THE FLATBED TRUCK TURNED onto Main Street and bumped across the bricked street, the bricks shifting and odd like rows of teeth. The flatbed was covered in a shapeless heap of scrap metal and aluminum poles and rebar and toolboxes, lines of rope pulled tight across the heap like some rugged web and heads turned with the clatters and clangs and Colburn nodded in reply to their curiosity. At the end of Main Street there stood an antebellum home and a sign in the yard read TOWN HALL. Colburn parked the truck. Killed the engine and smoked another cigarette. He asked himself again if this was really what he wanted to do.
Colburn called himself an industrial sculptor when he tried to explain it to the woman at town hall. He showed her the newspaper article from the Jackson Daily News about Red Bluff giving away abandoned downtown storefronts to artists and musicians and writers, to be used as studios or workspaces. The only stipulations being you had to keep residence in town and keep the buildings maintained. When she didn’t take it from his hand he shook it at her, as if to prove why he was here but she only shrugged and said it’s all true. If you say you’re an artist then I guess you’re an artist. She walked him down to the building without any more questions, her lips pressed tightly together as if knowing she was on the wrong end of a bad deal. She unlocked the door and waved her hand around at the empty space and then she had him sign a piece of paper and she gave him the keys.
“Is that it?” he asked.
“I suppose,” she said. “We got no precedent. You’re the only one that’s bothered to show up.”
He spent his first days driving the flatbed truck around the countryside, searching for forgotten machinery or vinecovered cars sunk back into the land. He pulled into driveways as heads looked around curtains and then he knocked on doors and asked for hubcaps leaned against trees or rusted cars sitting on blocks with wildflowers growing up through their open hoods. Sunworn men looked at him with thoughtless stares as barefoot children peeked out from behind trees or studied what he had already accumulated on the flatbed. The men would shake their heads and say I need this or I need that when he pointed toward truck doors attached to no truck or radiators wrapped in white blossoms or boats with rusted bottoms that were long since incapable of flotation. Colburn’s cause was helped when wives wearing aprons around their waists stood in doorways with their hands on their hips and sometimes stomped a foot. Sometimes cleared a throat. It was then that men would nod and say fine. You can take it but one day I’ll wish you hadn’t. The random pieces and parts more than metal and iron. More than surfaces of rust and grime. To the men they were memories of better days gone by or suggestions of the possibilities of futures they were now certain would never come. He hauled away their pasts and their hopes, strapped into the back of the truck.
Colburn worked in the broad front room and slept on a cot in a smaller room with a door that opened into an alley. He had a sink and a toilet and his clothes were piled in laundry baskets. He ate lunch at the café a block away but it was not open in the evening and the garbage bin in the alley was filled with plastic food wrappers and bottles from whatever he felt like eating from the gas station.
The front of his building was a large window and he liked working with the honest light of day and he liked them stopping with shopping bags in their arms or cigarettes in the side of their mouths or holding their children and watching him through the window. The sparks in a storm of red and orange as he cut through castiron pipes or smoothed the jagged edges of sheet metal. The blue smoke surrounding him like a cape and he would stop to look at them from behind his giant, rectangle welding mask, this creator of fire and smoke who was sweatsoaked and alien and he would wave a gloved hand but they would not wave back and instead took his kindly gesture as a sign to turn and leave.
But Celia did not leave when he noticed her there. Standing alone on a late afternoon and a southern breeze pushing her red curls across her face. One hand propped on her hip and the other hand touching the window with her fingertips. A tall and twisted roll of rebar serving as the centerpiece for his new creation and cut strips of barbed wire hanging from steel pipes that sprang from the top of the rebar like reaches of steel growth. The reek of smoke and Colburn with his shirt off and bathed in sweat and he set the blowtorch aside. Took off the welder’s mask. Picked up his shirt and wiped his face and scrubbed at his long hair that was matted against his head. He stepped back from the sculpture and took a pack of cigarettes from the top of a stool. He smoked and looked upon the evolution of his creation and thought it might be some type of tree in a treeless world or perhaps a thing that children imagined to be hiding in closets.
He sat down on the stool and looked over to the window. Her hair across her eyes and jeans with rips at the knees and bare feet. He waved and she moved her hand from the window. Kept the other hand on her hip and took several steps along the sidewalk as she raised her index finger and beckoned him to follow her.
And he did. He hurried to put his shirt on and he hurried out of the building and she walked half a block ahead, pausing at each corner to make sure he saw the direction she was going. He followed her through the downtown streets and noticed one of her back pockets was torn away and the bottoms of her feet were brown and she stopped when she came to the bar. A long and squat cinderblock building that may have been mistaken for an ill-fated attempt at a bomb shelter except for the halfmoon and scattering of stars that was painted along the side. She went in the front door, looking over her shoulder one last time to see if he was still there. When Colburn walked inside it took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust from light to shadow and once they came clear, he found her nestled behind the bartop, sitting on top of the beer cooler with her knees pulled up and sticking through the rips in her jeans. A bottle of beer for her and one for him already on the bar. A silver Zippo stacked on top of a pack of cigarettes placed between the bottles. Come on over here, she said.