Allegories of the Tarot

by Ribken, Annetta

  Hansom won awards and worldwide fame for his body of work. Many believed he crossed the line from technical skill into Fine Art with his Faces of the Fallen photo essay on homeless vets. Having just turned eighty-two at the end of 1982, he wasn’t getting any younger, nor was he expected to do too many more shoots. Which is why I applied the moment I heard about the chance to spend the summer working with him on his next project in the boonies of Southwest Georgia.

  What I hadn’t expected was to spend the first day of summer trundling out to a bingo parlor in the boonies with a man so far off his rocker he made that Pink Floyd movie seem positively sane by comparison.

  “Fairies,” he told me for the fifth time, “love to be around enormous swings of luck. The moment someone’s fortune changes, good or bad...It’s like candy to them.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But they don’t like a lot of flashing lights and fuss, so you’ll never find one in a casino or a dog track. You have to stay small time. Au naturel is the only way to catch one.”

  I made a face as I considered that.

  Hansom’s laugh brayed out like a big horse. It was jarring to hear that robust laughter pealing out from such a narrow-framed old man. “Not naked.” He brayed again. “Just in a natural state. Do I look crazy enough to go around shooting pictures butt naked?”

  I grinned back at him, not as relieved as I’d hoped to be. “Sure hope not.”

  Around dusk, we pulled up in front of the Hoot ‘n’ Holler Bingo Parlor in a little farming town too small to mention. I kicked as much of the red dirt as I could from the soles of my shoes and carried the tripod and other gear inside while Hansom spoke with the staff.

  He apparently did not mention fairies to them. That must have been a special flavor of crazy he was only sharing with me. Had to admit, other than his weird Tinkerbell fixation, the old guy’s faculties were sharp as a tack.

  “Where do you want me to set up?”

  “Back there.” Hansom nodded his head toward the far end of the parlor. He leaned in close enough that I could smell the Chicklets gum on his breath.

  “Fairies can’t see into corners,” he breathed.

  “Of course not, Mister—I mean, Hansom.”

  The regulars poured in between six and seven. They greeted each other with loud, rattling coughs. Ordered greasy food from the short order grill in back. Set up their pink-haired Troll dolls and colored daubers in meticulous arrangements.

  We waited most of the night. There were plenty of missed shots that would have been fine for any of the human-interest slicks. A palsied woman with a scarf on her head and her teeth in a glass of water glared at us over an Olympian selection of thirty-two different bingo sheets. The jowly caller taking off his cowboy hat and wiping sweat from his brow on one sleeve. A black man in patched jeans and a pressed shirt, disappointed that he didn’t have a good bingo after all.

  Not Eisenstaedt’s photos of V-J Day in Times Square or Sophia Loren, but solid stuff, real humanity distilled onto film. Hansom Haddix wanted none of that.

  Bored, I wandered to the snack bar and got a bottle of Coke and a MoonPie. I really didn’t have the money for either. My ex-girlfriend had wiped out my account to pay my share of the overdue rent and then dumped me. (All of which had been about four hours after I told her I’d dropped out of college to pursue my dream of being a photographer. You’re giving up a marketing scholarship for THAT? I never got a chance to answer.)

  I walked back to the corner, realizing for the first time that marshmallow could actually go stale. As I approached, a woman rasped out “BINGO!” like it was her last breath.

  Hansom thumbed the shutter release button.

  He only shot one roll of film that night, just winners and losers. No flash at all. Contrary to his usual habit, he took a single picture of a scene before moving on to the next composition. “After each shot, they hide. You have to be real particular and give them plenty of time to forget you’re there before you take the next picture.”

  “Hmm.” I was too young and maybe too worried for his sanity to engage him on this.

  Around eleven that night, we piled into the Chevy and rode back to the motel we’d set up in. We drove under streetlights that had been shot out, past boarded-up stores and three different First Baptist churches, a slaughterhouse and a Rexall drugstore advertising two-for-one paper towels.

  We’d rented two adjoining rooms. One of them we rigged into a darkroom. Soon as we were inside, Hansom made sure the heavy black fabric he’d stapled along the window frame and over the doors was still intact and lightproof.

  Meanwhile, I got the temperatures right by floating the gallon jugs of developer, stop bath, fixer, and clearer in a tub full of 68⁰ water. He came over to watch my work long enough to be sure I did things correctly.

  I asked him again why we weren’t going to make any prints.

  He dismissed the thought with a wave of his hand. “No point.”

  “Then why did we take the pictures in the first place?”

  “Make prints later if you want. What’s important to see is only on the negative.”

  Like so many of the things Hansom had told me today, this made no sense at all. I let it go.

  Hansom took a quick inventory of where things were in the room and switched off the light. I waited, smelling the vinegar stink of the stop bath, feeling for the scissors and timer I’d placed on the motel’s bureau.

  He had me withdraw the film, cut it, spool it onto the reel, and put a lid on the developer tank. The lights blazed back on and we both stood there blinking while I agitated the developer bath. Hansom kept track of the time.

  “All the fancy new equipment we could be using, and we might as well be making daguerreotypes. Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “Sir?”

  “I’ve seen the way you’ve reacted today. You think the old man’s gone batty, don’t you?”

  “Not at all, I—“

  “Say it!”

  “I’m glad to be here, I’m not going to question your—“

  “Stop.”

  I stopped.

  “The stop bath, I mean.” His voice held an edge now. A desperate tone had crept into his words. Something impatient and very close to manic. I hurried to obey.

  Hansom didn’t speak another word until we’d finished with the fixer, clearer, and distilled water wash. He snatched the strip of film from me before I could hang it up to dry.

  “I started seeing them in my Las Vegas shoots,” he said, inserting the still damp filmstrip hurriedly into the projector. His wrinkled hands, so steady on the shutter release just hours before, shook like the palsied bingo lady’s had. “They waited in big packs, tribes almost, in the dark corners outside the casinos, attracted to all the fortunes being won and lost, but repelled by all the noise and neon.”

  He pointed the projector at the wall and turned it on. I said nothing. “Get the lights.”

  I stood there blinking in confusion and dismay for a split-second, then swiped my hand over the light switch.

  Hansom waited til I was looking directly into his rheumy eyes. “When you first see them, you have to allow your eyes to commit immediately, or your brain never will. If you don’t see them on the very first glance—if you blink instead—then you never will. Understand?”

  I nodded, but it was a lie.

  Hansom slid the film into the projector and hurriedly focused the image on the wall. He grunted. “None in this one.”

  He went through three more then stopped.

  A man wearing a “Disco is Dead” t-shirt who’d won $200.00 for a Cover-All materialized on the wall in all his magnified, negative-image, toothy glory. The shutter had caught him in mid-jump. Hansom jerked a finger at the projected image. “See there! Just behind his right shoulder?”

  I’d become pretty good at converting negative images to positives in my mind. Most photographers get the hang of it eventually. Even so, I couldn’t be sure what I saw. It might have been
a tiny face, dragonfly eyes and slits for a nose. There might have been some out-of-focus bit of background there that resembled a scaly wing and limber little arm.

  There might have been, but I didn’t have time to decide. It could have just as easily been water spots from not letting the film dry.

  Hansom advanced the strip of film quickly through several more frames until coming to a stop on the image of a thoroughly depressed-looking woman who had missed a big pot by one number. Cigarette smoke wreathed around her face like a surreal picture frame. He scanned the blown up negative and shouted, “There!”

  I looked where he was pointing. It could have been a black butterfly wing by her earlobe, but it could have just as easily been part of her earring, too.

  The old man moved the film again and again, grunting mostly, but occasionally pointing at things too fast for me to really keep up with him. When he reached the last image, he rushed up to the wall and pounded on it with one angry, shaking fist. “Do you see them? Five in one shot! Five!”

  It was a picture of me, coming back from the rest room near the end of the night. I had talked to someone in there, the older black man in the patched jeans and pressed shirt.

  “You with the photographer.” It was more an accusation than a question.

  I nodded.

  “Seems kind of sad, a man such as himself wasting time snapping pictures at Hoot ‘n’ Holler.”

  “It makes him happy,” I replied, wondering if the man had recognized Hansom out there at the camera.

  “What do you think makes him happier? Taking pictures of people gambling money they ain’t got—or being taken seriously by a young man such as yourself?”

  By the time I found my words he had already zipped up and walked out.

  I peered at the enlarged negative of myself on the wall. Hansom stood at the edge, his knees pressed into the cheap mattress and bedspread. He waved a frantic finger at something blurred into the foreground. Specks of dust spun in the projector’s beam like tiny angels in search of a pinhead to dance on.

  In that negative, I had just decided to try my best to learn what I could from Hansom. No matter how senile he might be, the master photographer still had plenty he could teach me. It wouldn’t hurt to humor him about the fairies, would it? It’s not like anyone would ever have to know. Maybe there was an explanation besides the one involving straightjackets and rubber rooms. Dust or water spots on the film or something.

  “Do you see them?” Hansom pleaded. The projector shone in the old man’s eyes, making them glisten.

  I squinted. Took a step forward into the projector’s beam. Hansom tugged at my shirtsleeve like one of his homeless veterans asking for spare change. “Do you?”

  For a tenth of a blink or less, projected on the wall of a dingy southwest Georgia motel room from a bingo parlor negative taken by a Pulitzer-winning photographer, I saw something I can hardly describe, much less believe. In the foreground, almost too fast for the mind to commit, but not the eye—

  —A trick of the light?

  Lithe arms, holding hands. Blur-frozen wings.

  Eyes like tiny sequins that faded too fast.

  I hadn’t felt any difference the moment my luck changed, but I felt different now. Ecstatic. The hairs on my arm stood on end. Electrified with wonder.

  “Yes,” I breathed. My eyes watered a little at the ache of what they’d glimpsed and lost. I would spend the rest of my life trying to see them again, one split second at a time.

  ***

  Lon Prater has worked in the Reactor Compartments of USS Enterprise, edited the military’s textbook on arms deals, and kept things safe in the produce and laundry industries. He lives, writes, and plays a lot of board games in Pensacola, Florida. Visit lonprater.com to find out more.

  ***

  THE HIGH PRIESTESS

  Deadly Son

  By Billie Sue Mosiman

  The land of Solomon near the edge of the sea shook with thunder and lightning. Bold silver rain poured in shiny sheets, turning cobblestone streets to rivers. The people of the city closed their doors and windows, took in their goats and chickens, and prayed for the sun.

  Katrine, high priestess for the great Solomon, sat before a parted veil embroidered with palm leaves and pomegranates. She kept her window open so she could see the roiling sea beyond her home. Her sister, the empress, had come to visit earlier, but warned she might not be able to return because of rising waters.

  Katrine had sent her servants home to parents and mates rather than ask them to stay in her palace to be stranded. She was alone now, subject to the whim of weather, but she could far-see and knew she’d persevere. As for others in the city, she worried for their safety, petulant in interpreting the visions plaguing her. The sights she saw playing out in thin air before her disrupted her sleep. Many would die. That’s what she saw in the visions. Bodies piled like cord wood, fires set to consume flesh. There were too many for burial in the underground crypts.

  Far-seeing was Katrine’s gift. With her help as his main confidant, Solomon made the kingdom happy and prosperous. The land was a Mecca for trade, with ships coming from foreign shores like South India, Ophir, and Tarshish. Camel trains from across the vast deserts, from Arabia or Egypt, sometimes Tyre. The crops grew in fertile ground so the granaries were full each fall to feed the city’s citizens. Do this, she told Solomon, and he did. Do that, she advised, and he never refused. In this way Katrine felt she served both the Spirit and her country. Solomon was known far and wide as a good king, a fair and caring ruler over his people.

  At least he had been a fine man and king until he met Sheba, the queen of a land in Ethiopia, a country none of Solomon’s people had ever seen. When Katrine first met Sheba, she’d been highly impressed. The young girl’s hair was braided with gold threads all across her scalp. She wore a gold bodice that sparkled in the sun and a long, body-hugging, diaphanous scarlet skirt worked with streaks of gold thread. Her skin was even darker than any of Solomon’s people, so dark it was like stony night. The contrast between her color and her clothes made her look like a waltzing, ribald angel. She came to Solomon bearing gifts—barrels of fragrant olive oil, tankards of rich, heady wine, dried mango and coconut, barrels of gold nuggets. She bowed to him and when she smiled the audience was swayed to love her.

  It was the first night of the queen’s visit when Katrine saw the vision of downfall. The next morning she hurried to Solomon’s chambers. He sat, immersed with writing on a scroll, perched on a cane chair before a table inlaid with chips of abalone. He paused in his work, looked up, and frowned.

  “Something is wrong, isn’t it?” he asked. “I don’t have to far-see to know from the look on your face.”

  “Master! The woman from over the sea! She brings dissolution and catastrophe with her.”

  “Are you speaking of Sheba, our latest visitor?”

  “I am, Master. I saw a vision wherein she...she...”

  He waved at her with his quill pen. “Katrine, isn’t it too early to make these kinds of pronouncements on a stranger? Shouldn’t we give the girl a small chance to show herself either good or evil?”

  “But, Master, she’ll manipulate you. She’ll bring down the tem...”

  He spoke a word meaning the whole idea ridiculous and returned his attention to the scroll. “She’s just a girl. I’m not afraid of a girl.”

  Katrine, dismissed, bowed low and backed from the room. She had failed to warn him, to make him understand the seriousness of her vision. She would have to approach him again when the girl began to work her magic. She mustn’t let her master and her country be brought to ruin.

  That evening the empress sent carriage bearers to the palace where Katrine lived in a room separate from Solomon, asking her to come. When Katrine told her sister of the dire warning, the empress laughed, for she was sometimes amused by the idea of far-seeing. “You don’t know that for sure, Kat. The girl’s so clever and generous. She’s such good company. She even brought h
er own dancers for our evening’s amusement.”

  “You’re seeing the outward person,” Katrine insisted. “It’s the inner one of which I speak. The inner one is dark purple as the rind of shriveled valley grapes. I tell you, she’ll bring down Solomon.”

  The empress laughed happily at the idea of dried grapes and sent her maid servant to fetch a platter of them. “Since this gift has befallen you, your worries have mounted, my sister. You know yourself sometimes they are for nothing.”

  It was true some of Katrine’s visions failed to materialize. She believed it was because she’d waylaid the chaos by turning the people involved another way, speaking a different phrase, or praying a new prayer to some old deity. How could she explain some visions remained unfulfilled only because her advice had prevented them? She couldn’t prove it.

  ***

  Solomon took Sheba to his bed. The whole city knew it and none more intimately than Katrine. She rarely moved beyond her quarters in the palace, but during the times she did, she heard the two of them cavorting, laughing, and sometimes grunting like animals in rut. Katrine spent more time consulting the Great Spirit that moved her, and asking for intervention. The girl seemed no threat. She was the king’s plaything at the moment, but in time he would be mad for her. He would be willing to die for her. He would be so snared in her golden tendrils of mystery, he’d never waggle free.

  Katrine barely saw her master as his time was taken up with Sheba. Therefore, Katrine watched for the woman when she went for her ablutions. She was a fastidious woman and bathed daily, surrounded by her dark handmaidens. Katrine intruded, walking toward the pool set in the floor and taking a low position on a turquoise cushion. She smiled innocently at the worldly girl. “Your skin is so beautiful,” she said.

  Sheba eyed her carefully. She said, “I bathe in goat milk as you can see. It keeps my skin soft and pliant. Are you the king’s witchdoctor?”

  Katrine, taken off-balance, laughed then covered her mouth. One should not laugh at a personage as great as a queen. “I’m sorry, I was startled. No, I’m a friend of the king and his advisor.”