The Painted Man

by Stevan Allred

conclusion

Picture me painted black from head to toe, in a three-piece suit with a Borsalino fedora planted on my shaved head. Neither dancing shoes on my feet nor flowers in my hands. I’m sitting on a box next to Mike’s grave, elbow to thigh and chin to fist, and I’ve held this pose for nearly an hour, a performance for an audience of none. Only this morning we all stood here and watched his coffin being lowered into the ground. The mound of freshly turned earth is still covered with a strip of green outdoor carpet.

The Pioneer Cemetery in Logan’s Prairie is a quiet place. It sits on a knoll with a grove of white oaks at one end, a nice place for a picnic if you’re comfortable with all the headstones. Mike’s headstone would come later, and it would say his name, Michael Truman Volpe Sr., and his dates, and beneath that, at Michael Jr.’s insistence, the words ‘Beloved Father,’ because I found it untenable to stand up and say I was in favor of something more accurate, like ‘Selfish Bastard.’

All the old humiliations run through me, every slight, every small betrayal, all of the useless baggage I carry around with no place to set it down, and I move not a twitch while I replay every battle in that long war. Mike is so very quiet now, and the silence of sitting here is so instructive. While clouds move across the sky, their shadows sometimes passing over me, darkening the lawn and the headstones, and rendering deeper the black of my skin and my clothes, I have time to consider.

Consider this, for example. Mike wanted Mumsy to feel humiliated, and he wanted Michael to show everyone what a great sire he was, but from me, he couldn’t be bothered to desire a thing. If I could have made myself into something that my father wanted to buy, then I could have been a part of his most excellent stuff, the way Danielle was. The way Michael Jr. was with his captain’s bars and his dress whites.

It isn’t from Mumsy that I get my flair for drama. My father spent the last evening of his life putting on an elaborate dog and pony show for his friends and associates, for his ex-wife and his two sons. He even hired an actress of sorts to play the role of his girl friend. If he’d lived, I could have given myself the pleasure of exposing him for the fraud he was.

Only I know how truly desperate a man he was his final evening on God’s green earth. Only I know the lengths to which he had gone to fool us into believing he had his life completely put back together. And knowing this is the only thing of his I have that belongs only to me.

* * *

After I finished collecting Mike’s things I screwed up my courage and I walked out to the pond. The gap in the dike was scary up close, as big as two or three dump truck loads of dirt, and the mud flow below it spread out like an apron down into Joe Scheele’s place.

I worked my way down the mud flow to where Arnie found him. The mud was sticky and clung to my boots, making them clumsy and heavy. The creek poured down the slope, already cutting a new channel for itself. There were footprints everywhere, chopping up the surface of the mud flow and making shoe-shaped puddles. The mud was brown with a hint of orange. Even though they cleaned him up for the funeral, I’d rather think of him this way. For once in his life he was like me: his clothes, his hands, his face, every bit of him covered in a single color.

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