“Should I call you Erica? Or are you Mary?”
“Let me show you something.” With no more than a nod, she led her through the back of the house, out a door, and across a yard cluttered with clay pots and pieces of twisted, rusting metal. Excavated into the side of a hill, a shed the size of a two-car garage provided a long southern exposure. Inside the building, Diane could see at once the vantage of the light, even at this weak hour, and the openness of space that reminded her of the windowed vista of the beach house of her childhood. In the center of the room, wrapped around a massive post that supported the roof at its apex, stood a crude round table. Bouquets of brushes and palette knives rested points up in coffee cans and glass jars of a dozen shapes and sizes. A handmade rack held small rolls of canvas, slats of hickory, and measuring tools, and along the table's surface ran a river of colors, paints in pots, tubes, powders. Splatters on the floor spread as wild and violent as a murdered clown. Gesso, varnishes, turpentine, and resins huddled in toxic confederation. A toolbox overflowed with woodprinting tools, menacing carvers, brayers, pine blocks, zinc intaglio plates, chisels, and pastes. Diane ran her fingertips over the strange tools as she circled the table, stopping in front of a new canvas, stretched and prepped, which faced an empty stool. She imagined Erica in action. “Let me see what you have made.”
“It's all around you.” She waved her arms like a game show model, but her voice deepened in tone. “What I don't like I sell in a shop in town where I work, or once or twice a year in Santa Fe or Albuquerque. What I can't part with stays right here.”
The walls begged for slow contemplation, and Diane strolled as if it were Sunday in the museum and gathered in the pictures. In the far corner, another series. “Retablos? I just saw my first ones this morning in a coffee shop down in Albuquerque.” She inspected them more closely. “But I see you have made them your own.”
“These are the first things I painted when I was teaching myself how to paint. They're not very good, and I made many wrong turns before I found how I wanted to live my life.”
Seven paintings clustered on the wall behind a table as simple as an altar. Nearest to her, a taciturn state trooper, wrapped tight in his dark uniform, stood in a bleak and arid landscape, the earth bleached to bone, the sky bleeding to dusk, and along the darkest edge at the top copper border, a buzzard circled black against black. Diane tiptoed and craned to take a closer look, spied the outline of Virginia painted on his peaked cap, and reflected in the twin lenses of his mirrored sunglasses the familiar mushroom of an atomic explosion. The expression on his face could easily be mistaken for joy. Second in the series, a hyperrealistic close-up of a counter scene at an old-fashioned diner. In the background, a mixer twirled and bubbled up a frothy chocolate milkshake. Stacked beside the machine, a half dozen hamburgers prim in their paper wrappers, and on the top, an unwrapped sandwich. Instead of lettuce protruding from underneath the bun, she had torn and glued in impasto scraps of twenty-dollar bills. An order of bullets stood in the French fry holsters. In the foreground, standing on a shiny counter, a salt and pepper shaker set, capped by the faces of two men, gagged and furious.