Falling Idols

Graphic Arts

The kid — who couldn’t have been ten years old — was lean, mean, and fast. Accent on the fast. Leo swore that the kid must have been some hybrid form of city life, a mutant cross between human and cheetah, particularly adept at quick getaways. Leo saw a chainlink fence stretching across the width of the alley up ahead, and he figured if the kid could climb half as well as he ran, this two-block chase had been a colossal waste of time, energy, and lungpower.

His chest was beginning to burn out with thick, dull fire when the boy slipped. Wet garbage, probably, rotting underfoot. Too dark to see for sure, but no matter. The kid suddenly went sliding on one foot like an out-of-control skater, a greasy skidmark streaking behind him. His other leg flailed as uselessly as his arms, and in the light bleeding in from the streetlamps not yet shot out, Leo could see the kid’s toes bursting from the end of that extended sneaker. Finally the kid pinwheeled into the fence as if to shear through. It rattled him more than he rattled it, and sent him tottering backward.

By then, Leo had him by the shoulders.

“Leggo me, motherfucker,” the cheetah-boy said. Clenched teeth a downturned crescent against the black of his skin. The two-block wind-tunnel treatment had done little to wash the smell of gasoline from his clothes.

“What the hell were you trying to pull back there?” Leo said between wheezes.

“Who, me?”

Leo tightened his grip as the kid began to squirm, trying for a crotch kick that Leo barely dodged. “Why the hell would you want to burn down a building in your own neighborhood?”

The kid cursed. Repeated his demand for release. Called him every dirty name for a white man Leo had ever heard. Came up with a few more Leo hadn’t known about. Kid belonged in a chainmail bag with twenty milligrams of Valium shot in his rump.

He was just about to say Hell with it and turn the boy loose when the moon broke through the overhanging stack of charcoal clouds. Illuminating the green paint smeared along the inside of Leo’s forearm.

“Hey,” said the kid, and he stopped squirming. “You the painter, right?”

Leo gulped air, dousing the firepit in his chest to a dull glow. “Yeah. That’s me. I’m the painter.” Relaxing his grip.

The pale crescent showed in the kid’s face again, this time upturned. A step in the right direction. “I like your pictures.”

“Glad to hear it. You almost torched one.” Leo, relaxing even more. “So what’s your name, anyway?”

“Calvin.”

“Okay. Listen up, Calvin. I let you go, you promise not to run away? All I want to do is talk to you a minute. That’s all.”

Calvin’s luminous eyes rolled, mouth in a faint smirk. After a moment he nodded.

Yeah, and the second I let go he sets a new record for the hundred. But he couldn’t hold the kid captive forever. He released Calvin’s bony shoulders, and wonders of wonders, the kid didn’t bolt. They turned together, began to walk toward the mouth of the alley, the street.

“You want something to eat?” Leo asked. A deli was still open down the block, one of the last streetside livelihoods that hadn’t yet scrolled down steel latticework to button up for the night.

“Got a cigarette?” said Calvin, and Leo gave him one.

As he lit up, a large rat scuttled along in the shadows of the building to the right. Waddling, even. Their neighborhood was bountiful, every day a feast. This one held a tin can in its twitching muzzle. It disappeared into complete darkness, progress marked only by the clinking can. Urban cowbell.

“So you working on a new picture, huh?” Calvin asked. He pronounced it pitcher.

“Uh huh. What’s the matter, you didn’t like that one?”

Calvin dragged, thin chest puffing. Volunteering nothing.

“Talk to me. How come you’re out trying to torch buildings in your own neighborhood?” Surely the kid had to realize that these rowhouses, with no airshafts between and sharing common walls, could act like dominoes in a fire. Set one off, they could all go.

Calvin chuckled. Too old, that sound. “You wouldn’t understand. You not from here.”

Calvin’s face in the streetlight, too old, like his laugh, too knowing. Too adult far too soon. In this part of town, make it to eight and you’re a combat veteran. Hit twelve and you’re qualified for squad leader.

“Try me anyway,” Leo said.

After a long moment of contemplation, “I done it for somebody.”

“Who’s that?”

An even longer pause, then, “Bricklord.”

The name was dimly familiar. Bricklord. Street gang, maybe. With his age obviously shy of double digits, Calvin probably wasn’t old enough to claim active honors: tote the blade, the gun, wear the colors, sell the crack. He probably had older brothers, or cousins, and most gang bangers had peewee chapters, training grounds for the up-and-comers, the new blood.

Bricklord. Maybe the street name of a gang leader.

“So how come Bricklord wants you to burn down your neighbors’ home?” Leo offered the bribe of a few more cigarettes to loosen his tongue, but all it bought was the shake of the kid’s head.

Leo gave him the pack.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Calvin said again. “You just not from here, okay, whitebread? And you never will be.” Spoken as a factual given, not prejudice. Prejudice might have hurt less, for prejudice could be overcome, in time. While truth did not fluctuate. Truth cut to the core. Truth sawed into bones and lodged in the marrow.

“Gotta go,” said Calvin, and Leo did not stop him when he took sudden flight. Tattered sneakers flapping across asphalt as he darted into the street, and by the time Leo hit the mouth of the alley, Calvin was nowhere to be seen.

Leo headed for his original post in a quick stroll. Passing darkened stoops where figures sat, sharing wine and spicy food and the free time born of unemployment. Passing cars lined bumper-to-bumper at curbside, some blasting music, others sprouting legs dangling from open windows, still others as permanent as planters in suburbia. In the air that lingering miasma of failure, longing, discontent, of chances lost and opportunities never arrived. It was worse than the reek of uncollected refuse, because it was everywhere.

White faces were a minority here, this neighborhood among the city’s forgotten. But hate his color or not, nobody messed with Leo. Six-six and two hundred seventy pounds, shaggy-headed and full-bearded. He walked with impunity, back to the spot where he had been painting.

His canvas satchel of spray cans was gone, of course. A moment’s flicker of self-reproach, no more. At least the thieves had left his latest work unscathed.

Leo stood on the inner edge of a lot once occupied by a building that for years had threatened self-destruction. The job had been safely finished by a demolition crew hired by an urban renewal commission, and the lot cleared. Only the scorched earth of inner city remained, naked and blighted. The adjacent wall had been left blank, devoid of windows, as sheer a face as the Eiger. Before the plug had been pulled on the whole program, the renewal commission had at least had the wall whitewashed. The newness had quickly faded into a dingy hue to match the gray sky, but it was still more agreeable than the endless expanses of grimy brick.

And it made a much better canvas.

This one was nearly finished. Twin roses graced the side of the building, each bloom a full fifteen feet across. Shades of red and pink blended and merged to create a startlingly detailed depiction of petals yawning in the fullness of bloom. Two thorny stems curved gracefully toward ground, intertwining along the bricks and reaching for asphalt. They’d get there before Leo was finished. He was close enough now to work with both feet on the ground. The higher work had necessitated the painstaking task of securing himself with nylon rope and harness, and rappelling from the building’s roof.

With his paints gone, he could only hang up his smock for the night.

His final act was to haul a battered trash can from the building’s stoop out to the curb. Pickup in a couple days. He had already dragged it outside after investigating a shattering of glass — Calvin accidentally dropping a large jar — and finding the can stuffed with gas-soaked rags. Wedged beneath wooden stairs as Calvin fumbled with matches. The can reeked and fumed, but better this hazard sit curbside than in the building.

Homeward, then, three blocks and no scenic changes. World without end, world without help, world too low on hope.

Leo lived in a narrow, three-story rowhouse, like a brick cracker box turned on end. After quadruple-locking the door behind him, he paced into the kitchen, flicked on the light, snatched a bottle of beer from the refrigerator. Then followed the creaking staircase up, to kick back on the unmade double bed.

That empty left side — he still thought he could see in it the depression from her final night here, smell her scent. There were still hairs on the other pillow, too long to be his own. But for the past month he had shared this house only with the schools of silverfish that channeled along the baseboards, and the troupe of roaches that tapdanced into hiding at the first mention of light.

That empty half of the bed, a minimalist monument to his own naivety. See how far my ideals have carried me?

He sat. He drank. He longed for more stupor than he would allow himself.

Soon, he slept.

And unbeknownst to Leo, four blocks away a building burned.

*

In times past, Leo had held down a drafting table and an Associate Art Director’s throne with AdWorks, Ltd., pulling down a cool $54 thou per annum, plus percs. Not too shabby.

Advertising was a strange breed in the white collar world, a peculiar hybrid of business and hands-on creativity that allowed for far more individual expression that did the average corporate cubbyhole. It mattered less that he was a shaggy-headed hulk who looked as if he should be battling the Sheriff of Nottingham, than it did that he delivered goods par excellence. A substantial portion of which was artwork intended to hype the latest in high-tech barbarian toys to all those little would-be twenty-first century Conans.

Tweak the kids’ interest, spark their imaginations, whet the latent healthy species aggression in us all, and the little tykes clamored for the newest Lord Avatar gadgetry. Power swords and guns, shields and beasts and helmets, action figures sold separately. All featured in the continuing adventures of Lord Avatar himself, as seen advertised in Sunday newspaper comics, and coming soon to a Saturday morning cartoon near you.

The manufacturer was happy. AdWorks was happy. Wife Natalie was happy. And while money may not buy peace of mind, it at least affords one plenty of places to rest a weary head, and so Leo managed to live with himself.

Until the day a six-year-old in Green Bay got hold of his grandfather’s prized World War Two vintage samurai sword and skewered a playmate. Because the Lord Avatar plastic just wasn’t real enough anymore, and anyway, it never seemed to hurt on TV.

Peace of mind, once elusive, now fled to parts unknown. There had to be a better way than this to make a living. The flames of fast-track career burnout were raging. After a month of miserable deliberation Leo resigned his post at AdWorks and talked Natalie into selling the suburban split-level.

He wasn’t sure why he wanted to move to the inner city. Perhaps a deep-seated desire to immerse himself into a locale with a genuine past, true personality, traits the mass-erected outlying clone dwellings had neatly managed to avoid. Whatever the reason, it felt as strong as a biological need. And at first Natalie was game for the idea. Change was healthy. Change was stimulating.

The inner city was not without hope, and better days ahead. The past years had seen the renaissance of restoration. Instead of the demolition of old buildings and sprouting of bland housing, the powers that be were finally getting it right: working with what was already there, leaving architectural personalities intact while rehabbing the buildings where they stood.

An area downtown, a racial stewpot of blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and whites, was slated for a double-barreled blast of benefits: federally funded renewal and private sector gentrification. Leo jumped on the bandwagon and bought their own urban homestead, a rowhouse in which he and Natalie could live, and out of which he could operate his own freelance commercial art studio. With no pressure to accept assignments that might offend his newly awakened sensibilities.

But for reasons never made satisfactorily public, the plug was pulled on the entire life support system. And the private sector — businesspeople with plans to relocate office and retail space in rehabbed art deco buildings — didn’t find the area nearly as attractive as before. There’s no bread, let them eat cake, and federal cuts had claimed another casualty before Leo’s eyes.

It wasn’t much longer before Natalie pulled the plug, as well. This slumming business had a certain trés chic appeal, but really, enough was quite enough.

Leo decided to tough it out awhile. If all others had lost interest in making the area look brighter, perhaps the job fell to him by default. The only way he knew how, with brick walls for canvas and spray cans for brushes. Not much, but it would at least be an honest effort.

It seemed a losing battle only when he let his eyes stray too far from those little oases of beauty he managed to create.

Or when he listened in the dead of night and sometimes thought he heard a low, thick laughter rumbling through the streets.

*

Leo had replaced his missing paints by the next night, and went back to work on the stems. This time, Calvin visited of his own free will, with no intent of arson. Nor was he alone.

“Told you I met the painter,” Calvin was saying. “That’s him, there, word up. I told you.”

The guy Calvin had brought along was older, perhaps twenty, with unsmiling flint eyes and skin a coffee-with-cream color. An X-insignia ballcap sat bass-ackwards on a high-top fade. His hands were stuffed into the pockets of loose black pants, with taut muscles sculpted behind his T and a hooded sweatshirt. Air Jordans anchored him to the asphalt.

“That’s good work, cuz,” the new arrival said quietly. “You not bad, that’s for damn sure, you know what I’m saying?”

“Told you he good,” Calvin whispered. Eyes taking in the huge pair of roses trellised up the wall.

Leo’s breath, which had momentarily hitched, came easier now. And if he wasn’t yet sure of the new guy’s intentions, he still seemed civil enough.

The two walked closer, this stranger coolly appraising Leo’s work as if a prospective buyer in a gallery. Calvin asked Leo if he had any more cigarettes, so he parted with a few more. Calvin grinned, put them all in a frayed shirt pocket.

“Don’t be looking at me that way, ain’t nobody come here to pop a cap in your ass.” The older guy’s eyes met Leo’s for the first time. “So why you do this, cuz?”

Leo shrugged blocky shoulders, green paint still in hand. “I just want to, is all. Makes me feel good. Feel better.”

The stranger looked to one side, considering this. Grinning faintly at some private joke. He gently shook his head.

“Then you some kinda fool.”

Leo’s heart sank.

“Who are you, anyway?” Leo asked. “Are you the one they call Bricklord?”

“Who, me?” His eyes widened, then he burst into rich laughter. Until now, Leo hadn’t even believed him capable of it. “Shit, that’s a good one. Bricklord. Shit.” His mirth died to chuckles while Leo felt about as tall as the aerosol can in hand. “If it matters, my name’s Willy. But no, cuz, I ain’t Bricklord. You’d know that if you’s from here. But you not.”

That singular accusation again, which he could not argue. He was here by choice, they by circumstance. No bridge in the world could span that gulf.

“You think you doing us a favor, slapping this shit on the walls? The rainbows and clouds and stars and flowers and shit? Think you doing a favor for all us niggers and spics and slopes and poor white trash?” Willy didn’t speak so much out of anger as perceived fact. When Leo didn’t answer he went on. “Well you not. You can paint up a garbage can real pretty, and all you got’s still a garbage can. You didn’t change shit. I don’t know where you from, but that ain’t the way it works here.”

Calvin had been staring at his feet while this went on, a sad twist in the corner of his mouth. The boy disagreed, apparently, but knew better than to contradict. Not now, not here.

“What if it’s not for you in the first place?” Leo said. “What if it’s just for me?”

Willy shook his head again, as if he’d been pounding his skull against the wall rather than looking at it. “Just give it up, painter. You beat by something you won’t never understand. You beat before you even started.”

Leo stood mutely, watching as Willy tossed a friendly arm around Calvin’s shoulders and steered him away. Calvin managed one more quick glance at the wall, at the sweat and paint and hopes that brightened it, at Leo’s eyes. And then they were gone.

Along with whatever impetus Leo had to keep working.

He packed up and called it an early night.

*

Leo finished two nights later. It took him scarcely an hour, blending lighter and darker shades of green with touches of black until the second rose’s stem swept down to the foundation of the building. With neither run nor stray dribble to mar, to detract.

Then the calm appraisal of elation, standing in the presence of a work brought to completion. Brainchild’s maturity, left to stand on its own. There was no other feeling like that in all the world.

Still stung by Willy’s words from two nights ago, at heart Leo had to suspect Willy may have been right. But sense of duty was greater still, to contribute something to this blighted cityscape. If beauty was in the eye of the beholder, perhaps hopelessness was, as well. Even a fool had to start somewhere.

Leo returned the spray cans to his new nylon bag, then backed up for a broader view of the roses. Magnificent, his master work so far. Dawn was too far away, that first kiss of sunlight when this completed work might shine, and he wanted to be back here for the moment, so he could see, so they all could see.

Except…

They all were seeing right now. From the streets. From the sidewalk. From a scant few feet away, he noticed as he turned. Talk about losing yourself in your work — dozens of them had approached and he’d never heard. Standing motionless, staring. Young and ancient, black and white, Asian and Hispanic. Junkies. Winos. Mothers. Whores. A cop. Children. Dealers. Gangbangers. All of them half-lit by streetlights too few and weak to cut through much darkness on this edge of town.

Leo gave them a queasy, gentle smile, feeling sick within because no one seemed to appreciate his efforts. Feeling sicker still when the faces did not change.

Silence, except for the distant master mix of traffic and sirens, wailing babies and TVs blaring from open windows.

Someone in the street hit the play button on a monstrous boom box, speakers blasting gangsta rap, here’s life as we know and live it, brutal and dirty. The savage four-four rhythm prompted many, those who could, to dance. Whirling, contorting, letting themselves go with abandon, circling around a teenage girl who swayed and knelt beside a squirming cloth bag.

Leo, not liking this, not at all, saw no joy in the display. There was nothing of celebration in the movement, no release. It was darker, somehow, more elemental, obligatory. People in chains would dance this way.

From the comfort of shadows, Willy came forward to meet him. He looked much the same as the other night, gray sweats for black the only difference. The sad shake of his head was the same.

“Warned you once, cuz,” he said. “I told you you’s messing with shit you don’t understand.”

“I can’t understand what nobody’ll talk about!” Leo shouted. His only defense.

“Sometimes you got to take things on faith. I know you mean well, but you past the point of no return now, you know what I’m saying?”

Leo looked past him to the nightmare conga line out in the street. Dancers still caught in a frenzy of muscle and bones. The girl in the circle, still kneeling, swayed with lithe serpentine fluidity. Wild hair tossing to and fro about her shoulders, head thrown back in an act of perfect supplication. She reached into the bag beside her, drawing out its source of erratic movement: one of those plump rats so prevalent in the neighborhood. She lifted it to arm’s length above her head, and it squirmed like a worm on a fishhook, fat pink tail lashing at her wrist and forearm like a tiny whip.

Leo thought of films that he’d seen — strange rites born of Africa, of the Caribbean. Priestesses doing much the same thing with live chickens. Only now, rats were so much more in keeping with the locale.

“There’s a way things run around here,” Willy said. “We may not like it, but we understand it, and so we know how to live with it, you see what I’m saying? And we get by. Bricklord wants a building burned out? We give it to him. He wants to smell some food rot in the street? We give that to him too. He don’t never ask for life so long’s we keep him happy with all the other shit. Sacrifices, cuz. That’s what it’s all about. Keeping the place the way he likes it.”

Leo, shaking his head in numb refusal, Just who the hell is this Bricklord guy that’s got these people so beaten down?

“And then you come along with your spray cans,” Willy said.

Out in the street, the girl pulled a dagger from the folds of her dress. Within a tightening circle of dancers, she slashed at the rat with a deceptively gentle arc of the blade, then bucked beneath its all-but-severed head, catching the sudden dark drizzle on breasts and throat, forehead and tongue.

And everyone fell motionless. Waiting.

“Me, I think you do fine work,” said Willy. “But my opinion don’t mean shit. And Bricklord? Cuz, you done pissed him off good.”

Leo at first thought it was an earthquake. But it was too centralized. A low, subsonic rumble emanating from within the four-story building across the street, shock waves vibrating asphalt underfoot. Noise swelling like the approach of a subway train.

The maelstrom of sound reaching zenith, every window in the building blew outward with sudden fury, a rain of glass circling the foundation. Bricks rattled loose, tumbled free, hit ground in puffs of red dust. The entire structure sagged, like a balloon deflating of a few breaths of life. As Leo watched, the side of the building broke out in creeping webs of mold that filled in the cracks between the bricks…

And then the shape began to bleed through the wall.

It was gargantuan, immense. An amorphous, three-dimensional blackness taking form from the building’s structure like fog pouring through a screen. Its head reached midway between the third and fourth floors, featureless except for twin globes of eyes like harvest moons. Its hide reeked of rot, of despair. When its lower face split to reveal rusted metal teeth, its methane breath stank of the sewers.

Bricklord, behold his great and terrible majesty.

“Probably don’t mean much to say I’m sorry,” Willy said. “But you know it ain’t nothing personal.”

Even if Leo had been able to move his feet, it would have done little good. Bricklord crossed over to where he stood with three thunderous steps. As Leo stared aghast, numbly trying to fathom this apparition, its enormity and origins, it reached for him with one tree-trunk arm—

Then closed its hand around him. For something that had materialized through brick, it had gelled into something awfully solid.

He was lifted up, up, legs flailing and arms straining, and Bricklord aimed him at his own creation. Leo’s head was but a yard away from the roses, the only things in his field of vision, and with overwhelming sorrow he knew they would be the last things he ever saw.

Pressure.

The hand tightened around his middle, an encircling vise-grip, tighter, tighter, and Bricklord’s forefinger began to grind down upon his shaggy head. Much as Leo’s own finger had sought the nozzles of countless spray cans. His ribs caved in with a wet splintering.

Just before the huge finger pressed his head down into his shoulders, Leo could feel the unbearable pressure boiling like a volcano, then could feel no more, see no more, hear no more.

As Leo’s mouth and nostrils and eye sockets erupted into a red, unidirectional spray, Bricklord held him before the wall. And with bold, sure strokes, began to create.

*

Another gray day, a day like all the rest. Infinity before, infinity behind.

The status quo maintained.

Out in the street, home away from home, Calvin sat curbside and studied his own feet. Getting too big for his shoes to contain. Such fast feet.

He remembered seeing something on TV once, called the Olympics. Just exactly what they were he didn’t know, but he’d gotten into watching them just the same. Eagerly awaiting the moment when the runners would explode from their marks, looking so fast and free. Unchained.

I can do that, he’d thought at the time. And still believed it. Wondering who you talked to to sign up for the Olympics. Hoping that someday he would find out, get his chance to prove himself. Show them all what he was made of.

Maybe someday. Maybe. Find another kid and do some practice races, and for the relays, instead of a baton they could pass each other this dented can of spray paint that he’d found in the gutter this morning.

And had used once already.

Calvin was a far better runner than artist, but what he’d sprayed on the whitewashed wall, mere feet from where the painter had died, was still easy to discern: a tombstone shape, set in between the bottom of the flower stems.

The wall had become a regular montage of group effort. Calvin’s crude tombstone, the painter’s extraordinary flowers…

And the other thing, added late last night. Now dried, it was shaded in various rusts and reddish-browns. An oval shape, with splayed legs:

A gigantic cockroach, eating the roses.