“If you have to say what something’s about.” said Walter, “it’s not about anything except you saying it’s about something.”
“Spare me.” said Buck, “spare me these deep philosophical insights.”
Walter’s photographer friends sent him prints: an arrangement of goal intestines on backlit glass, a dead wallaby in a waterhole, a man—chin up—swallowing a squid tentacle coming out of a burning escalator. Muslim women swathed in curtains of blood. One of the friends called from Toronto, said he’d spent the summer with the archeologists flying over the north looking for tent rings. “There was this Inuit cache on the Boothia Peninsula.” Distance twisted his voice into a thinning ribbon.
The wooden box, he said, fell apart when it was lifted from the earth. Inside they had found knives, scrapers, two intact phonograph records of religious music, a bullet mold, a pair of cracked spectacles, a cooking pot stamped Reo, needles, a tobacco can. From the tobacco can they took a dozen negatives, the emulsion cracked with age. Prints were on the way to Walter.
When they arrived he was disappointed. All but one of the photographs showed squinting missionaries. The other photograph was of an Inuit child in front of a weather-whitened building. Her anorak was sewn in a pattern of chevrons and in the crazed distance lay a masted ship. Her face had the shape of a hazelnut, the eyebrows curved like willow leaves. She leaned against the scarred clapboards, arms folded over her breast, mouth set in a pinched smile and both eyes lost in their sockets.
Walter caught the flaw in the shadow. Light coursed through the space between the soles of the child’s boots and the ground because her weight was on her heels. She was propped against the building.
“It’s a corpse,” said Walter, delighted. “She’s stiff.”
Buck, toasting oatcakes, wondered what the photograph meant. “Like Nanook of the North, maybe? Starved to death? Or tuberculosis? Something like that?”
Walter said there was no point in trying to understand what it meant. “It can’t mean anything to us. It only meant something to the one who put this negative in the tobacco can.”
Buck, wearing a scratchy wool sweater next to his skin, said something under his breath.
Once or twice a week they drove to the mall with its chain stores, pizza stands, liquor store, sixty-minute photo shop, While-U-Wait optician, House of Shoes, bargain carpet, and Universal Herbals.
“I told you to bring the other credit card,” said Buck. “I told you the Visa was ruined when it fell under the seat and you moved it back.”
Walter pawed through his pockets. He leaped when Albina Muth rapped on the passenger window with a beer bottle. She was smiling, leaning out of a garbage truck parked beside them, smoke flooding out of her mouth, her rough brown hair like fur. She was wearing the same grimy, stretched-out acrylic sweater.
“Nice truck,” cried Walter. “Big.”
“It ain’t mine. It’s a friend of mine’s. I’m just waitin’ for him.” She glanced across the highway where there were three low-slung bars: The 74, the Horseshoe, Skippy’s.
Walter joked with her. In the driver’s seat Buck invisibly knotted up, yanked himself into a swarm of feelings. He had found the other credit card in his own pocket. Albina threw back her head to swallow beer and Walter noticed the grainy rings of dirt on her throat.
“You take pictures?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, sometime maybe you’n take one of me?”
“For god’s sake.” hissed Buck, “lets go.”
But Walter did want to photograph her, the way she had looked that day by the side of the road, the light strong and flickering.
In October Albina Muth started to sleep in the Mercedes. Walter went out on Sunday to get the papers. There she was, so cold she couldn’t sit up. He had to pull her upright. Dull, black-circled eyes, shivering fits. She couldn’t say what she was doing there. He guessed it was a case of Saturday night drinking and fighting, run off and hide in somebody’s car. It was a two-mile walk from the main road to somebody’s Mercedes, and all in the dark.
He brought her into the house. The south wall, glass from roof to ground, framed the mountain, an ascending mass of rock in dull strokes or rose madder, brown, tongues of fume twisting out of the springs on its flanks. The mountain pressed into the room with an insinuation of augury. Flashing particles of ice dust stippled the air around the house. The wind shook the walls and liquid shuddered in the glass.
In that meaningful house Albina Muth was terrible, pallid face marked by the weave of the automobile upholstery, hands like roots, and stinking ragbag clothes. She followed Walter into the kitchen where Buck worked a mathematical puzzle and drank seaweed tea, his lowered eyelids as smooth as porcelain, one bare monk’s tool tapping air.
“What?” he said, shooting up like an umbrella, jangling the cup, slopping the puzzle page. He limped from the room, the cast on his right loot tapping.
“What happened to him?” said Albina. She was attracted to sores.
Walter poured coffee. “He hit a deer.”
“Didn’t hurt the car none!”
“He wasn’t in the car. He was riding his bicycle.”
Albina laughed through a mouthful of coffee. “Hit a deer ridin’ a bike!”
“The deer stood there and he thought it would run off so he kept on going but it didn’t and he hit it. Then the deer did run off and Buck had a broken ankle and a wrecked bike.”
She wiped her mouth, looked around. “This is some place,” she said. “Not yours, though. His.”
“Yeah.”
“Must be rich.”
“He used to be on television. Long ago. Back in the long ago. A kid’s show—Mr. B.’s Playhouse. Before you were born. Now he makes pottery. That’s one of his cups you’re drinking from. That bowl with the apples.”
She put her head on one side and looked at the table, the clay floor tiles, the cast-iron bulldog, the hand-carved cactus coat rack, drank the coffee with a noise like a drain and over the rim of the blue cup she winked at Walter.
“He’s rich,” she said. “Can I take a bath?”
What would she say, thought Walter, if she saw Buck B.’s bathroom upstairs with the François Lalanne tub in the shape of a blue hippopotamus? He showed her to the downstairs bath.
She came many times after that, walking up the private road in the dark, crawling into the car and filling it with her stale breath. Walter threw a sleeping bag in the back seat. She added a plastic trash bag stuffed with pilled sweaters and wrinkled polyester slacks, a matted hairbrush, pair of pink plastic shoes with a butterfly design punched over the toe. He wondered what she had done with her children but didn’t ask.
In the mornings she waited outside the kitchen door until Walter let her in. He watched her dunk toast crusts, listened to her circular talk that collapsed inward as a seashell narrows and twists upon itself, and at noon when the bars opened he took her to the mall.
“Come on, take my picture. Nobody never took my picture since I was a kid.” she said.
“Someday.”
“Walter, she is living in my car.” said Buck B. He could barely speak.
Walter threw him a high smile.
The deep autumn came quickly. Abandoned cats and dogs skulked along the roads. The flare of leaves died, the mountain moulted into grey-brown like a dull bird. A mood of destruction erupted when a bull got loose at the cattle auction house and trampled an elderly farmer, when a car was forced off the road by pimpled troublemakers throwing pumpkins. Hunters came for the deer and blood trickled along their truck fenders. Walter took pictures of them leaning against their pickups. Through binoculars Buck watched loggers clearcut the mountain’s slope, and Albina Muth slept in the Mercedes every night.
Walter liked the road called Mud Pitch and drove past the wreck of the old poorhouse two or three times a week. This time it showed itself to him like some kind of grainy Russian nude tinted egg-yolk yellow. As he stared the sunlight failed and once m
ore it became a ruined building. He thought he would photograph the place. Tomorrow. Or the day after.
A cold front rolled in while they slept and in the morning the light jangled through cracking clouds, the sky between the house and the mountain filled with loops of wind. The camera strap sawed into the side of Walter’s neck as he ran down the terraces to the car. He could hear the bulldozers on the mountain. Albina Muth was curled up on the back seat.
“I’m working today. Got to drop you off early.”
The mountain mottled and darkened under cloud shadow. There was no color in the fields, only a few deep scribbles of madder and chalky biscuit. Albina sat up, face thickened with sleep.
“I’nt bother you. Just lay here in the car. I’m sick.”
“Look. I’m going to be working all day. The car will be cold.”
“Can’t go back up to the trailer, see? Can’t go to the mall. He’s there, see?”
“Don’t tell me anything about it.” He cut the Mercedes too far back, put the rear wheels in Buck’s spider lily beds. “Don’t tell me about your fights.”
The poorhouse was a rack of wind-scraped buildings in fitful sunlight, glaring and then dark like the stuttering end of a reel of film spitting out numbers and raw light. Albina followed him through the burdocks.
“I thought you wanted to stay in the car and sleep.”
“Oh, I’n look around.”
Inside the rooms were as small as pantries and closets. Furrows of clay-colored plaster had fallen away from the lath, glass spindled across the floor. The stairs were slides of rubbish, bottles, feathers, rags.
“You gonna fix this place up?” she said kicking nut husks, pulling light chains connected to burst bulbs.
“I’m taking pictures,” said Walter.
“Hey, take my picture, o.k.?”
He ignored her, went into a room: punched-out door panels, drifts of flies in the corners and the paint cracked like dried mud. He heard her in another room, scratching in the filth.
“Come in here. Stand by the window,” he called. He was astonished by the complexity of light in the small chamber; a wave of abrasive grey fell in from the window, faded and deepened along the wall with the swell and heave of damp plaster. She put her arm along the top of the low window, embracing the paintless frame and resting her head on her shoulder.
“Just like that.”
The light flattened so she appeared part of the window casing.
“For god’s sake take that disgusting sweater off.”
Her knowing smirk disappeared into the hollow of the rising sweater. She thought she knew what they were about. Her mouth ruched, she stood on alternate feet and kicked off her pants. She was all vertical, downward line, narrow arms and legs like wood strips, one nipple blank, erased by light, the other a tiny gleam in the meagre shadow of her body. She waited for Walter to bite her arms or shore her against the soiled wall. He ordered her to move around the room.
“Now by the door put your hand on the doorknob.”
Her purpled fingers half-closed on the china globe. The dumb flesh took the light from the window, she coughed, leaned against the door and the paint fell in brittle flakes. But there was a doggishness about her bent shoulders, her knuckled back, that goaded him.
“Behind one door. Squeeze into that broken panel. Don’t smile.”
Her face appeared in the splintered opening, washed with the false importance the camera inflicts. Click … whirr
Walter’s thrusting look swept the room across the hall: he saw on the floor a mound of broken glass, splinters and curved blades sloped in a truncated cone. Light pierced a broken shutter.
“Squat down over that pile of glass.” A hot feeling rushed through him. I was going to be a tremendous image. He knew it.
“Jesus. I could get cut.”
“You won’t. Just keep your balance.”
Submissively she lowered herself over the glass, the tense, bitten fingers touching the dirty floor for balance. Spots of sunlight flew across her face and neck as the clouds twitched along. She filled the viewfinder.
Again the angled limbs, the hairy shadows and glimmering flexures of her body.
“Can I put my clothes on? I’m freezin’.”
“Not yet. A few more.”
“Must of taken a hunderd,” she cried.
“Come on.”
She followed along to the end of the poorhouse where green shelves pulled away, to the fallen door that led like a ramp into the world. He headed for an old kitchen stove with a water reservoir, rusting in the weeds. The oven door fell away when he grasped the handle. Albina hung back, contracted and shivering.
“Albina, pretend you’re crawling into the oven.”
“I want to git my clothes on.”
“Right after this one. This is the last one.”
“I’n wait for you in the car.”
“Albina. You pestered me over and over to take your picture. Now I’m taking it. Come on, crawl into the oven.”
She came through the weeds and bent before the iron hole. Her hands, her head and shoulders went into the stove’s interior.
“Get in as far as you can.”
The blackened, curved soles of her feet, the taut buttocks and hams, the furred pinch of sex appeared in the viewfinder. There was no vestigial tail. She began to back out as he worked the shutter.
“I wanted you to take pictures of me smilin’.” she said. “Thought they was goin’ to be cute, I could get like a little gold frame. Or maybe like sexy, I could put them in a little black fold-up. Not gettin’ in no stove, behind stickin’ out.”
“Albina, honey, they are cute, and some are sexy. Just a few more. Come on, stand in the hot water thing on the side there.”
She climbed up onto the stove top, saying something he couldn’t hear, stepped into the water reservoir. In a cloud of rust her feet plunged through the rotten metal. The top of the range was even with her waist, and she looked as though she were to be immolated in some terrible rite. Blood ran down her foot.
Helpless, dirty laughter spurted out of the corners of his mouth and Albina wept and cursed him. But yes, now he could squeeze that hard, thin thigh, pinch the nipples until she gasped. He thrust her against the stove. Later, when he dropped her at the bar, he gave her two twenties, told her not to sleep in the car any more. She said nothing, stuffed the money in her purse and got out, walked away, the plastic bag of clothes bumping against her leg.
Milky light spilled out of the house. Buck’s shadow was limping back and forth, bending down, lifting, its shape distorted by runneling moisture on the windows. Walter went in through the side door, down the back stairs to the basement darkroom.
The film creaked as he wound it onto the reel. He shook the developing tank, stood in the sour dark listening to the slip and fall of water, watching the radiant hand of the clock. The listless water slid away, he turned on the light. Upstairs Buck walked back and forth. Walter squinted at the wet negatives, at the white pinched eyes and burning lips, the black flesh with its vacant shadows, yes, a thin arm crooked down, splayed fingers and the cone of glass that looked like smoldering coals. He really had something this time. He went upstairs.
Buck stood against the wall, hands behind his back. On his good foot he wore a brown oxford with a thick sole. There were all of Walter’s suitcases at the door.
“It’s getting too cold.” Buck B. said, voice like a ratchet clicking through the stops.
“Too cold?”
“Too cold for staying here. I’m closing the house up. Tonight. Now.” He had another house in Boca Raton, but Walter had never seen it.
“I thought we were going to stay for the snow.”
“I’m selling it. I’ve put it on the market.”
“Look. I’ve got negatives drying. What am I supposed to do?” He tried to keep his voice level in contrast to Buck’s which was skidding.
“Do whatever you want. But do it somewhere else. Go see Albina Muth.”
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“Look—”
“I’m sick and tired of having a tenant in my car. The Mercedes actually smells, it stinks, or haven’t you noticed? The car is ruined. I’m sick and tired of listening to Albina Muth suck up my coffee. And I’m tired of you. In fact, you can have the car, the stinking car you ruined. Get in it and get out. Now.”
“Look, this is ironic. Albina Muth is not coming back. She took all her stuff out of the car. This was it. Today. I took some pictures and that was it.”
Buck B. looked toward the black window, toward the mountain drowned in the canyon of night, still seeing the slope stripped of trees, strewn with rammel and broken slash, and beyond this newly cleared slope another hill and the field with the poorhouse visible for the first time through the binoculars.
“Get out,” he said through his nose, limping forward and raising Barb Cigar’s ex-father-in-law’s sabre. “Get out.”
Walter almost laughed, old Buck B. with his red face and waving a Polish sabre. The Mercedes wasn’t a bad consolation prize. He could have the interior steam-cleaned or deodorized or something. All he had to do was run back down the stairs, get the negatives and exit, this way out, one way to the Mercedes. He tried it.
About Annie Proulx
ANNIE PROULX lives in Vermont and Newfoundland, but spends much of the year traveling North America. She has held NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships and residences at Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. Her short-story collection, Heart Songs and Other Stories, appeared in 1988, followed in 1992 by the novel Postcards, which won the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The 1993 novel The Shipping News won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.