Chapter Thirty-Two #2
“Follow me,” she says, and takes me over to the wall where those dated posters of celebrities promoting reading used to hang. “We have this big blank wall now.”
I pretend-gasp. “Don’t tell me you’re retiring Yoda and Penny Hardaway and the Duke boys.”
“I just hope the American Library Association will forgive me,” she says. “At first, I was thinking I’d buy some inexpensive art at Home Goods or TJ Maxx to fill up the space. Then I remembered when Beena Patel mentioned you were an artist and I asked to see some of your work.”
“Yeah, well, those drawings I showed you were just rough—”
“Stop being so modest. How would you like to make this wall your canvas?”
“What do you mean? Paint you a mural?” She nods. I shake my head.
“Why not?”
“I’ve never done anything this large. I’d screw up the perspective. Too much pressure. Plus, I’m not even that good.”
“Nice try, but I’ve seen your work. You’ve already passed the audition.”
“Yeah, well, that’s flattering, but there’s a big difference between doing pencil drawings in an eight-by-twelve sketch pad and painting an entire wall.” I hand her the book I’m borrowing and she checks it out. “Thanks for thinking of me, though.”
“Well, I’m disappointed,” she says. “I guess it’s back to Home Goods.”
“Not necessarily. There’s got to be a lot of guys doing time here who have artistic talent. I’ll ask around, see if I can come up with a couple of names for you. Okay, I better get back. See you next time.”
I’m out the door and halfway down the stairs when I stop and go back in.
“What subject are you thinking of?”
She says she doesn’t have anything specific in mind—that it would be up to me. I remind her that I’ve passed on the offer, but she says, “Maybe you can come up with a few ideas, work up some sketches. Nothing too controversial that the powers that be could object to.”
“Okay then. How about a scene out in the yard with cons pole-vaulting over the fence? Or a seascape with Warden Rickerby playing beach volleyball with her custody officers? Do you think she’d pose for me in a bikini?”
She laughs and tells me not to be naughty. “But seriously, Corby, I suppose it should be something uplifting. Hopefully, something colorful.”
“I think colorful would be a tall order since the only color palette they seem to have here is drab gray, drab pink, and drab green.”
“Oh, you don’t know how resourceful I can be. I have contacts I can hit up at Sonalysts, Sherwin-Williams, and the Art Department at Connecticut College. I can get you all the colors of the rainbow, whatever you need. What do you say?”
I tell her I’ll think about it. Work on some ideas.
“So that’s a yes?”
“It’s a probably not but maybe.” She taps her finger against the blank wall and waits. “Okay, it’s a maybe unless you hate what I come up with.”
When she reaches over and kisses my cheek, I mockingly remind her that staff-inmate contact is against the rules. She says she doesn’t think she’d have lasted six months here if she didn’t break rules.
“Which is why you’re a badass,” I tell her. She grins and says she’ll take that as a compliment.
As I walk back to B Block, I get a little choked up by the faith she’s just shown me.
The challenge of that blank wall begins to excite me and ideas for the mural are already spinning by the time I’m back in the building and climbing the stairs.
Colorful, she says. Tropical birds in a rainforest?
Monarch butterflies against a blue sky winging their way back to Mexico?
She says she’d like it to be uplifting. A sky filled with hot-air balloons would be uplifting and colorful.
Okay then. Problem solved.… Except how would that be different from the kind of art she’d buy at Home Goods?
And more important, why would hot-air balloons speak to the guys in this place?
Sports heroes? I imagine it like the Sgt.
Pepper album cover. Jordan, Jesse Owens, Muhammad Ali, and Babe Ruth in the front row.
Behind them Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams, Jim Brown, and Larry Bird.
But what about Clemente, Gretzky, Tiger, Serena?
And what about Olympic athletes? Carl Lewis, Usain Bolt, Jackie Joyner-Kersee.
Would anyone besides me know my sentimental favorite, Steve Prefontaine?
Nah, I can just hear everyone bitching about who I included and who got left out.
And I’d probably have trouble getting all those likenesses right.
That’s supposed to be Magic Johnson? Nope. Way too complicated.
How about something historic? Maybe a battle scene between the Wequonnocs and the Connecticut colonists?
Uh-uh. Nothing uplifting about war.… Historic moments in the Civil Rights movement?
MLK, John Lewis, and the freedom fighters at the Pettus Bridge?
I’d love to stick it to the white supremacists around here, including some of the COs, but I don’t want it to come back at me or land in Mrs. Millman’s lap.
… Famous American writers?… Rock stars and rappers?
… The Apollo 11 moon landing? That’s one small step for a man …
I spend most of the rest of the day thinking up ideas that seem promising, then scrapping them.
By lights-out, I still haven’t come up with anything I want to go with, but it dawns on me that I’ve been so engaged by this project, I’ve barely given a thought to those two a-holes who are out to get me and what they might pull next.
The next day, same thing. Ideas keep sparking in my head, but nothing catches fire. By day three, I have a sketchbook filled with notes and drawings that turn into dead ends. I’ll give it another day or two. If I still can’t come up with anything that excites me, I’ll throw in the towel.
On the fifth day of driving myself nuts, I start thinking about mythology.
I open up that book I grabbed from the library when they were throwing shit out and thumb through those color plates by the masters.
I flip past Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus , then pause and turn back to it.
I study the painting’s composition—the unconventional choices Bruegel made.
The farmer in the foreground plowing a patch of land is the most prominent figure.
His size and his bright red shirt grab the viewer’s attention before anything else.
Yet, he’s insignificant to the Icarus story.
So are the shepherd minding his flock, the man fishing at the water’s edge, and the sailors aboard the cargo ship on the pale green sea.
These ordinary people going about their day’s work are oblivious or indifferent to Icarus’s headfirst crash into the Aegean and what I imagine came next: his flailing and fighting against a watery death.
Again, I wonder why the artist chose to make the story’s doomed hero the least significant figure in the composition—render him as a small detail rather than the central figure.
What’s Bruegel saying? The Icarus myth is usually understood as a cautionary tale against the recklessness of youth.
But maybe that lowly shepherd one tier down from the farmer provides a subtle clue about the artist’s intent.
He stares up at the sky, his attention focused on something the viewer doesn’t see.
Could he be staring at Icarus’s father, Daedalus, who invented the makeshift wings that led to his and his son’s escape from prison but also the son’s fatal fall?
Is the painting about Daedalus’s fate: having to bear witness to his son’s untimely death while he remains alive and aloft himself?
Having to outlive his boy, suffering with the knowledge that he’s the unintentional orchestrator of his demise?
I tear the color plate of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus from the mythology book, walk it over to the library, and run my idea past Mrs. Millman.
“So clarify something for me, Corby,” she says.
“Does this mean you’ve decided to paint the mural?
” I tell her it must because it’s all I’ve been able to think about for days now.
She applauds my answer. Then she takes the Bruegel print from me and studies it.
“I know this painting,” she says. “It’s in a museum in Brussels.
I saw it when my husband and I were traveling in Europe.
So you’re envisioning a landscape painting then. Any place in particular?”
“Yeah, this place. The land, not the prison. You ever see that ledge on the other side of the river?”
She nods. Mentions the inmate who tried to escape by scaling that ledge, but lost his footing and died from the fall.
“I was thinking about that guy. But what if he had made it to the top, then turned around and looked down at the view. The woods, the fields, the river, but not these ugly buildings and the ugly stuff that goes on here?”
“So you want to show what the property looked like before they built Yates?”
“Or after they tear it down. Or both.”
She looks confused. “Well, work up some drawings that we can show the deputy warden,” she says. “He’ll need to sign off on what you’re planning.”
“Do you think that will be a problem?”
She looks at me intently. “Nothing too controversial or he’ll take the easy way out and say no. And think about what you’ll say if he asks why you’ve omitted the institution.”
“Okay. Got it.”