Dark Maze

wait of someone to talk to after the long and lonesome winter indoors. It is spring when they will tell strangers—even cop strangers—the disquieting stories of their lives, and what they have spent the winter thinking about....

    * * *

    “So I was wondering, by the by,” he said, exhaling pungent blue smoke, “if you dress like that all the time or else if this here’s your day off, or what?”
    “You might say both.”
    I was wearing chinos with holes in the knees and about ten years’ worth of paint stains, a green tee-shirt from a Hoboken exterminating company that had a picture of a dead cockroach on the chest, a poplin jacket without much collar or cuffs left to it, a Yankees baseball cap, and black high-top P-F Flyer sneakers I have owned since about the last of the Miss Rheingolds.
    “Oh, I get it,” he said. “You’re plainclothes. Like maybe an undercover detective, hey? I like detective stories. Maybe I seen something about you in the newspapers?”
    I said, “Not in that paper in your jacket pocket.”
    He poked an elbow into Nobody’s ribs and said to him, “Here we have an officer with a sense of humor, hey? I like that in a cop. When cops can crack a smile, the city’s less jumpy. Ain’t I right? Damn straight I am.”
    Then to me, “Well, I read all types of papers, friendly. All the way from your New York Times down to this bugle in my pocket, which I can tell you is very often no weirder than stories they put in your polite press. This is on account of the fact that I have observed how everybody is pretty much equally depraved nowadays.”
    He stuck out a soft pink hand and added, with a neighborly sort of smile, “Well, anyhow, I am pleased to finally meet up with you.”
    We shook and he said, “I bet you don’t know who I am.” I said he would win that wager.
    “Well, don’t worry, it ain’t your fault you don’t know me,” he said. “I ain’t made much of a mark in this life.” He finished his cheroot and tossed the butt down into the walkway where it would eventually burn out. I thought about telling him how it has been my observation that a lot of people in the world wind up tossed to the ground as casually as he had just dropped his cheroot. But I kept my own thoughts quiet in order to concentrate on his, which he had already observed is the obvious nature of a cop like me.
    He sat down next to me on the bench and took a handkerchief from his coat pocket and, slipping off his beret, mopped sweat off a full head of skin. I knew he was bald! He asked, “Care to know my name?”
    I shrugged an assent.
    “Everybody who knows me, or thinks he knows me, calls me Picasso. Care to know how come?”
    I naturally answered, “Because you’re a painter?”
    Which was exactly what he had anticipated my saying, and which was why he sneered at me right as the words slid stupidly from my mouth. After which he turned to Nobody, who had presumably joined us on the bench, and said, “This one, he says, ‘Because you're a painter?’ Can you beat it?” He put his beret back on his head and pocketed the dampened handkerchief. Then he lit up another one of his skinny cheroots, but did not offer me one this time. He sat puffing silently, and gazing out toward the avenue. Then he said, “Come on over with me, you’ll see something about me and the art world.”
    I followed him up from the bench, leaving behind my Times and my half-eaten roll and most of my coffee. We walked to the bus stop sign on the avenue. He pointed to the other side and said, “See over there across the way in the bodega window where it says ‘special today, pork two-nineteen a pound’ and there’s a picture of a big fat pig that looks scared out of his gourd?”
    I saw it, I said.
    “Well you’re looking at a genuine Picasso. I bet you never knew that Picasso dabbled in the medium of calcimine paint, hey?” He laughed hard at this. It was one of the sorriest, nastiest laughs I had ever heard.
    “I paint up the Puerto Rican’s windows over there regular,” he explained, “in return for which instead of putting out actual money he keeps me in these good smokes and wine that ain’t good at all, and sandwiches. And this is mainly how I now have the artistic thrill of being a painter these days.
    “You know, I wish you would cross over there to the bodega sometime before next week’s special—so you can see up close how I captured the essential terror of the doomed pig. Like I said, I am a