The Doorframe Chalk-Up

Every Jenkins Chalk-Up starts the same way. The jasmine on the porch of the Doll House Gallery cracks open, somebody spots it, and by nightfall two fools are standing at a doorframe with chalk in their hands, ready to make idiots of themselves in public.

I have lived here six years and I have never missed a round. I came to Jenkins at twenty-two for the custodial job at the Harlan Arts Annex, and I figured I'd stay a year, maybe two. Then I won my first Chalk-Up and something in my brain rewired itself. Now I'm twenty-eight and I have never lost. Twenty-eight, and my one claim to fame is chalk on a mortuary doorframe.

For those who don't know, the Annex used to be a funeral home back in the twenties. Scott Armstrong bought it twenty years ago and turned it into an art space, but he kept a lot of the old fixtures, including a little windowless room at the back where the previous owner used to grind harissa paste. Don't ask me why a mortuary needed harissa paste. Scott won't ask either. He just shrugs and says tradition. That's his answer for everything.

The Chalk-Up is his tradition. Every month from first bloom to last, whoever wants to compete shows up at the Annex, Scott picks two names out of a coffee can, and those two race to complete a chalk design on the back doorframe before midnight. Judges pick a winner. Loser buys the winner a meatloaf plate at the diner. That's it. That's the prize. A meatloaf plate worth maybe nine dollars, and grown adults fight over it like it's a car title.

I love it. I don't apologize for that.

This month I was still in my coveralls when Scott came out on the gallery porch at four in the afternoon and held up a sprig of jasmine like it was a championship trophy.

"Bloom's open," he said. "Sign-ups close at seven. Race starts at eight sharp."

There were six of us in the can this time. Meghan Tran, who teaches ceramics and never actually competes but signs up anyway so she can gossip about whoever wins, got drawn and then immediately withdrew, which is her move every single month. She winked at me when she did it. She always winks at me. I've never figured out what the wink means and I've stopped trying.

The other name out of the can was Ada Harding.

Now. Ada.

Ada works at the Mountain Laurel Inn folding the little welcome notes they leave on hotel pillows. She's thirty-one, came back to Jenkins five years ago to take care of her mother, and she has finished second to me in four straight Chalk-Ups. Four. She has never once congratulated me. She has never once bought the meatloaf with good grace. Last month she threw her chalk at the porch railing hard enough that it busted in half, and Scott made her pick up both halves.

When she came out of the sign-up line she was still in her hotel uniform, the navy vest with the little brass pin and everything. Her hair was coming loose from its clip and she had chalk dust on her sleeve already, which I still don't understand, because the race hadn't started.

"Evening, Lloyd," she said, and smirked at me.

"Evening, Ada."

"Enjoy your streak while it lasts."

"I plan to. Enjoy folding notes while it lasts."

That's the general tone of our relationship. Real neighborly.

Scott read the rules off his clipboard like he does every month. One design, one doorframe, chalk only, no stencils, no rulers, no helpers. Finish or forfeit at midnight. And the special rule this month, because Scott gets bored: the design had to start in the mortar room and work its way out onto the frame. The mortar room is that little harissa alcove at the back, barely bigger than a closet, with the blackened grinding bowls on a shelf and a tin of steamship stove matches on the same shelf. No electric light in there. You draw by matchlight.

"Matchlight?" Ada said. "That's a joke, right?"

"It's tradition," Scott said. See what I mean?

So at eight o'clock we lined up, me in my coveralls and Ada in her hotel vest, and Scott struck the first match and we went.

I'll tell you what surprised me. Ada was fast in that little room. Faster than I expected. She'd blocked out her whole design in about ten minutes by the light of three matches, some kind of climbing vine thing that wrapped around the mortar shelf and coiled out toward the doorframe. My own design was a pattern of laurel leaves, because I'm from here and I lack imagination, and I was keeping pace but not pulling ahead the way I usually do by the halfway mark.

"You're slowing down, Davenport," she said around match number five. She talked with the match held up in one hand, chalk in the other, which should have been impossible and wasn't.

"Saving my arm."

"Sure you are."

"Four straight times, Harding. I know what I'm doing."

"And I know what I'm doing this month." She struck a fresh match off the tin and the little room lit up orange. Her face was all chalk dust and shadows and she was grinning, actually grinning, like this was the best night she'd had in years. It probably was. Four second places will do that to a person.

We were neck and neck coming out onto the doorframe proper. Her vine had reached the hinge side. My laurels had reached the latch side. Somewhere behind us Meghan was narrating the race to the small crowd in the hushed, reverent tones of a golf announcer, and Scott was pretending he wasn't enjoying it and fooling nobody.

Then I reached up for the top of the frame, stretched on my toes, and I heard it.

A crack. Then a bigger crack. Then a sound like somebody had tipped a whole pantry over behind us.

I turned around just in time to watch the mortar room shelf let go. The whole thing. The brackets had been holding twenty years of blackened grinding bowls and worn pestles and about forty tins of old pigment, and they quit. The shelf came off the wall, the bowls came off the shelf, and a stack of plaster casts that had been leaning in the corner for God knows how long went over with them, right across the doorway of the little room.

The door was blocked. Not partially. Completely. Tins of pigment and broken plaster from floor to about chest height, wedged tight, and behind all of it, in the dark, our match tin was buried somewhere under the mess.

The room went black.

"Ada," I said.

"I'm here." Her voice came from about two feet away. "Was that the shelf?"

"That was the shelf."

"Great." I could hear her breathing. Then I heard her laugh, one short bark of it. "Well. I guess the race is on hold."

"That's one word for it."

I felt around the wall until my hand found her sleeve. She didn't pull away. Somewhere out in the gallery, Meghan's voice had gone quiet, and I could hear Scott saying something calm and official about nobody panicking.

My phone was in my coveralls pocket. I knew that much. The problem was the coveralls were chalk dust and the pocket had a broken zipper and my hands were shaking in the dark, so I spent a solid minute patting myself the way a man searches for his keys at a funeral. Ada was doing the same thing on her side, except quieter and with more swearing.

"I had my phone in my tote," she said. "Which is out there. With Meghan. Under, I assume, a shelf."

"Mine's here somewhere. I can feel the case."

"You can feel the case."

"I can. I just can't feel the phone."

Then her hand hit the shelf. Not the fallen one, the little wall shelf above where the tin used to sit, the one that held the stray matches Scott always left for tradition's sake. I heard her fingers walk along it and then I heard the tin scrape.

"Oh thank God," she said. "The steamship matches."

The whole tin of them, the old antique ones with the fat heads. She struck one against the side of the tin and the room came back. Orange light, jumping all over the place, and the shadows of the grinding bowls lying on the floor looked like a row of broken skulls. The match was so big it threw more light than you'd expect. It also burned fast. She lit a second one off the first and stuck both upright in a puddle of old wax on the shelf that some competitor years back had left for exactly this purpose, which told me somebody had gotten stuck in this room before and I'd never heard about it.

"Scott knows we're in here," I said. "He'll dig us out."

"In twenty minutes maybe. After he stops enjoying it."

She had a point. I looked at the pile blocking the door. Tins of pigment, some of them half full and probably still good, which is a crime in itself, and broken plaster casts, and one grinding bowl the size of a dinner plate wedged in there like a keystone. That was not a twenty minute dig. That was a forty minute dig, minimum, and the match tin held maybe fifteen good matches.