Just building it internally.
She knew what belonged there.
Sky walked toward Jimmy.
“The back wall.”
Jimmy looked up.
“I want to paint a full mural.”
“That’s a large request from someone who’s been here four days.”
“I know.”
Sky did not circle the subject.
“But it’s the right wall.”
“I know what it needs.”
“And I’m asking anyway because Luther would’ve asked.”
Jimmy studied her.
“What is it going to be?”
Sky gave him only the broad shape.
She did not explain paintings before making them.
Luther taught her that.
You do not explain the painting.
You paint it.
The chapter.
The road.
The people.
The history of Garland’s made visible on the wall everyone looked at every day.
Luther at the center.
Sky herself just behind him.
Jimmy stared.
“You’re putting yourself on our wall.”
“I’m putting Luther on your wall.”
She looked toward the empty space.
“I’m just behind him.”
“Where I’ve always been.”
Jimmy stared at her for a long time.
Then at the wall.
Gregory walked in from the parking lot.
He took one look at them and immediately understood that something had shifted.
“She wants the back wall,” Jimmy said.
Gregory looked at the wall.
Then Sky.
“What are you waiting for?”
She began that afternoon.
The first day, Sky worked until she could barely focus her eyes.
At eight in the evening, Patrice arrived without being asked.
She ordered Sky to eat.
Sky ate standing up while mixing paint.
On the second day, men began arriving at Garland’s despite having no business there.
Word had spread.
Someone had told someone.
That person had called someone else.
People came inside, watched twenty minutes of Sky’s work, then called others.
By noon, eight extra people sat on toolboxes or leaned against motorcycles watching.
Sky did not perform for them.
That was what everyone noticed.
She did not show off.
She did not change her movements because someone watched.
She simply worked with the full-body concentration of someone who had finally located exactly what she was supposed to be doing.
The mural emerged over three days.
Not one figure at a time.
Sky built across the entire wall simultaneously.
Layer after layer.
The way reality itself works.
Nothing fully complete until everything is complete.
Road first.
Then sky.
The atmospheric kind.
Strand stood looking at the gradation for five minutes.
“How do you do that without making it look like paint samples?”
“Temperature,” Sky said.
Strand nodded as though he understood.
He did not.
Both of them knew it.
Then came the motorcycles.
Then the riders.
The chapter.
Not literal portraits.
Something more accurate than literal portraits.
Every man in the building could look toward the wall and somehow find himself inside it.
Not his exact face.
His place.
His character.
The thing someone sees when they understand what a group is rather than merely what it looks like.
On the third morning, Jimmy arrived at seven before most of the others.
He walked into the garage.
Then stopped.