The Cat's Pajamas

“Big stuff. Mind-blowing. But no reason to be stuffed in the slammer. Big in one way, small in another. Look up!”

I looked up.

“See that overhead?”

“The bridge? Now it’s behind us! Why—?”

“That’s where he fell.”

“Jumped?”

“No, fell.” Sam speeded up. “Notice anything else?”

“About what?”

“The overhead. The bridge.”

“What was I supposed to notice? You went too fast.”

“We’ll come back later. You’ll see.”

“Where he died?”

“Where he had his finest hour. Then died.”

“Where he was Orozco, Siqueiros’s ghosts?”

“You got it!”

Sam wheeled off the freeway.

“We’re here!”

IT WAS NOT AN ART GALLERY.

It was a church.

There were bright pictures on all the walls, each so stunning in their brilliance they seemed to leap on the air in flames. But other flames intervened. Two or three hundred candles flared in a great circle around the vast gallery. They had been lit for hours, and their flames made it high summer, so you forgot you had just come in from April.

The artist was there but concerned with his new occupation, an eternity to be filled with silence.

He was not fixed in a coffin but laid out on a cloud embankment of snow-white cloth, which seemed to drift him up through the constellations of candles that now trembled in a draft from a side door where a member of the clergy had just entered.

I recognized the face immediately. Carlos Jesus Montoya, keeper of a great sheepfold of Latinos overlapping the dry bed of the empty Los Angeles River. Priest, poet, adventurer in rain forests, love assassin of ten thousand women, headliner, mystic, and now critic for Art News Quarterly, he stood as on the prow of a craft sinking in flames to survey the walls where Sebastian Rodriguez’s lost dreams were suspended.

I looked where he looked and sucked air.

“What?” Sam whispered.

“These paintings,” I said, my voice rising, “are not paintings. They’re color photographs!”

“Sh!” someone shhed.

“Pipe down,” Sam whispered.

“But—”

“It was all planned.” Sam glanced around nervously. “First the photos to pique the viewers’ curiosity. Then the real paintings. A double art premiere.”