The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men (12 page)

He thinks they’ve come for the story. She thinks they’ve come for the girl.

So Emily tightens the legs of the tripod and checks depth of field while they wait for the families.

SAM

Sits on a gray boulder for most of the morning, inhaling one cigarette after another and pretending to study his notepad. White pages go fluttering in the wind like a magician’s dove. Every now and then he jots a question and stares at the next mountain as if searching for an answer. The boulder fits him like a throne, and it has a lichen-covered ledge that he can use as an armrest and a vague comfort that sends him musing. “So. You think they’ll actually bring the kid?”

Emily doesn’t rise out of her crouch or turn her head when she answers. “It’s her father. Of course they’ll bring her.”

“Great.”

“I doubt they trust us very much. Would you?”

“I doubt they ever saw the picture in the first place. They probably aren’t big newspaper readers up here. And besides—that was two years ago.”

“They saw it. Everybody in the country saw it. So how about bringing me that battery pack from the Jeep.”

“I should have been a lawyer,” Sam says.

“You should have been a reporter.” Emily takes a few more test shots with the Polaroid and listens for the crunch of tires on gravel.

“I’m just saying you can’t make a story out of an obit notice.”

“So leave. I’ll handle it.”

“I think maybe you don’t remember who we’re dealing with here.”

“Right. They take up serpents. It almost slipped my mind.”

“You’re not going to save her, Emily, and she’s not going to love you for trying.”

“I think maybe you’re right. Now how about hooking up that hose and giving me a fine spray over the front of the whole thing. Okay?”

EMILY

Loves the look he gives her; but this time he lumbers away, untangling the stiff hose and finally throwing up a wide fan of water. She wants a mist but even a torrent will do—an old photographer’s trick that seems to work, coalescing light around the window frames. She runs a roll through the Pentax and hopes for magic.

“They’re going to come crackling down that road any minute,” Sam yells. “And see what? Mrs. Greenburg’s son with his thumb over the end of a hose watering their church.”

Emily can’t tell if his hand is shaking or if it’s simply the way he sprays the water. She feels a warm current of air that has been rising
from the valley all morning, as if the mountain thinks it can take back summer. And there’s a faint scent of bread and apples from somewhere below. At last the sun drops low enough to transform the windows into dead eyes, the door into a gaping mouth, the steeple into a tall dunce cap. The wet paint turns a leaden white. It is what she has wanted most, the image of a clown face upon black velvet.

After she finishes shooting, Emily carries the tripod back to the Jeep and contemplates the almost invisible road that brought them to this place two years ago. It coils its wet way around the mountain and stretches back two years to when she and Dietz did their first story about the Holiness people. Since then she has not returned, which leaves her wondering if she will be remembered at all.

JARED

Tries to explain over lunch at his desk, egg salad dribbling over tomorrow’s news. “… couple of years ago. So I sent her up to the same little town to cover the trial. Seems one of the saints wanted to eliminate his wife using a copperhead, so you figure that’s got to be good for a feature story, right? Maybe a cover for the weekend magazine. Anyhow. I sent Emily and this kid named Dietz. Some hillbilly dumping ground up in the mountains. And I’ve got ’em camping out in a local motel, sending back dailies and taking in a few of the religious services. You know, the snake-handling stuff. Getting brotherly and sisterly with the families. Spending weekends with them at camp meeting or whatever the hell it is they do. Anyhow, developing trust. Next thing I hear, Emily’s cut herself, sliced the shit out of her arm on some broken glass. And then, get this, one of the grandmas takes her in. Bandages her up. Prays over her night and day—who the hell knows? Then, bam, the trial’s over. Just like that. The guy gets life, and we bang out a story from Dietz’s notes. I put Sam on the rewrite, and we go with it on a Sunday. A month later one of Emily’s pictures, the cover shot, gets nominated for a Pulitzer. Damnedest thing you ever saw in your life.”

SAM

Spends the early afternoon on the side of the church where the dropoff is steep, setting up equipment, loading film, helping her shoot from impossible angles. Stringing wire for the lights while she pokes around in the basement. Conspiring, he thinks. Framing some guy for a crime he doesn’t even know about yet. While all morning her eyes remain as empty as the space between stars. Where has she been, he wonders. Someone this beautiful, how can she hide?

And when they finally do arrive, the eight or ten silent families, they come like characters from a fairy tale, already ancient and unbelievable. Led by an old woman bent over her crooked cane. Followed by grave, silent children who hold hands. And two young mothers already pregnant beneath faded print dresses. Emily mingling easily among the women, Sam standing apart from the men, who appear to have been drawn in charcoal with brief, impulsive strokes. A tall teenager gives Emily a wiggle-fingered wave, and Sam wonders if she is the one. Tries to remember the picture of Marla Ann Creecy. Then tries adding two years.

The prelude is like any funeral, solemn and self-conscious—a touch to the shoulder, a whispered word or two as people file through the door; but the service itself opens with the first hint of guitar music and a sudden shout of praise. Emily takes his arm, and they fall into line behind an angular blond boy of maybe sixteen. At the threshold she slips her hand into his and draws him momentarily closer. “This,” she promises, “is going to be the most erotic experience of your life. Trust me.”

There is music already and singing, an “undeniable hypnotic appeal” that he will mention in the article. Maybe he will even call it the “little white church where they practice the only religion that’s illegal in America.” Toss in a few ironies, a few descriptive details. Three or four paragraphs if he ignores the extraneous stuff, like the stiff plastic bandages. Where Emily cut her fingers this morning. On the rocks by the basement door.

JARED

Gives Michael time to remember the picture, a close-up of a timber rattlesnake and the daughter of one of their preachers, Byron Creecy. Then he recalls for himself the girl, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, but not a day over that. “She’s beautiful,” he mutters. “Hair pulled back. Skin as smooth as cream. And got to be wearing her first touch of lipstick, which you notice immediately because of the natural contrast with the thing she’s holding in her hands. And I mean, they’re just about face to face. It’s sickening the first time you see it, but you keep turning back to it as you read the story, like you can’t believe the words without the help of the picture. So you look again, and she’s still lifting him up like this, like an offering or something. Bastard’s thicker than a man’s arm, and the skin is splitting, flaking off in places, I don’t know, maybe it’s the time of year for them to molt or something, but it looks like he’s being born right there in her hands. You can see the underbelly just emerging from the old skin, and it’s not white like you’d expect. It’s the color of melted gold. And the dead skin is like paper. But that’s not what haunts you. I mean, the snake, that’s not what stays with you when you close your eyes. It’s the girl. That’s what got this picture reprinted a million times. Her face. It’s tilted a little to the side and back, her own eyes closed like she’s in a trance, lips slightly parted, maybe praying. Emily told me they call it an Anointing, when the Holy Spirit descends on them and for a time they are invulnerable to poison or the sting of serpents or any mortal harm. Who the hell knows? I’m just telling you that’s not what it looks like to me. Not like praying. I mean, you and I could wait a lifetime and still not get that shot. I’m just telling you what I remember. Because what it looks like to me is a first kiss.”

BROTHER PAUL

Swings himself to his toes with each exclamation, arms pumping like pistons. As he says, “I know some people will say to you that Brother Byron must have been crazy, a sort of throwback to olden times. And
I do believe they were right. He was plumb Bible crazy and so sure in the Word that he gave himself up entire to the love of Jesus Christ with signs following. Because why? Because he understood this one plain spiritual fact: if there ain’t nothing dangerous about your religion, then you might as well join a country club. If you ain’t alive to the Spirit, then you might as well be dead to everything else. That’s what I’m saying. You got to risk something—I’m telling you here today—when you stand before Almighty God. You got to be like old Moses on the mount stepping into the devouring fire of His presence, amen, and kept alive by nothing but his grace. And just because you’re bathed in the Light don’t mean you’re going to live through it, my friend, I’ll tell you that much. Oh, yes, and I’ll tell you this too. I’d rather be snakebit than deaf to the Word a God.”

SAM

Studies the face and finds a visible longing that the preacher cannot articulate. Sees Brother Paul praying at the lectern, stumbling through his litany of sins confessed and blessings conferred without hint of order or, perhaps, even understanding that the words should make sense. The prayer becomes a kind of chant, and the face, Sam sees finally, has become the meaning behind the prayer. It is a face filled with fear and desperate longing. And it is what Emily has brought him to see.

Sam finally shuts out the chaotic sounds and studies the other faces around him, finding the same plea. On an old man with stick-thin arms, a farmer perhaps, worn down by rock-filled fields. On a young woman, heavily pregnant and sitting alone. And on all the others. The forgotten faces of middle children of large families, who would do anything to be loved, faces fearful of being left behind, desperate for attention, pleading past all reason, “Please God. Look at me.”

And after a time Byron Creecy is no longer a presence at his own funeral. There is simply a succession of readings, hymns, and reminiscences that, like the movements of a symphony, build to climaxes and
then fall away into interludes of soft meditation offered by the guitar and keyboard. It is like the ebb and flow of the ocean that most of them have never seen. And it is more than an hour after the last mention of Brother Byron’s name that the real moment arrives, a moment in the midst of a quiet hymn whose calm is broken by a shout.

The Spirit has descended upon a young man in the second pew, his body jerked into the aisle and made to shudder uncontrollably as a stream of babble pours from his mouth. Brother Paul makes room at the lectern, but the boy begins leaping like a man on a trampoline while several of the women start to clap and praise in their own tongues, reaching out from time to time like bathers about to step into a waterfall. The musicians increase the tempo as others stand and clap. The young mother hugging her belly and rocking as if soothing her just-born child. Sam looks over the whole room and gradually understands. That he and Emily are utterly alone. Wild music lifts them into the Anointing.

It’s then that Sam notices her, the girl from the picture. She is looking back, studying him from a calm distance. The innocent eyes and pouting lips of a child, but someone too who is much older than the image in his mind. She is Marla Ann Creecy, the girl who waved to Emily and the reason that they are here.

Her black knit dress is her only hint of mourning, and her own face is unreadable as she sways with the music, moving more like a practiced dancer than someone who has been seized by the Spirit. She watches Sam and Emily with open intensity, the way children examine strangers. And lets them watch her. Her sweater falls away, and she seems to leave the present with ease, surrendering to some rhythm older than the law of Moses.

She dances, and Sam watches with his story-mind and something more. Because her breasts are as full and round as a woman’s, and the dress follows her waist like a second skin, flowing over her hips and falling loosely to her knees. With her arms outstretched now and her face turned aside, she becomes in black and gold the renewed image
from the picture; and when the music dies, she sinks into a convenient pew, lifts her face to the rafters, and draws a lover’s deep sigh.

“We’ve got to talk to her,” Emily says. “When this is over, we’ve got to get to her. Alone.”

Sam blinks, and it is Emily, whose eyes are filled with fire.

JARED

Looks up at Michael, then back at his sandwich. After two more bites he makes a tight ball of tissue, dropping it into the Styrofoam cup, which, in turn, he drops into the trash. Running his tongue over his teeth and ruminating. “Marla Ann Creecy is a minor. And both her parents are dead, that’s true. But there’s not going to be another custody hearing because the laws of our great state have already provided that she live with her grandparents, who just happen to reside in another century.” Jared looks up again to see if this announcement has had any effect. “So why am I telling you what you might already know? Because Emily takes pictures, Michael. She makes things happen, you know what I mean? Dangerous things. I just thought you’d want to talk to her.” He waits, scratches an eyebrow. “Because we got a saying in this business. ‘Every story is two stories.’ You know what I mean?”

MICHAEL

Remembers a motel room as cold and filthy as the creek itself.

He and Emily are still twins, still so close that they don’t yet think of themselves as separate people. They are eight years old, and it is summer, and the sinuous water has worked its magic, tempting them away from the tepid motel pool, down to the long embankment, and into the writhing current beneath the trees. Where they play for hours. Building the dam, bathing in mud, and searching for treasure among piles of trash. Without one thought of danger. Until the sun sinks low enough to throw a shadow over neverland and they go running up the path, flecks of grass sticking to their ankles. Then grit from the parking lot. Then the hot exhaust of the air conditioner just as they reach the
door. And he remembers plunging into the room without thinking that there might be broken glass, rusty cans, twisted wire just beneath the surface of things. But it’s only Mother and the man sitting on the edge of the bed. And they are twins who’ve come dripping from the creek as it closes over them, the dark liquid cold of that particular afternoon.