So many loyal followers of the blog have wanted to know what happens next, after reading the first chapter which launched The Boy with a Torn Hat at 12:01 April 27th, that I have decided to post chapter 2 tonight. Not sure if I will do Chapter three next Friday, as our “G” rating moves a little (a lot) further down the alphabet.

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Chapter Two

1974

I go for the ones with the limp, and Renate walks on air.

The day I discovered her she was setting up shop in Heidelberg along the river walk, a promising spot to pull in anybody limbering up with a stroll after the stiff hibernation of winter. The first buds of spring spattered a hint of color on the hills across the Neckar, and the tourist boats coughed up a little Diesel out their lungs while their crews prettied them up for the start of the season.

An outline was beginning to take form on the easel she’d propped open, and completed watercolors and pastels for sale leaned against the parapet of the stone bridge, in an open portfolio for anyone to leaf through. A little folding table by her side held scattered bullets of color, dimples of paint, a flask of water and a few brushes. She was lost inside a loosely knit pullover, dark green, that hung down past her hips but showed no mercy, failing to conceal her elusive, womanly features. A thick braid of hair, not quite the chocolate brown of her beret, tapered down to the small of her back, and swayed ever so slightly, like a pendulum of woven silk, with each stroke of the brush or sweep of the chalk across the tablet on her tripod. She stood while she painted.

I couldn’t help but listen in when I came up from behind her for a chance to work my way through her drawings. A Frenchman was looming over her, trying to talk her down on price for a landscape he’d picked, apparently to impress himself with his negotiating skills, or perhaps the woman he had attached to his arm. He pulled out (from the color of it) a twenty. With great flair he held the money in one hand and the watercolor in the other, gesturing for the artist to choose. She promptly snatched back the drawing and threatened to tear it in half, and though I don’t speak French, which she spoke quite rapidly, I believe I understood where he was supposed to put the twenty marks. “Non non non non non!” he said. He reached back into his pocket and pulled out the other half of her asking price. The deal was done.

I quickly stuck my nose back into her portfolio, crafting my alibi if she sniffed out I was eavesdropping. She’s got a temper! I thumbed through her work. My own paintings mumble, even whine, when they’re not shouting obscenities. These sang in the choir. For most of us the colors of the day were brick and rust and carbon dioxide—dark, angry oils smelling of barbed wire and factories, scraped hard against a canvas with a palette knife or stiff, screaming brush. Renate’s chalk and water colors were soft green and softer blue, oxygen, instantly feminine, the possibilities of a perfect world, all springtime and hope. Even her stone and steel cities were somehow in bloom.

And yet, in her full array of landscapes, street scenes or nudes, everything was slightly blurred, as if the colors had slept on a bed of morning dew, forcing your attention to the one small circle the size of a silver dollar that was dry and in perfect focus—the view through a rifle scope. It found what appeared to be the same blissful woman in every painting, and zeroed in on her, sometimes picking her out in a crowd. But though all the figures in her paintings were animated, youthful and vibrant, and rich with detail, invariably the face within the cross-hairs was only a plaster-of-Paris replica of a woman, a mannequin. The message was cold as a bullet alone in a chamber, the waiting room of destruction before the friction of flight: Go Ahead. Pull the trigger. I won’t feel a thing.

I couldn’t let that happen. Who would do such a thing to her? Before I drew my next breath I made a vow to rid the world of her assassins, and I fell in love with the artist before I even saw her face. I was hoping that she was plain, or even ugly, attainable. Or, impossibly, a beautiful woman who might see something in me I have yet to see in myself.

I watched the French couple cross the bridge. The mec wore a concrete trench coat and scrolled up the watercolor he bought and tucked it under his arm, like it was nothing more than the Sunday paper, to be consumed at his leisure. The fool.

Renate—I would soon learn her name—got past their little flair up and right back into her work, peering over the top of her easel to pick up whatever details on the hillside caught her fancy. She must have glanced behind briefly in my direction, while I was still browsing through her sidewalk gallery, but I missed it. “Those are forty marks each,” she said, over her shoulder. “The smaller ones are twenty.” This she spoke in English, with a German accent. How did she know to speak English? My disguise needs a little work. Still a few cogs in my Yankee incognito.

I had been crouching over her paintings all this time, each one holding me for a moment in its tender grip before passing me on to the next. I could have lived inside that portfolio of hers, but I had to break free. I had to know, I needed to know, the face of the woman who had done this to me with a few soft strokes of a brush and a piece of chalk.

She was completely absorbed in her work, and when it was clear she wasn’t going to stop for me just because I willed it, I got up and stood where the Frenchman had been standing. My abrupt appearance on the other side of her easel startled her, and I broke her rhythm, the unpardonable sin against an artist, mime, or musician. I stepped to the side, stuttered an apology, and for the first time I saw her face-to-face without the shield of the easel or the glare of the morning sunshine reflected off the river. There is some mistake, I thought—she was so unlike the expressionless targets in her paintings begging for someone to breathe a little life into them, or blow them away.

Her dark brown eyes were those of a fawn on the run, forest fire, panicked and vulnerable, and when she mouthed a few words to me that I didn’t even hear, it was with lips so full and with breath so tender she could have blown the dust off the wings of a napping butterfly and never disturbed its sleep. She smiled for me, and I felt it in my heart and in my hips, each scrambling to be the first to knock upon her door.

I was struggling to sort all this out. Her mannequins could muster no more than a blank, bloodless glaze, as if they had French-kissed a vampire, but that obnoxious patron of the arts with the woman grafted to his arm proved beyond doubt the artist herself was all flame, just waiting for something, or someone, to stoke the embers. I didn’t know what to make of the contradiction. I only knew I wanted in.

It was my moment to speak, to say something fresh and good and just be somebody else. I could feel words crawling up from my heart as senselessly as ants but I couldn’t make a sentence. I was about to speak, but over her shoulder, a hundred yards in the distance and coming our way, was Lola. I couldn’t make out her face, but it was Lola.

It’s that slight limp of hers.

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Chapter three makes references, very slightly, to subject matter some readers might find offensive, and language(used playfully and not in any way cruelly or in a demeaning way)that may be offensive to some as well. I’ll let you know later in the week if I intend to post it. If I get through that barrier, it may be good to go until chapter 27, perhaps this will be our regular fireside read!

What do you think?