Summer of Light

by W. Dale Cramer

  He loved that woman. Her belief in him meant more than anything else in the world. It always had.

  He nodded slowly. “That’s all I ever needed from you,” he said. “All right. I’ll go downtown and take pictures. I’ll do the best I can. Even if it’s a wild goose, I’ll chase it. For you.”

  Polo.

  33

  * * *

  Goats and dogs and highborn ladies.

  MICK called Danny Baez the next day and told him what he was up to, sidling up to the idea at first because he figured Danny would think the whole notion of doing artsy photographs to try and impress some guy at the High Museum was a little froufrou. But Danny surprised him. He ragged him about being a “famous photographer” but Mick could tell he was excited about the idea. After checking the weather they set it up for the next Tuesday morning. Danny was running a crew on a high-rise on the north side of Atlanta.

  “Now, you know the safety man’s gonna run you off if he catches you. You’re not on the payroll. Uninsured,” Danny said. “You’ll have to wear your hard hat and go incognito, but if anybody gets curious I’ll cover for you. You think you can manage to look like an ironworker?”

  “Yeah. I think I can probably fake that.”

  On Tuesday morning Mick loaded his camera equipment in the truck and took off before daylight. The kids wouldn’t be up for an hour or two, and Layne was still in her robe.

  He still felt funny about leaving his kids with Celly. Going out the door he asked Layne if she was sure Celly would show. He was afraid the woman would come to her senses at some point and back out.

  “She’ll be here,” Layne said. “Everything is going to be fine. She has my number at work, and your cell number is written on the fridge. Go. Take pictures. Do good. And quit worrying—that’s my job.”

  He met up with Danny in the parking lot and walked onto the job as if he belonged there, with his camera equipment in a tool bag and the extra film in a lunchbox to keep it cool. Unless somebody recognized his face there was no chance he’d get tagged as an outsider. After nearly eight months away it felt good walking back onto the job with a bunch of guys, riding up in a crowded man-lift. Nobody talked much. It was still half dark, the daylight just starting to creep in from the east, and most of the guys were still half asleep. He had forgotten how cool it felt up there in the morning, even in summer. Invigorating.

  He kept pretty much to himself that morning because he didn’t want people posing for pictures. Danny didn’t tell anybody what Mick was up to, and they didn’t ask. Mick already knew a couple of Danny’s men. He’d worked with them before. There was a guy named Ralph who wore a pair of green goggles all the time—the little round ones like they issued for torch work, with an elastic strap. He wore them day and night, mostly because they made him look tough. Mick got up in the steel when Ralph wasn’t looking and got a shot of him way up high by himself, just standing free in the middle of a beam with one hand in his pocket, staring at the city. Using a long lens and bracing the camera against a vertical beam, Mick was able to zoom in and get the side-lit city in striking detail reflected in the lenses of his goggles. He also happened to catch him taking a bite out of a Twinkie.

  Mick didn’t go in with a plan, he just kept his eyes open and took lots of pictures. Everywhere he looked, stories appeared in front of his camera. Mick got several low-angle shots of an old electrician dragging a heavy cable out across the slab by himself, leaning into his work like a plow horse with the skyline of the city rising over him in the background. At break time he got pictures of guys laughing at each other’s lies—faces lined with work and sun, callused hands holding foil-wrapped cake from home, drinking coffee from plastic cups, opening a bottle with a pair of wornout side-cutters. Good faces. Solid, tough, trustworthy hands. When he left, right before lunch, Mick didn’t know what was in the bag, but he knew some of it was good.

  After he got on the job and started shooting pictures, Mick clean forgot about leaving his kids with Celly. He never gave it another thought until he was on his way back down the expressway in his truck. As he drove through downtown Atlanta the noon news said something about a baby-sitter in Colorado being killed in a bizarre household accident, and that’s when he thought about Celly. He picked up the cell phone and called home to check on the kids. That’s what he told himself, anyway. The truth was, he was afraid for Celly.

  Ben answered.

  “HELLO!!” He was screaming into the phone; probably because he thought Mick couldn’t hear him over the noise. There was an impossible racket in the background. It sounded the way Mick imagined the inside of the Poseidon sounded while it was rolling over—furniture crashing, glass breaking—that sort of thing. Above all the other insanity he could hear dogs barking. Lots of dogs. In the house.

  “What’s going on?!” he shouted.

  “WHAT?” Ben couldn’t hear. Mick could picture him putting a hand over his other ear.

  “I SAID, WHERE’S MISS CELLY?!!”

  “SHE’S TRYING TO GET THE DOGS OUT OF THE HOUSE!”

  Crash, rumble, the baying of hounds.

  They only owned one dog.

  “WHAT DOGS?” Mick had to repeat the question because it sounded like Ben ducked and dropped the phone.

  “HAP’S DOGS!” he yelled. “THEY CAME OVER TO PLAY!”

  Nine of them. Hap had nine beagles. Plus Andy, the large yellow leader of the pack.

  “WHAT ARE THE DOGS DOING IN THE HOUSE?”

  “THEY’RE CHASING THE GOAT!!”

  And then the line went dead. Mick calmly closed his cell phone, laid it on the seat, and drove a little faster.

  * * *

  He half expected to find Celly floating facedown in the pool when he got home, or hanging from the oak tree out front, or being loaded into an ambulance. But when he got there all the farm animals and packs of hounds had been routed. The doors were closed and the house was still standing.

  He found Celly in the den, feet planted, hands on hips, directing traffic while the kids—the kids—put the house back together. Her hair, or some of it anyway, was tied up on top of her head. She gave Mick a glance when he closed the back door, blew a strand of hair out of her face, rolled her eyes and turned her attention right back to the kids. Toad was sweeping up the remains of some porcelain figurines in the foyer, Dylan was vacuuming the living room, and Ben was picking up papers from the floor, thumping them into tight little piles and stacking the piles on the desk. Neatly.

  Mick eased up next to Celly, cautious of her mental state. There were goat pellets and hoof scratches on the dining room table and muddy paw prints all over the new sofa. The computer keyboard dangled off the desk by the cord, half its keys missing. Celly still hadn’t said a word, but she didn’t look like a sick woman on the verge of collapse. There was fire in her eyes and color in her cheeks. If anything, she looked defiant. Like a queen who had just put down a rebellion.

  “What happened?” Mick asked gently.

  She tossed her head to sling a ragged wisp of hair back from her face. Funny how she could pack pride into a little gesture like that, but it was unmistakable.

  “Mister Harrelson said he let his dogs loose for some sort of hunting excursion, but one of your children had left the back gate open and your dog, Andy”—she lipped the name in three syllables, A-yin-dy, with fairly obvious disgust—“was at that moment indulging himself in chasing that animal.” Meaning the goat. More disgust. Her aristocratic southern drawl got even more pronounced when she was mad.

  “Mister Harrelson’s pack of hounds heard the animal bleating and decided to join in the revelry. Meanwhile, another of your progeny opened the pool gate and a third, hearing all the commotion, opened the sliding glass door at precisely the wrong moment, whereupon he was bowled over by the aforementioned goat, who, fearing for his very life, bolted into the house hotly pursued by half the dogs in the county. Only after the entire slobbering horde had begun chasing itself in a circle through the den, the living room,
the foyer, the dining room, and back through the den, did the child have the presence of mind to pick himself up and close the door, thereby preventing them from finding their way back out of the house.”

  “I see,” Mick said, and he really did. It made perfect sense. He couldn’t figure out why it had never happened before. “Well, you handled it better than I would have, Celly. I’d have lost it.”

  She gave a satisfied little sniff and raised her nose a notch. “I know a man who can clean that sofa. Just have Layne call me. Dylan! Honey, you missed a spot. Over by the chair.”

  Dylan couldn’t really hear her over the high-pitched whine of the vacuum cleaner. When he looked up to see what she was saying he saw his dad and came running. Didn’t even turn off the vacuum, just left it.

  Soon as Mick scooped him up Dylan shot a suspicious look at Miz Weems and said into his ear, “I wanta swim.”

  Mick didn’t know all the details of what had passed between his kids and Celly, but the facts were fairly obvious: She was standing her ground, and Dylan was trying to go over her head. It was a test.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ll go swimming. Just as soon as y’all get done cleaning up this mess.” Then he put him down and shoved him gently him toward the still-running vacuum.

  “Thank you,” Celly said quietly.

  There was magic happening here. If this had happened on Mick’s watch he would have been fussing at the kids and cleaning up the whole mess himself. Celly was just standing there supervising.

  He waved a hand in the general direction of the kids. “How did you get them to, uh. . . ?”

  She gave him one of those down-the-nose looks.

  “Mister Brannigan,” she said, “it’s simply a matter of letting them know who’s in control. A child needs to know who’s in charge. If they think for one minute there’s no one bigger than them in control of things, it only frightens them.”

  It was a beautiful thing, and he could never have worked it out himself. Aristocracy, it seemed, had its strengths.

  34

  * * *

  The mold.

  THE NEXT Sunday morning Mick went downtown again. He told Layne he was going there to shoot pictures, and he did shoot pictures, but mainly he went for church. Not that Robert Dooley was a great preacher or anything—it’s just that when Mick was at the Beal Street Mission he felt useful. He could actually do something. It took him a little while to figure out that the main thing he never liked about church was that he couldn’t get in. When he was a kid he always thought church was like going to the movies: they took your money and put on a show. All he had to do was sit there, and sometimes pretend to sing. There was nothing for him to do, no way to be a part of what was going on.

  He did try to help Layne with the four-year-olds at her church—once. There was a little monster named Kevin who went around all morning bonking kids over the head with a pot. When church let out and Kevin’s mother came to the door to pick him up, Mick didn’t see him anyplace, but they could hear him bawling. Little Kevin was all folded up inside a cardboard box, and one of the kids he’d been bonking all morning was sitting on the lid. Bouncing. Laughing. Poor darling Kevin’s mother was shaking mad. Mick was afraid she would sue. Later, when he told Layne he thought the little demon got what he had coming, she said Mick probably wasn’t cut out to work in the nursery. It was always like that. He didn’t fit in anyplace.

  But when he went to Beal Street he knew what to do. There were things that needed doing, and Mick knew how to do them. Nobody at Beal Street expected him to talk a certain way or dress a certain way; there was just all this work that needed doing, and he knew how to work. The volunteer kids were all new, and yet anytime a kid had trouble with a homeless guy he’d come get Mick. Word must have gotten around on the street, because they didn’t try to con him anymore. The big guy—the one he put up against the wall the week before—came back as if nothing had happened, except that he was very polite and didn’t try to push Mick’s buttons anymore.

  When Mick first got there that morning he snapped a few pictures outside, but it was an overcast day and the light was diffused. He was still carrying the camera when he got down to the kitchen, where the Man With No Hands was orchestrating lunch, and he happened to catch one of those freak moments, completely by accident.

  There were three kids in the kitchen helping, including a girl who was frying a big pan of chicken on the stove—a tall wisp of a girl, her blond hair tied back with one of those gauzy scarves. She went to turn the chicken, and when she leaned over her cross necklace broke and fell right in the pan. She let out a little yelp and panicked, started sloshing the pan around and trying to fish her necklace out with the spatula she was holding. A bit of grease slopped over the side, caught fire, and the whole pan blazed up. She let go, screeching, and jumped back.

  But the Man With No Hands was watching. He moved in, smiling, and calmly reached right into the flames with his bare hook, picked out the necklace, raised it dripping out of the way and laid a cookie sheet over the frying pan to snuff out the fire. It all happened very quickly, but Mick managed to raise his camera and get one good shot, a closeup of a hook with that cross dangling from it, all shiny with grease, with flames in the background. There was an eerie beauty about it.

  After all the homeless people had been preached to and fed and given their staples for the week, and all the dishes were done and all the pots washed and put away, Mick took out the prints of the pictures he’d shot on Danny’s job and spread them on the steel worktable in the kitchen. The Man With No Hands liked them a lot, but he seemed preoccupied. He finally just came out and asked Mick for a ride up to Grady Hospital.

  On the way, Mick asked who they were going to see.

  “Bond,” he said. “James Bond. He’s a little . . . eccentric. You met him when the group from your church came down that time.”

  “Oh right, the guy with the eye patch, hiding behind the cars. Yeah, eccentric is a polite word. What happened to him?” Mick figured a heart attack, or an overdose.

  “Well, the information I got was kind of sketchy, but I heard he was panhandling up by Piedmont Park when some stranger offered him a drink of something out of the back of his car.”

  “And he drank it?”

  “Well, yes. Around here, that would be the normal thing to do. When Bond came to he was naked, tied upside-down to a tree in the middle of the woods. The stranger had poured acid on him.”

  Mick steeled himself, but when they got to the hospital it turned out that James Bond wasn’t hurt as badly as they expected. From the sound of the Man’s description Mick figured he would be unconscious and in critical condition, but James Bond was walking the halls in his hospital gown, still wearing his eye patch. He was doing a kind of spraddle-legged duck walk and didn’t seem to notice, or care, that his gown was flapping open in the back.

  “They were KGB,” he said, lifting his patch to peek around a corner, then dropping his voice to a whisper. “They got me in the privates. Wanta play cards?”

  They ended up back in the tub room at a little card table, teamed up against Bond and a wiry little black woman who had spilled flaming grease down the front of her legs and then ruined her hands trying to beat out the flames. She was fierce, and hugely entertaining. She’d slap a trump six down with a bandaged hand and then dare Mick to overtrump.

  “Don’t you mess with that six!”

  Mick thoroughly enjoyed the game. Bond kept tilting and squirming in his seat, trying to get comfortable, and the Man With No Hands fumbled a bit when he tried to pick up his cards, but nobody whined. They were happy and forgetful for a time, slapping cards down and talking trash. Mick got some great pictures—some of them with his camera.

  * * *

  Later, driving back to Overpass Plantation, Mick sensed that the hospital visit had brought back the Man’s own hospital memories. He was very quiet, and his thoughts were written on his face. Finally, Mick said to him, “People are strong, aren’t they
.”

  “Yes they are,” he nodded. “And weak. We need each other, if only for a card game.”

  Mick drove on in silence for a minute, then said, “You’re sure not like any preacher I ever met. You don’t fit the mold.”

  The Man With No Hands smiled. “There’s only one mold that matters.”

  They were passing through an old part of town, threeand four-story brick office buildings mixed with decrepit storefronts and weed-choked vacant lots, when Mick spotted an old homeless man coming down the sidewalk pushing a grocery cart full of junk. Wild gray hair hung down and crowded in on his face, and his clothes were ragged out worse than most. He was filthy. But the sun had come out, and now it lay across the homeless man at a perfect angle. Mick whipped the truck over to the curb and grabbed his camera, snapping it up to his eye and dialing in the focus.

  Looking at the man through the long lens while he was still a block and a half away, Mick saw something he could never have predicted. The man was bent and old, and leaning heavily into his grocery cart, but he kept turning his head and looking over his shoulder as if something was after him. That’s when Mick saw the nose. Just a flash in the sunlight, and with the hair Mick never got more than a glimpse of the rest of his face, but that nose had a distinct hook in it. The old man quickened his pace, and Mick saw that he was favoring his right leg, limping. His head was down, pushing that cart uphill with an awkward limp, but once Mick got him dialed in he saw that when he was facing forward he kept his head tilted over against his left shoulder.

  The way his father had always done.

  He lowered the camera without taking a picture, his mind filled with confusing and conflicting emotions. He couldn’t think straight.

  Then he saw why the old man kept looking back over his shoulder. Three young punks emerged from the alley he’d just left, about a half-block behind him. They were yelling and waving at him, laughing and taunting. When he picked up speed they broke into a trot and gained on him. Mick opened his door and got out of the truck.