Now he approached the river and it was cut and dry, carved out. It turned through the landscape like a wound.
At the edge, as he made his way down, he noticed a few stray beams of wood, tangled in the earth. They were like oversized splinters, angled and bruised, delivered like that by the river—and he felt another change.
Not more than five minutes earlier he’d told himself he wasn’t a son or brother, but here, in the last scraps of light, in what felt now like a giant’s mouth, all ambitions of selfhood had vanished. For how do you walk toward your father without being a son? How do you leave home without realizing where you’re from? The questions climbed beside him, up the other side of the bank.
Would our father hear him coming?
Would he walk to the stranger by his riverbed?
When he made it up, he tried not to think about it; he shivered. The sports bag was heavy across his back and the suitcase shook in what was suddenly just a boy’s boyish hand.
Michael Dunbar—the Murderer.
Name, and nickname.
Clay saw him, standing in a darkened field, in front of the house.
He saw him, as we do, from far away.
You had to give it to the young Michael Dunbar.
He had a healthy sense of resolve.
He got his calendar of great men, but only after enlisting his mother to help him find the requisite twenty-four women—including Adelle herself, who he said was the world’s greatest typist.
It had taken a few days, and a pile of encyclopedias, but they found the world-changing women easily: Marie Curie, Mother Teresa.
The Bront? sisters.
(“Does that count as three?”)
Ella Fitzgerald.
Mary Magdalene!
The list was endless.
Then again, he was eight, and sexist as any young boy could be; only the men made it to his bedroom. Only the men were hung on the wall.
* * *
—
But still, I have to admit it.
It was nice, in a strange kind of way—a boy living a real life to a sweaty town’s ticking clock, but also having another time frame, where the closest thing he had to a father was a paper trail of some of the greatest figures in history. If nothing else, those men, over the years, would make him curious.
At eleven, he got to know Albert Einstein, he looked him up. He learned nothing about the theory of relativity (he just knew it was genius), but he loved the old guy with the electric hair, poking his tongue out, midpage, of the calendar. At twelve, he’d go to bed and imagine himself training at altitude with Emil Zátopek, the legendary Czech long-distance runner. At thirteen, he wondered at Beethoven in his later years, not hearing a note he played.
And then—at fourteen:
The real breakthrough came, early December, taking the booklet from the nail.
A few minutes later, he sat down with it.
A few minutes later again, he was still staring.
“My God.”
In previous years, on this last page of the calendar, he’d looked at the Giant, better known as Il David, or the statue of David, many mornings, many nights—but for the first time now, he saw it. He decided instantly with whom his true loyalties lay. By the time he stood again, he couldn’t even be sure how long he’d been there, watching the expression on David’s face—a statue in the grip of decision. Determined. Afraid.
There was also a smaller picture in the corner. The Creation of Adam, from the Sistine Chapel. The curvature of the ceiling.
Again, he said it.
“My God…”
How could someone create such things?
* * *
—
He borrowed books then, and there was a grand total of three titles on Michelangelo in the Featherton public and high school libraries combined. The first time he read them one by one, then a couple simultaneously. He read them each night, with his lamp burning long into the morning. His next goal was to trace some of the work, then memorize it, and draw it again.
Sometimes he wondered why he felt like this.
Why Michelangelo?
He’d catch himself crossing the street, saying his name.
Or listing his favorite works, in no particular order: Battle of the Centaurs.
David.
Moses. The Pietà.
The Prisoners, or, as they were also called, The Slaves.
Those last ones always intrigued him for their unfinishedness—the giant figures, trapped inside the marble. One of the books, titled Michelangelo: The Master, went into great detail about those four particular sculptures and where they now lived, in the corridor of the Accademia Gallery in Florence; they led the way to David (although two more had escaped to Paris). In a dome of light stood a prince—a perfection—and flanking him, leading in, were these sad-but-gorgeous inmates, all fighting their way from the marble, unending, for the same: Each of them pockmarked, white.
Their hands boxed up in stone.
They were elbows, ribs, and tortured limbs, and all were bent in struggle; a claustrophobic wrestle, for life and air, as the tourists flooded past them…all focused and fixed on him: The royalty, gleaming, up ahead.
One of them, titled Atlas (of whom there were many pictures in that library book, from many angles), still carried the prism of marble on his neck, and battled the width and weight of it: his arms a marble rash, his torso a war on legs.
Like most, the adolescent Michael Dunbar was spellbound by David himself, but he had a soft spot for those beautiful, beaten-up slaves. Sometimes he’d recall a line, or an aspect, to copy out onto paper. Sometimes (and this embarrassed him a little) he actually wished that he could be Michelangelo, to become him only for a day or two. Often, he’d lie awake, indulging it, but knowing—he was a few centuries too late, and Featherton was a long way from Italy. Also (and this was the best part, I think), his art results at school had always been fairly poor, and by fourteen, it wasn’t even one of his subjects.
That, and his ceiling was flat, and three meters by four.
* * *
—
Adelle, for her part, encouraged him.
In the years that came before, and the ones that lay ahead, she bought him new calendars, and books: the great natural wonders of the world, and the man-made wonders, too. Other artists—Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Picasso, Van Gogh—and he read the books, he copied the work. He especially loved Van Gogh’s portraits of a postman (maybe in homage to old Harty), and he cut out pictures from the calendars as the months passed by, and stuck them to the wall. He enrolled in art again at school when the time came and gradually climbed past the others.
He could never let go of that first calendar, either.
It remained dead center in his bedroom.
When Adelle joked with him about it, he said, “I’d better get going, anyway.”
“And where might you be off to?”
It was the closest he ever came to a knowing grin, recalling the monthly dinner date. “To Walt’s, of course.” He was going out to walk the dog.
“What’s he cooking tonight, anyway?”
“Spaghetti.”
“Again?”
“I’ll bring you some home.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll be asleep here at the table, most likely.” She gave the ol’ TW a pat.
“Okay, but just don’t type too hard, all right?”
“Me?” She rolled a new sheet through the belly of the machine. “No way. A few friends to write to, and that’s it.”
They both laughed, almost for no reason—maybe just happiness.
He left.
* * *
—
At sixteen, his body grew, his hair changed shape.
He was no longer the boy who’d struggled to lift the typewriter, but an aqua-eyed, good-looking kid with dark wavy hair and a fast-looking physique. Now he showed promise at football, or anything else deemed important, which is pretty much just to say, sport.
Michael Dunbar, however, wasn’t interested in sport.