Depth of Field

by Brian S. Wheeler

  “There’s a sale here that looks like they might have some really nice baskets, maybe some really nice pottery jugs.” Janice sipped at her coffee. “Says there’s even antique books. You’d be interested in antique books, wouldn’t you?”

  Owen shook his head. Antique books offered at county auctions meant cheap Bibles, abridged readers’ digests, romance novels with water-stained covers, cookbooks for crockpots.

  “I’m going to skip today’s auction, Janice.”

  Janice set down her paper and frowned. “Then why did you drive all the way out to Barb’s?”

  “I wanted to ask you something.”

  “You’re too young for me,” Janice winked. “No, I will not marry you, Mr. Masters.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I’m sure you are.” Janice glanced at her watch. “Haven’t got all morning before the bids start being called. What’s on your mind?”

  “Did you ever work at the plastics plant?”

  Janice shook her head.

  “Any of your family ever work there?”

  “Well, of course. Everyone’s family in Flat Knob has had someone who worked at the plastics plant.”

  “They ever tell you what Chandler Raymond was like?”

  “That guy sure has got your interest ever since he bought that skull,” Janice snorted. “My aunt Ruby worked in his office for a few months. Aunt Ruby didn’t have a bad thing to say about almost anybody. But she had plenty bad to say about Mr. Raymond, and that should tell you something.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Aunt Ruby was a real looker in her day, and she’s always claimed that Chandler Raymond didn’t hesitate to paw at her during the few months she worked in his office. Claims Mr. Raymond’s first question during her job interview was about her measurements. Ruby said it was the way Chandler stared at her with those hungry eyes that drove her out of working at that office.”

  “Anyone else feel that way?”

  Ruby shrugged. “Hard telling. Ruby only told her story to her close family. Mr. Raymond was seen as a pillar of the community back in those days. He was an elder at the Presbyterian Church. He headed the chamber of commerce. He sat on the school board. Even women with the loosest tongues didn’t gossip much about someone like that in town. The rumors didn’t spread until after the plant closed its doors, and Chandler Raymond was an old man by then. There were younger women, and younger men, to talk about in Flat Knob.”

  “But there were rumors of something?”

  Janice smiled. “There was talk that Chandler Raymond threw the most incredible parties back in the day. Parties held behind closed doors.”

  “What happened behind those doors?”

  “I don’t really know, but I know who you need to talk to.” Bridget returned with the bill and avoided making eye contact with Owen as she tossed it onto the table. Janice swiped the bill away before Owen’s hand reached it. “This one’s on me. If you want to know about what went on during Mr. Raymond’s old parties, then you need to visit my uncle Mac. Mac was a plant mechanic back in the day. He used to love taking photos of everything. If anyone can show you what one of those parties was like, it’s going to be Mac. He’ll probably love to tell you. Doesn’t have anything to do anymore but ache and drink. So bring a bottle of vodka along with you to help make friends.”

  Janice dumped a pile of wrinkled bills on the table. “What are you planning to do this morning? You got papers to grade?”

  Owen chuckled. He hadn’t wasted a Saturday morning grading papers since the first year he had arrived in Flat Knob. “Thought I would take up an old hobby again. Thought I’d try out that old camera I got last weekend at the Turner sale.”

  Janice winked. “Oh, you and my uncle Mac are going to hit it off just fine.”

  * * * * *

  After calling Flat Knob home for a decade, Owen could still hardly believe the village held a run-down section of town more dilapidated than any other ruined block of the community. Owen recognized he had crossed into that section of the village when he passed the burned remains of a roller-rink, remains that had stood on the spot the entire decade Owen had called Flat Knob home.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Owen sighed at the view outside his windshield.

  Gray, asbestos siding covered Mac Reynold’s small home. Water stain ruined the wood near the home’s roof, and wild shrubbery nearly covered the front windows. A large, plastic tarp covered much of the roof’s shingles. A rusting, El-Camino sat beneath an aluminum carport along the home’s side drive.

  Owen grimaced. “Please don’t let them recognize me.”

  What bothered Owen as he parked across the street was the pack of adolescents banging rocks against Mac Reynold’s gray walls. Owen instantly recognized several faces as those belonging to current high school students, and Owen hated to give any student the opportunity to speculate upon how Mr. Masters spent his free time, especially when he appeared to them with a bottle of vodka in hand.

  “Hey look, Roy!” A voice squealed, and Owen’s heart sank. “Your pal, Mr. Masters, just pulled up with a brown sack lunch!”

  The half-dozen kids parted to show Roy Robison standing in the middle of their huddle, a cigarette burning in one hand, a large stone gripped in the other.

  “I should crack your skull open with this rock,” Roy snarled at Owen.

  “If you think you can throw that rock far enough to hit me, Roy.”

  A few of the students chuckled, and Roy stomped his boot.

  “You’re even more of a smart-ass away from your desk.”

  Owen laughed. “And you’re still a dumb-ass.”

  Roy sounded his best lion’s roar and slammed the rock against the gray home. “We’re going to kick the hell out of you.”

  Owen stepped forward, and before any of those students thought for a second of raising a fist against him, pointed to the smallest adolescent amid the crowd.

  “I see you there, Micah,” Owen glared at the boy. “Think real hard on what you’re about to do, boy. Your friends outnumber me pretty good. They’re likely going to pound me down real nice. But I want you to know, Micah, seeing how you’re the smallest of your pack, that I’m going to make sure I hurt you real bad before all your friends get the best of me.”

  Micah didn’t wait another moment before darting down the street. His friends followed. For a moment, they left Roy alone with Mr. Masters.

  “You better not take another step towards me,” Roy hissed. “You wait until I tell Principal Sherman that you’re spending your Saturdays drinking with Mac Reynolds. You just see what happens when I tell him how you threatened all of us.”

  A wrinkled face appeared in a front window. After his week’s dreams, Owen jumped at the visage that peeked from between the curtains. Owen sighed in relief upon realizing the face didn’t belong to a Turner as it reemerged in the opening front door.

  “You won’t do any such thing, Roy.” Mac Reynold’s sneered from his concrete, front step. “You say a word about Mr. Masters and I’ll make sure to have your mother ask you herself why I don’t let her have any of the medicine she gets shaking so badly to taste. You understand me, boy?”

  Roy spit towards Owen before stomping in the direction of his friends. Owen grinned to notice how Roy’s hands trembled as he set his cigarette back between his lips.

  “You the man Janice called about?” The face in the door smiled at Owen.

  “Just the one, and I brought a gift.”

  “Then you’re a good man,” Mac waved Owen forward. “Come in. Come in.”

  Owen found the home’s interior very different from the assumption he had formed from the property’s exterior. The rooms, though sparse, were well kept. The thick carpet was clean. There were no water stains on the ceiling, no peeling wallpaper. The living room smelled slightly of lemon-scented furniture polish.

  Mac motioned Owen into the living room couch before tripping out of the kitchen with a hand full of candy b
ars. The other hand held two shot glasses.

  “Pour us both a drink in these here glasses, Mr. Masters.”

  Owen quickly filled the request. “Owen is fine.”

  Mac shook his head. “No. Believe it or not here in Flat Knob, I think you deserve going by Mr. Masters. You want a chocolate bar? My breakfast of champions on my gray, morning afternoons in this fecal dump of a town.”

  Owen accepted a chocolate bar. He gathered a breath to speak, but Mac held up a hand and downed a vodka shot and gulped half of his own candy before his guest could speak.

  Owen waited until Mac caught a breath. “Why are those kids throwing rocks at your house? Seems they’re picking you out for torment.”

  “Oh, they’re just jealous of all the candy I’ve tasted,” winked Mac. “Kids that age start smelling some of the things I’ve had on my plate. They don’t understand it, but, down deep inside, they’re jealous of it.”

  Owen winced as he slammed his vodka shot down his throat. He knew what Mac meant. Only, he was more often the one envious of what was set on his students’ plates.

  “Janice tells me you’re interested in Mr. Raymond’s grand parties in the old plastics plant. Says you might want to look at my collection of black and whites.” Mac retrieved a leather album from beneath the coffee table. “Those were the days, and those were especially the nights. Feel younger just thinking about them.”

  Mac grinned while he displayed the album’s first pages. The early black and white photos appeared taken at formal dinner gatherings. Diners sported black ties and white dinner jackets. The women dressed in formal dresses, with pearls decorating their décolleté. Many of the early photographs centered upon Chandler Raymond presenting men with award certificates and handshakes. A band of horn players gathered in the background. Martini glasses and Champaign bottles were raised to the camera. Couples stepped and twirled on a ballroom’s dance floor.

  “We knew how to have such a good time back then,” Mac smiled as he turned another page.

  One print in particular caught Owen’s eye, a photograph of a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman whose mink coat and sparkling, diamond earrings paled in comparison to her beauty. Owen would never have thought a woman so alluring, with eyes so piercing, could ever have called Flat Knob home.

  “I can’t help but let my hand pause on that photo,” Mac sighed.

  “Who is it?”

  Mac looked up from the album and stared out of his front window, his eye’s searching the invisible for the memory of a name. “I don’t even remember anymore. Chandler Raymond just showed up with her one summer party. She was with us for a season, and then she was gone.”

  “What happened?”

  Mac poured himself another shot of vodka. “She died. That young, that beautiful, and she died. No one knows for sure just how. Only rumors.”

  “What kind of rumors?”

  Mac shrugged and forced a smile. “Does it matter? That was a long time ago. That was before things took a turn. Before things faded. Before the shadows seemed to gather.”

  Owen couldn’t tell precisely upon which page the change occurred, but the content of those black and white photographs shifted. Ties were discarded. Dress skirts rose higher. Alcohol twisted formal smiles into drunken grins. Pills and powders piled on glass tables. Men and women gripped desperately to one another, pulled each other closer and closer though no more dance floors filled any of the backgrounds. Articles of clothing dropped to the floor. Owen’s face flushed as he looked upon the album’s last pages of photographs. He couldn’t believe how feral the subjects had become. The business had turned to debauchery. A mask of savagery covered everyone’s face.

  Mac’s face gave no hint that he had noticed anything at all strange in the photographs.

  “I can’t believe Flat Knob ever supplied enough fuel for those kinds of parties.”

  Mac laughed. “Chandler Raymond always knew where to find that petro. No matter the itch, he knew where to find the medicine. He would never say where he got it. He just hinted that he had found wonderful means.”

  Owen thought of that face which had peered at him in that black and white photograph drying in the school darkroom. He remembered the faces and the locales that had haunted his week’s dreams. He thought of those stories he had found in old county newspapers. And he thought about a specific name.

  “Do you know anything about the Turners?”

  Mac’s face suddenly changed, and his hands snapped the photo album closed.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave, Mr. Masters.”

  “I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  Mac’s face softened. “That may be. Go ahead and take what’s left of the vodka with you. Let me warn before you leave, Mr. Masters. Nothing good has ever happened to anyone who spoke that family’s name. You’d do well to never pronounce that name again.”

  Puzzled, Owen drove the few blocks back through Flat Knob to reach his home. He found his trailer’s windows shattered, no doubt the work of Roy Robison and his pack. Back behind his roll-top desk, Owen fidgeted with that strange camera. The aperture ring still refused to budge.

  One print stood out among all the photographs kept in Mac’s album. It had been a picture Mac had taken of himself in the mirror. He had worn the wide-collared coat and bell-bottom slacks of the time’s style.

  And around Mac’s neck had hung a camera that looked just like the one Owen gripped.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 8 – Grinning Out of the Basement

  Owen slung the camera around his neck and drove to the first location his nightmares inspired him to visit. He arrived at the shuttered remains of Flat Knob’s main street, brick bank in the late afternoon, when Owen had always felt the light was at its magical, golden best.

  Owen regarded the bank from across the street, standing in an open lot vacated by the demolishing of Flat Knob’s ancient, single-screen movie theater. Much of the theater’s rubble still piled in the lot’s corner. He didn’t need to stare across the street for very long at the bank to judge what he thought would be the best angles for a photograph.

  Though he had never considered the bank before, though he had driven past it so many times without a thought, Owen knew what window he needed to center in the camera’s viewfinder, knew he needed the window surrounded by charred brick never cleaned following the blaze that decades ago closed the bank.

  Owen adjusted the shutter speed to get the most out of the light since the aperture ring remained frozen in place. A handful of trucks roared past Owen, and several of the drivers – who were likely forced to attend one of Mr. Masters’ English classes over the years at the county school – gave the strange man with the camera rude fingers.

  Owen didn’t pay them any mind on that Saturday afternoon. He peered too intently into the delicate lenses and mirrors of his camera to give attention to anything other than old ghosts.

  * * * * *

  Owen didn’t drive straight home. Instead, he detoured down the county highway to arrive at the consolidated school. It took him several minutes to try each key upon the ring of custodian keys Lance had loaned to him before unlocking a side door to gain access into the halls leading to the darkroom.

  Years had passed since Owen had last developed film as a yearbook sponsor. Fortunately, a student had abandoned a textbook near a sink, and Owen found a checklist of the process within its pages that jarred his memory enough to work through film developing without ruining the camera’s snapshots.

  Owen held his breath as he watched the shadows coalesce onto the paper submerged in the developer tray. He refused to look at that particular basement window of the bank as the shadows knitted together into brick walls. Owen would not stare at the photo until he completed the process, until he could bring the photograph beneath brighter light. He would not look until he locked himself behind his home’s doors.

  Owen stopped at a liquor store just outside of Flat Knob and filled a brow
n sack with a bottle of gin, and one of cheap scotch. He drove the rest of the way with his driver’s window rolled down, so that the chill would distract him from thinking too long on the photograph awaiting his inspection. He feared his courage might buckle, and that he might simply toss the photograph out the window if he brooded too long upon what he might find.

  He grimaced and downed a shot of gin, and one of scotch, before he set that print upon his roll-top desk with every light bulb burning in his home. Owen saw he had done well in balancing the light. The bank building’s details were not washed out from too much sunshine, no were they blurred in shadow. He was impressed with the angle from which he had snapped the old bank. Had he not feared that something terrible lurked within the print, he might’ve set the photograph in a handsome frame.