The Cat's Pajamas

“Still,” I said. “For photos, they’re brilliant!”

“Sh,” someone shhed even louder.

The great Montoya was staring at me from across a sea of summer fire.

“Brilliant photos,” I whispered.

Montoya read my lips and nodded with majesty, like a torero on a Seville afternoon.

“Hold on!” I said, almost grasping something. “Those pictures. I’ve seen them somewhere else!”

Carlos Jesus Montoya refixed his stare at the walls.

“Come on,” hissed Sam and pulled me toward the door.

“Wait!” I said. “Don’t break my chain of thought.”

“Idiot,” Sam almost cried, “you’ll get yourself killed.”

Montoya read his lips too and nodded the merest of nods.

“Why would someone want to kill me?” I said.

“You know too much!”

“I know nothing!”

“You do! Andale! Vamoose!”

And we were out the door from hot burning summer to cold April, but were thrust aside by a cloud of weeping followed by the weepers, a dark mass of women shawled in black and shedding fountains.

“No family weeps that hard,” said Sam. “Former lovers.”

I listened.

“Sure,” I said.

More crying followed. More women, larger and plumper, followed by a solemn gent as courtly and quiet as guidon spears.

“Family,” Sam said.

“We’re not leaving so soon?”

“There’s a crisis. I wanted you to see everything so you would take it in like a virgin observer, nonjudgmental, before you latched onto the reality.”

“How much you charge for that bag of manure you just filled?”

“No manure. Just artists’ blood, artists’ dreams, and critics’ judgments to be won and lost.”

“Give me that bag. I’ll fill it for you.”

“No. Step back in. Take one last look at genius slain and truth about to be corrupted.”

“You only talk this way late Saturdays with your clothes on and the bottle empty.”

“It’s not Saturday. Here’s my flask. Drink. One last swallow, one last stare.”

I drank and stood in the door where the harvest weather breathed out smelling of hot candle wax.