Just North of Nowhere

by Lawrence Santoro

  She sniffed at the thought: Vinnie’s brogans leaving tread marks in the dust. She squinted at the imagined sound Vinnie’s fingernails scratching the tight skin on his sunburned scalp as he squinted at her world, trying, at least, to look as though he were thinking, figurin' just what the hey had happened to old “Roofless” Potter, for cripes sake. She could see, she could hear plain as day!

  She sneezed again.

  Maybe she could find a few dollars – her own – to give to that Bunch person. He was an acceptable winter shoveler. He could probably sweep and empty and not do too much damage.

  My own money! She laughed, then laughed aloud.

  With the laugh, there came a tapping at the locked and shaded door. Her heart leaped. “Fer garsh sake! Open all day and they come by at closing.” She snapped up the shade, prepared to glower down some tourist, lost, some housewife, late, some child, frightened.

  Peering dead sour at Ruth, nose flattened on the glass, was Hillary Arroyo Burroughs. The old bitch staggered to hold on to a wooden crate.

  Ruth clicked her tongue loud enough to carry through the glass. “You can't come between business hours for goodness sake, Hillary?” She cracked the door, hating what became of her manners near Hillary.

  Grunting like an old pug, Hillary shoved her aside. “Haul ass, Ruth, I’m coming though.” She staggered a moment, then waddled full tilt to the back of the reading room. The dust sucked toward her in the wake of her passing.

  “For goodness sake!” Ruth didn't care if Hillary was darned near 100 – 90 anyway – old bitch shows up like a bull in a china shop, she can carry her own truck, confound her anyway.

  “Watch the goddamned street,” Hillary shouted without turning around. “I don't want every swingin' dick in Bluffton knowing this business!”

  Hillary wiggled the crate gently onto the 18-foot oak study table. Once it was down, she leaned her shoulder to it, shoved it to the center.

  Ruth cringed at the screech of nail heads plowing tracks in the newly varnished surface. “Sakes alive, Hillary! Never mind the Selectmen just refinished that –- and I remember there was one member fought even that!” Ruth touched one of the bright gouges as though it were a battle wound. “The last capital expenditure you people approved...”

  “Piss sake, stop gawping like a landed trout and give me a hand, Ruthie. This is a behest!”

  Could have dropped her with a feather, but Ruth held ground.

  Hillary blew past and Ruth followed to the front. The old woman's black Hummer was cocked on the sidewalk, one rear wheel on the pavement, the other on the bottom step of the library. The hatch yawned and the old biddy’s butt wiggled as she kneeled, wrangling another box from the vehicle.

  “PISS-sake, Ruth, get your flabby buns down here! This shit's important.”

  Ruth didn't respond well to orders, even when issued by Bluffton’s richest citizen – former whore that she may (or may not) have been (depending on whom one believed). She certainly did not respond to orders tied to grotesque profanities never before shouted in her library or on its grounds.

  “I assume you mean a bequest, Hillary.” Ruth looked up and down Commonwealth Street, determined no one who mattered would see her physically handling these things, these dirty items from God knew where, from the back of Hillary Arroyo Burroughs' jeep, from her basement, her attic, her life. She descended the steps. “A behest is an entreaty, a request. These... Criminies! This is heavy!” The words burst out of her as she strained and only half lifted the box with Hillary.

  “Don't jostle,” Hillary said. “They're glass and they're priceless. So watch what you're doing! Here. We take it together.”

  By the time they had gotten it and the remaining seven crates onto the study table, Ruth was soaked, her first work sweat in 27 years. It felt horrible. Horrible.

  On Hillary, the faint slick of oily damp looked natural.

  “Bequest, behest, be fucked. What the shit,” Hillary said, “get me a glass.” She waved a bottle at Ruth and sucked down great rasping gasps of library air.

  Ruth waited long enough to let Hillary Arroyo Burroughs know she was not to be ordered in her own library. Truman and Macarthur, she thought, Truman and Macarthur. Then Ruth fetched, curse it, she fetched.

  “And bring one for yourself,” Hillary shouted. “We got a night's work ahead!

  By midnight or so, Ruth didn't mind aquavit. She really didn’t. She had never had it. Even if she – she and Hillary Arroyo Burroughs, that was the kicker, fer garsh sake – even if they were drinking in the library – drinking in the library late at night! Even if she and the town's richest oldest lady bitch were drinking booze (was this booze? Ruth guessed it was!); were drinking booze in the library late at night; even so, this aquavit was not so bad! Imagine! She'd never tasted it and it wasn't bad.

  She took another sip, a secret sip. Room-warm the aquavit made her shiver from the throat down to gut.

  Across the table from Ruth, Hillary snored. The things Hillary had said as they'd unpacked the crate! One of many. How many? One, two, well, many. Silly things. The things she'd spoken of as they stacked the glass plates – what in the world?! They'd handled the glass with gloves, old lady sundress gloves, Hillary had brought a pair for herself, a pair for Ruth. They'd worn the lacy things to handle the glass, for garsh sake.

  Ruth sipped again. Aquavit, a licorice surprise. She knew liquors tasted like licorice. She had heard that. Was aquavit a liquor? She wasn't sure. What was more, she didn't care. Not even care enough to look it up! And there were books she could have looked in! Right here. “Books all around!” she said aloud. But she didn't! That was a surprise, too. Liquors are thicker, she thought, sipping then gently burping. “Thicker, they make you sicker,” she said aloud and giggled at her rhyme.

  She stopped giggling. All liquors taste of licorice she was pretty sure, “why else to call it liquor?” She never liked licorice sticks, but maybe, now, she would. What a surprise.

  Surprises, oh, surprises made a day, she reminded herself. She’d always said that. They set a day apart. Today there were surprises: the day had ended with licorice buzzing on her tongue and her with a drink-numb mouth; SHE was a surprise, herself: Ruth Potter? Drinking in the library! Especially surprising, drinking with Hillary, Hillary, the ever-hated Hillary. She'd assumed Hillary hated her. Why else would Hillary have kept at her all these decades?

  She was also surprised at being awake this time of night. Good-ness! She had almost never been at the library until. . .'til nearly 1:30 in the Ay Em! Ruth focused on the grandfather's clock in the corner by the stairway. Today is tomorrow.

  And these gifts of glass! Another surprise: the piles and piles of dark glass plates stacked before her on the table. The boxes they'd come in. Box on box stacked in the shadows. More glass. Those plates. Glass photograms. Graphs! This 'behest' from Hillary Burroughs – or from her long-dead 'husband' (yes, let's call him that! she thought); the photographic plates taken by her long-dead photographer. Her husband!

  They were photographs of Bluffton. At least the ones she’d seen had been. All taken by Hillary Arroyo's Mister (Let’s call him that!), Mr. Burroughs. The great man Burroughs who had come to town a century ago. Photographer, artist, big reputation from the east and elsewhere, from Europe.

  Hillary snorted in her sleep. Ruth sipped.

  Burroughs arrived, settled, made a great house on the bluff and lived here! Later, years later, Hillary came. Hillary, a girl from the south and west. Part Mexican, part not. Part many things. From somewhere else. Come for health, ha! The girl had taken up with old man Burroughs. Had become his woman, friend, companion. Wife? Maybe wife. Maybe not.

  Yes, Ruth realized, the bequest had been to Hillary, snoring across the table in her cups. Hillary Arroyo Burroughs, slipping down her chair, had had this legacy from her dead photographer. And Hillary, now, had made a gift of the pictures, these plates uncounted, to the library. If not a bequest. She was still living after all, wasn’t she? W
as still alive, wasn't she?

  “Hillary!” Ruth called. Loud.

  Hillary farted in her sleep.

  Still alive, yes. Not dead. Just drunk.

  From the shadows, the clock rolled a sonorous Westminster half-hour. Ruth touched one of the nearby plates. The fragile, shadow-painted things were hers, now. Ruth's now. The library's now. Surprise.

  Hillary snored again.

  Ruth had never heard a person snore! Wasn't that amazing? Except that Bunch who sometimes slept by the newspapers, winter afternoons after shoveling. He snored like a sawmill. But she had never sat and listened to one just sleep.

  Ruth burped with sudden yawning realization, “I wonder if I snore? Oh goodness.” Another amazement. She had no idea. No one ever complained. None ever heard her sleep! None, not ever. Not since her childhood. And children didn’t snore. Did they? No.

  Ruth's bare wrist touched the cool glass of one of the plates. She picked it up by its thin wooden frame. On the frame was a small strip of white. On the strip, hand lettered in old dark ink, were numerals. Each plate was numbered. Dated, maybe?

  She held it to the yellow light of the study lamp. A street scene. Daytime. Winter. Commonwealth Street buried in deep, deep snow.

  Ruth shook her head. Nice. A nice record of the town long gone. Nothing special. Just a day, a long time gone.

  A half hour before, before she slipped into slumber, Hillary had picked this one, at random, it seemed. “Look,” Hillary had said, handing it to her gently, “Here. Look at this.”

  Ruth had. After a few moments, she looked back at Hillary.

  “Concentrate, Ruth. Jesus Christ!” Hillary flicked her hand at the plate. “Don't start with me! Don't make your mind up, until!”

  Ruth stared. Even after only two or three of those aquavits, she had had difficulty staying focused on Hillary, the room. The world slipped apart, doubled into drifted pairs, wanted to slant sideways, spin. . .

  This plate, now: the plate stayed sharp, singular, still: Winter on Commonwealth Street. The turn into the old century, maybe a little before, 1890-something. The snow was trackless white, just fallen, still falling, maybe. Old photography didn't catch detail like fast moving snow. In the background, the bluffs across the river looked as now. The trees, black sticks against a bright lay of snow.

  Winters, Ruth thought, were harder then. They looked harder, anyway. Certainly were harder to get away from. No jets to Florida, then! Not that she'd ever jetted. To Florida or anywhere.

  On the photo, the street was empty. Nothing stirred. Not a creature. Not a mouse! Ruth giggled. A mouse WAS a creature, for goodness sake. But there was no mouse here! She giggled again!

  “For cripes' sake Jesus, Ruth; three sips and shitfaced!” Hillary was awake.

  Ruth lowered the plate and fixed the old lady with a look, her worst. “I have had considerably more than three sips, Hillary.”

  Hillary laughed. “Gotta piss.”

  “I’m not shitfaced,” she muttered to Hillary’s back. But Hillary was right. Three sips had drunked her. And that was three more than she'd ever had. No. She'd had a glass of beer in college. And a champagne one New Years day, back home. Back east. Back then. Another time.

  Hillary was back and Ruth ignored her with dignity, raised another plate. Wood frame. White strip. Numbers. She squinted at the numbers, a clear hand in faded ink.

  “A steel-nibbed pen,” Ruth said aloud, waving the plate at Hillary.

  “Burroughs,” Hillary said. Her voice sounded like a rusty screen door. “Everything the old way!”

  Ruth supposed she'd have to catalogue this, and all this. She looked at the stacks on the table, in the boxes, on the floor around them. Thousands. Thousands.

  When she looked up, Hillary was sleeping again.

  Ruth picked up the snow plate. The picture had been taken? Yes, taken in the afternoon. The stores on the river side of Commonwealth cast shadows that laid a soft dark blanket across the snow white street. Yes. It was late afternoon, early evening, for such shadows to be. See? She could be a detective! It was amazing how much you could intuit about the world by putting two and two and two to...

  “Garsh, this is clean,” Ruth said whispering to not wake the old lady. The snow was clear and smooth. Even in a deep fall like the one pictured, she would have expected somebody to leave tracks, some evidence of life in that world. Someone had to have been out and about by what? Winter dark came early in this latitude and below the bluffs. Say, three, maybe three-thirty in the afternoon.

  Ruth tipped the plate back and forth and squinted. No. It was smooth, the snow. Undisturbed. Huh.

  She laid it on the table and sat back. She had misjudged. The pictures, all the pictures, were quite remarkable. What was the term photographers used? Fine-grained. They had a clarity seen only in the black and white world that had passed.

  She once thought – a million years ago when she was a child – she once believed the old days, horse and buggy days, actually were lived in gray and shadow-white like all the pictures in her Nan's books. Nan. Not so long dead as one would imagine, a few years was all. But of course, she'd been a very old woman, her Nan.

  Something flickered at the edge of Ruth's vision. She snapped back from Nan's world. A fly, a small spider, something had moved on the glass. No. There was nothing. No, the movement was one of those things – a “floater” she had heard it called – something adrift in the vitreous liquor of the eyeball? A wee pressure on her optic nerve? The hour of day. Her age, exhaustion. Booze! Nothing so real as a bug.

  It moved again, beyond her focus. The liquor that had buzzed on her lips drained into her bowels. Ruth stared at the black and white world. She slipped the gloves from her hand and touched the glass with her bare fingers. Nothing there. Nothing. Nothing. Yet something. Something had definitely twitched on the glass, moved quickly on the thin silver emulsion. On it or under it, maybe, but something had moved and now was still. She pretended to look away, yet kept a secret gaze on the glass.

  It knew she was looking!

  For goodness sake, she told herself. “For GOODness sake!” She said aloud. “Who'm I pretending for?”

  Across the table, Hillary laughed. “Maybe you just don't have it, Ruthie,” Hillary said. “Even drunk, maybe you can't let goddamned go.”

  Ruth felt the burn. A tremor wrinkled through her, a shudder that warned that she was about to do something that would forever change her life. She was going, Goddamnit, to tell Hillary for all time! She lifted her eyes from the plate and.

  Fell into winter.

  For a half second Ruth thought this was a part of the drinking process, a normative part that no one had ever mentioned in her hearing.

  “Ahh-ahh,” she gasped at her sudden immersion in liquid cold, at the crotch high, thigh-deep embrace of soft dry snow, the ice that packed between her legs. “Oh, goodness,” she said. Her words, whipped away, were lost down Commonwealth Street. The same wind sucked the wet from her eyes. Her nose hairs cracked, frozen, dry! By the third second, her entire brain knew she had fallen into the photograph. “Oh, Hillary, for goodness sake,” she called out, holding her hair, “I am not dressed for this!”

  And she was back. Like.

  That.

  Warm and dust dry as ever before. As before, the clock ticked in nearby darkness. Snowblind whiteness faded. Her eyes opened to the night that filled the library. It was no later than... why, than when she had...why, when she had left. Nothing had happened. The glass plate was in her bare hands. Nothing had happened here since...since her trip. A chill shivered her shoulders and worked its way up the back of her head and down her arms.

  Across the table, Hillary squinted at her. The old Hillary smile played in her eyes. Ruth had hated that smile for half her life, that beady bright person-pinning smile that had. . .

  “Colder them days, huh?” Hillary said, and took the plate from Ruth's shivering hands. Gently, very gently. “Mind you,” she smiled an almost sweet, darn-near f
riendly smile, “this was before my time.” She read the tab on the back of the plate. “'January. One. Nineteen hundred.' Way before me.” She put the plate on the table with the others, and fixed her eyes on Ruth. “Long before I was born, Ruth. But Burroughs and me, we had a good party the night before he took this shot!” She smiled again. “You get me?”

  Ruth heard, but all she could think about was the plate. Her hand ached for its return. She flexed her fingers and realized they were cramped and stiff from clutching, reaching. “Hillary,” she began.

  “I knew you could do it,” Hillary said. “Figured you were one who could. Figured back in 19-whatever-it-was when you hit town, poker up your ass and a life made of dead fish and broken teacups. But you had the want in you. Like I did.” Hillary Arroyo Burroughs snuggled deeper into the chair. She looked small, frail and very old. “Least I wasn't a virgin. Thank the Christ for that,” she said and stared at the nearly empty bottle of aquavit. “Thank the Christ.” She laid the plate on the table between them.

  “Hillary, for garsh sake, what in the dickens? What is all that?”

  “It's a way out of 'now'.” Hillary's voice barely carried across the table and the stacks of plates. “Something Burroughs could do. Make these little worlds. You go there and live for a while in 'then'. In that time.” She pointed at the plate. Instinctively Ruth took it back, clutched it. “In all of the times! You go there. Into the world that was in that tiny moment the picture was took.” She smiled. “That's it. That's all. Think of all them worlds. And for God's sake, Ruth, close your mouth!”

  Ruth shut her mouth and looked again at the glass. “Burroughs made them?”

  “Burroughs. Yeah. He wasn't from here, you know. He always said that maybe they were alive. All them little worlds. Alive like the world is. I don't know. He wasn't from here and we never talked much about it. Between you and me, honey, I don't think he knew himself how it all worked. You know? Like television.”