Ghost Town (13 page)

Interesting,
I thought.
At last I have succeeded in becoming the fly on the wall.

THE TRUE ARTIST
takes advantage of every opportunity.

Having been relegated to little more than wallpaper by the guests in my own home, I hastened to make photographs, all abstract yet geometrically perfect. A face repeated a dozen times in fragments within my field of vision.

It was as if I really were a fly, or a grasshopper, or a honeybee—a multilensed, superior-sighted insect such as I'd photographed so carefully so long ago in the pumpkin patch.

Switching to macro mode, I tried again to capture what the shattered lens could see. Merilee Rowling laughing, her lips repeated dozens of times in a circle. Maureen Balderson with her tongue sticking out at me, again, multiplied by every break in the lens into a precise circular pattern of mathematical equality. Dwight Earl's eyebrows. My mother's handsome profile. The Baldersons' sandal-shod feet. Tim Balderson crawling on the floor to smash a cockroach with his fist.

It occurred to me that if these kaleidoscopic pictures actually turned out, I might have something resembling art.

"All art depends on happy accidents," I recall Chief Leopard Frog telling me.

Perhaps he should apply that same philosophy to his book of poetry,
I thought. Burl Hives,
indeed!

It also occurred to me that during the past twenty-four hours the population of Paisley, Kansas, had increased threefold, and that's not even counting Chief Leopard Frog, who will always remain a special case.

Spiritual leader of the uncounted.

Statistically speaking, I calculated, at this moment, Paisley is the fastest-growing town in Kansas.

If there were a newspaper in town, I would notify them of the event.

As it was, I merely helped myself to a waffle.

Interesting,
I thought, as the sweet maple-flavored corn syrup awakened my taste buds,
how a place that only a moment ago lay in complete ruins, like some latter-day Pompeii buried by bad luck and human neglect, could suddenly become so warm and bustling with laughter and chatter.

"Hello, stranger," Maureen Balderson said, at last breaking free from the ironclad verbal grip of Merilee Rowling. "Miss me?

"I miss everything," I replied. "But what can I do about it?"

"You could move away like everybody else," she suggested.

"No. We're stuck," I explained. "Nobody would ever buy our house and my mother needs her job. Even though it's a phony-baloney government job, it pays regular money."

"Did you know that in the olden days, when towns in Kansas were bypassed by the railroad by twenty miles or so, that the townspeople would pick up and move the entire town?" Maureen Balderson asked rhetorically.

"The people?" I said "Well, sure, the people would move "

"The buildings, too," she added. "Everything. Stone buildings, brick buildings, wood buildings, you name it. They put them on log rollers or cut them apart and hauled them on wagons.

"In the olden days," she continued, her voice becoming louder, "people just went to where they needed to so they could make things work, like the Native Americans who kept moving their tepees while following the buffalo."

"I'm not sure I understand your point," I said.

"You may be the last kid in Paisley, Kansas, Spencer Honesty," she said, placing her hand on my shoulder, "but you don't have to always be the last kid in town."

All of a sudden tears welled up in my eyes again, and try as I might I could not stop crying.

What a blubbering machine I had become!

Just call me Spencer Boo-hoo-hoo.

Maureen Balderson took me by the hand and led me outside to the porch, away from the others, then, saying nothing, put her arms around me and permitted me to cry against her shoulder for a full five minutes.

When at last I had exhausted my emotion, I saw that her shirt was stained with my tears.

She didn't seem to mind.

In the far distance down the gravel road, Chief Leopard Frog stood watching us. When he saw that I had spotted him, he raised his right hand and waved, sort of like the pope might wave to a crowd from His Holiness's private balcony. I took it to be Chief Leopard Frog's gesture of blessing.

"So when do you go back to Kansas City?" I asked.

"We're leaving this afternoon," Maureen explained. "Dad just wanted to be sure the house was okay, and Tim hadn't gotten to kill anything but houseflies and mosquitoes lately. It's only a few hours' drive. You ought to come see us sometime."

"I'd like to," I said, "but I can't drive myself and the Greyhound doesn't stop in Paisley anymore."

"You're a smart boy," Maureen Balderson said. "You'll think of something."

This time she kissed me on the mouth, deeply, tenderly, as if I were the only boy in the world.

Then she posed for me as I repeatedly took her picture with the kaleidoscope camera.

Click-thunk! Click-thunk! Click-thunk!

MERILEE ROWLING
stayed over one more night. I slept in my nest on the floor beside her bed. She asked me as many questions about Maureen Balderson as she did about Chief Leopard Frog.

I spun yarns about both.

I told her Maureen Balderson was Chief Leopard Frog's illegitimate daughter, that she was actually a princess in the Sac and Fox tribe, and that she had helped her father get his first book of poetry published by the leading publishing company in the Cayman Islands by trading a priceless necklace made of wolves' teeth.

I found the snapshot that I had made of Chief Leopard Frog and gave it to Merilee Rowling to publish in her magazine. I explained to her that Chief Leopard Frog lived off the land and preferred to stay out of sight, hiding in abandoned houses, of which there were many, except when he had a bundle of poems to deliver. That's when he'd come to see my mother and me, because we knew how to use the U.S. mail and he, being a primitive, didn't.

I explained to Merilee Rowling that all of Paisley was once Indian territory but it was taken away from them by unscrupulous late-nineteenth-century railroad barons, who tricked the Native Americans into thinking that they would get free passes to ride in the plush sleeping cars forever.

I could hear Merilee Rowling scribbling very fast in her notebook. Eventually, I got sleepy and forgot the exact details of the blarney that I was spewing.

Finally both Merilee Rowling and I fell asleep. By then it must have been well past midnight.

The next day when I awoke I remembered having told Merilee Rowling that I had been married to Maureen Balderson in a Sac and Fox ceremony under a hedgeapple tree but that the marriage could not be made legal until I turned eighteen. This "fact" didn't exactly fly with Merilee Rowling.

At one point during the evening she had gotten up to go to the bathroom and stepped on my leg. On the way back, she stepped on my leg again and fell down on top of me. At that moment we were both on the floor, our bodies touching, face to face.

"You're a cute kid," Merilee Rowling said, "but I think you're not the one for me."

"Well, good night again," I said.

"Good night, Spencer," she replied. "What a strange life you live."

As she was getting up to climb back into bed, Chief Leopard Frog walked into the room, picked up my camera, and took our picture with the broken lens.

"Yi!" Merilee Rowling screamed. "This place is freaking haunted."

"I'll take care of it," I assured her.

"What's going on in there?" my mother hollered.

"Bad dreams," I called back. "Good night."

Merilee Rowling left just after a great country breakfast that consisted of naturally cured ham, biscuits and gravy, and homemade apple butter. I helped her pack up her stuff and stood like a hitching post in the driveway while she pulled onto the gravel road. She honked the horn twice and was gone. That's when it dawned on me that she was wearing my peach-colored Columbus Catfish baseball cap, the one that had been my father's.

Such treachery from a trusted houseguest!
I thought.
Why, it's downright Shakespearean.

Code of honor, indeed!

At least Paisley was back to being Paisley.

The weather had changed Now the early mornings were cool, with a patchy fog, which for years I had thought was called Apache fog given my orientation to Indians and my limited homeschool education.

The pumpkins were ripe, the spiders fewer in number, and one morning there was frost on the three mailboxes.

I threw myself into business, shipping the last of the celebrity look-alike pumpkins to Milton Swartzman and another gross of bad luck talismans carved by Chief Leopard Frog. I also sent on the poetry book orders for him to handle according to the terms of our contract, keeping only a dozen copies of the book for myself.

The money was rolling in.

A fortnight later Dwight Earl the FedEx man showed up for lunch with a big package under his arm. It was from Sparkle Snapshot in St. Louis.

A letter was glued onto the outside of the box.

It was from the office of the president of Sparkle Snapshot.

Dear Valued Customer,
it read.

As you know, here at Sparkle Snapshot we take great care in what we do. Indeed, we have processed some of the best of the best from the world's finest photographers: Annie Leibovitz's cross-eyed sister, Sally Anne; Diane Arbuss cataract-challenged mother, Louise; Gordon Parks's
blind cousin, LaFrange O'Reilly; Walker Evans's next-door neighbor Big Turley Hawthorne, to cite but a few.

That's why, in 1974, we established the Sparkle Foundation and the Annual Sparkle Snapshot Award to call attention to our customers' achievements and to encourage the pursuit of photographic excellence.

Your photograph "Romeo and Juliet" has been selected as this year s winner. Congratulations! You may be pleased to learn that the judges' decision was unanimous.

What can I say?

You could have knocked me over with a lens tissue.

THE PRESIDENT
of Sparkle Snapshot was not yet finished with his accolades:

Enclosed you will find a sixteen-by-twenty-inch mounted reproduction of your winning picture,
he wrote,
a check representing your prize money, and a document for you to sign and return granting Sparkle Snapshot Service permission to publicize your photograph through the professional art and photography community in the United States, its territories and possessions, and sovereign and emerging nations abroad.

With sincere admiration,

Lance L. Leiberman

President

Sparkle Snapshot Service

P.S. Your regular processing order follows by U.S. mail.

P.P.S. Again, congratulations. This is extraordinary work.

Inside, mounted on heavy art board, was a big color kaleidoscopic photograph of Merilee Rowling and me in what appeared to be a lovers' embrace as seen through the multifaceted eye of a hovering honeybee.

The color was intense; the design, repeated over and over in nearly identical fragments, like wallpaper, only intensified the feeling that the viewer had accidentally stumbled into an intensely private world.

If you looked closely, you could see the ghost image of Chief Leopard Frog repeated as well in the form of a portrait hanging on the wall in the background. I could also make out my peach-colored ball cap hung on the doorknob and Mr. Riley's dead dog Flag watching over us like a hundred tiny sentries.

I had to admit, it was a remarkable piece of art—and the greatest achievement of the ghost camera to date. The only problem with it was that I didn't take the picture.

Chief Leopard Frog did.

But the check for one hundred thousand dollars was payable to me. There were also a dozen half-price coupons for additional film processing, which I thought was a nice gesture, and there was a handsome walnut and brass wall plaque, too.

Well,
I thought to myself,
you just never know when your luck is going to change.

I just wish it had been Maureen Balderson in the photo instead of Merilee Rowling. Something told me there would be trouble later on.

"Mom," I asked my mother, as we dined on chicken-fried steak at the table with Dwight Earl, who, I noticed, kept his FedEx uniform cap on even when inside the house, "have you ever considered putting our house on log rollers and moving it about two hundred and fifty miles to Kansas City?"

"No, I can't say that I ever have," she replied, sopping a biscuit into the white gravy. "How about you, Dwight Earl? That thought ever cross your mind?"

"Not even once," he answered. "Not even back when I was a drinking man."

"Well, it's good that you saw the light," my mother concluded approvingly.

"I'll be in my room," I announced, taking my plate to the sink.

First, I wrote a formal thank-you note to Lance L. Leiberman, in appreciation of the outstanding honor and award as well as the many useful half-price certificates.

I assured him I would tell everybody in town about the fine quality of his film services.

That wouldn't take long.

Then I began a letter to the only worldly-wise adult I knew, Milton Swartzman, president and publisher of
Uncle Milton's Thousand Things You Thought You'd Never Find.
In it, I told him about how my camera had gotten broken and how it had resulted in my winning a snapshot prize. I didn't mention how much money was involved. No point in getting Uncle Milton all worked up.

I held on to the letter for a couple of days until the regular mail brought the packet from Sparkle Snapshot that had all the new kaleidoscopic work in it. It was truly a treasure trove of surprises. I enclosed one sample for Milton Swartzman to help him understand the new technique.

As for the packet of pictures, it held my attention for hours. There was an entire roll devoted to Merilee Rowling prancing around like a glamour model, prior to the damage to the lens. I had to admit that even though she was a swindler and a liar and a hat thief and a con artist and a tease, she was a good-looking young woman. Eventually, somebody would settle down to make a life with her just because of her looks.