The rumors were rampant. Who had Samantha run away with? Every neighbor had a theory about this man or that. Margie from across the street was certain she saw Samantha at a downtown restaurant having lunch with a blond man in a blue blazer the very afternoon she disappeared. Another story placed Samantha and a mysterious but, as always, very handsome man in the lobby of a nearby Hilton. The police weren’t buying any of it. Why would she leave everything behind — clothes, jewelry, money? No note, no phone call. No use of her credit cards or bank account. The investigation went on for months. For a while it was all anyone could talk about.
You can’t get over how something so consequential could be so easy. Let’s have lunch. Followed by a little Christmas shopping. How could Samantha resist? Even at the time you half expected a moment of doubt would arrive, a sudden jolt of conscience that would force you to reevaluate. But it never came.
Bruce would sell the house later that year and move out of state. He sent a card the first Christmas, promised to visit but never did. They lost contact with him after that. There was a what-ever-happened-to story in the newspaper on the tenth anniversary of Samantha’s disappearance. And that was it.
The movie ends. Elaine turns off the projector, switches on the nearby lamp. She lifts her glass to find nothing but an amber ring at the bottom. As always, she reaches for the yellowed envelope sitting on the table, the same place she found it almost exactly one year after filming the boys mending the fence. The once-bright stationery has faded into uneven shades of gray. The single sheet of paper, cracking at the folds, is held together with discolored cellophane tape. She has long ago memorized every word and each detail of Nathan’s simple handwriting, even the spaces between words. Still, she starts from the beginning, reading each line slowly, pausing at key words and phrases.
...leaving you... most difficult decision of my life... will always care for you.
She reaches the last paragraph, absentmindedly lifts and then sets down her empty glass before continuing.
I’m moving to St. Louis with Connie Wilkerson. You probably don’t remember Connie. She worked as a temp in my office three summers ago. Please understand that this is not a sudden impulse kind of thing. Connie and I have been involved romantically for nearly three years. For what it’s worth, this has been my only infidelity. Connie and I love each other very much.
There was never a sense of triumph, only a moment of relief that it was over. For years she waited for her punishment, for the start in the middle of the night, the crushing guilt. Eventually she settled into a blunted state of acceptance, resisting the pull of either shame or self-pity. She seeks no forgiveness, doesn’t feel she needs any. Sometimes options disappear. At some point the script is written. You are only the actor.
She returns the projector to the hall closet, places it on the shelf next to the cameras she has not touched in years. She no longer believes in the magic of photography. A painter creates with brushes and oils, a photographer merely records with lenses and light. Of course, you have your tools and your tricks. You can draw the eye, freeze a moment, highlight, obscure, grab that split second when a guard is let down. But in the end, we see only what we are prepared to see.
She places the scruffy yellow boxes into the worn leather case and sets them next to the projector. She will watch the movies again. Maybe next week. Maybe in a few months. There is something comforting in the never-changing images unfolding in their predetermined sequence, a reassurance that comes from knowing that, perhaps like one’s fate, no alternative endings are possible.
James Lee Burke
Deportees
from The Strand Magazine
People think the Dust Bowl ended with the 1930s. It didn’t in Yoakum, Texas. I remember how cold and brittle and sharp the air was at eight in the morning six days after Pearl Harbor when my mother and I arrived at Grandfather’s paintless, pitiful home in our old coupe with the hand-crank windshield, but I remember even more the way the dust was piled as smooth as cinnamon against the smokehouse and barn and windmill tank, and how the sun was a dull silver disk and the sky an ink wash and the pecan trees bare and black like they’d been scorched in a fire.
The first thing Mother did when we entered the house was sit down at Grandfather’s piano, which he had bought from a saloon in San Antonio, and play “Clair de Lune.” She was a beautiful woman and had a regal manner, but she was also crazy and had undergone electroshock treatments and had been placed in the asylum in Wichita Falls. The edges of the wood grips on Grandfather’s revolver were cut with nine notches he had tried to sand out of existence with a nail file. It worked about as well as the electroshock treatments did on my mother.
“How you doin’, Buster Brown?” he said.
“That’s not my name, Grandfather,” I said.
“That’s right, stand up for yourself, Aaron,” he said. “But you ought to get you a little dog named Tige.”
You didn’t win with Grandfather. Even in old age he still stood six foot six. When he was a Texas Ranger he knocked John Wesley Hardin out of his saddle and kicked him in the face, and for good measure nailed chains on him in the bed of a wagon and threw him in the county jail and poured a slop bucket on his head.
He was sitting by the fireplace, his face warm and yellow as a candle in the light. “Y’all come to he’p me put up the Christmas tree?”
“Yes, sir.”
He knew better. My father had disappeared again. My mother kept playing “Clair de Lune,” an expression on her face like the shadows rain makes running down a window.
Grandfather got up and went into the kitchen and lifted a tin sheet of biscuits off the woodstove. The biscuits were brown and crusty and oozing with melting butter. The sky was dark, dirty with smoke, and I could see flashes in the clouds and hear the rumble of thunder that gave no rain. I thought I saw people rush past the barn, gripping their belongings against their chests, their clothes streaming in the wind, their faces pinched as though raindrops were stinging their skin, although I knew there was neither rain nor hail inside the wind, only dust.
“There’s Mexicans running across the lot, Grandfather,” I said.
“They’re wets. Don’t pay them no mind.”
He smiled when he said it. But I knew he didn’t mean anything mean or racial. In hard times you don’t share your secrets and you sure don’t borrow trouble.
“A woman was nursing a baby and running at the same time, Grandfather.”
He scraped the biscuits into a galvanized bucket, then slid a sliced-up ham onto the biscuits and draped a checkered napkin over the top and hefted the bucket by the bail. “Let’s go, Buster Brown.”
We didn’t need books to learn about the history of our state. It was always at the ends of our fingertips. It was even in the eyes of my crazy mother, who often seemed to take flight and travel back in time, for good or bad, mostly for bad. How about this? In 1914 an old woman outside Yoakum told my mother this story. When the old woman was a girl, two dozen mounted men with weapons tied to their saddles rode into the yard and asked if they could have breakfast. The girl and her parents started a fire under a Dutch oven and boiled coffee and cooked meat for the riders, all of whom spoke little. Their leader was a lantern-jawed man with soulful brown eyes and oiled, thick hair that hung on his cheeks. After a while he rested his knife and fork over his plate. “Why are you looking at us in such a peculiar way, little girl?” he asked.