Woodrow believed that for art to have any everlasting value it must be challenging and unsettling and take time to absorb; for this reason he believed Moby Dick to be perhaps one of the greatest novels ever written and Edward Hopper the most masterful storyteller with oil on canvas ever. Woodrow found Hopper’s desolately real urban and country settings, his painful attention to detail, to the hidden anguish and the dead vacant stares in the eyes of the occupants of his paintings, to be something almost heartbreaking to consume, whether in a gallery or museum or between the glossy pages of a coffee table art book.
When Woodrow first conceived The Poet and the Pistolero over coffee one fog-encased morning at a sidewalk snack shop in Venice Beach, an Edward Hopper image instantly came to mind. He would approach the painting as a European Romanticism window scene but with a twist: along with the outer view into the inner psychological scrutiny of the subject in the foreground, perhaps a young woman with a soft woolly head of hair in a drab gingham dress on a beige carpeted floor, the background action through the window just over her shoulder, with luminous shadows that reflected yellow light, would be the actual story he was telling with his artist’s brush. That’s where the drama with the poet and the pistolero would be playing out. He also noted to give the girl on the carpet a book or a magazine to apathetically leaf through while horrors are happening outside her window; with that notion he knew he had seized upon one of the key themes he wished to convey in the girl’s face, that look of reserved ennui as important events happen behind your back.
Woodrow always sketched in charcoal before committing brush to canvas. Over the course of two weeks he feverishly rendered hundreds of samples of the girl’s face, the room and the small bed in the corner with the white stone pitcher of water on the bland wood nightstand, and then the complicated segments, the violent, flame-fueled apocalypse occurring outside of her frame of reference. By the time he wore twenty charcoal pencils down to the nub Woodrow intuitvely knew that the European Romaticism window scene was not the method to convey his drama. He lamentably returned his sketch pad to the top right desk drawer and determined to meditate on this momentary detour in bringing his tale to life.
The idea came to him one night while listening to NPR and drinking an affordable bottle of Pinot Grigio from Trader Joes. Gone was the woolly-haired girl on the beige carpet. He would reverse the window scene, as Hopper had done in New Haven and Hartford and many other paintings, and reveal the outer view from an unknown interior perspective. The eyes of an unseen stranger cast upon the carnage.
It was time to open the tubes of paint.
The brush couldn’t convey the paint to the canvas with enough haste and fury. Woodrow captured a fleeting glimpse of a railroad landscape as seen through a train window, introducing movement in the work. There was a track in the foreground that ran parallel at the bottom edge of the painting. The central figure was a tall man walking along the railroad tracks in his bare feet. He wore a slate gray suit that was shredded at the shoulder pads and thin whisps of smoke hissed from blood-soaked bullet holes in his white shirt, visible as the wind flapped the hem of his coat in a heavy breeze, evidenced further by the fine granular sand blowing around his naked feet. His eyes are cloaked behind dark glasses, symbolizing the hidden inner life that can only be hinted at in brushtrokes. Woodrow sometimes grieved that he had no talent for writing.
A railroad track in a desert in Mexico. No one peering upon the painting would ever know that Woodrow gave the man a name and a backstory. He chose the name Trace and discovered in his dog-eared dictionary that it served his subject well: a surviving mark, sign, or evidence of the existence of something that has long passed. A trace element. A bullet-riddled man in a combat-scarred suit walking barefoot along a railroad track in the Mexican desert. In one hand he clutches a book. A garish red cover and in black script the words COLLECTED POEMS can be discerned.
Trace, Woodrow’s fantasy informed him, was a writer from L.A. who met a young, exuberant Hispanic poetess in a coffee shop in Los Feliz. God, she was beautiful, with eyes as dark and mysterious as Trace’s own tainted soul. They became romantically involved and when the young woman — Woodrow named her Yolanda — was compelled to return to Mexico on suspicious “urgent family business”, Trace doggedly pursued her across the border, learning to his horror that she was being married off to a low-level gangster to satisfy her father’s extravagant gambling debts.
On Woodrow’s canvas, at Trace’s feet, her dark knees sinking in the sand, is Yolanda. The veil of her white wedding dress hovers behind her in the wind like a white flag of surrender. Her olive-skinned cheeks are wet with tears and she is pleading with him to go no further. On the other side of the railroad tracks there is a roadside taco stand and behind the taco stand bright magenta flames are dancing in the azure blue sky. A careful observer of the moment would note the vague outline of a handgun in Trace’s waistband.
In the upper right hand corner of the canvas is a car engulfed in flames, a silver ‘57 Chevy Bel-Air, the driver hanging out the open door in deathly repose, mouth agape, frozen in mid-scream, a neat crimson bullet wound in his broad forehead.
“It’s violent and it’s surreal,” the gallery owner said with a thin smile when Woodrow presented the paining for exhibition. “And it tells a story, doesn’t it?”
“I guess so.” Woodrow stuffed his hands in his pockets and scuffed the soles of his tennis shoes on the hardwood floor, eyes warily cast downward. He was uncomfortable discussing or analyzing his work.
“Don’t worry, kid.” The rotund man clapped a hand on Woodrow’s thin shoulder. “It spins a good yarn with spare details, just like a Hopper painting. Isn’t that what you were aiming for? Looks like it to me. Listen, people love a good tale in this town in any form they can get it, it’s the whole creative inspiration thing, you see, movie people and all that, always looking for the next great idea, whether they get it from a painting they can stare at for hours or a late night lap dance at one of those strip clubs out by LAX. Not that I’ve ever been but that’s another discussion. Empirical knowledge. I’ve got a lot of it. But like I said, don’t worry. This beauty’ll get your rent paid next month. It’s good. It’s garish in its own poetic way. That’s what you were shooting at, right?”
“I wasn’t shooting at anything,” Woodrow mumbled. “I was just trying to tell a story.”
The old man hitched his pants over his bulging waistline and snorted. He stood on the porch, proudly surveying his freshly-spruced front lawn.
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Trace Remixed | Tagged: Carver's Dog, flash fiction, Raymond Carver, short fiction, The Trace Stories, Writers, Writing | 
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Posted by Rodger Jacobs
Butch occupied a table in a corner, far away from the jukebox and wrapped in shadows. He liked darkness and shadows. They were his friends and had never failed him. His eyes were fixed on the girl at the next table: Stella Bismark, an aging, busty beauty who claimed the unique title of One-Armed Stripper. Well, unique for a dump like this, a third-rate strip club on Lankershim Boulevard, but a freak show anywhere else, Butch thought.
