The Third Silence Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  The Third Silence By Nancy Springer

  Acknowledgments

  DARK LIE

  The Third Silence

  By Nancy Springer

  Copyright 2012 by Nancy Springer

  Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in Cicada, Nov/Dec 2003.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  The Third Silence

  By Nancy Springer

  So a bunch of us were walking downtown after school. Town, as in, Small Town, USA. Make that Small College Town. Which is lucky for me, because there are professors, who have brainy kids, so I actually have friends, which is not the usual fate of the school Nerd of the Arts. Which I am, despite my name. Hi, I’m Brad Litwack, and could somebody please explain me to my dad?

  So it was May of junior year, my friends and I were heading toward the Emporium of Ice-Cream after another school day, and it was sunny and there should have been birds singing, but instead I heard car horns caroling. “What’s going on?”

  One of the girls said, “It’s coming from the square.”

  “Why do they call it a square? It’s a circle.”

  Horns crescendoed, and ahead I could see traffic piling up. You would think people would be able to handle a rudimentary roundabout with a Dead General on Horse statue in the middle, but at least once a year… I grinned. “Some tourist went the wrong way again!” I broke into a trot. Wanted to see.

  The circle was packed full of pissed-off horn honkers while more cars poured in from four directions like beans funneling into a jar. Cars tried to turn around, cars tried to cut across the grass island, cars drove on the sidewalks while my friends and I ran in the street. It was a wondrous mayhem. I laughed out loud.

  “What if it’s an accident?” said one of the girls. “What if somebody died?”

  “Nobody died!” I pointed at the epicenter of the mess, a muddle of heads around a woman who seemed to be standing on the hood of her car—

  Painting?

  I couldn’t be sure at first. I just saw her gestures, smooth and precise, as if she were conducting Tchaikovsky. And her face, grave and still, with long gray hair pulled back in a braid. I recognized her, kind of. I’d seen her around town, maybe walking a Welsh Corgi, maybe clerking at an antique shop? She was one of those older women you see without noticing, faded female in faded jeans blending into the campus environment.

  I saw a flash of yellow, brighter than the petunias around the Dead General, tipping the sweep of a long-handled brush.

  “Is she painting the car?” somebody exclaimed.

  I barely heard. I was laughing again, like a child with a butterfly, and darting nearer, worming between cars and people. Yes, she was painting her car, a white junker angled to block traffic. On it and around it she had set out paint in big margarine buckets: crimson, caramel, lemon, sage, indigo, mauve, violet, each color with its own brand-new natural-wood-and-white-sable brushes. Moving as if she were choreographed, she finished the roof of her car and segued to the front left fender.

  I stopped laughing and just watched. Three wide strokes, indigo, mauve, violet, and she had painted a night sky over a hint of ocean. With the tip of her brush handle she pulled out white spindrift in the billows, white twinkles in the sky. Then with a smaller brush she started lettering something. I read aloud as she wrote, “All…dishevelled…wandering…stars.” I exclaimed, “Yeats!”

  She actually gave me a flicker of a glance over her shoulder as she moved on. She hadn’t spoken at all. Nobody spoke. Horns kept bawling, and some guy came storming over from his car yelling, “What the hell is…” But when he saw her painting, he shut up and just stood there, as quiet as everybody else. There was something so vehement about her silence that you forgot where you were going and just watched her.

  On the driver’s side door in crimson she wrote, “For Dario Fuentes.”

  Dario Fuentes? It was nobody I’d ever heard of, but I liked her lettering, arty and neat like origami.

  Around the car windows she wrote, “Western wind, when wilt thou blow?” and “Second star to the right and straight on until morning,” and “The rain never gets wet.”

  Like an operatic soprano soaring above the syncopated car horns, the yodel of a siren sounded. But I didn’t move. I didn’t even turn to see whether it was my father.

  Sure and graceful, like a ballet, the woman with the gray braid turned to the rear door and fender, took a big brush and made three swoops of sage: hills. A quick splatter of yellow: buttercups. Caramel shadows. Indigo and violet: sky and sea. All down her braid, down the back of her denim jacket, she wore little bows of yarn that exactly matched the colors in her palette. She must have planned this escapade for months, maybe years. I pictured her in shadows with her head on her pillow, her hair in waves like a flowing gray ocean, asleep, dreaming of what she would paint on her car.

  She wrote, “Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

  “Fern Hill!” I blurted. “Dylan Thomas.”

  She gave me a glance again, like a Yeats horseman casting a cold eye, never breaking the rhythm of her brushwork.

  Behind me a big cop voice said, “Okay, folks, show’s over. Move along. Back to your cars.”

  I didn’t have to turn around to know that yeah, it was my dad. Officer Litwack.

  His voice broke the spell. I heard a shuffle of feet, a woman giggling, and some man saying, “She never got over the sixties. Damned old hippie,” as he walked away.

  Behind my ear, one of my friends said, “Come on, Brad.” Friends? I’d forgotten all about them and the Emporium of Ice-Cream. I shook my head.

  “Well, we’re going.”

  “So go. Bye.” I didn’t even look around. Instead, I walked closer to the gray-braid woman, who probably never heard my footsteps, she was so intent on swooshing yellow petals onto her gas cap cover, painting a Van Gogh sunflower there.

  My father stood right behind her in his navy-blue army-booted uniform with his black guns-and-gadgets belt lugging heavy on his hips. He chuckled and said to himself, “Well, this is different.”

  Gray Braid didn’t look up, just dabbed a garland of quick mauve daisies around her sunflower.

  Dad switched over to his cop voice. “Ma’am,” he said, “I have to ask you to pack up your paints and move this car. Right now, please.”

  She ignored him so well that I actually wondered whether she noticed him, and it was hard not to notice anything as big and strong as my father. I mean, he was born to be a cop. His father had been a cop, and Dad wants me to be a cop too. Me, in that uniform? Yeah, right. But Dad says if more people with ideals signed up, the force wouldn’t have such a bad name. He hasn’t given up on me yet, because I can’t help listening to him at least some. When Dad speaks, people generally listen.

  Except the woman with the gr
ay braid. She stood up, but only to start painting something in blue on her car’s trunk.

  “Ma’am, I’d appreciate your cooperation. I don’t want to have to take you in,” my father warned her.

  She didn’t even blink to show that she’d heard him.

  “Ma’am—” he started to warn her again, but then he caught sight of me, and he kind of yelped, “Brad, what are you doing here?” Like he thought I was with her.

  “Just walking home.”

  For some reason Dad frowned at me. “You’d better get going, then.”

  Huh? Why? But then I realized: Dad didn’t want me to see him arrest Gray Braid.

  And I didn’t want him to arrest her at all. I stalled for time. “Who’s Dario Fuentes?”

  “What?”

  I pointed at the crimson name painted on the car door. “Dario Fuentes. Who is he?”

  Dad stared at the name, and under the peak of his police hat his face went as still as snow. For just a moment. Then his brows bunched like thunderheads, and he glared at me. All of a sudden he was like a different person.

  Like my grandfather. All nightstick.

  Dad used his cop voice on me. “Brad, I told you to go home. Get moving.”

  That voice could have muscled me home all by itself, it was so powerful. I backed off, but I managed to stop by the car’s rear bumper, watching as Dad reached 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 end? I didn’t know, and the way the cop was looking at me, I had to give up. I put the paintbrush back in the indigo pot and went home.

  * * *

  “DARIO LUIS FUENTES,” said the obituary in the May 1969 newspaper archives online, “age 21, a college student, died at 2:57 a.m. Monday in his Sherman Street apartment.”

  It didn’t give cause of death. They never do. Just data (survived by parents in Argentina and sister in New Jersey) and dates. Death and birth, both in May—

  My eyes widened as I peered into the sage-green shadows of the computer screen. If Dario Fuentes had lived, he would have been fifty years old today.

  I heard the kitchen door slam. I stayed where I was.

  “Brad?” Yeah, it was my father, but I knew he couldn’t be off duty yet. He’d come home to check on me. And probably to lecture me.

  Like Gray Braid, I gave him silence. I went on with what I was doing. He found me in front of my computer studying Dario Fuentes’s electronically transmitted face, complete with headband and long hair. Hippie, dark, and handsome—no, more than handsome. I’m a guy, I don’t usually see other guys that way, but Dario Fuentes was extreme. He was beautiful.

  I felt my father standing right behind me. After a still moment I looked up at him. He stood staring at Dario Fuentes, and something old and gray in his eyes made me break my silence. “Did you know him, Dad?”

  He didn’t exactly answer. He wet his lips with his tongue and let a few heartbeats go by before he said, “Did you ever notice, whatever you can handle the least, that’s the very thing the good Lord sends you?”

  I nodded, watchful. When Dad switches over to one of his spiritual moods, there’s no telling which direction he’s going to blow.

  All of a sudden his wind shifted to the north, angry. “Bradford, don’t you ever interfere when I’m trying to do my job.” Okay, he was right, I’d stepped out of line, I knew that. Dad scolded, “That should go without saying. You ought to have more sense.”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “You could have put me in danger. Or yourself. Or got yourself tangled up in something way over your head.”

  “Yes, Dad.” This wasn’t a good time to call the mixed metaphor to his attention.

  “You’re too smart to act so stupid. Don’t do it again. Are we perfectly clear about this?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “All right.” He took a deep breath and let it out through his nose. “I have to get back to work.” He started to walk away.

  I yelled after him, “Dad! Where is she? In jail?”

 
He wheeled like an attack dog. “What did I just tell you?” he barked. “Stay out of it!”

  Only thinking of a burning spear and a horse of air gave me the guts to keep trying. “I’m not interfering. I’m just asking a question, Dad.”

  “Well, don’t!”

  “Dad, please. I need to know.”

  He spewed one of his windiest sighs, but he answered me. “I put her in the hospital. Psych ward.”

  I yelped, “She’s not crazy!”

  “Oh, so you’re the expert? Still telling me what to do? You want her in jail now?” He stormed off.

  Right away, even before the door slammed, I felt ratstink bad. I sat there feeling rotten. Dad had kept her out of jail. He really was a good person and a good cop, one of the best. Yet here we were yelling at each other, because somehow this had gotten to be about him and me. Me and a blue uniform. Me and poetry.

  These be/Three silent things… Damn it all, how did it end?

  I got up and phoned the hospital, psych ward, knowing I was crazy even to try to talk with her. “Could I speak with, um…” I realized that I didn’t know her name. “Could I speak with the gray braid lady? The one who painted the car?” I actually felt myself blushing, this was so stupid.

  “And who is this, please?” asked a crisp white-coat voice.

  “This is, um, the boy who loves poetry.”

  “One moment.”

  Voices in the background, and then a smoky velvet woman’s voice said, “Supposedly I am mentally incapacitated, so I must play along. What is the password?”

  Hot catalpas. I squeaked, “Is it you?”

  “Perhaps. I say, ‘Fergus,’ and then what do you say?”

  She was so strange, I felt like I’d known her all my life, and she couldn’t have chosen a poem I knew better. How could I ever have walked past her without saying hi? I loved her. I said,

  “Who will go drive with Fergus now,

  And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade,

  And dance upon the level shore?

  Young man, lift up your russet brow,

  And lift your tender eyelids, maid…”

  I stopped, because I couldn’t think what came next.