Free A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories by Ron Carlson Page A

from New York and New Haven on weekends.
    On the first canvas, I broadbrushed the curve of one side in vermilion. I had to hold my head cocked a certain way as the lakewater gurgled up and down my eustachian tubes. Many times when I changed positions, water ran out of my ears. I worked fast because I figured I had two hours tops before Story ran into Gill Manwaring and I’d get a phone call. If I could grab a secure start on three canvases, it might testify to my equilibrium. But as my hands moved across the paintings, working all three in one stroke, then one for twenty minutes, I wondered. They didn’t look like volleyballs as we know them.
    So many times the magic in painting transpires in the twelve inches between the palette and the canvas, and your head, hand, or heart better get out of the way. I felt that warmth in my arms now, and I tried to proceed with caution or reason or passionless purpose, but I might as well not have been there. This was not the way I used to paint. I ran from the studio several times, whenever my neck would get too sore, and I dressed a piece at a time, retrieved the hammer, all my roofing nails, the butcher knife. My garlic was arriving at noon.
    When the phone did ring, Story simply said, “What’s going on?”
    “Story, I’ve got a start on three good pieces. Can I call you back?”
    “Dan, what’s this with Gill?”
    “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. I’ll tell you later. All about it. I gotta go.” And I did go. I found myself an hour later in the studio, one canvas finished, the others running to a close. The first looked like nothing, like a rose moon in a blue blanket, I don’t know, but God it thrilled me! Some of the edges floated like folded velvet; I’d never done that before. I’d never seen it done before! This was no landscape that I knew. The whole time I’d been in the studio, I’d only had two thoughts. One was simply a picture of Story’s face as she hung up the phone: that worry. The other was so profound it powered me through the day. I wanted, more than anything, for my children and grandchildren to come visit and play volleyball on the lawn. The picture made sense and gave reason to everything in my life.
    The garlic man, not a farmer but Cummings from the Food Center, had to come all the way through the house and he startled me, appearing at the studio door. I hadn’t heard him for all the water in my ears.
    Cummings was also the butcher, and as he stood at my studio doorway in his bloody apron, he seemed one of the Fates come to abbreviate me at last.
    “I’ve got your garlic,” he said, and the first glorious strains of the herb drifted my way.
    “Good!” I must have said it a little too loudly as Mr. Cummings stepped back and raised his hands in self-defense. To assure him that I meant no harm, I placed my brush and palette aside and asked him in to see what I was doing. He folded his arms over his apron and browsed my canvases, nodding steadily. The spectacle of the three huge canvases, flashed and spiraled with those strange colors, and the volleyball sitting on the table behind them seemed to confuse Mr. Cummings, but his nodding quickened. His assessment was only “Yep,” followed by seven or eight small “Yep, yep, yeps.” It didn’t strike me until we had unloaded two hundred pounds of garlic onto the front lawn, that Mr. Cumming’s yepping had been identical to the sad and final pronouncements of a doctor whose suspicions have been confirmed.
    When he left, I didn’t hesitate. I took up my hammer and jammed my pockets with the short galvanized roofing nails, and wondered why the opinion of one of the most prominent village tradesmen didn’t bother me; why in fact, I took his incredulity as encouragement; why, in fact, I felt absolutely encouraged by everything in the world: the flat noon light, the impending thundershower, Mudd Miller’s black Honda motorcycle leaking oil on his driveway across the street. Oh, I