The Cave Painter & The Woodcutter by Don Hannah Page B

real fine. And yerself?”
    â€œCan’t complain.”
    He’s looking at the snapshot.
    All lined up on the new couch. Bobby with his arm around Brittie on his lap. Angie with her arm around the both a them. Lookit’m smile. J’ever see anythin’ happy as that? Even Brittie, for once. When she started ta talk and she stutters—
    How should we’ve tried ta help fix her? I finish her words when she gets stuck, so she won’t feel dumb or…
    He gently tears the photo in two.
    Frustrates Angie though. One night she says ta me, “We should call her somethin’ else, can’t even say her own name without that stutter.”
    He keeps tearing it into smaller pieces.
    And then she goes, “B-b-b-b-b-brit-t-t-t-y.”
    â€œYou quit that.”
    â€œAw, y’re not the boss a me,” she goes. And I’m thinkin’, “What’s this now? What’s all this?”
    Angie, she starts ta change. I don’t mean about her packin’ on the pounds, not that; I mean that she starts gettin’ all contrary. We could a weathered it out, all of it. After Vistas let me go when money disappeared that time—and not me, wasn’t me, but he wouldn’t listen, said, “Y’re lucky I’m not callin’ the cops.”
    â€œCall’m,” I says. “Call’m, you prick, ’cause I had nothin’ ta do with it whatsoever! It’s that Farrah, and you know it, but y’re all too busy tryin’ ta get into her pants!”
    After that it’s a little while, not much more’n a month or so before I start up at the Palace Grill, but she’s at me before I’m hired ’cause I’m home so much.
    â€œWhere ya want me ta be? Costs money ta be anywhere but here. Watchin’ Oprah is free,” I says, “and I don’t see you out lookin’ fer no job.”
    Then kids get the mumps and there’s that big storm and we’re all locked up at each other’s throats. But we could a weathered all of it out, I think, we could’ve. Yes. Of that, I’m certain.
    Except for she said yes to that kid brother a hers ’cause he had nowhere else ta go. Once Kevin comes ta stay with us, that’s when the worst all got goin’. “He’s sweet as can be,” she says after he phones her up. “Loves lookin’ after little kids and that.” I say, “Sure. Okay.” I know he’s had a hard time of it, dirty stuff happenin’ to’m when he was a kid and that. I got sympathy for that, I know that stuff really happens, it’s not just the TV.
    The moon has disappeared. He’s holding the photo pieces, staring at them.
    But then he shows up.
    He slowly starts eating the bits of photo. Taking them like pills, chewing and swallowing them as he talks.
    I come home from work and he’s there already, havin’ one a my beers.
    The look of’m!
    Tattoos everywhere on his arms and his hands—Love and Hate and the like on his knuckles and all this Chinese nonsense—but it’s his face. Spider-Man webs on his cheeks he’s got, and zigzaggy things—all black as pitch—and 666 on his forehead like a big asshole. That’s real smart. How could he do that to his face? That stuff don’t come off. And these hoops in his ears the size a quarters, his ears all stretched out forever. Little spikes in his eyebrows and rings on his lip.
    â€œHe don’t give a fuck how he looks,” I say, and she tells me he’s had a hard time and ta be quiet and be patient with’m.
    Just a scrawny little runt, can’t weigh more’n a hundred and twenty, keel over if ya spit on’m, and always sneakin’ around, pants hangin’ off the tail end of his ass. I keep thinkin’ of how he wasn’t too bad-lookin’ once, and now he’s just gone and fucked himself for all time. What kind a job could he ever get? Who’d