Piece of Art
A canvas and unframed watercolor painting of the back side of Mt. Hood rested against the fence on the sidewalk near Mark and Donny. It was a weird piece of landscape art, out of scale, oddly colored, with a river that flowed uphill.
I encountered it on a Sunday afternoon walk. My head was full of thoughts about my Dad now residing in an assisted living center and it wasn't going all that well for him.
Donny and Mark were malt liquoring and about ready to increase their intake because an older man and woman had purchased Donny a can of Earthquake and Mark a can of Hurricane from the convenience store and were dropping them off as we stood there discussing the painting.
Mark told me he had removed it from a grocery cart used earlier to collect cans and bottles. How the canvas ended up there, he had no idea. Mark remarked the painting was amateurish, as if a kid had done it.
I suggested they hang the painting in the tree five feet away from us to brighten up the salon. Mark immediately nixed that idea. He didn't want to leave anything behind after he retired from the sidewalk every evening.
As we conversed, Mark was tossing Cheerios to a crow.
I told Mark that the bookstore was no longer charging a buck for books on the table outside the shop. They were free. He said it was pretty picked over, although I'd scored a volume of Norman Mailer's nonfiction, Miami and the Siege of Chicago. There was also a battered copy of Huckleberry Finn he might like. Mark said he hadn't read the novel since high school. I told him it still held up except for the cornball ending where Tom Sawyer make a gratuitous appearance because Twain wanted to appease Tom's fans.
Donny said he'd recently read two self help books from the store, The Way of the Warrior: An Ancient Path to Inner Peace and another one I don't recall. He said he often recommended them to his clients when he was a counselor for victims of domestic abuse.
He had mentioned his counselor role before. I had doubted the truth of this claim, but now had changed my mind and knew exactly why: nothing in the life histories of the members of the Old Crow Book Club surprises me anymore.
Someone had left a box of canned vegetables on the sidewalk. I imagined Lima beans and creamed corn and said as much to Mark. He laughed and said, yeah, that kind of shit.
Again, I didn't say anything about the intake form or the call to the Street Response Team. I might never mention them again. Our friendship would continue, of course, but the urgency I had felt, and I believed Mark had felt, too, to get him into housing had dissipated almost to point of vanishing. And hard rains were coming in a month.