Free The News of the World by Ron Carlson Page B

Tim, our model, in early. An irrepressible townie, he sits for the group bareassed in a buckskin jockstrap on a wooden stool, one knee drawn up to his chest, his heel on the stool seat. As he passed by me to go change clothes, he said: “One more time! Tomorrow I’m in Virginia Beach, and,” he pointed at me and smirked, “art class is history.”
    I had forgotten: it was the last day of school. I was surprised and for the first time in weeks, time became real. My students filed in around me, and I had to smile; this was certainly a waking dream, but a good dream.
    Mary Ann Buxton was waiting for me as I drifted among the easels. Seated directly behind Tim, she had drawn an incredibly precise version of the stool and had skipped up and drawn his shoulder axis and neck.
    â€œWhere were you yesterday?” she said. “The studio class, all nine of us, waited forty-five minutes. Is this what we pay tuition for?”
    I wanted to say: Truce; it’s the last day of school. Cease further hostilities. But I did say: “I’m sorry, Mary Ann; I was away.” Before she could start again, I interrupted her with this whisper: “Mary Ann. What’s he going to sit on?” I pointed to the blank space on her paper where his ass should have been. “Don’t be shy,” I said. “This is art.” I couldn’t stop myself; I winked. “Go ahead, really.”
    I was in a daze the whole hour. The volleyball at home. I couldn’t see a thing but the ball and the three paintings emerging in my mind. I wandered the studio muttering, “Good, good,” to everybody, even Mary Ann Buxton and her feathered fluffy version of Tim’s posterior. It was a tangible relief when Tim himself stood up, stretched, and said, “Okay. That’s my twenty bucks. Anybody looking now pays overtime.”
    Oh, Bigville! You sweet township! What I did the rest of the day was seen through eyes blurred by heat and vision. I shook hands with my fine young painters and headed out, running across campus, gathering a hundred stares in my wake. If any dean had been looking out the window, I would have received a letter.
    At home, I retrieved the ten-pound bag of rice and the fifty pounds of birdseed from the basement and spread them in a blinding flurry of thrown handfuls across the backyard, and incidentally my hair, the roof, and the raingutters.
    I went to see Mr. Cummings at the Food Center and he had my two chickens, that is, their innards, and he handed me the plastic pail without a look, my eccentricity gone ordinary in his eyes. At home, crackling across the birdseed and rice, I tossed gloopy handfuls of the intestines, etcetera, around the yard. I stripped off my shirt and made circles on my belly with the blood. I bent and tried to read the throws. I’m not sure what they said, but they looked authentic. I went into the basement and drew on the furnace room walls with charcoal briquets: sperm entering the egg, wiggling tails, hash marks of excitement, seven stars, the blistered moon. When I came back upstairs, blinking into the light, I saw Buster and Sadie, Mudd Miller’s two dogs, rolling on their backs in the chicken guts. It dismayed me at first until I remembered that Sadie had already thrown three healthy litters of five puppies each, and I debated whether to go out and writhe around with them for a while.
    The doorbell rang, and it turned out to be Mary Ann Buxton, in her traveling clothes, her little Volvo packed to the windows, still running on the driveway. She looked at me in a three-part glance: my charcoaled face, my bloody belly, and then, stepping back slowly, the aboriginal whole. There was nothing I could do.
    â€œHello,” I said.
    â€œMr. Baldwin,” she said finally. “Thank you for the help and encouragement in art this year. I’ve learned a lot. It was one of my favorite classes, and in appreciation, I brought you this little