That night I didn’t sleep, same as I didn’t when we lived together tongueless. The explosion never occurred. My wife didn’t return inside, needful to relate the narrow tunnel’s limit. Back to back to back to back I watched Down by Law, Barton Fink, Harold and Maude, and Deliverance on two of those indie film networks that Didi tried to talk our cable provider into dropping.
“Watching these kinds of movies helps me ‘see’ better portraits,” I always told her.
“It helps you see freakish people in a relentless world,” Didi shot back. And then, more often than not, we’d stare through one another before walking off to separate rooms in the house.
That stuff I said about furthering humanity instead of living off past do-gooder capitalistic ancestors? Didi studied studio art in college. Somewhere along the line she gave it up and took up framing. She spent her time in a frame shop, and five generations from now some kind of insecure relative-to-be will tell everyone how she’s related to a misunderstood and unjustly sentenced woman who suffered a series of miscarriages quietly. I don’t think it’s fair. Somebody should at least notice how Didi can use a miter box.
I’m not the only photographer named Ray Charles. There’s another one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Maybe there are others. The singer Ray Charles was born as Ray Charles Robinson back in 1930 or thereabouts. I’ve never typed “Ray Robinson photographer” into a search engine, but if there is one, then there’s no way he gets the ribbing or double-takes that the Baton Rouge guy and I get, I doubt.
Here are some fun facts: There’s a photographer in Georgia named Willie McTell, and two photographers who go by Doc Watson — one in Pittsburgh, the other in Riverside, California. Those last two men might be professors in an art department, thus the “Doc” title.
I’d be willing to bet that more than a few professional photographers have “Homer” for a name, but who in America remembers how that old poet couldn’t see?
Do not doubt how much I loved my wife for the quirks she forgave of me. Back in the bad days, I went off a-drinking about daily, took a uniform along with me — some days I was a soldier, others a police officer — and changed my clothes before driving home even though it wasn’t more than ten miles and the sheriff’s deputies knew me anyway. I had this notion. I believed that a cop wouldn’t think a man in uniform irresponsible enough to drink hard in a place like Worm’s then get behind the wheel. Didi never said, “So you’re a member of the Oxford, Mississippi, police force today,” or “Where exactly is the Army-Navy store where you’re spending good money on these uniforms?”
We had met at the frame shop, a place known by the odd, existentially challenging demand Hang Me Here. At the time, I’d been considering a series of photographs that involved an interesting-looking woman — somewhere between a woman with an ineffable port-wine stain birthmark that covered exactly half of her face and a supermodel with a desperate look in her eyes — half-clothed, standing amid vacant, rundown, out-of-business cotton mills throughout the southeast. Half-clothed leaning against idle, rusted spinning frames and looms! It would be symbolic!
Upon my job offer Didi said, “I don’t like to have my picture taken.” She said, “I’ve read up on how men say they’re photographers, and then the next thing you know these girls are working escort services in Tokyo, Bangkok, and Dallas.”
I said, “I understand your trepidation. If you should ever reconsider”—I pulled out one of my newly printed business cards—“give me a call. I promise I’m not some kind of pederast, or human trafficker, or Republican.”
Didi wasn’t supermodel or birthmark material, understand, but I couldn’t not stare at her. Her green eyes hinted at thyroid problems. She stood six-one and weighted about 130, but didn’t seem malnourished. Didi didn’t bother waxing her eyebrows, which a less-sophisticated aesthetician might consider as looking like two fragile misplaced moustaches on perfectly porcelain skin. And that hair of hers — as soft and brown as a common field rat’s.
“Your name is Ray Charles and you want me to pose semi-nude for you?” she said on that first meeting. Didi quit framing a paint-by-numbers clown than someone from the Junior League wanted to hang in her foyer. “Get the fuck out of here.”
We married three months later before a justice of the peace. Didi agreed to move to a land where Witness Protection people might be moving soon. I made some promises. For one, should we have a child — and we wouldn’t — I was never to make the kid eat newspaper after each meal. Didi’s own father — I don’t have a clue about psychology, but this seems relevant and causal — believed that the ingestion of paper products helped clean out one’s GI tract, thus saving money and the environment, in regards to bathroom tissue.
“I’d like to take your father’s photo,” was my only response when Didi divulged her childhood, there on date number one.
“If a skilled archaeologist dug up my childhood septic tank he could piece together American history from Watergate to the Iran-Contra affair,” Didi said.
“What about your mother?” I asked. What could I say? We ate Mexican food, and I wanted about quatro or ocho margaritas.
“A skilled archeologist might find her in the septic tank, too, for all I know,” Didi said.
At the end of the third day I had walked the perimeter of our house so far away, looking for odd springs, that I had to use a zoom lens to catch Didi stooped over, filling the hole in our yard. If this kept going on I’d have to set up a magnifying glass pointed toward my wife, and then zoom in on that. I walked in circles, unconcerned with work I needed to do. I thought, I can set up a magnifying glass, and then a surveyor’s level, and finally my zoom lens.
And then I found water surging up in the middle of the Calloustown Natural Baptist Church’s adjacent cemetery, among headstones that only read Munson or Harrell. If I had a cell phone I could’ve called Didi and said “Eureka!” like that, or, “Our hole is connected to the plot of little Ernestette Munson, born December 26/died December 31, 1870. So basically we’ve had a wormhole between her coffin and our backyard, so her soul can come visit on occasion, which might explain those cries we’ve thought to be feral cats coupled and stuck nighttime.”
Out loud, there on a slight bluff overlooking my own house, I probably said, “Uh-oh.” I looked around to make sure no one stood around in the church parking lot. I found a nice three-foot-long fallen limb and stuck it in the hole, then kicked some dirt, then scooted a small flat rock over that. Finally — and I would have nightmares about this for the rest of my life — I kicked over little baby Ernestette Munson’s miniature headstone to cover what may or may not have been a portal of sorts to our backyard.
The coroner, later, would pinpoint Didi’s death to right about the time I covered the unnatural spring. To this pronouncement I would say, “Okay,” and not explain where I stood, or what I did, at four o’clock that afternoon.
I have photographed every Munson and Harrell in Calloustown, whether they liked it or not. I’ve placed my camera on the counter of Worm’s Bar and Grill and tapped the shutter release button with my elbow. I’ve done the same at the Tiers of Joy bakery and Southern Exotic Pet Store. After my “Interesting Woman in the Middle of a Failed Cotton Mill” project never developed, so to say, I thought it necessary to encapture the blank, dull visages of a relentless people committed to proving General Sherman pointless and myopic and downright cruel for choosing to leave Calloustown unsigned, unscathed, still bloomful.
There are the “natural” and “unsuspected” photographs, and there have also been the normal family Christmas portraits, the near-coming-out pictures of eighteen-year-old girls walking down a staircase, the “Fifty Year Anniversary” photographs intended for newspapers, engagement and wedding photos. I shot Biggest Watermelon! photos, and the odd favorite dog/cat/mynah bird portraits with said animal standing in front of a Rocky Mountain or Niagara Falls backdrop.