The Opposite of Art by Athol Dickson

Author:Athol Dickson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Howard Books

11.

Ridler wrapped his latest attempt in brown corrugated cardboard trimmed to size from a box which had once contained canned peas. Then he wrapped it again in many layers of a Spanish-language newspaper from Juárez, and tied it all together with green twine. His packing materials had been salvaged from a trash bin behind Two T’s Grocery Store in Dell City, Texas, the only source of packaged food for ninety miles in any direction. Standing halfway between Carlsbad and El Paso, he wrote the address on a government shipping label. The ballpoint pen he used was attached by a beaded metal chain to the post office countertop, which was fastened to a wooden cabinet, which was connected to the building foundation, which clung somehow to mother earth. Ridler held the planet on a tether. The responsibility weighed heavily upon him. He wrote carefully.

“You left off the return address,” said the woman behind the counter.

“I don’t have one.”

She pursed her lips together in a way that creased the skin on her cheeks and chin. He felt he was under suspicion but did not know his crime.

She weighed the painting on a scale. “Fourteen dollars and sixteen cents by priority mail. I ain’t got nothing cheaper. Wanna insure it?”

“What does that cost?”

“Seven-seventy for coverage up to six hundred dollars. A dollar for every hundred worth of coverage over that. Most you can get is five thousand dollars’ worth.” She eyed the Juárez newspaper wrapping skeptically. “I’m guessin’ it’s not worth that much.”

Ridler only smiled.

When the woman took his money and carried the painting to a back room he released the pen. The planet began to drift away. On it Ridler saw Henry Blum ascending, the name on the shipping label, a skinny painter from Philadelphia and a fellow art student who had once allowed Ridler to sleep on his sofa for more than a month. Ridler thought of how he had seduced Henry’s girlfriend in Henry’s own bed, and how Henry had discovered them of course, and how that good man had cried. Ridler wondered if the painting would make any difference, if Henry would receive it, understand it, and forgive him. He remembered laughing at Henry, saying no woman was worth tears. Weakened by his guilt, untethered from the earth, Ridler thought of Suzanna through a window, Suzanna in Talbot Graves’s arms, and the grief which had unmanned him, years before.

The postal worker turned back toward Ridler after propping the painting against a canvas-sided bin on wheels. “Something else?”

“No,” replied Ridler. “That will do it, I hope.”

He emerged from the United States Postal Service building at the edge of the tiny town. Lifting a hand to shade his eyes, he looked across a vast expanse to the northeast. On the horizon rose El Capitan, a slab of solid limestone standing a mile and a half above sea level, the southernmost sentinel of the Guadalupe Mountains, blue and trembling in the superheated air. It rose above a flat desert floor populated by

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