STRATTON HAD Rain drive the CR-V the first couple of weeks of school while he put the used Bronco through its paces. It had been a good buy and he’d immediately handed the cash across the hood to the old man who seemed bereaved at the sudden loss of the vehicle. A good sign, he’d decided.
“You make sure this young lady takes care of this,” the old man had told him, unable to part without a note of reprimand.
Stratton’s last class the next day ran late despite his trying to shave off a few minutes to get on the road before traffic got bad. He had a student who was worried about a grade. Said he’d tried his best and wanted to know if there was anything he could do to bump up his average through some extra credit. He was a Marine Corps vet, an older man who had insisted on being called his service nickname of “Monster,” though Stratton had steadily refused, referring to him by his Christian name of Harold instead. It had caused tension throughout the semester.
“I’m just not getting it,” Monster told him, tugged at the bill of his trucker’s hat with its eagle, globe, and anchor insignia. It seemed that he had no other clothes than those which advertised his military history.
“I need you to be more specific than that.”
“I can’t be!” Monster said, swung his camouflage backpack out to his side like it was the object of his frustration. “I just try to sit down and read the text, but it doesn’t stick. Can’t you do something?”
He felt bad for the man. He could see that he did try, that he probably spent hours poring over the terms, trying to mash the reading inside his head the same way he packed a rucksack. Pushing hard against every shape of information until it slid into place.
“Here, let me see that test.”
He went through the sheet, noted where the answers had been left blank. He wrote in a few page numbers in the text where the answers could be found.
“Take a look at my markings. You get back to me with some corrections by the beginning of next class, and we’ll see what we can do, okay?”
“Okay, professor. Thank you.”
“Don’t worry about it. Beginning of next class, okay?”
“Yessir,” Monster said, marched out.
Once he was able to get clear of the building he drove over to I-81 and opened the truck up, let the speedometer nudge and hover at eighty before he felt the slight tremor of strain coming up from the chassis. He eased it back to seventy-five to keep even with southbound traffic. A good performance for a twenty-year-old truck. Older even than the driver it was meant for.
He took it into Newport for a tune-up, handed the keys over and sat in the air-conditioned waiting room with its racks of Field and Stream and Outdoor Life, scorched coffee with powdered creamer, Dr. Phil on the TV. He tried reading the magazines but the volume was too loud. He couldn’t get all that nasal pop psychology out of his head; he told the mechanic he was going to take a walk around the corner to the diner and to call his cell phone when the truck was ready.
The restaurant was a white clapboard building set just off the road called The Lunch House. A meat and three with a reputation for spicy fried chicken that wasn’t to be refused if on special. Stratton thought he’d chance it, get a coffee and slice of coconut pie if nothing else. At the very least the place should provide the comfort of shade and quiet.
It was still early for supper so most of the counter was just short of empty. Save one seat. As soon as Stratton recognized who it was he nearly backed out.
“Now if it ain’t the wayfaring stranger,” Buck Wiley crowed as he swung around on his stool. “I’ve been worried that you’ve gone on and quit me.”
“Hey, Buck.”
No way to avoid him. He sat one stool over, pulled a plastic menu from the clamps of a condiment stand. Ordered coffee only. No reason to prolong bad company more than he needed to.
“You haven’t gone teetotaler on me, I hope?” Wiley asked.
“No, I’ve just been busy. School’s started back up, so I don’t have the time I did.”
Wiley sawed a piece of meatloaf with a butter knife, popped it in his mouth. He had a way of eating that made it seem like he was getting back at the food. Like it had wronged him somewhere along the line and had to pay.
“That’s right. I forget you actually have to work part of the year. That’s a hard row, sounds like.”
Stratton had nothing to say to that.
“So I’ve been hearing a few things about you.”
“Something tells me you’re anxious to share.”
Wiley smiled, motioned for a refill of his iced tea.
“Sugar, can you get me some more lemon too? Doctor told me I need to get extra citrus in my diet.”
“Sure thing, Buck,” the waitress said, went away to fetch what he’d asked for.
“You having issues with scurvy?” Stratton asked.
“What’s that? Oh, the lemon. I get it. That’s clever. That must be why you get to call yourself professor. Quite clever. But seriously, what is that I’ve heard about you having some young girl living at the house out there with you? If I didn’t know you to be a distinguished citizen of Cocke County I’m afraid I’d have to arrive at a number of indecent conclusions.”
Stratton picked up his coffee, sipped, briefly considered spitting it in Wiley’s eye before he swallowed.
“You must be talking about my niece, Rain. My sister’s kid.”
“Sister, huh?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Families. Most people have them.”
“I’ve heard that. Damndest thing, ain’t it?”
Stratton lifted his hand to get the waitress to bring him the check.
“Going so soon? You just sat down.”
“Yeah, I’ve got to get the car from the mechanic. Plus, something’s made my stomach go bad.”
“I hate to hear that. I hope it’s not too serious.”
“The car or the stomach?”
Wiley grinned, made that expression that reminded Stratton so well of a close-range target. “Either one,” he said. “Or both. Hope you don’t ail too bad. We miss you down at the bar. Customers like you help me keep the lights on.”
He paid and left, walked back and stood in the full sun until the Bronco was ready. The mechanic came around and told him it was good for another ten thousand miles. Stratton paid him with his debit card, took the receipt, folded it once and put it in the glove box. On the way home he stopped at the convenience store for a six pack of beer and a sleeve of beef jerky, passed a trio of men at an overpass waving Confederate battle flags. A little towheaded boy standing with them had a sign that said OBAMA, THE GREAT RENEGER. Stratton rolled down the window, gave them the finger and drove on.
He sat down on the porch steps and cracked open one of the beer cans and began to drink and eat the jerky. It was a pleasant kind of day, the first forecast of cool air coming in with the hard September sky. A good time of year when the heavy yield of late summer began to thin, to go to earth. The seasons didn’t bother with what men made of their time. For that, at least, he was grateful.
EASTERDAY CAME out to gather Liza’s photographs that weekend. He crunched up the drive in a pickup pulling a rented U-Haul trailer, turned around in the dirt flat and backed close to the front steps. Rain had gone off with some friends from school so it was only the two of them who were there to load. Stratton met him on the porch with a cup of coffee, then they walked up into the emptiness of the trailer’s storage. They talked a while before they finally went back into the house to pull out what he’d come to collect.
It was slow work. Stratton had wanted to leave everything on the walls for as long as he could. Easterday was in no rush either. Before he would take a picture down he would study it a long time and make a note of it in a small ledger then lower it into a packing box, pad it against damage.
“I didn’t think there would be so many,” Easterday said. “I’ve not seen a lot of these.”
“She didn’t show all of her work,” Stratton told him. “She held back. Said it was better for her career.”
Easterday nodded. They continued to take the pictures down. Morning was consumed by their work. By the middle of the day it had grown warm and clear. They took a simple lunch of turkey sandwiches and sat on the front steps in the sun. A period to gaze after the mounting wall of boxes pressed to the back of the trailer, to contemplate the arrangement of what was ready to be taken away.
“I’ve wondered something about her attitude toward her subjects,” he said after a time. “Many people think Liza was cruel to the people in her photos. That she deprived them of dignity. But I’ve never been able to decide. Did she hate what she was showing the viewer? Was she ridiculing it?”
Stratton turned the coffee cup on its saucer, thought it felt like a kind of last supper sitting here with this man talking about his dead wife. When the words dead wife hit him it was as though the individual letters had lost their symbolic authority, that they were only an arbitrary arrangement of shapes that could have easily spelled out tree or stone. He sipped the coffee once more.
“I don’t know what she thought,” he said after a time. “I hated some of her pictures. They came out of a place I couldn’t ever understand. You see how ugly she could make something. How is a man supposed to feel about that? Something that his wife creates.”
Easterday was silent. Stratton had noticed when they’d met that he wore a wedding band. Stratton wondered what kind of wife he had, how he may have lived in a marriage of contentment or despair.
“I think, Mister Bryant, that she was saying something very dear. And I think she would be grateful to you for making sure others can hear her.”
As Stratton walked him out to his vehicle, Easterday said that he would be regularly in contact with details about the installation and the premiere of the exhibit, likely sometime in late January or early February. He had to get the university publicity lined up, make sure the debut was as heralded as it merited. Stratton thanked him, shook his hand, and watched as he drove away. He stayed in the yard for a while, found ways to kill time for much of the afternoon in an effort to delay going back into the emptied house. When there was no way to avoid it he went in and gazed at the voided walls, at the spaces where people were supposed to be looking back at him. He lay his hand against the expressionless wall as though his hand might read what his eyes couldn’t. But it was just skin against paint—two illusions indifferent to one another.