“He’s eleven. He’s an eleven-year-old boy, Mr. Fisher.”
Why did she say that? Gregory thought. Why does she have to make me out to be such a baby?
“And a fine one,” said Fisher.
“You two know each other?”
Gregory caught Fisher’s eye and said, “I go to school with Margaret. She’s Mr. Fisher’s daughter.” He could see surprise on Fisher’s face that he hadn’t told his mother about the bike. Then Fisher’s face became approving, even, Gregory thought, admiring.
“Of course, of course. It’s coming back to me now. You sometimes usher at the ten o’clock Mass, if I’m not mistaken.”
“First and third Sundays of the month. Knights of Columbus. So many want to pass the basket, we have to rotate. But as I said, I sure could use a hand. My Margaret is at some Girl Scout thing this afternoon, and I’ve got extra bundles to deliver.”
While Fisher was speaking, Gregory watched his mother’s face change as she recalled that he was a widower raising his daughter alone. Gregory had once heard her talking with Mrs. Hunsicker after Mass. “Lord knows—and so do I—it isn’t easy,” she’d said, “you’ve got to hand it to him.”
Fisher looked at his watch. “I’m already running late.”
“Please please, Mom. Please?”
His mother smiled. “He’s such a dreamy boy, I guess it would be good for him.”
Why, why did his mother have to say things like that? How could she not be aware of how embarrassing her comments were? Were his feelings so unimportant to her? She was doing that thing that adults always did—talking about him as if he wasn’t there, and as if he were a prize houseplant who needed just the right amounts of sun and water.
That’s what I like about Margaret’s father, thought Gregory. He’s different. He sees who I am. Even right now, for example, he’s looking right at me. He can see my mother is embarrassing me. At the same time, a tiny wave of fear went through him and he could not hold the man’s gaze. It didn’t make sense but he worried that somehow, in his shame at his mother’s remark, he had been rendered as transparent as he felt—after all, it was this man’s daughter he was often so dreamy about.
“I’m sure he’ll be a big help, Mrs. Kessler.”
“Well, you let me know if he gives you any trouble.”
Fisher put his hand on Gregory’s shoulder and with a gentle twist turned him toward the truck. “I’ll have him back in time for supper, then. We’d better get moving; we’re losing time. Thanks, Mrs. Kessler.”
For the whole first hour or so they hardly spoke. Fisher hopped in and out of the truck three or four times each block, popping in for a bundle, throwing a sack of clothes to be laundered in a wire bin in the back of the truck. Gregory started to get bored and wished he’d brought his transistor radio; then he started to worry that maybe he’d done something wrong. Finally, Fisher leaned across and punched his upper arm. “Know what I like about you?”
Gregory shrugged.
“You’re your own man. I’ve been thinking. You never mentioned any of that bike business to your mother, did you? I could see that right away. Know what? That’s what I like. A boy’s adventures are a boy’s adventures and nobody’s business but his own, I say. You? I see you understand that.”
Gregory liked his way of looking at it. It wasn’t that he was afraid to tell, it was that he didn’t want his mother “minding his beeswax,” as she herself would have put it. Here was a grown-up who seemed to understand him better than he understood himself.
“I’ll tell you something else I think you know already.” They were coming down a steep hill and Fisher ground the gears a bit downshifting. The truck stuttered and Gregory rocked forward and braced himself on the dash. “Your mother doesn’t mean to embarrass you. She just can’t help herself. One thing about mothers, son—they were never boys. Mothers love you and want what’s best for you, but they’ve never been boys. So listen to your mother, son, but listen carefully because—and this is what I really like about you, that even at your age you know this—when she tries to talk to you about guy stuff, she don’t know a thing about it. Am I right? You know that, don’t you?”
Gregory felt certain that he did know this, just as Fisher said, although he’d never really thought about it. He nodded.
“Okay, then.” Fisher was pulling alongside Veterans Park with its monument and lawns and flowerbeds and band shell. “You jump out here and wait for me. I have to load for the afternoon deliveries and you can’t come. I’ll bring you some pizza when I come back. All right?”
Gregory nodded. As the truck whined off, Gregory sat in the shade, leaning against the band shell, feeling the cool concrete through the thin cotton of his T-shirt. He watched a robin working the lawn in front of him, hopping and stabbing at the ground with its beak. Now he really wished he’d remembered to bring his radio. He lost the shade after a while and had to move to a cooler spot. When he was about out of his mind with boredom, the truck pulled up and Fisher beeped the horn.
“You like Grape Nehi?” Fisher asked him as he handed him the slice of pizza.
The afternoon was different. Gregory rode in the back of the truck. Fisher would call out a name to him and Gregory would find the brown package with the name on it in crayon. It was fun. There was a rhythm to it on certain streets where the laundry had lots of customers. Whenever Fisher returned to the truck he would heave a cotton sack of laundry at Gregory who caught it, staggering, and worked at pretending it wasn’t heavy.
“Everything under control back there?” Fisher would yell above the noise of the truck.
At the end of the day, back in the neighborhood, Fisher dropped Gregory at his house. “Hey!” he said as Gregory was getting out of the truck, “don’t you want your pay?” He handed Gregory a five-dollar bill, which was the most money Gregory had ever held in his eleven-year-old hand.
“You want to work some more tomorrow?”
Gregory nodded, holding the bill at both ends, astonished.
“Put that away somewhere; that’s just between the two of us. And listen: you’re worth every penny of that pay, you hear? But you can’t tell anybody I gave it to you. If they find out down at the laundry that I’m paying you, then they’ll think that I can’t handle the work myself and I might lose my job. I’ll pick you up just after nine.”
Dinner was something his mother made out of tuna and egg noodles. Dougie put ketchup and salt and pepper on it; Dougie put ketchup and salt and pepper on everything his mother cooked. His mother sat and spooned herself a helping. “Did you have fun riding in the truck, Gregory?”
“Wha’ truck?” Dougie asked through a mouthful.
“Gregory’s made a friend. One of his schoolmates’ fathers is the laundry man. You must have seen his truck around town.”
“Yeah, like wherever me and my friends go! He’s like a spy or something. We look up and there’s his truck. The guy’s a creep.”
“Is not,” said Gregory.
“Is too.”
“Is not.”
“Is too and so are you!”
“Stop it. The two of you stop it right now!” She turned to Gregory. “Where did you go?”
Gregory was moving things around with his fork, trying to separate the tuna and the celery from the noodles and make three piles so he could eat each ingredient one at a time.
“Mom! Make him stop! I can’t stand it when he does that!”
“Mind your business then and don’t look.”
Gregory was thinking about the different neighborhoods where they’d picked up and delivered laundry and Veterans Park where he’d sat in the shade. He shrugged. “All over. Everywhere,” he said. “
See?” Mrs. Kessler said, looking at Dougie.
“See what?”
“He has deliveries all over town. Or maybe you think he’s a communist spy, paid by the Russians to watch you and your friends ride your bikes?”
“He’s a perv, Mom. Zack caught him taking pictures
of us swimming.”
“He takes pictures of birds, stupid! Birds! He showed me some.”
“Yeah. Did you ever see his daughter? What a retard! She looks like a zombie! An albino zombie!” Dougie made a monster face at Gregory, pulling down his lower lids with two fingers and pushing up a pig nose.
All in one motion Gregory stood and swiped all his food off his plate at Dougie. “Is NOT!”
“That’s it! Both of you! Gregory, you will clean this up right now and Douglas, you will stay in your room the rest of this evening. Now move!”
“Is too-oo,” sang Dougie as he left the table.
Wednesday they made deliveries on the north side of town, across the river. It was suburban there: lawns and trees, flagstone walks and decorative lamp posts. When Fisher came back to the truck he sometimes seemed winded. He had a handkerchief around his neck and his face was red and sweaty. It was hot in the back of the truck, but Gregory didn’t mind. He’d brought his transistor radio and earplug and sometimes he could listen to a whole song before Fisher came back with a bag of laundry for him.
This time for lunch Fisher had made them bologna sandwiches and bought Cokes from a machine at a filling station. “I know a great spot,” said Fisher. “Come on, ride up front now; it’s hotter’n a whorehouse on payday back there.” He smiled.
Gregory only understood the hot part but he smiled back. Why was Fisher looking at him and shaking his head? Did he do something wrong?
“I swear you are the best assistant I ever had!”
Gregory wanted to ask about Margaret. Wasn’t she a good assistant?
“Most things that are worthwhile doing require an assistant, somebody you can trust, somebody smart and loyal and fun to be with. Somebody who likes to learn.” They had pulled onto a gravel road outside of town. “Even some things that are not worthwhile require an assistant, like this stupid job.”
Gregory could see they were following the river; he could hold onto the handle and lean way out the door and look at himself in the tall sideview mirror and see the great cloud of dust billowing behind them.
“So. Do you? Like to learn things. How do you do in school?”
Gregory shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about school. Grownups always wanted to talk about school. He felt a little wave of disappointment in Fisher.
“Because I’ll tell you what I’ve been thinking. You’re a great laundry assistant, a good worker, and you don’t complain all the time like some people.”
Gregory thought he must be referring to Margaret.
“But see the thing is, I don’t know if you have what it takes to be a good photography assistant.”
Gregory wanted to say, “Yes, yes I do!” but he wasn’t sure what it took, only that he wanted to do it.
“You have to be smart. And you have to be honest. Here we are.” He pulled off into a little clearing where there was a picnic table by the river. A tall weeping willow grew in a nearly perfect dome at the water’s edge. Fisher turned off the truck, sat back, and gave Gregory an appraising look.
“I do good in school,” Gregory said.
Fisher smiled. “Grab that bag behind your seat,” he said. It was Fisher’s camera and photographic gear. It was heavy as Gregory carried it to the picnic table; it hung below his knees and he struggled not to trip over it. The canvas strap cut into his shoulder, but he did his best to make it look easy for him. He hoisted it up onto the picnic table. Fisher seemed pleased with him.
As they sat there eating their sandwiches, Fisher began to remove items from the bag: the camera, a piece of red cloth, a large brown accordion folder, and several lenses he arranged in graduating order of length on the table. He finished his sandwich quickly and began dusting the lenses with the red cloth. “The thing about photography is that a photograph never lies. A picture of a bird’s the bird in that moment when you shoot him. It’s a little like hunting, except you don’t kill anything. You don’t have to stuff it and mount it to bring it home with you. They say that in a few years time, we’ll all be using color film like the magazines do. Won’t that be something? Here, look at this.” He slid a black-and-white photo of a bird from the envelope. “This goldfinch. I’ve got him right here. We’ve got him right here. But that bird flew away the minute I took that picture and he’s someplace else now, just going on with his finchy life. You understand?”
Gregory nodded.
“And no matter what happens to that bird after that, if it gets eaten by a cat, or gets sick and dies. Well, we still have this picture of him to admire like this, in private. And the bird doesn’t even know you have its picture. Not that it would care. It’s like having a secret. Like knowing something nobody else knows. You see?”
Gregory thought it only mostly made sense to him, but he couldn’t think what part to ask about. He nodded.
“Unless you show it to somebody else, see? Like you know this bird here now. How you can almost know what color it is by looking at it carefully.” Fisher looked him in the eye, unblinking, for a long moment.
“Does this mean I’m your assistant?” Caught in the man’s gaze, it was the only question Gregory could formulate to ask.
“Depends.” Fisher rose, attaching a medium-size lens onto his camera. “It’s not a little thing, an assistant. You have to be willing to learn. It’s not just about cameras and lenses and carrying bags. We’ll have to wait and see. Tell you what. While I shoot some birds, why don’t you sort out those pictures in the envelope for me? Just put the pictures of each kind of bird together in a stack. Don’t worry you don’t know the names of them, just put the like ones in a stack, like playing solitaire, okay?” He headed off toward the water.
A sparrow landed on the bench and hopped up on the table where it pecked at crumbs from Fisher’s sandwich, then flew away. Gregory carefully took the thick stack of photos from the folder. The one on top was a bird with a straight pointy bill. He guessed it was a kind of woodpecker and placed it next to the finch on the table. Though the birds were all gray in the photographs, there were differences: some had a bit of white along the wings or tail, others a black stripe across the eye or a tuft or crest of feathers on their heads. He made a little pile for each. He recognized robins and sparrows and jays, and he knew cardinals and orioles from his baseball card collection. He kept the piles in rows so Fisher would see how neat he could be.
He picked up another photo of the bird that Fisher had called a goldfinch and under it was a very different picture: in this one a man and woman faced the camera, naked; the woman sat on the man’s lap and—his thing was in her thing! Her head was thrown back and the man was smiling at the camera, his chin over her right shoulder, his left hand cupping her breast. The whole bottom third of the stack were shots like this, of people coupling in various positions. Gregory’s heart raced and thumped the way it had when he stood with Dougie at the top of the bluff, although the feeling wasn’t fear exactly, and he didn’t want to back away. He tried to recall what he’d heard about this. He was curious about what the people in the photos were doing and curious about the pictures’ effect on him. He thought he might cry, but he didn’t feel sad, and at the same time he felt like he might laugh, though nothing was funny. It was like being tickled, just before you yell “Stop!” He looked ahead, his hands shaking, at picture after picture.
“Smile!” said Fisher, and snapped the photo just as Gregory looked up. He lowered the camera on his way to the table. “What! What the devil? You’re not supposed to be looking at these!” He picked up the stack of them. “Oh my lord, son, I’m sorry. You’re not supposed to see these. I had no idea these were in there. These are private, you understand? Private.”
Gregory sat with his head down, his hands on the bench under his thighs, his face hot, trying to calm himself.
“What’s the matter, son? Oh, you’re worried about that photograph I took when you were looking at the dirty picture, aren’t you? Listen, you don’t need to worry about that. I’ll never show that photogra
ph to anybody, not your mother, not the sisters at the school, nobody. I promise.”
Gregory felt panic; it hadn’t occurred to him that he was caught on film, captured like a bird, looking at the forbidden pictures.
“Look, son. I’m being honest with you. You remember I said that an assistant has to be honest? Well then, you deserve to be treated the same way. You still want to be my assistant, don’t you?”
Gregory nodded.
“Okay then. Neither of us will say anything about these pictures. To anybody. Honest. Honest?”
“Honest,” said Gregory.
“You have to understand. Just like I told you, there’s a lot to learn growing up. Those pictures are guy stuff. A man might sometimes like to be alone with pictures like these, well, maybe to study them, like you study those pictures of the birds. You see?”
Gregory said yes, an assistant needs to be smart.
“This must be a shock to you, a boy raised by his mother.”
Gregory thought for a moment. Mothers aren’t guys. They don’t know a thing about it!
“Now think about it,” Fisher went on. “People will try to say there’s something wrong with pictures like these. But what does it hurt these people in the pictures? They’re off doing whatever they’re doing now, don’t even know you looked at them.”
Just like goldfinches.
“And a man might feel some very strong feelings looking at these. Good, powerful feelings.” He had been holding the packet of photos at arms length, now he brought them to his chest. “You’ll feel those feelings when you get bigger.”
Wait! Gregory wanted to protest. I did feel those things! Once again, it seemed as if Fisher were reading his mind. “Oh. Oh boy. Now I see,” said Fisher. “You’re more of a man than I thought. You felt some of that already, so you think you know what I’m talking about, am I right?”
Gregory felt terribly transparent, as if there was nothing he could possibly hide from Fisher.
“Well, you don’t. You understand? You don’t! You’ve got a lot to learn.” Fisher looked at his watch. “Time to move out, soldier.”
Interference & Other Stories Page 13
