cans sitting neatly in them, still neatly. Here was the maintenance of all the order he cared about.

“Oh Mateo,” I whispered.

Here at last were his important things: a backpack, his camera, his laptop, and the first two bulging, heavy volumes of his black book.

I tucked this all into his backpack and then I reached back in and grabbed can after can and a box of markers. I couldn’t leave anything. Vinicius would want some. And I had to make sure I had enough to pass down. I took it all.

I took it all and left one thing, on the back window, in bright green: ARROWMAN IS.

Jamar helped me carry it

all to my room and then left me alone while he went to pay Marcy.

“It was an easy one,” I heard her say. “He slept right through. What’s in all those blankets, anyway?”

I put the sketchbook and the three-volume black book under my bed and sat down at my desk, pushed aside my typewriter, opened the laptop in front of me. Whatever was on here was everything I was ever going to have. I hoped it was enough.

It booted up fast and showed me his desktop. The wallpaper was the Zakim. I found hundreds of pictures of graffiti, arranged in folders according to artist. I found dozens of saved PDF files, all information about the Zakim Bridge, from scrapped plans to preliminary blueprints to photos of its progress that must’ve offered some glimpses inside, to photos of elephants making the inaugural crossing. I also found what I’d come for: his address book. It held all the connections I would someday use when I figured out what to say.

While I was perusing through his hard drive an IM popped up. It was from
ViniBitt
. It said, “PRIMO!!”

I took a deep breath. Felt myself shaking. I was now speaking for him.

“Vinicius,” I typed. “This is Fletcher.”

I went to Brazil to

see and to ask, so I’d know the whole story, as much as could be known. I went to fill in the blanks, as much as could be filled. And maybe to fill in some blanks for his family.

I went to the Brazilian consulate and got my visa and crammed a
Portuguese for Dummies
and Jamar drove me to the airport on a frigid afternoon in the middle of January.

“I really wish you would’ve waited until I could go with you,” he told me as he pulled up to Terminal E. “You know this makes me nervous, you going there by yourself.”

“It’ll be fine. Vinicius will be there.”

“He doesn’t even speak English.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“No language. It’s your worst nightmare.”

“It’ll be OK. Don’t freak me out.”

“And if you do decide to tell them about Caleb,” he said, “and if it goes badly—”

“Jamar, I told you, if any part of me feels like it might go badly, I just won’t tell them at all.”

He sighed. “So you have your passport?”

“I do. I need to go. I’ll call you when I get to Panama.”

“Panama. Fucking-hell. These are places in high school textbooks. Be careful, huh? Pay attention to your surroundings.”

“Oh Jamar.” I closed the door and slipped on my backpack. Caleb was strapped into the backseat and I put a kiss on his little pom-pom hat. He’d be turning one next month.

As I was leaving Jamar lowered the window and said, “Bradford, come here a second.”

“I’m going to miss my flight.”

“Back, you know, right after Cara, when I said you were a guy and not a man. That was wrong and I was wrong to say it. It’s not about who you sleep with, or—whether you know about sports or tools or have a pearls-wearing wife or whether commercials make you cry. I think it’s about whether you step up. When something hard comes along. A man steps up. He doesn’t dodge it or run away from it or try to push it onto someone else. He steps up. Even if it isn’t his responsibility. And that’s why there are so many guys and so few men. Because stepping up is hard. And yet there’s never been anything in your life you haven’t stepped up to. I mean, from the time you were twelve, to moving in with Cara, to Caleb, to everything. To this.”

When he was done I let it sit for a beat, just long enough so he would know I would remember this forever. And then I said, “Did you want to get that off your chest in case my plane goes down?”

“I was saving it so I wouldn’t have to see you for the week it’ll take your massive ego to calm down now.”

“Haha.”

“Tell them I say hi. Or
oi
. Or whatever.”

I traveled for almost

a day, which felt like forever. I guess since São Paulo time is only one hour ahead of Boston, I imagined it couldn’t be that far. But it was winter when I took off, and it was summer when I landed.

I walked into Arrivals drowning

in Portuguese. It was easily the most afraid I’d ever been. It was as Jamar had said, one of my nightmares where I mysteriously forget how to speak. It was scary not only because I couldn’t communicate, but because it stripped me of everything I thought I was. I liked to consider myself a master of words—my job had been built around perfecting them, my hobby was about stringing them into stories. Words were my identity. And suddenly I couldn’t understand a single one. I was not a master of words, it turned out, but a master only of English. And here that was worth virtually nothing. I felt more isolated than I’d ever felt, and that’s maybe saying a lot.

I followed the passengers exiting the plane and found my way through customs, showed my passport and visa. But when the crowd was no longer moving in a single direction I felt even more lost and I stumbled and gawked and felt the first stirrings of panic. I thought that if I could only find the ticket counter I’d book myself a seat on the next flight back to Boston.

And then I saw him. My first thought was: Mateo. That’s how much alike they looked. Silly that Mateo ever joked about them not being related. He’d been watching for me and when he saw me he smiled and took off his sunglasses.

We had talked so much, so tentatively and with so much effort, on the webcam and through auto-translated IMs for so long, that when I finally saw him it felt like I was dreaming, and not just because I’d been traveling for twenty hours. When Vinicius put his arms around me I didn’t know what to feel. It was so many things. Most of all I was thinking I loved him. Because he knew Mateo. Because he had those green eyes. Because I knew Caleb was going to look so much like him.

“Welcome,” he said in slightly rehearsed English, and it made me feel suddenly at home in this place. “Welcome, Maker of Arrows, Fabricante de Flechas.”

I rode a moto-taxi,

Vinicius on one in front of me, looking back from time to time to make sure my young driver hadn’t lost his and to flash me a thumbs-up and that wide, white grin.

I stayed at the Amaral

house. Mateo’s parents and aunt and uncle were friendly and gracious but I think, when they understood I had no new information about Mateo, they didn’t know what to make of my presence. They treated me politely as a guest and didn’t know that in some weird way I was family—and I hadn’t yet fully decided to tell them or Vinicius. But I slept on the couch and woke up each morning to the cheeping of the two little birds in the cage across the room, and I felt content.

I met Tiago, who was

breathtaking and angry and wanted nothing to do with me. He did not shake my hand or even respond when I placed Mateo’s ankle band into his, and he withdrew into the crowd at Colonel Fawcett’s the moment Vinicius seemed willing to let him go. I think he still believed I was the reason Mateo rejected his gift of the Oliveira Bridge and returned to Boston. While I would like to believe that, I know it wasn’t true. Tiago hated me and didn’t understand we were so much the same.