“Hey! Look, guys! It’s the nanny!” Then he started in on Mick, giving him the cleverest lines he could come up with. Things like, “Ooooh, what you gonna do, nanny? Hit me with your purse?”
Mick knew three of the four ironworkers in line behind him. The other guys were all okay, it was just Tewk. His buddies couldn’t decide whether Tewk was funny or embarrassing, so they stuck their hands in their pockets and watched. Mick let it go, turned his back on them. Tewk was all mouth. Now, at least, he was leaving the girl alone.
That would have been the end of it except that Tewk never did know when to shut up. He kept razzing Mick behind his back. Dylan’s grip on his forehead tightened up, and Mick could feel him turning around to stare at Tewk. He muttered, “Where’s a light saber when you need one? Huh, pal?”
He got the tray with the burgers on it and put Dylan in a booster seat. Sure enough, a minute or two later Tewk and his buddies sat down right across the aisle from him. All through lunch, anytime Tewk thought of a clever nanny line he’d belt it out around a mouthful of fries and then pound on the table laughing at himself. Mick ignored him. Once or twice he heard Tewk’s buddies trying to get him to lighten up, but he just wouldn’t quit. Dylan could hardly eat his Happy Meal for watching him.
Mick kept his head down and somehow made it through lunch. Tewk and his friends straggled out into the parking lot while Mick was strapping Dylan in his car seat. Tewk stopped at the back of Mick’s truck to light a cigarette. The other three stopped, too, but they were looking antsy, edging toward their truck.
“Yo, nanny, you gonna take your kid swingin’? I heard you like to swing.” Talking about Mick’s little accident. Clever.
Mick closed the passenger door and brushed past Tewk as he walked around the back of the truck, trying hard to ignore him. But right when he was opening his door, about to get in and drive away and leave the jackass standing alone in the McDonald’s parking lot, Tewk said the wrong thing.
“Hey, Mick, I heard you quit your job so you could stay home and take care of a little retard. Is that him?”
Mick leaned in and told Dylan, “I’ll be back in a minute.”
He closed the door gently and walked right up to Tewk, who blew smoke in his face.
“What did you say?” Mick asked it very calmly, which, if Tewk had any sense, would have made him pay closer attention.
His buddies were standing back finishing their biggiesize drinks, sucking on straws. Grinning over his shoulder at them, Tewk mouthed, “Ooooh, Nanny’s mad! I think he’s gonna spank me!”
When he turned back around Mick hit him square in the teeth. His sunglasses flew off and he staggered back a step.
Tewk wiped fingertips across his lips, looked at the blood and tossed his cigarette away. If he’d still been grinning at that point Mick would have been worried, but he wasn’t. Tewk glanced at his buddies, and for just a second there was uncertainty in his eyes. That was all Mick needed to know.
Tewk came at him hard but he didn’t know what he was doing, throwing roundhouse punches. Tewk was taller and his arms were longer, so Mick covered up and slipped a few punches to get inside. The first solid uppercut buckled Tewk’s knees, then Mick caught him with an overhand right on the way down. It was all over in about thirty seconds.
Flat on his back in the parking lot with Mick standing over him and a crowd starting to gather, Tewk looked out of his good eye at his buddies like he thought they were supposed to help him out or something. All three of them just stood there with one hand in a pocket, still sucking on straws, kind of half smiling at him. They knew where the line was, and they knew he had stepped way over it when he bad-mouthed Mick’s kid. He had it coming. And he hadn’t heard the last of it, either. Mick almost felt sorry for him when they all got back to the job. Randy Tewksbury was in for a long afternoon.
Just to make sure they had plenty of ammunition, he bent over, grabbed a fistful of T-shirt, lifted Tewk a little so their faces were inches apart, and said, “Who’s your nanny?”
When he got in the truck he had to put Dylan back in his seat. He’d unbuckled himself and watched the whole thing through the back glass. Driving off, watching Tewk’s buddies help him to his feet, Mick could tell by their faces they were already razzing him, using that line on him. He was going to hear it a lot.
Dylan had a little smile on his face, a look of pure admiration. “You won,” he said. “You’re the dood duy.”
“Yeah, right,” he smirked. “I’m the good guy.”
It killed him that Dylan saw what happened. Something the therapist had said that very afternoon came back to haunt him, something about how Dylan “tended to process visual information much more readily than auditory.”
It ain’t what he hears you say, it’s what he sees you do. He felt like he’d let his son down, like he’d shown him something that ran against everything else they were trying to teach him. Sure, Tewk had it coming, but deep down Mick knew that didn’t stack up against the picture he’d planted in a four-year-old boy’s mind. A picture that said if somebody got on your nerves it was okay to clean his clock.
Then there was Tewk. Deep down Mick knew, he and Tewk were more alike than he cared to admit.
20
* * *
Still life with children.
AUBREY made four-by-six prints from the latest batch of negatives, and Layne naturally fell in love with the pictures of the kids. She just flipped past the ones of the barn, even though Mick told her from a purist standpoint he thought they were better. That was an Aubrey word—purist—but the ironworker in Mick got a kick out of wearing a label like that.
“See,” she said. “I told you. Pictures need people in them.” She had a maddening way of being right for the wrong reasons. Once, when he was working on the ignition in his truck, frustrated because he’d spent all morning trying to get it to crank, Layne walked by, pointed out a missing screw in the license plate frame and said maybe that was the problem. He explained very patiently that the license plate screw had absolutely nothing to do with the ignition, but she wouldn’t give it up. Finally, just to shut her up, he found a screw, ran it into the license plate, and then turned the key. That no-good truck fired right up. There was no way to convince her it was a coincidence.
He didn’t want to take pictures of the kids. Even Aubrey liked the pictures with kids in them, but Mick knew what he wanted to do. He didn’t want to shoot snapshots, he wanted to take photographs of barns and old houses. Landscapes. In his entire life this was his first and only attempt at artistic expression, and he knew exactly how he wanted to go about it.
He tried to explain artistic expression to Danny Baez the next weekend when he took Ben fishing down at Danny’s place on Jackson Lake. But even Danny didn’t see any point in taking pictures without people in them.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Sounds to me like you’re just being the same old stubborn Mick. I been trying to tell you for years, you need to loosen up and think outside the box. Like that time at the Ford plant. . . .”
And so it went.
They were in Danny’s bass boat, and on the way back to the dock Danny said he needed to pull his boat out and take it to a guy to work on the motor, so after they unloaded the boat Mick helped him put it on the trailer and haul it out. Danny lived on a little wedge-shaped lot at the back of a cove. He had been feuding with his neighbor over the property line, and his neighbor had just put up a six-foot fence right on the line, all the way down to the water. When Danny tried to drive out, he learned that the boat trailer wouldn’t fit between the house and the neighbor’s new fence. It was a big boat. The truck would go through all right, but the trailer was too wide.
They stood around scratching their heads for a while, debating about whether to tear the fence down or knock the back wall out of Danny’s garage. The neighbor was watching. The first idea would have gotten Danny locked up. The second would have been a disaster. Finally, Ben tugged at his sleeve.
“
Will the boat float with the trailer under it?” Ben asked.
It was a brilliant solution, but it took a kid to come up with it. Danny drove his truck around to the public ramp while Mick and Ben puttered down the lake in a bass boat with a trailer strapped to the bottom of it. Ben reminded his dad two or three times that it had been his idea.
Fortunately, Mick had tossed his camera bag into the boat with his fishing gear, and he took it out now. Ben’s chin was up, proud. The red setting sun sparkled the water and lit Ben’s profile, standing up there like a commodore in the front of the boat. For a moment Mick saw his own face through the camera lens, the clear expression of hope and pride he’d worn when he was Ben’s age, and he didn’t know whether to feel pride or pity.
They got some strange looks when they pulled the boat up to the ramp with the trailer already strapped to it, but Mick just nodded and acted like they did it that way all the time. His kids had a way of changing how he saw things—like Danny said, thinking outside the box. He thought about it a lot on the ride home, and it spilled over into the photography part of his brain. Sometimes a guy just had to swallow his pride. Purist or not, Mick would start taking the kids with him when he went to shoot landscapes.
One sparkling Saturday in late spring it paid off, bigtime.
There was an old homeplace not far away where a friend of Mick’s grew up. His friend’s father had died and his mother, in her eighties, ended up in a nursing home. The vacant homeplace had been up for sale for nearly a year. The old house sat in a grove of big V-shaped pecan trees, and the leaves were just starting to bud out. Somebody had planted those trees and spent years caring for them—somebody with kids and dogs and dreams, and a family name that would soon fade from the land. Set back among those pecan trees, the deserted farmhouse looked lonely and old, and full of stories it wanted to tell. Mick shot a few pictures with the morning sun slanting through the trees and across the covered porch with its two empty rocking chairs—a lot of sharp angles and high contrast. Somebody had left the front door open and the windows up. Lace curtains ruffled against the black emptiness inside. He set up the tripod and bracketed a couple shots of the front of the house before he noticed a face peeking out the corner of the right-hand window; Ben had slipped in through a back door to look around. He wasn’t smiling or anything, and all Mick could see was that face, staring out like a question mark, but somehow it made the shot come alive.
He set up to take some pictures angling down the porch from the side, centering on the empty rockers, the unswept leaves blown across the boards and in drifts against the wall, the screen door hanging from one hinge. Right before Mick snapped the picture, Toad stuck her head out the door. She was holding onto both sides of the frame and leaning out, looking right at him when the shutter snapped. Barefooted, with her white-blond hair tied back, and wearing that old cotton dress, he knew in the black-and-white stills she would come out looking like a ghost child from the past.
“Freeze,” Mick said. “Don’t move a muscle. NO! Do not grin. Put your face back like it was.” As she obeyed he noticed for the first time how thin she was and how the whites of her eyes made her look hungry, like a depressionera kid. He shot six pictures, a range of exposures, and he knew he had something special.
After he shot the house the kids dragged him around back to the barn. They’d already been playing in it. It was a huge barn, old but solid, with most of the brick-red paint still on the outside, although it was flaking and peeling pretty badly. The outside wasn’t much to look at—too old for a postcard and too new for art, but the kids had a ball playing in the hay. Somebody had dumped a mound of hay in front of the loft, and Ben and Toad saw right away that they could climb up and jump from the loft onto the haystack and slide down the sides. Dylan wanted no part of the loft. When they started climbing and jumping he latched onto Mick’s thigh like he was afraid somebody would try to force him to climb up there.
The big loading door up high on the front of the barn was wide open and a shaft of morning sunlight angled right in on the haystack, so Mick decided to set up the tripod and try to get some shots of them jumping. He set the shutter speed high and opened the aperture wide, but he wasn’t used to action shots so he didn’t expect much. When he thought he had shot enough he left the camera on the tripod and went over by the haystack to round up the kids. Toad, who happened to be in the loft right then, stood up and yelled, “Catch me!”
She flung herself out into space and Mick threw his arms up to catch her.
There was not one ounce of fear in that girl.
* * *
Mick was standing next to Aubrey waiting to see his reaction when he took the prints out of the dryer and laid them out to flatten. Going down the line Aubrey leaned close to them, nodded once or twice and said, “Mm-hmm.”
They developed three rolls. He got through the whole first roll with not much more than a nod, but when he got to the ones of Ben looking out the front window he took his glasses off and wiped them with a lens cloth, put them back on, leaned even closer and let out a low whistle. There were three photos just alike but shot at different exposures. Aubrey picked up the magnifying glass and bored in on the middle one. When he straightened up he ticked the bottom of the picture with a forefinger.
“This one’s excellent,” he said. “Striking.”
Three or four pictures later he blinked and his eyes went wide. “Another one!” he said, and then did a close study of the one with Toad leaning out the front door.
“Two out of seventy-two.” Mick shrugged. “Not a real high percentage.”
Aubrey shook his head. “I don’t think you understand the odds, Mick. A lot of photographers will shoot for a month just trying to get one picture of this quality. You’ve got two on the same roll.”
He didn’t say much else while he scanned the rest of them, until he got to the very last print. Mick didn’t see what it was before he snatched it up.
“Oh my.” Aubrey said it very quietly, but the look on his face—Mick thought he was about to cry.
“This one,” he said, shaking the picture lightly. “This is the grail, Mick.”
“Let me see it.” Mick hadn’t seen it before Aubrey snatched it up, so he didn’t know which one he was talking about. Aubrey ignored him and picked up the magnifying glass. Mick finally moved in and looked over his shoulder.
It was a picture of Toad flying through a shaft of light. Her arms were flung wide, her head back, her hair dancing wild and that cotton dress pressed against her by the wind of her flight. It was absolutely crystal clear. He could see specks of dust drifting in the sunlight and little scraps of hay frozen in midair all around her. Her face, tilted up toward the light, had a look Mick could only describe as pure childlike joy, and her eyes were closed. He remembered the moment well, but not the picture.
“I didn’t take that,” Mick said.
He frowned. “You didn’t?”
“No. See the hands in the bottom right?” It was just his outstretched hands; the rest of him was out of the frame.
“Yes.”
“Those are my hands.”
A shrug. “I thought maybe you set the timer.”
“Right. In precisely ten seconds my daughter is going to be flying through this exact spot. ’Fraid not. It must have been Dylan.”
“Your four-year-old?” One eyebrow went up.
“Well, look. There were only the four of us there. Here are my hands, and if you look close—right up here—you can see one of Ben’s feet hanging off the edge of the loft. There’s no way Dylan meant to do this. I don’t know, I guess he must have been playing with the switch and took it by accident.”
“Wow,” Aubrey said softly, staring at the picture. “I’ve always heard it’s better to be lucky than good. This one’s a winner, I guarantee it.”
“You serious?”
“Deadly. You never know what judges are looking for, but nobody could ignore this. It’s . . . surreal.”
“But I d
idn’t shoot it, Aubrey. I can’t enter a contest with a picture I didn’t take.”
“Did you set it up? Aim the camera, set the shutter speed and F-stop?”
“Yeah.”
“Then no matter who your assistant is, it’s your photo. You have three fine pictures here, Mick, and one of them is a drop-dead stunner. But for a juried show we need to submit six. They might not all make it in front of the judges, but you’re allowed six. Bring me three more the same caliber as these and you’re on your way. Maybe you’ll be able to quit your day job.”
“Right,” Mick snorted. “My day job has a no-quit clause in the contract.”
“Oh, and another thing. You need to start thinking about titles.”
“Titles?”
“For the photos. When you submit a group of photos for a show they have to be titled. Individually.”
“Man. That’s gonna be harder than taking the pictures. I’m no good at stuff like that. I’ll ask Dylan—maybe he’ll get lucky again.”
Aubrey couldn’t quit staring at that picture. “An accident,” he whispered. “Wow.”
For better or worse, Mick’s whole life felt like an accident.
“You never know what the day will bring,” he muttered.
21
* * *
Banana pudding and pine trees.
LAYNE’S church held their annual spring picnic at a local park when the dogwoods were in bloom. It was a gorgeous place, a picture of Georgia in the springtime—little islands of pine trees here and there surrounded by clusters of pink and white azaleas in full blossom, wide stretches of well-kept grass and some really fancy playground equipment for the kids. It was an Easter kind of day, all sunshine and crystal blue skies—and warm, but not the kind of stifling heat they knew they’d be getting in a month or two. Mick didn’t know many people there, but they made him feel right at home.
Summer of Light Page 16
