Buttermilk
Shawn put on his rain jacket
and set out for Shelly Norman’s. The address was Stadium Way, so he decided to
head for the high school and figure it out from there. In the light of day, he
could re-appraise the architecture. The spires became pyramidal gables topped
with Russian-looking ornaments, bronze gone spearmint green with patina. The
externals were a matter of three stripes: steep wooden roofs, two stories of
thin, flame-colored bricks, and a five-foot base of rough-cut sandstone.
A plaque in the courtyard explained the materials as
windfalls from Tacoma’s long-standing international port – bricks from China,
sandstone from Italy. It was built by the Northern Pacific Railroad as a hotel,
in the style of a chateau, then abandoned during the 1893 depression and later
purchased by the city.
Crossing the parking lot, Shawn peered through a high
spiked fence to find the reason for the school’s name: the largest high school
stadium he had ever seen, set into a natural basin facing Commencement Bay. The
field was artificial turf, alternating five-yard stripes of kelly and forest
green, bracketed by two small mountains of concrete bleachers. The far end zone
was so close to the water that a well-booted field goal could, at the moment,
land on a Libyan freighter anchored on the other side.
Shawn circled the field, not realizing that he was on
Stadium Way until he heard Shelly’s trilled greeting.
“Shawn! Shaw-awn! Over here!”
She stood in front of a three-story Tudor with a peaked
roof, decorative planking and a low covered porch. He was painting this?
“Hi,” he said, climbing the steps.
“You can imagine what it’s like on game nights,” said
Shelly. “Of course, it used to hold twenty thousand, so I shouldn’t complain.
Come on in! I got us some doughnuts.”
Shawn had to work to keep down his salivary glands. With
dwindling cash and the menacing bubbles on his spare tire, he had yet to buy
groceries. He sat at the kitchen table and dug into a jelly-filled as Shelly
outlined the project.
“At the end of the driveway is my garage, which Richard
converted to a studio about ten years ago. I haven’t quite figured out what to
do with it, but I do want to keep it in good condition, and it’s looking a
little doggy. You’ll need to give it a good scraping first, so I got you a wire
brush and a putty knife, whichever you prefer. I also got some primer, for the
bare spots. That’ll probably take you most of today. If we get sun tomorrow,
you can start the painting then. I’ll pick up the paint this afternoon. Do you
like grilled cheese?
Shawn wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Sure. Love it.”
“Good! I’m not much of a cook, but when it comes to
melting cheese, I’m an artist. You like Coca-Cola?”
“Sure.”
“Well, there’s your lunch. I’ll bring it out in a couple
hours. Oh, and there’s a ladder next to the studio. Be careful, though – it’s a
little rickety.”
Shawn took a glazed old-fashioned to the driveway and set
the ladder under the front roof beam, where constant exposure had done the most
damage. He thought of his response the night before.
“Paint? I... painted my dad’s tool shed once.”
“Would you paint for me? I’ll pay you ten dollars an
hour.”
“Um, sure! Just so you know I’m no expert.”
“Expertise is not required. A good heart, patience –
that’s what I need. Tomorrow at ten. Here’s the address.”
Working the putty knife under the more obvious flakes,
Shawn was forming a plan of action. If you paint over a piece of loose paint,
it will start to peel that much sooner. Therefore, you must scrape like a
fascist, seeking and destroying all flaws. It almost seemed like fun.
Most of the work was on the beam, along with three
sun-baked patches on the front wall (which was, essentially, the old garage
door, nailed shut). After scraping, he found an old broom and ran it across the
walls, cleaning out cobwebs and small flakes. Then he pulled out the primer.
For this, he had a more immediate reference.
“I don’t think I’m doing it right, Dad. It looks all...
blotchy.”
“No, no. That’s fine. The primer has its own special job.
It soaks into the wood and seals it off. If it looks blotchy, that just means
it’s working. That allows the paint to do its job, which is to cover everything
and make it look pretty.”
His dad stopped to scratch his moustache. “Gee. You might
even say the primer is a man and the paint is a woman. But you might not
understand that for a while.”
Where scraping afforded the luxury of destructiveness,
primer afforded the luxury of sloppiness. Shawn stirred it with a fallen twig,
then used an old brush to slap it over the patches of bare wood. He had just
about finished when Shelly appeared on the back steps with a paper plate and a
Coke.
“Hey! Look at you! You’ve made some progress. Come and
have some food.”
“Sure!” said Shawn. He cleaned the brush under the garden
tap, then joined his employer on the front porch. He was surprised to find that
he’d been working for four hours.
“You should have seen what Richard went through when he
first painted that thing. Someone had let one of those godawful passion vines
take over both sides. It took him two days of yanking and clipping to get rid
of it – and then another day for scraping, cleaning and priming. Gee willikers,
you were hungry, weren’t you?”
Shawn had polished off the first sandwich – made with
generous slabs of Swiss and cheddar – and was halfway through the second.
“I’m not much of a breakfast person,” he said.
Shelly peered over Shawn’s shoulder. He could see what
made her eyes so interesting: a mottling gray that gave them the appearance of
of blue opals.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “The way those clouds
look, I’m thinking you should leave the actual painting for tomorrow. I am,
however, going to pay you in advance, on the condition that you get to a tire
store and replace that nitro-glycerine spare. I don’t want you running off a
road somewhere and leaving my poor studio half-done.
She handed Shawn a fold of cash. He slid it into his
pocket, thinking it rude to count it in front of her. When he looked back up,
she was staring at a spot across the street.
“Richard certainly loved those football games.”
When he reached the far side of the school, Shawn took
out the cash and counted out 124 dollars. An hour later, the guy at the
used-tire place let out a low whistle.
“I’d give you maybe ten more feet before she blew.”
On the way home, he had to force his body to relax. What
with black dogs and exploding tires, he had gotten used to driving all
tensed-up, prepared for calamity.
The next morning was so bright that Rainier’s snowy
flanks disappeared in the glare. He decided to walk to work, just to take it
all in, and stopped at a coffeehouse shaped like a ski chalet. When he got to
the house, Shelly proffered a trio of bear-claws and a box of supplies: a
three-inch brush, stir-sticks, a key for opening paint cans and a gallon of
exterior flat the color of buttermilk.
He started from the beams, and once again began to
develop a strategy. The back of the can said to brush toward the previously
painted area, to avoid lap-marks. But this didn’t entirely work. It didn’t fill
in the rough grain of the baked-out wood. He found he could apply a number of
strokes in the opposite direction, as long as the final stroke was back toward
the paint. As the hours passed, his brushwork became increasingly fluid, and he
sensed that he might even have a talent for this.
By lunchtime (grilled Muenster on sourdough), he had
finished the roofbeams and front wall. He did the side walls during the
afternoon, and by four-thirty was standing in the pre-dusk light, admiring his
crisp white structure. He was especially proud of the beams, which betrayed
nary a sign of their previous neglect. He heard the kitchen door creak open
behind him.
“Goodness!” Shelly half-sang. “A Michelangelo in the
making. I don’t think Richard would even recognize it.”
He assumed, from her constant references, that Shelly’s
husband had died fairly recently. She spoke of him as if he were still around.
“I know I paid you in advance,” she said. “But it looks
so splendid, I want you to take this twenty and have some fun tonight. Then, on
Monday, we can start the kitchen.”
Photo by MJV
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