The Burnt Orange Heresy

There were torrents of it, and I could hardly see to drive. Berenice, because of her suit, had to roll up her window, but it was too hot for me to roll up mine. My left shoulder and arm got soaked, but with the humidity I would have been just as wet inside the car with the window rolled up. The rain finally came down so hard I had to pull over to the curb in Lake Worth to wait for a letup.

Berenice was frowning. "How much," she asked, "does a baby whale weigh when it's first born?"

"One ton. And it's fourteen feet long." I lit a cigarette and passed it to Berenice. She shook her head and handed it back. I took a long drag. "One ton," I said solemnly, "is two thousand pounds."

"I know how much a ton is!" she said angrily. "You- you-you damned intellectual, you!"

I couldn't contain myself. I had to laugh and ruin my joke.

I could have taken State Road Seven straight away by picking it up west of West Palm Beach, but because the old two-lane highway was used primarily by truck traffic barreling for Miami's back door, into Hialeah, I stayed on U.S. 1 all the way to Boynton Beach before searching for a through road to make the cutover. I got lost for a few minutes and made several aimless circles where new blacktops had been crushed down for a subdivision called inappropriately Ocean Pine Terraces (miles from the ocean, no pines, no terraces), but when I finally reached the state highway, it was freshly paved, and the truck traffic wasn't nearly as bad as I had expected.

The rain, mercifully, had stopped.

My crude map was clear enough, but I had zipped past Debierue's turnoff to the Dixie Drive-in Movie Theater before I realized it. The mixed dirt-and-gravel private road leading to Debierue's home-and-studio was clearly visible from the highway, and on the right of the highway about three hundred yards before the drive-in entrance, but I had failed to notice it. I made a crimped circle in the deserted drive-in entrance and this time, from the other side of the highway, it was easy to spot the break.

Thick gama grass had reclaimed the deep wheel ruts of the road, and I crawled along in first gear. The bumpy, rarely used trail straight-lined through a stand of secondgrowth slash pine for about a half mile and then made a sigmoid loop to circumvent two stinking stagnant ponds of black swamp water. On the right of the road, abandoned chicken runs stretched into the jungly mass of greenery, and weeds had grown straight and tall along the sagging chicken-wire fences. The unpainted wooden chickenhouses had weathered to an unpatterned dirty gray, and most of the roofs had caved in. The narrow road petered out at an open peeled-pine gate. I eased into the fenced area, with its untended, thickly grassed yard, which resembled a huge, brown bathmat, and pulled up in front of the screened porch of the house.

Paradoxically, I was awed by my first sight of the old painter. I switched off the engine, and as it ticked heatedly away, I sat and stared. I say "paradoxically" because Debierue in person was anything but awe inspiring.

He resembled any one of a thousand, no literally tens of thousands, of those tanned Florida retirees one sees on bridges fishing, on golf courses tottering, and on the shuffleboard courts of rest homes and public parks shuffling. He even wore the uniform. Green-billed khaki baseball cap, white denim Bermuda shorts, low-cut Zayre tennis shoes in pale blue canvas, and the standard white open-necked "polo" shirt with short sleeves. The inevitable tiny green alligator was embroidered over the left pocket of the shirt, an emblem so common in Florida that any Miami Beach comedian could get a laugh by saying, "They caught an alligator in the Glades the other day, and he was wearing a shirt with a little man sewn over the pocket . . ."

But unlike those other thousands of old men who had retired to Florida in anticipation of a warm death, men who had earned their dubious retirement by running shoe stores, managing light-bulb plants in Amarillo, manufac turing condoms in Newark, hustling as harried sales managers in the ten western states, Debierue had served, and was still serving, the strictest master of them all-the selfdiscipline of the artist.

Debierue, apparently unperturbed by the arrival of a strange, beat-up convertible in his yard, sat limberly erect in a green-webbed, aluminum patio chair beside the porch door, soaking up late afternoon sun. I was pleased to see that he was allowing his white beard to grow again (for several years he had been clean shaven), but it was not as long and Melvillean as it had been in photos of the old artist taken in the twenties.