The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel Read online

  Suddenly those green eyes were fixed on me but he didn’t smile. He stepped away from the wall and stretched his arms.

  I said hi.

  “You came.” He held out his hand and I shook it. I was surprised by his grip—there was a lot more in it now, a strength and confidence missing (or simply omitted) at work. I remembered what he’d said about his secret identity, how he was the real Mateo at night. I wondered what I was getting myself into.

  “Of course I came.” We stood facing each other, a stand-off. I wanted to suck his lips. “I—like your tattoos,” I said, giving a nod at his arm. The patterns started an inch or two before his wrists and stopped in the middle of his biceps.

  “Oh, yeah. Thanks.” He raised his right arm and turned the forearm veiny-side up, gave it a little shake (I wondered if it was to shake off my gaze), and lowered it. “It’s Boston.”

  “That’s cool.” I almost asked to see it again. “The skyline? From what angle?”

  “Looking from Cambridge. From Memorial Drive.” He raised his arm again and turned it over quick and put it down, more just to refer to it than to offer it for further inspection. “It’s a little outdated now. They keep building. So.”

  “What’s the other arm? Different angle?”

  He raised his left arm. “No. This side’s São Paulo.”

  “California?”

  He smirked and I felt like a total dipshit. “No. Brazil. Where my family’s from.” He pronounced it like he was from there too. Bra-ZEE-oo.

  “Oh. Cool. Yeah. I wondered.”

  “Boston and São Paulo.” He dropped his arms to his sides.

  “That’s cool.” No more talk of geography, I decided, eager to change the subject to one that made me sound less ignorant. I wondered if that was even possible with him. For as worldly as I thought I was, he seemed so much bigger. “So when do we...?”

  “Start?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come on.”

  He led me out of the station, down a long flight of stairs and into the parking lot. The air was moist and I felt hot already. I plucked at my shirt and hoped the heat would make him shed his sweatshirt soon.

  The smell of brick-oven pizza from a restaurant across the street caught my nostrils and I breathed it in.

  “I saw the Zakim on TV tonight,” I said. “You know how they use it as the backdrop on the news?”

  “Oh yeah.” He laughed.

  “I say it’s too clean!” I pumped my fist like a revolutionary.

  He laughed again, this time like how you laugh at a kid who plans to lasso the Moon. “It is too clean.”

  “Then why are we here and not there? Are we driving?”

  “Fletcher, we’re not really doing the Zakim.”

  “—We’re not?” I found myself disappointed but I’d be OK with a change of plans if they involved seeing those tattoos up close.

  “Not tonight, anyway.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  He turned and socked me playfully in the arm. “Tomorrow. Man, you’re crazy. No. The Zakim’s what we call a heaven spot. The best of all places. But it’s a dream. A dream. It would be su-i-cide.”

  “Then why did you say we were going to?”

  “Wanted to see if you’d go, I guess.”

  “So you know I’d go. What do you think about that?”

  “Like I said, you’re crazy. Louco.” I shrugged and he added, “But that’s good.”

  “Oh.”

  “You have to be, a little bit, to do this stuff.”

  “OK.”

  “Want to try something smaller?”

  Before I had a chance to respond he gestured for me to follow.

  He led me down Hyde

  Park Avenue for a mile or more, blue TV light flickering in the windows of three-deckers we passed. Then we dipped down a side street, and at the dead end we climbed over a chain-link fence. Mateo went over it a lot easier than I did but I didn’t embarrass myself. From there we entered the woods. He was silent but he picked his way among the bushes and branches carefully enough to imply a sense of direction. I realized I hadn’t ever stopped to think about whether I trusted this guy. That just wasn’t something that came up in the fluorescent-lit halls of our cubicle maze. And rarely was it something I thought about on dates. I’d never had a date in the woods.

  Really, Mateo could be planning to kill me, could turn and plunge a knife into my belly at any moment and no one would ever be the wiser. Could drop me into a pit and seal it over with rotting plywood like in Silence of the Lambs. Could kidnap me and bring me to a den of Brazilian drug lords, hold me for a ransom Cara and Jamar could never pay. But I figured he probably wouldn’t. And if he did, well, he was cute—and I could forgive practically anything of the cute.

  I smirked at the thought, and tried to focus. I focused on the sounds of the woods, on the chirp of city crickets, on the softening traffic noises, on the steady huff-huff of our breath. Most of all I enjoyed the sound of the twigs crackling underfoot. I was almost never in the woods. I marveled that there could even be this much woods in the city.

  “How much farther?” I said, feeling sweat slide down my back.

  “Not far.” He lifted a low branch over his head and held it until I could grab it. His bare arms looked ghostly in the dark. “Ever heard of Clarice Lispector?” he said.

  “No, who’s that?” His gang leader?

  “A Brazilian writer. A novelist. I was thinking about what you said, about something not having to be factual to be true. It reminded me. One of her books has a line like that, something like, This story, although invented, is true.”

  “Cool.”

  “Had to read it in high school. Hour of the Star. Worth picking up if you can find a translation. It’s super short. You could read it on your lunch.”

  He stopped suddenly and I almost bumped into him, then regretted not seizing the chance. We were standing against a chain-link fence looking down into a concrete canyon through which, at the bottom, fifteen or twenty feet down, ran two sets of train tracks.

  He pointed. “See that wall down there? It’s just begging to be painted on. Don’t you think?”

  I laughed. “How do we get down there?”

  I wondered if he had some kind of rope ladder set up and once again worried about embarrassing myself. But he bumped the back of his hand against my arm and said, “Down here.” He led me down some leaf-covered concrete steps I hadn’t even noticed were there, and he pushed open a door that had appeared to be locked. The city seemed willing to permit him access to whatever parts of it he wanted, all its secret places. The stairwell emptied out alongside the tracks.

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t trip,” he said.

  “Is there a third rail here?”

  “Nah, this is the regular train, not the T.”

  We walked across the tracks and I marveled at the thickness of the rails and at the huge width of this space, this canyon for trains. When you’re on a train the concrete walls are only ever a few feet beyond the windows, but standing on the track, well, haha, you could drive a train through here.

  “So this is safe?” I wondered aloud, looking around, looking up at the fence where we’d been standing moments earlier. In the dark among the shadows it seemed impossibly high up. We were trapped down here, vulnerable. If some sneaky woods-dweller were to shut that door behind us, how far would we have to walk before we found another one unlocked? And would we be able to get there before a train came blasting along?

  “Safe how?” he said.

  “Safe from trains, I guess?” But I also meant safe from cops, rabid hobos, graffiti gangs....

  “Well, the commuter rail you can hear a half-mile away,” he said. “It’s that high-speed Acela you have to watch out for. Those things are silent!”

  “Those are the ones that track-repair guys are always getting creamed by.”

  “That’s why you do your research. Know the schedules. Know them like your phone number. An
d always be aware of the time.” He pulled out his phone. “I’ve got the Amtrak and MBTA websites bookmarked.” He grinned. “We have some time.” He shrugged off his backpack and kneeled down with it on the ground in front of the concrete wall. Water marks covered the concrete like roots, and creamsicle-colored sodium lights bulged every twenty feet along the wall, throwing pools of orange light at the darkness. From the backpack Mateo pulled a pair of latex gloves and held them up to me. “You’ll probably want to use these.”

  I took them. They didn’t seem new, exactly, but they were free of paint—like an aging condom in a hopeful high schooler’s wallet. “You don’t? Isn’t this type of paint pretty toxic?” I snapped them on.

  “I’m used to it.”

  “Shame shame,” I said, thinking No glove no love.

  “Haha.”

  “I noticed your hand right when I met you. It doesn’t help your secret identity much.”

  “Can’t be 100 percent. I figure people figure I build models or something.”

  He stood up, slipped one spraycan into the pocket of his hoodie. The other he shook, the pea inside clacking—a familiar sound to me even though I’d used spraypaint only once before in my life, to paint a bike. He held out the can.

  I took it. Shook it again. “I have no idea what to write.”

  “Start with your Social Security number.”

  “Ha.”

  A grin. His teeth stood out white. “Just throw up a quick tag.”

  “A tag.”

  “A signature. Your name.”

  “Hmm. I’m not about to paint my name on here.”

  “I don’t mean your real name, silly,” he said. “A nickname. An apelido.” He took the other can from his pocket, uncapped it, shook it. His fingers seemed to know the can by heart. He didn’t examine the valve to make sure it was pointing the right way, as I’d already done at least twice. He made a quick arc on the wall, then another. I watched. “Where’d you get your real name, anyway? Fletcher.”

  “My grandfather.” I shook the can some more, getting ready, psyching myself up. My heart was beating fast.

  “Was he an arrow maker?”

  “An arrow maker? No, he worked in a factory that made—telephone wire, I think.”

  “Huh.” He was outlining interconnected bubble-letters but I couldn’t make out what they were or what they spelled. The pungent smell of paint made my nose itch.

  “In middle-school I got Fletcher the felcher a lot.”

  “Felcher? I don’t know what that is.” He stepped back to examine his work and then started making more outlines beneath the ones he’d already made. There was no room for error here, I saw—no eraser at the end of the can, no backspace key. In that way it was like using a typewriter. His arm moved with certainty.

  “Felcher. Like felching? A verb. To felch.”

  “To felch. I don’t know.”

  “I’m not about to explain what it is.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s mind-bogglingly gross.”

  He stopped painting and looked at me. I’d been right after all about his face coming alive at night. His green eyes seemed to glow like a cat’s in the orange light. “Now you really need to tell me.”

  “It’s when someone—” I felt my face get hot. “No, I’m not telling you. Google it. Use your phone. Go ahead.” I shook the can some more.

  “Never mind Google. What’s to felch?”

  “I’m really not comfortable.”

  “OK, OK, jeez.”

  He continued his outlining, then stopped and rummaged in his backpack amongst cans of paint, every once in a while holding one up in the light, which bent shadows around his eyes like a moving mask. He was a criminal, I realized, at least according to the cops. He was a wanted man. Yet he’d brought me here, showed me this, revealed his secret identity.

  “OK, so to felch,” I said. “It’s when you ejaculate in someone’s rectum and then—ingest your own semen out of their—rectum.”

  He gritted his teeth and said, “Oh, I’ve done that.”

  I stared in silence.

  “I’m kidding! I don’t even know why I said that. I’m kidding.” He looked at me earnestly. “You believe me I’m kidding, right?”

  “I believe you.”

  “We need to forget about that shit. That is some sick shit. Fletcher the felcher is not a good tag for the arrow maker.”

  “Arrow Maker. That doesn’t sound like a very unique name.”

  “Arrow Maker.” He said it a couple of times, testing it. “Hmm. Well Michael’s not a unique name either, and he’s an angel, right?”

  For a second I thought he was talking about my Michael, but he meant God’s.

  “Are you saying I’m an angel?” I said, and instantly regretted it. Perhaps I was assuming too much here.

  He looked at his work in progress and dragged his arm across his forehead again. “Just saying Arrow Maker is OK for a name.”

  I looked at the blank wall and shook the can again. “Arrow Maker. How about just Arrow. Or Arrowman.”

  “Sounds good to me.” He made a gesture of moving the can across the concrete. “Go.”

  “I’m nervous.”

  “Nervous?” He shook his head and his tongue zipped over his lips. “Half hour ago you were ready to do the Zakim Bridge!”

  I smiled. I pressed the valve and the spray came out hard, started dripping down the concrete. “Uh. Shit.”

  “Hold it farther away,” he said, coming closer, sneakers crunching twigs. He took hold of the base of the can, directing my hand. “Here.”

  I sprayed a little. He moved his hand on top of mine, put his pointer finger on top of mine on top of the valve. “You want to move it while you spray, you know? Ever do calligraphy? With a fountain pen?”

  I could smell him and he smelled like fabric softener and—what had he eaten? pancakes?—maple syrup.

  “In high school, I guess. Art class.”

  “Remember how if you let the pen sit on the paper it would bleed? You needed to keep it moving. Same here.” His finger on top of mine pressed the valve. My heart was pounding and I hated the presence of the glove separating us. He guided my hand and soon we’d produced three lines, a capital single-line A, dripping blue at the bottom legs and across the middle. “You want to make an outline first,” he said. We went around the A again to make it bubble. “Looks good so far. Then you fill it in. Then you can do whatever shit you like to it, you know?”

  He let me go on my own and moved back to his work in progress, rummaged in his backpack for a new color. He popped the cap off with a flick of his thumb and put it in his pocket.

  And I remembered, as he was painting, that the clacking of the aerosol can pea was the same sound as the clacking of my typewriter keys.

  With the low light and his heavy stylization, I couldn’t read what he’d written—but then a six popped out. And a one. It was a date. Below the date, nudging the letters, was an apple.

  “What’s the apple?”

  “Cherry. I haven’t done the stem yet.”

  “A cherry. And numbers.” I thought of a slot machine.

  Suddenly his phone started chiming. We both looked down at his pants. “Gotta go, Arrowman.” He capped his can and dropped it in the backpack.

  “Train?”

  “Acela.”

  We ran across the tracks and retreated to the stairwell and waited there like Jesse Jameses for the train.

  When it finally blew past—it was four minutes late and as sneaky as Mateo had said—it sucked my breath from my lungs. Leaves whisked up around us. Mateo’s hair and the strings of his hoodie swirled around his head but his face was all smile. When the tracks were clear and the night was quiet again we returned to our work.

  We painted for another twenty

  minutes and then went back across the tracks and up the stairs, Mateo carefully shutting the door behind us. We sat amid the grass and brush at the edge of the woods, knees against the v
ine-laced fence, to watch a second train go past. The lights on the train sent stars skittering across the wet paint of our work.

  Beside my drippy, embarrassing ARROWMAN, the R’s of which were bent into arrows, was a remarkably three-dimensional cherry frozen in the middle of an explosion. Its stem was spinning in a vortex that seemed to be spewing forth a date, the numbers of which were highlighted in red that looked sticky and somehow even sweet. The numbers were today’s date. Or yesterday’s, now that it was past midnight.

  “I get it,” I said, feeling my cheeks heat up.

  “The date upon which Fletcher Bradford popped his graffiti cherry.”

  I laughed while thrilling at the innuendo. “It looks incredible.”

  “Thanks. You know, usually this is a no-no,” he said. “Sticking around.”

  “Because you can get caught?”

  He nodded. “Usually I take a quick look, snap a photo, and scram. Usually you don’t want to linger around any longer than that.”

  “But this is safe here?”

  “It’s pretty safe here. Nobody comes here. There’s not really anyone to see it.”

  “Won’t people on the train see it?”

  “A blur, if that. So nobody bothers to paint here.” He pointed to our graffiti. “Those’ll run for a while.”

  “You mean drip?”

  He shook his head, smirking. “Before it gets painted over or blasted off. More visible the location, shorter the run.”

  “Ah.”

  “All those squares and rectangles of gray paint you see on walls and stuff—the ones that look like Tetris blocks—that’s where the city painted over people’s work.”

  “Is it? That sucks. I’ve always wondered what those are.”

  We were quiet for a while. He pointed up and we watched a pair of squeaking bats dive at bugs in the air.

  “A kid named Jeremy popped my real cherry,” I said. “I’m gay, by the way.” It felt funny to say it only now. Usually it was one of the first things I said.

  He was poking a twig into a hole in his sneaker. He looked over and in the shadows his face revealed nothing. “Yep. You are.”

  “You knew?”

  “Let’s just say I know you were checking out the junk in my trunk long before you ever saw my car.”