Mr. Bones Read Online Free PDF Page A

eager, excited by the danger, by being so close to the fires that scorched his paintings, the dazzle of the knife blades, the clubs that smashed the pots. They were like the panting people who chased fire engines or joined window-breaking mobs or wrote letters to serial killers, falling in love with them, marrying them on death row. The women were perhaps destructive themselves and had lived by ruining other people—but not on this scale. The ingenuity of Minor Watt shredding his paintings, smashing his porcelain, crushing the decorated skulls, microwaving his majolica, roasting his Polynesian clubs in his fireplace, had not occurred to them—they didn’t own any works of art. He avoided these women. What did they know?
    And at the parties he attended he was treated as notorious. Stab a Stella and people flee—or hang around, transfixed. He stopped going to parties. “Charisma vampires,” he said; they sapped his energy.
    What alarmed the art world was that Minor Watt had the means to replace these works. When he showed up at auctions the other bidders glared at him, and when he was successful gloom descended on the salesroom, for it was known that the piece he’d bought—painting, book, pot, sculpture, dueling pistol, helmet, whatever—would be shattered to bits. And if it happened to be a rare South Indian bronze, it would be blowtorched into a sorry lump of unrecognizable metal. Ownership to Minor Watt meant oblivion.
    Some works cried out to be destroyed. Certain statues, certain paintings, the carvings that collectors referred to as “exquisite.” They seemed defiant, and not just the delicate ones but the robust images too. The broad black strokes in a wall-sized Rothko seemed to stare at Minor Watt and say, “Kick me.”
    Had these artworks been people, he would have been arrested, convicted of murder, and imprisoned. But what he did was regarded by most people who knew of it as worse than murder. Yet he was almost delirious in his innocence, free to slash paintings and shatter gold Mayan ornaments and all the rest, because the objects belonged to him.
    Furious people visited him to vent their feelings. Even a policeman: “Your neighbors are complaining . . . smoke . . . noise.” He laughed: what noise? Even stepped on, a Meissen shepherdess made less noise than someone chewing corn flakes. “Your neighbors said they heard gunshots.”
    â€œYes. I blew holes in a Jasper Johns. It seemed created to be shot at. Then I burned it. I have a permit to carry a gun.”
    â€œI’ll need to write it up. It was a painting?”
    â€œIt was a target.”
    The sound of the gunshots had rippled through him and swelled him with a sense of power. He felt bigger, stronger, more visible; his name was on people’s lips. He was better known, more famous, as a destroyer of art than he’d ever been as a collector. And that was another motivator, the conceits of the other collectors, the presumption, the calculation. He laughed when one of them said, “A piece just like that sold at auction for a million-two.” In the past they had ignored him, taken him for a philistine. What philistine? His eye was unerring in choosing the greatest works to destroy—the best went first, then the lesser works. In this way he proved that he had taste. Had he been a philistine, he would not have discriminated. But he was a connoisseur, and he brought all his connoisseurship to his destruction.
    Some dealers—not many—avoided him. Some auction houses tried publicly to bar him from sales. But because of the money he was willing to pay, in a period when business had never been worse, he was discreetly welcome, usually after hours, in the galleries and studios. And he was willing to pay more than anyone else. He didn’t haggle. If he saw a thing he liked, he bought it without hesitating.
    He grew to love the twitch of greedy anticipation in