A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories by Ron Carlson Page B

throws. I’m not sure what they said, but they looked authentic. I went into the basement and drew on the furnace room walls with charcoal briquets: sperm entering the egg, wiggling tails, hash marks of excitement, seven stars, the blistered moon. When I came back upstairs, blinking into the light, I saw Buster and Sadie, Mudd Miller’s two dogs, rolling on their backs in the chicken guts. It dismayed me at first until I remembered that Sadie had already thrown three healthy litters of five puppies each, and I debated whether to go out and writhe around with them for a while.
    The doorbell rang, and it turned out to be Mary Ann Buxton, in her traveling clothes, her little Volvo packed to the windows, still running on the driveway. She looked at me in a three-part glance: my charcoaled face, my bloody belly, and then, stepping back slowly, the aboriginal whole. There was nothing I could do.
    “Hello,” I said.
    “Mr. Baldwin,” she said finally. “Thank you for the help and encouragement in art this year. I’ve learned a lot. It was one of my favorite classes, and in appreciation, I brought you this little present.”
    It was a prepared speech or she wouldn’t have gotten through it, and she managed a “Thank you and good-bye,” handing me something and backing down the stairs with a look of frenzied relief on her face. She was glad to have left the car running.
    I looked in my hand. It was her painting of the four birches near the Dean’s garden. My eyes burned inexplicably, and I went back into the house and sat on the floor in the hallway for a moment. Mary Ann Buxton had squatted outdoors for three days frowning at this canvas, chewing her lip, and it was a good painting, two steps beyond representational. I looked at it for five minutes, as if I was counting the strokes. Those damn trees. I love those trees.
    In my studio, my three paintings rose to me like live things. I buried my heart into the third and final canvas. I didn’t look up again until I heard Mudd Miller on his porch calling the names of his children, the ones he could remember. Oh, it was a bellow full of love! I looked at myself, covered with blood and paint and charcoal, my face a savage smear in the mirror. “Oh, Bigville,” I moaned aloud. “It’s all going to work.”
    I showered and began to cool down. I called the office and Ruth Wellner said the meeting would go another hour. I stood in the dining room looking out through a window ringed by garlic at my yard littered with chicken waste, rice, and birdseed, and I had the momentary thought: “You fool, you’ve ruined your own home.” But it was a fleeting doubt and to quash it, I did an errand. I drove the Sportcraft volleyball over to Luther Allen’s and left it with the groundskeeper.
    Story did not arrive home until after ten. I had roamed the house for a while, cruising my new paintings with a hot, fond confusion. I liked them even if I didn’t know what they were. Finally I settled in the living room with Mary Ann Buxton’s four birches propped against the mantel where I could see them, and Life Before Science on my lap. In the new darkness, the volume put my legs to sleep and I followed soon thereafter. It was a heavy book.
    I was dreaming of Dr. Binderwitz scolding me, pointing his unwashed finger in my face, when Story woke me, bumping me softly with her leg. “Hey,” she said. “Did you eat?”
    I checked my watch: ten-thirty. “What happened?”
    “Want some chicken?” she said. “I brought you some chicken.”
    So we ate cold chicken and drank Piels Light on the rocks at the kitchen table like two characters in a good short novel while I woke up and Story gave me the details of the meeting.
    As Story told me the tale, she laughed and ate chicken and we drank cold beer, and the moment in the kitchen light reminded me in a primal way of why and how much I loved her.
    “I’m painting again,” I said.
    “I knew you would.” She reached and took my