The Fear Artist

T
WO TWO-GALLON CANS
of paint weigh about five times as much as he’d thought they would.

Feeling as burdened as a prospector’s donkey, the wire handles of the cans cutting into his palms, he manages to pull open the door of the shop unaided. The door immediately swings shut on his chest, so he pushes it with his knee and edges through it sideways, left side first. One hundred percent of his attention is focused on not letting the door close on the can in his right hand.

Which means that when Poke Rafferty steps onto the wet sidewalk with his back to the road, he’s too preoccupied to hear the people running. So he’s unprepared when the crowd suddenly floods past, going at top speed, and the very large man strikes him from behind.

Rafferty pitches forward at a diagonal and bounces off a couple of running men on the way down. He instinctively throws his hands in front of him to break his fall, then tries to yank them back again when he registers the dangling paint cans. He fails on all counts, landing on his elbows with bone-chipping force and allowing the cans to hit the pavement hard enough to burst open in two eruptions of color, Apricot Cream (Rose’s choice) and a sort of rotted eggplant called Urban Decay, which Miaow picked for her room.

The man who ran into him has come down on top of him, all the way to the pavement. Rafferty is trying to struggle out from under, his hands slipping on the apricot concrete, when he hears
three sounds, like the crack of a bat in a stadium, and the man shudders as though he’s been shocked, then shudders again and rolls off Rafferty and into the paint, on his side.

His blue eyes, wide with surprise, look at Rafferty as though Rafferty is the most important question he’s ever been asked and he doesn’t know the answer.

Rafferty pulls his head back for a better look, and the man opens his mouth, but all that comes out is a ragged tatter of air.

He’s a once-tough, sixty-five or so, the planes of his face softened by the passage of years, wearing a T-shirt and a photographer’s vest over cargo shorts, both soaked from the rain. The chunky garments emphasize the thirty or thirty-five extra pounds that suggest he might be American or German. His fair, wet hair, vaguely military and brush-cut, all of an inch long, is in retreat from a high, balding forehead. For some reason what draws Rafferty’s attention, as people continue to run past, is that the skin on the top of the man’s head is crimson from sunburn. It’s been raining for days, but the man is sunburned.

Rafferty glances up the sloping road, sees that the running crowd is thinning, and says to the staring man, “I’ve got to get up. Are you okay?”

As he pulls himself to a sitting position, the wide eyes follow him and the mouth opens and closes noiselessly again. Then the man reaches up with his right hand and it lands heavily on the pocket of Rafferty’s T-shirt, tearing it slightly before the hand rises again and comes down on Rafferty’s left shoulder. The weight of it tugs Rafferty down a few inches, and the gesture opens the man’s vest. Up close, Rafferty sees the blackish red, like a third paint pigment, saturating the white T-shirt beneath.

“Hold it,” Rafferty says to no one. “You’re …”

The bat cracks again, and it looks as if the man has been yanked by an invisible cord, jerked three or four inches, headfirst, over the slick, colorful pavement. His head slowly turns to the right, with so much effort that Rafferty wouldn’t be surprised to hear it creak, and he stares disbelievingly in the direction the running crowd came from.

The red fluid pools into the apricot under the man’s chest.

“Let me get you up,” Rafferty says. All he can think is that the bleeding might slow if the man is upright instead of facing downhill. Rafferty slips an arm under the bleeding man’s shoulders and slowly, carefully, pulls him to a sitting position. The man’s head wobbles and then lolls left and drops forward, his chin hitting his chest so hard that Rafferty can hear his teeth snap together.

Rafferty is looking wildly for help when the man suddenly raises his head and says something, almost a whisper.

“What?” Rafferty says. “What did you say?”

The man’s mouth works two or three times, like someone getting ready to pronounce an unfamiliar sound, and he coughs a thick, dark, oyster-size gout of blood down over his chin. The muscles in his face stiffen into a mask, rigid with will. He peels his upper lip free of his teeth and says, in a voice that’s almost all air, “Helen.” With a tiny nod, he brings his head back up. “Eckersley.” Another cough, more blood. “Cheyenne,” he says, and he slumps to his left.

Rafferty bends over him, looking for a breath, feeling for a pulse, and the gray day is shoved aside by a burst of light. He looks up to see a television crew—a cameraman with a shoulder-mounted rig, a lighting man with a blinding sun gun, and a third guy, probably the producer, pushing the other two into position. Rafferty’s shouting, “Get a doctor!” but the crew comes in closer, closer, the cameraman going into a gradual crouch to catch the dying man’s face, and Rafferty reaches behind him with his free hand, snags the wire handle of one of the mostly-empty cans of paint, and slings it at the camera.

The can clatters on the camera’s grip, sending its remaining paint in an airborne arc of Urban Decay, and the cameraman rocks onto his seat, yanking the camera back and throwing out a hand to catch himself. The producer advances on Rafferty, shouting, but then three brown-uniformed police materialize between them. One of them slams his chest into the producer, backing him off, and the other two come over to Rafferty.

“Are you all right?” one of the cops asks. His English is heavily accented.

“Yes, sure,” Rafferty says in Thai, “but this man—”

Before Rafferty can finish the sentence, though, a new man, wearing an elegant raincoat over street clothes, steps in between him and the man lying flat on the pavement. “We’ll take care of him,” the man in the raincoat says in English. “You just go with the officers.”

“But he’s—”

“I’ve got him,” the man says, leaning close and holding Rafferty’s gaze. He’s tall for a Thai, sleek and handsome, if a little puffy beneath the eyes, and his English is as accent-free as California. “Either go with the officers willingly or they’ll drag you.” He kneels in front of the man wearing the photographer’s vest, blocking Rafferty’s view.

One of the uniforms bends down and extends a hand. The other has his hip cocked and his hand resting on the butt of his pistol.

Rafferty gets up, avoiding the outstretched hand. The patrolman closer to him wraps his fingers around Rafferty’s bicep and tugs him away. And then there are three more cops coming down the street, eyeing the TV crew. The producer helps his cameraman up, whispers something to him, and hauls the lighting man toward the cops. Instantly the cameraman is sprinting down the hill, his feet splashing in the gutter, as the producer and the lighting guy dance interference in front of the oncoming police. By the time one of the cops shakes free and takes off in pursuit, the cameraman has rounded the corner at the bottom of the hill.

The uniforms manhandle Rafferty downhill and position him in a doorway, out of the rain, so the fallen man and the other police are behind him. The street is empty now, except for the knot of men in front of the paint shop. Rafferty tries to turn to look behind him, but the cop pulls him back into position and says, “Papers.”

“That man’s been shot,” Rafferty says, the realization dawning on him at last. “He needs a doctor.”

“Nobody got shot.” The cops exchange a fast glance, and the one who’s not holding Rafferty lets his eyes flick up the hill. “He’ll be fine,” his partner says.

“I heard the gun,” Rafferty says. “He was bleeding like—”

“He wasn’t shot,” the cop says. “There wasn’t any gun.” He gives Rafferty’s arm a token shake. “Let me see your papers.”

Rafferty says, “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” but he digs in the rear pockets of his jeans and pries his wallet out. As he begins to open it, he sees the smear of blood on his hand. “Look,” he says, holding it under the nose of the nearer cop. “He was bleeding. Don’t tell me he wasn’t—”

“Nosebleed,” the cop says. “Papers,
now
.”