Unexpected Dismounts Read online

  Some of it I’d seen in progress, since at home, when he wasn’t wheedling for a ride with me on the Harley or finding ways to empty the snack drawer, he was drawing. Pen and ink was his current medium and caricature his style. I chortled at the faces that blossomed like comic strips on steroids from the wall before me.

  He had informed me back in January, when he’d started this series, that as “a artist,” he knew what features of a person’s face to “blow up all big.” When I’d asked if he meant “exaggerate,” he’d said, yeah, that was the word, adding, “You got you a kick-butt vocabulary, Big Al.”

  We were still working on his.

  His drawings, however, said far more than verbiage could, in my view. He had a gift for overstating the right facial features until the final portrait was fully loaded with the person’s essence. At least as he saw it. Gazing at the drawings was like climbing right into Desmond’s head.

  Each of the Sacrament Sisters had her own piece in a four-paned panel. He’d managed to capture the sarcastic twist in Sherry’s mouth and the constant pout in Zelda’s. Jasmine’s eyes took up most of her face and drooled oversize tears. Mercedes was all lips and in-charge eyes and held a gigantic sponge in her hand. I loved that there wasn’t a trace of their pasts in sight.

  When Owen caught up with me, I’d just moved on to a squatty likeness of Hank, on which everything about her, including her shiny bob of hair, was square except her mouth. Desmond had caught it midway into an overblown twitch that made me want to twitch back.

  “I’m s’proud of our boy I’m about to pop my buttons,” Owen said at my elbow. “I’m like a peacock strutting through here. I mean, didn’t he just hang the moon?”

  I didn’t even try to sort through Owen’s usual mishmash of metaphors. I got his drift, which essentially matched mine.

  “This is pretty incredible,” I said.

  “It’s pure genius.” He waved an age-spotted hand toward a likeness of a wizened man with a toothy grin the size of a watermelon slice. “Now, this one’s new to me. I know I’ve seen this character, though.”

  “You have, Owen,” I said. “In the mirror.”

  “Well, I’ll be.”

  “Okay, check this out.” I pointed to one of an ancient woman engulfed in her own wrinkles, with one huge ear straining for the side of the page. There was no mistaking my neighbor on the other side, whose current career was making sure I didn’t turn our tiny Palm Row street into a red-light district.

  “That’s Miz Vernell all over, isn’t it?” Owen said. “He’s got her looking like an old crow. Exactly like the biddy she is.”

  Crow. Biddy. Next she’d be a—

  “Looks like she’s going to fly right out of there like a honkin’ goose.”

  At least this time he’d kept all the similes in the same genus. Or was it class?

  Owen turned to a parent who had the misfortune to stroll down our aisle and began to extol the virtues of Desmond’s undeniable brilliance. I continued to soak in the drawings. One depicted Bonner in swollen sunglasses that made him cute in that preppy kind of way. Another grouped some of the members of our Harley Owners Group, each HOG resplendent with gigantic leather shoulders or a Darth Vader–sized helmet. “Mr. Chief,” of course, had his own piece, bigger than most of the others because Desmond had portrayed him as larger than life. While I personally would have chosen his broad chest to exaggerate, or the crinkles of sixty-two years around his be-still-my-heart eyes, Desmond had selected the high cheekbones and the ponytail. The difference in our views of Chief was startling. To Desmond he was the bad Harley-ridin’ daddy who didn’t take nothin’ offa nobody. To me, he was the most provocative human being who ever climbed on a motorcycle—

  Okay. Don’t go there.

  I put both hands to my cheeks and commenced convincing myself I was just having a hot flash. It was time to locate Desmond, and I was about to turn away from the wall of drawings when one more caught my eye. The contrast between it and the rest of them was so jarring, I actually caught my breath.

  It was a more distorted figure than the others and was drawn from the shoulders up. Desmond had hyperbolized a black patch over one of his subject’s eyes; the other seethed. A shudder ran through me, and I wanted to turn away, but the longer I looked at it, the more it forced me to stay. Was that half of the man’s head missing, or just the shadows Desmond had uncharacteristically shaded in behind him? He didn’t appear to be of any race at all. He was at once wild beast and cunning human, and the only thing I was certain of was that this person wasn’t anyone I knew.

  But Desmond must know him, and that was more disturbing than the drawing itself.

  “Owen,” I said, eyes still locked on the piece. “Did Desmond tell you who this is?”

  Owen turned to me, and the father he’d been holding hostage bolted for the next aisle. Owen shook his head as he scrutinized the drawing. “That’s not one of his.”

  I stuck a finger toward the signature at the bottom—Desmond Sanborn—curled around an unmistakable Harley-Davidson logo. “He signed it,” I said.

  But Owen was still wagging his head. “I helped him with his whole portfolio, and this wasn’t in it, unless all the icing has slipped off my cupcakes, but last time I checked, I still had all my marbles.”

  “Mr. Schat-zee.”

  We both turned to Desmond, who’d managed to slip up behind us despite the gargantuan proportions of his motorcycle boots. His feet were growing so fast, he was already on his second pair since Christmas.

  He and Owen did their private hand-slapping combination before Desmond turned to me, grinning lobe to lobe. I did not, of course, try to hug him. We had an understanding that I didn’t act like a mother in front of “other women.”

  “You ain’t seen the one I done of you yet, Big Al,” he said. He squinted at my forehead, but he didn’t ask. I’d explained it to him beforehand, which apparently I should have done to the entire community.

  Owen was pointing at the dark drawing, but I shook my head at him.

  “Where is mine?” I said to Desmond.

  He reached inside his sweatshirt and wafted out a page that flapped the blue ribbon attached to it.

  “This what won me the prize,” he said. “I call it ‘Classic Mama.’”

  I choked down a sudden lump and studied the drawing he presented to me. I had to admit he’d drawn me to a T. Light hair to my shoulders, about six weeks past the due date for a trim. Long face, eyebrows raised halfway up my skull, mouth in midword. He was right there: I was pretty much always telling him something, whether it was, “Keep your pickin’ fingers off my Oreos,” or “This is not West King Street, Clarence. We don’t pee off the back stoop.” He usually straightened himself out when I called him Clarence.

  But what kept me staring at Desmond’s caricature of me was the look in my eyes. The gaze he’d penned stared back more through me than at me, and for a very strange moment I hoped this two-dimensional figure could tell me what I was thinking.

  “Looks like I got you right here,” Desmond said. He tapped his palm with the index finger of his other hand.

  “Dream on, kid,” I said. “I am not one of your women.”

  His eyebrows drew in over his nose. “You dig it, though, right?”

  “I definitely dig it,” I said. “Is my face really that bony?”

  “Them’s muscles, Big Al.” He cupped his hands to his own cheeks. “You got, like, somethin’ strong going on here, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Strong enough to keep you in line.” I didn’t actually believe that, but I figured as long as I had him fooled, he might survive on my watch until he was eighteen.

  “Desmond,” Owen said, “your mother and I are wondering about this particular piece.”

  He nodded toward the eye-patch drawing. The sheen evaporated
from Desmond’s eyes.

  “That ain’t s’posed to be here,” he said. “I don’t know who put it up there.”

  “I did.”

  I turned to the very round woman with the cascade of mahogany-tinted hair who was all scarflike skirts and clay bead bracelets up to her dimpled elbows. Although I remembered the clothing that looked too rich for an educator’s salary, I almost didn’t recognize her as Erin O’Hare, Desmond’s history teacher. At our last parent conference she’d been a blonde. It must take several bottles of dye to color that mane; it was almost as long as she was tall.

  Although Desmond had reported to me on more than one occasion that “Miss All-Hair’” rocked, he was now giving her the same look he gave me when I told him he couldn’t watch Lady Gaga videos. It didn’t seem to faze her.

  “I found it under your desk when you left one day, and I asked Mrs. Pratt if she wanted to enter it.” She turned to me, head first, hair following. “It shows his range, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Owen said. “This young man has more depth than the St. John’s River. We’re talking the Grand Canyon here. I’ve seen shallower wells.”

  Miss O’Hare only stared at him for a fraction of a second. I guessed if you taught middle schoolers all day, you heard pretty much everything.

  “I’d say it was one of your best pieces,” she said to Desmond, “if I had the actual subject to compare it to.”

  “There ain’t no actual subject,” Desmond said. I was glad this wasn’t his English teacher we were talking to. “It’s just somethin’ I made up.”

  That may have been more disconcerting than the idea that Desmond might actually know somebody that creepy.

  “Then as I understand it, we can’t really consider it a caricature,” Miss O’Hare said, gesturing toward it with a drapey sleeve. “Not if you don’t have an objective set of physiognomic features to draw upon for reference.”

  Desmond’s brows shot up to his mini-’fro. “You still talkin’ American, Miss All-Hair?”

  She wrinkled her nose at him. “That’ll keep you quiet for a while.”

  “Good luck with that,” I said.

  Desmond reached for the drawing, eyes still scowling. “Imma take this down—”

  “Step away from the display,” Miss O’Hare said. “You’ll get it back when the show’s over.”

  He opened his mouth, obviously to protest, but I said quickly, “You better go get your stuff together. We’ve got to get home so you can finish your homework before we head out with Chief.”

  The smile sprang back to his face and he raised a hand to high-five Miss O’Hare.

  “Right back at ya,” she said, but he was already on his way down the aisle, one of his “women” Velcroed to each side. Maybe the momentary storm on his face had just been my imagination.

  Owen also took his leave, still remarking to everyone along the way at the fathoms which Desmond’s artistic talent reached. Whether they were interested or not.

  “So, Miss Chamberlain.”

  I turned back to Miss O’Hare. “Please—it’s Allison.”

  “Hence the ‘Big Al’ nickname,” she said.

  “I’m just grateful it isn’t anything worse.”

  “Are you serious? He loves you. But, listen, while I have you alone …”

  My antennae sprang up. “This can’t be good.”

  “It isn’t ‘bad.’” She grimaced slightly. “I just wish he were doing as well in my class as he is in art.”

  “Is he still drawing pictures when he’s supposed to be reading?” I said. “We’ve talked about that. Well, I’ve talked.”

  “No, we’re okay there.”

  “Look, I know he thinks he can charm his way out of anything, so if that’s it, I can …”

  She was shaking her head, no easy task with fifteen pounds of tresses to drag along. “Desmond and I have an understanding about that. Don’t tell him, but I sort of like it when he tries to butter me up. Trust me, in this job, his are some of the kindest words I hear all day. I take what I can get.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Two things actually.” She held up a Sharpie-stained index finger. “One, he’s at a disadvantage because he doesn’t have the history background most of the other kids have just by virtue of growing up here. Somehow he missed out on all the field trips in elementary school, and he says his biological mother never took him to the Oldest School House or even the fort.”

  “She never took him out of West King Street,” I said. “And it’s been all I can do to get him to the dentist and the barber and the pediatrician.”

  She was nodding. “You’re obviously doing a wonderful job with him.”

  “Just not good enough.”

  I started to rake my hand through my hair and realized too late that I was still wearing my bandanna as a do-rag. I knocked it off the back of my head, spastically tried to catch it, and bumped the heel of my hand against my forehead. I had an immediate visual of a three-inch smear of black ash collecting in the folds of my brow. Erin O’Hare had the good grace to act like she didn’t notice.

  “If you have a chance, just hit a few of the historical high spots with him,” she said.

  “I can do that. I actually used to be a carriage-tour guide.”

  “Then you could probably teach me a few things.”

  I stopped short of telling her there was a fat chance of that, since I had neither a college degree nor her command of the English language. I was still wondering what physiognomic meant.

  She was holding up a second finger. “The other thing is Desmond sometimes seems distracted, not by the other kids, but by whatever’s going on inside his head.” She gave a frustrated shrug. “I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but he’ll just seem especially anxious and then he’ll withdraw. It’s only started happening recently, and then other days, he’s his usual outrageous self. Have you seen that at home at all?”

  I tilted my head in thought. The only thing similar I’d seen was just a few minutes before, when he saw the drawing of Mr. Eye Patch on the wall.

  “Well, in any case,” she said, “it’s something to think about. I only mention it because I know you’re going through the adoption process, and I would hate to see bad grades go against you.”

  Speaking of anxious. “Do they look at that?” I said.

  “I don’t know, but just in case.”

  “I’m on it,” I said.

  “If you need anything, anything at all, you know where to find me.” She patted my arm. “But I think you know him better than anybody.”

  Was that true, I wondered as I went off to pry Desmond away from his female devotees. Because at the moment, in terms of his bottomless depth, I wasn’t sure I’d plumbed more than a couple of inches.

  I planned to run that by Chief, the way I did most things Desmond. I thought that evening’s ride out to the beach—Chief’s way of making up for missing Desmond’s art show—might be the perfect opportunity.

  Silly woman.

  In the first place, whenever Chief was around, Desmond never let more than a few inches of space exist between them. The minute Chief turned into Palm Row, Desmond was out the side door, over the porch rail, and across the lane to Chief’s parking spot in front of the garage before the man pulled into it. Granted, the street was only four houses long, but Desmond did have getting to the garage in seven seconds down to a science. Or, in his case, an art form.

  I joined them at a more sedate pace, carrying Desmond’s gloves, scarf, and toboggan cap.

  “I don’t need all that, Big Al,” he said, predictably. “I got my leathers.”

  “They aren’t going to keep your fingers from freezing off,” I said, and pressed his gloves into his hand.

  He looked at
Chief, who was wearing not only gloves but a turtleneck that nearly reached the bottom of his helmet.

  “I ain’t no wimp,” Desmond said. “I’m only doin’ this ’cause you won’t let me ride ’less I do.”

  “That is absolutely correct,” I said. “You’ll thank me when that ocean air starts biting your face.”

  He whipped his head, which now looked three times smaller with the cap pulled over his hair, toward Chief. “You ain’t playin’ with me now, Mr. Chief. We for real ridin’ all the way to the beach.”

  “All the way. We can’t ride on the sand tonight because it’s high tide, but we’ll take A1A to Marineland and back.”

  “Sa-weet,” Desmond whispered. It was the kind of awe a person usually reserved for rock stars and mountain ranges, neither of which Desmond had ever seen in person. Erin O’Hare was right: He did need to get out more.

  Desmond climbed on with Chief and leaned back on the “sissy bar” Chief had recently installed so the kid wouldn’t drop off the back. I had to admit, as I followed them on the Classic out of Palm Row and onto Artillery Lane, that Desmond appeared to be in perfect sync with Chief. He leaned only when Chief and the Road King did, anticipating nothing, and kept his hands clamped to the sides of Chief’s jacket. When they eased over the far side of the Bridge of Lions and into the relative darkness of Anastasia Island, it would have been easy to mistake them for one rider.

  Anastasia was a barrier island, shielding the mainland from the brunt of the ocean’s force. As the long curve onto State Road A1A brought the crests of the Atlantic into view, I started to feel a little protected myself, at least from the brunt of the day behind me. Both the beam from the St. Augustine Lighthouse and the glow of the silver-coin moon sparkled on the water, rendering its inky blackness friendly. And I could smell the brine and the fish and the sea grass. One of the things I loved most about riding a motorcycle was breathing in the life scents that were hidden like secrets from people closed up in cars.

  It was easy at times like that to feel like I might get this Harley-riding thing down. It hadn’t come naturally to me, the way it had to Chief and Hank and Leighanne and Nita and just about everybody else I knew who’d ever fired up a hog. But tonight I felt confident on the Classic, floating over the causeway south of Pellicer Creek with the Atlantic roiling on one side and the Intracoastal Waterway rippling in relative calm on the other. For a moment I felt more like still water than a restless sea.