Combat Camera

by Andrew Somerset

  “Suit yourself.”

  Zane drank the water. He could taste the chlorine. The blanket was cheap, made from some fuzzy plastic material. There was a hole in it, a cigarette burn. That blanket will probably burn faster than newspaper. Things like this should not be allowed.

  Chechnya was worse, much worse, than Sarajevo. The Russian way of war hadn’t changed since Stalingrad. In Groszny you lived in the cellar and came up to the surface only briefly to scrounge for food and firewood. If you were lucky, you made it back to the cellar. If not, the shells found you and you became a patch of snow filled with frozen blood. A shell leaves not very much.

  The Russian troops were ill-trained boys in ill-fitting uniforms, whose feet slowly rotted in the triangular footcloths that they wore in place of socks. The Russian way was to shell and bomb until the earth itself groaned and the air stank and shrieked with shrapnel, and then to throw the bodies of their soldiers into the maelstrom like logs into a wood chipper, to become more stains in the snow.

  A thousand pictures could not explain Groszny. And Zane had been at it too long. No picture could ever explain that.

  “It’s not healthy to bottle things up.”

  “You’re a shrink now?”

  “No, I’m your fuckin’ friend.”

  He got up and went into the bathroom and put the glass on the counter and splashed water on his face. Then he dried his face with a towel and went back into the room and sat on the edge of his bed, facing her.

  “It was a dream about Chechnya. I was trapped in the shelling. That’s all.”

  The splash of yellow light from the bedside lamp washed over her knees and left her face in half-darkness. High-contrast, highly directional light. You get dramatic, moody pictures. Zane got up to find his camera.

  “What do you think it means?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. It means I was in Chechnya once.”

  You get shelled, you get scared, you have a nightmare. And then some overpaid jackass starts in about repressed memories of your unhappy childhood and your secret fear that your father will cut off your penis with a carving knife. And people get paid for this.

  Zane picked up his camera and checked the film counter.

  “Don’t you ever talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t hide behind that camera forever.”

  He took a picture of her, sitting on the edge of her bed in an oversized T-shirt. A flash of irritation crossed her face. He took another shot.

  “I have better things to do.” She flicked off the light. He got up to put his camera away, utterly blind in the sudden darkness. Looking for his camera bag, he stubbed his toe and swore.

  “Serves you right,” she said, but she turned the light back on. He put the camera away and inspected his foot. It felt as if he should have been bleeding, but there was no visible damage. Shit, Zane, you’re just a big baby.

  He sat down on his bed again and looked at her for a long moment before he spoke.

  “They used to say, in the U.S. Civil War, that when you’d been in combat you’d seen the elephant.”

  “Seen the what?”

  “The elephant. I used to think it meant something deep and important, like the elephant was so big and incomprehensible and I had to find it and explain it. But then I found out what it really means.”

  She sat and watched him in the half-light, and again he wanted to take a picture, drawn by the starkness of the light.

  “Which is what?”

  “It’s a story: the circus comes to town and this yokel drives down there in his wagon because he wants to see the elephant. His horses see the elephant and they panic and bust up his wagon and kick the shit out of him. So he limps home, all beat to shit, and his wife says, how was the circus? Well, he says, I sure saw the elephant!”

  He got up and went back into the bathroom and got the water glass. He had a mickey of rum in his bag and he got it out and splashed some in the glass and then drank it and waited for the glow.

  “So you’re the yokel.”

  He refilled his glass and raised it to her in a mock toast.

  “I’m the yokel of fucking yokels.”

  “That Christine, she really messed you up.”

  “What?”

  “You were babbling about Christine.”

  “She messed me up, all right.” He refilled his glass for a third time.

  “Who’s Christine?”

  He looked carefully at Melissa. She was about the same age Christine had been, and probably as different as it was possible to be.

  “You know, when I started out, I thought I could save the world.”

  “Superman’s dead, man.”

  This threw him for a moment. He finished his rum and decided not to refill it. It was coming back as heartburn.

  “You get past that,” he said. “And then you just hate everyone. It makes it easier. If you hate everyone then you don’t have to hate yourself. And then you get tired of hating everyone and then you know how God feels.”

  “How does God feel?”

  “Sad and tired and helpless,” he said. He put the glass down and turned out the light and tried to go to sleep.

  Somewhere near the eastern edge of Alberta, Zane gained a new and visceral understanding that the continent is just plain wide. He arrived at this after about thirty minutes of silent travel, Melissa staring out the window at the unvarying landscape. If I’d known how big this country is, he said, I would have stayed home.

  She didn’t reply.

  The car covered ten further minutes of the continent’s width before a motorcycle passed, a Harley Davidson that came up behind and swung out to pass before Zane realized it was there.

  Melissa whooped.

  “You got owned, man.”

  For the Harley, the continent was somewhat narrower.

  “Man, you gotta pick it up,” she said.

  Pick it up and leave a smear of engine oil and bits of metal down the road as the engine drops out.

  “I should hitch a ride with that guy.”

  “I can let you out here if you like.”

  “You gotta love a Harley. Get up on that thing with the wind in your hair and just go.”

  The wind in your hair and the bugs in your teeth.

  “You ever actually ride on one?”

  “I used to have this boyfriend owned a Harley.”

  “I guess it goes with the territory.”

  “What territory?”

  He watched the road for a moment thinking how to put this tactfully, and then looked over at her.

  “No, shit, this was way back. Before I got into stripping.”

  Zane found himself shifting his weight again, pushing himself against the seat back.

  “How far back was that?”

  “I was fifteen.”

  “And your boyfriend had a Harley.”

  “He was thirty-five.”

  At fifteen, Zane was momentarily in love with one Caroline Pearson, who was not in love with him, momentarily or otherwise. Caroline Pearson was going steady with the captain of the football team; this playing field was by no means level, and Zane didn’t stand a chance. And this was the most serious personal crisis he faced during that school year.

  “I didn’t have anyplace to go. He kind of took me in.”

  “A real prince, was he?”

  Melissa rolled her window down two inches.

  “No,” she said. “He was not a real prince.”

  A dull ache had formed in the small of Zane’s back and he twisted in his seat in an effort to dispel it.

  “I fell for the bike. I just liked the thought of myself up on the back of that bike with the wind in my hair like some kind of wild thing. It seemed like a good deal to me.”

  “We’re gonna have to stop soon for gas.”

  She looked over and caught his eye and he looked back at the road.

  “Shit,” she said. “I wasn’t looking for a deal. I just wanted to be his
wild thing.”

  “Well.” You want to say something about teenagers, about dumb kids, but you both know that you don’t know the first damn thing about it. Not in this case.

  “He was a bad dude.”

  “Thirty five, going after teenaged girls.”

  “No, I mean a bad dude. He was dealing drugs, all kinds of stuff.”

  “This was Vancouver?”

  She shook her head.

  “Just some little shit-ass logging town.”

  “So he was the local dealer.”

  “More than that,” she said. “He was gonna turn me out.”

  “So you left.”

  “Shit, no. He fuckin’ owned me, man. I had no place to go. There’s no place you can run in a little shit-ass town like that. And the cops know all about him but they turn a blind eye.”

  “But you got out.”

  “He got busted.”

  “But you said the cops turned a blind eye.”

  “’Til I started fucking this cop.”

  Caroline has virgin lips, scrawled on Caroline Pearson’s locker door in thick black marker, and Zane at first didn’t quite get it. Or he didn’t want to get it. But you get older and the goddamn continent just keeps getting wider, and eventually, you get to know how God feels.

  And then Melissa was laughing.

  “Shit, Zane,” she said. “You fuckin’ fell for that?”

  And she leaned back in her seat and put her foot up on the dash and rolled her head back and laughed again. He didn’t think it was quite that funny.

  Zane’s car expired just outside Medicine Hat. At one moment he was zipping along at his customary pace, somewhere just below the speed at which a cop on patrol would feel obliged to take notice, and at the next moment he found the car coasting as the accelerator needle rotated inexorably back towards zero. The engine note became a letter of resignation: it continued to operate to fulfill its existing obligations, but had given its notice and henceforth would take on no new projects. And nothing that Zane did could compel it to reconsider its decision.

  Zane expressed his feelings concerning this turn of events in a single word. He pulled to the right edge of the shoulder and stopped, then took the engine out of gear and floored the accelerator. The engine responded that it would be working to rule from this point forward, but thanked him for showing interest in its career and future plans.

  “What’s the matter with it?”

  “If I knew that, nothing’d be the matter with it.”

  This was, of course, wishful thinking; Zane’s knowledge of motor vehicle maintenance was limited to adding gas and inflating tires. He put the engine out of its misery and then got out, lifted the hood and gazed upon the mystery within, while trying to conceal his bafflement.

  At a time like this you realize how far removed you are from those hardy souls of yesteryear who, faced with inoperable Model T Fords, stripped apart their engines and fashioned replacement gasket-seal-grommet-bushing-things out of old tin pots. Humanity in general has declined. We soon shall see computer scientists and nuclear physicists starving in droves, simply because they’re unable to open cans of baked beans without the aid of electrical appliances. Future archeologists will discover their shrunken bodies and their final scribbled notes: delivery of sufficient kinetic energy to can may cause it to rupture, allowing access to contents – could build machine for this purpose if only could find wood and nails to use with this hammer!

  Al Joad, you are not.

  “Do you know anything about cars?”

  “I was hoping it was something obvious.”

  “So you were faking it.”

  “Not faking it, per se.”

  “So it’s up to me to save the day.”

  Zane appraised her while he considered the possible meanings of this remark. This could be the final blow to your manhood: Melissa has a secret past as a licensed mechanic.

  “You know how to fix this?”

  “I know how to hitchhike into town and find a towtruck.”

  Which she did, leaving Zane at the roadside with a deceased automobile and a panicky conviction that she would not return. He thrust this thought aside by reminding himself that her bags were still in the trunk of his car. His story wasn’t going far without its luggage.

  Melissa returned in the front seat of a towtruck driven by a man who wore a battered ball cap, a shirt that declared his name to be Scott, and clean work pants that suggested he spent more time towing cars than working on them. Scott seemed disappointed to see Zane, a human signpost indicating the end of his role as white knight of the towtruck. He asked what the problem was, the question a challenge as clear as an oil-stained work glove thrown on the gravel at Zane’s feet.

  “It just more or less conked out.”

  “As in the engine died?”

  Scott snapped his chewing gum and affected an air of boundless capability.

  “Not exactly died. It won’t go any faster than a crawl.”

  “Make any noises when it conked out?”

  “Not really, no. In fact, it stopped making noises.”

  You bullshit artist. You’re no more going to fix this bastard here at the side of the road than I am. Nothing will reveal itself until this beast is hooked up to diagnostic equipment that neither of us understands. Why not cut to the part where you tow us into town, and you go back to fantasizing about the girl in the Snap-On Tools calendar?

  Scott knew enough to quit when he was ahead, and declined to look under the hood. On the way into Medicine Hat Melissa took the middle seat and carried on an animated conversation with him, and his ears turned bright red when she suggested that the disastrous and unrecoverable failure of Zane’s engine was for her a stroke of luck. Zane, for his part, considered the terrain of southern Alberta.

  Zane felt an imperative to keep moving. The Toyota was long past its best-before date. He left the car with a wrecker and took a cab to the nearest car dealership, where he stalked the lot looking at used cars.

  The ritual of tire-kicking summons salesmen like demons to an incantation; in this case, in the form of a man in sports jacket and tie who said his name was Rod. Rod shook hands with great force and bonhomie, and favoured words such as “gosh” and “golly” which in Zane’s estimation hadn’t been used since 1953, and even then, not by real people. Zane took this to indicate that the salesman’s name was Roderick but he adopted his Rod persona to come across as the kind of hokey, just-folks small-town Little-League-coaching everyman who you’d gladly give your money to in good faith, only to discover after the fact that you’d been screwed over on every aspect of the deal not expressly covered in writing. This understanding, Zane felt, was the basis of a solid working relationship in the field of automotive sales.

  “I’ll give you seven thousand bucks for it, cash on the nail, and forget the extended warranties and other bullshit.”

  Rod blinked and looked quickly at Melissa, unsure how to deal with the bluntness of Zane’s offer. He had made a point of ignoring the state of her face, as if it was none of his business and certainly not something he’d allow to deep-six the deal. Consequently, he didn’t look at her long.

  “What about the fabric treatment?”

  “No fabric treatment.”

  “And how much will you be putting down?”

  “Seven thousand bucks. Plus taxes and assorted bullshit. And we drive out of here today.”

  For reasons beyond Zane’s ken, the deal seemed suddenly urgent: he needed the car, now. He needed to be on the road again that same afternoon. And this problem, at least, he knew how to lick. What earnest towtruck Scott didn’t comprehend, with his faith in tools and know-how, was that all mechanical problems are ultimately solved by a liberal application of cash. And this point, Zane was not ashamed to drive home to his adopted daughter.

  “Seven thousand cash?”

  Rod’s mind had evidently recovered from its surprise at Zane’s unorthodox purchasing procedures, and had seized on the es
sentials of the deal, to wit, the commission. The reasons for Zane’s urgency, like the state of Melissa’s eye behind her sunglasses, he chose to ignore.

  “I’ll get you a cashier’s cheque. And I want to be out of here this afternoon. So let’s get cracking.”

  Rod got cracking.

  It transpired that in Medicine Hat, no amount of cracking is sufficient to close a deal on a used car and complete the necessary paperwork within two hours. The deal was not done until nearly one the following afternoon. Zane, feeling unaccountably agitated by his loss of momentum, soothed his nerves by proceeding to the local shopping mall. He felt an overpowering urge to own a wristwatch.

  He had lost the habit of wearing one. On the rare occasions when Zane wanted the time, he ordinarily checked his cellphone. But now, a watch seemed suddenly essential. He fussed at length over a large display of watches and finally selected a stainless steel dress watch with a black dial and silver numbers. The hands glowed in the dark and the face lit up at the press of a button, and the crystal was flat and reflected the sterile fluorescent light of the mall. He was not ashamed to admit that it appealed to him mostly because it was shiny.

  The watch did not fit. To adjust the band, he needed a pair of pliers, so he bought an expensive multi-tool featuring pliers, two knife blades (one serrated), Phillips and slot-head screwdrivers, a can opener, and a small saw. So equipped, and with his new wristwatch shining importantly on his wrist, he bought himself a pair of polarized sunglasses with blue mirror lenses, a mechanical pencil, two notebooks, a paperback novel to read on the trip, a new toothbrush, a thermos, two stainless steel coffee mugs and a compass for the dashboard of his new car.

  He told Melissa that he needed supplies. In truth, the mere act of shopping was calming his unexplained attacks of nerves. He had been driving so long that it felt strange to be in one place. Also, once you drop seven thousand on a car, the rest seems like spare change.

  He bought a new road atlas of Canada, with which he could navigate from Vancouver to St. John’s via Whitehorse, should the need arise. The road map in his glovebox was useless, partially because it covered only Ontario, but more importantly because it was no longer in his glovebox. It had gone missing long before the Toyota reached the wrecker’s yard, and Melissa insisted that she had no knowledge of its whereabouts.