Fishing the Sloe-Black River

FROM MANY, ONE

I used to love the way she painted quarters. There were many fabulous colors that she could concoct on them. Don’t ask me how she got them to stick, because she had big stubby fingers for a little woman, and she must have used a very small paintbrush. But I’d come home from work in the evenings around five or six and she’d be in the back greenhouse, which we had turned into a little studio, and she’d be bent over the table, just all caught up in making these coins look colorful. She never really let me come into the studio. That was her space. There were times that I’d watch her from the kitchen and she would just billow around in her big white apron, past all the flowerpots, like she was being blown around by that big fan. Dallas is hot anyway in the summer, but this was so hot you could fry eggs in there.

I never saw the quarters until one Saturday afternoon when she was out canoeing the Brazos with Jeanie. I was trying to fix her old Karmen Ghia, looking for a screwdriver so I could take the clips off the distributor cap. They were rusted on. So I went into the greenhouse, where I reckoned there were some extra tools, and all these coins were out lying on the table. There were rows and rows of them, all painted.

The eagle sometimes had these weird multi-colored wings. Sometimes there was a small picture — a television, a radio tower, a car — on the eagle’s chest. The olive branch was always yellow for some reason. The strangest ones were when you could see into George Washington’s cranium. I mean, here’s this guy that everyone goes nuts about, father of the country and all that, then all of a sudden he’s got a tiny picture of an apple in his brainbox, or weird animals on that big curl of hair at the back, or he’s wearing lipstick, or that little tail down the back of his wig looks like a map of Central America. Then there was always these little dots along the year. 1974 had yellow dots, 1989 had green ones, that sort of weird stuff. Then, in all the spaces, there were these psychedelic colours. She colored in the writing, and one of them said, in bright pink, IN O WE TRUST, where she didn’t color in the G or the D.

I’ve never been much into modern art or anything. I mean, I like Remington and stuff, but not that other crap. But this wasn’t crap, see. This was kind of funny, really. I liked them.

Laura wasn’t pleased when she found out that I’d been in there. “That’s my studio, for crissake.” She said the my real loud.

“It’s my house,” I said.

“It’s my work.”

“You’re my wife.”

“And you’re my goddamn husband.”

We’d been married for three years, and it was around Valentine’s Day, but we’d both forgotten. Maybe it was all the work I was doing in the labs — I was a lab assistant to a professor who was building phylogenetic trees of sparrows, breaking down their DNA and grouping them — sometimes ten, twelve hours a day. She liked to draw all the time. She was from a good family, her father was an investment banker in Houston, and I guess she spent a lot of her teenage years doing paintings.

Once I woke up and caught her sitting beside the bed, drawing my face on one of these quarters. She was hunched over the bed with these tiny paintbrushes and a palette, her hair tied back, a real serious look on her face. Boy, did I ever want to see that one. But I looked and looked in the greenhouse, and I never found it. I knew it was around somewhere, because she told me she never spent them. I searched for hours, under the table, in all the plant pots, down under the wrought-iron stand, on the ledges, but it never showed up. I expect maybe she painted me with big black eyes, my hair receding, big jowls and all that sort of thing, even though that’s not true.

But I did find some other coins. They were self-portraits, her face painted on top of Washington’s, big long mane of red hair running down her back, that one eye all painted with mascara, her lips flaring out. She was pretty, all right. I could see why she did it. She’d always been pretty, right from the day I met her. So, I took one of those quarters and put it in my wallet. I kind of liked to look at it when I was at work. Most of my job was extracting the blood samples.

I came home from work one night and she wasn’t there, so I went on down to the bar. We live in a fairly good neighborhood and the nearest bar is down by the highway. It’s a dark bar, lots of people hanging out in the corners. You see some strange ones there. But the thing about it is, it’s amazing the things you don’t know about people. I was sitting there at the bar, talking with the bartender, Paul, and it turns out this guy does computers on the side. There’s nobody there hardly, so we talk for a long time, about computer sequencing, research, and things about sparrows and stuff, when all of a sudden he points down at my hand and laughs, then sort of grabs my cheek.

“Doing a little on the side?” he says to me. I look down and realize that I’ve been fingering this quarter in my hands for the last half hour. It’s the portrait of Laura. That face is full of yellows and reds.

I ask him what he’s talking about, and he reaches in under the counter and pulls out about twenty of these quarters. They spill through his goddamn fingers. Jefferson with a peace sign on his forehead, another with the LIBERTY shortened to BERT, the eagle wearing a bra, all sorts of colors everywhere. Says he likes to collect them himself when customers come from the Rose down the street. Says to me that the guys at the Rose, and sometimes the girls, bring the quarters in. One of the afternoon strippers there makes them.

“They put them in the jukebox,” he says, “so at the end of the night they know which quarters are theirs. You see red ones and green ones and blue ones and all sorts. But these are great. This chick is an artist. I’d like to see this chick dance.”

I don’t know much about things, but I do know that it’s amazing, the things we don’t know. I went home that evening and wanted to drive that Karmen Ghia right through the greenhouse, plow it right on through, shatter it into pieces. Laura got home, late, and just went straight on out to the greenhouse. She looked awful young and pretty. She swept past me and said: “You look tired, honey.” She actually said that. She said “honey.” I sat there, in the kitchen, wondering what sort of face she was drawing this time.