Shooting the Moon

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  “I didn’t know you were a writer,” he said after he’d finished the article. “This is real good.”

  “I’m not a writer,” I insisted. “I couldn’t write my way out of a paper bag. But newspaper reporting is different. You just put down the who, the when, the how, the where, and the why, and you’ve got it licked. There’s nothing fancy to it.”

  “It’s still real good.” Private Hollister pulled a deck of cards out from his top drawer and waved them at me. “What do you say?”

  “I don’t know. I’d hate for you to get ahead of me.”

  Private Hollister pulled a pad of paper out of the drawer. “Look, a whole new record-keeping device. The notebook’s retired. Nothing can ever change about how things ended this summer.”

  One game. August 29, 1969, the Friday before Labor Day. We’d started playing the minute I walked in, and we kept playing until five p.m., taking a fifteen-minute break for lunch. The day began with Private Hollister two games ahead of me, but by midafternoon we traded the lead with every hand.

  “You got him right where you want him, now show him where the door is,” Sgt. Byrd cheered from the pool table, where he was going through a stack of papers. He held one up to examine it more closely, and I realized he was looking at a photograph.

  “Is that one of yours?” I asked him. Ever since he started helping me in the darkroom, I’d wanted to see some of Sgt. Byrd’s photographs, but he never printed any. He only developed the film.

  I put down my cards and walked over to where he was. “Can I see one?”

  “Nothing to see, really,” Sgt. Byrd said, but he handed me the picture all the same. It was of a soldier sitting in front of a hootch, clearly somewhere in Vietnam.

  “I shot three hundred rolls of film over there,” Sgt. Byrd explained. “And now it’s all developed. So I thought I’d try printing some.”

  “This one came out good,” I told him, admiring how the print’s graininess gave it a sort of moody feel.

  “Yeah, it’s okay. But I don’t know how many more I can do.”

  “How come?”

  He let out a deep breath. “Too many memories. I look at all my negatives and I ask myself, why do I want to remember that?”

  “Maybe you don’t have a choice.”

  “Exactly, my dear Watson. That’s the very conclusion I’ve drawn myself. I’m between the proverbial rock and hard place, memory-wise.”

  “You giving up on the game, Jamie?” Private Hollister called. “Because I’m still ahead, and that’s fine by me.”

  I sat back down. And by four forty-five we were racing through the final hands. The person who reached one hundred points won the game, the set, the match, the whole enchilada.

  My last hand was a beauty. I was dealt two pairs off the bat and a run of three spades, the three, four and five. Every turn I picked up something I could use, discarded what I didn’t need. But when I looked up at Private Hollister, I could tell the same thing was happening for him. Should I go ahead and knock? If I waited too long, he might get that last card he needed, might rid himself of all deadwood and get gin.

  I knocked.

  It was close. Very close. I spread out my cards on the desk. I had one unmatched card.

  Private Hollister laid out his hand. Three pairs. The jack and queen of hearts. And two pieces of deadwood, cards that didn’t match anything.

  I’d won. By a card. On the last day of summer.

  “Man, oh man,” Private Hollister said, shaking his head. “You whupped me.”

  He wrote the points down in the notebook. And then, at the very bottom of all our scores, he signed his name and handed the notebook to me to do the same.

  “You keep it,” he said, when I tried to hand it back to him. “Just so you remember all the good times we had playing. That’s about the most fun I’ve ever had playing cards. It ain’t fun unless you’re playing with somebody who knows what they’re doing.”

  I could have cried. I didn’t, but I could have.

  Now I eyed the deck of cards, wondering if it would spoil things to ever play gin rummy with Private Hollister again. Maybe I should leave the memory of my amazing victory in pristine condition, unmuddied by any later losses.

  Oh, what the heck. I took a seat across from Private Hollister. “Deal ‘em,” I ordered.

  For a while I checked in at the rec center two or three times a week, sometimes hanging around to play cards, other times just stopping in to wave and then heading on to somewhere else. School was running me ragged. Mrs. Ronco kept assigning me newspaper articles, and it seemed like I was doing everybody’s darkroom work for them. Alice Freeman said she bet our newspaper would win some sort of prize for photography, I did such a great job making the pictures look good.

  At first, every time I stopped by the rec center, my heart beat a couple beats faster right before I walked in. Would Private Hollister still be there? The Colonel had never given me a direct yes or no about helping him, and I knew I shouldn’t ask. It went against protocol to ask about a soldier’s orders, and I’d done it once. I couldn’t do it again.

  But after a few weeks, I relaxed. It seemed clear that Private Hollister wasn’t going anywhere. I relaxed so much, sometimes I went for a week without checking on him. Alice had started teaching me to take pictures using her camera. She thought it was crazy that I knew so much about developing and printing film and not a thing in the world about photography, which she informed me was the art of writing with light. We’d stay after school and take pictures of the football team, the lockers, the janitorial staff, all kinds of different stuff, just to see how interesting we could make it look.

  One afternoon when I got home from school there was a roll of film from TJ waiting for me. “Any letter?” I asked my mom, who was writing out a grocery list on the kitchen table.

  “I don’t know if he wrote you one. He sent a short one to Daddy and me. Not much news. He says he wants to learn to fly a helicopter.”

  Of course there was no letter in the envelope he sent me, just the film. I decided to go ahead and develop it that afternoon, and if I didn’t have time to print it, I could take the negatives to school with me the next day and work in the darkroom there.

  “Don’t even ask me to play cards,” I called out as I walked into the rec center. “I don’t have the time. I’ve got a roll of a film to develop and a history test to study for. It’s all about Greek columns, if you can believe it. Like anybody needs to know that stuff.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not sure I follow you.”

  The soldier sitting at Private Hollister’s desk was not Private Hollister. He didn’t bear the least resemblance to Private Hollister. He was heavy-set and bifocaled and had a five o’clock shadow. I wasn’t sure if Private Hollister actually shaved more than once a week.

  “Where’s Private Hollister?” I asked, realizing it had been over a week since I’d seen him, maybe two. “He’s supposed to be working here.”

  “Reassigned. I’m Private Grenier. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Reassigned where?”

  “1st Signal.”

  “Here? At Fort Hood?”

  “Not sure. He might have been with one of the units that shipped out to the Third Corps Tactical Zone last week.”

  “Vietnam?”

  “Saigon or thereabouts. Place called the Parrot’s Beak. Buddy of mine at Fort Sill was there. Said it was pretty grim.”

  Panic rocked me like a hurricane wind. I’d stopped paying attention and now Private Hollister was gone. I ran from the rec center and looked around wildly, as though maybe it wasn’t too late, maybe there was still time to find him. But there was nothing to see, just the blank-faced buildings that lined Battalion Avenue, typical Army architecture, nothing there to give you a plan for what to do next, nothing to give you one single answer.

  There was only one place I could go for answers, and that was the chief of staff’s office. If I wanted to know what happened to Private
Hollister, I’d have to ask the Colonel.

  fifteen

  “He can’t see you right now, honey. He’s on an important phone call.”

  Miss Murlene, the Colonel’s secretary, smiled at me and held out a plate of cookies. “Mama made these last night, special for Col. Dexter. She thinks the world of him. Take one; they’re snicker-doodles.”

  I took a cookie and munched on it without actually tasting it. How could I have let Private Hollister get away from me? I counted back the days since I’d seen him last. Ten. Ten days. Anything could have happened in that amount of time. He could have been shipped out to Vietnam, killed, and returned to the States in a body bag in ten days, easy.

  “You want to sit down, sweetheart?” Miss Murlene pointed to a row of hardbacked chairs lined up against the wall outside of the Colonel’s office. “I don’t know what his phone call’s about, so I can’t tell you how long he’s going to be.”

  I sat down on the middle chair, taking another cookie from Miss Murlene. I immediately started fidgeting. “Are you sure you can’t interrupt him?”

  Miss Murlene shook her head sadly. “Oh, no, honey, you know how your daddy is. That’s the number one rule around here: no interrupting Col. Dexter when he’s on the phone.”

  “What if it was an emergency?”

  “What’s your emergency, honey? Did something awful happen at school? Awful things were always happening to me at school. One time I spilt orangeade all over my new skirt at lunch, and I just cried and cried. My sister had to call Mama and tell her to come bring me a clean skirt, or else I’d just have to come home. Did you spill something on your clothes at school, darlin’?”

  “No, ma’am. There’s just something I need to know.”

  Miss Murlene smiled at me. “That’s sweet, coming all this way to ask your daddy a question. You children really look up to him, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Miss Murlene turned back to her desk and began typing at machine-gun speed. Every few minutes she turned to see if the phone’s red light was still blinking, and when she saw that it was she’d turn to me and make a big sad-clown frown. I liked Miss Murlene, but I realized that she was not necessarily the best person to have around in a crisis. Especially since she apparently couldn’t recognize a person in a crisis situation when she saw one.

  “He’s off the phone!” Miss Murlene cried after I’d been sitting in that chair long enough for my rear end to go numb. She picked up the receiver and pressed a button. “Colonel? Jamie’s here to see you, sir. Yes, sir. I’ll send her in.”

  She turned to me and smiled like she’d just gotten me a date with Santa Claus. “Go on in, honey. He’ll see you now.”

  When I opened the door, the Colonel was getting up from his desk, which was the size of a small car. On the wall behind him hung plaques in neat rows announcing his various awards and honors, and directly over his head was the 1st Cavalry insignia, needlepointed and framed by my mother, a shield with a black horse’s head on the upper right-hand side, a black diagonal slash running beneath it, the background a yellow-gold. She made one for every post we were assigned. It was like having an embroidered history of the Colonel’s career.

  The Colonel didn’t bother with any small talk or niceties when he saw me. “I’ll take you home,” he said, reaching for his briefcase. “Your mother is waiting.”

  “I didn’t come here for a ride.” I walked in and closed the door behind me. “I needed to ask you something…. It’s about Private Hollister.”

  “It can wait,” the Colonel said, coming around to the front of his desk and taking his cap from the coat rack. “We need to get going.”

  You can get to a breaking point with some people, and I had reached it with the Colonel. I had spent my entire life loving him better than anybody else in the world, and looking up to him and admiring him, but I’d just about had it. I’d tried not to hold it against him that all my life he’d told me the Army way was the best way, but when it came down to it, he hadn’t done things the Army way at all. He’d done things the way everybody else did them: When he’d had a problem, he tried to take the cheater’s way out. I’d done my best to overlook this fact once I’d learned it, but I’d had enough, now that he was giving me the runaround with Private Hollister. Like he actually cared about protocol. Like he actually cared about the Army way of doing things so much he couldn’t tell me one way or another what had happened to my friend.

  I slammed my fist on his desk. Hard.

  “No, it can’t wait! No, it cannot. You’re going to tell me what happened to Private Hollister, and you’re going to tell me right now. Did you sign those orders? Is he in Vietnam?”

  The Colonel put his briefcase down. He put his hat on. “One dead boy in that family is enough,” he said in a steady voice. “More than enough.”

  It felt like every muscle in my body went slack when I realized what the Colonel was telling me. “So you didn’t sign the orders?”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, picking up his briefcase, he told me, “Your brother is missing. We need to go home.”

  It took me a full five minutes to comprehend what the Colonel had said. I’d followed him out of his office, past Miss Murlene’s desk, into the hallway, down two clattering flights of stairs, and outside into the late afternoon heat, the parking lot still pulsing with it, the tires just minutes away from melting. I’d slid gingerly into the car, the leather seats still hot enough to burn, and clicked on my seat belt before I fully understood what the Colonel meant when he said my brother was missing.

  He did not mean that TJ was lost in the supermarket.

  He did not mean that TJ had gone home to a friend’s house after school and had forgotten to call.

  He meant that my brother was somewhere in Vietnam, but nobody knew exactly where, and nobody knew exactly what he was doing, or if he was doing anything at all. He might just be sitting there, on a half-rotten log in the jungle, a bamboo leaf tickling his ear, just sitting there and waiting for somebody to find him.

  sixteen

  Every last picture was of the moon.

  I’d torn out of the Colonel’s car the second he’d put it in park in our driveway and bolted back to the rec center. But once I’d gotten into the darkroom, I took my time developing the film, working carefully as I could so the negatives would be perfect, no marks, no scratches, nothing to get in the way of what I wanted to see. I believed those negatives would reveal the truth about TJ, what he’d been doing right before he went missing in action, what he’d been thinking about, some clue that would tell me where he was about to go.

  Then maybe somebody could go and get him back.

  There’s a moment in the darkroom, when you hang your negatives to dry, that you finally see what occurred the moment you opened your camera’s shutter to let in the light and make a picture. I was learning that half the time me and my camera had been looking at different things. I’d focused on Alice’s face, but the camera caught the girl behind her combing her hair in the mirror. I took a picture of a tree bending in the wind; my camera found a bird taking flight from a branch.

  Alice said that the best photographers saw what their cameras saw. They saw the girl in the mirror and the flying bird. What TJ and his camera had seen was the moon, thirty-six frames of it.

  When I loaded the negatives in the enlarger and printed the pictures, I discovered that in some of them wispy clouds were sliding by a full moon’s eyes, and in others crescent moons stood suspended in the night sky like slivers of light, Venus twinkling beneath them. There were quarter moons and waning gibbous moons, every sort of moon there was, sometimes with stars peeking out from the corner of the frames, sometimes framed by circles of light—which later, when I looked it up in the encyclopedia, I learned were called penumbras.

  I printed every one of them, over and over. I blew them up until moons filled the frames. I blew them up until the only thing you could see were millions of tiny grains of light. S
omewhere in there was a clue, I felt sure of it. For two days I printed the moons over and over again, my hands shaking, my heart racing. And with every picture I printed, I grew more and more afraid.

  Because there were no clues. There was nothing but light and darkness, circles and crescents, a tiny star, a piece of a cloud.

  When I was done, when I finally couldn’t think of one more way to look at TJ’s moons, I took them to Cindy’s house. I wanted to show them to somebody who wouldn’t feel afraid when she saw them.

  “Is this my birthday present?” she asked me when I handed her the photographs. “Because it’s my birthday tomorrow, only I’m not having a party. My mom says since TJ’s lost we can only have a family party. Otherwise it would be bad manners to your family.”

  “You could still have a party if you wanted to,” I told her, my voice flat. I felt as though my body had suffered a series of electrical shocks and now I was empty of feeling. “And then when TJ comes home you could tell him all about it.”

  Cindy shook her head sadly. “It’s too late. My mom already called everyone and told them not to come.”

  “Do you want to hang up the pictures? It would be sort of like decorating for a party.”

  Cindy grabbed a roll of tape from a kitchen drawer, and we went upstairs. Thirty-six eight-by-ten moons take up a lot of space, and by the time we were done putting them all up on Cindy’s walls, her room was covered.

  “Did you know that some planets have lots and lots of moons?” Cindy asked me. We were sitting on her bed like a couple of planets ourselves, orbited by every kind of moon imaginable. “I thought my teacher was crazy when she said that to me, but then I asked Daddy and he said it was true. Satan has at least twenty-eight moons.”

  “I think you mean Saturn.”

  “And Jupiter has moons too,” Cindy continued, ignoring me. “A bunch. But we only have one. But at least people can go to our moon. The other moons are too far away.”