Bad Men

If she did not relent, there would a tantrum and she would be distracted from the task at hand, and she could not afford to be distracted from it. She gave up and dismissed him with a wave.

“Go, go. But if you think that there’s even the slightest thing wrong with Jack, you come straight back home, you hear me?”

He nodded solemnly, then broke for the door. His mother stood and walked to the window, her bedroom looking down on the path that wound between their property and Jack’s house. In the beginning, she had led him along the way herself, either holding his hand or watching anxiously as he bounded ahead. After a while, she had started to let him make the short walk between the two houses alone. It wasn’t far, and she could follow his progress every step of the way. She felt that it was important to allow him a little independence, a little room in which to grow. She wanted him to be tougher, while simultaneously fearing the consequences of releasing him from her protection. It was the dilemma of every parent, she knew, but a mother without a man to share the raising of a male child felt it more acutely. Sometimes she sensed that she was being forced to make choices that were against her nature in order to compensate for someone who wasn’t there.

The boy trailed his way down, the soda can still clutched in his hand, like a small, bright fragment of canvas set adrift from the whole, his red windbreaker startlingly bright against the trees. Her eyes remained upon him until he reached the old man’s door. She saw him knock and wait patiently, and then the door opened and he was gone.

Vincent “Jack” Giacomelli had come to Dutch Island in the spring of ’67, after he had lost his job teaching at some fancy college on the East Coast. He was a walking history of art, even if his knowledge and appreciation had never enabled him to paint with even one iota of the talent and imagination of those of whom he spoke to others. Things had started to turn black in the summer of ’65, when his wife left him for a professor of physics who drove the kind of fancy sports car that physicists (who were, in Jack’s experience, so boring they made even mathematicians seem kind of entertaining) were not supposed to know existed. After she went away, Jack’s life began to fall apart, or maybe it had been falling apart anyway and that was why she left. Jack was never too sure, and most of that period of his life remained a blur. Truth be told, the blur extended up to a couple of months back, when he had fallen and bumped his head, and Joe Dupree had sat him down on the chair and spoken to him in that way of his, that quiet way that told you that if you didn’t shape up and take his advice, then you might as well pack your bags, lock your doors, and head for the mainland, because Joe Dupree wasn’t going to have any nonsense on his island.

What Jack couldn’t figure out was why he didn’t feel any resentment toward the policeman. After all, people had been telling him to shape up for the best part of forty years and he hadn’t given a red cent for their advice. But Joe Dupree was different. There was no other way to put it. When Joe Dupree looked at you in that strange, sad way of his, it was like being an onion beneath a knife held by a skilled hand, as layer after layer was exposed and discarded until only the very core remained.

Or until nothing at all remained, depending on how far he went, or the sort of onion you were. Jack had been kind of worried that if Joe Dupree kept peeling, he would find out some terrible truth about Jack that the old man himself had never even suspected existed or that he had somehow refused to face. It was the fear that he had nothing left to offer, nothing but bad art and broken promises, and that Joe Dupree was capable of revealing that truth. Once exposed, it could never again be hidden.

After that talk, Jack went on the wagon for a while. It didn’t last, of course. It never had before, and even Joe Dupree wasn’t likely to have that much of an impact on a hardened booze hound like Jack, but the old man was more careful now, drinking only in the evenings and never, ever, taking a bottle to bed with him as he used to do in the good old days. Instead, he began to paint at a faster pace than ever before.