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painting.

Fourteen

    PYTHON WAS WAITING for me when I came out in the morning, but not sitting the way he usually did. He was standing by the door, waiting, and as soon as we reached the sidewalk he started leading me.
    “What are you doing?” He was taking me toward the center of town and I wanted to go toCarlson’s bed and breakfast, the opposite direction, so I let him go.
    He stopped.
    “You’re going the wrong way.”
    He waited, watching me, his tail flopping.
    “We’re going this way.”
    But he didn’t turn. He had never done this before, fought me this way, so I decided there must be a reason. I went to him and grabbed the fur on his shoulder and followed the way he wanted to go.
    Toward downtown, but off to the side, into an alley and then another alley, and we came to the back of Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium.
    He was there looking sort of the same as the first morning when I saw him.
    His behind was sticking up in the air, his front end was jammed down in some boxes and garbage so that I couldn’t see his face, and there was no movement.
    Mick.
    He looked like he’d been thrown in the trash and for a minute I thought he was dead. I let goof Python and walked up to where he was crumpled.
    “Mick?”
    There was a sound—like air coming out of a tire—and I saw the rear end move.
    “Are you all right it?”
    “No.” The voice was muffled, coming from inside the garbage. “Do I look all right?” He rolled sideways—fell over—and brushed napkins and coffee grounds and beer cans and worse out of his face. “Tell me, do you have a gun?”
    “Gun?” I shook my head. “No, why?”
    “I was hoping somebody could come along and shoot me and end this.”
    His face was all puffed and smashed and bloody, both eyes swollen almost shut, the lips cracked.
    “What happened?” I asked, but I knew the answer.
    “I’m not quite certain. It may have been something I said or something they said. One thing has a way of leading to another, doesn’t it? We were all beyond reason and there was a fight and I wound up here.”
    “They always fight in Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium,” I said. “You shouldn’t have gone there.”
    “Nonsense—it’s a very nice pub. Much nicer than many I’ve been in. I remember one in Sydney—my God, they had ball bats in Sydney. They very nearly killed me for talking about one of their dogs—I think they were collies.” He rose to his feet, staggering and wobbling, his clothes half torn off.
    “You look awful.”
    “In the name of art,” he said. “All in the name of art.” He looked up at the sun where it was starting to show above the roof edge of Lyle’s and spit out what looked like a tooth. “What time is it?”
    “I don’t have a watch—I think just after seven thirty. Close to eight.”
    “Ahh—eleven hours until the presentation tonight. Good, right on schedule. Everything moving right along as the plan dictates.”
    “Plan? You mean all this”—I pointed to the garbage and the way he looked—“is part of a plan?”
    “Well—I meant to win the fight, or at least do better.”
    “You knew there would be a fight?”
    He smiled, and I was right, there was a gap where a tooth had been. “It was as sure as that little grave in the bushes, my dear. There had to be a fight, didn’t there? Because there was a Lyle’s and there was a me and there was that herd of animals who drink in there—of course there would be a fight.”
    “And you did it anyway?”
    He looked at me—or tried to look at me. It was really more of a squint through the puffy eyes. “All of it, all of everything here was to be in the monument—what I like or don’t like, what happens to me or doesn’t happen to me doesn’t matter. The art is all of it, isn’t it? Don’t you know that already?”
    I didn’t say anything but I knew he was right. I thought of the painting the night before, sitting there crying because the painting made me cry, and I knew he was right. I