Modest Art

The first time Charles got spanked was at the age of twelve by his father’s new girlfriend. Charles had drawn an image on a piece of A4 paper. The image itself was abstract, loops and whorls and lop-sided shading. His father’s girlfriend crumpled the paper into her purse, secreted Charles behind the backyard shed, and whipped his bare cheeks red with a sun-worn dog leash.

At school, the hard plastic seat of his desk bit into him. Prolonged shock set in, like a headache through his whole body. He couldn’t understand what this new sensation was—not the pain, but the surprise of it. The worry that he could be dragged away from his thoughts and stung raw. It was his first taste of helplessness.

Charles didn’t know it at the time, but when he drew pictures, he drew the thoughts of the people around him. His father’s girlfriend, Stevie, had gotten scared. She saw something within the abstract swirls of Charles’ doodle, something oily and shameful. To anyone else, the picture meant nothing. To Stevie’s eyes, Charles had exposed her.

After the shed beating, Charles hid in his room. He loved drawing, but soon understood that company was just as much a necessity to his art as pencils and paper. In solitude, his arm went numb. Sometimes he’d bring his pink plastic drawing tray to the bathroom and listen to the muffled conversations of the neighbors just outside the window, the tray balanced on his knees, his bony backside perched on the lip of the bathtub. He didn’t understand what they were saying, but their presence hummed in the color-sight of his mind. Images of nothing in particular sprouted from the paper in cushioned arcs and faded angles.

If he stayed too long, Stevie would hammer on the door. 

Everything Charles drew got inspected. Sometimes Stevie would catch him in the doorway, dump his schoolbag on the living room carpet, and shuffle through it like she was looking for stolen art or smuggled drugs. Other times his bedroom gave him a feeling of off-ness, as if his drawers had switched positions, or his blankets had flipped and rotated. He hid his art beneath his mattress, never sure which images would spark Stevie's darkness.

“We need to have a talk,” she said on his thirteenth birthday. “This thing you’re doing needs to stop.”

Charles wasn’t sure how to answer. He understood that she would often become enraged at his art, but he saw no pattern to it. Why some pictures and not others? Most of his pictures looked the same to him. His fulfillment came from the process, not the result.

Stevie pierced Charles with her dark-eyed stare. Her jaw was set, guarded, bulldog-ish. She did all of the talking. She seemed to think that Charles was toying with her, that he knew something about her that no one else should know. His drawings were his way of taunting her, of dangling dynamite just above her head.

“Your father and I have a good thing going,” she said. “I won’t have you messing it up just because you think you know me. And it’s childish—this shit you do. Drawing little clues. Leaving them around the house for your father to see.” The finger-flesh around her nails was red and puffy from nervous nibbling. Between every sentence she would look to the side, at nothing, reflexively biting at her hand until the next thought made itself ready for speaking.

Stevie took Charles behind the shed again. After, as she wiped a little blood from the dog leash, she informed him that he was going to stay with his grandma for the summer.

What Charles didn’t realize until it was too late was that his grandma—the mother of his father—was vacationing in Florida. What Stevie meant was her own mother. Charles could not understand how the mother of his father’s girlfriend was his grandma, but he didn’t say anything. He was happy to be going anywhere else. He had been resisting the tingle his hands felt when they needed to draw. A summer away from Stevie meant that he could at last breath easily. He packed all of his colored pencils, some highlighters, a folder of printing paper, and a college-ruled notebook his father had pilfered from work. His pink drawing tray was too big for his backpack, so he tucked it under the neatly folded jeans and t-shirts in the suitcase his father let him use.

Stevie’s mother, Beverley, was nice in a way that felt, to Charles, like automatic bodily functions: breathing, blinking, sweating, burping. Small compliments were handed out like Halloween candy. Meals were prepared, displayed, and cleaned up with the gummy slowness of sap leaking down bark.

Beverley lived in a long trailer right outside of the Washington Church of Jesus Christ. The “t” in “Christ” had been set to look like a plain white cross, different from the italicized, serif-ed font, with the effect that Charles came to think of it as the church of Chris. Beverley was friends with the pastor, she said, although it was obvious even to young Charles that she was a charity demonstration designed by the pastor’s wife, Denny. (“Those Washingtons are good people. Look how well they take care of Beverley.”) Charles spent most of the summer in Beverley’s trailer watching old episodes of Transformers in between repeats of a Gaither Vocal Band VHS tape, brothers and sons harmonizing about touching and being touched by Jesus.

Beverley took comfort in Charles’ pictures. She would often scoop them up from his TV tray, lilt back in her recliner, and read them like a newspaper, occasioned with grunts of knowing satisfaction. “Mmhm,” she’d breathe with a molasses nod. “Yes, yes.” Charles didn’t know what she saw in them. He didn’t care. He was happy to be drawing openly and without fear.

Even though Beverley lived squarely outside of the church, she never attended service. This wasn’t because she lacked faith—Beverley was confused about many things in her old age, but God was one thing she could be certain of. The reason was because of her back. She could not sit anywhere other than her cracked pleather recliner for more than a few minutes before getting piercing pain. The last time she had sat in the church pews, Denny had to personally drive her to the hospital.

“Draw me a picture, hun,” Denny said one evening. She often dropped by late on Saturdays to make sure Beverley hadn’t passed away in her sleep. Denny had puffy auburn hair, ice-blue eyes, light freckles just above her cheekbones, and wore a business suit that wouldn’t make sense in an actual office. Charles understood from the chatter after Sunday service that Denny was considered friendly, graceful, and a “real looker” for forty. He also understood that, even though she was no longer the young beauty many had fallen in love with, she was still only half the age of her husband, the great Pastor Washington, who was having a harder time staying awake at the podium and who was losing the ability to pronounce words with more than one hard consonant.

While Denny and Beverley chatted about the state of the country’s dwindling faith, Charles lost himself in the mindless, colorful habit of his art. Drawing put Charles into a mood that was not exactly joyous, but still pleasant. Time extended, as if he was stealing excess seconds from the clock and using them all for himself. It was in these moments he felt like he was getting a lot of thinking done, and yet was doing no thinking at all. He couldn’t explain it, but, also, he had never tried to. No one ever asked.

He was yanked from his trance by a throaty squeal. Denny, hands shaking, tugged his drawing away from him by its corner, pinched between two fingers like it was a soiled diaper.

“You let him draw this smut in your own house, Bev?”

“What do you mean, Denny?” Bev leaned close to the picture. “Looks like kid scribbles.”

“This is vile!”

Charles recognized the look in Denny’s eyes. A horror, a fascination. Unlike Stevie, Denny wasn’t immediately compelled to destroy the image. Whatever it was she saw, she wanted to keep seeing it.

“Usually he draws the sweetest things, Denny,” Beverley said, reaching into a drawer where she kept some of her favorites. “Look at this one here. If this ain’t the Lord’s good graces shining through this young man, I don’t know left from right.”

Denny took both pictures home. She drank a half a bottle of red wine, pleasured herself in the shower, and then passed the pictures to her husband.

“I found this smut out by the trashcan. Any idea where it’s from?”

Pastor Washington wheezed, blinked the moisture from his bubble-gum eyelids, then shrugged. “Don’t look like much to me, dear.”

Denny had always taken pride in her intuition. It wasn’t clear how Beverley’s ward was doing it, but he was drawing things that only certain people could see. She took a special interest, dropping by Beverley’s trailer every day with treats and art supplies, watching out of the corner of her eye as Charles pressed and smudged his pencils seemingly at random. Half the time his pictures were deep perversions, ones that made the hairs on Denny’s arms stand stiff. Everything else was a mess of nonsense only Beverley could appreciate.

“Here’s all I need from you, hun.” Denny had let herself into Beverley’s trailer early one Sunday morning, an hour before service started, and dragged a sleepy Charles to the far side of the nave. “You just sit in the back pew with your little tray here, and draw, draw, draw. That’s it. Just draw, alright, hun?”

Charles drew. He was worried he’d be scared—the echoes against the tall walls, the quiet eyes, the stiff suits, the other kids his age with slicked-back hair and glossy shoes—but once everyone was seated, his fingers tingled in that familiar way. Time stretched into a cool wave. And then he was done. Denny collected his art and stood at the podium.

“One more thing before we leave.” She held up one page at random. “If this image speaks to you—and don’t lie in front of the Lord, I know it speaks to one of you—come see me. Thanks, and God Bless.”

Everyone departed in a cloud of curious murmurs except for one woman, a twenty-five-year-old Mexican mother. She stayed seated as her husband ushered her children to the parking lot. She was clammy and shivering.

Charles didn’t hear what Denny said to the woman. They spoke low, each phrase punctuated by either a long silence or the rap of Denny’s knuckles against his stack of pictures. Eventually they both stood, hugged, and separated. The mother exited choking on sticky sobs.

Denny’s heels clacked with a little jig. “How much longer you gonna be around, hun?”

Over the course of the next three weeks, Charles acted as a sort of courtroom artist. On top of Sundays, Denny held Wednesday church dinners, Friday church lunches, and Saturday pre-Sunday worship sessions. She introduced a very special twice-monthly Feast of Jesus, which had a eucharist of oyster crackers, a sacharist of grape juice, and other -rists of body parts and fluids she claimed were just as much in need of consuming, such as shredded horseradish for Christ’s bile and chicken liver for Christ’s heart. Charles was present for all of these events. Instead of A4 paper, he now had thick, lightly yellowed parchment cut into foot-wide circles. Denny said this gave his work an air of much-needed holiness, and she looked almost like a museum curator as she presented each circle on a flat metal board while wearing white cloth gloves.

Charles didn’t understand what Denny was gaining from his efforts. Like with Stevie, Charles felt swaddled in helplessness, albeit a much less painful form. He understood his drawings affected people. He knew it brought out darkness in Stevie, calm in Beverley, ambition in Denny, and any other number of reactions from the people at Washington Church, but the connection between what he was doing was invisible, intangible, and incomprehensible. He felt like Beverley’s Gaither gospel video, just playing over and over without any idea who was watching or how they were reacting to the performance.

Denny had grown bold. Whenever Charles drew a picture she knew was for—or about?—her, she framed it and put it near the entrance of the church. It excited her to see images so forcefully erotic on display, all shapes and shades of flesh, eyes rolled back, entities colliding, yet invisible to everyone but her. She didn’t logically understand what it was Charles was doing, but she trusted it. Perhaps she trusted it more than even Charles did. He never showed interest in his finished works. Sometimes, when someone would react, his mouth would open slightly, his head tilting in that innocent confusion boys had before they grew more aware of themselves.

It was all about power. And control. And sex.

Denny knew herself well. Even when she was sixteen being courted by a fifty-five-year-old church pastor, she understood that she was just as much in control as he was. To her, there was no difference between power and sex. They were both foreplay for each other in an endless circuit. And when her peers would lament that she was only a teenager being taken advantage of by a creepy old man, she would spin that into a new type of power, one of weaponized sympathy. People would obey you when they thought you were in control, or when they worried you weren’t. The only helpless positions were in the middle, where you couldn’t commit to being either strong or victimized.

So, for three weeks she had a vice grip on her community. She would confront each member, one by one, with a Holy Circle (what she called Charles’ pictures) and pretend as if she, too, understood what was there. She would ease them into confession, if there was one, and feign comradery and empathy. It almost didn’t matter what the person saw; the image, to them, was a private reflection, so anyone who could view that privacy had an acidic form of control. Some secret thoughts were laughably naive, like a woman disgusted at herself for shoplifting, or a girl embarrassed by a crush. Others were unquestionably illegal—fake marriages for citizenship, romances between cousins, selling toxic products—and these were the ones where Denny found herself free to push the boundaries of her own position of power: pocketing donations, manipulating loyalties, and sometimes, if she felt especially invincible, coercing someone into submissive carnality. It was only possible because no one else seemed to understand what Denny had understood quite early; if the image was made for you, only you could fear it.

After the second Feast of Jesus, she had to confront a simple, looming fact: Charles was not hers to keep. Summer was almost over. Her position in the church allowed her to sidestep the awkwardness of showering her attention on a boy who was not her own, but even Beverley was becoming too quick to remind everyone that Charles wouldn’t be around for her much longer.

“Hate to see you go, Charles. But your mom and dad’ll be here after tomorrow’s service,” Beverley said.

It was only at that moment that Charles learned his father’s girlfriend had become his new mother. The summer exile had allowed them an easy marriage and honeymoon. Beverley was surprised that Charles had not been informed. She wrapped him a dusty, bitter-scented hug, then told Denny to try and have him back before lunch.

Denny had no real idea how to keep Charles. Adoption and abduction had flitted across her mind, but both seemed far outside of her capabilities. All she could do was use him as much as possible while the good times lasted. During his final week, she held a service every morning. At this point, the majority of the community had come face-to-face with her and her miraculous Holy Circles, so they were willing—even if begrudgingly—to wake up several hours before work to have pre-dawn worship. The church was fuller than ever with guilty eyes that refused to meet. If Denny managed to enthrall the remaining constituents before Charles left, then maybe she could ride that wave of power for the next few years.

Charles had trouble concentrating during the final morning’s service. He drew half as many pictures as usual. His mind kept flashing to his time behind the shed. To Stevie’s curled nostrils. To the sun-bleached leash half-wound around Stevie’s veined knuckles. He fidgeted in his seat, reliving old blisters.

At the end of the service, none of Charles’ Holy Circles elicited reactions from the crowd. Denny usually only presented one, casting a single fishing line of guilt or confusion into the pews and hastily reeling someone in. This time she went through the whole stack twice, shuffling through like pre-exam flash cards. The service ended with a sigh of awkwardness. Even Pastor Washington, who was usually asleep in the corner by that point, had noted Denny’s clumsy desperation, and asked her in private to please stop with the circle business, if she didn’t mind.

“We had a good run, hun,” Denny said, ruffling Charles’ hair with a bit too much force. “Let’s get you ready to go.”

Charles packed as slowly as possible. Every time he heard a car pass in front of the trailer, he winced. Denny and Beverley made easy conversation over coffee, avoiding the subject of Denny’s recent use of Charle’s pictures after sermons. Even though Beverley didn’t attend the actual services, rumor had gotten out to her trailer quite early on. Her mind was too labored these days to fully piece together what Denny was up to, but she felt in her heart it was an abuse of the church. Beverley liked things the old and simple way, with a nice sermon, some music on the organ, and the Holy Spirit to speak through you in divine glossolalia. The idea of Holy Circles felt too mystical and Eastern-y. Still, she never spoke it out loud, and they managed to talk about nothing with each other until Stevie arrived in an old Ford pickup truck.

“Pleasure finally meeting you,” Denny said, taking Stevie’s gnawed-on hand into her own. “We’ve enjoyed your mother’s company for years, but I always seem to be out of earshot when any of her family drop by.”

Stevie gave Denny a limp handshake and responded with a tight smile, immediately turning her attention to Charles. “Your father had too much work, Charlie. Hope it’s alright if it’s just you and me on the ride back. You’ve been good, right?”

Charles nodded.

Denny’s intuition kicked in. She could read a stranger just as well as anyone she knew, and somehow felt, deep down, that Stevie contained a wrongness. The way she brushed aside Denny’s greeting, her lack of address to her own mother, the way she locked eyes with Charles as if he were an employee, the way she angled her body and shoulders away. Stevie was like one of Charles’ Holy Circles—swoops and colors and angles that could not be described but, somehow, could be understood perfectly by just the right person. Denny was that person.

“Didn’t want your son at the wedding?” Denny asked.

Stevie stiffened. “Excuse me?”

“Seems when people elope, they usually at least bring their own son. Although, I guess he’s not really your son, is that right?”

“Who are you again?”

“Denny. This is my property—the one your mother lives on.”

“Ah, you’re Washington’s wife,” Stevie said. “I lost track after his first two. Mom, thanks for the help, but we gotta head out. Traffic. C’mon, Charlie.”

Charles loaded his suitcase into the truck bed while Stevie hopped into the driver’s seat. 

Denny didn’t like losing the last word. She walked into Beverley’s trailer—quickly, but careful not to look like she was running—and came back with a stack of circular drawings. They were the ones Charles had drawn that morning.

“Hold up, I think these are yours!”

Denny fanned the stack of images on the windshield.

Stevie took an involuntary breath. Her eyes were locked, unbelieving, on the swirls and loops that showed her own carefully buried darkness. “You bitch,” she said, springing out of her seat. “You don’t know shit! Give me that!”

Denny had expected to rile Stevie up. She didn’t know how she knew to bring out those pictures, but it had made sense to her in the moment. Something in her mind connected the pieces like it usually did, in a way she just knew to trust. It also made sense that Stevie would react, as so many others had, with intense emotion. But Denny was not, and had never been, prepared to be attacked. Her avenues of power and control were in words, in manipulations, in the act or the withholding of the act of sex. Blood rushed to her head as Stevie launched forward, smashing her fist against Denny’s jaw.

The women rolled in the parking lot, blood browning in the chalky gray gravel. All around them Holy Circles flopped, lifted slightly by a breeze or the twisting of their bodies.

Charles, not knowing what to do, jumped into the driver’s side of the truck, knocking the gear stick into neutral gear. The truck lumbered forward, slow as a cloud across the sky, until its wheels encountered resistance. It stopped. Someone screamed and crunched at the same time.

Charles spent the next three hours in Beverley’s trailer while she stood outside with the police and the ambulance. He didn’t look out the window. He didn’t want to. He heard Beverley and Pastor Washington and a few other voices he didn’t recognize, but he couldn’t tell if Denny was hurt, or Stevie, or both. He heard neither of them. He was worried it was his fault. He was worried they had both popped like balloons of blood. He was worried strangers were going to ask him tough questions, and when he couldn’t answer them, they would put handcuffs on him and take him to jail with scary, full-grown men. So he did the only thing he could think to do, the only thing that took away the numbness of helplessness, which was draw.

Beverley came in older than ever. The police and medics had left. It was clear she was in no shape for excitement of any sort, let alone hours of interrogation and trauma. Her loose skin seemed powdery in the light of the little TV, which hummed Bill and Gloria Gaither at their peak. She didn’t say anything, just put her boney hand on Charles’ shoulder, kissed him on the top of the head, and sat down next to him. She took one of the pages from his tray, and for the first time recoiled at the image. Without thinking, she whispered, “this is the devil’s work, Charles.”

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Sources:

• Image: Lannie "Merlandese" Neely III