Ray Charles, photographer. One time the local paper wrote a human interest piece about me. I’d just received a first-place prize at the Mule Days festival for a photo I’d taken of a Civil War reenactor sitting beneath a cypress tree, holding a Happy Meal box. The newspaper guy titled his piece “Ray Charles Shoots and Scores.”
Didi said he made fun of me. And then she went silent.
“I’ve had our garden hose shoved down here since eleven o’clock,” Didi said. “It’s on full blast, and it’s not coming back up. There’s no end.” She wore her gardening attire: Bermuda shorts and a gray sweatshirt advertising Ortho.
I said, “Water’s not free,” because it’s the first thing that came into my head. “There’s also a train of thought that goes something like, ‘Hey, let’s be environmentally correct and not waste water. Let’s conserve it.’”
Didi didn’t ask about my earlier pilgrimage. She didn’t spit out, “So I take it you’ve been sitting down at Worm’s bar wasting what could’ve been our vacation money,” which only meant that Didi stood there focused, obsessed, and infatuated. My wife said, “If the snake’s size has anything to do with the length of its lair, we might need to be concerned.”
I stared at her. What was she saying? Did Didi break the unspoken truce? I looked down and said, “It’s because of the drought, that’s why we’re supposed to conserve water.”
“It has to be coming out somewhere. There’s no way I could be filling up an underground cavern. Walk around in circles, Ray, and see if this is bubbling out somewhere I can’t see from here. Do snakes have back doors? What about voles?”
“You better hope it’s not a yellow jacket nest,” I said. “Is this your way of telling me I’m too fat and need some exercise, walking around in circles?”
Didi remained half-hunched, steady with the nozzle below. “If I thought that, then I’d say it flat out, Ray. Now start circling me. You know, maybe a stride farther out each lap.”
I did. And I took a photo of my wife from behind with each lap until I stood in the road. The best picture, near dusk, looked like she had a tail between her legs. I thought about telling her, but we seemed to get along so well with this, a mysterious chasm, in our midst.
If we had well water I’d’ve gone to the spigot and shut Didi’s experiment down. Having a dry well, like a dry socket in one’s jaw, is a painful situation with the inherent endless bad consequences of anticipation. Even way out here where Didi and I lived in Calloustown, we had “city” water provided by Lower Piedmont Sandhills Water. They say that if ten thousand more people move to within the town limits, maybe they’ll make a sewer treatment plant, dig sewers, and get all of us Calloustowners connected. Only ninety-five hundred to go, or thereabouts.
Our water bill would go up, sure, but to be honest the mystery tunnel had me wanting an answer too. Was there a Chinese man on the other side of the planet cursing Mandarin because of an artesian well sprung up on his property? Or maybe he praised Buddha for filling up a rice paddy more so. Were there fishermen on the Congaree River wondering how come the current took their boats downstream without warning?
If my wife filled up the septic tank — or our neighbors’ tanks down the road — how long a silence would I be able to muster after saying, “I told you”?
Didi said, “I don’t expect you to keep walking circles at night, but I don’t want to slack up what I’ve started.”
“I can redirect the floodlights,” I said. “Hell, with floodlights you can stand there waiting for water to bubble back up at you all night long.” Because I didn’t want to precipitate another communication malfunction I said, “That can’t be all that great for your back. Let me take over for a while. You can go pee, get something to eat, do whatever you need.”
My wife looked at me as if I’d disrespected her ancestors. Our longest “fight” occurred two weeks after she’d gotten on the computer and joined that Ancestry.com ruse. Didi emerged from our “study,” opened up my darkroom door without knocking, and said, “I knew it! My great-great-great-great-great grandfather was an Indian. He married a woman who’s listed as ‘Unknown Indian,’ and they had a son who married a white woman!” She went on and on. “And then my great-great grandfather had a wife whose father started up a silk mill, and they had a child who lived just two days and another son who was retarded somehow. Anyway, my great-great grandfather married a Jewish woman, and she had a brother — what kind of uncle does that make him to me? — who worked for a man whose father was born in Istanbul and later became a diplomat of one kind or another!”
There was more. I listened to it all. I didn’t say anything about how she could’ve ruined some rolls of film I had of the Cosby-Coleman wedding if she’d barged in five minutes later. I said, “Who cares? Maybe you should worry about making a mark in history your own self, so that knobheads in the future can look on Ancestry.com and say, ‘I had a great-great-great-great-great aunt who led the anti — Second Amendment movement in America,’ instead of, ‘My great-great-great-great-great aunt sat around hoping to find importance in herself because of what her ancestors supposedly achieved.’ Do you see what I mean? If not the anti — Second Amendment, then at least something like ‘I wrote a novel’ or ‘I won the lottery and gave half the money to an orphanage.’ I mean, the whole reason I have Ray Charles Photography is so future generations can understand the importance of marriage and debutante balls, among other things.”
Didi locked herself in the study for six days. I’m pretty sure that she peed in a jug the whole time and only ate and used the bathroom otherwise when I left to make women’s trains and veils appear more spectacular than they really were, to keep a viewer’s eye on the dress instead of the look of condemnation that plastered the bride’s face.
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There exist a number of inexplicable veins that traverse planet Earth. The best one I’ve found, in all my research, when Didi let me use the “study,” occurs in Turkmenistan. It’s a flaming pit of natural gas called the “Door to Hell” and measures almost a football field in diameter. No one knows how deep the pit distends, or where the gas begins.
There are strange holes in the bottom of oceans, with gasses and such leaking out. People believe in portals, like in the movie Being John Malkovich, a film that Didi abhorred. She wasn’t president of the Eraserhead fan club, either. Willing suspension of disbelief didn’t show up anywhere on her family tree, evidently. If you put a freakish baby or a workplace with four-foot ceilings in a movie, Didi didn’t care about buying a movie ticket.
I took over atop the hole at nine P.M. on that first night. I thought about pulling out my Zippo to see if, perhaps, the “Door to Hell” had its back entrance in my yard, all the way underneath the Caspian Sea, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic Ocean, and so on. But I didn’t. What if it shot up a flame and burned my eyeballs useless? How many times would Ray Charles Photography get mentioned on all those TV shows then?
I sniffed and listened and waited only ten minutes before Didi returned, a bag of pimiento sandwiches in hand. “I don’t want to say I don’t trust your being able to keep a nozzle in the hole, Ray, but I don’t trust your being able to keep a nozzle in the hole. Go on back inside and take care of the dogs. I’ll call if I need you.”
I let go of the hose when she latched on. I said, “Hey, I got an idea. Maybe this endless vein holds gas. I’ll leave my lighter with you in case you want to check it out.”