The Tin Can Tree (3 page)

“It’s coming along,” Ansel said. He was swathed in a big checked dishtowel, wrapped right over his suit jacket and safety-pinned at the back, and on the counter stood the almost finished pizza that Simon was decorating. The kitchen was rippling with heat. James took his shirt off and laid it on the counter, so that he was in just his undershirt, and he opened the back door.

“Aren’t you hot?” he asked Simon.

But Simon said, “No,” and went on laying wiener slices down. On the floor at his feet were little sprinklings of flour and Parmesan, and the front of his suit was practically another pizza in itself, but the important thing was keeping him busy. It was too bad the pizza-making couldn’t go on for another hour or so, just for that reason; they would have to find something else for him to do.

Ansel said, “Now the olives, Simon.”

“I don’t think I like olives.”

“Sure you do. Olives are good for the brain. Will you look at your shirt?”

Simon looked down at his shirt and then shrugged.

“It’ll wash,” he said.

“Your mama’ll have a fit.”

“Ah, she won’t care.”

“I bet she will.”

“She won’t care.”

“
Any
mother would care about
that,
” said Ansel. “Makes quite a picture.”

“Pictures,” James said suddenly. He straightened up. “Hey, Simon. You seen my last photographs?”

“No,” said Simon. “You get another customer?”

“Not in the last few days, no. But I took a bunch on my own a while ago. When you’re done I’ll show you.”

“Okay,” said Simon.

“Olives,” Ansel reminded him.

James went over to the back window and looked out. There was the Pikes’ Nellie, burrowing her way through a tangle of wild daisies and bachelor’s buttons. He had been planning to pick Joan a bunch of those daisies, before all this happened. They were her favorite flowers. Now he couldn’t; the house would be stuffed with hothouse funeral flowers. And anyway, he couldn’t just walk in there with a bunch of daisies in his hand and risk disturbing the Pikes. The daisies would have grown old there, waving in the sunshine on their long green stems, before he could go back to doing things like that again.

The pizza was in the oven. Ansel slammed the door on it and wiped his hands and said, “
There
, now.”

“How much longer?” Simon asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Fifteen-twenty minutes. We’ll go out where it’s cool and wait on it. You coming, James?”

James followed them out to the living room. It seemed very dark and cool here now. Ansel settled
down on his couch with a long contented groan, and Simon went over to Ansel’s window and stood watching the road.

“Anybody seen those people?” he asked James.

“What people?”

“My mama and them. Anybody seen them?”

“No, not yet.”

“Well, anyway,” said Simon, “I reckon I’ll just run on over and have a look, see if maybe they haven’t—”

“I think we’d have seen them if they’d come,” said James. “Or heard them, one.”

“
Still
and all, I guess I’ll just—”

“You two,” Ansel said. “Do you have to stand over me like that?” He was lying full length now, with his head propped against one of the sofa arms. “Kind of overwhelming,” he said, and James moved Simon gently away by one shoulder.

“I almost forgot,” he said. “You want to see my pictures?”

“Oh, well I—”

“They’re good ones.”

“Well.”

James went down the little hallway to his darkroom. There was a damp and musky smell there, and only the dimmest light. He headed for the filing cabinet in the corner, where he kept his pictures, and opened the bottom drawer. The latest ones were at the front, laid away carefully (taking pictures for fun wasn’t something he could afford very often), and when he pulled them out he handled them gently, examining the first two alone for a minute before he returned to the living room.

“Here you go,” he said to Simon. “Your hands clean?”

“Yes.”

His hands were covered with tomato sauce, but he held the pictures by the rims so James didn’t say anything. The first picture didn’t impress Simon. He studied it only a minute and then sniffed. “One of those,” he said. James grinned and handed him the next one. Neither Simon nor Janie Rose had ever liked anything but straight, posed portraits—preferably of someone they could recognize, which always made them giggle. But when James wasn’t taking wedding pictures, or photographs for the Larksville newspaper, he turned away from portraits altogether. He had the idea of photographing everyone he knew in the way his mind pictured them when they weren’t around. And the way people stuck in his memory was odd—they were doing something without looking at him, usually, wheeling a wheelbarrow up a hill or hunting under the dining-room table for a spool of thread. Old girlfriends of his used to object to being photographed in their most faded blue jeans, the way he remembered them from some picnic. But almost always he won out in the end; the pictures of people in his mind and in his filing cabinet were nearly identical. Joan he imagined in a dust storm, the way he had first seen her (she had come down the road with two suitcases and a drawstring handbag, spitting dust out of her mouth and turning her face sideways to the wind as she walked). For a long time now he had waited for another dust storm, and last week one had come. That was in those first two pictures, the ones that Simon had barely glanced at. Even when James said, “That’s your cousin Joan, if you don’t know,” thinking to make Simon look twice, Simon only raised his eyebrows. It was the third picture he liked. In that one Ansel was lying on his couch, looking up at the sky through the window and absently playing with the cord
of the shade. “Ansel!” Simon said, and Ansel turned his head and looked at him.

“What now?” he asked.

“I just seen your picture here.”

“
Oh
, yes,” Ansel said.

“Of you on your couch and all.”

“Oh, yes. Here, let me look.” He raised himself up on one elbow, reaching out toward the picture, and Simon brought it over to him. “That’s me, all right,” said Ansel. He studied it for a while, smiling. “It’s not bad,” he said.

“I think it’s a right good picture.”

“Yep. Not bad at all.” He handed the picture back and lay down again, staring up at the ceiling and still smiling. “They’re wonderful things, pictures,” he said.

“Well, some of them.”

“Very
remaining
things, you know?”

“I don’t like them other kind, though,” Simon said. “Dust clouds and all. I can’t see what
they’re
for.”

“They’re for me,” said James. “Here, I got another one of Ansel.”

“James,” Ansel said, “do your legs ever get to feeling kind of numb? Kind of achey-numb?”

“Prop them up.”

“Propping
up
won’t do it.”

“It’s what you get for not having your shots,” James said.

“Oh, well. Right behind the knee, it is.” He propped his legs against the back of the couch and slid farther down, so that his feet were the highest part of him. “This couch is too short,” he said. “Here, Simon. Hand me the next one.”

The next picture had Ansel sitting up, looking self-conscious. When Ansel saw it he smiled his dippy little
smile again and brought the picture closer to examine it. “This is one I posed myself,” he said. “Had James take it like I wanted. James, I believe it’s my
shoes
aggravating that feeling.”

James set the rest of the pictures beside Simon and reached over to untie Ansel’s shoes. “If you’d get the right
size,
” he said.

“No, it’s to do with my illness. I can tell.”

“It’s on Wednesdays you get your shots,” said James. “This is Saturday. That’s five times you missed.”

“Lot you care. Listen—” He twisted around, so that he was facing Simon. “What was I talking about? The picture. That’s right. I was about to say, in my estimation this picture is the best of the lot. The one of me sitting up.” He tilted the picture toward the light. “Heroic, like,” he said. “Profile to the window and all.”

“The other one’s better,” said Simon.

“What other one?”

“The first one. You lying down.”

“That’s because you’re used to me lying down,” Ansel said. He sighed and tossed the picture onto the coffee table. “Everyone’s used to it. When I stand up they hardly recognize me. Faces change, standing up. Become more bottom-heavy. Pass me the next one.”

“I think the pizza must be done,” said James. “Hey, Ansel?”

“Well, take it out. This one of Mr. Abbott—I’d be insulted if I was him. Troweling up the garden plot with his back to the camera and his rear end sticking out.”

James got up and went to the kitchen. The pizza-smell filled the whole room, and when he opened the oven he thought it looked done. From a hook on the wall he took a pot-holder and then hauled the pizza out and set it on the counter, burning one finger on the way.
“Ansel!” he called. He came to the living room doorway. Ansel was just bending over a picture, rocking slightly back and forth and frowning at it, and Simon was sorting through the rest of them. “Ansel,” James repeated.

“This one here,” said Ansel, “ought not to’ve been included.”

“Which one?” Simon asked.

“I’m ashamed of James. You ought not to see it.”

“Well, I just
saw
it,” said Simon. “What’s the matter with it?”

“Nothing’s the matter. I’ll just set it aside.”

He pulled himself up and laid the picture face down on the back of the couch, looking over his shoulder to make sure Simon hadn’t seen. “Shamed of James,” he said.

“Well, for heaven’s sake,” James said from the doorway. “What’s all that about, Ansel?”

“It ought never to’ve been included, that picture.”

James crossed the living room and picked up the picture. It was a perfectly ordinary one—he’d done it as a favor for Miss Faye, who wanted her screened back porch photographed now that her nephew had spent half the summer building it. She had led James way behind the house, deep into the wild grass that grew there among scattered piles of rusted stoves and old car parts, and she directed him to photograph the whole long house so that her people in Georgia could get an idea how the porch was proportioned. “I think this is too
far
, ma’am,” James told her, but she insisted and this was what had come of it—a wild, weedy-looking picture, with the house rising above a wave of grass like a huge seagoing barge. Miss Faye’s porch was only a little bump sticking out along with a lot of other bumps—Janie
Rose Pike’s tacked-on back bedroom, the woodshed under James and Ansel’s bathroom window, and the rusted old fuel barrel on its stilt legs beside the middle chimney. He hadn’t shown the picture to Miss Faye yet, for fear of disappointing her. But it wasn’t all
that
bad; he couldn’t see what was upsetting Ansel.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“Well, never you mind. Just give it back.”

“What you trying to pull, Ansel?”

“Will you give it back?”

James handed it across, but before Ansel’s fingers had quite touched it Simon reached out and took it away. He swung away from the couch, avoiding Ansel’s long arm, and wandered out into the middle of the room with his eyes fixed frowningly on the picture. Ansel groaned.

“You see what you done,” he told James.

“Ansel, I don’t know why—”

“Then
listen,
” Ansel said. He leaned forward, talking in a whisper now. “James, someone
departed
is in that picture—”

“Where?” Simon asked.

“Oh, Lord.”

“Well, I don’t see.”

“Me neither,” said James. “What’re you up to, Ansel?”

Ansel stood up, supporting himself with both hands on the arm of the couch. When he walked over to Simon he walked like a man wading, sliding his stocking feet across the floor. He poked his finger at one corner of the picture, said “There,” and then waded back again. “I’m going to lie down,” he said to no one in particular.

“Ah, yes,” said James. “I see.”

“I don’t,” Simon said.

“Right here she is.”

He pointed. His forefinger was just touching the Model A Ford that stood behind the house, resting on cinder-blocks that were hidden by the tall waving grass. All that could really be seen of the Ford was its glass-less windows and its sunken roof—it had been submerged in that sea of grass a long time—and in the front window on the driver’s side, no bigger than a little white button, was Janie Rose’s moon-round face. She was too far away to have any expression, or even to have her spectacles show, but they could see the high tilt of her head as she eyed James and the two white dots of her hands on the steering wheel. She was pretending to be some haughty lady driving past. Yet when James drew back from the picture he lost her again immediately; she could have been one of the little patches of Queen Anne’s lace that dotted the field. “I don’t see how you found her,” he told Ansel.

“No trouble.”

Simon stared at the picture a while and then tilted it, moving Janie Rose out of his focus. “She just blurs right in again,” he said. “She comes and goes. Like those pictures in little kids’ magazines, where you try and find the pig in the tree.”

“The
what?
” Ansel said. He raised his head and looked at Simon, open-mouthed.

“But it’s here, sure enough,” said James. “Isn’t that something? I never saw her. Not even when I was enlarging it, and I looked it over right closely then.”

“It’s funny,” Simon said.

“You hungry, Simon?”

“I guess.” But he went on staring at the picture. He seemed not so much to be looking at Janie Rose as turning the whole thing over in his mind now, holding
the picture absently in front of him. With his free hand he was pulling at a cowlick over his forehead.

“When our mother died,” Ansel said suddenly, “I was beside myself.”

Simon looked over at him.

“I couldn’t think about her. I couldn’t think her name. Yet people are different these days. I see that.”

“Oh, well,” Simon said. He returned to his picture. “James, is there such a thing as X-ray cameras? Could you take a picture of our house, like, and have the people show up from inside?”