Shooting the Moon (3 page)

My first day of work I'd shown up in a white blouse, a pair of pressed Bermuda shorts, and penny loafers, no socks. It wasn't the first time I'd been to the rec center, but it was the neatest I'd ever dressed for a visit. On gray winter Sunday afternoons, the Colonel, TJ, and I would play pool on the pockmarked, cigarette-scarred green tables, and I'd wear a sweatshirt and old jeans, happy to be shed of my church clothes for the day. The Colonel was an excellent pool player, and he was teaching me and TJ all his tricks. My mother did not like this one bit. She thought it was inappropriate for a girl my age, on the very edge of womanhood, to play pool and spend Sunday afternoons in a smoke-filled room alongside young soldiers who were not above using colorful language if the situation called for it.

The Colonel, on the other hand, thought any girl worth her salt should be able to shoot a game of eightball. So when he told me midsummer that if I didn't get over the fact that my two best friends
had moved away within two weeks of each other, both of their families reassigned overseas, and if I didn't quit moping around on the living-room couch eating Snickers bars and reading old comic books, he'd get me a job peeling tomatoes at the mess hall, I suggested that I could volunteer at the rec center instead. I told him it would give me the opportunity to serve soldiers, which I knew he'd like, since one of his favorite sayings was, “Service to others is the highest calling.”

I'd never been to the rec center on a weekday morning, and I'd been surprised when no crack of pool balls or ringing pinball machines greeted me my first day of work. The only sound in the whole place was the insect-whir of a ceiling fan and the soft flipping of pages. A soldier sat slouched behind the checkout desk, his face hidden behind a Superman comic book. When he looked up and saw me, he shoved the comic book into a drawer and came to attention.

“I'm the new volunteer,” I said, hoping the tone of my voice would let him know that comic book reading was fine by me, although I was not a DC
Comics fan myself, preferring the Marvel heroes as a general rule. “Are you the person I need to talk to?”

He reddened a little and stood. “Private Hollister, miss,” he said. “Private First Class Bucky Hollister. My CO told me what your name was, but now I don't rightly remember.”

I stuck out my hand. “Jamie Dexter. I'm very excited to be working here.”

Private Hollister looked at my hand as though I'd just offered him a live trout to do the tango with. His face got even redder, and so did his ears, which stuck out about a mile in either direction. He couldn't have been a day over nineteen.

“Well, if you want to know the truth,” he said, backing away a few steps, like he was going to do whatever it took to avoid shaking hands with me, “there's not a whole lot to do here in the mornings. Most guys don't show up until lunchtime.”

“Maybe you should serve doughnuts in the morning,” I said, an idea that appealed to me as soon as I came up with it. “People will show up early if there are doughnuts around.”

“I don't know about that, miss,” Private Hollister said. “I'd have to check with my CO.”

After we'd been playing cards together a week or so, Private Hollister admitted he never checked anything with his CO. “But if you're still looking for a project, I thought of something you could do,” he said to me after he'd written down the scores for our final hand in his notebook. “You know anything about developing film?”

“Not really,” I told him. “TJ's the photographer in our family. He took pictures for the school paper when it wasn't football season. He printed all the pictures himself.”

In fact, most of TJ's allowance and his tips from bagging groceries at the commissary went to film, camera equipment, and photography magazines. Most of my allowance went to Archie comics, Snickers bars, and overdue library book fines.

“You interested in learning something? Because I've got all these guys who come in here with questions about how to develop their film in the darkroom back there,” Private Hollister said, nodding toward the hallway that led to the rec center's arts
and crafts area. “Personally, I don't know a thing about it. Might be good if somebody who worked here did.”

“I'd rather play cards,” I told him. “I'm not really all that interested in photography.”

But then I got TJ's first package, and suddenly I was very interested.

TJ's first letter to me wasn't a letter at all. It was a roll of film.

The package was waiting on the front hall table when I got home from the rec center on a Friday afternoon. I rushed to tear it open, but my mother stepped in between me and the mail.

“Let's wait until your father gets home, honey,” she said, picking up the package and holding it out of reach. “TJ's first letter from Vietnam is a special occasion.”

I paced around the house for the rest of the afternoon, wanting so bad to get my hand on TJ's letter. TJ's package. Well, maybe not a big package.
Maybe it was more like a padded envelope. But something was in there. Something from the war. Every five minutes I'd call out to my mother, “The Colonel won't mind if we open it. He's not sentimental about things like letters.”

“Oh, you'd be surprised by how sentimental your father is. He's an old softy,” my mother would call back.

I harrumphed at that. The Colonel was as soft as a granite wall.

But I have to admit he seemed almost emotional when he saw TJ's package on the table. “Why don't we take a look at this thing,” he said, and I could tell he was as eager as I was to see what was inside. Normally the Colonel hardly even said hello when he walked in the door after work. He liked to go upstairs and change, first thing.

The three of us sat down on the living room couch, and the Colonel used his penknife to open the padded envelope. He shook it a bit, and a black film canister dropped out. The Colonel examined it, and handed it to me. There was a note attached. “‘Jamie: No facilities here,'” I read.
“‘Please develop and send contact sheets.'”

No signature. No message about where he was or what war was like. Just a roll of film. And what did he mean
Send contact sheets?
You didn't get contact sheets when the PX developed your film. All you got were pictures and negatives. One reason TJ said he learned to develop his own film is that he liked having all of his pictures printed on one sheet of paper, to see which ones were worth blowing up to eight by ten. Why hadn't he written
Please have developed at PX?
He knew I didn't have the faintest idea about how to develop film.

But I'd known TJ long enough to know this about him: When it came to photography, he did not make casual mistakes. If he'd wanted me to take it to the PX, he would have written,
Take it to the PX.
In fact, if he'd wanted it taken to the PX, he would have just mailed it to my mother.

But he hadn't. He'd sent my mother and the Colonel a boring letter about the flight over and mess-hall food. “‘Everything comes out of a tin can,'” the Colonel read. “‘Even the meat. Even the chocolate cream pie. One guy I know actually wrote his
mom asking her to send fresh tomatoes. I'd like to see that box when he opens it.'”

The Colonel and my mother laughed, like that was some great joke. Personally I couldn't care less that he'd made friends with a guy all the way from Alaska or that he'd seen a cockroach bigger than his fist on his first night in-country, information also included in the letter. What did that have to do with anything important?

He'd sent me the roll of film with the instructions to develop it. And the more I thought about it, the more I felt like that was fine by me. No one else was going to see TJ's war pictures before I saw them. Maybe I hadn't gotten a bona fide letter, but the pictures were my property.

“You know who can help me with this?” I asked Private Hollister the next day, showing him the film. “I mean, how do you even get the film out?”

“I told you, nobody around here really knows.” Private Hollister was wrapping tape around a Ping-Pong paddle handle as he spoke, cussing under his breath when he wrapped his fingers, too. Overall, the job appeared to be slow going. “I
mean, there are a few guys who come in and use the darkroom, but it's hard to say when they'll show up. This one guy? Brezinski? All he takes pictures of are tanks. And there's Sergeant Byrd, he comes in a lot in the afternoon. He's a strange dude, though.”

“What's so strange about him?”

“I heard he was at Khe Sanh with 1st Cav, and that it did something to him. I see him around, and once in a while he's friendly, but mostly he's just up in his own head. He goes off post with a camera by himself whenever he's off duty. You almost always see him with a camera.”

“What's Khe Sanh?” I asked, hopping up to take a seat on a pool table, a practice strictly forbidden when anyone was in the main room, but one that Private Hollister let me get away with if no one else was there.

“It's a Marine base, only Army units are there too. It's a real bad spot, way out in the boonies. They say you're lucky if you don't get shot just getting on or off the plane at the landing strip. That's happened to plenty of guys. Guys who were done
with their tours and heading out to go back to the States.”

“You think he'd teach me to develop film?”

Private Hollister peeled a strip of tape from his hand. “I guess so. He's strange, but he seems nice enough. Usually you see him here around three.”

I was waiting in the darkroom at two forty-five, clutching TJ's film cartridge in my hand. Butterflies whirred in my stomach as I imagined accidentally exposing the film to the light or dropping it into a sink of developing solution and not being able to get it out. I was dying to know what the war was like. TJ's letter to my parents hadn't said much at all, just that he was adjusting, that he liked the guys in his unit, that he hadn't had to work in a combat situation yet. There was nothing in it that let you taste the true flavor of war, smell the smoke of bombs, hear the helicopters as they took off from the middle of the jungle.

“I think you're asking a lot of TJ, Sport,” the Colonel said to me when I complained about his lackluster letter. “He's been over there two weeks. He hasn't had time to wipe his rear end yet, much
less write us a poem about the joys of Southeast Asia.”

“You think he likes it over there?” I asked. We were eating dinner, my mother's famous squash casserole, the Colonel's favorite, and I could tell I was wearing him thin with my comments and questions. The Colonel liked to be able to savor his food, especially when it came to cheesy casseroles covered with buttered breadcrumbs toasted to a golden brown.

“I think he probably hates it,” the Colonel replied, his fork halfway to his mouth, strings of cheese stretching to his plate. “I think he's probably thinking about this squash casserole right now and remembering how soft his pillow upstairs is.”

“I think you're wrong,” I said, and felt even more determined to learn how to develop TJ's film. Then the true story would come out, with TJ at the center of it, the hero of it all.

“Hollister said you were looking for me?”

The GI who entered the room most closely resembled a whooping crane, or at least what I
imagined a whooping crane to look like, tall and thin to the point of distraction, a pointy nose, the sort of person who didn't quite seem comfortable in his skin but might surprise you by being an amazing dancer.

“Are you Sgt. Byrd?”

“Ah-yup. In the flesh. The one and only. That's Byrd with a
Y,
by the way. I can't fly, but I won't crap on your windshield, either.”

Well, what are you supposed to say to that? I pointed to the name strip sewn over the pocket of his flak jacket. It read BYRD, T. “What's the
T
stand for?”

“Theophilus. Middle name of James. You can call me Ted, if you want to be informal about it. I'll call you ma'am, unless you have another moniker you'd prefer to be referred by.”

“Jamie's fine,” I told him. “You think you could teach me how to develop this roll of film?” I held it up. “My brother sent it to me from Vietnam.”

Sgt. Byrd eyed the film with interest. “Where's he at?”

“He's with the 51st Medical Company in Phu Bai,” I told him. “He's a medic.”

“Hard job. No gun, no glory. A lot of bullet-dodging. Medics are the true war heroes, if you want my opinion.”

That's when I decided I liked Sgt. Byrd.

He set down the camera bag he was carrying and motioned me to toss him the film cartridge. “Good film, medium speed, which is right for the kind of photography I bet he's doing,” he said, examining it. “And black-and-white, which makes our job a lot easier. Color processing is a headache. It's better just to send color film to a lab.”

He picked up a large white plastic spool from the counter. “You ever see one of these things? It's called a film reel. The hardest part of the job. You've got to get the film from the cartridge onto this baby, and you've got to do it blind.” He pointed to a door on the other side of the room. “You sit in that little closet over there and make it happen.”

“In the dark? What if I ruin the film before it's even developed?”

Sgt. Byrd reached into his bag and pulled out another film cartridge, which he handed to me.
“You can practice on this one. I'll shout directions to you through the door.”

“I don't want to ruin your film,” I protested.

“Ain't nothing but a thing, my young friend,” said Sgt. Byrd. “I'm all about the process. The end product is less important to me. You ruin some film, big deal. I'll take more pictures.”

I took the film, the film reel, a canister, and canister cover into the closet and closed the door. I was in complete darkness. “Okay, what do I do first?” I asked, fumbling around, trying to feel what was the reel, what was the canister, holding on to the film cartridge for dear life.