by Chris Fabry
“He’s not going to lock us out. I’m going to pay him.”
“But if he does, we lose all of this. I can’t afford to be without my computer and camera. And you don’t want to lose the new desk and your DVDs.” Jonah pawed on the floor with a foot. “My mom was saying you could put your stuff at our place. Just until we figure things out.”
“Jonah, what kind of image does that present? You and me working out of your mother’s house? Come on. We’ve been there before. Have a little faith. We’ll get through this.”
“I’m trying to be responsible. The equipment’s all we have.”
Devin scowled. “Fine. Give up. Move your stuff home to Mother if you’re scared. I don’t blame you.”
“It’s just until we can get settled,” Jonah said.
“No, it’s not. It’s giving up. If you take your camera and computer and stabilizer and tripods—you take that out of here and it’s over. It’s like a couple moving in together and one person says they need space. ‘I just need my space. Give me space.’ The other person moves out and it’s over. Kaput. They never see each other again.”
Jonah stared at the painfully thin carpet. “I’m not . . . What was her name?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“If I don’t take the equipment, it’s over for both of us. He locks those doors and the property inside is his. I had a friend who worked over at a Chuy’s when they closed, and the guy wouldn’t even return the purse she left behind the bar.”
“I told you, I’m going to pay.”
“With what?”
“Garrity’s family writes a check this week for sure. That will buy us more time.”
Jonah thought a minute. “Devin, we’ve known each other a long time.” He waited. “Agreed?”
“Yeah, we can agree on that.”
“And I’ve been as committed to this as you. I’ve shot video of old people who can do nothing but drool and I haven’t complained. . . . Okay, I’ve complained a little.”
“Agreed.”
“But I’ve been here every day. Well, almost every day. And I’ve worked my tail off.”
“You’ve worked hard but you still have quite a tail.”
“But there comes a point when you have to make a decision. When you have to see the truth.”
“Which is?”
“Maybe it’s not working. We could shoot this documentary another ten years and we wouldn’t find what you’re looking for. Even when we get a gig, like with Garrity or the weddings, they don’t pay.”
“The wedding paid.”
“They gave us cake and the check bounced.”
“It will work; trust me. Stop whining!”
“I’m not whining. This is the truth. Garrity was an anomaly. He was one in a million. Most of the people we’ve shot have been so stiff you couldn’t tell if rigor had set in. They couldn’t remember most of their lives and couldn’t communicate what they did remember. That one woman was so nervous—”
Devin waved him off. “Her daughter told me she had a weak bladder.”
“Weak? That’s like saying Niagara Falls gets a little fast at the edge.”
“I should have warned you.”
“You should have bought me a raincoat. And galoshes.”
“Jonah, this is part of the process. It’s paying our dues. Remember when I told you we had to pay our dues?”
“I’m fine paying dues. I can work long hours for no pay. I can keep going without a steady check. For a while. I can set up a shoot and get the audio and sequence the music. But I don’t think we’re getting anywhere. You’re a great visionary—you have ideas and you can see what is coming together on-screen—but old people are sometimes scared of you.”
“We’ve gotten some great footage.”
“That’s meandering toward pointless.”
“It’ll come together. And maybe we’ll hire somebody softer, more inviting, to do the interviews.”
“Devin, we don’t have money for rent. How do we hire another employee? Maybe we’ve reached the peak, you know?”
Devin leaned forward, his elbows on his empty month-at-a-glance calendar, his finger and thumb slightly apart. “We’re this close to something big. I can feel it. Something with the shoot that changes everything. We can’t give up. The people at Garrity’s funeral, if they ask who did that, the phone will ring off the hook and we won’t have time to tie our shoelaces. Then we’ll finish the documentary and win an Academy Award.”
Jonah stared blankly.
“Fine. Go unplug your stuff and leave.” Devin stood and put out a hand. “No hard feelings. I’ll get somebody else.”
“I don’t want you to get somebody else. Devin, I’m not your enemy.”
He pointed a finger at Jonah. “Every time you talk about quitting, you’re my enemy.”
“This is the first time I’ve said anything.”
“Then every time you entertain the idea of quitting, you’re going against me.”
“So now you’re doing the Minority Report thing? You can get inside my head?”
“My friend is my coworker who believes in what we’re doing. Somebody who buys the vision and runs with it, even when it gets tough. Have a little faith.”
Jonah unfolded a chair that was leaning against the wall by the bookcase. It was left over from the pizza restaurant and had flour stains on the seat. He sat and the rivets whined.
“My dad said something to me a long time ago,” Jonah said. “He said life is like a pretty girl who smiles at you and asks you to come to her house. It feels good to be with her. And you get all tingly and warm inside. And about the time you get up the nerve to ask her for a kiss, when you think she’ll say yes, she plants a boot in your mouth. This is not an if but a when. It’s going to happen. If it’s not a boot, it’s a sock full of nickels. Life swings it hard, and if it connects, the best thing you can hope for is to lose a few teeth.”
“Your dad was Mr. Encouragement, wasn’t he?”
“He was a realist.”
“Is that why he killed himself?”
Jonah looked away.
“I’m sorry—that was a cheap shot. Keep going. I want to hear what life does next. Seriously. Can you at least cash in the sock full of nickels or does life take those with her?”
Jonah rubbed the fuzz on his chin, then gestured with a hand. “His point was you have to make the right decisions early.”
“You mean like not going over to life’s house?”
“No.”
“Keeping her away from the sock drawer?”
“You have to decide how you’re going to handle the boot because if you don’t, you’ll give up when things get tough. Just sit down and stop living because it’s too hard. Life hurts too much. It kicks you in the teeth, which it did to him. And it’s doing it to us.”
“So you’re illustrating irony here? Because giving up is exactly what you’re doing.”
“I’m not giving up. I’m trying to move forward. I’m making a good decision now so I don’t have to suffer later. I keep the equipment instead of buying it back from the sheriff’s auction.”
Devin turned his chair toward the window.
“This business wasn’t a bad idea,” Jonah said. “It was good—”
“Leave.”
“We shouldn’t have set up the office. You should have saved the inheritance—”
“We can’t present a professional image from your mother’s spare bedroom.”
“We don’t have a professional image! Don’t you see that, Devin? We don’t have paying clients. We have a hundred hours of old people talking about life in the good old days.”
Devin waved a hand. “Whatever.”
Jonah walked to the door. When Devin turned, he saw something in the man’s face he hadn’t seen before. A resolve—defiance perhaps.
“You know what the problem is, Devin? I can’t tell you anything. I can’t talk about what’s bothering me. Or what’s wrong with the business. You don�
��t want a partner. You, you, you—” he stammered. “You want a lackey, a camera operator. Some techie who can get the shots and call it good and edit and take your direction. But you don’t want feedback. You don’t want correction. You don’t want to work together; you want a slave. You’re the only one who can have an idea. And that’s sad because I’m fully invested. I wanted to be part of this.”
Jonah ’s face was red when he finished, his voice raspy.
“Where’d that come from?” Devin said.
“I don’t know. I guess I’ve been waiting. All the things I wanted to say but was afraid to.”
“I should have told you to get out a long time ago. That was good.”
“You think so?”
“There was real energy there. Like you were feeling it.”
“You want me to try it again?”
“The ‘you, you, you’ part was impressive. It felt a little forced when you said ‘slave,’ but I’d keep it if you’d recorded it.”
“I’m trying to get more passion in my life. You know, like living from the heart instead of the head.”
“Your mom tell you that?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s right. It’s working. You convinced me. It was really good.”
“Thanks.”
“And you’re right.”
“About what?”
“All of it.”
Jonah lifted an eyebrow. “You think so?”
“Yeah, absolutely. I’m a narcissistic, overbearing, grandiose thinker who only wants to do things the best way because my way is the best way, and if you don’t like it, hit the road. It’s in my DNA. Passed from generation to generation. I don’t see reality. Someone like you can.”
“Someone like me? What does that mean?”
“Just that you’re different; you complement me. My weakness is your strength.”
“So you want to help me move the equipment?”
“No, give me a couple of days.”
“Devin . . .”
“He’s not changing the locks until the end of the week, right? Give me a chance to get the money. If it doesn’t come in, I’ll personally carry everything in here over to your mother’s house and put it in her spare bedroom. And I’ll do it from the heart, with passion.”
Jonah took a breath and shook his head. “End of the week. That’s it.”
Streams from Desert Gardens
scene 4
Wide shot of medical certificates on wall. Tight shot of Dr. Crenshaw’s name and his accreditation as an ob-gyn.
Crenshaw voice-over:
The year was 1937—toward the end of the Depression, but there were still heavy pockets of despair and hopelessness.
Picture of a young Crenshaw in hat and gloves.
Just surviving was the most anyone could hope for. Many children were sent to live with family members. Aunts and uncles who had means.
Wide shot of Crenshaw in his leather chair by the window. Early morning light.
My mother had begun to cry, days on end. I was very young. Too young to understand. But it’s here, in my memory. My mother stayed home that day with the other children and my father walked with me into town—he had sold the car. We got a ride from someone passing and they let us off in front of an ice cream shop. We couldn’t afford ice cream. We couldn’t afford food. But as a child you don’t understand that.
My father took me inside and ordered an ice cream cone and handed it to me. Then he had me sit down in a booth across from a man and woman I had never seen. And while I ate my ice cream, he walked out the door.
I never saw him again. I never saw my mother. Or my siblings.
Tight shot of Crenshaw’s pictures with his adoptive mother and father.
My adoptive parents couldn’t have children. They made an agreement with my mother and father that there would be no contact after the ice cream shop. Years later I asked them about what had happened. I suppose they thought I would forget. Everything was hush-hush; you didn’t talk about such things back then. You didn’t bring it up because it meant you were ungrateful or you were trying to cause trouble.
My biological parents knew they couldn’t take care of all of us children. I was the youngest of three. And they saw something in me, or so my adoptive mother said. They thought I had some intellect, a promise of something greater. My adoptive father was a medical doctor. My parents simply felt this would be better for me. So they gave me away.
Tight shot of Dr. Crenshaw’s face, eyes moist.
I’ve helped many people through the years. I like to think I’ve saved some lives. I don’t know if that’s true. I like to think their sacrifice led to my success in medicine. But I often think of what it must have taken for them to make that choice. What led to that decision? Did they argue? Were there tears? Struggle? I have no idea if they knew I became a doctor. Were they proud of me? Those questions have haunted me all my life.
Cutaway to Crenshaw’s bare feet, his empty slippers beside them.
Cut to picture of adoptive father, mother, and Crenshaw at medical school graduation.
I’ve often wondered if I would have made that kind of sacrifice. Or what would have happened if they had kept me. Would I still have become a doctor? In God’s providence or fate, would I have found a way into the medical profession, or would I have learned a trade, perhaps? Carpentry? Plumbing?
Tight shot of Crenshaw’s face as a tear escapes.
Is life worth living if the children are hungry? If it doesn’t improve, would it be better to stay together or separate? . . . A life hangs on these questions.
Fade to black.
CHAPTER 8
BEFORE LEAVING each evening—and most nights she didn’t leave until dark—Treha would visit Dr. Crenshaw, also known as Cranky Crenshaw. He had been one of her success stories, though the abyss he gravitated toward felt different from dementia. Not as much disease as disconnection and depression. It seemed there was a past cloud that hung over him, and Treha tried to be the warm air that pushed the cold front away.
She had no real clue of how it actually worked. All she knew was that some were locked inside themselves and couldn’t break through without help. She wasn’t sure where the keys came from, only that she had them. Each time she saw eyes open, she was given something. But what? Hope? A vision of the future? She lived in a world of possibility, where one day someone might call her forth as well. It was a little like the fairy tales of Rapunzel, trapped in the tower. Sleeping Beauty, waiting for the kiss. Perhaps her prince would come. She would awaken and find the world different, her mind repaired.
Or perhaps there was no one with a similar key for her.
She knocked lightly on the door and pushed it open. Sunlight faded on the lonely room and she saw his silhouette in the chair by the window, a well-read newspaper folded in front of him.
“Treha,” Dr. Crenshaw said. It sent a warm feeling through her. He tapped the chair beside him, identical to his own. “Come in and sit.”
She kicked off her shoes and sat, drawing her knees to herself and closing her eyes. “All right. Ready.”
“X-T-E-R-E,” he said, pronouncing each letter slowly.
As soon as he had said the final letter, she replied, “Exert.” In truth, she had known how to begin the word as soon as he said the first E.
“Good,” he said. “How about R-E-B-O-D?”
“Bored.”
“No, try another. There are several—”
“Robed. Orbed,” she said quickly, without effort.
“Yes, it was robed. I should run a timer, my dear.”
He gave her the next two words, which she solved just as quickly, and then a list of letters for the paper’s final jumble below a cartoon that was supposed to help.
The old man laughed, his eyes twinkling. Treha squeezed her legs with her arms and watched him fill the blanks with a pencil.
“I have been working on this all day, staring at it, moving the letters around in my brain, and you
simply hear them and fit them together. It’s amazing.”
She paused, not responding to the adulation. “How was your day?”
“Oh, it was full of excitement.” He gestured with a hand, overdramatizing the words. “Way too much to talk about. If I told you all of it, we’d be here all night and my blood pressure would be through the roof.” He chuckled, though he didn’t receive anything back. “How about you, Treha? Anything happen to you today?”
“I like hearing about you.”
He folded the paper neatly and she noticed he had made marks and notes on the front. He put the paper on the small table between them. Sitting back, he took a breath as if gaining momentum.
“All right, let me see. At breakfast the oatmeal was tepid and the orange juice was warm, so I mixed them together. I was doing it to disgust Elsie, of course. I called it ‘orangemeal.’ And just to get her goat, I tried it, and it turned out not that bad.”
“So you’re eating again.”
“I had some toast and the orangemeal, and for lunch I managed to down the mystery meat of the day and some yogurt. Oh, and the Lovebirds were back. Though she’s not doing well. She’s using oxygen now and seems more pale. You probably heard about it. He brought her a rose, a single red rose. I have no idea where he found it—probably took it from the garden—but the other women swooned when he wheeled himself up to her. He gave her the rose and kissed her on the cheek as she ate. It makes me sick the way those two carry on. Like teenagers.”
“I think they are sweet.”
“Yes, you would. You haven’t seen as much life as I have. There is a fine line between sweet and nauseating.” He smiled and shook as he laughed. “The Opera Singer was in rare form today—tuning her voice, running the scales. Then Hemingway arrived and thought he was in Pamplona. He was ordering drinks for everyone, saying the great DiMaggio would be coming soon, and then his eyes grew wide and he said the bulls were coming. He actually got out of his chair and put his ear to the floor and yelled that they were coming down the corridor and we needed to clear the dining room.”
Crenshaw imitated the man perfectly but Treha did not smile. She simply burrowed her head further behind her knees and watched.
