Exposure

by James Lockhart Perry

  "Whaddya mean?"

  "Look around you." Mischa waved out at the weather and the still climbing seas. "You think you're in control of anything out here? You think any of us are?"

  "Fuck no, but—"

  "Listen Rudy. You're a good kid, and I love you, but Donny just taught you the only thing you'll ever need to know."

  "About sailing?"

  "About anything. You want to master fear, you leave your atheism on the dock."

  Now Rudy gazed at Sheri, watched her trying to get a handle on things, watched her working out how to get control of the situation, and actually empathized. How would his uncles have handled her kind of fear? Simple—they would have left her at the marina. A little late for that, and Rudy was pretty sure a boot in the back and a twenty minute swim in the nighttime ocean would backfire. Still, Mischa and Donny were right. There was no room for atheism out here, not hers, but especially not his. So he sat the terrified, judgmental love of his young life down, got her attention, and took the huge leap of faith of telling her everything about his day.

  Chapter 18

  The difference between Sam and his brother Henry was a matter of appearances versus reality—Sam looked mean and nasty, but Henry was the real deal. Henry subscribed to the Al Capone theory of management—the uglier you behaved, the less you had to explain things to people. In the gang, where BJ was the brain, the two Daves handled the customers, Donny handled the muscle, and Mischa kept the peace, this cold, ugly meanness was Henry's principal contribution. He kept the conversations short and the disagreements uncomplicated. Nobody fucked with Henry. It just wasn't worth it.

  Sam, on the other hand, used his foul humor strictly as a shield, as a way of warding off emotional entanglements. The problem with faking it like that, of course, was that every so often Ranger Team Lydia would sneak in under the bombardment and capture the enemy position. And once you took away the hair, fat, and muscle, and added a colostomy bag, all the churlishness took on the pathos of an old geezer casting aside dignity on the slide to oblivion.

  Sam had once photographed terrified squealing pigs being shoved off a truck and down a chute into the killing room of an East Los Angeles meat packing plant. Even as he punched the shutter—dying to throw up and swearing he would never eat another rasher of bacon—he had wondered if he might not be looking into his own future. How would he deal with it when his time came? Would he go out spitting like Henry, or would the ghosts use their electric prods to drive his fattened, tear-soaked soul down the chute of his life?

  Sam couldn't remember the last time he had seen the inside of a prayer service—and no, he wasn't about to go sucking up to the almighty just because things had started looking iffy—he at least retained that scrap of dignity—but he would have been inhuman, if he didn't feel a little tingle in the hair shaved off the back of his neck.

  The one who puzzled him was Lydia. One of Sam's last photo assignments had taken them to the slums of Naples in Italy to shoot background on an outbreak of the four-century-old civil war in the organized-crime ranks of the Commora. A young girl had been brutally murdered, and the European papers had picked up on the outrage. Sam's London agent hoped to coax him out of retirement for one last pile of cash, and sold the trip to Lydia—Sam refused his calls—as a vacation with a handful of photographs. So while they were over there, nosing around Naples and Campania, Sam and Lydia wandered into a cathedral well back from the harbor and found a crowd of old women huddled at the altar in black tulle and silk crepe.

  Sam got his celebrated shot of Widows after Carnage, but Lydia couldn't stop talking afterward about all that faith. It truly impressed her, all those women praying so patiently for their husbands' violent, bullet-ridden souls. For a while, Sam wondered if his wife was going to start showing up at the studio in a full-length, black crepe funeral dress with her face behind a silk veil, but she finally quit mentioning it. Now, for a day or two, Sam had wondered if Lydia was stealing off to church every morning to wail and pray and scrape her widow's knees on his colostomy-bagged soul.

  They had been together long enough, that Sam instantly saw through the smokescreen of this new job of hers. She might disappear all day, but there wasn't the slightest hint of a retail-office worker bee in the way she left the apartment in the morning or dragged herself home at night. Much as he despised himself for it, Sam had even stooped to smelling her breath when she kissed him hello. But nothing to that either. So what was she doing that made her act so damn secretive?

  Then the girl called—the Spavik kid's girlfriend Sheri, as Sam dimly recalled—and asked for Lydia and sounded surprised that he didn't know who she was. And when it all started to mix together in Sam's head, he began to wonder seriously about the cards up Lydia's sleeve. He let it go for a couple of days, until she came home one afternoon in a grumpy mood, and his own irritation got the better of him.

  "So how was your day at the office?" he asked from the makeshift daybed on the couch.

  "I told you I work in a store," she scowled. She picked up the dishes from the coffee table and disappeared into the now immaculate kitchen. Water started running in the sink.

  "Oh yeah, that's right," he called out. "Flipping pancakes, cutting roses, stocking ketchup bottles, selling bed linen—"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I'm talking about my wife lying to me, when we both know perfectly well, she's back in the fucking photography business!"

  No response from the kitchen. No dishes or working hands interfering with the smooth fall of the water into the sink. No squeak of linoleum. Finally, Lydia turned off the faucet.

  Might as well take it from the top, Sam decided. "So how was your day at the office?"

  Lydia walked out to the living room, tough and poker-faced. "I'm glad to see you're beginning to recover. Another week, and you'll be right back to wallowing in your sorry fate and spitting on anyone stupid enough to give a damn about you."

  That was going way too far. It didn't matter if it was true. "I didn't—"

  "Call me a liar?"

  "It's my fucking studio!" Sam protested.

  "It was your fucking studio! Which you sold off without asking me a damn thing about it! Sold off to some half-witted neighborhood punk, like none of it—like nothing we ever did together—meant a thing to you."

  That shut Sam up, but evidently, Lydia wasn't finished—evidently, this had been coming for a while. "So yes, I'm helping them out, but what gives you the right to an opinion? As it turns out, he's probably got more talent than you ever did."

  "Right," Sam snorted.

  "Why? Because of your Pulitzer? You said yourself it was an accident and a curse. This kid takes a hundred pictures a day and treats every one of them like a gift from God. Curse, my ass. You're the curse."

  "I didn't say it was a curse—"

  "Now who's lying?"

  "I said it was the start of my slide. And you're not supposed to remember when people say things like that to you anyway."

  "How could I forget? It was all you ever talked about!"

  Lydia stormed back into the kitchen and left Sam splitting hairs. He hadn't said curse. What he'd told her was that the famous shot of the pistol-toting Lebanese child was the start of his long slide out of the photography business. There was a difference, wasn't there? And so what if it was an accident? Did she mean like the discovery of radium or penicillin?

  Sam still could smell the sweat and chemicals, still feel the otherworldly glow of the cramped darkroom he had borrowed in West Beirut the night he broke open the Pentax and found the three negatives intact and unexposed. The ghostly inverted negative of the boy shocked him at first—after all, when Sam leapt out to retrieve his camera, he had seen nothing but a pair of corpses lying on the ground. Yes, one of them was a child, but this was Beirut in the middle of a ghastly civil war. And Sam was preoccupied anyway, with a smashed camera and the blood spurting out where his fingernail had been.

  The second he spotted the negati
ve, he knew he had a hit, but he had no idea what was coming. It wasn't just the awards and prizes, but the way the world started treating him. All the way from world-class editors to Redondo Beach policemen. His opinion on almost anything suddenly mattered. Work of his that no editor would have touched now underwent examination for the deeper significance beneath the superficial appearance of crap.

  And being who he was, Sam naturally clammed up. Somehow, he never got around to explaining how the shot went down—neither the blind hand around the corner, nor the corpses on the ground. Not even when teams of journalists fanned out after the war, searching for the Lebanese boy who nearly shot himself a Pulitzer-prize-winning photographer. Not even the hundredth time some journalist asked Sam how it felt to have a bullet come within a millimeter of the brain behind the viewfinder. Sam wasn't dissembling either—he just didn't give a shit.

  It was all a matter of ten lousy seconds. Because that was how long it took from losing his finger to retrieving his camera. Later that night, when he exposed the negative in the enlarger and took his loupe to it, Sam realized how horrifically he had fucked up. Because in the loupe's magnification, he found the bawling child, the tears on his dusty cheeks, the mucus seeping from his nose, the whiff of smoke from the ancient gun, the father's hand still flung across his sandal—all immaculately focused and exposed. But then, a second look suggested that the father's hand was tugging at the boy's pants leg. And when he saw that hand, Sam finally realized what had happened.

  All of the time Sam stood in the rubble cursing his luck, wrapping his finger, fulminating over a broken camera and a deadline with no material to submit, wondering how the fuck he was going to replace a high-end Pentax in the middle of a civil war—all that while, the boy who must have been shot less than ten seconds earlier, the child who would make Sam's so-called reputation, lay bleeding to death six feet away.

  Chapter 19

  Sheri awoke late in the morning in the huge bed in the rear stateroom. Alive apparently. The low, white ceiling took a moment to register, as did the gentle roll of the boat she had been dumb enough to climb into. With a suspected murderer no less, and in the middle of the night. No one could accuse Sheri Ballin of being timid.

  Portholes ran around the wall above her and streamed beams of bright sunlight onto the sheets. Sheri ignored them. She would deal with the view later, once she got used to the notion that the only thing separating her from a billion gallons of salt water was a measly half-inch of fiberglass. For a second, she actually thought she heard singing, but dismissed that out of hand. She had already learned enough about her boyfriend in one twelve-hour period to last a year.

  Murderer. Sheri was hardly one to hang a relationship on a legal technicality, but this was definitely stretching it. She had always known Rudy as a hustler, and not particularly good at it either, but she had always figured him for small enough to control. Okay, maybe not small, but compact and simple enough to get her mind around, to peg like she had pegged every other actor in her life's relentless assembly line.

  Sheri had met Rudy at a party in one of those houses along the Hermosa Beach Strand. He arrived in a loud paisley shirt with a panama hat like some gangster on a Miami Beach holiday. He asked for one of those dreadful Tequila Sunrises and, when the hostess gave him a blank look, mixed it up himself. Must be a bartender, Sheri figured, so she asked him to dress up her usual soda water as a gin and tonic. He laughed and leapt to it, drilling her with aimless, clever conversation until she wanted to scream. Finally, she asked what he did for a living. When he hedged on the subject, she blurted out, "Oh so you're not a bartender, you're a drug dealer."

  "Fuck you," was his reply, and he turned his back on her and walked away. It was all she needed to see. From that moment onward, Rudy Spavik was the only man she wanted.

  But which Rudy Spavik was she talking about? The steel core who despised drugs, liars, and hypocrites, or the sloppy, non-stop hustler with so many angles that he couldn't see how they all pointed to small-minded foolishness? Okay, that was harsh, but here Sheri lay on a boat that might or might not belong to her boyfriend, running from trouble that might or might not be real, with a guy who might or might not be a killer. Try and hang your hat on that one, Little Miss Control Freak.

  Sheri sat up and found a complete set of clothes waiting for her at the foot of the bed. Dull, practical seafaring garb, of course—what Rudy didn't know about women. But see what she meant? Now she had this entirely new Rudy to deal with, expert sailor boy with serious brains and hints of depth, who knew his way around a boat and brought up the ocean God within an hour of introducing himself. She could definitely see herself going for the new model, but she wouldn't have minded a test drive.

  Sheri dressed and headed out to the living room or whatever she was supposed to call it. Not the scene she was expecting. Real food sat cooking on the little stove in the tiny kitchen with two places set at the nearby table. The new Rudy stood across the room, puzzling over a section of the wall.

  "Hey," he said when he heard her, then quickly added, "What's the matter?"

  "Aren't we still on the ocean?" she tried, going for diplomatic.

  "Sure."

  "Then who's steering the boat?"

  Rudy choked with laughter. "Sorry," he managed when he caught her look. "It's on autopilot." As if that explained anything.

  Rudy found the hidden latch he must have been looking for. He pushed, and a section of the wood paneling came away in his hands.

  Sheri gasped, "What's that?" Snap-in brackets held a pair of ugly compact machine guns and an assortment of clips and handguns. Tightly wrapped wads of money lined the bottom of the compartment.

  "I wondered if Sam found these," Rudy said to himself. He freed a handgun from its clips and checked it over a little too knowledgeably for Sheri's taste. But then he put it back and replaced the wood panel. "Ready for breakfast?" he asked, as if killing devices made the perfect ornament for any living room.

  He wasn't getting off that easy. "My uncles might have been a little paranoid," he finally explained, as he finished scrambling and serving her eggs with bacon, potatoes, and baked beans. "It's what we always ate for breakfast," he digressed, then continued, "Their business probably had something to do with it. Donny was always on the lookout for pirates, at least when we sailed the Baja."

  "Pirates?" Sheri asked skeptically. "You sailed the Baja?"

  "That's right," Rudy said and left it at that.

  Sheri lit into her first scoop of eggs and discovered what Rudy called one of the wonders of small-boat sea travel. Maybe it was the sun or the salt air, but taste took on a whole new meaning. The blandest, dullest food plowed into the taste buds like delicacies in a four-star restaurant. Sheri wolfed down her share and wondered if Rudy needed help with his. Apparently not.

  "I'll do that," she said when he started for the sink. "You go up and see if there's a crash headed our way."

  "Nothing out there to crash into."

  Did he have to remind her? She was half-way through the dishes, when she realized that he had re-arranged all the supplies she put away the night before. A small lurch of the boat tinkled through the glasses to make the point. Sheri looked closer and caught onto the clever design tricks for preventing everything from flying through the air. Not that they made her feel any better. She felt a surge, and then the boat listed over twenty degrees or so. The lurches started rolling in, one after another. Sheri finished up quickly and climbed out through the hatch to an entirely different scene from the night before.

  The three sails were up, what Rudy had called the Genoa, main, and mizzen. All three massive, white skyscrapers of cloth were set at an angle and packed into perfect round shapes by the force of the wind. They were like nothing Sheri had ever seen.

  "Where's the motor?" she asked, uncertain. The wind blew into her cheeks and forced an unconscious rise in her voice. The bow cut through the waves at an angle that brought fine sprays of water over the deck and into their fa
ces.

  Rudy pointed at the sails. "You're looking at them. Here, take the helm." He shoved her at the huge silver wheel. "Just hold it steady a second," he said over her protests. She tried, but it scared the shit out of her. The slightest touch seemed to echo through the boat and into her feet and up her weak knees.

  Rudy lifted one of the seats, pulled out a life vest, and fit it over her head. "Just until you're used to it." He pulled out a short canvas strap and clipped her vest to a hook on the wheelbase.

  "This is supposed to make me feel better?"

  "Just until we're done."

  "Done with what?"

  "I'm going to teach you how to tack."

  So for the next hour, she practiced screaming Rudy's new favorite phrase, Coming about! And spinning the wheel to port, while he rushed around to move the sails, then repeating the scream and spin to starboard, while he rushed to move them back. It would have grown monotonous, if she wasn't so terrified and exhilarated all at once. And whenever she even thought about letting her guard down, the sails screeched and flapped, the boat shuddered like it was falling apart, and the boom came hurtling for her head.

  "Damn it, Sheri! This isn't a fucking game!" Rudy shouted at one point, grabbing the helm out of her hands and shoving her out of the way.

  "Do I look like I'm playing?" she shouted back with a vicious kick at his calf and a lunge to take back the wheel.

  The longer they went at it and the less she screwed up, the more Sheri started to feel like she might even belong here. A sure sign was the slow burn of her fuse at the way the self-appointed sailor king barked his orders. Finally, Rudy let up on the tacking and pointed up at the mainsail. "Now keep your eyes on those red pieces of yarn on the main—"

  "You already told me, damnit! If they're straight, the sails are okay, if they flutter, I'm screwing up! Now shut up and let me steer!"