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:
Smoke
by Jeff Lawrence
Alone in his apartment and missing a cigarette, Judson Smith reached inside his jacket. He was convinced that his creative juices were nicotine-dependent. Sarah used to tell him that he should list smoke as a main ingredient in his paintings. He tried it once at a local art show: "Still Life with Lasting Rift, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas (With Smoke)." It didn't sell, but it made her laugh.
Judson lit the cigarette, put it to his lips, drew in a deep breath, and slowly exhaled. Another lingering thought of her. It drifted around his head refusing to go away and settled into his jacket--a smell that would remain.
Judson ran his fingers through his stylishly unkempt dark hair. Not exactly the Marlboro man, his slender face was carved in strong deep lines that left shadows in the crevices. The features were firm but not hard under his unshaven beard. His skin was dark with a tinge of saffron that said he was not from anywhere near Texas. A thick black denim jacket dropped down on his narrow shoulders, revealing a grayish button down shirt that was tucked into his loose black baggy jeans, no belt. Thin legs were mounted in oversized black work boots.
Taking another puff, he looked at the new canvas and thought about starting. He hated the first strokes. Committing to the unknown. Starting again.
Thoughts of her dissipated slowly.
Judson drew in another breath and glanced down at the cigarette. It was already getting small, and he thought about how quickly he went through cigarettes now. He inhaled again and left the cigarette in his mouth, gently wedged against the inside of his upper lip.
Sometimes, Judson would imagine that Sarah was a cigarette, dangling from the corner of God's mouth. She would feel the suck of air, and the slow burning at the other end would brighten and intensify. God would blow a dirty vapor into the atmosphere and occasionally knock the dead ashes off the end. Eventually, he would toss her to the pavement and put her out with a twist of his foot.
Judson could sit like that for hours, thinking about her, but today he didn't have the time. Glancing down at his watch, he knew he wouldn't get any work done. He crushed the stub of the cigarette in the dirty ashtray that sat on the small end table near his easel. Next to the ashtray were his wallet and keys, which he grabbed and slid into their appropriate pockets as he headed to the door. He locked up his side of the duplex and hopped the three steps from the porch to the narrow walkway that led from the house to the sidewalk. Reaching the sidewalk, he turned up Maple Avenue and headed toward Main, lighting another cigarette as he went.
Every day since the accident three months ago, Judson had walked the 13 blocks to the graveyard to spend a few minutes with Sarah at exactly 12:36 p.m., the official time of her death. He took the same route through the small community, retracing the same steps and the same memories every day. He wasn't sure how one gets into a rut, but he was smart enough to know that he was in one now.
When Sarah died, he had her buried in the old graveyard east of town. He didn't know how long the cemetary had been there, but the oldest grave he had found had 1896 carved in the stone's face. His favorite marker was an obviously homemade headstone for a five-year old named Jonathan J. Willard. The stone was in a typical gravestone shape with a flat bottom and a semi-circle top, but it was made of plain, rough cement and had what he guessed were the boy's marbles pressed gently into the face of the marker. Judson imagined a mourning father making it for his little boy's grave. It made him wish he had made Sarah's stone rather than buying the expensive marble job that the funeral home recommended.
Judson got to the corner and turned down the Main Street of "Biscuit, Texas: The Arts Community of Texas," as the brochure had read when he and Sarah decided to leave the city and move out to the new development. The small town, located 30 minutes west of Austin, had grown up several decades ago around a large biscuit factory, which was unimaginatively titled "The Biscuit Co." The owners had even placed a large neon sign over the factory that flashed "BISCUIT" in huge red letters for the entire countryside to see. The company made prefabricated bread mixes--biscuits, pancakes and corn bread--the kind you add water and an egg to and then pretend they're made from scratch. It was the first of its kind in Texas and had done well for many years, but with the increase of international corporate giants, the factory had declined. But, since the community's citizens were dying as fast as the factory was laying off employees, it had not caused much of a disturbance.
Two or three years ago, an Austin real estate developer, Harvey Mason, had become convinced he could strike it rich by buying up the small town and transforming it into an artists' refuge, full of cheap gallery space and rental properties. Mason had converted Main Street into a stretch of high-end galleries and restaurants. The second story of each gallery was an open room rented out either as an apartment flat or a workspace--or both, which was the case with most of these artists. A rural town with a biscuit factory was an odd place for an arts community, but Texas' artists are different breed, and as Mason himself liked to say behind closed doors, "Biscuits are to cooking what most of these artists are to painting, if you catch my drift."
Mason secured success by luring José Martín, the Southwest's hottest artist, to move his gallery to the new development. Mason promised Martín a prime spot on the town's central intersection as well as a share of the profits from Michealangelo's, the developer's new high-priced artsy diner located caddy-corner from Martín's gallery. The small community pulled hundreds of artists and want-to-be artists, like Judson, out of the city's crime plagued and expensive arts district.
Reaching Main Street, Judson could smell the fresh baked bread at the Corner Bakery. Sarah used to pick up bread daily at the bakery on her way home from the Martín's gallery where she was a receptionist/salesperson making $7.46 an hour handling all incoming calls, marketing, sales, shipping requests and what ever else needed doing. The fresh baked bread had made Sarah feel she was in Paris or Switzerland or someplace far away. The smell was warm and full in the autumn morning as Judson rounded the corner.
Main Street's bricked surface gave it that official small town feel. The unevenly positioned red bricks, each stamped with "Johnson Brick Co.," showed the wear of time with smooth, rounded edges and more than an occasional crack. Judson wove his way through the scattered window shoppers who peered into the galleries--Harvey Mason's Fine Art, The Painted Desert and Barnyard Sculptures--that lined the north side of Main before crossing the street in his typical jay-walk fashion. On the south side of Main, Judson passed the Santa Maria and the Southwestern Treasures galleries and the Lazy J Steak House before turning the corner onto Live Oak.
Live Oak was lined with old, one-story homes striped with a muted color of weather resistant siding, each one possessing a large front porch of worn-out wood frames coated in flakes of white paint. The neighborhood, which the artists irreverently called Biscuitville, was mostly rentals now, owned by developers from the city. Judson turned east down First Street and continued his walk and his cigarette, moving quickly from house to house down the crooked and cracked sidewalk.
Six blocks ahead, First Street dead-ended at the Resurrection Cemetery where Sarah was buried. Judson enjoyed his quiet times at the cemetery. He would listen to the breeze drifting past gravestones and through trees as he wandered from stone to stone reading their inscriptions and thinking about their stories. He would subtract their date of birth from their date of death and wonder how they died and what families they left behind. Most of them had family members buried nearby. You could tell by the names on the stones and the thin line of cement in the grass that marked out the family plots. But Sarah had no family near her. In fact, he wasn't even officially "family." He wished they had married, but they didn't see the need in it then. Now, even if he could afford to buy the plot next to her, people would never put the two of them together as family--different names means different people, at least on gravestones. Chances were, someone would buy up the plot next to her before he would need it anyway, and then they would be buried separate and alone in distant parts of the ground. He never thought these things mattered much until Sarah died.
The day she died, Judson had sat at the hospital in the little stale room with 1960s checkered fake-marble tile floor. The stark white walls were decorated with two matching seaside landscapes made out of brown, orange and beige cloth that announced how long it had been since the last renovation at Mercy Hospital. Judson stared at Sarah and the tubes and equipment and watched and waited and watched and waited and occasionally poured himself a glass of water out of the plastic pitcher on the tray next to Sarah's bed. Nurses had come in and out at irregular intervals with no update to give him, and doctors came in rarely and had little more to say. A priest in full black and white uniform had stopped by to see if he could do anything. The second he had said it, Judson regretted his "there's nothing you can do" response. He had wanted to run out in the hall and ask the priest to come back and do something. Pray, maybe. Or just sit with him, but at least not leave him alone in there. Instead, Judson had sat by himself and watched and waited until finally Sarah's body twitched and tensed up and her lips parted a quarter of an inch and her breath went . . .somewhere. It happened just like that. Her lips parted and blew, like the way she used to blow smoke from a cigarette. Only it wasn't smoke from a cigarette--it was her breath. He wasn't sure if he had seen it, or heard it, or maybe he felt it, but he knew it was gone. He had looked at her on the hospital bed, but all that was left was a used up body ready to be discarded.
Judson tossed his cigarette to the pavement as he neared the place where First Street dead-ended at the Resurrection Cemetery. From a short distance he could see a small bundle of men gathered on the East side of the cemetery near were Sarah was buried.A big, yellow bull-dozer dug away right beside them. What's going on? The men wore the city's standard blue-gray work coveralls and all but one of them had red baseball caps on, the greasy wear-it-while-you-work kind of hats that all city workers in Biscuit wore. Equipment was scattered on the ground, and the bull-dozer was piling up a large mound of soil and sod behind them. Why are they in the cemetery? For three months, Judson's visits hadn't been disturbed, and he now felt invaded by these men. He double-timed it through the cemetery, forgetting the etiquette he'd been taught about stepping on people's graves. A little closer, he could tell that they were working right were Sarah's grave should be, but...it wasn't there. Frantic, he scanned the area. What are they doing? Sarah's casket was sitting out next to the hole the men were digging. Just sitting there on top of the grass, the silver and gray surface of the casket was still shiny like it was when they had buried her, but it wasn't buried anymore.
"Judson!"
The voice startled him. He looked and saw Bill Stearns, the cemetery's caretaker. He had gotten to know Bill since Sarah died and was glad to see someone he knew.
"Judson, wait right there. I need to explain something to you."
"What are they doing to Sarah?"
Bill hurried over to Judson, but Judson stormed right past him. He wanted a closer look.
"What are you doing?" Judson screamed at the men, and then to Bill, "What are they doin'?"
"It has nothing to do with Sarah. It's just a city waterline."
"What?"
"Yeah, Harvey Mason's building a new hotel on this side of Main, and he's gotta have water to run a hotel."
"But . . . why here?"
"Not sure. Money, I guess."
"Why Sarah?"
"It's not just Sarah. They're going all the way through. They're moving em all over five feet that way," Bill motioned with his hand toward the other side of the ditch.
"Moving them?"
"Yeah, movin 'em. They ain't gonna know the diff'rence." With this comment, Bill played to the crowd of workers glancing around at them and getting them to laugh along with him.
Judson froze. He couldn't breathe. Looking from Bill to the other men trying to process what was happening. He didn't know what to say. Logically, He knew what Bill said made sense, but he couldn't resolve it with what he felt rising up in his throat.
"Judson, I been watchin' you come here fer three months. You been showin' up at 12:30 every day since Sarah died, haven't missed one yet. But someday, your gonna have to let her go. She's gone. She ain't gonna snap outta this. She's dead and gone. Dead...and...gone."
Judson looked hard at Bill. The knot in his throat was burning now. He turned and walked to Sarah's casket.
He knew what he had to do.
Reaching the left side of the casket, he dropped down on his knees and yanked on the shiny silver latch in front of him. It snapped open.
He felt the men staring.
"Hey, I...don't think you wanna do that."
Judson scooted around the casket to the next latch and popped it loose.
"Bill, can he do that?"
Bill, looked at the group of men and raised his hand as if to say leave him alone.
Judson worked his way around the casket and popped the two remaining latches loose. Sliding back to the center, he reached down for the handle and took a deep breath. In a split second, less time than it takes to open a casket lid, movie scenes flashed through his head--skeletons and rotting flesh and mice and ...Judson was thinking more about the smell than he was about Sarah. He wasn't sure why, but people always said the smell was the worst thing.
When the lid came up, Judson leaned forward to look down inside the casket. He wasn't sure what he had expected to see, but there she was--dead. He could smell the odor, but he'd been ready for that. Her body lay still, rotting slowly. Like the day they buried her.
Judson didn't take more than a second or two. He'd seen what he needed to see. Sarah was not there. She was gone.
He pushed the casket's lid back so that it hung open on its hinges. Standing up, he looked back at Bill and said, "You take care o' that for me?"
He could feel the men's eyes searching him for a reaction. Bill nodded.
Judson walked through the small crowd toward the entrance of the cemetery. Walking away, he gulped a breath of the clean air and swallowed down the lump in his throat, then reached inside his jacket and took out a cigarette and lighter. He lit the cigarette and sucked the air in deeply, watching the end of the cigarette brighten and intensify. He blew a dirty vapor into the atmosphere and watched it disappear.
He wondered where Sarah had gone. He knew that she hadn't just disappeared. She was somewhere.
