The Spy's Little Zonbi (6 page)

“
Limp's our chief photographer and he'll show you the ropes. You'll go out with him for a week and then you're on your own. Work fast and keep people in focus. That's all I need, nothing fancy.” Mack motioned for the kid to come with him. “There's plenty of old gear to get you started.”

The kid followed Butterfish to a locked closet outside the darkroom as he pawed through his ring of keys. He wondered if this kid would survive a summer of Limp's nonsense. Before shoving the key into the lock, he took a good look at his new intern. You just never knew these days. When Mack had recruited spies, he looked for crew cuts and football player shoulders. This one looked like he was about to pick up a guitar and sing “Hey, Jude.” But he'd been wrong before. Maybe the kid would make the cut.

A
fat man in a thong became Chase's mentor.

Times
Chief photographer Limp Shockley went out of his way to make people uncomfortable. One of the descriptions circulating the newsroom was that Limp could make a rabid timber wolf feel awkward and slink off to the other side of the ponderosa until the coast was clear. Limp mostly sported striped seersucker slacks with vivid thong panties he flashed at inappropriate moments. His recent marriage to an eighty-five-year-old woman forty years his senior seemed to provide a treasure trove of new material. He was quick to show off honeymoon snapshots to anyone brave enough or too slow to get away—images of Speedos, thongs, and horribly wrinkled skin.

“
Lord have mercy, you're the spittin' image of that sixties boy-band leader.” It was the first thing he said to Chase. “My name's Limp, but it sure ain't floppy, you know what I mean?” Then came the pucker of lips and fast wink.

Chase sat in the passenger seat of Limp's beat-up Honda Accord. They both had old Nikon FE cameras with 24mm lenses in their laps. Limp said it was all any news photographer worth a damn needed. If something happened far away, you strolled in closer. If you were too close, then you stepped back. A motor drive was made for wasting film and creating more work in the darkroom.

“
One at a time,” Limp said. “You squeeze 'em off real slow, one at a time, just like ripe pimples.”

The odometer read 299,962 miles and Limp claimed to have a bottle of Cold Duck in the back hatch to celebrate the 300K mark.

As they cruised the shaded road along Salisbury City Park, he said, “I sure do like breaking in the new boys.”

Chase could hear the peacocks and other exotic birds echoing up from the small Salisbury Zoo, which took up most of the land adjacent and east of the city park. The zoo and park were sliced in half by Beaverdam Creek, where the slow-moving water was layered with feathers from black-necked swans, great blue herons, pigeons, bald eagles, and seagulls. Gulls were so ubiquitous that one had been named the mascot of the local college sports teams at Salisbury State. The maroon and gold were led onto the various sporting fields and courts by a trotting Sammy the Seagull.

As a gentle breeze spun the feathers on the muddy creek in slow circles, Limp pulled up to a spot in front of an ivy shrouded split-rail fence. The small parking area divided the city park from the zoo. Limp explained it was his old standby spot for easy feature pictures.

“
Just like a good fishin' hole when you were a tan and frisky ten-year-old boy. You knew right where to go when the mood struck you for some twelve-inchers.”

They sat and took in the view of the late-morning visitors coming and going from the park and zoo. Baby strollers, ten-speeds led by the handlebars, and dogs tugging on their leashes—all possibilities, Limp explained, but not interesting enough unless he was on a tight deadline and needed to fill space quickly.

“
I use a special rating system.” Limp sat back in the driver's seat and adjusted the camera in his lap. “Feature pictures run from one to three, like you were giving stars for a restaurant critique. One would be a kid throwing a Frisbee. Nothing more than some little honey pie with a nice expression. I'll get his name, age, and town, then write up a caption back at my desk. Mack might complain but run it anyway. If I get a shot of the kid being hit in his little angel face with the Frisbee, I might rate it a two—if you can still see his expression and all.”

“
So what makes a three?”

Limp paused to add something to the scene. “That's when the boy's dog is chasing the Frisbee and runs into him just as the disc bounces off his precious noggin'. If I captured the mid-air collision, eyes wide and scared, with the dog, boy and Frisbee in the frame, then bingo, that's definitely a three.”

Limp continued, “But if the boy gets hurt, then you might be screwed. A shot of a kid getting hurt is no good, although you might be back at square one with a news photo. A kid being loaded on a stretcher next to an ambulance is a one news photo. Now, if the kid dies from getting hit, then you may have a three, but they may not run the picture at all. This is a small town. Displaying pictures of dead children is frowned upon by local advertisers.”

“
So we have to come up with a front page feature photo every day?” Chase fiddled with the camera in his lap, still trying to grasp the f-stop versus shutter speed conundrum. “One per day and it may or may not get bumped to section two if there's spot news?”

But Limp had apparently decided he'd covered enough details. He closed his eyes and held an index finger to his lips for Chase to be quiet then adjusted the seat for a nap. Chase rolled down his window and felt the cool air trapped in this shady ravine. The air smelled like a circus, with hay and animals and something sweet like cotton candy. There were happy screams and gentle conversations as people milled about. The half dozen picnic tables just outside the zoo entrance were crammed with families.

Limp began to snore so, camera in hand, Chase carefully escaped the Accord and found a spot on a long log converted into a bench.

One little boy, maybe three years old, dropped and retrieved his popsicle, meticulously picking away bits of dirt and dry leaves. A couple lay tangled on a blanket in a narrow spot of sunshine. Using his belly as a pillow, she read a book, while he faced the passing clouds. An old man fed squirrels from a baggie, but they kept returning to empty peanut shells, apparently spoiled by other treats.

Chase figured Limp would rate these all a one as far as feature pictures went. Then he heard the sounds of some commotion—urgent voices—coming from the direction of the zoo entrance. Families from the picnic tables paused to look up. Chase was preparing to investigate the racket when he recognized laughter mixed in with the angry shouts. He held his ground when he realized the ruckus was coming toward him.

The laughter and screams came from fifteen or so children moving in an excited group. They half-surrounded an elderly zoo volunteer carrying a whisk broom, attempting to herd an uncooperative litter of pink piglets back to the enclosure they'd apparently escaped from.

The litter of ten moved in unison, with fish school precision. They brazenly rushed the frustrated woman, nipping at her boot toes, then wheeled about toward the children, who backed into one another with shrill screams. The wall of kids would re-form as the woman steered the litter with the broom, and the little pigs again found her boots interesting, possibly edible.

Chase crept toward the scene, set his exposure to automatic, and manually advanced to a new frame. He knelt ten feet from the woman, who was trying to brush the piglets in a new direction they didn't want to go. He squeezed off a frame, advanced, and took another. The woman's monogrammed zoo cap was askew, and she wielded the broom with no sense of menace. The background of these images was the smiling faces, the pointing fingers of the children. Chase took frame after frame, shifting to stay at a distance, kneeling for a better perspective. Then from back inside the zoo came a loud grunt and two high-pitched squeals, as the mother pig apparently had woken alone. The tiny herd immediately altered course and sped full throttle in retreat. The spectacle was over. All that was left was frozen, Chase hoped, among the millions of light-sensitive silver halide crystals that made up the film in his camera.

Chase caught up to the woman before she could disappear back into the zoo, and she was happy to give him her name and confirm she lived here in town. She'd been volunteering at the zoo since losing her husband to cancer in the summer of seventy-five. “You better have gotten my good side,” she said before marching back to work.

Chase's hands were shaking. He hadn't realized how much of a rush this could be. If Chase hadn't captured it, the little scene would never have been remembered, except perhaps by the woman and the children who had watched. Like grain prices and proposed parking meters, it would mean something to this community. He'd anticipated being nervous photographing strangers, but it wasn't like that. Even if you got as close as you needed to be with such a wide-angle lens, you were still hidden—both voyeur and intruder. Chase tucked away his small pencil and the thin reporter's notebook in his back pocket and settled on the log bench to savor the emotions before Limp woke.

***

“
Will I get a scanner?” Chase asked when they were back on the road.

“
Yeah, sure, you'll get your very own,” Limp said, and Chase noticed his was switched off.

“
Yours is off.”

“
It makes too much noise.”

“
But what if there's a fire?”

“
It's a small town, Sugar Pie. Anything happens, I'll find out.”

The slim Radio Shack police and fire scanner was a burden to Limp, who preferred cruising for photos of playing children and artsy images reflected in puddles and ponds. Spot news was an interruption of his day, although he did seem to love unnerving cops protecting their yellow police lines.

“
I bet you tie your wife up with this stuff,” Limp said to a bored cop during their first week of training, adding a lascivious wink. Their press passes allowed the photojournalists to duck under the bright yellow tape for shots at a garage fire. Limp took care to flash that day's pink whale-tail underpants as he bent under the fluttering barrier. The cop continued to look bored, nodding them in the direction of the Fire Chief.

The odometer flipped to 299,970 as Limp turned them south on Route 13, past the college on the right and away from Salisbury. A few miles later and they were rushing through Fruitland. On the outskirts of Eden they hit 299,980.

“
Where are we headed?”

“
Just cruisin', Pie.” The noonday sun snuck behind tall thunderheads, which regularly built over the Chesapeake in the heat of the day and then raced across the peninsula toward the Atlantic. The storm's wake would leave millions of fat night crawlers miserable and dying, flooded from their holes and trapped on the steaming pavement.

Limp raked a comb one-handed through his greased-back hair, and when he wasn't talking you saw the hint of Elvis. “Southern Queer,” was how Limp once described himself.

“
I love you,” he said to break the silence, tucking the comb in his shirt pocket.

“
What?”

“
See how that is?”

“
How what is?”

“
Tell someone you don't know very well that you love them,” Limp said. “And they look at you like you called them the N word.”

“
I took a picture, Limp.” Chase fumbled the notebook out of his back pocket. “Back when you were sleeping.”

“
Power napping, Pie.” Chase saw him glance down as the numbers rolled to 299,982. “So what'd you shoot? Something that might let us knock off for an early dinner?”

“
Maybe, if it's in focus.”

“
Shootin' that wide angle lens makes it hard to screw up focus. Did your manly fingers switch over to automatic exposure?”

“
Yeah, but it all happened so fast.”

“
Well, rewind the spool now and a little later in the dark we'll see if you got lucky.”

The clouds roiled overhead, dropping low and dark, and Limp flipped on the head lights. The first giant drops hit hard, almost hail-like, and he had to fight the steering wheel against the buffeting wind. Limp threw a quick glance over at Chase, making a funny face and shrugging his shoulders to acknowledge the awesome display.

“
Mother Nature's pissed 'bout somethin',” he said in a fake southern drawl, and Chase went to fasten his non-existent seatbelt. Instead, he clutched his camera tighter.

A nearly blinding sheet of rain cut their pace in half as Limp switched the wipers to their fastest setting. The mileage rolled to 299,985 as he craned forward to see the right turn that would take them due west, through the little towns marked Venton and Monie, and directly into the buffeting storm.

Chase kept quiet and let him drive, partly because the rain was so loud. He'd found that sometimes you needed to take a break from talking to Limp.

The clouds continued to lower over the little blue Accord, deep puddles yanking hard at its narrow tires. Giant plumes of water splashed up over the hood from brand new rivers rushing across the pavement. They hit 299,990 and lightning cracked directly overhead. Green leaves tore from swaying limbs, a few plastering themselves to the windshield before the wipers broke their veiny grip. Limp leaned forward and smeared fog from his vision.