Barbara on the other hand was startled just to see her husband slide open the van’s door. She hadn’t known they were unlocked.
“Hey,” Jay said. “Have I been looking forward to this.”
“Papa,” Dora said, “you look so sharp!”
“Well I feel sharp. Feel real good, baby doll. Feel good all the time, because I know I’m helping people.”
The father tugged the long bill of his cap. Barbara looked over the bandage by his ear. Jay’s bruise had faded, the scar had shrunk, but he was careful about keeping the spot protected. Now he found her eyes.
“We’re helping a lot of kids here, too,” he said. “A lot of these boys and girls, without us they’d have no chance.”
Around his gleaming bulk came the smell of the crowd, unwashed and sun-blasted. The family stepped out into chock-full air, as much as into the flap of tenting, the creak of plank pathways, or the singing of the aluminum poles each time the breeze picked up. Jay led the group down through the jumble to his central tent-offices, stopping several times for introductions and more banter. He took into account, as well, how the NATO guardsmen affected the refugees. The poveri hadn’t even had time to grow accustomed to his own armed tagalong, and now the family had arrived with two more. The campers who were made the most nervous appeared to be the most African, with tribal scarring and brimless sequined caps. Their steep-cheeked faces fell, when these men and women spotted the extra brace of gunslingers, both of them blonde and pale to boot, down from the European North. The tent-dwellers from the deepest South gave the troopers the widest berth, backing into the mud that bordered the plank byways, never mind that they were barefoot or, at best, in plastic flip-flops. Everyone in camp, really, backed away from the pair in uniform. The mother was grateful that the soldiers had slipped off their padded bulletproofing, and grateful too that Jay adjusted his patter. The man started to sound like a schoolteacher. He made it clear that he would never have brought his family to the camp if he believed there were any possibility of trouble.
“The heavy artillery,” he said, “that wasn’t my idea.”
As they went, Barbara and the kids also learned about the camp’s layout, a wider semi-circle that sloped down to a smaller one. It was an amphitheater, and down at the stage lay the important setups, including jay’s beloved kitchens. Papa directed a staff of twenty-plus, something else the wife hadn’t realized. Besides that, the Jaybird was the lone worker from the U.S. He had his Coordinator’s work cut out for him, needing to communicate across several varieties of anti-American resentment. Barb thought of the electronic misunderstandings that JJ and Chris got into over the internet.
Yet she alone seemed to understand the difficulty, and to see through the upbeat charade. Barbara alone, the half-out-the-door wife, seemed to be the only one who worried for the capo, even as he struck poses that implied he was everybody’s friend. But how could these poveri connect finally with this transplanted food-industry exec? Most of them spoke a mangled Italian, and more than once she heard them break down into pidgin French or a sub-Saharan patter. From underfoot, meanwhile, came the suck and pop of the walkway boards in pockets of mud. Not that it had rained, out here; the water was the run-off from the hose-and-coat-hanger showers — if not from some less sanitary facility. Plus chalky clouds of pesticide would waft across the family’s path every now and then. Lice powder, Jay explained. The Site had a doctor come in and dispense a fresh dose every week. But for Barbara the acid-flavored dust only reinforced her unhappy take on the place, as bad as that first day down in the original city, a reeking underworld in which you could barely speak with the ghosts.
After the group reached the center of the camp, the mother tried twice to point the way back to the parking area. Wrong each time. The Jaybird corrected her, stepping in front of her and thrusting out his chest.
“Listen,” Barb said, “I’m not sure the kids can—”
“Kids,” Jay said, “I’ll tell you what to look for. If you’re ever lost in here, just look for your family.”
He pointed at something closer by. At the corner of a broad tent hung a wide and ornately framed photograph, another group shot, a rough match to the one up by the parking area. The portrait itself, now that Barbara looked at it, held several heads in the surreal fixity of the Sears Roebuck studio. One of those heads however was impossibly enlarged, some kind of trick with the copier. For this was a copy, a doctored full-color scan of a shot Barb had seen before. This was her and the children, in a free portrait she’d won at a church raffle a year ago. The enlarged head was her own, mushrooming above the kids’ as if she were the family Vesuvius.
“I don’t ask this guy about the technology,” Jay announced, waving a hand at Silky Kahlberg. “I don’t want to know.”
“No,” the Lieutenant-Major said. “You don’t want to know.”
He was fluttering his lapels, getting some air under his pretty jacket. Not that you could see what he might have in the armpit.
Jay went on with the story. A number of the refugee families, he explained, had arrived at the site with, of all things, a hefty self-portrait. “Hey,” the father said, “everybody wants a picture of themselves. Think about it, it’s like I.D.” In the camp, however, the ungainly squares and ovals took up space in tents already crowded. In a couple of cases, the odd item of salvage made the neighbors jealous. So after a few days of getting to know his site, The Boss had hit on a plan for community building.
“It was time,” Jay said, “we had some signage.”
Circulating with his least-busy staff members, he’d labeled and cataloged all the larger, more garish frames — and Barb for one realized what that part of the process was about, community building among his colleagues, tunneling through their built-up suspicions when it came to Americans. Jay had insisted, too, that the records be kept in English, Italian, and French. Then he’d rounded up volunteers from around the camp.
“Oh,” Barbara said, “I get it. You—”
“Now this next part,” Kahlberg said, “this is the miracle part, if you ask me.”
Jay’s volunteer homeless had gone around collecting the catalogued pieces. The families had let Barbara’s smiling but still-unknown husband remove their family photos and take the fittings, though often it was their sole possession of any value. The Center took them away peaceably, with nothing but a piece of paper in return.
“I just figured,” Jay said, “the Site could be a city and a nation. A nation, it says somewhere, is just the same people living in the same place.”
Again, Barb understood better. She could appreciate how the Americano’s fair business practices had mattered less to the people in camp than the picture of his family. At the same time as he’d asked for their frames, he’d shown them what he had at stake, in Naples: his own little band of runaways, smiling and airbrushed. He’d shown them what he’d given up.
The mother tried to explain. “These clandestini, for them it’s probably been years since they saw anything like this.”
“That’s just technology,” Jay said. “Silky does it in the NATO shop.”
“No, I’m saying, the way we look, it must’ve seemed like we come from—”
“The liaison officer,” Silky said, “has access to all document functions.”
He went on smiling, between the tips of his hair, tucked back and poking from under his ears. Meanwhile, Jay pointed towards the reshaped portrait overhead. Even the NATO guards looked up at it, letting their rifles hang slack.