by Bill Eidson
“You’re going to leave me to chase these nuts by myself?”
“God knows there are enough hungry kids out there who would be thrilled to work with the famous Peter Gallagher.”
Ben started to get into the Jeep when Peter grabbed his arm. “None of them are my old drinking buddies. Look, the work is what keeps you going. And the work you and I’ve done together is the best of our careers, and you know it. You going to let this new situation ruin everything?”
“I’m coming back. Just need some time away.”
Peter shook his head. “These stories won’t wait.”
Ben laughed. “Nothing I hate more than a goddamn pushy reporter. Listen, ask Kurt for another photographer. He’ll assign one.”
Peter shook his head. “You know I wouldn’t trust anyone else this early in the story. Give me a camera, I’ll do it myself.”
“You’d put your thumb in front of the lens.”
“C’mon,” Peter said. “Stay and shoot. Keep your mind on your work, the rest of this shit will fade away.”
Ben just looked at Peter, who kept his face sincere for a couple of beats before giving up and smiling sheepishly. “Hell, that’s what I tell myself, anyhow. Sometimes I’ll go a whole hour or two without thinking about Sarah or Cindy.”
Ben smiled slowly and got out of the truck. “Come here.” He opened the tailgate and pulled out a camera bag. He mounted a four-hundred millimeter lens onto an autofocus camera body, switched on the camera, and made sure it was set to the simplest programmed exposure mode. “This is where you turn it on. You press this button, and the lens will focus. You press it a little harder and it’ll take the picture. There are thirty-six shots of fast film in there and there’s plenty more in the bag. You know where I keep the key to the van.” He pointed to his old Ford, painted a nondescript gray. “That’ll give you room to shoot, a tripod, and a little urban camouflage. But stick to the horny senator, if you think you’ve got to do that story. Don’t go after that gangland boy on your own. Some of them are pretty camera shy.”
Ben switched the camera off and put it back into the bag. He draped the strap over Peter’s shoulder.
“I think you’re missing the point,” Peter said.
“So are you. Whether or not I quit Insider, and how I’ll learn to live with Kurt playing daddy to my kids are things that I need to think about long and hard—and on my own. I’d also like to do it without spying on someone through that hunk of metal, plastic, and glass. All right?”
Peter smiled ruefully. “Just took me so long to break you in, I don’t want to have to start from scratch with some Jimmy Olson.”
Ben shook Peter’s hand. “I appreciate the concern.”
He got in the Jeep and turned it around. Peter was bowed under the heavy weight of the bag. Ben rolled down the window. “All that said, don’t leave that camera out in the rain. I’ll need it when I get back.”
“It’ll all be here,” Peter said. “Safe and sound.”
Ben almost turned around several times on the five-hour drive north. It was one thing to pack and take off with the intention of being alone with your thoughts. It was quite another to actually be alone with them.
He stopped to pick up groceries and continued on to reach the lake just as the sun was falling behind the mountains. It was a marvelous sunset, the sky and water turning first scarlet, and then deep gold. A part of him ached for a camera to record it; a part of him felt relief that he had nothing to do but observe it.
He carried his supplies into the cabin quickly, feeling a bittersweet nostalgia for the place. The vacation excitement as a kid. Coming in and seeing his grandparents waiting. Swimming with his mother and father. His mother had thick black hair that would float against Ben’s arm when his dad towed them side by side on their backs.
“Harris family train,” his dad would say, his hand cupped under their chins.
Then as an adult, there were so many good memories embedded in the place with him and Andi. Even when they lived in San Francisco, they made it back to the cabin for vacations most years. Visit the old man, give the kids a sense of home. The kids on the braided rug in their bathing suits as Ben’s father told them one of his hunting stories.
“Will you take us sometime?” Jake would ask. “I’d use my dad’s gun.”
“That old thing?” Ben’s dad would jerk his thumb at the shotgun hanging over the mantelpiece. “It’d blow us all up.”
Ben’s father and grandfather had built the cabin themselves in the early fifties, several years before Ben was born. The image of his dad as a young veteran back from Europe felling trees alongside his own father had been alive in Ben ever since he was first old enough to hear the story.
The cabin was simple: a living area with the kitchen off to one side. Fireplace, to the left. Two small rooms in the back: one with a double bed, the other, bunks.
In the past few years, Ben felt the only thing he had managed to accomplish himself with the property was to keep up with the taxes and do minor repairs. Though his father had been dead for almost three years, and his grandfather twelve, Ben always felt as if the two of them were with him in the cabin.
And although neither had been judgmental men, now he felt ashamed in their presence.
Divorced man. Lost his children.
Ben’s mother was killed by a drunk behind the wheel of a logging truck when Ben was eleven. She was just a few weeks past her thirtieth birthday. As an adult, Ben could look back and see that his dad must have gone through what was a clinical depression. He lost his asphalt paving business by failing to show up at jobs. For days at a time, he didn’t leave the house. He just sat in front of the television. Face stubbled, gaunt. Smoking cigarette after cigarette.
Finally, Grandfather Harris came by late one night and said, “C’mon, deer season opens tomorrow. Dog’s in the truck.”
“No,” Ben’s dad said.
“I didn’t ask you. Just move your butt. You, too, Ben.”
Ben’s dad had been only an occasional hunter before his wife’s death. However, on that trip, Ben could still remember the color beginning to come back into his dad’s face. A sense of purpose, if not happiness, as he made his way through the woods with Grandfather Harris’s old Remington shotgun broken over his arm, loaded with deer slugs. They found nothing that day, nor the next two. But on their last morning out, he led Ben and Grandfather Harris into the woods and shot a buck.
Although Ben was sickened by the blood and the deer’s lolling head, the grim satisfaction on his father’s face was better than the crushing hopelessness he had been seeing.
Ben asked his father to teach him to hunt like that.
“If you want,” his dad said. “What else have we got to do?”
For the next two years, Ben hunted with his father and grandfather after whatever was in season. Duck, deer, coons, even bear. Ben’s father built up an impressive array of racks and mounted trophies, including the head of a four-hundred-fifty-pound black bear.
He also got a job at the Bath Iron Works, and forced himself through the motions of taking care of Ben. At night, Ben’s dad still spent hours in front of the television, smoking cigarettes. Not talking.
Ben learned to track, he learned how to control the dogs, he learned how to keep upwind of the animal he was stalking. He learned patience. The old Remington became his, and his father told him if he bagged a deer by his thirteenth birthday, he would give him a rifle.
But it wasn’t until a few weeks before that birthday that Ben fully realized how completely he had conned himself for the sake of his father. They were waiting in a stand the first week of deer season. It was a crisp, cold day with the sun just beginning to lower. A buck emerged from a thicket to drink from the stream. The deer picked its way along a carpet of red maple leaves, sniffing the wind cautiously, before splaying its legs wide to put its muzzle into the water.
Ben’s dad gestured for him to make the shot. Ben braced himself carefully, took aim … an
d realized that he had no desire to kill that deer.
To pull the trigger, yes.
To capture it, yes.
To somehow own what he was seeing before him, the liquid brown eyes, the arch of the deer’s powerful neck.
But to kill it, no.
And he didn’t want his dad to do it either.
Ben pointed the barrel off to the left and pulled the trigger. The deer wheeled away and was gone.
Anger flashed in his dad’s eyes. “What the hell happened?”
Ben slid down from the stand and walked back to the cabin alone.
Three weeks later, Ben caught what he believed was the same deer on film. It was a wet, raw November morning. His dad was in another stand about a mile away, unwilling to be part of “this nonsense.”
Truthfully, the shot was barely a success as a photo. Ben was using his mother’s old Brownie and from the distance away with the relatively wide lens, the deer was just a thumbnail-sized shape on the first prints. He had a camera store in Portland blow the shot up, crop it. He hung it on the wall in his bedroom. The shot was so soft after all the enlargement that it was more symbolic of the deer than representative. Ben knew that most people would find the shot nothing special.
But he kept coming back to it. The breathless feeling was there for him. The tension in his legs from the long wait. The cold. The soft sunlight filtering through a heavy cloud cover. The pressure to simply take the shot competing against the desire to get the composition right, to wait until the deer turned his way, cocked that rack of antlers in silhouette against the mountain stream.
Throughout that winter, Ben’s father moved from anger to confusion as Ben turned from hunting magazines to studying the work of Ansel Adams. That spring, the day before bear hunting season, his father told Ben that he would buy him the rifle even though Ben hadn’t bagged the deer.
Ben told him what he really wanted.
His dad looked at him silently, then said, “We’ll talk about it.”
But the next morning, his father postponed the hunting trip until the camera store opened and they went in together to buy a used Nikon. His dad smiled in the background as Ben haggled over a telephoto lens.
As they drove away in his dad’s old Plymouth, Ben looked at the camera on his lap, the jewel-like finish of the body, the heavy lens. Holding it gave him the same feeling as being out on a winding trail early in the morning. Breath making a white fog in the cold air. Not knowing what was around the next bend, but eager for it.
His dad said, “Just learn how to do it right.”
“Thanks, Dad.” Ben’s voice was husky.
His father rested his hand on his shoulder. “I should’ve seen it sooner, what you were doing.” His father paused. “I miss her, Ben. What I’ve really wanted to do since your mom was killed was to shoot that trucker. Not the guy that’s in prison now. I hate him, but now it’s too late. What I’ve wanted to do is hunt him down and shoot him before he got behind the rig, before he killed your mother. If I could, that’s what I’d do.”
His dad sighed. “But that can’t happen. And stacking up racks and mounting heads won’t make it happen. Neither is shoving you along to do something you don’t want. It’s time I sell my guns. Put your old Remington up on the wall for display. Maybe use it to bag a few ducks for dinner now and then.” His father smiled crookedly. “I’d kill for my family, but it’s too late. So I’m gonna stick close to the family I’ve still got.”
His father’s love had warmed Ben all his life. His dad had embraced Andi and the children completely. It was devastating for all of them when he died of a heart attack.
And yet, a year ago, Ben had been glad that his father wasn’t around to see him separated, going through a divorce. Ben couldn’t help wonder what his dad would think of him now. What would he think of Ben arriving at the cabin without his family? Of leaving his wife and children to another man?
After flipping the circuit breaker to turn on the power, Ben loaded up the refrigerator. He felt the cans of beer. Still cold. He grabbed two, and then went out to drag the old aluminum rowboat down to the water. He shoved off into the lake. He rowed for a long time, until the light he’d left glowing in the cabin was just a faint pinprick. His hands and back ached.
He lay along the thwart with his legs bent, his head on a flotation cushion. Slowly, the last color from the sky disappeared, and the stars emerged.
He sipped at the beer, waiting for some epiphany, some better understanding. But even in doing that, he knew he was using the old steps for himself. Why should the stars reveal anything about Ben Harris? Without him being able to frame them through ground glass, without being able to compose them against a stand of trees, black and silver in the moonlight, he had no control over them.
And without that, he could find little meaning.
How could she do it to us?
That’s what he really wanted to think about. A year ago, when she asked him to move out, he stumbled around for months, thinking, How could you do it? Have you forgotten who we are?
Fifteen years of marriage, gone.
His lover and best friend, gone.
Now this. Married.
The idea of Kurt dating Andi had been bad enough when Ben first heard through the kids that she was dating a senior editor at Boston Magazine. At the time, Ben knew Kurt only through his reputation, which was as an effective, if somewhat staid, editor. At that distance, the idea of Andi dating was barely palatable. The idea became hellish when Kurt won the hotly contested editor-in-chief position at the Insider, and became Ben’s boss.
Ben had been tortured by the image of them in bed; physically repelled at the thought of Kurt’s broad back moving over her. At times, it had taken all Ben had in him not to stand up in the office and knock Kurt out of his chair.
But the finality of this was worse. The idea of Kurt sitting at the breakfast table, pouring cereal for the kids, talking to them as if he were their father … and worse, the possibility, the likelihood that they would respond, that they would love this interloper.
Ben sat up, dipped his hand into the lake water and rubbed his face. Tried to wash some acceptance into himself. Told himself that times had changed; that Kurt was in and he was out. That he had to accept that he was joined at the hip with Kurt, a man he doubted he would’ve liked under any circumstances.
It was a nauseating pill, but Ben knew he had to swallow it somehow. For the sake of the kids. For some semblance of a friendship with Andi. As for the Insider, he’d give it a little more time. His work with Peter was the best of his career and he saw no reason to let Kurt take that away, too.
Ben shifted on the thwart, squirming to find some comfort on the hard wood, but he couldn’t. He felt out of sorts with the world. Not for the first time, he thought, How did I let this happen?
Andi had been just twenty-one when they met. Good girl from an old Boston family who had long ago lost their money, but not their expectations.
“Help her out,” said Jack Griswald, their editor from the Portland Press Herald. Ben, a veteran photojournalist of all of twenty-five himself, had taken her out on her first hard news assignment to cover an accident at a paper mill.
A workman had been killed, a horrific accident where his jacket had caught in a roller press and he had been pulled in. The accident itself was too gruesome for the paper. Ben limited himself to reaction shots from co-workers, and the spokesman for the mill. Then they went to the workman’s home to talk to his widow. Absolute de rigueur in those days. Ben hated it himself, but when he looked over at the new reporter then, her face white, her fists clenched over her notebook, he thought he would have to conduct the interview himself.
But she did her job as well as anyone could have expected. She talked quietly with the widow and learned about the workman, Jeff Kirkland, and listened to the woman’s grief, without ever asking that brutally cruel question so many reporters favored: “What are you feeling?”
And in the car on the way b
ack to the paper, Andi cried quietly, making no objection when Ben rested his hand on her shoulder. However, upstairs in the newsroom, she went back to her business, and wrote an article that was factual, but sensitively conveyed the loss of Kirkland to his wife and son.
All very professional, and Ben respected that about her.
On the side, she continued to help Dorothy Kirkland, first by helping her find a job, then with a follow-up article months later that brought in enough cash to establish a college trust fund for the Kirkland boy. For this, Andi gained the nickname “PollyAndi” from her peers. Griswald admonished her, saying that although the Kirkland articles had worked out, if she was to be a reporter, her role was not advocacy or charity.
“For me, he’s wrong,” Andi said, looking over Ben’s photos one night. They were friends at that point. He thought she was interested in him, but couldn’t tell for sure. He, on the other hand, was hopelessly in love. He was feeling like a coward for not pursuing things further.
She touched his prints, shots of children, of criminals, of accident victims. Shots of loneliness, of happiness, of loss, of serenity and euphoria.
“You manage it, though,” she said. “You show your indignation, your respect, your compassion. It’s all here.”
“I report first, though.”
“It’s still filtered through your head. Just like I choose what to write, you choose what to shoot. It’s inevitable that we editorialize.”
“That’s the challenge,” Ben agreed. “What I capture is not necessarily the whole reality, but the one I see. But I try to keep myself out of it.’’
“Mmmm. I want my words to do some good and I have to go about it the direct way.” Her eyes met his. “As a matter of fact, I appreciate directness in most things. I like to know what people are feeling.’’
“Uh-huh,” he said, feeling suddenly like he was about to jump out of a plane. “Seeing as you appreciate directness …”
“Which I do,” she said, smiling.
He told her how he felt about her. Stumbling a bit, but getting the words out.
