The Blues & Billie Armstrong 62
THE BOY IN THE WINDOW
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
Valentine was waiting in her seat when I slid behind the wheel. I looked over and said, “I’m ready.” I had some grand feeling buzzing in my chest like I was bravely going into battle. But Valentine said, “One more stop.”
There was another series of lefts and rights before Valentine directed me to a dirt turnout in front of a battered little house.
It sat back from the street on a minor hill terraced and cultivated into what was now a weedy garden.
From the street I saw the wooden stakes leaning this and that way and leafy yellowing vines run amok, snaking around rotting tomatoes and avocados and gigantic zucchinis. Around the garden a balding picket fence was bedecked with surprising little sculptures or conglomerations of found materials—bottle caps and broken glass and driftwood and abalone shells and rusted hamster wheels and who knows what else. The house itself was a simple affair, what the oldtimers called a “salt-box,” the pale blue paint beginning to fade.
I followed Valentine up the steep wooden steps and onto the wood-floored porch. “I promised her I would bring back some clothes,” Valentine said. Inside, she quickly excused herself and left me in the front room at loose ends. The room was maybe twelve by twelve, not much of a “living room” by today’s standards at all, more of a “parlor” or “sitting room” as it might have been called when the house was built.
There was a certain patchouli and tofu aesthetic that was inescapable. Eclectic and definitely vibing toward the thrift-store school of earth-friendly decorating. Franklin woodstove in the corner. A well-tread Persian-identifying rug with a mandala pattern dominated by deep red and sporting goldenrod fringe. A beat-down sofa in burgundy velveteen with big rounded armrests. Hundreds of records—a long line of old vinyl albums on the floor under a shelf holding a turntable, an honest to timewarp Girard turntable in like-new condition. Vintage McIntosh amp and Advent speakers.
Through a doorway into an adjacent room, I noticed a painting. Originally, this next room was probably a second parlor, but now each wall was chest-deep in dark wood bookshelves absolutely brimming with books. Hardbacks and paperbacks of every size, scrunched together, some stacked on their sides and some piled on the floor, homeless.
Normally, the first thing I do when faced with a stranger’s library is examine the contents at length. What can’t you learn about a new acquaintance from tilting your head to read the spines of their books? What you can learn is whether you might ever wish to learn more. And in a way this Billie, this grownup fleshed-out Billie, was a new acquaintance, although one I had daydreamed of meeting for many years.
But I was distracted from the books by the striking power of the paintings hung on the walls above the bookshelves all around the room. They were clearly hers, clearly in the same style as the paintings at The Lost Pelican—the rich colors of the forms not quite contained by their sharp black outlines, creating a live-wire pulsating effect of universal but fragile connectedness across the illusion of individual sovereignty.
Everything in these rooms worked as evidence of a personality, a heart, a soul that had stayed the course. There was a part of me that felt ashamed at the fealty she had shown to her vision through the years, and under the threat of capture, while I had squandered most of my principles to see myself sparkle and sputter in the eyes of others. I was merely a blustery headline, but Billie had managed to live her truth, even in hiding.
Besides the singular, arresting style of the paintings, I recognized the forms themselves as a dreamer recognizes the details of past dreams that invade a new dream as if they are memory, although memory of a separate timeline that only exists in the dream world. “Dreamality,” Billie had riffed one sunwashed morning long ago, sitting like a yogi on the green chenille bedspread.
Here was the Ferris Wheel, the top half of its circle rising above an old faded fence, the cars all empty but for one small and indistinct person stuck at the top of the arc. Here was Molly’s pier stretching out toward the middle of the lake, the backs of two seated figures in silhouette against the moonrise. This whole room seemed to be a museum to those few weeks that Billie spent in Lupoyoma City. The Ferris Wheel, the pier, the ballfield. The Watkins place and Frankie’s store. The Fairlane and the Weeping Willow, Molly’s pier, Trey Morgan’s trailer, Preacher’s Alley. All represented here in the shimmering shapes and dark earthy colors of her heart, a combobulation of elements that spoke of love and pain and processing.
I stood frozen before one large canvas when Valentine came into the room without saying a word, as if the room itself tended to hush its occupants. The painting that transfixed me was maybe three feet by four and unframed. It depicted the window between our rooms at the house on Fourth Street. This painting was brighter than the rest of the work, except for the window itself, which was streaked blue gray like a thunderous evening sky and darkened even more by the deep blue silhouette of a slender childlike figure apparently trapped on the other side of the window, one hand raised to the glass.
“Do you think this is enough?” Valentine said, and I looked over and saw the full-size suitcase she had packed for Billie. She held it in front of herself with both hands and leaned backwards to counter-balance the weight of the thing. I recognized this was my cue to help, to take the suitcase out to the car, or at least to signal that I was available to do so. But I couldn’t move. I stared into the painting and saw May 1970 and the haunt of all the years since.
Finally Valentine said, impatiently, “Are you ready?”
“I think I might need a lawyer,” I said.
There was a blank pause, a stutter in the air.
“You don’t need a lawyer just to testify to the grand jury,” she said. “Just answer the questions truthfully and it’ll be fine. With your testimony and Billie’s testimony, I believe we have a good argument for self-defense.”
I looked at the boy-like shadow in the painting, with his hand raised to the glass as if somehow the life on this side of the window was off limits to him.
“It wasn’t self-defense,” I said, but Valentine had left the room.
I caught up to her on the porch, still lugging the fat suitcase stuffed with Billie’s clothes. I stood there, with the late morning sun raising the dew off the shaggy front-yard garden, and I looked out to the blue line of the ocean in the west, but my mind’s eye stayed on the blue-black shape of the boy behind the window in the painting.
“One time when I was a kid,” I said. “I asked my grandfather, Pop—everyone called him Pop, and a six-pack and a rocking chair always turned him into a philosopher—but once I asked him, ‘Pop, what does a man know that makes him a man?’ And Pop said, ‘Boy, a man knows the difference between shoveling dirt and hitting hardpan.’”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means I need to see Billie.”
The Blues & Billie Armstrong is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance of the fictional characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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