Ghost Town (3 page)

From the recycling bin in my mother's office I chose among dozens of mail-order film-developing companies that routinely solicited business from people who had died or moved away from Paisley. The closest service used a post office box in St. Louis, so it was to the Sparkle Snapshot Company that I sent my first roll of film.

A lot of things change when you live alone.

Time, of course, is among the biggest. Days go by in which nothing worth mentioning happens. It's not that they're all the same. I imagine that if I were floating on a raft across the Pacific Ocean my ship's log might read a lot like my life in Paisley:

Hot today. Caught a fish.

Cloudy but still hot. Saw a seagull.

Another hot day. A truck went down the road, turned around, and went back the way it had come. Must be lost.

Another hot day. No rain expected. After bedtime, heard coyotes howling.

Watched a hawk catch a skink. Not easy.

And so on.

With no other people around, it's easy to let your appearance suffer. Certainly there's no need to dress up. Daily bathing becomes optional, too. You could give yourself a haircut if you wanted to, but what's the rush?

Thus, by degrees, people slip into a barbarous state.

"All the more reason to practice your art," Chief Leopard Frog urged. "Art lifts you up and separates you from the lower species."

The return of my first roll of film after ten days of waiting stimulated a Christmas-like feeling. My hands shook as I held the fat yellow envelope.

What if my pictures were no good?

But I needn't have worried. Except for the first two exposures, which were simply red streaks against a dark gray background, each of the images that followed was crisp, clear, and colorful. Yellow flowers. Green multieyed, multilegged monsters. A sprig of hay that looked like a cactus in the desert. The talisman's shiny nose and laid-back ears. A faded gum wrapper.

But then, the last picture in the stack startled me so much that I actually jumped up from my chair.

It was a snapshot of Tim Balderson's sister, Maureen, combing her hair!

What in the world?
I thought.

Somehow, Sparkle Snapshot in St. Louis had managed to mix in a picture meant for the Baldersons.

Oh, well,
I thought.
Nobody's perfect.

FOLLOWING A LONG DRY SPELL
, a thunderstorm finally passed through Paisley, too late to save the corn crop, but with nearly four inches of welcome precipitation in twenty-four hours, the creeks overflowed and the pastures turned from brown to green overnight. The pumpkin patch, previously a tangle of knotted, brittle vines, suddenly sprang out in every direction like kudzu.

Chipmunks, possums, raccoons, and foxes came out from hiding to get a long, cold drink; birds lined up on the telephone wire to dry their wings; spiders repaired webs; and a turtle poked his head up from the pond to see what all the commotion was about.

I figured this might be a good time to take another set of pictures. I had to ration my film because film and developing are expensive—one roll is a full week's allowance—but after a hard rain the color of the landscape changes, the miniature population explodes, and things bloom as if they've been waiting for this moment all season.

I put on my dad's Columbus Catfish cap, slung my camera over my shoulder, and headed up toward Ma Puttering's place. Hers is the third mailbox I mentioned before. Three in a row at the end of our driveway: the Baldersons', ours, and Ma Puttering's, whose forty acres starts where the gravel county road turns into a private dirt road with a
FOR SALE
sign wired to a creaky wooden gate. That sign has been there for at least three years, ever since Ma Puttering quietly passed away.

I remember her as a nice lady with a gray streak in her hair who kept a pack of dogs and once in a while made homemade blackberry jam just for me.

Her place has gone to ruin since then, however. Nowadays, it's home to an extended family of quarrelsome raccoons. Nobody's ever going to buy it. Nobody's ever going to buy anybody's house in Paisley.

What would be the point?

From a distance, Ma Puttering's house looks like a quaint, picturesque ivy-covered cottage, but when you get a little closer you can see that the corner of the roof by the chimney has collapsed, a number of windows are cracked or broken out entirely, and the ivy isn't ivy at all but a huge mass of pumpkin vines that just keep on reseeding themselves year after year.

I switched my camera from macro mode to regular and took a portrait of the place. What I saw through the lens looked sort of like a postcard from England: a thatched-roof cottage in a quiet English village, like the birthplace of a famous poet—say, maybe Thompson.

Just as I snapped the shutter, the sun divided into a thousand shafts streaming downward through the clouds, and a cottontail rabbit that had been enjoying a breakfast of red clover stood up on his hind legs and looked straight at me.

Perfect!
I thought.

I used the rest of the roll on close-ups of ladybugs, yellow ones and orange ones, plus spiders, butterflies, and paint peeling from an old shed door.

I also tried to get a picture of a deer at the edge of the woods, but I think he was too far away. Still, my artistic confidence was higher, I paid closer attention to the light conditions, and I thought one or two of my shots might turn out to be keepers.

When I placed the roll in the yellow postpaid envelope to send to Sparkle Snapshot in St. Louis, I thought about paying two dollars extra to get double prints but finally decided against it because at this time in our lives two dollars is two dollars.

However, something was changing in the way I looked at things. In the days of waiting for my film to get to the lab and for the lab to do whatever it is they do when they get it and for the United States Postal Service to get it back to me, I must have seen a hundred excellent picture opportunities.

Wouldn't it be nice to be rich enough to take a picture of everything that catches your eye?

Wouldn't it be nice to freeze all the beauty that crosses your path?

Man, that would be something!

I'll do that right after I build a library for Paisley.

Chief Leopard Frog says eventually you learn to do it with your mind's eye, but I find that my mind's eye's brain has a tendency to forget. That's when pictures become extraordinarily helpful.

Leaning against a cottonwood tree, the official tree of the state of Kansas, I pondered this thought.

Here's what I came up with:

Just as a hammer is a tool for increasing force against the head of a nail, the camera is a tool for the extension of memory.

I was pretty proud of this insight.

But, of course, there was nobody to share it with. My thoughts are trees falling in silence in an empty forest.

IT WAS ALMOST SEPTEMBER
. Most kids in Kansas were going back to school, but my mother surprised me one afternoon after
Oprah
by saying that due to our geographical circumstances, I would not be among them.

"I've signed you up for homeschool," she announced. "The nearest public school is simply too far away. You'd be riding a bus in darkness over bad roads twice a day. It's too much of a risk, not to mention a hardship. I, for one, do not want to be making bologna sandwiches at four o'clock in the morning."

"But Mom," I said, "how will I ever meet anybody my own age? It's like we're living on an ice shelf near the South Pole. Except we don't even have penguins."

"I'm sorry," she replied. "It's the best we can do right now. Maybe next year our lives will change."

When my pictures came back from St. Louis, I went to my room to open the package.

There was one shot of a spider eating a moth that was extraordinary. The light was perfect. The spider looked terrifying. The moth appeared to be a tiny rag of dust and parts.

The picture of the deer was a blur. The peeling paint could have been an abstract painting hanging in a big city museum. But it was the portrait of Ma Puttering's cottage that made me gasp, for there, in the foreground, was Ma Puttering herself, using a long-handled hoe to chop weeds in her squash garden.

This is no mistake at the lab,
I realized.

This was something much, much bigger.

They say that people who are confined to prison cells or hospital rooms look forward most of all to meals and mail. At least, the optimistic ones do. Even when the postal service brings nothing and the food is cold, boring, and undercooked, there's always tomorrow.

As the last kid in Paisley, Kansas, I felt a lot in common with the incarcerated. Solitary confinement versus solitary freedom. What's the difference? Either way, your world is very small.

In part because of the danger involved, I decided to shoot an entire roll of film on bees.

The pumpkin flowers attracted several varieties, I noticed: honeybees, bumblebees, and several other kinds of very small bees that one could easily mistake for flies.

The technical challenges proved greater than I'd imagined. To get a good macro photo you have to be within a couple of inches of your subject. You also have to shoot at a slower shutter speed than normal, which means your subject can't be moving.

Try telling that to a bee!

As with all worthwhile endeavors, my work required patience.

"Look at it this way," Chief Leopard Frog said. "If you were fishing, you might sit for hours before you got a bite."

"True," I replied.

"Anyway, what's the rush?" he added, using a phrase that was well on its way to becoming my personal motto.

In the morning hours, in late summer, a pumpkin patch is a very busy place. The broad leaves of the pumpkin plant are bigger than the hands of a man, and the vines twist and turn and angle themselves to capture sunlight.

Underneath, even on the hottest days, is a cool jungle floor teeming with life. Toads hide here, as do mice, lizards, and skinks, and because they're here, snakes come. Crawling insects, arachnids, caterpillars, worms, and once in a while a rabbit all move quietly beneath the floppy leaves.

Above is an insect airport with takeoffs and landings going on constantly.

I sat on a wooden crate and staked out a flower that was close enough for me to lean in to when the time came.

Patience,
I told myself.

What's the rush?

Twenty-four exposures on a single strip of celluloid film. One pumpkin flower. Hundreds of bees. And all the time in the world.

Actually, that last statement is more of a euphemism, or perhaps an attitude, than a statement of fact. Pumpkin flowers prefer early sunlight.

By ten o'clock in the morning, they begin to close, folding their star-shaped petals into an impenetrable yellow cone. At that time, the bees are forced to search elsewhere, perhaps to seek out honeysuckle or clover.

On the first day, I made three shots, of which one—I was hopeful—captured the image of a pollen-covered bumblebee.

After that, all I had to look forward to was the mail and lunch, neither of which proved to be particularly eventful.

I spent an entire week on bees. I got portraits of seven different bees of three different varieties. Now, of course, I wanted to learn more about bees. It's one thing to know what they look like—alien creatures with huge compartmentalized eyes—but it's quite another to know what they do.

But there is no library in Paisley.

I did get stung once, right on the tip of my right thumb, which hurt like the dickens and made my thumb swell up to twice its normal size.

"You're obviously allergic to bee stings, Spencer," my mother said, wrapping my thumb in a cool compress and giving me an antihistamine to ease the pain. "I don't want you playing with them anymore."

"I wasn't playing," I explained.

A WEEK ISN'T LONG
to wait for something. Not even for Christmas. Two weeks, however, is a different story. Two weeks is a long way away. In the olden days, they called two weeks a fortnight, a word that suggests that somehow you have to get past the well-guarded fort to arrive at the night you've been dreaming of.

A fortnight.

If you were to order something and had to wait a fortnight, chances are you would soon stop thinking about it and begin fretting over something else. Consequently, when at last it showed up it would be a surprise.

"Oh!" you would say. "Look what came today!"

As if you had had nothing to do with it.

Like a dog burying a bone so later he can "discover" it.

"Hey," he says to himself. "What luck!"

Green pumpkins the size of baseballs had formed in the shadows beneath the vines when my pictures finally arrived from Sparkle Snapshot in St. Louis.

I had forgotten about the wasp portrait. My, but he was an evil-looking fellow. A poison dart with a grudge is what he was—a wriggling, saber-shaped creature with a stinger at the end of his abdomen that could puncture your skin more efficiently than a med tech's hypodermic needle.

I placed that snapshot aside, expecting next to see perhaps the eyeball of a honeybee. Instead, I found myself staring into the face of my father.

You could have knocked me over with dog dander!

I knew it had to be him, even though I'd never met him. I'd seen pictures my mother had kept, and besides, he was wearing the peach-colored Columbus Catfish baseball cap that I had on my head right now. Moreover, he kind of looked like me, or, more accurately, I was beginning to look like him.

There were two snapshots of him in the pack of twenty-four nature portraits, each quite similar, as if taken only seconds apart. He was smiling, but self-consciously so, perhaps uncomfortable with having his picture taken, or possibly, I speculated, uncomfortable in the presence of bees.

I wouldn't blame him. My thumb bears a scar from the attack I endured. It's a fine line less than half an inch long that cuts right through my fingerprint. It's strange to think that a bee can alter your fingerprint for all time.