tiny sailboat was following a safe path through the storm toward a patch of calmer water in a little harbor behind the lighthouse.
The painting was in a big cardboard box that had HARTZ MOUNTAIN printed on the side, atop a pile of typical flea market junk: Tupperware containers, old Merle Haggard eight-track tapes, a battered Scrabble board, and about a dozen pairs of roller skates.
As I made my way over to the cardboard box for a closer look, a bald-headed biker dude dressed in leather pants and a leather vest cut me off at the pass. Tattoos covered every epidermal cell from his wrists to his shoulders. He lifted the painting out of the pile and held it up to compare it with a tattoo of what looked to be the Blessed Virgin Mary that was spread across his right deltoid.
“Hey, Spike. Check this shit out, babe!” he yelled to his soul mate, also adorned in cowhide, who stood at the end of the table holding an Army-issue .45 automatic that she was examining as if she were a Marine drill sergeant. “She looks just like Sally Field in that TV show I loved when I was an altar boy. I must be having a goddamn senior moment. What was the name of that show?”
The woman with the gun glanced over at the painting. “The Flying Nun, and you are totally not even fucking close, Bart. You better start looking through this shit for a pair of bifocals.”
She released the breech on the pistol and turned her gaze to the old woman running the rummage booth. The old woman sat in an electric wheelchair, sucking hard on a Camel.
“How much for the gun?”
“Make you a deal. The pistol and the painting for your boyfriend for fifty bucks.”
“Just the gun,” Spike snarled.
“Forty-five bucks,” the woman told her.
“Sold.”
Bart dropped the painting back into the Hartz box, Spike paid for the .45 and tucked it in her belt, and they climbed onto their motorcycles and roared out of sight.
“So that painting is five bucks?” I said to the woman in the wheelchair.
“No, it’s ten bucks,” she said.
“But I just heard you offer it for five to that woman who bought the gun.”
“That’s right, Cowboy. I offered it to her as a package, you know, like when you get french fries with a cheeseburger, and it don’t cost more than a nickel or a dime more than the burger itself. That gun and that painting were a combo platter.”
“Well, ma’am, I can see an obvious connection between a cheeseburger and a plate of fries, but I’ll be damned if I can find a common thread between a .45 automatic and a religious piece of art.”
“Oh, so we are a big businessman now, are we? I’ll tell you what, Mr. Home on the Range meets Harvard Business School,” the old lady said, “give me six bucks for the damn thing, and I will throw in a pair of roller skates.”
“Tell you what. I will give you five bucks, and you keep the skates.”
“Deal.” The old lady mashed a steering button on the wheelchair arm and pivoted in place. “I’m telling you, with a belt buckle like you got cinched around your waist and the business head you’re hiding under that hat, you could be fucking president of these United States one day, sonny. I’ll get you some bubble wrap for your painting,” she said and wove her way through the obstacle course of hanging racks, cardboard boxes, and bargain hunters like an F-14 pilot, leaving her own vapor trail of cigarette smoke.
While I was waiting for her to return, I picked up my painting to get a closer look. As I was examining the picture, I felt a card glued to the back of the frame. I flipped it over and began to read.
The faded yellow card described the lady in the painting to be St. Barbara, the patron saint of those besieged by lightning. The short, handwritten description of her sainthood said that she had earned her title when her mean stepfather was struck dead by lightning after he had lopped off her head for some minor offense.
My painting of St. Barbara went home in a blanket of bubble wrap. Little did I know that she would lead me into a world where lighthouses not only still existed but still guided the lost souls loose on this earth.
My travels with Mr. Twain had taken me all the way from Heartache to the Alabama beach