At the Jim Bridger: Stories by Ron Carlson Page B

I’ve never seen it since. I heard him hiss: “Do something. Hide.”
    Again I saw myself arriving in the photograph. Now I was alone. I landed carefully and the entire venture was full of care, as if I didn’t want to wake something. I had a case of instruments and I wanted to know about that light, thatshadow. I could feel my legs burn as I climbed toward it step by step.
    What I did in the room was take two steps back into the corner and stand behind the lamp. I put my hands at my side and my chin up. I stood still. At that moment we heard a key in the lock and daylight spilled across the ratty shag carpet. Mr. Shinetower came in. He was wearing the red-and-black plaid shirt that he wore every day. It was like a living thing; someday it would go to lunch at Alfredo’s without him.
    He walked by me and stopped for a moment in front of the television to drop a handful of change from his pocket into a mason jar on top, turn on the television until it lit and focused, and then he continued into the little green bathroom, and I saw the door swing halfway closed behind him.
    Jeff slid out from the bed, stood hastily, his eyes whirling, and opened the door and went out. He was closing it behind him when I caught the edge and followed him into the spinning daylight. When I pulled the door, he gasped, so I shut it and we heard it register closed, and then we slipped quickly through the arbor to the alley behind the units and then ran along the overgrown trail back to the bayou and sat on the weedy slope. Jeff was covered with clots of dust and hairy white goo-gah. It was thick in his hair and I moved away from him while he swatted at it for a while. Here we could smell the sewer working at the bayou, an odd, rich industrial silage, and the sky was gray, but too bright to look at, and I went back to the other world for a moment, the cool perfect place I’d been touring in Mr. Shinetower’s magazine, quiet and still, and offering that light. Jeff was spitting and pulling feathers of dust from his collar and sleeves. I wanted so much to be stirred by what I had seen; I had stared at it and I wanted it to stir me, and it had done something. I felt something. I wanted to see that terrain, chart it, understand where the blue glow arose and how it lay along the juncture, and how that light, Iwas certain, interfered with the ordinary passage of time. Time? I had a faint headache.
    “That was close,” Jeff said finally. He was still cloaked with flotsam from under Mr. Shinetower’s bed. “But it was worth it. Did you get a good look? See what I’m talking about?”
    “It was a remarkable photograph,” I said.
    “Now you know. You’ve seen it, you know. I’ve got to get back to work. Let’s go fishing this weekend, eh?” He rose and, still whacking soot and ashes and wicked whatevers from his person, ran off toward Alfredo’s.
    “I’ve seen it,” I said, and I sat there as the sadness bled through me. Duncan would have appreciated the moment and corrected Jeff the way he corrected me all those years. “Seeing isn’t knowing,” he would say. “To see something is only to establish the first terms of your misunderstanding.” That I remembered him at such a time above the rife bayou moments after my flight over the naked photograph made me sad. I was not a genius, but I would be advised by one forevermore.
    Happily, my work at the motel was straightforward and I enjoyed it very much. I could do most of it with my shirt off, cutting away the tenacious vines from behind each of the rooms so that the air-conditioning units would not get strangled, and I sweated profusely in the sweet humid air. I painted the pool fence and enameled the three metal tables a kind of turquoise blue, a fifties turquoise that has become tony again just this year, a color that calls to the passerby: Holiday! We’re on holiday!
    Once a week I poured a pernicious quantity of lime into the two manholes above the storm sewer, and it fell like snow