Free Restoration by John Ed Bradley Page B

name?”
    “I never met ‘em.”
    “I meant your name.”
    “Cherry,” he said. “Rondell Cherry.” He put the headphones back on. “Go see what you want, just keep me out of it.”
    We walked past him and entered the room with all the chairs and slowly made our way to the center. The only light came from a couple of fluorescent panels high up on the ceiling. Although it was dark in the room it didn’t take long to locate the mural. It was right where it should have been. That is to say, it was directly in front of us, some ten feet off the ground, and up above a run of mirrors and sinks for washing hair. The canvas, though covered with paint, was a different texture than the wood paneling and drywall that built out the rest of the room.
    I glanced over at Rhys. I might’ve anticipated the tears, but not the intensity of her crying jag. The woman wept. She wept just as those young women probably had wept sixty years before at the House of Bultman when Levette Asmore’s empty coffin was laid out with a single magnolia flower on the lid.
    “You want a Kleenex or a handkerchief or something?” I said.
    She shook her head.
    The paint covering the mural—corn yellow streaked with dirt and water stains—also covered the rest of the room. The painting itself, from what I could see of the outline, was about the size of a small outdoorbillboard. The corners were curling and in other areas bubbles were lifting on the surface. A couple of air-conditioning vents had been cut into the canvas and one of the vents had leaked. You could also see seams running between each of the four panels.
    “He used some kind of glue, probably wallpaper paste, and tacks,” Rhys said. “See the tacks running along the edge? They just painted right over them, too.”
    “It’s really there, isn’t it?”
    “It really is,” she said.
    I supposed you could look at any wall with nothing on it and see the same thing, but the space possessed a power that was unexpected. The power came from imagining the image that resided beneath the grime and paint, the one Asmore had put there.
    Wholly unprepared for any voice but Rhys’s, I jumped when one sounded a few feet behind us. “That used to be a picture,” Rondell Cherry said.
    “What was a picture?” Rhys said, making sure to keep her back to him. I had to give it to her: she was good, she could turn it off as quickly as she turned it on.
    “That place up there on the wall,” Cherry said.
    “No kidding?” And still not even a sniffle.
    “The beauty school’s been here thirty-one years, that’s since 1970, and before that they had an insurance agency here. The insurance people bought it after the old post office moved and the government sold the building, and they were the ones that redid all the insides like you see here. They had all their desks in this room. It was one of the insurance people who told the Wheelers about the painting.”
    “My name is Rhys Goudeau,” Rhys said, offering him a hand to shake. “And this is my friend Jack Charbonnet.”
    He nodded at us both.
    “You been working here long, Mr. Cherry?”
    “I started in ’87. I’ll make fifteen years next January.”
    “You really think there’s a picture under there?” Rhys said. “When did Mrs. Wheeler tell you that?”
    “Oh, whenever it came to her, I guess, a long time ago. I never knew her to lie. On top of that, we had some new air ducts put in and the electrician had to cut bigger vents. He made his cuts and I took out my pocketknife and scraped off the paint that covered the piece of board and cloth and whatnot and you could see it was something under there. Just too bad it’s all ruined.”
    “What sort of person is Mrs. Wheeler?”
    “What sort of person?”
    “Yes, what sort? Is she a nice lady? A good lady?”
    “Miss Wheeler is an
interesting
lady, let me put it to you that way. We get along handsomely and always have, since day one. Also, I think she’s very funny. She likes to keep