Nothing but a Smile

by Steve Amick

  He tried to tell the guy he could just take out a small business loan from the GI Bill, buy it from the old goat himself, direct.

  “Save that for the next location, when you branch out. Or for a delivery truck or something. This is a wedding present. End of discussion.” And as if to make it final, Wink walked over to the cash register and dropped the keys on the little worn wooden counter, and they stood and stared at each other for a time.

  This business about a wedding present, on top of his insistence that Reenie needed to sign the papers, too, made it pretty clear, Keeney thought, what this was about. Even more than the issues with his injury and discharge, the guy felt guilty about the way he'd treated Reenie. Or felt he'd treated her. As far as Keeney could tell himself, Reenie didn't seem to have any real beef with her old flame. But they both got the idea sometimes that Wink felt he'd treated her a little like a victory girl, never a serious girlfriend or potential wife. All the better for me to come along, was the way Keeney saw it, but if the guy needed to make some grand gesture like this for it to sit right with him, peachy.

  “Thanks then,” Keeney said finally. “You're something else.”

  “As are you,” Wink said. “And you're welcome. With only one string attached.” He raised a finger in the air. “Not really a condition. A request. I want you to help me with something. Once you're settled in, just let me shoot a photo essay of you running this place, showing how you make it work, the daily stuff and how you've adapted.”

  Keeney sucked his teeth. He wasn't crazy about having his picture taken, even when the hook was out of sight. Then again, folks stared all the time anyway, especially kids and 4-F types, so what the hey? What he'd seen of Wink's more serious photo work, it probably would turn out pretty nice.

  He asked Wink if there'd be half-naked girls in the shots, prancing around the shop, flashing their ta-tas while he sold magazines and newspapers and gum.

  Wink grinned. “Not unless that's how you normally run this joint. And if it is, I think maybe I do want to keep a piece of this, because you're sitting on a gold mine, my friend!”

  “Too late,” he told him. “You're out.”

  “Cheap bastard,” Wink muttered. “Fucking ingrate.”

  “Degenerate,” Keeney shot back.

  Wink stuck out his hand to shake, and it turned into a little bit of a quick embrace—not much, just a backslapping shoulder grab, the way things sometimes got back in the service, when no one wanted to choke up and get gooey about things, but they sort of were. Keeney didn't want to think about it too much and get all blubbery, but thinking about his hand and the “adapting” Wink was talking about made him think about how far he'd come himself since going through physical therapy. And not just in operating the hook. He remembered how he'd thought, lying in that hospital cot, that the world was pretty much a dark place that took things from you. And maybe it was, if you didn't make an effort to fall in with the right group of people, in which case, maybe all bets were off on the world making any headway in the taking things department.

  At the door, Keeney told him, “You're the swellest guy ever once screwed my wife.”

  “Once?” Wink said, grinning like a goddamn movie star. “Stop kidding yourself, brother!”

  Keeney told him he'd have to ask him to leave if he was going to engage in such risqué banter. “I own and operate an upstanding establishment here, sir.”

  “Yes,” Wink said, tipping his hat to leave. “You do.”

  84

  Mr. Price was still pressuring them to sell out. He'd just appear, unexpected, to “say hello” and start in again as if they'd never been through it before.

  Wink was starting to wonder if the man considered him a softer touch than Sal. Lately, he seemed to show up only when she was upstairs or in the darkroom or, more often, out on an errand. Maybe he'd switched tactics because they'd married and it was all common property, but Wink suspected, more likely, Sal was just too frank with the man and wouldn't listen as politely as Wink tried to do.

  Each time, Wink tried to act like he was hearing him out, then suggest that maybe at another time, in the future, but right now it just wasn't feasible.

  Mostly he managed not to be rude because of what he'd learned about the man since they designed the card deck for him. And he was afraid if he lost his temper with Jericho Price, it might not be the only thing he'd lose.

  Lately, Price's tactic seemed to be to make it “absolutely clear” that he had no interest in the camera shop itself—”just the licensing, images, and all other entities held by S&W Publishing.”

  He said it like he was doing them all a huge favor in not trying to take away her pop's twenty-year business.

  There was one thing Wink was damn glad to sell. And it was a relief to see the generous whim he was starting to consider slightly foolhardy benefit him in some way beyond just making him feel like less of a heel.

  He'd given Keeney a week or so to set up shop, get the place reconfigured the way he wanted it without any input from the old man, and then he approached him again about shooting a photo essay. Keeney could hardly turn him down.

  The first day Wink spent following him around the tiny shop, it was obvious the guy was straining to act natural, slipping into wooden poses with each click of the Argus. But by the second day, Keeney got used to him being there or forgot about him, because the shots were incredible. Going over the contacts in the darkroom, with Sal peeking over his shoulder, he thought he'd almost call them powerful and moving.

  His pal from back in the Pacific, now a photo editor at Life, thought so, too.

  85

  For the second night in a row, she stirred around one a.m. from dreams of being out in the middle of Lake Michigan, rocked by waves, and sat up, light-headed, queasy, and slipped out from beneath the gangly trap that was her long-limbed new husband and just made it, quietly enough not to disturb him, to the bathroom to throw up. If she hadn't known that morning was only an option, that sickness could come at any time of the day, and if she hadn't been well aware she was significantly late, she might think she was coming down with something.

  Yeah, boy! she thought. I'm coming down with something, all right.

  This second night, after emptying her stomach as quietly as possible, she pulled off her nightie, uncovering the stomach in question, and examined it in the mirror.

  This was as flat as it would ever be. Tugging Wink's ratty robe down from the back of the door, she left the nightie on the floor and put the robe on instead and went out into the hallway and down the stairs, turning on lights. In the studio, she began setting up for a shoot, positioning the lights, the camera, arranging some throw pillows on the wooden riser.

  She heard Wink on the stairs, tentative, probably still asleep.

  “Babe?” he said. “Everything okay?”

  She almost laughed. He sounded so quiet and unsure, as if maybe she were a prowler. What if she had been—calling her babe and being gentle would disarm a prowler?

  He stood before her now, squinty-eyed and swaying from sleep. “What's the idea?”

  “My swan song,” she said and dropped the bathrobe. “You need to get it down for the record. Before it's gone.”

  “Gone?” he said. He still didn't get it.

  “Changed. Everything changes, sweetheart. It's okay.” She was laughing at him a little now, mostly because he still seemed so confused, partly to keep from crying and worrying him more. She patted her belly and a look came over him. Maybe he finally got it, the big dope. She knew she was grinning at him like a moron, even if she felt like she might start seriously bawling any second. These would probably be totally unusable—full nudes, bush and all, with a grinning girl with misty eyes, pointing to her slender but seemingly unremarkable midsection—but she wanted them anyway. For posterity.

  “Just take my picture, dear. Take our picture.”

  86

  He came across a letter one day, among the general camera shop correspondence and bills
, that looked like fan mail, addressed to Weekend Sally in care of the store, though they now had a separate PO box down the street for such things. Right off, it was a little troubling, that much alone.

  On a single piece of lined legal paper, handwritten, it said only this:

  pricktease

  It was postmarked from right there in Chicago. He burned it immediately, keeping it from Sal.

  But he couldn't hide everything. She claimed that lately she'd begun to notice the occasional “creepy hoodlum teen” looking shifty, looking like he was watching her or following her. Wink didn't imagine it would be very reassuring to her to admit that if it were a threat, he didn't think it was threatening in a particularly sexual way because he was pretty sure they were watching and following him, too.

  Another time, soon after, returning one night from taking in a Loretta Young picture with Reenie and Keeney about a pretty farmer's daughter going to the big city and having to change her plans, Wink found a pane of glass smashed on the back door. Likely, it was kids again, hooligans. It seemed like an exact replica of the broken pane he'd repaired about three years before.

  “This,” he said, trying to get her to laugh about it, “is where I came in.”

  But he wasn't honestly sure it was something to laugh about.

  87

  They already had names picked out for the baby. If it was a girl, Manuela, her own mother's name, though they'd probably just call her Manny. If it was a boy, Billy, in honor of Chesty. That one had come from Wink. He insisted.

  Wink had a game he played with the baby. He'd pull back her blouse and place his lips to her belly and blow a wet raspberry so loud it made her nervous the baby would be born deaf. It vibrated and buzzed like one of those reducing machines with the belt you strapped around your middle and it shook you to pieces. (Reenie had purchased one with her money from one of her first photo shoots, but Sal refused to even try it, and anyway, Reenie never looked any different no matter what she did.)

  Even if she got him to knock it off with the raspberries, he'd feel around to see if he'd provoked any response. If he felt a few kicks or rolling maneuvers, he'd try it again or move on to the next assault—the photo lights. He was convinced the baby could see light and dark at this stage, and so he'd try to wake it up by turning on all the lights in the studio. Usually this did produce a few flutters, but then it would stop. She'd tell him that the damn lights were so hot, he was probably warming up the poor thing and making it drowsy. “It's not a rotisserie chicken,” she'd say.

  Wink usually seemed to feel remorse at this point and would pat her bulge gently, give it a kiss, and whisper, “Sorry, baby. You go to sleep now. Your daddy got a little carried away.” But sometimes he was too wound up, and any suggestion that the baby had dozed off only spurred Wink on to try one more time, and he'd turn on the radio and blast brassy big band music and keep feeling around, trying to make it fidget, until she'd have to tell him to take some pictures, just to get him to stop groping her stomach like a melon and turn down the music.

  She didn't mind posing for him like this, though she thought she would. She thought she'd feel huge and bloated and anything but sexy, but the truth was, she sometimes felt very sexy. And since these photos were for no one but them, who cared if she was no longer pinup material?

  To loll around nude in her state was so much more languid and lazy and swell. She imagined it was probably how those large Italian gals must have felt, a few centuries back, that they'd seen many times right up Adams at the Art Institute on free-admission-Monday nights. She liked to think, if he had his right hand back in shipshape order, these were the kind of pictures Wink would be making, only with oil paints and with big gaudy frames for wealthy patrons who would applaud him for just entering a room—not the kind of pictures you created under a fake name and delivered in manila envelopes and reproduced on cheap pulp and wrapped in brown paper. It was a little hard to explain the difference, but there seemed to be one.

  88

  He heard the voices before the pounding—a low murmur of slurred words and half-suppressed laughter: drunks out at the front of the shop, trying the handle.

  It was almost eleven on a Saturday night. And the worst possible time: he was shooting Sal in the altogether, baby belly and all. “For no-body but you-oo,” she'd cooed, loving it, lolling like a wave against the tumble of half a bolt of dark velvet he'd unrolled across one of the low risers.

  It wasn't the first study he'd shot of her like this, but it only got better each time. And she was noticeably bigger in each session, a state he found surprisingly beautiful. He loved experimenting with lighting the curves and roundness she now offered, and as much as he kidded around with her in these private sessions, once even coaxing her onto Chesty's aunt Sarah's ridiculous bear rug, it was still sometimes all he could do not to get choked up.

  But now there was this pounding and monkeyshines. “Cover up,” he said and stepped out into the hall, moving to the front of the shop and turning on more lights. He supposed they might be legitimately confused about the shop being open this late—had seen light from the little studio area in the back cascading out into the dark hall—but mostly they were certainly drunk and even more certainly foolish.

  “Closed!” he called, waving his arms to go away. “Eleven p.m.! …” adding, under his breath, “ … jackasses …”

  There were several grinning faces shoved down close in the glass of the front door, but one in particular stuck out front and center: puffy, like something underwater, a distorted halibut over at the Shedd Aquarium.

  But slightly more familiar than any anonymous halibut. He recognized him from the sports page—or at least the brand-new scar, just over the bushy left eyebrow. It was Jo-Jo “Kid” Fortunato, the Cicero Sicilian, local middleweight contender who'd won a big fight the night before. And he looked pie-eyed, out celebrating, no doubt.

  Keeney had asked him, just yesterday, if he wanted to get a couple tickets, and he'd declined, telling him boxing wasn't really his cup of tea. The truth was, he could hardly stand to leave Sal alone these days, even though the baby was still months off.

  “Bring out the girlies!” they chanted, pounding on the door, laughing hard. “Bring out the girlies!”

  With a crash, the glass shattered, and the boxer came toppling through. A half a second of silence followed, everyone stunned, his cohorts behind him staring in at their fallen leader, hunched over, halfway through the frame of the door. Then there was yelping and glass bottles skittering on the sidewalk and a shriek from behind Wink, which had to be Sal, trying to get covered up and probably still in the dark as to what the Jesus H. was going on out front.

  The prizefighter was cut up and bleeding when he righted himself, bellowing, “Weekend Sally! Come out, come out!” and his entourage, a gal or two among them, laughed now, maybe relieved he hadn't been guillotined by the falling glass.

  “Go!” Wink said and the group fell back, some of them latching onto the boxer by the coat, pulling him back out onto the sidewalk and away.

  Wink stood there, listening to the retreating shrieks and more bottles rolling on the sidewalk, trailing off into the distance.

  89

  It sounded like they'd fled, so she stuck her head out in the hall. “Sweetie?” she said, and then when she saw the damage, the glass glinting across the floor out front, “Oh my God!” She started toward him, but he held out his hand like a traffic cop.

  “Don't! You've got bare feet.”

  He was right. She backed away, telling him he should maybe call someone—the cops?

  “We don't need a cop,” he said, “we need a new window.” Moving to the phone behind the counter, he said he'd try Keeney, see if he could help him with the mess.

  Suddenly, he was back, lurching through the front door—a huge, grinning man with cuts on his face, and he was pointing at her. “Knew it!” She turned for the stairs, seeing Wink step out from behind the counter to intercept the intruder, but the man just
shoved him back with one hand and kept going, Wink sounding hurt, like he'd fallen hard back there or had the wind knocked out of him. She lurched toward the stairs but lost her footing, stumbling with a heavy weight suddenly on her. “Whoopsy!” He laughed, rolling off her, the two of them fumbling, trying to get to their feet. He'd miscalculated the first step, whether from being drunk or from his injury with the door, and probably meant to grab her rather than fall on her. She heard a woman shrieking that sounded an awful lot like her, and she flailed, all hands and nails, pushing him away, kicking, scratching, and he tottered back a little, weaving slightly on the bottom step with part of the robe in his fist, still grinning like he'd caught a prize, but his eyes were swollen and half open, and his words were slurred. “Mr. Price said you was here!”

  He tore the robe, pulling it open, hanging on to both pockets. She screamed, squirming, trying to snatch it back and close it.

  But he just stood over her, staring and squinting at her naked body, looking confused, looking like he was trying to refocus. Finally, he muttered, “Holy crap, lady! You're huge!”

  Behind him, Wink appeared, swinging the sash weight he used to strengthen his lame hand and bringing it down on the guy's skull.

  The big jerk slumped forward, and she didn't have time to scramble out of his way, so he fell on her again. She screamed and kicked, but Wink had him off her in no time, yanking him back by the collar, rolling him off. He was either out cold or at least too groggy to fight, as Wink heaved, dragging him away from her, the guy's huge head thumping down the stairs. She watched him trail away behind her husband, out the back door, into the alley.