The Moment Before

Chapter Sixteen

            I sketched here last summer. Hunkered down on the brick steps of Portland’s outdoor “living room,” with my graphite and my pad, I spent hours watching, drawing. There was a man with a dog—a beautiful boxer-pitbull type mutt. He called her Olive and as he sat in the sun, his shirt off and his eyes closed, he just stroked that dog like all that mattered in the whole world was the touch of that sun-kissed fur. The man was covered in ink and track marks. His beard was a scraggly mess and you could count his ribs—they were Jesus ribs, the spaces between them hollowed out and smooth. This guy, he was probably no more than 30, but missing teeth.

            The dog called Olive stood and guarded this sack-of-bones guy. Anyone walked up too close to her master, she would growl a low, guttural moan. You got the feeling that no matter what this man, this obvious junkie, went through, that dog had his back. The lines and the shading and the shadow from my charcoal blended with the reality of that connection. It was like the love between those two living creatures slipped inside me and found its way out through my hand. Now the sketch is sitting on an easel in the grandest house in Portland. I wonder where the subjects are. My models. And in that wondering, I know where I need to go next.

At Blick’s I buy Prang-wrap charcoal pencils. I buy a couple of sticks. A black brick eraser, a soft kneaded one. And a pad of heavy-weight paper. My left forearm always goes smudgy, so I get some free cloths from their rag bag, and some spirits to clean off all the ashy residue. The smell of oil paints and gum erasers and linseed oil—it goes into the core of me, a jolt of joy, almost a fever. It’s like I feel in Ms. Bowerman’s class. Home. The thereness of the world melts, and in my belly is a bed of coals, warming me for the chilly day. It’s twenty-eight blocks to Forest Park, and I need to walk all of it just to settle the jumpy thoughts and ideas welling up inside me.

            Slow down, whispers Sabine.

            This is the most alive I’ve felt in weeks. Bright sun plays hide-and-seek with pewter clouds. There is such movement in the air. A gusty wind kicks up some neighborhood chimes. Birds are everywhere—a robin scoops up an enormous worm from a puddle in the sidewalk. But the worm’s too big—the bird keeps dropping it, and the worm tries desperately to wiggle away only to have that robin grab it again. The bird is spring-fat, and I’m wondering if it’s getting ready to lay eggs, or already has some nearby. The underbelly on that robin—the color of lips.

            The sun disappears, and the bird flies away, its too-big worm safe for now, wiggling back to the trickle of water in the sidewalk crack. More breeze and chimes. I keep walking, and now I’m on a street lined with cherry trees. Blossoms pink as a prom dress are fluttering, swirling in the wind. And then, out of nowhere, the way it can be on a Portland spring day, the sky opens and pummels everything with tiny white balls.

            Hail and pink blossoms pelt me—an attack of machine gun pellets. The tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat of them on the roofs and windshields of cars. It’s deafening. My face stings with the assault. My windbreaker shields me a little, but the frozen force of the storm drills through to my bones. I keep walking toward the park.

            By the time I get to the Lower Macleay sign and walk up the trail, it’s over. White drifts like seafoam fill cracks and puddles. Tender bright green fir branches are covered in a skin of ice, which is already rapidly melting. A slender rainbow arcs over the forest and bird song returns. It’s a Disney movie.

Right now, I’d be in Bowerman’s. But, I’m not. Brady Wilson has been marked absent yet again. I’ve probably missed two tests in Blue Dot trig. I’m sure I have a solid F. My stomach knots up at the thought of the Portland Journal article buzz at Greenmeadow. Martha must really hate me, and Nick must loathe me, and it’s a good thing my phone battery is dead.

            Sun finds its way to the soggy trail. My kicks make a schlupp sound in the muck with each step. Up and up and up and up. The little hail and wind storm has left a path of broken nature: twigs, petals, leaves. And the manmade part of it: plastic bags and beer cans.

            By the time I get to the Witch’s House, the sun has melted all traces of frozen white. Spring is spring again, and there’s a particularly welcoming patch of grass in view of my subject: an ivy-crusted section of a dilapidated stairway. A stairway to nowhere.

            I drape the plastic Blick’s bag over a flat rock on that patch of grass and sit down cross-legged. Set out my supplies in a line against some chunks of basalt. Just holding my tools, smelling them. And then getting started. The way charcoal marks a blank page like a dog peeing on a bush. Indelible. Fragrant. A witness.

            Sabine used to tell me that when she arched into her scorpion, she’d visualize a bird perched at the end of a twig—delicate, strong. She said that cheerleading perfection was the marriage of grace and strength. And when she got it right, the high was better than anything. As I draw my hand across the page, make the lines, and find that one place where they intersect—the one place that creates form—that’s what I feel, too. Grace and strength.

            The way the ivy winds and covers the stone, rising and thriving on a dead and broken thing, that’s what I want. On the paper and in my heart. Blurring edges, finding perspective, recreating real.

            Sun pours down now, baking off the damp, steam rising from the ground in a fog. Pencil, then stick. Eraser, then pencil. It grows. It takes shape. Stairs that end at the sky. A violent sky. Unpredictable. Angry. Then, forgiving. The ivy is holding the stones, keeping them rooted to earth. In all the world, there is not a holier feeling.

            And then, soft footsteps coming up the path. The crunch and mud-sucking of someone large. And when I raise my eyes, it’s a familiar shape loping up the trail. And in his hand, a white and pink, slightly soggy, Voodoo Doughnuts box. “Thought I’d find you here,” he says before sliding onto the patch of grass beside me and brushing a layer of plastered pink petals from my jacket.

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