Re: Quicklog: Marvel, Clem & Jake
[Comfortable back home was an old pair of jeans, some more of that damn plaid. Comfortable was made up of a bunch of parts that fit together like farm machinery, where you knew the parts that made up the whole and if one broke, you could figure out the replacing of it smart-quick. Jake figured broke was a way of thinking about the parts of him that didn't fit. Like maybe someplace between Vegas and Savannah, when he'd been small enough not to notice and no-one who knew the difference who wasn't gutted out by grief, he'd lost something real important. Clockwork, that didn't tick.
Jake thought he was comfortable in who he was, but Jake, he didn't have much of a baseline to jump from, and comfort was familiar, plain as Jake could see it. Familiar was dirt-ingrained habit, and habit was jeans and football games and the kind of girl who laughed like it was a secret. His face played out uncertainty like it was a movie theater screen: Jake fondly imagined he was as stoic, and untouchable as Graham - imagination sadly was its limits.]
I played plenty. [Cautiously, and with reservation. The games had been something real easy to talk over the potatoes at dinner. Pass the beans, talk a few plays over with granddaddy and the meal passed easy. Nothing about breaking his last stick of charcoal, nothing about late afternoons smoothing into evening with the art instructor over his shoulder. Football, nobody was anything that wasn't real neat that could be sketched out in a playbook. Every day was a sunny afternoon.] Everyone at school played. My granddaddy, he wanted me to go to college on a scholarship or something, I wasn't that good. [A shrug of shoulders gone skinny over long months in a car.
Art on a plate, that made him straighten, spine constricting with alarm. Art, his granddaddy had been clear, was a sissy occupation, but chefs, Jake knew from the kitchen that had seared a burn onto the back of his hand, were men. Real important men, who swaggered like football pros.] You think? [He liked the idea some, but art with food wasn't the same as color. Jake missed color worse than anything else in an art-supply store: the way it ranged from clear-cut jewel tones all the way through to the misty color of the sky soaked out before dawn. His smile broke through, tentative as sunshine.]
Nobody home much cared about art. Mostly said it was a waste of time. Food, that everybody cared about, I reckon.