Recovering Charles

by Jason F. Wright

  “Don’t interrupt.”

  “You were done!”

  “My office, my classroom, my rules.”

  I put an index finger to both sides of my head and pulled the trigger.

  “Don’t do that, Mr. Millward. I haven’t got my camera out.”

  I laughed—easy to do in Larry’s world. “It’s good to see you, too. But it hasn’t been that long, sir.”

  “Long enough. Long enough, young man, long enough.”

  “How have you been? Am I keeping you from something?”

  “Yes, you’re keeping me from my work, and for that I’m indebted to you, Mr. Millward.”

  “You don’t have to call me ‘Mister’ anymore; I’m out of school.” I’d said that every single time I’d seen my old professor since graduation from NYU. It never mattered.

  “Are you still a Mr. Millward, Luke?”

  “Of course, but we’re not in class. I’m not a student. We’re peers now.” I’d said that before, too.

  “Your last name, Mr. Millward, defines you.” He put his hands on the back of his head, interlocked his fingers, and stretched back in his chair. “Your last name tells society who you are and where you came from, both in the short term and in the greater sense of where your ancestors’ ship originated.”

  I smiled and repeated each and every one of those familiar words in my mind as he spoke them.

  “You’re right, as usual, Mr. Gorton.” Those words were equally familiar.

  “Then we agree to play by proper societal conventions.” He put his feet on the floor and dramatically swiveled around to a mini-refrigerator on the floor. “Let’s drink.” He pulled out two small bottles of water.

  “Thanks,” I said, as he tossed me one.

  He opened his and guzzled half the water. “How’s work?”

  “Work is great. I’m getting a lot of freelance projects. Even saying no to some now. I just can’t take every job anymore.”

  “Listen, you do that as infrequently as you can. You never know which picture could change—”

  “The world. I know.”

  Larry returned his feet to their home on his desk. Noticing the Oreo-sized holes in the heels of his socks only reminded me how much I had missed the man. Confident, kind, and maybe more comfortable with his place in life than anyone I’d ever known.

  I suppose he reminded me a bit of Jordan. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed being around them both.

  I’d been a fence-sitter on photography until I entered his classroom for the first time. The art had always interested me, but like so many other passions it seemed impractical to turn art into industry and a hobby into a living. Hauling a camera around the world shooting pictures sounded glamorous and rewarding. But I knew few achieved the highest levels of success. Most never won awards or saw their work on newsstands or on Drudge. Sadly, few of the dreamers could make the leap from child shutterbug taking pictures on a disposable 35-millimeter to standing in the back of the White House Rose Garden shooting images of the president and leader of the free world.

  I wanted that back then, but my heart and head didn’t believe I had the eye.

  Thank goodness Larry Gorton thought I did.

  “Mr. Millward, what can I do for you? You bring me pictures to gush over?”

  “No, sir, not this time. Just visiting. Checking in.”

  He chugged the rest of his water and shot the bottle hard across his office, using the wall as a backboard, watching it bounce around the rim and settle in the trash can. His raised both arms above his head. “That’s a three.”

  I grinned and fidgeted with Larry’s plastic Rudy Giuliani

  bobblehead doll.

  “What’s on your mind, kid?”

  “Sir?”

  He lowered his eyes and folded his arms across his sweater-vest.

  “I don’t know, I guess I just wanted to say hi. I’ll let you get back to work.” I returned Rudy to his spot on Larry’s desk and stood.

  “Sit.”

  I obliged.

  “You’re a horrible poker player, Luke Millward.”

  You have no idea.

  “How’s your father?”

  It was my turn to chug the rest of my water bottle. I tossed it toward the trash can. Missed. “Figures.”

  “You heard from him lately?”

  “Not exactly.” As my academic mentor, Larry had known bits and pieces of my personal history. He knew Mom was dead from prescription drug abuse, and he had met Dad once during my freshman year at NYU. But sitting there I couldn’t recall how much I’d told him about Dad.

  “You hear from him much anymore?”

  “It’s been a while, sir.”

  “How long?”

  “A couple years, I guess, maybe a little less.” I picked up the bobblehead doll again.

  “He still drinking?”

  I nodded.

  Larry did, too. “That’s a shame. . . . Tough life you’ve lived, young man. I bet your mom would be proud.”

  I nodded once more.

  “Then tell me, Mr. Millward, what else is going on in your exciting, jet-setting life? Is there a woman?”

  “Not really. Dates here and there. I’m hanging out a lot with a girl I met in school—Jordan Knapp.”

  “Good woman?”

  “Sure is. We’re just friends though. No time for a relationship right now.”

  “Does she know that?” he asked.

  “That we’re just friends?”

  He nodded.

  “Sure she does.”

  Wait for it.

  “Good. And let’s not forget the most important relationship, the one with our lens, you remember?”

  I laughed despite myself. “Of course.” I mocked his deep voice. “‘The eternally intimate relationship between life and lens.’ How could I forget?”

  Larry smiled and probably congratulated himself on another job well done. Few professors took as much pride in the finished product than Larry Gorton did.

  The two of us sat and enjoyed the rare silence that comes when two people trust one another. Eventually the chatter resumed. Politics, Iraq, the rash of paparazzi incidents in LA, Katrina, Rudy’s rumored run for the White House in 2008, the Yankees. He showed me photos he’d taken earlier that summer on a trip to China. The pictures were captivating enough to take my mind off Jerome Harris. Almost.

  “Can I ask you for some advice?” I finally said.

  “Of course, that’s why you came.” He checked his clock. “I’ve still got time. Class starts in twenty-five.”

  “I got a call the other day from a man in New Orleans.”

  “After Katrina?”

  “Yes.”

  “Proceed.”

  “This man, Jerome—a native I’m guessing—he called to tell me he knew my father. He’d been living in New Orleans.”

  Larry put his feet back on the floor and leaned onto his desk. There was never a better listener.

  “He said he played with my father in a band. They both live in the Lower Ninth Ward.”

  Larry’s eyes asked for more.

  “My father is missing. No one has seen him since last Sunday.”

  “Before landfall.”

  “Yes, sir. And now they’re all worried. Worried he’s dead somewhere, or worse—injured, in trouble, something . . .”

  “And this Jerome, you’ve never met him?”

  “No.”

  “Any reason to doubt him? To mistrust?”

  “Don’t see why.”

  Larry studied my face. His eyes processed the scene. “You think your father is dead.”

  I stood and walked to the trash can, picking up the bottle that had landed on the floor and dropping it in.

  “Hmm.” Larry leaned back in his chair again, rubbing his face before lacing his hands behind his head.

  “Would you go?” I asked.

  “I don’t do hypotheticals, you ought to remember that. Trust your eyes and the lens, nothing else.”

&nb
sp; That was precisely what I knew he’d say from the second I pushed open his office door. I examined a line of photos in matching black frames on his back wall.

  “You could always take your camera,” Larry said.

  “Sir?”

  “Take your camera to New Orleans. Make the drive. The airport is probably still closed anyway.”

  “Drive from New York to New Orleans.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s a long way, an awfully long way.”

  “They do make maps, Mr. Millward. There is even this crazy new thing called the interweb—all the kids on campus are talking about it. Some of these interweb places even give turn-by-turn directions. Imagine that.”

  I looked for something to throw.

  “I’m serious about this, young man. Make the trip. Take your camera. Blog it. Stop at other cities along the way. New Orleans isn’t the only area cleaning up.”

  I took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. I ran my fingers through my hair. My stomach flittered. I looked at my watch and put on my jacket.

  “Mr. Millward, you’ve seen a lot of suffering in your life; you’ve seen parts of the world most of my students will only see in the fantastic pictures you’ve taken. But you’ve never seen what’s happening in the Gulf. You’ve never seen this kind of human event. Go. Capture it. Educate us. Honor them.”

  I knew you’d be good, I thought. I didn’t think you’d be that good.

  “OK, then, I’ll let you get to class. Thank you.” We shook hands.

  “You’ll go?”

  “We’ll see.” I said good-bye and put my hand on the doorknob.

  “Luke.”

  I turned to face him.

  “Go recover your father.”

  Chapter

  8

  Larry Gorton was right.

  Unfortunately, having correctly predicted what he would say didn’t make hearing it any easier.

  I needed to make the trip. Find closure. Photograph the scenes. Give the man a proper burial back in Texas. All true. Part of me felt relieved that at least death would have ended his temporal addictions, freed him from his greatest flaws, and released him from the loneliness he’d wrapped himself in since Mom’s death.

  I reminded myself again that he hadn’t always been the man I’d spoken to on the phone two years ago. Anxious. Desperate. Running. Addicted.

  Alone.

  I also reminded myself that he hadn’t been the one driving the truck that killed my grandmother. He hadn’t been the lazy doctor who so willingly prescribed pills to my mother that she didn’t need. And he hadn’t been the one who abused those pills and buried his head in the sand of depression.

  Dad hadn’t been the one who refused to notice the sun was still rising, even though she wasn’t.

  Even though we’ve grown apart, I still want the best for him.

  It felt good to think that.

  I hadn’t allowed myself to consider any alternatives. I was sure Dad had been killed in the storm or its aftermath and his body was waiting somewhere to be identified and claimed.

  But what if he hadn’t been killed? What if my father was unreachable in Houston or Baton Rouge or some other far-flung city? What if he’d boarded a bus and chosen to start over wherever it dumped him off? What if he wanted this? What if he wanted me to find him and forgive him and write a song with him?

  I pushed that awkward notion aside long enough to call Jordan and ask her to meet me at six o’clock for an early dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant a few blocks from my building.

  She walked in, on time as always, and glided into the chair across from me.

  “This seat taken?”

  “I’m going.”

  She smiled and took my hands in hers.

  “Alone? You’re sure?”

  I smiled. “Yes.”

  ~ ~

  My mother and father were native Texans and high school sweethearts. Dad had been “going with” Mom’s biology lab partner, Becky Ravenscroft, and every day they ate lunch together on hard round orange stools attached to the last rectangular table at the back of the cafeteria.

  On an otherwise uneventful Thursday afternoon, Dad was eating a Fluffernutter sandwich on Wonder Bread and chatting with Becky when he saw my mother glide in the back door of the cafeteria. She was carrying nothing but a brown paper bag.

  Dad had never seen this girl before. “She moved in slow motion,” he described. “Her hair was so well-coifed. Her blush so immaculately applied. Her teeth so pearly white.”

  Dad said she parted the crowd like the Red Sea and walked toward him, scanning left and right for a seat. Just as she saw Dad, the school’s all-state tight end yelled and waved at Becky from three tables away. “Becky Ravenscroft! You good at geometry?”

  Becky hopped up and scampered to the “athlete’s table.”

  Mom, oblivious, saw only a lonely young man sitting at the last table in the cafeteria. She approached the boy she would one day marry. “Mind if I sit here?”

  “Sure,” Dad said.

  “You mind?”

  “No! I mean no I don’t mind. Sure you can sit here.” Dad’s palms were so sweaty he had to set his sandwich down and wipe his hands on his jeans under the table.

  She sat down and began pulling her lunch out one item at a time—plastic bag with Fritos, plastic bag with four pieces of celery, plastic bag with a Fluffernutter sandwich.

  Dad said he knew right then he’d spend the rest of his life stocking their pantry with marshmallow cream and peanut butter. Within a week, Dad finally had the great new girlfriend he deserved, and Becky had to find a new lab partner. The new couple was inseparable for the remainder of their junior year and right through high school graduation.

  They stayed together, even when Dad was ready to sprint past first base but Mom wanted to save herself for marriage because she’d promised her mother on her sweet sixteenth that she would. Dad strongly suggested she wear more modest clothes. Mom suggested he take cold showers.

  When Mom wanted to go to SMU instead of Texas A&M, Dad changed his plans and followed her.

  When Dad had a dream during his freshman year that one day he’d design buildings on earth and a temple in heaven, Mom encouraged him to quit premed and study architecture.

  Not a year later, Mom decided her heart wanted to teach elementary school children instead of pursue a doctorate and become a professor. Dad bought her a Snoopy thermos and filled it with daisies.

  Then Dad felt inspired to spend a semester abroad studying architecture in Italy. Mom took a semester off and followed him.

  So when Dad got down on one knee in the shadow of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and asked if she’d make his dreams come true, the answer was easy.

  “Yes.”

  Chapter

  9

  The bags waited for me by the door.

  Still, I wasn’t convinced I was going. I’d packed the carry-on-sized suitcase I’d used to travel the world. My laptop and camera bags were ready to go. And over the last twenty-four hours I’d successfully cleared my schedule for a week.

  Clients were appeased. Kirky, my agent, was supportive, probably because he wanted to see the shots. Of course Jordan thought I was already on my way out the door and made me promise to call from the road at the end of my first day. She hid it well, but I knew she wasn’t thrilled I’d chosen to handle the burden alone. I’d made the case that she had her good name and a lot of money riding on several high-profile closings. She should stay.

  Frankly, the truth was a pretty good reason, too. Her joining me would have felt very serious. Very adult. Very much like something a couple would do.

  Since sitting down with Larry I’d avoided watching the news or going beyond ESPN.com on the Internet. This freed my consciousness to make a rational choice, not one mired in the emotionally-draining images still floating north from the Gulf region. Once the television was on, I knew how challenging it would be to turn it off.

  My wallet was in m
y front pocket. The lights were off. I’d locked a few valuables in a safe hidden in a cabinet under my bathroom sink. The Sebring I’d rented online was waiting for me on a Hertz lot in Greenwich Village.

  It took three tries but I finally reached Jerome. “I’m coming.”

  “Good. I was startin’ to wonder ’bout you.”

  “Yes, sir. Any news on my father?”

  “Not yet, but lots of friends lookin’, keepin’ eyes open, and askin’ ’round. And ’member now, other folks missin’ too. Lots of ’em.”

  “Understood.”

  “Get comin’ then. You got the number?”

  “It’s in my cell.” I suddenly remembered Jordan’s curiosity. “May I ask how you found me? My number?”

  “Your dad gave it to Jez, in case anythin’ ever happened.”

  “Of course.”

  “All right then. Come by the club Verses, on Chartres. Almost at the corner of Toulouse in the Quarter. We’re ’bout the only thing here. But don’t expect no music playin’ right now. Just

  gatherin’ up and seein’, makin’ sure we know who’s survived here. Get comin’, son.”

  “I will.”

  “And bring a photo.”

  “I will.”

  We thanked each other and hung up. I took my laptop back out of its bag, powered it up, and plugged it into my photo printer on my desk. I printed the most recent photo I could find of my father. We were standing side by side on the street outside my first NYU apartment. I repacked my laptop.

  The other bags still waited for me by the door.

  There were 1,306 miles and two long days—maybe three if I wore out early—between New Orleans and me.

  I looked at my watch. Nearly noon.

  What’s the point now?

  I slid the bags aside with my foot, stepped out, and locked the door. Not five minutes later I was on the subway bound for Times Square and a ticket to whatever movie started next.

  “Can I help you?” the young man behind the counter

  mumbled. He had the look of an hourly employee who resented selling a movie ticket in the middle of a weekday to a grown man who should have been at work.

  I smiled and fought to assume the best about him. A useful nugget from my father. “Let’s see, what’s starting now?”