Death Valley

by Perly, Susan;

  The robed gentleman came over. He looked down at Vivienne’s head. “I lament,” he said.

  Andy said, “Baby, your scalp is singed.” He touched her head. “There’s a big clot. I need to get you to a doctor.”

  “No doctors, I have a book to finish.”

  “Let me help you, baby, take all the pictures you want, we’ll finish it together.”

  Not since Martin Hirsch in Vietnam had anyone offered to help her. Her primary lesion was Vietnam when she was fifteen, turning sixteen that November, and just getting started. After that, they admired her, but she waded in close to death and that scared some souls who felt Vivienne’s close-up shots of the morbid might infect them. People not in the photographs thought their souls might be stolen. Andy offered to partner with her; he was touching her burned scalp with the care of a combat medic.

  And the strange gent wearing the velvet rug around his legs pulled the wide lapels of his chevron wool coat around his neck, threading the red scarf through his hands like a rosary.

  He placed the red scarf on Vivienne’s head. He put one hand on the scarf, and he spoke: “I lament the end of the nation. I lament the end of the free people. I used to stand behind a camera, I shot their movies for them, I walked into the fire of the storm, I was invincible, I owned planets.”

  He turned his head down towards them. One of his eyes had been badly damaged. It looked like it was glass, or blind. This left eye had a drooping area under it, which made his face longer on the left than the right. He walked to the edge of the cliff. Andy said to Vivienne, “You’re hurt. Let’s get you to some help.”

  “Later,” she said. “After New Year’s. There’s something here.” She was not addicted to danger, or violence, or war, she was beholden to her eyes. She had pledged to be faithful to witness. “I can feel a story.”

  The robed man bent his two legs into a lotus position. He put his head down in his lap, suggesting that his back was supple, despite the old robes and air of destitution.

  “And they said, There is no hope: but we will walk after our own devices, and we will every one do the imagination of his evil heart.” He straightened his back. His closed his eyes. He took the coat off with ease. Life had happened to this man, he knew how to get out of a coat quickly. On the velveteen soft Baluch rug of orange and grey-green from the Middle Eastern territories, he was in a perfect lotus, his shoulders amazingly aligned here on the tableland volcano edge where a nominal highway cut through the grand nowhere.

  The man said, “I am Jeremiah. I come to say to you my lamentation for the people. I lament the nation, please return to us our land. I see them with their banks, I see them with their riches, they are crooks every last one of them; this boom has to go down. I own three houses, I think I own a fourth. I left my wife, I abandoned my daughters, I have nothing but money – it has to go bust. Now therefore go, to speak to the men of Judah, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying, Thus saith the LORD; Behold, I frame evil against you, and devise a device against you: return ye now every one from his evil way, and make your ways and your doings good. Go back to your station, your camp awaits you, son. Evil is the only road ahead that way. But back you may have a chance to redeem the spent chances. Do not crush the brush. Pack it in, pack it out. Leave no trace.”

  The Jeremiah man got up from his lotus position and went to the edge of the canyon. He looked down. “Don’t jump,” Andy said, coming to his side. He pushed Andy away.

  “Leave me to my solitude. I know my future… And lo, even those whose land suffered Nagasaki did remove Chernobyl from their textbooks. And lo, those in receipt of bombs did say nuclear power is safe. Jerusalem is no more; now it is Alice in Wonderland.” He leaned over the edge, looked over it. Vivienne grabbed his shawl and put it over his shoulders. Moths flew out of the shawl, and off his coat, a swarm of them into the canyon. She stepped back, and shot a pic, the man’s profile making a triangle shape of his back in the woven wool item, bent at the waist. He touched his toes, he made pinwheels with his arms going in opposite directions from each other, he moved into a tai chi position and slowly, ever so slowly, he rotated, doing soft leg and arm damage to invisible opponents. He put his hands together in a prayer position and bowed to the canyon, and all of God’s world below, a gouge in deep burnt rock brown. “Let me toss you little hummingbird moths out into the world, go well my hoverers, go in the wind like the sand.”

  A line of bikers came around the badlands bend. They stopped, pulling in closer to Vivienne and Andy at Father Crowley Point. Six bikers got off six Harleys. In black leather, top to bottom, and the characteristic blue or red bandanas. “Hey,” the first one said to Vivienne, “How’s it going?” He was friendly, white, sunburnt, beefy. His darker complected, acned second came over; he had longer darker hair, a moustache and a gold tooth when he smiled, also friendly. Each of them had one gold earring.

  The darker haired biker looked at Vivienne’s camera. “Nice rig. You want me to take your picture? You and your son?”

  Vivienne laughed, Andy did not. “I’m in the service,” he said. “I’m going to marry her.”

  “First I heard,” Vivienne said, not to Andy, but flirting with the biker.

  Andy did not take the bait. “She’s been in a bomb test,” Andy said to both bikers.

  “Ain’t it the story,” said the ponytail. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t afford the chemo.”

  “Take a shot of us,” Vivienne said. She came close to Andy. They put their arms around each other. “I’m already married,” she said, as the biker aimed the Olympus and pressed the shutter, holding it as if he knew something about cameras. He did not take too long to line the shot up – the sign of an amateur these days, over-importantly lining up mom on some city street in some foreign land, as if the casual informal shot for the family was the key shot in a major motion picture, oblivious to locals and traffic, not at all how a pro on vacation shoots a candid shot – with fun and offhand skill, holding the camera with one hand. The biker turned the camera vertically to get her and Andy in, the way travellers later wish they had done.

  “Let me get an insurance shot,” the biker said. He wore a grey feather in his red bandana.

  “Sure, honey,” Vivienne said, opening her arms wide, waving her hands to motion him closer.

  “Your son got a stick up his ass, ma’am?” he asked, from behind the camera. Andy was smiling for the camera, but the biker could sense that Andy was jealous, wanting the badlands to be his and Vivienne’s alone. Vivienne did not want to betray Andy’s tender jealousy.

  “Yeah, sure, as a matter of fact,” she kissed Andy’s cheek. “It’s called –” she made eye contact with the biker who was holding the camera down at his side, just as she did “– it’s called the military.”

  The biker smiled, but less a laugh smile than a smile of been-there shot-that. “Oh, yes,” he said, keeping the camera at his side, “they got their hands around my neck back in the day, I can tell you. I got back from Madame Nhu and Diem. I got a good job working for CBS News. They saw I had a knack for the film, so they put me to work, where?” He took a couple steps towards Vivienne. “I got out of Hanoi and I got to work in Central America. They put me into El Salvador. I was a war vet and I was back shooting another war, this time my camera was my, well, you know.”

  This biker had those war eyes. Vivienne knew that look, she had seen it set in her own eye sockets in the mirror.

  “You ought to get that arm to a doctor. Or at least a vet,” the biker said, smiling, his eyes brightening from the dark blue back to a brilliant sea blue at his own small joke.

  “You mean,” Vivienne said, “one of those like in the movies where the guy says, ‘You are the first patient I ever had who talked back.’”

  “I’ve seen a few of those.” He took a pack of smokes out of his leather jacket, a box with a dancing skeleton on it: WOODEN-KIMONO NAILS. “Care for a coffin nail?” he asked Vivienne, who said, “Don’t mind if I do.” He had nice fin
gers, silver rings on seven of them.

  “There used to be a place out on the Pan-American Highway, outside of San Salvador, during the war, called Jimmy’s,” the biker said, curving his body, using the black leather folds as a quick leather grotto against the wind, lighting his smoke not with a lighter but with a thin match from a small box. Sure, weatherproof matches, that was what you wanted out here. His five fellow bikers were smoking too, standing around, taking a leak, schmoozing, using their bikes as tables, chairs, bar counters.

  “Jimmy’s. Jimmy was Chinese,” the biker said, lighting Vivienne’s Wooden-Kimono Nail off the same match. “Everybody knew Jimmy. You got caught in a bad invasion, you could hole up at Jimmy’s, spend the night. Jimmy looked out for the reporters. I could leave my rig with Jimmy, no problem. So anyway one night we get the word from Jimmy, we had stopped in for a beer on the way out to the war, there was going to be a big attack, maybe we didn’t want to chance going back to the capital. The Americans, yeah, my people. Chinese Jimmy and his Jimmy rooms on the highway knew what the guerrillas were doing and the damn American generals did not. Far as I ever heard, Jimmy did not ever tell a one of them about any damn guerrilla attack. Let them make their own way out. But he warned us, he warned the press. There are guys like that everywhere. It was the dry season, everything was real dusty on the Pan-American. The guerrillas had their own radio station.” He inhaled.

  He looked at Vivienne the way a man in a bar in the dark looks at a woman on a bright August afternoon. He was making a nice little corner of the badlands widescreen. He was acting incidental, the way a confident man can. Man, Vivienne was feeling that itch. She wanted that look captured inside her camera, which he himself was holding. Those eyes had known war. The brotherhood of baby blues with explosions etched around the war irises. “That was the thing about El Salvador, the guerrillas had their own radio station.”

  “You mean their own radio frequency. Their band?” Vivienne said. Well, here was the thing. She knew of Jimmy’s. She in fact knew Jimmy’s. She knew Jimmy. She had been there, in El Salvador. She had holed up at Jimmy’s more than once. She had a photographer’s crush on this biker guy, but stronger still was her long-bred suspicion of new people getting too close. Better not to say she knew Jimmy.

  The biker came closer into her personal space, but he blew the smoke away, sticking his tongue through it, making perfect smoke rings. His tongue had a tiny turquoise stud in it. “That’s right, little lady. When they were going to make a guerrilla raid on some town, say Berlin or out in the farmland, they would broadcast the plan so the people could evacuate before the battle and the cameramen could decide in or out, do I want to die today.”

  “I have seen that day,” Vivienne said. Not lying, but not forthcoming.

  She was ignoring Andy. He walked out to the dividing line on the highway. He lit a smoke, as easy as a guy leaning against a closed store window. A big oil tanker truck came at him. He nonchalanted out of the rig’s way, watching Vivienne flirt with the biker. “Now I know how that husband of yours feels,” Andy said, just loud enough for Vivienne and the biker to hear him.

  “He talking about Dad?” the biker asked.

  Vivienne stepped closer to him, about two inches away, put her hand on her camera’s neck, which they were now both holding. “Yeah, that is right. Dad. Is that not right, darling, you and Dad never could get along, could you?”

  “I knew there was something about her,” he shouted to his buddies who were yanking up their pants, buttoning their leather against the weather, and getting back on their bikes, kicking them into noise. “Gotta go,” he said. He handed the camera to her, the lens pointing to him. She took it from him, her right hand feeling at home with it close to her muscle memory flesh again. He fished in his jacket, and handed her a card: BARRY KATZ, Freelance Cameraman, Fotógrafo, Sansen, 444 Columbus Ave, San Francisco, California.

  “Yo tambien fotógrafo,” she said, walking him to his bike.

  “Fotógrafa,” he said. “The lady with the camera, good luck, buena suerte, que vaya con Dios.”

  “Ojalá,” she said. “Shalom,” looking down at the card, “Barry.”

  “Look me up if you’re ever in the city.” He was revving the bike.

  “Got a pen?” Vivienne said to Barry, who put a foot down in the dirt.

  “Always,” Barry said. He went into a black leather pocket, taking out a slim silver pen. “You can use it underwater, or when you’re travelling to the moon, honey. My buddy Marty Hirsch gave it to me. He’s been on the street for years, lost his hands to diabetes.”

  You hear a thing. It cannot be. So you do not hear it. Vivienne pulled a scrap of paper out of her pants pocket. She wrote #15 on it. “You get to Panamint Springs, ask for this room. It has good pics in it.” Miniature shock waves changed the air pressure in her brain. Her body was a propagating disturbance. Hirsch? No way. Marty Hirsch homeless in San Francisco? She would not hear it.

  Then the echo insists back into you. “Is your buddy Hirsch…” She could not say it.

  “Marty Hirsch,” the biker said. “My old buddy. I was his second-incommand, or as Hirsch used to say, I was his wing-nut wingman. Here.” The biker unzipped a side pocket on his leather jacket. He showed Vivienne a photograph. The man in the photograph was wearing a dark olive pullover. It was frayed at the boat neck, the cuffs were soiled, the hands coming out of the sweater sleeves were wooden. The man was standing in a wonky way, jolly like an alky. His pants were grey, sweatpants. The sweater was tucked in, the pants tied by a rope. The man was deeply tanned, scorched in the way of the homeless on the street. His feet were bare. He wore a piece of cardboard around his waist: JUNGLE ROT. NO LOOKING. Behind him, a couple walked, wearing parkas with the hoods up. “We’re talking one mother of a cold day in the Tenderloin. I found Marty at the corner of Eddy and Leavenworth, I took him to the Elm Hotel, got him a homeless single. We tried to get him into rehab. No dice.”

  It could not be the same Marty, not her Martin Hirsch. Her MH was sleek, handsome, hilarious, fearless. He followed the story until the story followed him. Her Marty taught her everything. He treated her young pretensions as if they were the sincerity of an adult. Her Marty made her the photographer she was. Her Martin Hirsch led her to see her first human being setting himself on fire. Her Marty gave her the gift of being in her destiny at the tender age of fifteen. Marty was her mentor in everything. He tendered her into how love could be. With the flesh war outside their rickety red door of luck, he took her into the gauze drapery. Marty was her first love. His deep knowledge had become part of her DNA, the way it is with mentors in our lifetimes. The man in the photograph Vivienne held was disfortunate. He had nowhere eyes. He was in the jolly gone place a Vietnam veteran might go, when alcohol is his new wife, and the sick things he has seen in war eat him bad as a snake uncoiling in his insides, the wickedness of the world feasting his goodness to a soul husk. Her camera felt like a lie around her neck. A thing born in fire and solace had become a thing that brought Martin Hirsch to amputation and addiction. They come for your scars, they come for your early young lesions, they rip them off like skin and they pour alkali rivers in them.

  “We got him off meth,” the biker said, “but no way the booze.” He flapped the photo. “At least he’s got feet here. No feet, no hands. There was some total fuck-up at the VA to get him some feet, last I heard. I haven’t seen him since I don’t know when.”

  “Can I have this?” Vivienne asked.

  “I don’t… Miss, why would you want a picture of this bum? He’s my buddy.”

  “Come here,” she said. She took him to the edge of the canyon. She whispered in his ear. He took her two hands. They sat down at the rim. He put his arm around her shoulders. Vivienne Pink wept at Father Crowley Point, solaced by Barry Katz, the leather-clad biker. Then he began to sob and she solaced him. He got up.

  He got back on his bike. Vivienne stood beside the bike; a sudden bonding had made them old friends for a mom
ent. “That is the most fucked-up fuck of a thing I ever heard of,” he said. The line of bikers stretched back east in a curve around the badlands.

  Vivienne came to Andy. “That guy? His name is Barry Katz. He was Martin Hirsch’s best friend in Vietnam. I missed meeting him, he was off in Laos, he just told me.” She was sobbing. “My Marty. Remember I told you about the guy I met in Paris, I was fifteen, it was late May? He took me to Vietnam.”

  “Guy picks you up at the Venus de Milo?”

  “The very one.”

  “I was jealous when you told me,” Andy said.

  “I’d just met you.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  She laughed. “That man, who took me that week I met him in Paris to Saigon to be his camera assistant? My mentor? The man who changed my life? He is homeless in San Francisco. He is a boozehound with no hands. This man took photographs for the ages. He took pics that were on all the covers. He has wooden hands. They cut off his feet. I do not know what to do.”

  “Marry me,” Andy said, cradling her head to his chest. She pulled back.

  “Oh, for pity’s sakes. What is it with you men and marrying? Can you not just listen to a woman for a change? Are you going to end up just like all the rest?”

  “No,” Andy said. “I’m sorry to hear about your friend Martin Hirsch.”

  “Oh fuck off. What do you know? Stay out of my world.”

  The things that cannot be, already are. All these years, the young Marty Hirsch, Vietnam photographer, was in her mind, frozen in 1963, 1968, 1972, 1974. But that man had been kidnapped by distress, that man had been made a street person by berserk circumstances, that frozen man in the frozen photographs had ceased to exist, that young shining eye was a drunk, wearing rope-tied pants, and the barefoot alcoholic now had no feet. All bets were off. Anything, now, could happen. Care had deserted her.