Where the West Begins

Abstract

Where the West Begins Bradley Bazzle (bio) Jacob gripped the charcoal like a tool, not like a pencil. He drew in confident, unbroken lines. He kept his eyes off his drawing and on the model, a seated man. The shape of the man’s body was unusual, long and thin but paunched, like a cat held up by its forelegs, and with the same sherbet-colored hair as certain cats. Jacob had recognized the man right away, from a sculpture class he’d taken, but he doubted the man recognized him. He was taller now. His jaw was darkened by hair he had to shave every other day, to keep the skin smooth the way he liked. He was seventeen. The man’s small, squinty eyes kept fluttering closed, and his body began to look as though it had been punctured and was deflating. Jacob didn’t want to embarrass the man, but there was his drawing to consider. Next time the teacher visited his easel he planned to suggest to her, discreetly, that they take an unscheduled break. If the break was short, he could keep working; he wouldn’t have to worry about who to talk to, or how to escape the room unnoticed, or where on the deserted college campus to wander. In addition to Jacob, there were four other students, two boys and two girls, all of them rising seniors who had to take the class as a prereq for AP Art. Jacob was the only student from his own school, which was the ritziest in Forth Worth. The other two boys went to a Catholic school. One, Bobby Ray, had a muscular body that made a striking contrast with his smooth round face. His name could be seen on billboards throughout the Metroplex, since he shared it with his father, who owned car dealerships. Bobby Ray spent breaks smoking cigarettes in a car with the other Catholic-school boy, Kyle, who had acne and wore his pants so low that he had to wear suspenders beneath his oversized T-shirts. As for the girls, Nina seemed friendly but was intimidatingly stylish. She had purple streaks in her hair and a nose ring, and oddly shaped blouses that she may have sewn herself, with patches of a lacy material that showed the tan flesh of her sides and back. Nina spent breaks chatting with the teacher as though the two were old friends, and sometimes they were joined by the second girl, Clarissa. Clarissa had long blond hair that, combined with her equanimity, made Jacob think of hippies in old movies. She was thin and wore flip-flops that emphasized her spidery pale toes. Of all the other students, Clarissa was the one Jacob could imagine befriending. She had the same car as his, a navy blue Ford Explorer, which might provide an ice-breaker if they found themselves in the parking lot at the same time. Nice [End Page 114] car, he might joke. But what if she was embarrassed by the car? Jacob was embarrassed. Recently, the boy behind the counter at the yogurt shop had asked Jacob, “Did your dad buy that for you?” Driving home, Jacob had formulated a lie (“He helped me with it, yeah”), but in that moment all he could say was yes, yes he did, then pay with his father’s money for his cone of frozen yogurt. Now he fantasized about getting a job at the same yogurt shop and making friends with the boy while pretending, with dignity, that the boy hadn’t made the comment about his car. But Jacob already had a job. He was getting paid ten dollars an hour to scan every file at his father’s company and save the scanned files onto a computer. There was mention of a lawsuit, but the real reason for the job, Jacob’s father insisted, was to enter the digital age. Soon there would be no more paper files, no more file-cabinets, no more rooms full of banker boxes. Imagine all that space! But Jacob didn’t care about the digital age. The rote unstapling, scanning, and restapling made him feel as...