The Painting of Porcupine City (11 page)

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 vine-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.”

I was glad for the darkness but still I looked down, flooded in the incredible novelty of bashfulness. “I thought I was more discreet than that.”

“You probably are. I was paying attention.”

“You were, huh?”

“Maybe I was.”

“Maybe you were?”

I felt my collar bones flush. I wanted to ask outright, get confirmation, put an end to the ambiguity. But on the other hand I was enjoying it too much to end it. With anybody else we would’ve screwed by now and I’d be home already, staring up at the ceiling, laboring over blank sheets of paper or watching my fish swim around.

“They didn’t really know what that word meant, did they?” he said. “In middle school, I mean.”

“Felcher? I doubt it. They just thought it was a funny word.”

He nodded. “In Portuguese, arrow is flecha. It’s more obvious from the Portuguese why a person who makes arrows is called a fletcher.”

“That’s true. You’ve stumbled onto one of my secret interests. I’m kind of an etymology nerd.”

“I like words too.”

I pulled my legs out of Indian-style, sat up on my knees and wiped dry leaves off my jeans. “We should probably get going, right?”

“Really should’ve been gone before the paint dried,” he replied. “This was a bad example of how this is done. But I guess your first time is always clumsy.” He reached for his backpack and from within it he pulled a paint-smeared Polaroid camera. He stood up, steadied his elbows on the rail of the fence, and pointed the camera into the train canyon. He took two photos of our work, held one out to me. “Here,” he said, “put that in your black book.”

I took the photo from him. It was developing slowly, but so far I liked what I saw.

I thought/hoped, when Mateo

offered to drive me home, that it was a bit of clever maneuvering on his part to get me to his place. Once there, there’d be some reason why he had to go inside—for his car keys, for a drink of water. It wouldn’t be polite to leave me standing on the sidewalk, so he’d ask me to come in, and I would. Then there’d be some reason to go to his bedroom—his keys were there, he needed to change his shoes, check his email, whatever. The bed would be there and I’d sit down and then he’d sit down and before long we’d be in it together. That’s how it worked. That’s how I was used to it working.

There were other ways it could work, though, too. He could drive me home with the goal of wrangling his way into my bedroom, into my bed. This was the scenario that seemed more and more likely as the others, one by one, didn’t pan out.

So, standing on the sidewalk outside my place, one foot still in his Civic, I helped it along: I invited him in to watch TV.

“Nah, thanks though,” he said. It was a remarkably casual decline, the decline of someone who believes he’s only turning down television. Giant mark in the straightboy column. “I’m gonna get home. See you at work tomorrow?”

“Cool.” I was disappointed but not dismayed. I’d done this enough to know when someone wanted out of there, and I didn’t get that sense from him. I just didn’t get any sense from him. “It was fun.”

“Yeah. Oh—hey, you’ve got the photo, right?”

“Right here.” I patted my front pocket. Then I closed the door and watched the car take off down the street.

“Weird,” I said out loud.

I went inside. I thought about waking Cara. I thought about beating off. But I ended up just going to sleep. I must’ve had the Polaroid in my hand when I lay down, because when I woke up the next morning I found it under my pillow.

Street art became synonymous

with Mateo Amaral, even all the stuff that obviously wasn’t his. All demanded a moment of my attention—could
that
be his?—and reminded me of the wall by the tracks outside Jamaica Plain. I realized how ubiquitous graffiti was, and considered for the first time that every line was put there by someone with a story, and that every block of gray paint covered a story up.

On the columns of bridges, on the backs of trailer trucks, on newspaper dispensers and billboards and telephone poles and on the sides of stores. I saw it from my car, driving to work. I saw it from the T. I saw it running errands. Every time I saw it I thought of his colored fingers.

“You’re really crushing on that guy from work, aren’t you?” Cara said one night when I must’ve been staring too googly into the distance beyond the TV. “I think you’re in love. You have the glow.”

“I’m definitely not in love,” I said. “Puh-
lease
.”

“You’re at least smitten.”

“I may be smitten.”

“You going out painting again?”

“I hope so.”

“What’s he like in bed?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t done anything.”

“Nothing?! How does he kiss?”

“We haven’t kissed.”

“Are you still not sure he’s even gay?”

“Haha. Nope. Not even sure.”

“Why don’t you
ask?
You can end the speculation any time you want.”

“I don’t want to end it.”

She sighed. “Does he have roommates? Sometimes you can infer by the roommate.”

“I don’t know if he does. I don’t think so. He rents a place in JP.”

“Does he live with his parents? You said he’s from Brazil.”

“I don’t think
he’s
from Brazil. His parents are. Or were.”

“Wow, you know almost nothing about this boy, do you?”

“Not much, no.”

“No wonder you’re in love.”

A week after the first

night, he asked me, in a whisper in my cubicle, to go out a second time (though it was clear from his hand that he was going out every other night by himself, or at any rate without me). This time he suggested Brighton, which was closer to my home turf than his. I wondered if there was significance to that as we climbed into a fenced-in area surrounding construction on a small bridge. A clean new concrete wall stood in front of us. He seemed to know it would be here. I wondered if there was some kind of graffiti newsletter that advertised these ideal places.

I tried to be bolder this time. I turned down the gloves he offered and started painting while he was still picking through his colors.

After we’d been painting for a minute he stepped back and surveyed his work, shaking the clacking can. In tall letters with long, flowing serifs, stood DEDINHOS in black, brown and yellow.

“Those colors remind me of sunflowers,” I said.

“Nice!”

“Is that your tag?” I tried to be nonchalant about asking, and continued painting. I was still trying to get the arrows right on my first R and was using way too much paint to do it—I kept lengthening and widening the arrows to subsume drips.

“Yeah. That’s me.”

I was surprised and delighted to finally know his tag. It was his identifier, could link him to everything he’d done around the city, however much that was, and until now I figured he didn’t want me to know about everything he did. The way he carefully guarded his secrets, I wasn’t going to risk taking another one from him. Here was proof that I only needed to be patient.

“I’m trying to think where I’ve seen it around,” I said. “You paint all the time so I must’ve seen it around, right?”

“I’m sure you have.”

“It’s Portuguese?”

“Yup.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Fingers,” he said with a smirk. “Little Fingers.”

“Little fingers like your pinkies?” Why did that seem to warrant a mark in the homo column? “That’s gangsta.”

“Not little like small, really. Little like—endearing?”

“You mean little like
widdle
?”

He laughed. “My cousin Vinicius—” he said it
Vih-NEE-cee-us
“—gave it to me when we first started painting. I’ve always been messy.” He held up his hand and grinned. “Vini called me Dedos and that became Dedinhos.” And this he said like
DEH-jin-YOS.
“The rest is history.”

“That’s pretty cute. How old were you when you started?”

“Hmm. Around thirteen.”

“Wow.”

“I’ll tell you about it sometime. Come on, let’s find someplace else.”

“But I’m still working on my R’s.”

“You and your R’s.”

“How do you know about

all these places?” I asked, figuring there couldn’t really be a newsletter. “Do you have some kind of sixth sense for good places?”

“I keep my eyes open.” He smirked. “Also you can read up online. Other writers make note of choice spots.”

Ah, so there
was
a sort of newsletter.

On the brick wall of a narrow alley near Kenmore Square he’d produced a big green rectangle; this he outlined in white, making it look like a highway sign. When he began adding words to the sign, I wondered whether this was going to be another tag of his or something. But when the words
Porcupine and City gained enough definition to be legible, my cheeks started getting hot.

“Oh man,” I said, distracted enough to drag a stray blast of paint across a door. “You know my book?”

He stopped and wiped his forearm across his face, smearing a coil of hair straight across his cheek until it popped off and re-coiled like a spring. “Sorry? Your book?”

“You found my book.
Porcupine City
.”

“Oh, that’s
your
book?”

“Haha. Yes. How’d you find it?”

“The interwebs.” He turned back to the green sign. Beneath the first words he added 0 Miles.

“You were stalking me?”

“Hardly. You’ve seen my writing so I wanted to see yours. Fair’s fair, right?”

“Oh man. You didn’t read it too, did you?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Maybe yes.”

“You’re ambiguous.”

“It was good. I liked it.”

“You read the whole thing?”

“It’s only 200 pages.”

“208.”

“See?”

“Now I’m embarrassed.”

“Why embarrassed? I said it was good.”

“It’s just so—ugh.”

OK, so
Porcupine City
began

as my senior writing project at Shuster College, largely the thing that separated my BFA from a plain old BA. It almost kept me from graduating, though. Not because I didn’t do the project, but because I did nothing but the project. A few halting, resentful paragraphs about the romantic tribulations of a guy named Bradley exploded in length and depth that scared me and exhilarated me and for months filled my days and nights with an unrelenting
tap tap
of laptop keys. Other classes and papers and projects faded into the background. Friends faded too. Jamar, when he claimed to notice dark circles growing under my eyes, tried to stage a one-man intervention.