Shooting the Moon

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  I was waiting in the darkroom at two forty-five, clutching TJ’s film cartridge in my hand. Butterflies whirred in my stomach as I imagined accidentally exposing the film to the light or dropping it into a sink of developing solution and not being able to get it out. I was dying to know what the war was like. TJ’s letter to my parents hadn’t said much at all, just that he was adjusting, that he liked the guys in his unit, that he hadn’t had to work in a combat situation yet. There was nothing in it that let you taste the true flavor of war, smell the smoke of bombs, hear the helicopters as they took off from the middle of the jungle.

  “I think you’re asking a lot of TJ, Sport,” the Colonel said to me when I complained about his lackluster letter. “He’s been over there two weeks. He hasn’t had time to wipe his rear end yet, much less write us a poem about the joys of Southeast Asia.”

  “You think he likes it over there?” I asked. We were eating dinner, my mother’s famous squash casserole, the Colonel’s favorite, and I could tell I was wearing him thin with my comments and questions. The Colonel liked to be able to savor his food, especially when it came to cheesy casseroles covered with buttered breadcrumbs toasted to a golden brown.

  “I think he probably hates it,” the Colonel replied, his fork halfway to his mouth, strings of cheese stretching to his plate. “I think he’s probably thinking about this squash casserole right now and remembering how soft his pillow upstairs is.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” I said, and felt even more determined to learn how to develop TJ’s film. Then the true story would come out, with TJ at the center of it, the hero of it all.

  “Hollister said you were looking for me?”

  The GI who entered the room most closely resembled a whooping crane, or at least what I imagined a whooping crane to look like, tall and thin to the point of distraction, a pointy nose, the sort of person who didn’t quite seem comfortable in his skin but might surprise you by being an amazing dancer.

  “Are you Sgt. Byrd?”

  “Ah-yup. In the flesh. The one and only. That’s Byrd with a Y, by the way. I can’t fly, but I won’t crap on your windshield, either.”

  Well, what are you supposed to say to that? I pointed to the name strip sewn over the pocket of his flak jacket. It read BYRD, T. “What’s the T stand for?”

  “Theophilus. Middle name of James. You can call me Ted, if you want to be informal about it. I’ll call you ma’am, unless you have another moniker you’d prefer to be referred by.”

  “Jamie’s fine,” I told him. “You think you could teach me how to develop this roll of film?” I held it up. “My brother sent it to me from Vietnam.”

  Sgt. Byrd eyed the film with interest. “Where’s he at?”

  “He’s with the 51st Medical Company in Phu Bai,” I told him. “He’s a medic.”

  “Hard job. No gun, no glory. A lot of bullet-dodging. Medics are the true war heroes, if you want my opinion.”

  That’s when I decided I liked Sgt. Byrd.

  He set down the camera bag he was carrying and motioned me to toss him the film cartridge. “Good film, medium speed, which is right for the kind of photography I bet he’s doing,” he said, examining it. “And black-and-white, which makes our job a lot easier. Color processing is a headache. It’s better just to send color film to a lab.”

  He picked up a large white plastic spool from the counter. “You ever see one of these things? It’s called a film reel. The hardest part of the job. You’ve got to get the film from the cartridge onto this baby, and you’ve got to do it blind.” He pointed to a door on the other side of the room. “You sit in that little closet over there and make it happen.”

  “In the dark? What if I ruin the film before it’s even developed?”

  Sgt. Byrd reached into his bag and pulled out another film cartridge, which he handed to me. “You can practice on this one. I’ll shout directions to you through the door.”

  “I don’t want to ruin your film,” I protested.

  “Ain’t nothing but a thing, my young friend,” said Sgt. Byrd. “I’m all about the process. The end product is less important to me. You ruin some film, big deal. I’ll take more pictures.”

  I took the film, the film reel, a canister, and canister cover into the closet and closed the door. I was in complete darkness. “Okay, what do I do first?” I asked, fumbling around, trying to feel what was the reel, what was the canister, holding on to the film cartridge for dear life.

  He walked me through the process: I unwound the film from its spool and slid one end of it into a slot on the outer edge of the reel. The tricky part was loading the film onto the reel, which meant catching the edges of the film on the reel’s teeth. This took me about twenty tries and a lot of hot-blooded cussing to accomplish. Once I finally got the film loaded, all I had to do was insert the reel in the canister and cover it. That part was a cinch.

  “I think I’m ready to open the door now,” I told Sgt. Byrd.

  “Is the canister lid on tightly?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then emerge and let’s see how you did.”

  Sgt. Byrd was full of high praise for my work. “I’ve never seen anyone figure out how to load a film reel that fast,” he told me. “You’re a natural, kid.”

  I felt the heat rise to my cheeks. I’d never been called a natural at anything before. I was good at several things: throwing a football, unknotting knots, multiplying fractions. I could draw hands that almost looked real, except the thumbs were never 100 percent right. But no one had ever noticed a pure, natural-born talent in me before now.

  “You ready to try your brother’s film?”

  I nodded. “Combat ready.”

  A shadow seemed to pass over Sgt. Byrd’s face. “Let’s call this a combat-free zone, how ‘bout it? Combat-free, duty-free, fancy-free. Land of the free, home of the brave.” He smiled and handed me TJ’s film. “Time to get to work, what do you say, pal?”

  “Okay,” I told him. “I think I can do it.”

  He patted me on the shoulder. “Oh, you can do it all right. Like I said, you’re a natural.”

  He was right. I was.

  five

  TJ started taking pictures in junior high school, when we were stationed on an Army post in Bad Kreuznach, a small German town an hour or so from Frankfurt. When you’re an Army brat stationed in Germany, you’re in for serious sightseeing duty. You’ll be dragged from castles to river cruises to medieval cities that are damp and cold even in the heart of summer. Your parents will feel it is their solemn obligation to drag you to these places over and over, whenever relatives come visit, whenever it’s a bright and shiny Saturday and there’s no football to be played, whenever you complain because the TV stateside is so much better than the lousy Armed Forces Network.

  There are a couple of ways of dealing with your life as a constant tourist. If you’re like me, you’ll develop a serious comic book habit and never leave home without at least five Archies, three Beetle Baileys, and a Little Lulu or two tucked into your backpack. You’ll learn how to read comic books while you’re walking, and how to shove them into the back of your jeans the second your parents turn around to see why you’re moving so slow.

  If you’re like TJ, you’ll learn how to use a camera.

  Taking pictures was about the first thing TJ ever did that made him different from the Colonel. The Colonel was the gung-ho type, always in forward motion. But to take pictures, you have to stop, step back, look around. Taking pictures, TJ stood still for once in his life. Up until the time he picked up his first camera, he matched the Colonel stride for stride, no matter where we were. If we were home, you could find the two of them either playing football or working in the yard, also known as the Colonel’s domestic domain, digging, watering, weeding, putting pesticide powder on the rose bushes. If we were at the PX or commissary, TJ and the Colonel went into competition mode, seeing who could find the most items on the shopping list the fastest.

  But the
camera slowed TJ down. I think that’s why the Colonel never made a big to-do about TJ’s pictures the way everybody else did. And TJ’s pictures were great. Even I could see what my mother was always saying: TJ had a good eye. You’d look at pictures he’d taken of an old stone wall circling round some ancient city, and you’d see things you hadn’t when you were standing right in front of it. You’d see the images the shadowy parts of the stones made, or the little piece of graffiti someone had drawn where the wall met the ground.

  The Colonel didn’t see the point of it. “You can live your life or you can watch it,” he’d say every time one of our expeditions got slowed down because TJ wanted to take a picture of something, a statue, a duck waddling down the middle of the road, a little kid who’d just dropped his ice-cream cone on his lap. “But if you’re going to watch, stand back, because those of us who choose to live are going to run you down.”

  “Just because you never learned how to focus a camera doesn’t mean you have to pick on TJ,” my mother would chide him. The Colonel always laughed when she said that, but you could tell TJ’s photography still got on his nerves somehow.

  For years TJ took his film to the PX to be developed. But when we moved to Fort Hood his junior year, he signed up for a photography elective and learned how to develop his film himself. For the most part, his pictures were still a sightseer’s pictures: Here’s this interesting building, here’s this weird-looking tree, over there, see that 1958 Coupe DeVille?

  But after TJ enlisted, his pictures changed. One, he started taking pictures of people. Two, he started taking pictures of the moon.

  “Do you really think the moon is all that interesting?” I asked him one afternoon when we were sitting in the kitchen after school, not long after TJ had enlisted, his latest pictures spread out all over the table. In some of them, the moon was just a bright blob of light in the night sky. In others, it was thin and sharp-edged as a dime. “A comet would be interesting, and a meteor plummeting toward Earth would be very interesting. But the moon just kind of sits there all night.”

  “It’s got shadows in it,” TJ explained. “From the craters. I think the shadows are interesting. And I like the idea that now there are human footprints on the moon’s surface. There’s something pretty cool about that. And, I don’t know, it’s this place in space that people have actually gone to. Can you imagine flying through space to the moon?”

  “You ever want to be an astronaut?” I traced a full moon in one of TJ’s pictures, imagining I could see Neil Armstrong’s footprints on its surface.

  He shook his head. “Don’t have the brains for it.”

  “You’ve got to be pretty smart to be a doctor.”

  “I’m doctor-smart, but not astronaut-smart.”

  “Well, now that you’re joining the Army, maybe you’ll stay in. You could be a general. I bet you’re general-smart.”

  TJ grinned. “Maybe. Let’s see if I’m smart enough to stay alive first.”

  “If you’re going to be a medic, you won’t be in any big battles.” I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed about this fact.

  “Are you kidding? Who do you think is out there picking up the wounded? If you want to know the truth, I’d rather have gone Field Artillery. But I thought Mom would swallow the Medical Corps easier.”

  I looked at TJ with greater appreciation. Field Artillery. Now that was some serious business. Those were the guys with the mortars and the howitzers.

  My favorite pictures of TJ’s were of the track team. He photographed the races for the school paper, but the really good pictures were the ones of people right after they’d finished running. He’d get right up in their faces, and if you didn’t know they were runners you’d think they were witnessing momentous events, their faces were so joyful or full of pain, the sweat glistening like tears on their cheeks. I didn’t know much about art, but I knew those pictures were beautiful.

  “You go to college, you’ll have access to some great darkroom equipment on campus, I’d bet,” the Colonel said one night after dinner. It was during that period where TJ still had time to walk away from his enlistment contract, and the Colonel couldn’t keep himself from nudging TJ in that direction. I was pretty sure my mother was putting him up to it.

  We were out in the backyard, working in the garden. TJ leaned against the hoe he’d been turning over dirt with and said, “I’ll take my cameras with me to Vietnam. I bet I’ll get some great pictures there.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that you might not get sent to Vietnam?” the Colonel asked. He smiled. You could tell this idea had just come to him, and it had cheered him right up. “They need medics in all kinds of places. You might get stuck in the desert around Fort Huachuca. They might need you at Fort Dix, in New Jersey. You want to give up college for a trip to New Jersey?”

  “They’re sending everyone to Vietnam these days, sir,” I informed the Colonel, not so much to argue with him, but to show him I was a well-read individual. “It was in Time magazine. They’re going to draft a quarter-million men to send over there this year.”

  “Time magazine doesn’t know everything there is to know about what the Army does,” the Colonel grumbled. He dropped the subject and returned to his tomato plants, which were just beginning to shoot up out of the dirt.

  But TJ didn’t want to drop the subject. “I’ll be able to take some amazing pictures over there,” he said, sounding suddenly excited by the prospect. “How far south is Vietnam, anyway? It’s not in the Southern Hemisphere, is it? The sky would be completely different if it was.”

  He went inside to look up “Vietnam” in the encyclopedia. And that’s when I wondered if half the reason he enlisted was for the adventure of it. To take pictures of things he’d never seen before. He might never make it to the moon, but he could get an all-expenses-paid trip to Southeast Asia.

  The Colonel shook his head. “He thinks he’s going on safari with a telephoto lens. He thinks he’s going to have a spare second over there to take pictures. Like hell he will. He’ll be too busy trying not to get himself killed.”

  But the Colonel was wrong about that.

  He was wrong about a lot, it turned out.

  six

  I only had one friend who had a brother in Vietnam. So when I’d finished developing and printing TJ’s film, which took me two days in the darkroom, Sgt. Byrd walking me through the process step by step, I took the photographs to Cindy Lorenzo’s house, even though I knew there was only a slight chance she’d appreciate them. Cindy was not actually my first choice for an audience, but since my two best friends, Liz and Pam, had moved away, and my next best friend, Jennifer, was spending the summer with her grandmother, I didn’t have much of a pool to pick from.

  There were good things and bad things about being friends with Cindy Lorenzo. The worst thing was that she was an eleven-year-old girl whose brain was still on the first-grade level. She could read and dress herself and ride her fancy bicycle in wobbly circles around her front yard, but she couldn’t think straight at all. It was like her emotions got in the way of her thoughts. She was nervous and excitable and shaky around the edges. She hit and bit.

  The good things about being friends with Cindy Lorenzo included the fact that I could tell her my secrets and she never blabbed a word of what I said. I could brag on myself, and she wouldn’t raise her eyebrows every few seconds the way regular people would to keep me from getting too puffed up with my own greatness. Some days Cindy acted like she thought I was some sort of hero, and that’s a feeling that’s hard to resist, no matter who’s having it about you.

  “I’m not a ballerina, but I could be one if I wanted to,” Cindy informed me the minute I walked into the Lorenzos’ front hallway. “Joey said I couldn’t ever be a ballerina, so I kicked him.”

  Joey was one of Cindy’s invisible friends. Most little kids had invisible friends who were nice and friendly, but with Cindy’s crowd it was hit-or-miss. She complained all the time about her inv
isible friend Suzanne, who was a pincher. “I just stuck my tongue out at her, that’s what I did,” she’d say, to let me know that Suzanne’s pinching had not gone unavenged.

  “Bless your heart, Jamie, you don’t have a bit of tan this summer. You need to get yourself over to the swimming pool.” Mrs. Lorenzo swooped into the room in a cloud of rosy perfume. It was hard to make your eyes go from Mrs. Lorenzo to Cindy and back again and convince yourself they were related. Cindy was tall for her age, but she walked hunched over like an old lady, and her skin was splotchy and drab. Mrs. Lorenzo, on the other hand, fluttered and flittered hither and yon, high color on her cheeks, her hair piled on top of her head in one dramatic style or another. She and my mother were best friends, which is why Cindy and I got thrown together so much. That, and the fact that the Lorenzos lived across the street from us, and I could babysit Cindy when her parents wanted to go out to dinner.

  “Let’s go talk to Brutus,” Cindy said, tugging on my hand. “He says he misses you, even if he likes it better over here with me.”

  I followed her upstairs to her bedroom, looking as I always did at the family pictures that lined the wall above the railing. There were Cindy’s brothers, both grown, the older one, Nathan, even married with a baby. You could see that they were Mrs. Lorenzo’s children, no questions asked, with their handsome faces and pretty brown eyes.

  The picture that fascinated me the most was the one at the very top of the stairs, the family picture the Lorenzos had taken the year before, when both sons came over to visit at the same time, right before Mark, who was twenty-three, left for Vietnam. It was a “Who in this picture doesn’t belong?” picture, with the answer being Cindy. The other four Lorenzos were looking the photographer straight in the eye, their white teeth gleaming, dark hair shining, everything pressed and straight and starched, Col. Lorenzo and Mark both in uniform. Cindy sat slouched next to her mother, her nervous eyes wandering away from the camera, her shoulders slumped in their little-old-lady slouch. It was like someone had snuck her into the picture as a joke, and the other Lorenzos were ignoring her the best they could.