Tag

Encounter

His eyes were dark and fast. His lashes were long and graceful. He had the dark hair of his race: la raza. His arms were wire and his hands tight. Nine years old and he crouched in the tree like a beast.

He could hear the sound of his name calling through the park, and occasionally he caught a glimpse of the frantic searchers as they dashed about the bushes and ponds and turning lanes, shouting his name as they ran.

"Paul. Paul. Come back, Paul. You can have cake and Kool-Aid, Paul. Where are you?"

He knew the words. He knew them well. He was Paul, and sometimes it was a good name as in "Paul, you got it right, you're a good boy, Paul!" And sometimes it was harsh like "Paul! Don't pinch. Sit down. Sit down, Paul! Don't pinch!" And cake was sweet and sticky between the fingers and on the face and forehead and all along the tracks of his ever-stretching hands. And he knew the sound of a love-spoken voice and the feel of love-burnt tears smashed tightly against the tenseness of his face.

But better than all of these things--even better than he knew the nervous Kool-Aid that would leap in splashes from the brittle picnic cups and spill cool into his throat--better than the sad, long looks of his mother, better than all of these things he knew the good feel of the tree.

The tree with its rough smudging bark against his now bare feet. The moving, swaying, gentle tree that drew him higher and higher. The solid roughness of the tree against his enwrapping arms. The tree to which he clung high above the calling park.

He hung tightly to the trunk and limbs like a koala.

Ed Morris had been a photographer for too many years. He would think back over the eons to his youth and laugh a quiet, cynically embarrassed laugh in little air whiffs through his nose when he recalled the idealism of a young man with a camera and a world full of shape and balance and texture. He would think of what a fool he had been and about how abruptly it had been necessary for him to learn where a man could make a living with film. He had learned about economics early into the first baby, and, by the time he was well into the second, he had almost eliminated the surges of regret and remorse at the thought of his aborted dreams.

His sign read:

The Morris Studio
Family Portraits
Weddings

* * * *

When a child is lost and the streets are busy with terrible cars and trucks and buses, a mother feels terror and darts about frantically sobbing at her imagined discoveries. She asks them all, "Have you seen him? He was wearing a red shirt. Have you seen my little boy?" But not Mrs. Diaz. Her eyes were dull; her actions sluggish. They had called her to come to the park with words she knew would always come. "Paul has run away. We can't find him. We're sorry." He always ran away. Even in his empty bedroom with the door closed and locked, he ran away with his hands slapping and scratching at the panelled walls and with his screams muffled within his tightly closed lips.

At the special school they told her, "Paul is doing so much better this year. He understands us when we speak. Sometimes he obeys." And she had thought, "Yes, he runs faster, he climbs quicker, he is harder to catch now."

Mrs. Diaz had been a lovely woman. Her rare smiles were flashes from a distant and hazy, but magnificent sensuality.

The contours of her body were veiled and dulled by a thickness. She was a woman of tragically hopeless beauty. She had become numb and unmoving and impassive as if the contours of her mind were also dulled by a thickness.

And from limb to limb he could crawl--the little boy with dark hair and the stains of a picnic upon his tight face. He never smiled.

* * * *

"You kids had better smile today when the man takes the picture. This is costing me a damn fortune."

(Family Portraits)

Sometimes it is a woman's way to win an argument by gradually eroding the resistance of her adversary. This had been the case with Mrs. Murphy and the family portrait. It had taken her over a year to bitch and jab and maneuver her husband into agreeing to hire Mr. Morris to take one of his very expensive family portraits and she was quite proud of herself in winning the long battle.

"Hurry, children," she said, "Mr. Morris is a busy man and can only spare us a few minutes."

"All that money for a few damn minutes," muttered Mr. Murphy as he straightened his wide tie and searched out the reflection of his large, heavy face for correctable flaws.

The children were in their best clothes. Clothes that were purchased by Mrs. Murphy for very special and very uncomfortable occasions.

"Don't complain, Harold," she told her husband. "Mr. Morris is a famous photographer in this town--and so creative. We were lucky to get him at all and much less at such a reasonable price." She was wallowing in her victory and he knew it and, also, he knew there was nothing he could do about it at that point. He had lost. He had to shut up.

The two little boys were dressed in sport coats and wore little bow ties and little vests. Mr. Murphy had a huge vest that perfectly matched his straining suit. The little girl wore a pink dress that scratched and ruffled around her small legs.

The children stood stiffly by the car in their fine clothes with Mrs. Murphy and her rare pearls while Mr. Murphy gruffly locked the front door and then reluctantly shuffled toward them.

If a neighbor had been watching, she would have sworn the Murphys were going to a funeral.

* * * *

The once beautiful, now tired Mrs. Diaz wandered slowly and quietly around the large park as the frenzied searchers ran and cried out for her son.

"I'm so sorry," the teacher had told her. "We had finished with the food and were all sitting in a circle singing songs, and Paul just disappeared. Usually someone stays with him, but--it couldn't have been more than a minute--my aide left him to laugh at the songs with the rest of us, and he was gone. I'm sorry."

Mrs. Diaz had assured the teacher and the aide it couldn't be helped and that Paul had been running away for as long as he had been able to run.

And she watched the other children in a close bunch by the picnic table. They were misfits by the standards of the world. They were retarded, crippled, twisted little children clumped together in a minute corner of a huge green park. She watched the little crippled girl with sparkling eyes laugh at the tickling of the small boy with no hair or real words and she thought how fortunate their mothers were to have such perfect children.

Paul was a thin, tense muscle who spoke to no one and looked at no one.

* * * *

"What a fine looking family you are!"

"Thank you, Mr. Murphy. You're so kind."

They were on the sidewalk in front of the Morris Studio. He had met them there to suggest a highly creative alternative to the standard studio portrait.

"Why don't we all walk a few blocks to the park and take the photos there. It's so much more natural that way. I know a huge, old tree that will make a marvelous background for your photograph." And for the twentieth time that spring Ed Morris marched a family troupe down to the park he used for a stage and toward the tree he used as a prop.

Mr. Murphy had a great jolly mustache which clashed bitterly with his hard, cruel eyes. Mrs. Murphy had a double chin that lapped beneath her sarcastic lips. The boys were mean and had flat noses, and the precious little girl had teeth that were much too large for her thin, little mouth.

"There's the tree over there," said Mr. Morris. "Isn't it a fine old tree?"
"What a lovely tree," said Mrs. Murphy.

* * * *

And high above with a nerve-thin body paced Paul between the forked limbs.

* * * *

"Here we go. Let's see. You stand in the middle, Mr. Murphy, with Mrs. Murphy beside you. Children you can be in front here. Let's put this pretty little girl in the middle. There that's good--right in front of this fine old tree. This won't take long at all. That's right, Mr. Murphy, Mrs. Murphy. Close it up a bit."

With the camera set, Ed Morris looked through the square view-finder at the inverted image of five, forced smiles. Mr. Murphy's great, wide, bitter smile; Mrs. Murphy's smile of feigned adoration and warmth; the boys' demonic little crooked smiles; and the little girl's teeth. He saw them all huddled together there at the foot of the great, natural tree with their smiles and their ties, and their starched ruffles and perfect pearls.

* * * *

"There he is! There he is!" shouted a searcher. "There. I can see his red shirt high up in that old tree. Mrs. Diaz, we have found Paul!"

And Mrs. Diaz could see her boy, and she walked slowly toward the massive, old tree with no sound and no expression on her face.

"Mommy, there's a boy in the tree."

"Shut up," snapped Mr. Murphy. "Let's get this over with."

"That's it. That's it," sang Mr. Morris. "Everyone smile."