Painted Skulls

I’ve never actually seen my son. Haven't seen a new photograph of the boy in seven years. The only photo I have (requested by my lawyer, ordered turned over by the Oklahoma judge, the very judge that denied my visitation rights) is a five by seven that's taken on the texture of worn notebook paper. Two white line creases, from me folding the picture to fit it into my wallet, section it. The photo’s colors have faded, but even so, the boy's blonde hair shimmers like new plastic.

It’s Monday morning. Portland, Oregon. The colors are all dull, like they’ve been scuffed up with sandpaper. It isn't anything like home. There’s a small parking lot at the edge of a muted green city park. Most of the spaces are empty, but there’s at least a hundred people dotting the park’s grass looking up into the narrow sky as if they’re sentries for the ozone layer. A few children are flying on the stars and stripes swings, their lips pressed together to make the airplane noise. I look at the small artist’s portfolio sitting beside me on the new brown leather seat. Want to sketch the scene outside, but I haven't had time to sketch anything in months.

I rap on the privacy glass and the driver of the black, lengthened Lincoln lowers the protective social barrier. I tell him my name is Karl and to leave the barrier down so I can get more air. The fortyish driver is all dark curls with smoke toughened skin and a thick trimmed beard that’s fading to gray. He’s listening to Fleetwood Mac, The Chain, I think. The volume is turned down low. My foot is tapping on the floor, but not to the music. I make my foot stop, but it resumes tapping seconds later anyway.

I tell the driver that I'm scared shitless of a ten-year-old boy. “A boy I haven't even met. A boy that loves football and soccer, baseball and video games. At least that's what it said in the letter I got from him right after winning the temporary visitation order.”

Don’t know why I’m talking to the driver. I hate it when people start telling me all the little ins and outs of their personal life assuming that I want to know. Don’t you? But here I am spilling it to this guy anyway. I can’t seem to stop, and there’s something comforting about confessing to this stranger on the other side of the barrier.

“It's the only letter he’s ever sent me,” I say. “I’ve often wondered why he didn't answer any of my letters. I have my suspicions. I plan on asking him. Can’t ask him about them over the phone, his mother’s always listening in. I mailed him a letter once a month until he was eight. Then I just mailed him one every Christmas. Not getting a response seemed less disappointing that way.

“His name is Dane. It’s not a name I care for. But nobody asked me. Hell, I didn't even find out about him until a year after he was born. Two years after that, paternity was determined. He’s my only child.”

The driver nods. He’s probably not the talkative type, and I can’t say that I blame him. He probably has a wife and kids that he wants to get home to, maybe take to the park, maybe this park, and here I am mucking it up for him.

Looking at Dane’s photo, I wonder if the child's resemblance to me is a mirage. Turning the picture, I study it from different angles, wonder if the similarities will disappear like some kind of optical illusion. Had the same bowl-cut flat hair when I was three. My hair is much thinner now and darker, reddened, like dogwood bark. The boy's Blue Jay eyes and the hard angles of his jaw are the same as mine. Even the straw cowboy hat he's holding in his hands and the blue western shirt he's wearing have the feel of my own youth. But really, what does that mean? Nothing. It's the DNA that matters.

“The DNA test concluded that there is a 99.9% probability that Dane's mine,” I say. “Sounds pretty convincing, but that just means that one out of every thousand random men has the same genetic pattern as Dane, and I'm one of them. When Dane was born the population of the United States was around two hundred and sixty million. Do the math and about one hundred and thirty thousand other men walking around in the US could have fathered him. They would all test at 99.9%. Hell, you could be his father.”

The driver looks up at me in the rearview mirror. He’s lipping the Fleetwood Mac lyrics, “Damn the dark. Damn the light.”

What are the odds that Jacqueline slept with one of those other one hundred and thirty thousand men? Probably pretty small. Right?

I glance at my watch. Ten to four. Stagnant minutes. The stiff dark suit makes my neck and the middle of my back itch. The tie is choking me, and I pull at it. The plane ride has left me crumpled. I’m wishing I'd worn jeans and a T-shirt. Wore the suit because I wanted to look responsible, but now I feel like I may just come across as intimidating or stuffy to the ten-year-old. Don't want to scare him. Don't want him to think I'm just another boring old stiff. When we get to the cabin, I'll change.

Where are they? Where could they be? Are they coming? They are coming. They have to be.

In the direction of the driver I say, “Jacqueline, that’s the boy’s mother, she doesn't really have any choice about this. If she refuses this visit, she will lose custody, and she knows it. It took me seven years to win the right to see my boy. A right I would have been granted when paternity was determined, if the system worked.”

You see, people assume that winning visitation is part of determining paternity and establishing child support, but they aren't the same. Jacqueline moved to Oregon while she was pregnant. The Oklahoma judge ordered I pay child support but refused to order visitation because Dane lived out of state. The judge claimed that ordering visitation was outside his jurisdiction. (Although he didn't seem to have any problem hitting me with the three hundred and fifty dollar per month child support payments.) Said I would have to go to Oregon to fight for visitation. As a struggling artist, I didn't have the money to do that. Maybe I could have gotten a job. Worked the forty-hour grind like everyone else, saved a few bucks after paying rent, electric, gas, child support, but I wasn't qualified to do anything that would have paid much more.

“She dropped out of high school her senior year to be a Beastie Boys groupie,” I say. “Imagine that. Then, a couple of years later, pregnant, she moved to Seattle to be a part of the music scene. But I guess that didn’t work out either because within a couple of weeks she had moved down to Portland. Now she’s a deadbeat welfare case that’s never had a job a day in her life.”

I won a temporary visitation order two months ago. It’s a get-to-know-one-another order. Normally, during the first week of a temporary visitation order, the child has to return to the custodial parent's care every night. But because my attorney is a good one, because he was able to prove that Jacqueline had been malicious in her interference in my attempts to form a relationship with my son, Dane will be spending the entire week with me. If things go well, I'll be granted a permanent visitation order.

#

A rusting purple Ford Ranger pickup with a dent in the driver’s door pulls into the parking lot. The woman behind the wheel is Jacqueline, the bloodsucking bitch. She's an ugly woman that now has rolls of yellowed skin. Not one of my prouder moments. She's a strawberry blonde, and that should have been all the warning I needed, but I hadn't been thinking. We met at a Halloween party. I went as Andy Warhol (a white fright wig and pasty make-up), but nobody recognized who I was supposed to be. She came dressed as Molly Ringwald (the master of lies) circa Pretty in Pink. I followed her back to her place. I was young, drunk. We were only together that one night.

The pickup parks next to the lengthened Lincoln, and, looking past Jacqueline, I get my first look at the boy. He's pretty much a stretched cartoon version of the kid in the photo. The big exceptions are his wife-beater t-shirt and his blue hair. It’s not the bright blue of a rebellious teen but a lighter little boy powder blue. He doesn't seem interested in me. His eyes are locked on the Lincoln I’m sitting in.

My driver starts to get out, and I tell him not to bother. "Got it," I say, and he says, “Cool.” Then I pull up on my door handle only to find the door locked. Under my breath, I mutter “damn it” and then remind myself that I shouldn't use that kind of language, especially in front of the boy. Thumbing the switch, I pop the door, and climb out, make my way around to the purple Ranger where Dane and his freckles are squinting up at me. He doesn’t have freckles in the photo. They’re new, a late gift from his mom.

I open the door for the boy. What do you say to a ten-year-old son that's never met you? "Hello," I say. It's a start.

He hops out of the pickup. "Hey."

As Jacqueline leans over in the seat to say something to me, I shut the door to the truck. I know what she's going to say anyway. She wants money. She wants him to come home early. She'll issue some kind of ultimatum. She'll tell Dane to call her every day and every night. At some point, she'll say something very ugly to me.

I give Dane an awkward pat on the head. Two gold studs protrude from each of his earlobes. This makes me frown, but I quickly bite the frown into a grin while wondering what else he might have pierced. "You got your stuff?"

"Yep." He thumbs at the bed of the truck. "It's in the back."

A Dallas Cowboys duffel bag sits in front of the wheel well. I pull out the bag. "Nice. You like the Cowboys?"

"Yep," he says. "One day I'm going to play for them."

This amuses me, partially because I'm a Kansas City Chiefs fan and partially because he told me in his letter that last year was his first year to play football. He also said that this year he didn't sign up for football because he wanted to concentrate on soccer. Said he wanted to be a pro soccer player. "You are huh?"

"Yep." Pointing at my hand, he says, "Is that me?"

Looking down, I see I'm still holding the picture of him. "Yes."

"Can I see it?"

"Sure." I hand the boy the picture.

Jacqueline has managed to extricate her considerable girth from the worn seat of the pickup. She’s wearing a red and pink flowered tent-like dress over jeans, and it makes her look even bigger than she is. She's glaring at me, and I can feel her stare. It's like feeling the cold enveloping calm of an oncoming tornado creep over your body, into your skin. She wastes no time.

"You got a check for me, Karl?"

I reach into my coat and pull out an envelope. "Right here."

"Give it to me," she says flapping her fingers to her palms.

She obviously expects me to bring the check to her. Heaven forbid she actually has to walk around the pickup to get it. This is a power play. They're quite common when dealing with Jacqueline. I could toss the check on the ground or in the bed of the truck or place it on the roof of the truck. She's a short woman and watching her try to retrieve the check would be amusing. But that type of behavior would be childish. Still, childish or not, I prefer not getting any closer to her than I have to, and I refuse to allow Dane to play the part of go-between. So, I open the passenger door of her pickup, toss the check on the driver's seat, and shut the door. Having left her own door open, she snatches the envelope off the seat and rips into it. After glancing at the amount, she stuffs the check into the back pocket of her jeans. I feel sorry for the check.

"If you hurt my boy in anyway or try to take off with him," she says. "I'll hunt you down, Karl. And when I find you I'll kill you."

"Give me some credit, Jacqueline."

"Why should I?"

I nod in the direction of Dane. "Can this wait?"

She rolls her eyes. "Whatever."

"This is getting old," the boy says.

Thinking he's talking about our argument, I start to agree. Then I glance down and see he's studying the picture. "What?"

"This picture. It's old."

"It's the only one I've got."

Dane frowns and then reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his wallet, a blue Dallas Cowboys wallet with a single large silver star on each side. He velcro opens it and flips through the contents. Finding what he wants, he pulls out a baseball card and hands it to me. On the front is a picture of him wearing a red and white baseball uniform and holding a bat as if he’s just cracked his eight hundredth career homer.

"Look at the back," he says pointing.

I flip the card over: Dane Reed, Age 10, Height 4 ft. 6in., Weight 72 lbs., Position: 3rd base. It irritates me that the last name isn’t my own. The court ordered his last name changed when paternity was determined. That Jacqueline has never bothered to have Dane use my last name, is typical Jacqueline. "Nice card," I say. "Thanks."

Dane smiles. "No problem."

His mother huffs.

The boy walks around the pickup to her. She bends to receive him, and he hugs her and gives her a kiss on the cheek.

"Call me when you get there," she says. "And call before you go to bed. I want to hear from you at least twice a day."

The boy says, "I will," and then points over at the lengthened Lincoln. “Do I get to ride in that?”

“Ask your father.”

He turns, looks at me. He has Jacqueline’s dainty smile, and her awkward way of looking through me.

“Yep.”

Jacqueline puts a hand on each of Dane’s shoulders and pulls his back into her body. “He wants to come home early,” she says to me. “Thursday night. Soccer practice starts early Friday morning.”

She’s wearing a crooked grin that I want to permanently straighten. I find it unlikely that soccer practice starts on Friday morning. The visitation order says that I’m to have Dane until Monday afternoon, and she knows this. She’s trying to eliminate half the time I’m supposed to get with him. “It’s my time,” I say. “I won’t give up half of it.”

“They won’t let him play if he misses the first practice.”

I walk around the pickup with Dane’s bag, toss it into the back of the Lincoln. The quicker we leave, the less arguing there will be. “Then I’ll take him,” I say. “Just tell me when and where he’s supposed to be, and I’ll make sure he’s there.”

Her crooked grin mutates into a dangerous scowl, and for a moment I wonder if she is contemplating leaving, taking Dane, and I suppose that she is, that I can see in her eyes the calculation of the consequences.

“Never mind,” she says to me, then she kisses Dane on the top of his head. “If you don’t want him to play then why can’t you just tell him so? Why do you have to play these games?”

She’s heard what she wants to hear. This, too, is typical Jacqueline. There is no point in arguing with her over what was actually said. There is no point in trying to explain to her that I want him to play soccer if he wants to play soccer, that I can take him to soccer practice as easily as she can, that a few hours of soccer practice aren’t more important than four days with his father. There are many things I want to say to her, but every one of them would start her screaming. And they’re all things I can’t say in front of Dane.

#

The big Lincoln floats along the two-lane blacktop as we leave the city gloom behind. On both sides of the road, the trees are like walls, layer after layer of high wood walls. Dane is sitting across from me playing a video game on his new Play Station Portable. The PSP is a gift from me. I sent it to him before flying out. The game he’s playing is called Burnout, and the object is to run opposing players off the road. Weight, speed, and timing are critical. He moves the handheld device as if it’s a steering wheel, tilting it to the left when he wants to turn left, tilting it to the right when he wants to turn right. He throws a little hip action into it when he’s trying to slam another car off the road. He’s wearing earphones, singing, "We are the lazy generation, we are the lazy generation, we are the lazy generation," but I can still make out the metal on metal of the collisions over him lipping the soundtrack. I try not to stare. I want to pull the earrings from his ears. I want to wipe the blue from his hair. I want to hug him and kiss him and rock him to sleep.

We talk on the phone a handful of times every year. At least I try to make sure we do. How do you keep the attention of a three-year-old on the phone? Or a ten-year-old for that matter? It's hard, especially when cartoons are blaring from a TV in the background. That's not an excuse, although I realize it sounds like one. Sometimes Jacqueline would tell me to call back “He’s taking a bath,” or “He’s eating dinner,” or she'd just flat tell me that I couldn't talk to him. Most of the time when I called, the only person I got to talk to was her, not that you could call it talking. She likes to yell, scream really. She calls Dane her “little shit.” She calls me a “fucking deadbeat.” It doesn’t matter to her that I’ve paid my child support on time every month since the day the court hit me with paternity. When Dane and I were allowed to talk, I could only say certain things. She would listen in on the line and would only let me talk to him for a few minutes. That's no way to get to know your kid. But that's the reality I had to deal with.

We pass a mom and a dad, two kids, and a white dog in a Nissan Maxima. You can tell from the way Dad’s eyebrows are raised up and the way he’s looking into the rearview mirror that he’s yelling at the kids. They're twin boys, maybe a year or two younger than Dane. They're making faces at their father. One thumbs his nose back and sticks out his tongue and the other smashes his face together with the palms of his hands, then they both erupt with laughter. Mom covers her mouth and looks away from Dad and the boys.

I haven’t married. I could have married Jacqueline. She’d made it clear that that was what she wanted. Always asking me if I was seeing anyone. Always wanting to talk to me before putting Dane on the line. Always bringing up the night of the Halloween party. She never said that she wanted me. But she made sure she didn’t have to. I didn’t love her. Don’t love her. Can’t stand her. Sometimes I catch myself praying that she’ll be in an accident, killed. I know that isn’t right, but I can’t help it. All those years. She could have let me see Dane anytime she wanted. But she wouldn’t. Said the only way she would ever let me see him was if I moved to Portland. It took an Oregon judge to change her mind about that.

I glance back at Dane and discover he’s studying me. With a small hand, he pulls the earphones from his head and sets aside the PSP. “Mom says you’re rich.”

“Not really,” I say. “I have money, but I’m not rich.”

“She says you bought a big house and a new car. That you’re sort of famous.”

“Your mom says a lot of things.”

“I know!” he says with animated shoulders. “I just told her yesterday that she talks too much.”

“And what did she say?”

“Shut up you little pecker. She was just kidding around though. We do that. She calls me little this or little that and I call her big this or big that. It’s a game.”

Mt. Saint Helens looms ahead of us, as barren as the moon. I want to tell the quiet driver that there’s been a change in plans. To go to the airport. A thousand dollars and we could be in Egypt or Ireland staring up at the Abu Simbel Temple or touring Blarney Castle. I wonder how far I would have to fly to get Dane away from Jacqueline. Is there some island we can go to where we can catch everything that’s slipped by? Someplace where Dane already accepts me as his dad? He said it once, “Dad,” when he was getting the PSP out of his bag. “Thanks… Dad,” he said. But he’d stopped before the “Dad” and then he’d had to heave it out of his mouth like he was trying to speak German. I can think of no place we could go that would be far enough away from Jacqueline.

“Mom says that you do art. That you paint skulls.”

I pull the portfolio off the seat and tuck the corner of it up under my arm. I started painting when I was Dane’s age. Received an MFA from the University of Kansas State in studio art five years ago. My primary medium was graphite on paper, Oklahoma landscapes and detailed portraits. Not anymore.

“Yes, I paint skulls," I say. "But it’s not art.”

A year ago a friend brought me a skull and asked me to paint it. Roamer, his orange tabby, had died of Leukemia. Having chopped the dead cat’s head off, he’d taken it to an Osteological technician who’d cleaned the skull with Dermestid beetles, which eat all the tissue from the bones. Then he’d brought me the shiny white skull and a photo of Roamer. He asked me to paint the skull using the photo for inspiration. Disgusted by the thought, I declined. But my friend kept offering me more and more money until I did it. I was thinking about Dane. About how far a thousand dollars would go towards getting a visitation order. Not long after that, the skull of a poodle showed up at my door with another photo and another check for a thousand dollars. Now I’m the budding Dale Chihuly of skulls. Dogs and cats, lizards and snakes, horses and rabbits. Some pieces sell for several thousands of dollars.

Dane looks a little confused, and I can't blame him. After twenty-three years of painting, I know the skulls are bullshit art. That they're overly dramatic and lack originality. Hell, if you've seen one of them, you've seen them all. They're junk, though people buy them anyway. Soon, if I allow it, I'll be turning them out by the hundreds. I won't have to paint them anymore. Dozens of employees will take care of that for me. Then I can go back to my landscapes and portraits and hope that someday, I'll be forgiven by the art community. But how do you explain all of that to a ten-year-old?

I tell him that I’ll take him to soccer practice. That he won’t miss out. That he’ll get to spend time with me, and I’ll get to see him play. That I want to see him play. He says the coach wasn’t sure when they would start practice. He drags over his Dallas Cowboys duffel bag and rummages through it. With the tip of his tongue stuck out of his mouth and his head tilted to one side, he finds what he's looking for, a small black notebook. Opening it, he flips through the pages. Then he presses his index finger to a spot on the page.

"I have the coach's phone number right here," he says. "We can call him on Thursday night and see if he's decided about practice."

I nod in appreciation of Dane’s organizational skills, his intelligence. He has a small space between his front teeth, like his mom, which I hadn't noticed before. He would have lost his baby incisors when he was around seven-years-old and I wonder what he would have looked like missing his front teeth. There’s a thin scar on his upper left arm in the shape of an L, and I point at it, ask him how he got it.

“A lady backed into me with her car,” he says. “Riding my bike. Broke my arm.”

“When did that happen?”

He shrugs. “Last summer. It was no big deal.”

We both look out the window at the rolling green, at the things we cannot change.

#

The cabin is just outside of Seattle. Far enough away that I don’t have to worry about Jacqueline happening into the neighborhood but close enough to keep the court happy. I’ve only seen a website of the place until now. The cabin is all rough weathered logs and stone chimney. It reminds me of Home in the Woods by Thomas Cole and that’s why I picked it. Maybe it'll inspire me.

The driver hops out of the seat before the Lincoln has a chance to settle. He has my door open and is back at the trunk removing my single piece of luggage before I can say anything to stop him. It makes me wonder whether he's in a hurry or if he just thinks I'll try to stiff him out of a tip by opening my own door and unloading my own luggage.

Dane has his duffel bag slung on his back like a backpack, an arm shoved through each of the handles, and is hiking up a short incline to the front door of the cabin.

Outside the Lincoln, the sunlight seems to bounce off the leaves. It’s as if a dimmer switch for the sun has been turned full blast and the glare from all the light has made everything hazy. Looking up, I feel as if the tiny sky is collapsing onto me. There's no real sky, just a piece of it halloed by all the trees. Real and tall and unlike any thing I've ever seen, these trees with trunks as big as a compact car make the tallest of the Oklahoma Oaks look like small bushes.

I meet the driver at the trunk with a fat tip in my hand. The wind is evergreen and more billowy than gusty as if a crowd of blanket shakers has encircled us. The driver leans in and grabs my arm. "It'll be fine," he whispers, before snatching the tip. And I wonder how he can know.

Inside the place, Dane opens each of the doors looking to claim the best spot. There are hunting trophies mounted in each room and he yells them out to me as he discovers them: "a big fish the length of my baseball bat," "a zebra skin," "a giant brown bear." In the living room, African masks adorn the wall where you'd expect to find a TV and every piece of wood furniture is layered in quilts. The boy says he's taking the room with all the cool weapons on the walls and suggests that I take the room with the heads.

I make Dane take a shower (because that's what parents do) while I crash on the couch with the portfolio beside me and my single piece of luggage propping up my feet. I open the portfolio a sliver, consider flipping through the memories. But I decide to wait. The portfolio is for Dane, not me. The walls moan with the sound of running water and I close my eyes to listen, hoping I'll hear Dane's voice in the hum of the walls, but he doesn't sing.

After the shower, he sits across from me in a chair made of antlers. He's wrapped in a terry cloth towel. The PSP sits beside him. "Why didn't you want to see me?" he asks.

"I always wanted to see you. You know that."

"No," he says. His voice is calm, inquisitive. "If you really wanted to see me you would have moved out here."

"I'm sorry, son. But that's not true. You know she wouldn't have let me see you even if I had moved out here. That was just an excuse."

His face looks determined. Determined and stubborn, his powder blue hair is sticking all up in every direction. "No it wasn't. You could have come. You could have seen me."

He throws the PSP against the wall with enough force to knock half the African masks to the floor.

"You didn't want to see me," he reaffirms. He gets up and hard heel-toes his way into his rented room. The door slams.

Can't blame him. There's a contradiction to be resolved. Either it's like his mother says, I didn't want to see him, or it's like I say, I wanted to see him and his mother wouldn't let me. And neither answer will ever truly satisfy.

I pull the portfolio up to my chest. Inside there are dozens of images, the images that have made up the last ten years of my life: the house where I lived, the school where I attempted to perfect my art, the people that inspired me, the room that I set aside for Dane. Glued on the back of each sketch is a document, a document that has something to say about what happened. I dealt with each motion I filed for visitation, each of the court's denials, each of Jacqueline's letters (in every one, she gives me reasons why she won't let me see Dane) the only way I knew how. They are my proof. I brought them to show him.

Standing, I take off my coat, bury the portfolio in the bottom of my suitcase. At the door to Dane's room, I knock once and my head begins to pound. When I open the door, he's sitting on the queen bed looking up at a wall of spears, arrows, and slingshots. He has put on an Oregon Duck's jersey, and he's holding one of those five subject spiral notebooks in his lap. His Blue Jay eyes are bathing. For a moment, I can't move. Can only stare at him. Then I go and sit beside him.

He opens the notebook from the back. He flips through eleven or twelve blank pages and then every sheet is covered with his words. When he finds what he's looking for, he hands me the notebook. This page is covered with little drawings. Ten-year-old sketches of what painted skulls might look like.

"I know they're not very good," he says. But he's wrong. "Teach me?"

"Sure," I say, and then the Dallas Cowboys duffel bag rings. We both turn to look at the white starred bag on the floor. It rings again. We look at each other. "You going to get that?" I say.

Dane shakes his head. "I'll call her back," he says, looking up at me, waiting.

I flip to the first blank page.