The Best of Connie Willis (52 page)

It’s a tough job being a photographer. The minute most people see a camera, their real faces close like a shutter in too much light, and all that’s left is their camera face, their public face. It’s a smiling face, except for Saudi terrorists and senators, but, smiling or not, it shows no real emotion. Actors, politicians, people who have their picture taken
all the time are the worst. The longer the person’s been in the public eye, the easier it is for me to get great vidcam footage and the harder it is to get anything approaching a real photograph, and the Amblers had been at this for nearly twenty years. By a quarter to nine they would already have their camera faces on.

I parked down at the foot of the hill next to the clump of ocotillos and yucca where the zoo sign had been, pulled my Nikon longshot out of the mess in the backseat, and took some shots of the sign they’d set up by the multiway: See a Genuine Winnebago. One-Hundred Percent Authentic.

The Genuine Winnebago was parked longways against the stone banks of cactus and palms at the front of the zoo. Ramirez had said it wasn’t a real Winnebago, but it had the identifying
W
with its extending stripes running the length of the RV, and it seemed to me to be the right shape, though I hadn’t seen one in at least ten years.

I was probably the wrong person for this story. I had never had any great love for RVs, and my first thought when Ramirez called with the assignment was that there are some things that should be extinct, like mosquitoes and lane dividers, and RVs are right at the top of the list. They had been everywhere in the mountains when I’d lived in Colorado, crawling along in the left-hand lane, taking up two lanes even in the days when a lane was fifteen feet wide, with a train of cursing cars behind them.

I’d been behind one on Independence Pass that had stopped cold while a ten-year-old got out to take pictures of the scenery with an Instamatic, and one of them had tried to take the curve in front of my house and ended up in my ditch, looking like a beached whale. But that was always a bad curve.

An old man in an ironed short-sleeved shirt came out the side door and around to the front end and began washing the Winnebago with a sponge and a bucket. I wondered where he had gotten the water. According to Ramirez’s advance work, which she’d sent me over the modem about the Winnebago, it had maybe a fifty-gallon water tank,
tops, which is barely enough for drinking water, a shower, and maybe washing a dish or two, and there certainly weren’t any hookups here at the zoo, but he was swilling water onto the front bumper and even over the tires as if he had more than enough.

I took a few shots of the RV standing in the huge expanse of parking lot and then hit the longshot to full for a picture of the old man working on the bumper. He had large reddish-brown freckles on his arms and the top of his bald head, and he scrubbed away at the bumper with a vengeance.

After a minute he stopped and stepped back, and then called to his wife. He looked worried, or maybe just crabby. I was too far away to tell if he had snapped out her name impatiently or simply called her to come and look, and I couldn’t see his face. She opened the metal side door, with its narrow louvered window, and stepped down onto the metal step.

The old man asked her something, and she, still standing on the step, looked out toward the multiway and shook her head, and then came around to the front, wiping her hands on a dish towel, and they both stood there looking at his handiwork.

They were One-Hundred Percent Authentic, even if the Winnebago wasn’t, down to her flowered blouse and polyester slacks, probably also One-Hundred Percent, and the cross-stitched rooster on the dish towel. She had on brown leather slip-ons like I remembered my grandmother wearing, and I was willing to bet she had set her thinning white hair on bobby pins.

Their bio said they were in their eighties, but I would have put them in their nineties, although I wondered if they were too perfect and therefore fake, like the Winnebago. But she went on wiping her hands on the dish towel the way my grandmother had when she was upset, even though I couldn’t see if her face was showing any emotion, and that action at least looked authentic.

She apparently told him the bumper looked fine because he dropped the dripping sponge into the bucket and went around behind the Winnebago.
She went back inside, shutting the metal door behind her even though it had to be already at least a hundred and ten out, and they hadn’t even bothered to park under what scanty shade the palms provided.

I put the longshot back in the car.

The old man came around the front with a big plywood sign. He propped it against the vehicle’s side. “The Last of the Winnebagos,” the sign read in somebody’s idea of what Indian writing should look like. “See a vanishing breed. Admission—Adults—$8.00, Children under twelve—$5.00 Open 9
A.M.
to Sunset.”

He strung up a row of red and yellow flags, and then picked up the bucket and started toward the door, but halfway there he stopped and took a few steps down the parking lot to where I thought he probably had a good view of the road, and then went back, walking like an old man, and took another swipe at the bumper with the sponge.

“Are you done with the RV yet, McCombe?” Ramirez said on the car phone.

I slung the camera into the back. “I just got here. Every tanker in Arizona was on Van Buren this morning. Why the hell don’t you have me do a piece on abuses of the multiway system by water haulers?”

“Because I want you to get to Tempe alive. The governor’s press conference has been moved to one, so you’re okay. Have you used the eisenstadt yet?”

“I told you, I just got here. I haven’t even turned the damned thing on.”

“You don’t turn it on. It self-activates when you set it bottom down on a level surface.”

Great. It had probably already shot its hundred-frame cartridge on the way here.

“Well, if you don’t use it on the Winnebago, make sure you use it at the governor’s conference,” she said. “By the way, have you thought any more about moving to investigative?”

That was why Sun-co was really so interested in the eisenstadt. It
had been easier to send a photographer who could write stories than it had been to send a photographer and a reporter, especially in the little one-seater Hitoris they were ordering now, which was how I’d gotten to be a photojournalist.

And since that had worked out so well, why send either? Send an eisenstadt and a DAT deck and you won’t need a Hitori and way-mile credits to get them there. You can send them through the mail. They can sit unopened on the old governor’s desk, and after a while somebody in a one-seater who wouldn’t have to be either a photographer
or
a reporter can sneak in to retrieve them and a dozen others.

“No,” I said, glancing back up the hill. The old man gave one last swipe to the front bumper and then walked over to one of the zoo’s old stone-edged planters and dumped the water bucket on a tangle of prickly pear, which would probably think it was a spring shower and bloom before I made it up the hill. “Look,” I said, “if I’m going to get any pictures before the touristas arrive, I’d better go.”

“I wish you’d think about it. And use the eisenstadt this time. You’ll like it once you try it. Even
you’ll
forget it’s a camera.”

“I’ll bet,” I said. I looked back down the multiway. Nobody at all was coming now. Maybe that was what all the Amblers’ anxiety was about—I should have asked Ramirez what their average daily attendance was and what sort of people used up credits to come this far out and see an old beat-up RV. The curve into Tempe alone was three point two miles. Maybe nobody came at all. If that was the case, I might have a chance of getting some decent pictures. I got in the Hitori and drove up the steep drive.

“Howdy,” the old man said, all smiles, holding out his reddish-brown freckled hand to shake mine. “Name’s Jake Ambler. And this here’s Winnie,” he said, patting the metal side of the RV, “last of the Winnebagos. Is there just the one of you?”

“David McCombe,” I said, holding out my press pass. “I’m a photographer. Sun-co. Phoenix
Sun
, Tempe-Mesa
Tribune
, Glendale
Star,
and affiliated stations. I was wondering if I could take some pictures of your vehicle?” I touched my pocket and turned the taper on.

“You bet. We’ve always cooperated with the media, Mrs. Ambler and me. I was just cleaning old Winnie up,” he said. “She got pretty dusty on the way down from Globe.” He didn’t make any attempt to tell his wife I was there, even though she could hardly avoid hearing us, and she didn’t open the metal door again. “We been on the road now with Winnie for almost twenty years. Bought her in 1989 in Forest City, Iowa, where they were made. The wife didn’t want to buy her, didn’t know if she’d like traveling, but now she’s the one wouldn’t part with it.”

He was well into his spiel now, an open, friendly, I-have-nothing-to-hide expression on his face that hid everything. There was no point in taking any stills, so I got out the vidcam and shot the TV footage while he led me around the RV.

“This up here,” he said, standing with one foot on the flimsy metal ladder and patting the metal bar around the top, “is the luggage rack, and this is the holding tank. It’ll hold thirty gallons and has an automatic electric pump that hooks up to any waste hookup. Empties in five minutes, and you don’t even get your hands dirty.” He held up his fat pink hands, palms forward, as if to show me. “Water tank,” he said, slapping a silver metal tank next to it. “Holds forty gallons, which is plenty for just the two of us. Interior space is a hundred fifty cubic feet with six feet four of headroom. That’s plenty even for a tall guy like yourself.”

He gave me the whole tour. His manner was easy, just short of slap-on-the-back hearty, but he looked relieved when an ancient VW bug came chugging catty-cornered up through the parking lot. He must have thought they wouldn’t have any customers, either.

A family piled out, Japanese tourists, a woman with short black hair, a man in shorts, two kids. One of the kids had a ferret on a leash.

“I’ll just look around while you tend to the paying customers,” I told him.

I locked the vidcam in the car, took the longshot, and went up
toward the zoo. I took a wide-angle of the zoo sign for Ramirez. I could see it now. She’d run a caption like, “The old zoo stands empty today. No sound of lion’s roar, of elephant’s trumpeting, of children’s laughter, can be heard here. The old Phoenix Zoo, last of its kind, while just outside its gates stands yet another last of its kind. Story on page 10.” Maybe it
would
be a good idea to let the eisenstadts and the computers take over.

I went inside. I hadn’t been out here in years. In the late eighties there had been a big flap over zoo policy. I had taken the pictures, but I hadn’t covered the story since there were still such things as reporters back then. I had photographed the cages in question, and the new zoo director who had caused all the flap by stopping the zoo’s renovation project cold and giving the money to a wildlife protection group.

“I refuse to spend money on cages when in a few years we’ll have nothing to put in them. The timber wolf, the California condor, the grizzly bear, are in imminent danger of becoming extinct, and it’s our responsibility to save them, not make a comfortable prison for the last survivors.”

The Society had called him an alarmist, which just goes to show you how much things can change.

Well, he was an alarmist, wasn’t he? The grizzly bear isn’t extinct in the wild—it’s Colorado’s biggest tourist draw, and there are so many whooping cranes Texas is talking about limited hunting.

In all the uproar, the zoo had ceased to exist, and the animals all went to an even more comfortable prison in Sun City—sixteen acres of savannah land for the zebras and lions, and snow manufactured daily for the polar bears.

They hadn’t really been cages, in spite of what the zoo director said. The old capybara enclosure, which was the first thing inside the gate, was a nice little meadow with a low stone wall around it. A family of prairie dogs had taken up residence in the middle of it.

I went back to the gate and looked down at the Winnebago. The family circled the Winnebago, the man bending down to look underneath
the body. One of the kids was hanging off the ladder at the back of the RV. The ferret was nosing around the front wheel Jake Ambler had so carefully scrubbed down, looking like it was about ready to lift its leg, if ferrets do that.

The kid yanked on its leash and then picked it up in his arms. The mother said something to him. Her nose was sunburned.

Katie’s nose had been sunburned. She had had that white cream on it that skiers used to use. She had been wearing a parka and jeans and bulky pink and white moon boots that she couldn’t run in, but she still made it to Aberfan before I did. I pushed past her and knelt over him.

“I hit him,” she said bewilderedly. “I hit a dog.”

“Get back in the jeep, damn it!” I shouted at her.

I stripped off my sweater and tried to wrap him in it. “We’ve got to get him to the vet.”

“Is he dead?” Katie said, her face as pale as the cream on her nose.

“No!” I had shouted. “No, he isn’t dead!”

The mother turned and looked up toward the zoo, her hand shading her face. She caught sight of the camera, dropped her hand, and smiled, a toothy, impossible smile. People in the public eye are the worst, but even people having a snapshot taken close down somehow, and it isn’t just the phony smile. It’s as if that old superstition is true and cameras do really steal the soul.

I pretended to take her picture and then lowered the camera. The zoo director had put up a row of tombstone-shaped signs in front of the gate, one for each endangered species. They were covered with plastic, which hadn’t helped much.

I wiped the streaky dust off the one in front of me.
“Canis latrans,”
it said, with two green stars after it. “Coyote. North American wild dog. Due to large-scale poisoning by ranchers, who saw it as a threat to cattle and sheep, the coyote is nearly extinct in the wild.” Underneath there was a photograph of a ragged coyote sitting on its haunches and an explanation of the stars. Blue—endangered species. Yellow—endangered habitat. Red—extinct in the wild.