It was my idea. Should have been Paul’s — hell, almost two decades before that it was his idea, going to Cobalt to paint the pit-heads — but lately he hadn’t been painting, hadn’t been out of his house to so much as look in so long, he was convinced he didn’t have any more ideas. “Bullshit,” I said to him, ignition keys jangling in my fingers, coaxing him outside. “You’re more of an artist than that.” “No,” he said. “And you’re not either.” But Paul didn’t have much will left to fight me, so he grumbled around the house looking for his old paint kit, the little green strongbox filled with the stuff he euphemistically called his Equipment. Then he climbed into the cab of my pickup, grunted, “Well come on, Picasso, let’s do it,” and we headed north. Just to see. There are other things to paint in Cobalt, after all: the black-and-umber tarpaper houses, built high on the rock with materials as likely stolen as they were bought; the roads wending dangerously through the lips of bedrock, like the untended streets of a medieval town; the grocery, built on top of an old mine shaft, a three-hundred-foot-deep root cellar where the owners dangle their overstock of meat and cheese against the improbable heat of high summer in northern Ontario.
What do You think about The Pit-Heads: Short Story?
