Suitcase Charlie by Guzlowski John

Suitcase Charlie by Guzlowski John

Author:Guzlowski, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948403054
Publisher: Kasva Press LLC
Published: 2018-12-17T00:00:00+00:00


Hank didn’t want to sit down. The legs of his black slacks were wet from the short jog from the car to the door of Fisch’s apartment. Instead of sitting, he walked over to one of the pictures Fisch had hanging on the wall of the front room. Hank remembered trying to figure it out when he was here last time. He was beat that night, from the heat and the work and seeing that boy chopped up like a chicken. And he was a little beer-drunk and sleepy that night too, and he remembered that he could barely keep his eyes open by the time they spoke to Mr. Fisch. Sitting on the couch here in Mr. Fisch’s living room that first night, Hank had kept looking at that one picture; he couldn’t tell if the white blotch on the top left of the canvas was a cloud or a cow. He figured now would be a good time to check it out, while he waited for the coffee and waited for Marvin to stop pissing and find his way back here.

He turned on one of the table lights and walked to the wall. The light helped. The painting was about two feet tall and a little less across. The frame was beat up. Hank could see where the thing had been nicked here and there, but that wasn’t what surprised him. It was an old frame, and the painting was old too. Standing close to it, he wondered how he ever could have thought that it was a picture of a cloud or a cow. It was a painting of a violinist, a fiddle player, and it looked like it had been painted by a drunk or a very talented twelve-year-old. Some of the painting was clear and made sense. The fiddle player was standing and playing in front of a log cabin. There was white snow on its roof. That must have been what Hank thought was a cloud or a cow—just some white snow on a roof. Just behind the fiddle player there was a boy holding a cap. He was extending it forward, like he was collecting money for the fiddle player, to get people to pay for his playing. So far, no problem.

Then the painting started to get weird. First, the colors were all wrong. The snow on the roof was white in places and blood-red in others. The fiddle player’s face and hands were sort of green, and he was wearing clothes that didn’t seem to be any one particular color, just dabs of all different colors. Then the painting got weirder. In the street behind the fiddler and the boy, there was a big-breasted woman in a black skirt with some kind of roses scattered across it. She was smiling and hugging a man with a white briefcase. Maybe the guy was an accountant, but the really weird thing was that she didn’t have a blouse on. She was just standing in



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