The Third Silence by Nancy Springer Page B

for the “Dario Fuentes” door handle and yanked it. The door didn’t open for him. He peered inside and pressed his lips together. “Locked with the keys in the ignition,” he muttered. He walked around the car, trying each door. All locked. This car was not going anywhere soon. I’m sure Gray Braid had planned that too. She was still painting her trunk, lettering something—
    My father strode to her and grasped her by the arm, pulling her away from the car. “All right, Ma’am, that’s enough.”
    I yelped, “Dad, don’t!”
    He turned on me, head down like he was a grizzly bear about to charge. “Bradford, go home. Now .”
    “No.”
    I had never said “No” to a direct order from him before. I still don’t know how I said it, or why, unless it was something about the long, virginal paintbrush in her hand still yearning blue toward the car. Or maybe something about all dishevelled wandering stars.
    My father’s face went bloodless white, as white as first star on the right, then crimson red, like straight on till morning, sailor take warning.
    I blurted the first thing I could think of. “Dad, she’s my friend!” Even though I’d never talked with her, this did not feel like a lie. “Don’t put her in jail. Please.”
    My father breathed out with a windstorm noise between his teeth—like he didn’t trust himself to say anything to me. He turned away and headed toward his vehicle, hauling the woman with him.
    All the time she had not said a word. But as he pulled her away, she looked me straight in the eye, gave me a Mona Lisa smile, and handed me her paintbrush, still wet with indigo.
    * * *
    I didn’t go home.
    I wanted to, because I knew I was in trouble and hanging around there might only make it worse. But I couldn’t just leave. It was like she had passed me a baton.
    Anyway, Dad didn’t come back. Another cop came to get traffic untangled. I stood behind the white car and looked at what the gray-braid lady had painted on the trunk. A poem:
    These be
    Three silent things:
    The falling snow…the hour
    Before the daw
    It stopped there. Where my father had taken her away.
    Damn, oh dammit, I’d seen that poem somewhere, but how did it go? The falling snow, and she had etched snowflakes into a blue-and-lemon-mauve dawn sky…the hour before the dawn…but what was the third silence?
    If things went as usual, it would come to me sometime too late for me to help.
    I saw a guy with a Nikon taking photos of the other side of the car, and with the long blue-tipped brush still in my hand I drifted around there. Oh, man, she must have painted that part before I got there. “Dream of pear empanadas,” it said around the windows. “Don’t cry over chihuahua pee. Penguin dust! Bring me penguin dust! Thank you for reading my car.” On the door, amid waves like flames, it said, “The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea.” On the fender, amid flames like waves, it said, “With a burning spear and a horse of air, to the wilderness I wander.” In odd spaces I saw a crimson dragonfly, a handprint in yellow and caramel, and a purple rectangle that said in curly letters, “Poetic License.”
    I asked the photographer, “You from the newspaper?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Who’s Dario Fuentes?”
    “Huh?”
    I led him around and showed him the name on the driver’s side door. He took a picture of it.
    “Rings a faint bell,” he said. “Somebody local.” For a minute I thought he said loco.
    The cop directing traffic got things cleared out enough for a tow truck to back in. Another cop started working on the driver’s side door with a Slim Jim. “Run along, son,” he told me.
    Standing on the hood of the car, the photographer laughed. I got up on the curb under the Dead General and looked. All over the roof she had painted a huge sunburst.
    “Sun roof!” the photographer hooted.
    I wondered whether she had meant it that way. Three silent things… Damn, how did that poem