Shooting the Moon

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  “Brutus says he comes from Africa, but he never told you that because you don’t like Africa,” Cindy said, leading me into her room.

  “I like Africa,” I protested before I could remember not to get caught up in conversation with Cindy like she was just another one of my friends. Within seconds, I’d be arguing on her level, saying hurtful things just to feel superior.

  “Brutus says you don’t.” Cindy reached over and pinched me. “So don’t lie.”

  “Sorry.” I rubbed the red welt on my arm. “I won’t anymore.”

  Cindy sat primly on her neatly made bed, the pink chenille spread pulled tight, and reached across a pile of stuffed animals toward a raggedy, stretched-out boxer dog with fluff coming out of his left eye socket where the eye used to be. This was my beloved Brutus, given to me by TJ on my third birthday. According to my mother, he’d struggled hard over whether or not to give me Brutus or keep him for himself, but in the end brotherly love had won out. He’d named Brutus before he gave him to me, saying that if he ever got a dog, if our mom suddenly stopped being allergic to them, that’s what he’d planned on calling it.

  “You know you have to give Brutus back to me one day,” I told Cindy, the way I did every time I came over. “I only loaned him to you. It’s not for keeps.”

  Cindy hugged Brutus tight to her chest. “Brutus likes it here better, I told you he told me that. He told me that he hates you and wishes you would die.”

  You wouldn’t think that some crazy thing Cindy Lorenzo said to you, something made up in her halfway working mind, could hurt your feelings, but Cindy’s words could pinch as hard as her fingers. I knew I should just ignore her, and sometimes I could. But right then I wanted to pinch Cindy back.

  “Hey, Cindy, do you want to go to the playground and see who’s there? We could swing on the swings.”

  Cindy went pale, the brown splotches on her skin standing out worse than ever. “No, no, no, no,” she said, the last “no” scaling into a wail. “No, I will not, no, no.”

  She curled up into a ball on her bed, still clutching Brutus. I felt a tiny pang of regret, but more than that, I felt like I’d gotten Cindy back and she deserved it. It was not the nicest part of myself that felt that way. Sometimes I thought it was too bad that I’d figured out Cindy couldn’t stand being around a lot of people at once. A nicer person than me would never have used this information against Cindy. I tried not to do it too much, but every once in a while I couldn’t help myself.

  “Okay, okay,” I said after a minute. I sat down next to her on the bed. “That’s not what I came over to ask you, anyway. I wanted to show you the pictures TJ sent me from Vietnam. Well, he didn’t send me the pictures, actually. He sent the film. I developed it by myself.”

  “TJ’s a meanie!” Cindy shrieked. “I hate him!”

  Cindy was in love with my brother. Her love had shown itself in a parade of little-kid insults and pinches and kicks. It was like watching the Three Stooges, the kind of funny that makes you laugh and wince at the same time.

  “I developed this film myself,” I repeated, wanting Cindy to be impressed, even though I knew that she wouldn’t be. She’d probably never given one thought in her life to how pictures got from the camera to a piece of paper. Still, I liked saying it. “Sgt. Byrd taught me how to print pictures this very afternoon. He said I’m a natural, from start to finish.”

  Learning to develop the film had been easier than I thought it would be. Sgt. Byrd talked me through the whole process, making me do everything myself, saying that’s the only way I’d learn it. When I finally pulled out the long strip of negatives from the processing tank, I felt like some kind of genius. I hung the negatives to dry, trying not to peek at what they might reveal.

  To print a negative, you have to load it into an enlarger, which is the machine that shines light through the negative and exposes the image on a piece of light-sensitive paper. When you’re ready to do that, you turn off the room’s overhead light and turn on the safe light, open up the enlarger lens, and turn the enlarger light on, which projects the image onto the paper. From there, it’s a lot of adjusting until you have the image just the way you want it. Turn off the enlarger, put in a sheet of photographic paper, turn on the enlarger for six seconds. Then it’s time to slip the paper into the developer for a minute or so, and then into the stop bath for ten seconds, and then you put it into the fix. Finally you wash the paper off and hang it up to dry.

  My hands shook trying to load the first negative into the enlarger. I didn’t know what to expect, couldn’t quite imagine what picture would emerge, but I knew it would be something amazing.

  Instead, it was a picture of a hut.

  “Actually,” Sgt. Byrd informed me, “it’s called a hootch. And it’s a good picture. Your brother knows what he’s doing with a camera.”

  Maybe. If what he was trying to do was bore people to death. From a roll of thirty-six negatives, I counted eleven huts, nine assorted groupings of GIs—most of them sitting around with their shirts off and drinking beer—six pictures of the same dog—a white terrier with a black spot around its left eye—and eight pictures of bushes and trees. There was even a close-up of a blooming flower. A flower. I shook my head in disgust.

  Now, sitting on Cindy’s bed, I opened the manila envelope I’d put TJ’s pictures in once they’d dried. “Here’s a picture of some soldiers that are probably friends of TJ’s. I think some of them are sort of cute, don’t you?”

  I held up the picture for Cindy to see. I was trying to act excited about it, but the fact is, the whole roll of film had been a disappointment to me. Huts and tents and soldiers waving beer cans in the general direction of the camera. Nothing worth noting, in my opinion, especially when there was a war being fought in the vicinity. If I was excited about anything, it was that I’d learned to develop and print film. I wanted to show somebody what I’d done, even if the end result wasn’t all that fascinating.

  “Come watch me ride my bike,” Cindy said, hopping off of her bed.

  “Don’t you want to see the rest of TJ’s photographs? He’s in Vietnam, just like Mark.”

  Cindy crossed her arms over her chest. “I know TJ’s in Vietnam. I’m not stupid. I’m not retarded like you think. I’m just special and I have a medical condition.”

  “I know you’re not retarded,” I said. “It’s just we both have brothers in Vietnam, and it’s this thing we have in common.”

  Cindy looked at me for several seconds. Then she nodded and sat back down next to me on the bed. “I like having things in common.”

  I showed her the rest of the pictures. The last one I pulled out of the envelope was a moon shot. “I want that one,” Cindy told me, tugging the picture out of my hands. “I could put it on my wall, and then I could look at the moon any time I wanted.”

  “Okay.” I could go back to the rec center in the morning and print another copy if I felt like it. “Are there any others you want?”

  “No, just the moon.”

  It was one of TJ’s better moons, I thought. It had a band of light around it and it sat plush in the middle, beaming, a fat full moon on a beautiful night.

  “Now will you watch me ride my bike?” Cindy asked.

  “Sure,” I told her, tucking the pictures back into the envelope. Usually I would have found an excuse to go home, but I was feeling good. I had developed and printed a roll of film. And maybe even better than that, TJ had asked me to do it, which meant he believed I could. I don’t know why he believed it, but he did. So now we had something in common, even though we were so far away from each other.

  “Come on,” Cindy groused at me from the doorway. “Let’s get going!”

  I picked up the envelope and followed her out the door. “Okay, okay, you don’t have to be such a grouch.”

  But I was smiling as I said it. I guess I was in a generous mood.

  seven

  TJ’s next so-called letter came two weeks later. I ripped open the padde
d envelope, hoping this time there’d be a note with some real news in it, some good old-fashioned descriptions of rifle reports or a hand grenade rolling across a jungle path, something that would give me a real feel for what it was like to be TJ right then. It might be tough for me to actually get a job as an ambulance driver in Vietnam, but if TJ would just write me a real letter, it would be like I was there in Vietnam, right beside him.

  But all that envelope contained was two rolls of film in their little black canisters with their little gray caps. His letter to my parents was as boring as the one before it had been. The food was bad; the nurses were nice, a couple of them were even pretty; he’d been riding some in the medevac helicopter, which was the helicopter that went to pick up wounded soldiers. That last part had the potential to be interesting, only TJ didn’t describe an actual time when he’d ridden the helicopter out to a battle scene. My seventh-grade English teacher, Mrs. Robertson, would have deducted ten points for lack of specific detail.

  Because I was a natural in the darkroom, I decided to try developing the film alone, without Sgt. Byrd there to guide me through every step. I felt nervous about it, but I reasoned that I couldn’t depend on Sgt. Byrd to be there to help me the entire time TJ was in Vietnam. And I didn’t make a single mistake, if you don’t count dropping the film spool lid in the dark closet and having to get down on my hands and knees to find it and then dropping the second roll of film in the dark, before I’d even unspooled it, and having to scramble around twenty minutes before I found it by kneeling on it.

  But I didn’t expose the film, and that was all that counted. When I finished getting it on the spool and into the canister and got the lid on tight, I mixed the developer and poured it into the canister. I poured out the developer after ten minutes, poured in the vinegary-smelling stop solution. After that came the fixer. Then I rinsed off all the chemicals, pulled out the negatives, and hung them up to dry from the clothesline strung across the room, and went out to talk to Private Hollister.

  “I wish TJ would write me a real letter,” I told him after we’d sat down across from each other at his desk and he began to deal the cards for a game of gin. “I don’t even know if he got the pictures I developed for him.”

  “When did you send them?”

  “A week ago.”

  “He ain’t got the package yet, then. Or he’s just getting it right about now.”

  “Well, you’d think he’d want to see how I did on the first roll of film before he sent me any more.” I leaned back in my chair, thinking about how badly I wanted to hear what TJ had to say about the job I did with his film. He’d only asked for contact sheets, where each negative was printed in miniature, so you could see all your pictures from a roll of film on one sheet of paper. I’d done a sheet for him, but I’d also done prints of each photograph.

  Private Hollister picked up a card from the top of the deck. “Your pictures looked pretty good to me. Or TJ’s pictures, I guess I should say. I bet hell like them a lot. Did your folks like ’em?”

  “Yeah, I guess. I mean, my mom hung two of them on the refrigerator, so I guess she liked them. This new batch looks pretty interesting, from what I can tell,” I said, discarding and picking up a card from the deck. “It’s hard to tell exactly what you’re looking at when you’re looking at a negative. Definitely people, but I think there might be some of helicopters this time.”

  We played five hands of gin, with Private Hollister coming out on top, three hands to two.

  “I guess I’ll go print those pictures now,” I said. “The negatives ought to be dry. I hope there’s some good stuff. Like maybe a combat picture or something. Maybe some North Vietnamese prisoners of war. Sgt. Byrd taught me some Vietnam talk when we worked on the last roll of film. Like an ambulance is called a cracker box and you call the enemy Charlie or Mr. Charles.”

  “You know, Jamie, there’s something—” Private Hollister started, stopped, coughed. “There’s just this one thing you ought—” He stopped again. “Forget it. It ain’t important.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked him, itching to get to that film.

  Private Hollister nodded. “Nothing that can’t wait till later.”

  I made contact sheets of both rolls of film. Last time I’d printed all the pictures, but this time I decided to be more picky. Once I’d developed the contact sheets, I sat down at a table in the darkroom with a magnifying glass to go over each picture and see which ones were worth taking the time to print. As I’d thought, there were plenty of pictures of people, lots of soldiers—holding beer cans or sleeping or lying on cots reading magazines. There was a trio of pretty nurses, and the dog he’d taken a picture of before showed up again, this time with a bandanna tied around its neck.

  I was starting to get bored. Since I didn’t know any of the people, their pictures didn’t mean anything to me. But then an image caught my eye. Three medics were carrying a wounded GI on a stretcher toward a helicopter. In the foreground was another soldier, only he was looking away from the helicopter, like he didn’t want to see what was going on all around him. The wounded soldier had bandages wrapped around his chest, and there was blood seeping through them.

  That was the picture I wanted to print.

  It’s a funny thing, printing a photograph, because when you’re in the process of doing it, you’re paying attention to the tiniest things, like the fingers on a hand, trying to get them to show up in sharp detail, or bringing out the shadow falling across somebody’s face. Each little piece of the picture is like part of a puzzle, and the more defined you make everything, the more your picture tells a story.

  For some reason, I got all involved in bringing out the details on the soldier’s face, the one who was looking away. He was probably headed back to get someone else, but the way the camera caught him, it seemed like he couldn’t bear to look at the man the medics were carrying to the helicopter. Maybe because his was the only face I could really see, I kept wanting to look at it, kept wondering what he was thinking about.

  And then my eyes drifted up to the wounded soldier. There was a lot of blood coming through the bandages wrapped around his chest. Did TJ know whether or not he made it to the hospital alive? Was he alive now? Back in the States? Or back in a combat zone?

  I spent an hour printing the picture, trying it again and again until I felt I had it right. I brought it out to show Private Hollister. “Isn’t this amazing?” I asked him, feeling excited about the work I’d done. “I mean, it’s a picture of somebody who’s actually been hit by the enemy. It’s the real war.”

  “It’s real, all right.” Private Hollister looked awkward, like he didn’t quite know what to say to me. “I mean, it’s definitely a real war. Don’t know if I want to look at pictures of the people who are getting killed over there, though. I’ve seen enough of that on TV, I guess. Heard enough about it on a day-to-day basis over the last few years.”

  “Did you ever know anyone who got killed there?”

  Private Hollister was quiet for a minute. I wondered if he was going through a list of buddies, trying to remember if everybody was still accounted for. He cleared his throat and said, “Yeah, well, my brother Barney did. Right at the beginning, back in ’65. Hardly anybody knew there was a war then, not like the way it is now, with protesters and hippies and everything.”

  “Your brother died?” For some reason, I found this answer nearly unacceptable. Private Hollister wasn’t the sort of person who had a dead brother. He wasn’t the least bit tragic. “Did you cry?”

  He laughed and looked up in the air, like he didn’t know how to answer that question and was hoping the ceiling might have some advice for him.

  “I don’t know why I asked that,” I said quickly. “It’s just if TJ died in Vietnam, I’d cry, but I’m a girl.”

  “My mom cried,” Private Hollister said, sounding more comfortable all of a sudden, like the topic of girls crying was a lot easier one for him to handle. “Man, she cried a whole river. The docto
r finally had to give her some pills.”

  “My mom has these pills the doctor gave her for bad headaches. She takes one, she sleeps for twenty-four hours straight.”

  “Huh,” Private Hollister said, like I’d just told him something very interesting and worthwhile.

  Right about then we ran out of conversation.

  I put the picture down on Private Hollister’s desk, picked it up again. “Well, I guess I’ll go clean up in the back. I’ll do some more printing tomorrow. After work, that is. Don’t forget, I’m here to work.”

  “You’re here to play cards is more like it.” Private Hollister grinned.

  “That, too,” I agreed. Then I walked back to the darkroom to clean up the mess I’d made. I pinned the picture of the soldier back up on the line and leaned over to pick up some scraps of cut negatives off the floor. As I tossed them into the trash can, a shiver zipped down my arms to the tips of my fingers, the way it did whenever I was lying in bed in the dark and got convinced there was a ghost watching me from the corner of the room. But when I looked around the darkroom, all I saw was the picture of the soldier on the stretcher, his face peering down at me from the clothesline.

  Later, when I looked at that picture again, I stared for a long time at the soldier, imagining what I would do differently if I decided to print it again. I wished I could see the soldier’s face. I thought about the fact that he might have been somebody’s brother. Somebody who was waiting for him to come home.

  I knew that was one picture I wasn’t going to show to my mother.

  eight

  In the weeks before TJ left to join the Army, things around our house got loud and very quiet at the same time. The loudness came from TJ yelling, “Hey, have you seen the lock to my footlocker?” from upstairs when everybody else was downstairs, or from me yelling across the hall, “Hey, TJ, I’m going to the PX, you want me to get anything on your list?” It also came from my mother, who, despite a certain talent for keeping a stiff upper lip during trying times, kept having minor emotional outbursts, like when she was doing dishes by herself in the kitchen and suddenly cried out to no one, “Whose idea was it to have this war, anyway? Whose idiotic idea was it?”