CANVAS BLUES
Vignettes Regarding the Artwork of Brendon Kotes

IX: Yesteryears

The house Robbie moved into had a yard the size of a baseball field. While that yard had stood empty, but for an occasional mowing by the realtors, neighborhood kids played pickup games or used the space as a shortcut to access the playground. A path, trudged out by hundreds of small sneakers with light-up heels and swishes and Velcro, grew harder packed and dirt heavy, grass trampled until blades dared not poke free their heads.

Middle schoolers claimed the bulk of the yard, right where the trees began to dot, but before the forest took over. They used a towering oak as first base, those at the plate using one hand to press against the bark, the other tossing acorns at the pitcher. Second base was an old stump, forcibly used as a table, muffin and gummy snack packages wedged between the splintering wood. Third base sat almost outside the foliage-heavy property line; a pair of old desks, one right-handed, one left. The left-handed one was third base since it sat closer in, where the other had branches that hung low, low enough to scrape the head of anyone who sat inside it.

Brendon thought the desks were only used as third base, up until one summer afternoon sent long shadows across the path. Casey had been left back somewhere at the playground, no curfew for dinner calling him home.

The girl made strange sounds. The boy stranger still. Heavy breathing, slight creaking of the rusted metal, leaves shivering, yet not masking a squelching sound.

Brendon held his breath. Held it tight in his chest, lungs closing around the air, refusing to let it rush free.

He drew what he’d seen later. A girl with her head thrown back, short orange-blonde hair hanging so her ear was visible. Boy with his face hidden, but his hand up grasping her shoulder, his dark head bobbing. Under the back of the desks there were slits where bundles of clothing piled, the boy’s jeaned knee making the right-handed desk rock and creak in unharmonious time.

For some reason, Brendon hid the drawing from his parents and showed it to Casey first, along with the tale of what he’d seen. Casey listened wide-eyed and rapt, his tongue still. Then he traced a finger over where the boy’s knee had pressed, then up to the girl’s unflattering neckline because Brendon had yet to understand shading well enough to make two-dimensions appear as three. That didn’t seem to matter to Casey.

“She’s got a mad face.”

“That’s not a mad face. That’s a…focused face.” Like when girls at school bent over projects.

Casey shook his head. “Mad.”

“I drew it,” snapped Brendon, tugging at the paper. “She’s not mad. She wasn’t mad. I watched.”

Casey grabbed the edge of the paper and jabbed a finger at her face. “She looks mad.”

“You’re a horrible drawer. How would you know?” And Brendon yanked. The paper tore at the side where Casey held it, cutting through the desk and the girl, but leaving the boy whole, though his face remained invisible, turned away, his expression unable to reveal his own secrets.

“That was your fault.” Casey crinkled the paper and threw it at Brendon, but it just fluttered in the other direction.

After Casey left, Brendon quietly threw the paper away and pulled out a stub of a pencil to practice faces. He drew the girl’s face over and over, until she showed up in his dreams, her expression morphing from mad to focused, to sorrowful to giddy, her eyes the catalyst for his learning of nuance.

What he didn’t learn that day, what took him much, much longer to learn, was why Casey had been so insistent.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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CANVAS BLUES
Vignettes Regarding the Artwork of Brendon Kotes

VIII: Present

Mr. Livesey and Brendon lunched at a quiet outdoor table at La Vie Simple, a café that specialized in nothing, yet did it all quite well. That was how Brendon had described the restaurant and it had been between the café or the pizza diner since the pub wasn’t open yet. They both ordered a beer—a stout for Mr. Livesey and a pale ale for Brendon who then took his time peeling at the condensation-wet label as small talk frittered away into comfortable silence for a gentle while.

“How long have you been working?” asked Mr. Livesey. He sat back in his chair, one hand resting on the wrought iron table.

“In the studio? About six years.”

“And before that? Do any freelance work then?”

Brendon smiled briefly. “That’s the way of it, isn’t it? Yes. Used to sell sketches for a quarter back in middle school. Mostly anime girls, sometimes boys. Then it switched to pets after a friend’s dog died and I gave her a canvas with a little painting of it.” He paused. “Did a lot of cars too.”

“And after school?” prompted Mr. Livesey.

Brendon sat back with a sigh. “A few vendor fairs, here and there. Had a stall up in a quiet downtown street a few towns over three days a week. Had a second evening job that kept me going.”

“But not anymore.” Again, with those not-a-question statements Brendon wasn’t sure how to answer.

They remained quiet for a time, the gentle purring of slow-moving cars on this mellow day mostly drowning out the clinking of plates inside the café. Brendon cleared his throat and left off picking at the label, now a pile of discarded paper threatening to blow away in the light breeze.

“My painting—”

“Yes, your painting. There’s no need for refunds. My client isn’t looking for monetary compensation and she wasn’t close enough to this victim to warrant a need for revenge,” said Mr. Livesey fluidly, becoming even more businesslike and forthcoming. “Rather, Ms. Arpsol is concerned that she has no way of dismantling this threat appropriately.”

Brendon mouthed the words “victim” and “threat,” testing them out, knowing his shock must have been etched into his face as if he’d painted it there. “It’s a painting.”

Mr. Livesey cocked his head. “So it is.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~

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CANVAS BLUES
Vignettes Regarding the Artwork of Brendon Kotes

VI: Yesteryears

Most of Brendon’s early work depicted dinosaurs. Stick-legs and fat heads with lolling eyes and tongues sometimes longer than the creature’s body. When eight, during a spring break from elementary school, Casey came over. Still young enough to not know the difference between a Camaro and a Firebird, yet old enough to mimic the revving of the engine and boasting a nose that could identify brands of beer by scent alone, Casey came with uncut hair and khaki shorts to spread himself across Brendon’s bed, sweaty skin an irrelevance in those short-lived days.

“Why do you have a T-Rex on your ceiling?”

“It’s a giganotosaurus.”

“What’s the difference?”

Brendon rolled his eyes with casual affront. “Everything.”

But Casey wasn’t interested in those differences. In fact, Casey wasn’t interested in anything but the bin of knock-off metal cars that had an occasional marker tucked within.

“You have a fire truck! And this car… My dad says those ’83 ‘vette motors are crap to work on, like picking around at bones and hoping for muscle to grow.” He tossed the shiny black car over his shoulder dismissively.

Brendon didn’t know what that meant, but he didn’t want Casey to know that. So cars became the rule of conversation. They’d play racing, shoving cars across the shaggy carpet that their little wheels could not withstand. They’d lay tracks out of old blocks and mountains out of clothes to drive straight up, switchbacks a thing of the nonsensical adult world and not logical child-thinking. The dinosaurs came out, here…and there. In an apocalyptic land where Mad Max roamed or in an epic superhero time travel episode.

The dinosaur drawings on Brendon’s wall slowly swapped out for intricately detailed cars that Casey would critique in loving detail, his eyes alight and his words a tumble. At the time, Brendon just enjoyed the warmth that spawned from the appreciation of his art.

Eight years later, Casey first kissed Brendon in the front seat of a cheap, run-ragged Mustang with the engine purring and an indie rock band Casey loved playing from the small speaker of his iPod. No dinosaurs to speak of, unless one counted the car.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

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CANVAS BLUES
Vignettes Regarding the Artwork of Brendon Kotes

IV: Yesteryears

The day Brendon was born, a thunderstorm rolling in during a late June afternoon, the oil from a diesel had spread across the parking lot, a snake wound tight at one end and slippery, whipcord at the other. A dark rainbow patterned the asphalt and stuck to the bottom of his mother’s sneakers. She tripped on the way in, in between contractions, and though she didn’t fall, her stomach heaved and the diaper bag filled with newborn outfits spilled off his father’s shoulder and into the slick as he jerked to catch her.

Inside, in the corner of a labor and delivery room, that same diaper bag sat in an out-of-the-way corner, rainbow oil seeping up through cotton threads to bless a never-before-worn onesie with color goodness and a painter’s spirit. It had dried by the time his father changed Brendon into it over in the maternity ward, the dark smear almost unnoticeable against the navy fabric, and besides, the rest of the clothes had long since been smeared with worse things of a biological nature.

His mother later claimed it was a fairy, or faerie were Brendon in trouble, that had flown by and kissed Brendon’s fat baby thighs and spindly fingers to grant him such an artistic nature. He had a stork’s kiss, a puckered splatter of darker skin, that ran just under his hipbone and curled in the shape of a sickle, or a moon, or a fingernail, or the curving keel of a ship’s bow cutting up from the water, or the gentle sloping of a river, or the trajectory of a hummingbird’s wing, or…

Brendon’s mother could and did make up a hundred different ideas of what that patch of skin might represent and he took them into his heart, one after the other, where they blossomed from his fingertips on bath tile walls and later from the end of cheap, splitting bristles bought from a dollar store.

She’d say it was a fairy who kissed him and brought his talent, but he knew better.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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CANVAS BLUES
Vignettes Regarding the Artwork of Brendon Kotes

III: Yesteryears

Brendon Kotes grew up in a small house in rural Maryland, just a few miles from the bay, but on the wrong side, where the money landed in patches rather than wide swatches of world. He hadn’t landed in money, per se, but he had landed with something infinitely better: two loving parents and a couple of straight-laced older siblings who gave him just enough rope to explore, but not enough to hang.

Not like Casey Mattingly, whose older sister introduced him to drag racing and the smoky after parties that tasted more of rubber and pisswater beer rather than the freedom he claimed. Casey fell, again and again, like a rock desperate to sink into the bay. And when that first crevice did not go deep enough, he’d find a new one, a better one, a darker one, until he settled in the deepest trench and no amount of hands could drag him out.

Where there’s one side, there’s always another.

Robbie Frey lived in one of those patches of wealth, with a boat slip and a jaguar under his own name before he turned eighteen. Possibly a bit overboard in terms of spending at times, with a dabbing of debt to hang on his kitchen corkboard, but all in all, a good fellow with a decent job who only stayed up too late on the weekends sometimes, who had only skipped his homework occasionally, and tried his best not to be late to work, but traffic happens.

A good sort. A balance to Casey’s insistent calls of freedom and open road. For who needs traffic at seven thirty in the morning on a bright spring day when one could have long stretches of tarmac to squeal down during moonlit hours of humid glory?

Robbie did, that’s who. But not Casey.

And not Brendon either, but it was years before he realized he didn’t need that long stretch of tarmac either. Didn’t need the car, the drive, the steady job or the transient races.

Just a good sable brush and the inkling of an idea.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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