“What’s going on?” the Man With No Hands asked, but Mick didn’t answer him. Mick saw what was coming and broke into a run.
The punks reached him before Mick did. The old man was passing a vacant lot strewn with rubble from a torndown building when one of the punks shot past the old man, grabbed his grocery cart and flung it off the sidewalk onto a pile of bricks. A second one grabbed the old man from behind and whipped him off his feet, tossing him like a toy. He hit between junk piles and rolled. Running up the sidewalk, all Mick could see were his feet sticking out when the third one ran up to him and started kicking. The other two joined him and the homeless man’s feet drew up out of sight.
Mick yelled at them when he was still thirty or forty yards away. The biggest one stopped kicking and looked up, then punched his buddy in the arm and pointed. The second one looked up, saw Mick closing on them and turned toward him, grinning. He was the smallest of the three, but even on a dead run Mick could see he was the ringleader. The other two took a half-step back and waited.
In the few seconds it took Mick to close the interval, he saw the punk’s hand go to his back pocket. Saw his wrist flick.
But the young man, in his inexperience, made several mistakes. He underestimated the resolve of the man bearing down on him as badly as he underestimated the weight of a Nikon F3 and the length of its neck strap.
Mick let the strap slide through his fingers until he was holding the camera like a sling behind his back, then put on the brakes and feinted left. The punk’s eyes went where Mick wanted them to.
It only took one swing. He was pretty sure he broke the kid’s jaw.
The other two took off right then, just turned tail and booked up the street. The little guy crabbed away and staggered to his feet as quick as he could while holding his jaw together. He held Mick in a rancid glare for a few seconds, then turned and staggered off after his friends, leaving his knife behind.
The old man was still curled in a ball, moaning and rocking himself on the ground. Mick knelt down, touched his shoulder.
“Dad?” he said. His hands were shaking. “Are you all right?”
The head turned. He looked up at Mick then, and the hair fell away from his face.
“ ’Oo are you?” he asked, wheezing.
It wasn’t his old man’s voice. This guy’s accent was distinctly British, and his face, now that Mick saw it up close, was not the face of his father.
“I dunno you,” the old man said. There was fear in his eyes, and confusion.
The Man With No Hands caught up with him then, and knelt down beside him. The old bum wheezed and coughed, spat blood onto the sand.
“He could have a punctured lung,” the Man With No Hands said.
Mick was still too confused to say much, still breathing hard, still dealing with adrenaline rush and a half dozen other things. He nodded. “I’ll get the truck.”
They picked him up, gingerly, and laid him in the bed of the truck. The Man With No Hands sat back there holding the old man’s head on the way to the hospital.
Later, after they dropped him off at the emergency room and headed back toward Overpass Plantation, the Man With No Hands asked Mick about what happened. About why, without a second’s hesitation, he had charged in against three younger men.
“I thought he was my dad,” Mick said softly.
“I see.” He let the words hang in the air for half a block, and then said, “You were trying to save him.”
“Yeah,” Mick said, his eyes on the street in front of him. “Imagine that.”
35
* * *
Pretend cigars.
CELLY stayed with the kids on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and over the next couple weeks Mick shot nearly a thousand pictures—some of them at Overpass and the Beal Street Mission, some of them at Danny’s high-rise. He spent several late evenings in Aubrey’s darkroom developing prints, picking out the better ones and setting them aside.
After a couple weeks he had a sizable collection of keepers. Aubrey took the pile upstairs, spread pictures all over his dining room table and started going over them with a magnifying glass. There must have been sixty or seventy prints. After a while he straightened up and took his glasses off.
“I think we can find a portfolio here,” he said, wiping his eyes with the back of a wrist. “I’ll start developing final prints tomorrow. Some of them need adjusting—a little burning and dodging here and there to bring up the background detail—but make no mistake, this is a very nice group. One other thing, though. I need to order a binder, a nice leather one with your name embossed on the front—Michael Brannigan.”
“The name’s Mick.”
“Well, yes, but Michael sounds a little more . . . professional, don’t you think?”
“It’s Mick, Aubrey. If you put my name on the front of the book I want my name, not somebody else’s. The name’s Mick.”
Aubrey’s mouth went crooked for a second, but he gave it up. “All right, then, Mick it is. I also need to buy some boards to mount eight-by-tens, but don’t worry about paying for it—I’ll keep up with everything and take it out of your first big sale.”
“It’s your money.” He chuckled, still refusing to pretend there would ever be a big sale.
Celly had come in with a cup of hot tea on a china saucer and was just standing there checking out the pictures. Mick didn’t see it right away, but after a while he noticed she looked better than she had the last time he saw her at her house.
She sipped her tea and raised an eyebrow, looking over the spread.
“These are very nice, Mick. They get right up off the table and talk. But then, as Paul Theroux pointed out, a picture is only worth about a thousand words.” A wry smile. She had actually made a joke.
After she left, Aubrey leaned close to him and, almost whispering, said, “I can’t thank you enough, Mick.”
“For what?”
“For letting Celly keep your kids. They’ve worked a miracle on her.”
He thought about it for a few seconds and nodded. “Yeah. They’ve been known to do that.”
* * *
The next night he had planned to go over and help Aubrey with the final prints, but Layne’s aunt Essie died. Layne couldn’t get off work for the funeral the next day, so that evening they had to make a two-hour drive down to a dinky little farm town close to Columbus and put in an appearance at the funeral home. Layne called her sister to see if she could keep the kids for an evening, but Lisa had a social engagement so they ended up taking the kids with them to south Georgia. Big mistake.
Things had been going well for the last couple weeks. Mick had managed to stay out of trouble somehow, and everybody was all excited about him and Aubrey putting together a presentation for the High Museum.
On top of that, Dylan was swimming. Once he got over his fear he took off. They spent three or four hours a day in the pool, always in the deep end. Dylan wouldn’t go near the shallow end anymore—he said it was for little kids—and in a few short weeks he had blossomed into an otter just like his brother and sister. Skinny as he was, Dylan shot through the water like a needle. Life was good, and Mick was on a roll until the night they went to see Aunt Essie.
They only spent about an hour at the funeral home after a two-hour drive down there. They didn’t know Aunt Essie all that well. She was actually Layne’s great aunt, her grandmother’s sister. Aunt Essie sent her a card once or twice a year, always out of season. Like as not, she’d send Layne a Mother’s Day card in November, and it was always covered from corner to corner on the inside with completely illegible handwriting, as if she’d written it while riding a bicycle down a dirt road. Aunt Essie did come to their wedding. Mick could still remember Layne cutting up over the antique waffle iron she gave them. He was pretty sure it was one of Aunt Essie’s own wedding gifts, from seventy years ago.
The funeral home was set up like a little church, with pews and a pulpit and the open casket down front. Cousins and second cousi
ns and aunts and uncles came from all over Georgia, and there were a bunch of them Layne hadn’t seen or talked to since the last funeral. People were quiet and reverent when they first came in. They’d go down front for a minute or two and gaze solemnly on Aunt Essie’s earthly remains, then troop to the back pews to sit down and gab, catch up on the family.
Mick didn’t know anybody there except for one or two of the cousins, so it fell to him to keep the kids entertained on the back pew—keep them out of trouble while Layne caught up on family gossip. Everything was going fine until he got up to go to the bathroom, and on the way back he bumped into Uncle Sid, who recognized him as Layne’s husband.
“So, what do you do?” Uncle Sid asked. He was a wiry little retired farmer who had a head like a tomato with glasses on it and a navy blue nose with an oxygen tube in it.
“Well, I’m an ironworker by trade, but right now I’m staying home with the kids.”
The tomato head recoiled a little and Uncle Sid looked like he’d just bitten into a bad persimmon.
“Pshaw! You mean you don’t work?”
“Well, no, sir, but it’s just temporary. I plan to go back in a few weeks, as soon as the kids are in school.” Come follow me around one day, you old coot, and see if I don’t work.
“How long you been out of work?”
“Let’s see . . . It’s been since before Christmas, so I guess—”
“Since Christmas? Pshaw! How you put food on the table?”
“Um, well, Layne has a pretty good job. Good benefits.” I put food on the table with potholders, Gramps, right after I buy it, bring it home, and cook it.
“But you ain’t workin’?”
Mick could see it all in that sour-persimmon look. Uncle Sid was thinking how in his day he’d have set the Klan on him. Mick was all set to spar with him, but he happened to look across right then and see what the kids were doing.
Layne was sitting in a pew with her back to him, catching up on old times with her cousin Alicia. Layne’s head was down, laughing at something her cousin had said, so she didn’t see the look of horror on Alicia’s face. She was staring past Layne at the kids.
While Mick was gone they had apparently amused themselves by digging in their mother’s pocketbook. Now they were standing up in the pew behind Layne’s back, all three of them, in the rear of a funeral home with a hundred people watching, puffing away on the pretend cigars they had found in Layne’s pocketbook. Oh, they were having a big time, grinning and puffing, everybody watching them, laughing and pointing.
Somebody tapped Layne’s shoulder and whispered to her, and before Mick could get over there she had snatched the tampons out of their hands and jerked all three of them down into the pew.
They left right after that. It was a long, chilly ride home.
36
* * *
The heart of the matter.
AUBREY bought all the hardware he needed to put together a portfolio—a stack of boards and matting material for sandwiching the prints, all in matching shades of blue, and a rich-looking leather binder with Mick Brannigan etched in gold on the front. He had gone through the pictures until he’d narrowed the field down to twenty-seven shots, and he had them all spread out on the dining room table. Most of them had been shot on the job, construction workers doing their thing. The rest were a mix of homeless people and old barns and houses.
“What I’ve done so far,” Aubrey said, “is go through and sort out what’s great photography and what isn’t. I’ve had to be absolutely ruthless in sorting them out because one mediocre picture can bring down Ecklund’s impression of the whole lot. I’ve spent hours going through them, and I’m confident that the ones we have here on the table are your very best, from an art critic’s point of view. But I won’t make final decisions about what to present. You have to do that yourself.”
Mick scratched his head, gave him a sort of Stan Laurel wince.
“I don’t know how these artsy people think,” he said. “How many do we actually need for the portfolio?”
“I’m thinking twelve to fifteen. More than that can get confusing or monotonous. Less, and it looks like you don’t have much to show. The main thing I think you have to do is decide on a theme. Your presentation needs to be focused. You want to have something to say—something that nobody else is saying, or at least something you say better than anybody else. One thing that ties it all together. Once you know what you’re looking for, the selection process gets easier.”
“So, what do you think I’m saying, Aubrey?” This kind of stuff was just out there for Mick.
Aubrey shook his head. “It’s not up to me. I have my opinions, but yours is the one that matters.”
Mick planted his fists on the edge of the table and leaned over the pictures, studying them, for a long time. Aubrey had burned and dodged and tweaked the final prints, brought out the best in them. Mick saw them with new eyes. He saw homeless people and children and workingmen—wonder and confusion and fear and disappointment and triumph in all kinds of faces.
Aubrey stirred first. “What do they tell you?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” Mick said, still leaning on the table. “All I see is people trying to make sense out of things, trying to make it through the day and wondering why. There are more questions here than answers, but maybe that’s just me. Maybe that’s how I see my ownself.”
Aubrey stared at him for a minute, then leaned on the table beside him, poring over the pictures.
“Yes,” he said, finally. “There’s no pretense here, quite possibly because you don’t know how to pretend. But there has to be a common factor, a thread that ties these pictures together.”
The picture of Toad flying through the air over the haystack was not there—Mick had sold it to the gallery and no longer owned it—but it kept flashing across his mind anyway as he looked over the body of work in front of him. The picture of the electrician dragging out a cable with the skyline rising behind him, the ironworker eating a Twinkie with the same city reflected in his goggles, the silhouette of Dylan handing a loaf of bread to an old homeless man, a close-up of a guy in church with his hands raised, his eyes closed, and the trail of a tear on a grimy cheek—all of them reminded him of Toad, flying through the air with her eyes closed. It occurred to him all at once that his own life reminded him of the same thing. He was, at that moment, in the act of building a portfolio for the High Museum—doing something totally foreign to him, something completely out of his experience and comfort zone, for the purpose of flinging it out there with a kiss and a prayer.
“What about faith?” Mick said.
“What about it?” Aubrey was still staring at the pictures, thinking.
“ Faith,” Mick repeated. “It’s what I see here. People believing in something bigger than themselves, or at least hoping. People all blind and confused, but reaching for something anyway. Working, walking, trying—putting one foot in front of the other and pressing on. Not churchy faith. Faith at street level.”
Aubrey straightened up then, took his glasses off and chewed on the end of them. Slowly he began to nod, and a smile came into his eyes.
“Yes. I can see that. Street Faith. That’s good. That’s very good.”
It still took two hours to cull the pictures that didn’t fit, but the finding of the theme was the key. The job became doable. At some point Celly got in on it. Mick and Aubrey explained what they were looking for, and then the three of them argued endlessly about what fit and what didn’t. They had a grand time, and finally agreed on twelve pictures. After they cleared away everything else, they lined up the final twelve and argued about what order they should be in.
But they got her done. In a day or two, when Aubrey and Celly were finished matting the pictures and arranging them in the binder, they would send them to A.J. Ecklund at the address on his card, with a cover letter that Aubrey would write and Mick would sign. And then they would all wait.
Mick didn’t know ho
w to thank Aubrey and Celly. He tried, but he just didn’t much know what to say.
“It’s all right,” Aubrey told him. “We’re having fun. Besides, it’s what neighbors do.”
37
* * *
Clothes is clothes.
HE NEVER should have done it. Mick never quite understood what pushed him to it, unless it was simply that he was trying to find a way to restore himself in his wife’s eyes after the funeral-home fiasco. He should have listened to his instinct, that grim sense of foreboding that sat like a brick in his gut whenever he looked at that hamper—the one in the middle of the closet.
But it ate at him, that one forbidden thing. Day after day it sat there in the back of the closet and watched him, waiting. It caught his eye and began to challenge him; then it taunted him, and then it beckoned him. Over time the hamper in the back of the closet appealed to his pride and called to him, precisely because it was forbidden. She said she’d kill him graveyard dead if he touched the clothes in there, but Mick suspected that the only reason she wouldn’t let him wash her clothes was that she didn’t want him to know everything she knew. She was jealous of her knowledge.
He would show her. She would be proud. She would say that he was the smartest man in all the earth.
He flung open the closet door and stood in the opening. Clothes hung down opposite sides of the dark closet—mute, withholding judgment. There, in the center, at the far end of the closet sat his judge, squat and dark, a deeper shadow at the end of shadows. He could have sworn it bulged and pulsed. Through the open window came the sharp warning hack of a blue jay, and a chill ran up his spine.
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