Trick of Light

by Bayer-William

  It's spooky on Sixteenth—no traffic, poor lighting, block after block of windowless flat-roofed warehouses. Just before Third there's a late-night jazz club, a row of parked cars in front. Joel slows, then works his way through the labyrinth of narrow streets that lead to the China Basin waterfront. He finds El Dorado, drives down to the dead end, cuts the engine.

  I peer around. We're in a lonely place. No residential or commercial buildings, just a burned-out structure to our right. Straight ahead, perhaps a hundred yards to the east, a couple of huge cargo vessels are tied up at piers. There're bright lights over there, the kind they use when loading ships at night. The lights are harsh, hurt my eyes. I turn back to Joel.

  "Which one's Pier sixty-four?"

  He points to the left. He's alert now, edgy.

  "I don't like it here."

  "Neither do I, kiddo. If we were on China Basin Street we'd be closer to the water and we could drive out either way. From here we gotta hike to the water and there's only one way out."

  "Kinda like we're in a box."

  "That bothers me." He pauses. "Unless—"

  "What?"

  "It's safer over here."

  "Safer from what?"

  "Whatever's going to happen."

  "Which is?"

  "No way to know that yet."

  Jesus, Joel! Spare me, please!

  "I'm getting out," I announce, opening the door.

  "Wouldn't do that, kiddo."

  "Why not?" I aim my camera toward the water.

  "Just wouldn't, that's all. Sit tight awhile. See what happens."

  I laugh. "Next thing you'll be telling me to keep my powder dry." I aim at the ships, check focus.

  Joel starts to grin. The explosion cuts him off. Even as I'm blinded, I shoot by instinct.

  "Down! Head down!" he yells, yanking me back into the car, pushing me into the space beneath the dash, a space into which I can't possibly fit. The roar is huge. My ears go deaf. Then it feels as if the car is actually lifted off the street. I feel the weight of Joel's body crushing me down, my camera biting into my chest. There's a great rush of air; then, as suddenly as it began, the world becomes quiet once again.

  I take a deep breath. Something nauseous and acrid enters my lungs.

  "Let me up, Joel! I can't breathe."

  I'm grateful when he takes the pressure off my back. I shake my head to clear it, sit up and look ahead. The vessel that was docked at Pier 64 is engulfed in flames and there's a terrible chemical smell in the air.

  "Jesus!"

  "The ship blew up," Joel says. "Incredible! There was this huge fireball. Then . . . BOOM!" He looks at me. "You okay?"

  I nod, touch my camera. "I think I got it."

  We get out of the car, start across a rubble-strewn field toward the pier. I'm a little dizzy, hate the smell in the air, am fearful of more explosions, but plod on, seeking a clear field of view. When I find one, stop and look, I feel myself drawn in. I forget about Joel, move closer. I know what I'm looking for—people to give scale to the fire. But I don't see anyone, and then it occurs to me that the explosion was so powerful anyone on or near that ship was knocked down or blown to bits.

  Sirens in the distance. The hook and ladder companies are on their way. A fire like this will burn for hours and there'll be no exclusive film; in minutes the waterfront will be crawling with press. Still I advance toward the flames.

  "Get close as you can before you shoot," Maddy always said.

  The air's unbreathable, the heat sears my face; still I continue to work. I'm seeking a strong encapsulating image that will say more than merely Fire! It's people I need, and since the only people around are firefighters, I concentrate on them.

  There's one who catches my eye, a young guy with classical features, a warrior's eyes, an athlete's noble brow. When I approach, he turns.

  "Real dangerous here!" he yells above the roar. "Better stand off!"

  "Look, I got my job," I tell him. "Let me tag along."

  He looks at me. "Trying to be the brave reporter-girl, are you?"

  "That's me!" I yell.

  "Sure, girlie, tag along." He grins. "I like your spunk."

  He turns his back, making it impossible to shoot his face. I track him to the dock. Out on the water, I see three fireboats, water guns blazing, working the burning ship.

  "Hey, Mr. Fireman Man!" I yell. "What's the cargo aboard this tub?" He ignores me. "Smells awful!"

  Just then there's a secondary explosion on the ship. He crouches, half turns. That's the moment that I shoot. Whap!whap! The agony contorting his face is just about perfect.

  "Wow, you look great!" I tell him.

  He stares at me, crazed. "This isn't a movie, lady. We're fighting a real fire here."

  Whap!whap!

  "Gotcha! Thanks!" Then I back off from the flames.

  Joel finds me in the tangle of fire trucks on China Basin Street, tells me the toll so far is one dead, thirteen injured, and that it looks as though a bomb went off, igniting the ship's fuel tanks.

  "A few hours earlier," he says, "it would have been much worse. They'd just finished unloading her. She was carrying anhydrous ammonia. When that stuff hits water you get a cloud of toxic gas, the kind that explodes your larynx and scorches your lungs."

  "What's going on, Joel?"

  He shakes his head. "Two tips, same source, both dead-on accurate. The first about illegals, the second about a bomb. What's the connection and why the tip-off? I don't get it." Again he shakes his head. "I'm being used, kiddo, and I don't know why. That worries me a lot."

  It worries me too.

  We hang around. Unlike the scene at the Presidio, there're no law enforcers strutting here tonight, just weary firefighters and arson investigators, sweaty paramedics and hollow-eyed cops. When I tell Joel I'm afraid the bad air's going to make me faint, he escorts me back to his car. On the way home, at my request he stops on the Embarcadero, lets me out. I go to the seawall, breathe deeply, trying to clear my lungs. He joins me. We stand together facing the water, inhaling, exhaling, taking in the fresh thick salty air. When, at last, we feel cleansed, we sit side by side on the seawall, staring at the skyline of Oakland sparkling across the Bay.

  "Usually, when you get a tip," Joel says, "it's about something that's already happened. Like, 'Check out the basement,' 'So-and-so did it,' 'Rumor on the street is such and such.' This is different. These tips are about events that haven't happened yet. So I wonder—what kind of person knows when a boatload of illegals is coming in and that a bomb's going to go off . . . can even tell me where to park so I won't get hurt? Someone obviously wired into the waterfront. But I think it's more. When someone can predict the future like that, it's a signal he controls the events he predicts." He turns to me. "Power, kiddo—I think that's the message here."

  It's been three days since I papered Capp Street; so far no messages on my machine. Deciding to cover the block again, I return with a fresh sheaf of flyers. When I get there, the first thing I observe is that all my posted flyers have been torn off the telephone poles.

  Fine, I think, that's just fine.

  I set to work with hammer and tacks, vigorously restoring my notices. Then I work the block, up one side, down the other, slipping my flyers alternately beneath windshield wipers and front doors. When I'm finished, I stand, hands on hips, surveying the street, displaying my determination to whoever may be peering out. I'll keep coming back, I promise silently, until I get results . . . and if that means standing on the corner handing off flyers to passersby, that's what I'll do.

  My action portraits of the handsome fireman are intense and my accidental shot of the fireball is as strong a disaster image as I've ever shot. Carla Dean, News picture editor, phones to tell me she's thrilled. The shot's exclusive, no one else caught the fireball, she wants to run it on the front page full bleed.

  "It's Pulitzer caliber," she says.

  "Wow, I don't get that," I tell her. "I was just fooling around whe
n suddenly the thing went off. I wasn't even looking through the finder. I barely had time to trip the shutter before Joel tried to stuff me into a space you couldn't stuff a hat."

  She laughs. "Trying to save a freelancer—sounds like Joel." Then she turns serious. "It's a good story, Kay. Only problem—since you were there and ready to shoot when it happened, you're going to be questioned about, like, 'How come you knew?'"

  My hand shakes as I put down the phone. It never occurred to me the picture could get me in trouble, that I'd have to explain how I happened to be at the right place at the right time: "Tell us, Ms. Farrow, do you make a habit of hanging around piers waiting for explosions, or were you there because you knew one was going to go off? In which case wouldn't it have been prudent to inform the authorities? A man was killed, you know."

  Jesus!

  At one A.M. the phone rings.

  "Hello?" I hear heavy breathing at the other end. "Hello?" I say again.

  "Yeah, you the cunt leaving paper up and down Capp?" The voice is gruff, the tone mean.

  Normally I'd hang up, and if he called again, unplug the phone. Tonight I decide to stay connected.

  "Hey! Hear what I'm saying, bitch?"

  I don't say a word.

  "Whatsamatta? You some kind of fuckin' freak or something?" It would be so easy to tell him which one of us is the freak, but instead I bite my lip.

  "Listen up good. Don't come around with that shit again. Show your face around here you're gonna get hurt. Got it, cunt?"

  He waits a beat, then hangs up.

  Calmly I replace the headset. Probably just a secret admirer, I decide.

  I'm back on Capp at seven A.M., my intention to catch the residents as they leave for work. Walking the block, I don't see a single one of my flyers—not on the telephone poles, the windshields of parked cars, even discarded on the street.

  I post myself at the exact spot where Maddy was run down. As pedestrians pass I offer them my flyer. A few accept, the rest walk by, some gazing at me curiously, most avoiding my eyes. I detect no particular hostility, certainly nothing to equal the venom of my anonymous caller. One high school boy accepts a flyer, then says, "Have a nice day." That cheers me, proving kindness still exists among the young.

  Two hours pass. People come and go, exit buildings, get into cars, drive off. My feet start to hurt. Tired of standing in one place, I walk down to the corner, reposition myself beside a stop sign. Here, whenever I try to hand off a flyer, the driver waves me away.

  By nine-thirty I'm filled with compassion for all the street people whose handouts I've shrugged off through the years—earnest Scientologists, creepy Jehovah's Witnesses, pathetic oldsters wearing sandwich boards trying to lure me into cheap eateries. It's a lousy job, handing stuff out. Rejection is the norm. After a certain number of snubs you start to offer in a manner that tells passersby you expect to be rebuffed.

  By ten o'clock my pride is pretty much worn down. I walk the block, repaper the poles and cars, slip flyers again beneath doors. This is it, I tell myself, as I finish up. This'll be my last shot. I've made my point, shown my contempt for my anonymous caller and his threat. If the people here are too mean-spirited to help, there's nothing more I can do.

  My answering machine's blinking when I get home. Immediately I play the message. I recognize the voice from nearly the first word. It's the Mexican woman, the nurse who lives on the corner of Capp and Twenty-fourth.

  "I saw you on the street this morning," she says. "I believe you are sincere. I have something to tell you, not too much, but we must meet someplace where we won't be seen. Please wait for me at five this afternoon inside Mission Dolores Basilica. Sit on the left side. I will find you." Pause. "My name is María Quintana."

  I spend the day in anticipation. At two I walk over to Marina Aikido to train. I return home, shower, then go out with my camera. The sunlight's too bright. I can barely stand it even wearing my heaviest shades. At four-thirty I stop at a pay phone and call a cab. I instruct the driver to take me to Mission Dolores.

  The original adobe mission chapel is small, elegant, austere. Built in 1782, it's the oldest building in San Francisco. The basilica next door, constructed in 1913 in the style called churrigueresque, is huge, exuberant. It's here, in the flamboyant chapel, that I genuflect, then take a seat in a pew eight rows back from the main altar. Five P.M.: Incense fills the air. A mass is scheduled to begin in half an hour. A concerned-looking priest hurriedly crosses the nave. Another slips into a confessional, then turns out the light to signal he's open for business. Three confession boxes are now in use. Elderly women in black, assembled close by, patiently wait their turns.

  This is a Hispanic church, different from the Irish Catholic churches I attended in my youth. Here the lighting level is low, a comfort to my eyes, the smell is of incense and damp stone, and the statues are brooding and mysterious, with an emphasis on startled eyes and the pain and bloody wounds of martyrs.

  I'm lost in these thoughts when I feel a presence at my side. I turn to find María Quintana, bowed head wrapped in black scarf, nurse's uniform concealed by black raincoat, knees firm on the kneeling bench. Hearing her start to mutter a prayer, I kneel and mutter a half-forgotten one of my own.

  We sit in silence side by side. The pews are filling. The organist is playing. Mass will soon begin. I wait for her signal. Are we going to have to sit through the entire mass before we speak?

  At 5:28, as people swarm in, she rises and moves to the side aisle. I follow her up the transept to the door that leads to the cemetery garden of the old mission. Silently she leads me past the gravestones of forty-niners and early Franciscan friars, across ground where thousands of nameless Costanoan Indians are buried, until we reach a small hedged area surrounded by rosebushes near the statue of the great Franciscan Junípero Serra.

  Here, where the light is soft, she turns to me at last, meets my eyes and, for the first time since we met, greets me with a smile.

  "Thanks for calling me," I tell her. "I was about to give up."

  "I kept hoping someone would contact you. When I saw you this morning, I understood no one had."

  "That's why you decided to call?"

  She nods. "I could not bear to watch you standing there so patiently where she fell. If no one else would speak with you I knew my duty, that it would have to be me."

  Her face seems pretty to me now. When she smiles a network of crinkles appears on either side of her eyes and a dimple deepens in her chin. But it's her voice that compels me—throaty, accented, resonant with compassion.

  "Did you see my friend before?" I ask.

  "Oh, yes," she says, "several times, always at night, but not usually on our block. She was more often on Cypress, the next street over. But people on Capp also noticed her. It was her eyes and the camera that made her stand out. Where we live people do not walk with cameras on the street. I believe she and you are the only two I have seen. That is how I knew you were connected."

  I'm stunned. "When you say you saw her several times, how often do you mean?"

  She thinks a moment. "Perhaps ten times, maybe more."

  "When was the first time? Do you remember?"

  "Yes," she says. "I thought about it this morning. It was in January, I am sure. I remember because I was surprised. It was raining, I was putting out my trash, when I saw her walking in the rain up the block."

  "Others saw her too?"

  "Oh, yes. People mentioned it, the old Anglo lady with the extraordinary eyes—what was she doing, why had she come?"

  "Did anyone know?"

  "Not at first."

  "Then—?"

  "There were rumors. She was crazy, a gringa loca." María Quintana lowers her eyes. "I am sorry, but that is what people said."

  "Why do you think nobody called?"

  "They were afraid. They did not wish to become involved. I did not either, but now—" She shrugs. "This morning when I saw you I knew I had to speak."

  I gaze into he
r eyes. "What was she doing there?"

  "No one knows. But she had a room, a little room she rented on Cypress Street. When we saw her, I think, she was coming or going from that house."

  Maddy rented a room!

  "Do you know the address?"

  "I am not sure."

  "You could find out?"

  Her eyes turn cautious.

  "I am sorry but I do not wish to ask. To do so is to invite trouble," she says. "People are afraid to speak about it now that she was killed."

  "Did you see her killed?"

  She shakes her head. "I only heard the sound."

  "Others heard it too?"

  "Everyone."

  "Yet no one saw it?"

  "I believe some did, but they do not wish to speak of it. It was a very bad thing. Everyone felt that way. They felt badly that it could happen to such a nice person and so close to where we live."

  "It wasn't an accident, was it?"

  She shakes her head. "I do not know."

  "If it wasn't an accident, María, people wouldn't be afraid to speak. Even if you didn't see it, I wish you'd tell me what you think."

  She shakes her head again, yet her eyes stay locked to mine. It's then that I understand she will only speak of things she has seen.

  "Thanks for what you've told me," I tell her. "The rest I'll have to find out on my own." I pause. "First, I need to find the rented room. I'll make up more flyers, leave them on Cypress under all the doors. Maybe then someone will call, tell me which house."

  "Please do not leave more paper," she says. Her eyes are disturbed. "That is why I called you, so you would not leave more. The neighbors do not like it. It makes them afraid."

  It's my turn to shrug. "I must find her room."

  María stares at me, then looks down. "Try the green door," she whispers. "But I did not tell you this. I did not tell you anything."

  I nod. She embraces me, kisses me on both cheeks.

  "Thank you, María."

  "It is nothing," she says, slipping away.

  I watch as she moves through the garden cemetery, then reenters the basilica by the side door. I check my watch. The mass must be nearly over. Too late for her to take communion, but still time to catch the benediction. Making my way out directly to the street, I feel no sorrow for my own lost faith. It's the dojo, with its stringent values and discipline, that is my temple now.