Chapter Ten
Archer
I ’D FOLLOWED ECHO for less than ten miles before she pulled into a strip mall in Hazel Dell, a less than glamorous part of town, and parked my bike next to her car, which appeared to be running like a top thanks to Hatch.
“Not exactly where I expected you to lead us,” I said, climbing off my bike and pulling off my helmet.
“You asked where I spend my Thursday nights,” Echo replied.
I nodded. “You’re right. I did. For some reason, I thought your special weekly night spot would be in Portland. Ya know, at some restaurant that served the best braised boar ragu over handmade tagliatelle. Or maybe an art museum or something like that.”
Echo smiled. “What’s the matter? ‘ Sir Ramic’s Kingdom ’ isn’t cultured enough for a man of your elegant taste?”
“I’m sorry, what now?”
Echo pointed to the sign hanging over one of the shops in the strip mall.
I glanced up. “What the hell kind of place is that?”
“Come on, I’ll show you,” she said.
Echo led me inside to what I could only describe as the seventh level of Dante’s Inferno.
The walls were lined with what appeared to be ‘Victorian era’ wallpaper, not that you could see much of it through the shelving piled high with a variety of stark white ceramic pottery, dishware, and knick-knacks, in all sorts of shapes and sizes.
In the center of the room were large rectangular tables, each surrounded by folding chairs.
At the center of each table was an array of art supplies.
Three of the tables were occupied by groups of elderly women, busily painting salad bowls, mugs, and animal figurines.
Another table by what looked like a trio of mothers and their young daughters, all who seemed to be having a lovely time drinking tea and eating cakes.
The last table was occupied by a solitary woman who I guessed to be an Amish librarian born sometime just before the Civil War.
Apparently, for her, tonight’s method of staying one step ahead of the icy hand of the grim reaper included hand painting a full-sized ceramic Mallard duck. To be honest, the thing looked like it had been painted by a psych patient, on LSD, in the back of a moving pickup truck.
One seat in the room was placed slightly higher than all of the others. It was upholstered in thick, purple velvet and adorned with gold leaf and costume gemstones. A bejeweled scepter had been placed in the middle of the tufted seat, awaiting the return of its queen.
The room smelled like I was the first man to ever step foot inside it, some kind of cloying fragrance lingering in the air that I could only describe as a combination of cucumber water, potpourri, and about seventeen different perfumes all mingled together.
The only scent that I distinctly recognized reminded me of fingerpainting in kindergarten.
“Well, what do you think?” Echo asked in a tone that told me she was studying my facial expression.
“I think there’s something wrong with this place,” I whispered. “Something unholy and unnatural.”
Echo stifled a giggle as a large woman approached us. Her stark white hair was piled ‘high enough to reach heaven,’ as my mom would have said, a tiara nestled within her teased locks.
“Miss Echo,” the woman said in a hushed but excited tone. “You had me a little worried when you didn’t show up at seven on the dot as usual.”
“Well, I—”
The woman turned to me before Echo could respond. “And you brought a friend . ”
She looked at me like a mother whose child had just dragged a feral cat into the home. Better still, she looked at me like I was the dead rat inside the feral cat’s mouth.
I smiled. “Hi, I’m Archer. I’m the reason Echo’s late.”
“Well, it’s nice to have you, Archer. Welcome to my creative castle. I’m Queen Annette, but I’m sure Echo has told you all about me already.”
“She hardly speaks about anyone else,” I lied through the biggest smile I could muster.
“I have your spot reserved for you as always, Echo. I suppose I’ll have to set out another chair,” Annette said, trying and failing to hide the irritation in her voice.
Annette led us to a small room off the main space that contained well-lit workbenches, a potter’s wheel, and jars of paints and glazes lining the walls, before shuffling off to get another chair.
“Sorry about that,” Echo said. “Annette is a bit…”
“On her own planet,” I offered.
Echo laughed, letting out a loud snort.
“Sorry, the weirdest noises fly out of my mouth sometimes,” she said, her cheeks beginning to blush.
“No need to apologize to me about bodily noises. I hang out with bikers all day. Trust me, every noise that comes out of you is music to my ears.”
The truth was, the sounds I most wanted to hear were Echo’s moans as she rode my face.
“I think I’m a little nervous. I’ve never had anyone sit with me while I worked,” Echo said, sweeping her hair behind her ear.
“Well, then, I’m honored. What exactly is it it you do in here?”
Echo opened her mouth to speak just as Annette returned with a folding chair in one hand and a tall, delicate looking vase in the other. I took the chair from her and thanked her as she handed the vase to Echo.
“Another masterpiece,” Anette said.
Echo waved her off. “It’s just a little something I threw on the wheel last week.”
“It’s beautiful,” I chimed in.
“Her work is pure pottery poetry,” Annette replied, seemingly unmoved by my comment.
“Annette picks her personal favorites of the pieces to glaze as I see fit,” Echo explained.
“She makes her work sound so clinical. Echo is a true artist and a master glazer. I’d put her work up against Lana D’amico or Rolf Thorn’s. She’s that talented.”
“Wow,” I said. “Do you have any of her finished pieces here, in the studio?”
Annette shook her head. “Miss Echo has made it clear that she doesn’t want her work sold or displayed.”
Echo smiled. “I get my satisfaction from the work. Creating from a pure place that isn’t influenced by money or the opinions of others.”
“So, what do you do with all the finished pieces?” I asked.
“We donate everything I make to help furnish low-income housing residences. ”
Annette sighed. “I keep telling Echo that work of her caliber belongs in a gallery, but she won’t hear it. But she shows up every Thursday night and blesses us with another masterpiece. Echo refuses to work for profit so I found a charitable cause in which to donate her work.”
“That’s good of you,” I said, detecting a whiff of bullshit in the air.
Annette cleared her throat. “In full transparency, I write off the supplies used in Echo’s pieces in my charitable giving each year on my taxes. My accountant assures me everything is on the ‘up and up.’”
Every instinct I had told me this woman was bad news, but I didn’t want to start shit in a place that was so important to Echo. At least, not until I had more than a gut feeling.
“The soul of a true artist, huh?” I asked, turning my attention back to Echo.
“Something like that,” she replied with the cutest fuckin’ smile I’d ever seen.
“Well, I’ll let you do your magic with the vase and as always, take your time, and let me know if you need anything.”
“Thank you, Annette,” Echo replied.
Annette then turned to me for no more than one and a half seconds. “It was nice meeting you, Arrow,” she said, exiting before I could correct her, leaving me and Echo alone for the first time all day.
“So, that’s Annette,” Echo said.
“She’s, ah, well, she seems very enthusiastic about your work,” I replied .
“Annette is overexaggerating. Like a proud mother who puts every drawing her kids make on the refrigerator.”
I cocked my head. “I dunno. Seemed like more than just that.”
“Okay,” Echo said, ignoring me and focusing on the vase. “What do you want to look like?” She cradled the pottery in her hands. Studying every curve and line, intently. “Tell me.”
“Isn’t the artist the one who gets to decide which color the pottery should be?” I asked. “Isn’t that the point of this place?”
Echo shook her head. “Not for me. I mean, what fun is there in making decisions? The best part of the whole process is when the piece reveals to me how it wants to be glazed. Then I simply do my best to achieve it.”
“You make it sound so simple,” I said.
“To me it is. Simple and satisfying. That’s why I come here every week,” she said.
“Oh, but I lied.” Echo’s hand shot to her mouth.
A look of true concern on her face. “Having the piece tell me what it wants to look like is actually my second favorite part of the process. My most favorite part is removing the glazed piece from the kiln, because you never really know exactly what a glaze is going to look like until after it’s been fired. ”
I chuckled. “I’d hardly call that a lie. More like a correction.”
“It can be challenging for me to make that distinction sometimes. My thought processes tend to be binary. One or zero. Like or dislike. Black or white. ”
“But life is full of so many grey areas,” I said.
“Ah, there’s the rub. How life is and how my brain responds to it can be two different things.”
I nodded. “I see, but I’m not sure you have to be neurodivergent for that to be the case. I’ve come across plenty of people who seem to live on some sort of alternate plane of reality, but you don’t strike me as one of them.”
Echo paused, and when I say she paused I don’t mean she stopped speaking, I mean totally froze.
She remained perfectly still with her eyes locked on the ceiling for at least thirty solid seconds, maybe longer.
She didn’t breathe and she didn’t blink.
Then, without warning, she snapped back to life and asked, “Have you ever watched Let’s Make a Deal ? ”
“What the fuck just happened?” I stammered uncontrollably.
“Oh, sorry,” Echo said, laughing at what must have been a look of total confusion on my face. “Did I zone out for a moment?”
“Quite a moment, yes.”
“My family calls that ‘returning to my factory settings.’ It happens sometimes when I’m hyper-focused on a thought. Especially if I’m with someone who’s a quick thinker, like you.”
I laughed. “I wish my dad could have heard you call me that.”
“What? You are super smart,” she protested.
“You might be confusing a smart mouth with a smart brain.”
“I don’t like that. Please don’t do it again,” Echo said in a way I’d never heard anyone speak.
It was direct but felt free of judgement.
Blunt yet surgical. “You’re clearly very intelligent and you shouldn’t allow anyone, not your dad, not even yourself talk to you like that.
If I heard someone talk about my friend that way, I’d let them have it. ”
“The way you let me have it the day we met?” I asked.
“Waaaay worse,” she replied.
“So, we’re friends?” I asked, leaning forward in my chair.
Echo nodded. “I’d say so, yes. Wouldn’t you?”
“I’d say that I hoped we’d become more than friends.”
This time Echo didn’t freeze. She short circuited. Her left eye blinked rapidly while the right kept a slow and steady pace. Her mouth twisted up before stammering out, “M…M…Monty Hall.”
I shook my head. “You don’t want to date me because you’re in love with a guy named Monty Hall?”
“No,” she said, now blushing. “I’m ignoring your comment for now to get back to what I was saying about how my brain works.”
“My apologies, please continue.”
“Monty Hall was the host of an old game show called Let’s Make a Deal, and on that show, they had a segment where a single prize would be hidden behind one of three doors and the contestant would have to choose which was the correct one.
Choose the right one of the three and you may win ten thousand dollars or a trip to Honolulu.
Pick one of the other doors and you’d end up with a pile of old newspapers or a donkey. ”
“A donkey? ”
“Well, there was a donkey on the show. I’m not sure they gave each losing contestant a real live donkey to take home with them, but then again this was TV in the sixties, so who knows.”
“So, you’re telling me that your brain works like a game show donkey’s?”
Echo pointed her finger at me. “See, you’re quick.
And, no, that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that most people have three doors to choose from in their minds when processing information.
One marked ‘Yes,’ one marked ‘No,’ and one marked ‘Other.’ Behind the door marked ‘other’ is that grey area you mentioned.
All the possibilities that are neither yes nor no. Does that make sense so far?”
“I’m tracking with you,” I replied.
“Well, I don’t always have access to ‘Door Number Three.’ In fact, often times I can’t even see it, let alone open it. There’s a governor in my brain which tells me I have only one of two options, which can oversimplify, and therefore complicate my decision making.”
“So, what about me? Do you think I’m behind Door Number One or Door Number Two? Am I a yes or no?”
“That’s the funny thing. When I think of you, all I see is Door Number Three.”
“And how do you feel about that?”
“I feel like you need to go pick out a ceramic to glaze off one of the shelves so I can concentrate on this vase.”