I develop film at the CVS on St. Petersburg Beach. You learn a lot about people that way. It’s how I learned about Michael Miller.
I was a police officer back in Brooklyn — six years in Clinton Hill and Prospect Heights — so I figure this job’s only temporary, until I get back on my feet. The truth is I needed something in a hurry and I’d developed film before at Kings Plaza before I entered the academy. It’ll do for now, at least until something opens up with the Pinellas County Sheriff, or maybe the St. Pete P.D. I got my feelers out.
I left New York and came down here about a year ago with my girlfriend. I needed to get away from the stress, the intensity. Out of the cold. We made the decision on the F platform at West Fourth Street in the middle of February. Three below. She’s gone now, back up north with somebody new — another cop, I think — and maybe the lesson to be learned from the whole sorry mess is this: never make a life-altering decision on an F platform when it’s three degrees below zero.
When I was managing the One Hour Photo at Kings Plaza, we’d do 300 rolls a day on average. It was the heyday of 35-millimeter film and reprints and enlargements on the big Noritsu processors, and we were cooking from the time we opened until we shut the machines down.
But it’s the late ’90s now, and film is fading like the old century into the new. Down here, we’re lucky if we process sixty rolls on a good day. All pretty easy. You don’t make much money developing film, but like I said, it’ll do.
As you might imagine, we get tons of vacation photographs down here: endless waves of ill-exposed shots of the sweaty, lobster-skinned snowbirds who flock to the dozens of condos and hotels on St. Pete Beach — the concrete boxes, one after another, that line Gulf Boulevard like crooked teeth on sandy gums. Vacation photos generally fall into four categories: the beach; the Central Florida attractions (Disney and Universal, Busch Gardens in Tampa, maybe the Florida Aquarium or one of the local sports teams); dinner; and the hotel room. Over and over and over. There may be seven million stories in the naked city, but down here there are just those four — repeated thousands of times each season.
We also get a small amount of film from the local residents of St. Pete Beach. A mixture of retirees and refugees, that’s the best way to describe them. Aging pensioners and errant souls flushed down the great interstates from Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana. All seeking a new life. All running from something. My uncle, who’d been NYPD but is now an insurance investigator outside of Chicago, calls I-95 and I-75 “the sewer pipes of the Northeast and Midwest.” I remind him that I’m down here, and he says “Exactly.”
***
Michael Miller is a local kid, small and frail and good-natured, but not the sharpest Crayola in the box. He always shows up for work, though, and he’s never late, which in a beach town is saying something. He works the evening shift with me most nights, and I’m teaching him the ropes.
The drug and grocery sections of the CVS close at nine. After closing, we shut down the processors, zero-out the register, clean up — it’s usually nine-thirty before we get out. Sometimes after work, I ask him “You got time for a beer?” and he usually does, so we grab a six-pack from the Publix next door and walk across Gulf Boulevard to the municipal access lot, then over the wooden walkway and onto the beach. Michael and I, we sit in the sand and stare out at the darkness, occasionally watching the lights of some great ship as it makes its way up the Gulf of Mexico to Mobile, or New Orleans, or some other meaningful port of call.
Tonight I ask Michael: “You ever been to New Orleans?”
“N’Orleans?” he says, in his screechy cracker drawl, “Naw. I ain’t never been anywhere since we moved here when I was a kid. Since as long as I can remember, anyway. You?”
“Just New York, really, before here.”
“Well, at least you been somewhere. Hell, I only been to Orlando twice — an’ both times just for the day.” He takes a final swig of the Budweiser he’s drinking and digs the empty can into the sand. He stares into the dark water and furrows his brow.
“Sometimes I just wanna take off,” he says. “Leave it all behind: the sand, the salt, the pitchers. Just pack up my car and take off up 75. To somewhere like N’Orleans.”
“You’d need a car first,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “That’s one of the things that keeps me here.”
Michael’s family is from Ohio originally, near the West Virginia border. His father was long gone by the time he can remember, so now it’s just Michael and his mom and his two sisters: Clara, fifteen or sixteen, and Mae, who is, I think, twelve. “My mom says I’m the man a’ the family now,” he tells me.
Michael often talks about his plans to save for a car so that he can leave, and I find it funny since I just arrived, came here by choice, me and Angela. But Michael, he wants a car, and he wants out — I guess it’s not much of a beachside getaway for some. And not just any car, mind you, but one that’s “bitchin’,” he says, maybe a souped-up Charger or a chrome-plated SS or something. He goes on about it almost every night we’re out here, sitting in the sand, looking at the dark. Then after a beer or two I pick up the rest of the six-pack and we get into my ’87 Chevette and I drive Michael home, to a two-bedroom apartment he shares with his family above the garage of an old beach house.
Tonight as I’m dropping him off, I notice there’s a Harley on the side of his house, a huge black and chrome masterpiece parked very carefully under the old wooden stairway that leads up to Michael’s apartment. Bitchin’, I think.
“You in tomorrow?” Michael asks as he opens the door to the Chevette and steps out.
“Four o’clock,” I say.
He smiles, crooked and toothy, then gives me a thumbs-up sign and says, “Well, alright…” and he’s off, loping up the flight of stairs two at a time to his glass-louvered front door. He always does that when I drop him off, runs up the stairs like that. I guess it’s all the energy he has left over from not having to walk home.
***
I often dream of walking the beat, Eastern Parkway on a winter morning — always winter, of course — my breath drifting visibly a few inches out in front of me, then curling up around my cheeks as I move along. Out further when I’m yelling at someone, jets of wet, white exhaust rolling three or four feet ahead as I shout down some skel or play crowd control or fend off a bystander who hates me. And when I’ve run someone down in the cold air to make a collar, I can see the steam rising off me right through my uniform.
I had what was known on the job as a “heavy stick,” and I regret that now. Eventually, it was hard to find guys to work with me. So I left. No pension. No prospects. Just me and my heavy stick. At the time, though, my thinking was this: when a perp goes down, you better keep hitting him, because you never can tell how hurt he is, whether he’s going to stay down and let you cuff him or jump back up and kill you. So I’d hit him until he stopped moving. Serve and protect, yeah, but survive. Again, that was my thinking at the time.
Still, in my dreams I see only the backswing now, and that slight pause in my motion when I bring the nightstick up, not unlike what you see in a golfer’s swing, a momentary calm before the start of the downward stroke that leads to the loud THWACK of the driver hitting the ball.
I meant to golf a lot more when I moved to Florida, a lot more. It just didn’t work out that way.
***
I’m teaching Michael the tricks of the trade, and after a few months on the job he seems to be learning just fine. Not that there’s much science to it, really — we mostly just feed the film into a giant C-41 processor, two rolls at a time, and the machine does the rest. Spits out developed negatives on plastic leaders, looking like giant two-tailed sperm as they spew from the processor, fluttering into a clear plastic bin that hangs from the end of the machine. Then we take the developed negatives and print them onto photo paper.
When printing the negative, the main thing to remember is this: the darker the negative, the more light density you need for exposure. If you are not giving it enough light, all sorts of things will be washed out in the darkness of the printed image.
The negatives aren’t cut yet, so you have twenty-four or thirty-six pictures on one long plastic snake of a strip. You slide the strip through a plate and look at the negative to see how dark it is. If the faces in the negative are light — as they often are in the bright sun of Florida — you decrease the light exposure to ensure the features aren’t too dark. Indoors shots, close-ups, where you have a flash bouncing off skin, the faces on the negative are dark, so you pump up the density of the light to get through what’s been exposed. This is the only way to make the faces visible. And that’s what people want: faces. After you decide how much density of light to give, you press the print button and wait for the mechanical “Ker-click” as the negative is exposed. Then you move on to the next one.
This is what I’m explaining to Michael as I’m seated in front of the Noritsu and he’s leaning over my shoulder looking on.
Michael brings in a lot of his own film to be developed. His mother takes quite a few “pitchers,” as Michael would say. I’ve been showing him the ropes using his own pictures as practice. He usually has a roll to develop each Monday, after a weekend with his family. “I want to remember the good times,” he says his mother tells him, so there they are, every weekend, he and his mom and his sisters: cooking out, sitting around a table with beer and soda and cigarettes, running around barefoot in the sand of the little dead-end street where they live. Most of the shots are overexposed — not unusual on the beach — but if you balance the light density right, you can create a pretty nice final product. This is the type of stuff I’m teaching Michael.
Judging from the roll that Michael brought in this morning, I’d say Michael’s mom has a new man.
***
Michael and his sisters outside the house. Into the sun. Minus three density.
Ker-click.
Michael’s mother and her new man, he’s on the Harley, she’s standing alongside. Minus two.
Ker-click.
Clara and her mother’s new man on the Harley, she’s in front of him, arms on the gas tank. Even. Sun must be in a cloud.
Ker-click.
“Now wait a minute, Tom,” Michael says, taking a sip of water from an old orange Buccaneers mug that he keeps under the sink at the rear of the developing lab, “if your negatives are dark, that means your pitchers are really exposed. So then how come you have to give ‘em more density to make the faces come out? I mean, I just don’t get that.” He’s moving around as he says this, like he does whenever there’s something he doesn’t understand, gyrating like some life-size slinky, one hand on the side of the Noritsu.
I’ve already tried to explain it to him — twice, I think — but I try again anyway.
“Because you need extra light to penetrate the dense negative.”
“Huh?”
“You need extra light on the negative…”
“—but the more light, the darker the pitcher, right? So if your negative’s already dark, why you need to darken it more?”
We go on like this for a good five minutes. All the time I’m finishing his roll of film: his mother with the new guy on the couch, arm in arm, smoking cigarettes; the two of them joking with Clara, poking at her as Mae looks on. The three kids and the new guy on the couch. Michael, Mae, Clara, new guy. On the negative it’s the other way around — new guy, Clara, Mae, Michael.
All the while Michael’s arguing with me over the proper way to expose a negative.
“I still don’t get it…”
Finally, I grab him by the arms and say: “Listen. You have to trust me. Dense negative, more light.” Not in a rough way, but enough to get his attention once and for all.
He stares at me, then begins to laugh, and says: “Well, alright, Tom. Dark negative, more light. But I still don’t understand it.” Then, still laughing, he drains the last of his water from the orange cup and walks back over to the sink as I place the strip of negatives on a rack until the developed pictures come out of the printer.
As I’m hanging the negatives, I say to him: “Hey, who’s the new man?”
“You mean my Mom’s new man?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, that’s Smitty. She met him at Shoney’s. He’s a cook.”
“Yeah? You like him.”
“My mom sure likes him.” He pauses. “An’ he’s nice to us. He’s got a bitchin’ Harley, y’know…” Another pause. “He’s younger than my Mom…”
“Really?”
“Yeah, like thirty or somethin’. But she’s really into him and he’s nice to her, so…” He trails off and stares out over the lip of his cup.
“Smitty, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s his last name?”
“Jones.”
“Smitty Jones?”
“Yup.”
We both stare at each other for a moment as the first prints of Smitty Jones come down the last ramp of the Noritsu printer and the electric cutting machine slices them into perfect four-by-six reminders of the weekend just past. Smitty and Michael’s mom mussing Clara’s hair, Smitty dancing with a beer and Michael’s mother by the dining table, Michael watching from behind, smiling.
***
The thing is, on the streets of Brooklyn they never expected me to run that fast. It was something I always used to my advantage.
Big white guy like me, you figure I’m slower than shit, typical lard-assed flatfoot, lose me around some street corner or in some alleyway. They didn’t know I was 50 flat in the 400. So nobody makes it far. And when we’d approach somebody and he’d turn to run, that’s when I knew I had him.
When Angela ran, on the other hand, I sure as hell couldn’t catch her. She left me after three months on the beach, when the money was running out and it became clear that there were no sunny law enforcement jobs on the horizon. Hiring freezes. Colder than anything I’d known up north.
She’d cry about it some nights toward the end, asking: “What’re we going to do, Tom?” and I’d try to console her, but the truth was I didn’t know what the hell we were going to do either. I’d remind her we could always go back to New York if we changed our minds, told her: “Don’t worry, whatever it is, we can handle it…” But apparently ‘we’ couldn’t handle it as well as she felt she could on her own.
So I came home one night to our shiny new apartment complex, Lakeview Arms. No lake, no views — no arms, for that matter. Nice façade, though. Over dinner she announced she was going back to visit her family on Long Island, just for a while. That’s what she said, but we both knew she was leaving for good. I tried to think of something to say, but all I could muster was: “Good time to do it, I guess, summer’s comin’…” and that was it. I kept her stuff around the apartment for another month or so, looking at her keys each night on that ugly wooden key rack we bought at a craft fair in Dunedin the first weekend we moved in. Then one night, drunk, I broke that stupid key rack into pieces and packed all her stuff into a big box, which I put into the storage closet on the terrace. Never mailed the box, come to think of it. She never asked.
***
On top of the counter opposite the cash register is a plastic bin with envelopes containing each customer’s developed film, organized by a printed number on the envelope. You present your ticket; we flip through the bin and find your envelope. Below the plastic bin is a file cabinet for the older envelopes — you’d be amazed how many customers don’t pick up their developed film for a month or two or more. Each Friday, one of the workers goes through the “orphan” drawer and makes phone calls to the customers who haven’t come back for their order. Sometimes, it turns out, they’re hotel guests who’ve gone back to Michigan or Canada or England or wherever and forgotten entirely about the roll they dropped off, or they’re seniors who can’t remember what pills to take each day, never mind where they left their photos. Sometimes it’s just locals waiting until they can get the cash to pay for what they’ve developed.
Today, it’s Michael’s turn to make the calls, and he’s doing it as I arrive. As I come up to the counter, I can see and hear he’s upset about something. He’s almost shouting into the phone. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him mad before.
“Your pitchers are ready,” he yells, moving his body backward and forward like a stringless marionette. He pauses, then says: “What? I said ‘your pitchers.’” He shoots me a glance and tries to smile as I come behind the counter.
“Your pitchers. They’re ready.”
Pause. Then slower.
“Your…. Pitchers…. Are…. Ready!”
Pause.
“Your pitchers!”
Finally, he hangs up the phone in disgust. He looks at me for a second, his face bright red. He turns away to get his cup of water, mumbling: “Damn old woman don’t even know what pitchers are!”
As he leans against the sink, slowly filling his orange cup, I’m thinking of telling him the difference between pitchers and pictures, but he seems in a bad enough mood as it is, and I don’t want to embarrass him. Instead, I sit down at the printer, and the familiar Ker-click of the Noritsu seems to have a calming effect on the both of us. There are about ten rolls to be printed, but I clear them up in about two minutes, leaving Michael to himself on the other side of the C-41. He leans against the sink facing a picture of Nora, the blond-haired mannequin we taped to the wall over the sink. Nora is an image sent out by Noritsu on specially designed negatives, used each morning to check the color balance on the machines. You know: facial tone, hair color, background color, that sort of thing. Nora’s her name. I figure Nora is a figment of some Noritsu engineer’s imagination, how Japanese engineers picture all American women: platinum blond hair; big blue eyes; clean, professional attire; unidentifiable ethnicity. Not sultry, but appealing for sure. As I’m watching, Michael suddenly rips the photo off the wall and he’s staring at it intently. Must be trouble with a girl that’s putting him in this mood.
“Anything wrong?” I ask as I finish up the last roll.
“Naw,” he says. “Naw. Nothing I can talk about.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah.” There’s silence for a moment, then he says: “Hey, you think Nora’s an actual woman? I’ll bet she’s one of the most photographed women in all the world…” He turns and looks at me with that crooked smile of his.
After work, we’re back out on the beach drinking beer, and it’s a particularly dark night because thick clouds are covering the moon almost completely. Asses in the sand, Michael and I stare out into the darkness. We talked a bit at first; now we’re just sitting, listening to the weak waves of the Gulf of Mexico as they lap the shore.
Finally, Michael says: Y’know, Smitty’s been to N’Orleans.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He tells me he lived in that Latin Quarter for almost a year, with a girl named Spike.”
“Spike?”
“Well he says that wasn’t her real name. She was just a little thing, he says, with spiky hair.”
He sips his beer and exhales loudly, halfway between a sigh and a cough.
“Smitty says he wants to take us all there. He said he’d load Clara and me on the bike anytime and drive us all the way.”
“The three of you?”
“Yeah, load up the bike with some beers and some nuts and beef jerky and take off. With Mae and mom following behind in the Cougar. Me on back, Clara on Smitty’s lap. Be pretty nice, I think. My Mom’d love it. I think she’s hankering to get outta here soon.”
“Beer and nuts and beef jerky?”
“That’s all you need t’be happy, Smitty says.”
And we sit there in silence for a while longer as I ponder beer and nuts and beef jerky, and whether it is all you need to be happy. I begin to realize how alike we are, Michael and me, both stranded on this barrier island, flotsam and jetsam, staring out into the salty darkness, two pieces of debris on the shores of a vacation land that’s not a holiday for either of us.
Finally, Michael says: “Y’know, I think she really loves him,” and I notice his eyes look glassy, almost like he’s going to cry.
***
When I left the force there were twenty-seven citizen complaints against me. In six years. Twenty-seven. That’s a sure ticket to a career without advancement, a lifetime walking the beat. Lifers, that’s what we call them. Guys forty-five, fifty, still in uniform, never rising above the rank of patrolman, not enough in pension to retire. Arthritic knees and bunioned feet, faces raw and leathery from a lifetime of New York winters. Bellies sagging over worn and desperate gun belts.
It’s a record you can’t outrun. I knew it, and I think Angela knew it even back then. They say to err is human, but some mistakes you make in life you wind up paying for ’til the day you die.
No thank you, I figured. I’ll head to warmer climes.
***
I was off on Monday. Didn’t do much, some laundry, some groceries, some television, and now it’s Tuesday, but Michael Miller hasn’t shown up for work. Didn’t call, nothing. This is something he never does, so I’m concerned. But I don’t have his number, never had a reason to call, don’t even know if he has a phone. Susan, the manager of the photo lab, asks me if I can handle things alone in his absence, and I can, of course, since the workload’s light, as it always is. So she leaves, but I’m still wondering what became of Michael. I remember there’s an employee contact sheet in the drawer under the cash register, so I pull it out and dial the number next to his name. I get a busy signal, then another, and after a few more tries give up.
A little after 5:30, I pull an order for an elderly couple and notice Michael Miller’s name on the envelope just behind it. No phone number at all on the envelope, but after finishing with the customer, I open the envelope to take a look at the photos inside. But there are no photos inside. Just the developed negative, still in one long strip, sitting in the envelope, sitting in the bin. The film was developed, but the negatives were never printed.
I roll my chair over the Noritsu printer and get to work.
***
I still don’t know where Michael is, but judging from these pictures he’s not too happy.
It’s his mother’s usual weekend roll, and the pictures are similar to the others — except for Michael, who’s not smiling in any of the shots.
Smitty and Clara on one end of the couch, Michael on the other. Plus one.
Ker-click.
Michael and his mother at the dining room table. They’re not arguing, but they seem to be deep in discussion about something. Plus two, minus one magenta.
Ker-click.
Smitty outside in the sun: shirt off, sunglasses on, cigarette hanging out of one end of his mouth, holding up a dead gull to the camera. Clara’s in the background giggling, in a bikini top and cut-off shorts. Minus two.
Ker-click.
And so on. All the while, Michael Miller’s got a puss on his face like I’ve never seen. He’s not the light-hearted little guy I’ve come to know in the past three months.
Clara and Mae dancing with each other in the living room, plus two.
Ker-click.
Clara and Michael’s mom sitting on the couch, with Smitty in the middle. Smitty’s arm’s around Clara; her hand is on his knee.
Ker-click.
***
Okay, you can see where I’m going with this. Smitty, it seems, is giving it to Clara, and I’m betting Michael found out. I wasn’t sure until I saw the last print, something different: the background is of a smaller apartment, darker, with brown plaid sofas and clutter strewn across the floor. Clara’s sitting on the couch, leaning against the armrest in an oversized t-shirt, legs tucked alongside her body. Smoking a cigarette. From the angle, I can’t tell if she’s wearing pants. Ker-click. It all comes together.
Now Michael’s nowhere to be found, and there’s no way for me to find him until after my shift. So I’m sitting there, occasionally helping a customer, but mostly just alone with my thoughts: about Michael and his mother and his sisters, victims of a predator, the type of scumbag that I’d encounter every day on the job. I’ve been forcing down the anger for more than a year, but it’s all coming back to me. Along with the pain I inflicted, the beatings, the times I raised my nightstick like a gavel and slapped bloody justice across the head and shoulders of whomever I decided deserved it that night.
And most of all I’m watching Smitty Jones now, print by print, slither down the conveyor toward the cutting machine. Smitty posed by his bike. Clara and Mae with Smitty, Michael in the background leaning head-in-arms on the TV stand. Smitty and Clara and Michael’s mom in the living room, Clara playfully taking the cigarette from Smitty’s mouth and pretending to smoke it. Each print stops for a moment at the cutting machine, which takes its forceful jab, violently slicing the borders as I watch the whole story develop before my eyes: the depth of the blues, the intensity of light from the flash as it illuminates all that’s going on. There’s not enough correction in the world to fix these images as they make their way toward their inevitable end.
***
It’s past 7:30 now, and I’m helping a woman with reprints, which can be the hardest thing in the world, because 35-millimeter film often doesn’t line up properly with the negative numbers printed on the roll. It all depends on how you load it. So you wind up with conversations like this:
“I’d like two reprints of twenty-four. Busch Gardens.”
I look at the print and then the negatives.
“Twenty-four or 23A?”
“What?”
“What you’re calling ‘twenty-four’ is 23A-24. The picture you’re holding there” — pointing at her print then holding the negative up to the light — “that’s 24A-25.”
As I’m saying this, from the corner of my eye I see a scrubby-looking local by the grocery counter at the other end of the store, with cut-off t-shirt and motorcycle jeans, leather wallet on a chain hanging from his pocket. It’s Smitty Jones. He’s smaller and thinner than I’d thought he’d be, but it’s him. He’s buying beer.
The woman I’m helping says: “What? 24-A? I don’t understand. I want 24.”
“You don’t want twenty-four. Twenty-four’s another picture.”
He also has a can of nuts.
“I don’t understand. I want a reprint of this one.”
I didn’t see beef jerky, but they sell it at the counter. Still, my argument over reprints continues.
“Look,” I say, practically grabbing the woman’s head and shoving it under the negative, “the picture you’re holding is here — 24A-25 — and the picture before it is here — 23A-24.” This goes on a little while longer; the customer still isn’t getting it. In her world, the twenty-fourth picture you take is always number twenty four. In my world, things don’t line up that neatly.
Smitty is gone. Finally I say, “Trust me,” and she relents.
And now I’m waiting, waiting, waiting for my shift to end.
***
I work like a madman so I can leave as soon as possible when the store closes. Turn off the processor after the last roll goes through. Pop the buckles that hold the lid of the C-41 in place and unsnap each of the six rollers that roll the film through the chemicals. Screw mopping, I figure. The manager will never know. I can always claim I was short-handed. I’m out by 9:10.
In the parking lot, I check by reflex under my seat, where I keep my gun. Off-duty revolver. I’d heard about how dangerous Florida can be, so when I came down here I threw it under the seat with a trigger lock on it, just in case. I check now and it’s still there and I’m not thinking of using it, but I pull it out anyway just in case. It’s loaded and ready to go. With the key from my keychain I remove the trigger lock and put the gun back under the seat.
I make a right pulling out of the parking lot. I’m moving too fast and the manual steering of the Chevette whips back as I complete the turn, nearly breaking my thumb. I hear the gun rattle against the side of the seat, then slide back to the center. The pain in my thumb only increases my rage.
As I pull up to the dead-end street, my headlights reflect the day-glow tongues of the sockless sneakers on Michael Miller’s feet. He is sitting on the steps, in cut-off shorts and a sleeveless tee, head in his hands. I park the car on the sand-covered sidewalk at the bottom of the stairs and turn off my lights. Michael doesn’t look up at first, and when he finally does he just stares at me silently. His eyes are swollen and I can’t tell if he’s been hit or just been crying uncontrollably. After a moment he lets his head fall back down into his hands.
“Where are they?” I ask as I emerge from the car, but he says nothing. It’s a voice I’ve used a thousand times in the past, in a thousand different situations. Designed to get answers. It’s rusty but still very much there. Again, I say: “Where are they?”
“Gone,” he says, and he lifts up his head again and I get a closer look at his eyes.
“Where is she?”
“Upstairs,” he says.
“What happened?”
He looks at me again, through those red swollen slits, and his lips make an oval and he tries to speak. But then the bottom lip begins to quiver, and for a moment we’re stuck there, his lip dancing uncontrollably at the bottom of his face, eyebrows screwed into knots at the top. From the apartment upstairs I hear another sound — it must be his mother or Mae or both and I wonder exactly what I’m going to find upstairs when I get there and what Michael actually meant when he said “Gone.”
And then the knot of his brow comes undone and his eyebrows point skyward and he looks at me again and says: “Tom I, I cain’t…” but that’s all before the oval of his mouth melts into a violent grimace and he begins to cry. His head falls forward and lands against my knee.
I look up at the apartment again and I want to go up to see what’s happening but I can’t, not with Michael collapsed against my knee, so I sit down next to him and gather up his head and hold it against my chest and he weeps uncontrollably into my t-shirt. And all I can manage to say is: “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Whatever it is, we’ll handle it…” and as always, I’m not quite sure what that means. After a while, he looks up at me and says: “I’m the man of the family, y’know…” Then he wipes his eyes and leads me up the stairs to the apartment.
***
Through the front door it is not Michael’s mother but Clara we find. She’s crying hysterically, lying face down on the couch with her head buried between two pillows. Wearing running shorts and a little tank top, skinny legs and arms hanging off the couch in all sorts of weird angles. I’m surprised at how white her skin is, despite living on the beach for her entire life. The single bulb of the living room lamp is barely enough to fill the darkness of a room I’ve seen so many times before in the weekly rolls that Michael brings. We are frozen in place and I feel like I’m in one of those pictures now, simultaneously standing there in Michael’s living room while also considering the negative and how it will look when we’re all exposed.
From the corner of my eye I see Mae in the little dining area. She has eyes as wide as Tweety Bird’s and looks more eight than twelve, far too young to quite comprehend all that is going on. She was crying as well, but now just looks scared. And before her on the table lies the note from her mother, unfolded and still with the tattered envelope beside it.
And I think the most important line in the note was not “I know what’s happened here and who’s responsible and what’s to come, and I know that for the sake of Smitty and me and our love we must leave,” but rather, “This is nothing like the life I ever dreamed I’d be living when I made the decision to come down here.”
There is a single light above the dining table as well, but it too isn’t bright enough to provide much illumination to the scene. And I’m still thinking of the negative and how an image like this is all flash-reflected flesh tones, with little more than darkness in between. The couch, the table, the rug, the curtains, all of these things we surround ourselves with to provide comfort and context, security, stability, all gone in the final exposure. Too dark to be recognized, obscured except for the human faces arrayed across an otherwise darkened frame. Clara in tears, Mae in fear, Michael all puffy and weak. Plus six just to distinguish their features in the darkness all around them.
James F. Haggerty is based in New York City. He is a writer, attorney and communications consultant. He has written several books on communications issues, and his nonfiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, Fortune and Forbes, among others. He was also a columnist for American Lawyer’s Corporate Counsel magazine from 2011-15. His fiction has previously appeared in 12 Gauge Review, and a new story will appear in the upcoming edition of Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature.
ELEVENTH HOUR LITERARY 