(2005) Wrapped in Rain (7 page)

"That be all?" Bessie asked me over her shoulder. When she stood up, I realized how disproportionate she really was. To get that way had taken some doing and some time. At five feet two, she probably weighed more than 350 pounds. She was enormous-a picture all to herself. She looked forty, plus or minus five years, and the heavy purple eye shadow did little to disguise the hard mileage. When she moved, she clanked like a walking Christmas tree because she was draped in jewelry-about ten necklaces, just as many bracelets on each wrist, and rings on all ten fingers, a few with more than one ring. She was barefoot with a few toe rings and dressed in a sweaty purple tank top-no bra-and spandex shorts. The spandex worked like an ineffective girdle, and a bra would have been helpful. The sides of her shorts were stretched so tight that they were see-through. The wall behind her was covered with cigarettes, chewing tobacco, and pornographic magazines. A bumper sticker on the wall behind her read, "Spandex is a right, and I'm exercising mine."

"Well, hey, sweet thang."

"You're open kind of late," I said.

"Honey, we're always open. Weekends. Holidays." She turned her head gently sideways, smiled ever so slowly, and said, "We're a full-service station." Then she paused. "You need me to change your oil? Won't take but a few minutes." Something in her tone told me she wasn't talking about cars.

"No ma'am. Thank you. My oil's fine. Just the gas, coffee, and maybe a cinnamon roll." Next to the coffeepot was a little sign that read, "Ice Cups Free, Spit Cups $1." When I turned to read the sign, she flopped up on the counter like a whale at Sea World.

"You know, it's funny," she said, "people around here love to chew on ice." The inside of the store was covered in mirrors, so when she pulled up the front of her shirt, wiped her mouth, grabbed her lipstick off the top of the cash register, and put on two thick layers of deep purple lipstick, I caught it.

"Yeah, I can see that."

She slid off the counter and eyed the Canon. "That's a big camera." She sprayed herself with three squirts of two different types of perfume and then held up a small carry mirror, rolled her lips together, dabbed one corner with her pinky, and said, "You always carry that thing?"

I looked down and admitted, "I rarely go anywhere without it."

"Hah, like American Express," she said and slapped her knee, sending waves of jiggle up and down her thigh. "American Express. Get it?"

I smiled and took another look at her. This woman had lived fast and hard. This gas station was the best she either could or would do. "Something like that."

"Don't it get heavy?"

I thought for a moment and squinted one eye. "I suppose it's kind of like wearing glasses. I don't even think about it anymore."

The woman leaned over the counter again and pushed her elbows together. "What are you, a photographer or something?" At the end of the bubble gum aisle, the little cowboy had sat down on the ground and stuffed three more pieces of Super Bubble in his mouth. Wrappers surrounded him like snowflakes, and his mouth was so full he could barely close it. Pinkish-red saliva oozed out the sides of his mouth.

"Most days," I said, smiling and trying not to look at her. "Other days, I just take pictures."

"Yeah," the woman behind the counter said, nodding, "tell me about it. A lot of my customers bring their cameras. Big, little, 35-millimeter, digital, even some movie cameras. Honey, I've seen 'em all. Every shape and size." She motioned over her shoulder. "They set 'em up on a tripod in the back, but that one," she said with one hand on her hip and nodding at my waist, "is a good'un. How much it cost?"

I pulled the camera off my shoulder and held it out over the counter. "Well, let's just say that you'd have to sell a lot of gas to get one. Here, have a look for yourself."

The woman tilted her head and looked at me out the top of her eyes. "Darlin', you know that gas ain't what I'm sellin'. Besides, I wouldn't know what to do behind a camera. I'm always in front of it."

I slung the camera back over my shoulder, said, "Suit yourself," and pulled a cinnamon roll off the shelf.

While her right hand instinctively began gliding across the greasy keys of the cash register, the little boy snuck around the back of the bubble gum aisle and tiptoed up behind me. The woman looked up at me, got my attention with her eyes, and then shot a glance at the boy. I watched him now out of the corner of my eye. I whispered to her, "I was curious once too."

She smiled, and her shoulders relaxed. I set my coffee, cinnamon roll, and a can of beans on the counter and said, "This plus my gas." The woman stretched her neck and watched as the little boy slowly reached out his hand toward the shutter button on my camera. I kept my eye on her and noticed that one of the perfume shots had yet to dry on the middle fold of her triple chin.

We stood in silence, and yet I heard a familiar voice saying, Listen here, child, that's God's little girl, baggage and all, so don't go judging the cover. He doesn't care what she looks like. He'll take her and us any way he can get us. Just like the woman at the well. Best you switch lenses and start seeing her that way too.

Yes ma am, I nodded, thinking to myself. Even though she had been dead five years, Miss Ella was never too far away.

When set on high-speed advance, the motor drive on an EOS-1V can shoot ten frames a second. Add to this the fact that I never carried my camera turned off, and it meant that when the little boy gripped my camera, placed his finger on the shutter button, gritted his teeth, and squeezed it like he was launching a missile, it spun through half a roll of Kodachrome 64 in just over a second.

The rapid clicking of the motor drive scared the little cowboy, and he let go like he had just squeezed the guts out of his pet frog. I squatted slowly and looked into the boy's face, bloated with bubble gum and smeared with sticky saliva-a picture of total fear mixed with complete delight. Without a word, I held up the camera and motioned to the boy. "Well," I whispered, "now that we've started, we might as well finish the roll. This time, hold it down two more seconds. Count `one mis'sippi, two mis- 'sippi."' I held the camera closer to the boy. "Go ahead. Same as last time. Just squeeze longer and count this time." There was no way on earth the boy could speak. Pink, halfchewed bubble gum was spilling out the cracks of his teeth, and it was all his lips could do to contain it. Realizing his delightful predicament, the little boy just nodded and uttered a muffled, "Ye-fir." Slowly, he lifted his hand and placed his finger on the camera like he was reading Braille. Finding the shutter button, his eyes lit up as if he had just found the last cookie in the jar.

He squeezed.

Thirty-six perfectly good frames, gone in 3.6 seconds. The motor stopped and started to automatically rewind, and the boy flinched, quickly shoving his hands in his pockets and looking over both shoulders like he was expecting a blow. "All right," I whispered, "now we're rewinding." I turned the camera sideways. "Here, listen." The boy leaned in, tonguing his gum from one cheek to the other-which required some effort-and listened. The motor clicked to a stop and I opened the back, lifted the roll, wound the tail inside the canister, and handed it to my new friend-something I had done ten thousand times, absent the boy. "There, it's all yours. I'd say you did great your first time around. Next time we'll work on looking through this little hole right here and then aiming at something." Holding a six-shooter in one hand and the film in the other, the little cowboy looked at the film like I had resurrected his frog.

I patted him on the shoulder, and the lady behind the counter said, "That'll be forty-seven dollars even."

"What about all this?"

"Naw, honey," the woman said after sucking through her teeth. "Coffee's on me. Cinnamon roll too. That nasty old thing's probably stale anyways. And you can have them nasty of beans. They give me gas. And don't tell me I make good coffee." She looked down at the little boy and pointed, causing ripples of fat to jiggle up and down her short arm. "Chil', you better get your butt back over there by that bathroom door like yo' mama done tol' you to 'fore you get in any more trouble." The boy's eyes grew wide, fear replaced delight, and he threw a glance at the door, shoved the film canister in his pocket, and sprinted to the bathroom door where his mom was apparently washing her hands. Running around the first aisle, four pieces of gum fell out of his back pocket, and bubble gum wrappers flew everywhere.

I grabbed my coffee, cinnamon roll, and can of beans and whispered, "Thank you, Bessie," and headed for the door.

"Honey"-she put her hand on her hip-"you come on back when you need your oil changed. Anytime. First one's free. And, sweet thang, bring that camera." I pushed open the door with my back, which rang the cowbell hung by a tattered piece of twine, and she turned her attention from me back to the television. She kept one watchful eye on the boy in the corner and then picked up the phone and dialed an eleven-digit number from memory. She wedged the phone between her ear and shoulder and reached for the almost empty bag of pork rinds as her entire body clanked beneath the drapery of jewelry. "Yeah, George, this is Bessie. I want one of them bracelets. Number 217." Instantly, the dialogue box in the lower left corner of the television screen switched from "Only 24 Remaining" to "Only 23 Remaining."

In the short time I had been inside, a breeze had picked up and rain clouds had blown in and blocked out the October moon. The temperature had dropped too. It was October 4 but still a warm night. Now it was maybe only 85 degrees rather than 93. I looked up, smelled the coming rain, and thought to myself, Weather man was right. Definitely rain. Might even get a twister.

Fortunately, and unfortunately, I knew about both. Five years ago, just after we buried Miss Ella, Doc sent me to spend a week with a team of scientists from NASA who were chasing twisters through the cornfields of the Midwest. The scientists were young, eager, and naive, as was I, so like Pecos Bill trying to lasso the whirlwind, we got close. Admittedly, too close. They lost a million-dollar van, and we all got pretty banged up in the process.

When the tail of the twister hit the barn above the cellar we were piling into, it just completely erased it from the earth. The only thing left was the dirt. I was closing the cellar door with one hand and squeezing the shutter with the other. Doing so earned me a shattered wrist, a few cracked ribs, and a nice cut across my right eye, but that was the shot. The path and damage were extensive, so I taped the cut across my eye and spent a day following the outcome.

When Doc got the pictures in New York, he immediately put them on the wire. A few days later, my pictures were on the front cover of three national magazines, including Time and Newsweek, and seventeen newspapers across the Midwest. Reader's Digest even sent their top roving editor from London, a crusty old New Zealander who had written something like 150 stories, to meet me in the Nebraska cellar and write a story relaying the harrowing events. The next month, I was standing in the checkout line at the grocery store and looked up to see that his story about me had made the lead in the U.S. edition. That put me on the map, and to be honest, I owe it to Doc. I nursed my wounds at home, and Doc called me saying, "Son, I've been in this business forty years, but you got a gift. You're not the best, but you could be. I don't know how, but what you do with a camera is nothing short of miraculous. Closest thing to art I've ever seen in this business." If he knew the truth, he wouldn't be so amazed. Oh sure, I took the pictures, and maybe my craft was getting better, but if he knew what was going on inside my head, he might not be so amazed. I hung up the phone and there in the silence echoed Miss Ella, Don't even think about letting that go to your head. 7b whom much is given, much is expected.

Yes ma am.

I skipped around the grease spots again and stepped back into my truck. I set the Canon on the passenger seat as an eighteen-wheeler turned into the parking lot, honked, and then swung around back. Another oil change. Bessie looked up and saw the rig, and her fingers started flying over the keys on the cash register. The mother, wearing a red baseball cap pulled down tight over her ears, emerged at last from the bathroom, collected the wrappers, and spread them out across the counter, along with some Fig Newtons and a few sodas. Mother and son had matching caps. The windows above the beer cooler had condensed and started to fog up, so I couldn't see her too closely, but I knew one thing for sure. Something wasn't right. They didn't fit. I inserted the key into the ignition, waited for the glow plugs to warm up, and shook off Miss Ella, who was about to start quoting the New Testament. "No ma'am," I said, waving my hand across the dashboard, "I am going home."

Bessie slid the wrappers into the trash can and then waddle-walked out the back door. I peeled the tab off the lid of the coffee cup and listened as Maxximus tried to eat through the metal door. Taking a big gulp of really bad coffee, I swallowed and slowly let it warm my throat and stomach. She was right. It was horrible coffee. Its only redeeming feature was the mixture of heat and caffeine.

I revved the diesel, eased off on the clutch, pulled north, and felt the miles tick slowly by. My mind slowly returned to the one thought that I had not been able to shake for the last three days. Actually, I'd been trying to outrun it for the last nine months. It was the one thought I couldn't outrun no matter how fast or far I drove, flew, or ran. After nine furious years of being on the road forty weeks a year; visiting more than forty-five countries; owning a worn-out passport; getting dozens of immunizations; experiencing dysentery, malaria, and dengue fever; taking tens of thousands of photos; and making forty-seven national and international magazine covers as well as countless front pages of newspapers across the country, I was thinking about putting it down. Of turning off the camera. Permanently. My narcotic had become ineffective. To quote Gibby, I was "outside the efficacy range of the drug." I should have seen it coming. It had been the same with baseball. Sure, the injury made it easier, but the truth was that like most drugs, if you take them long enough, they work less and then not at all. Since I'd dropped Mutt off on Gibby's doorstep, I'd received a rather complete education on therapeutic narcotics.