“I’m fine,” Rosita says. “Thank you, Sheriff.”
“I appreciate this, Mr. Bragg,” Sheriff Saunders says. “You don’t know how many people you’re helping.” I follow the sheriff to the door. “Oh, one last thing. We have your guitar at the station. Wouldn’t want to lose something that special.”
I nod, glance back to see what Rosita thinks about this, but she shows no sign of having overheard. I watch as the Jeep drives away and am back in the kitchen, lighting a cigarette on the stovetop before Rosita speaks again.
“Thank you for letting me stay,” she says.
“I’m not sure why you’d want to.”
“I’m enjoying the company.”
Fantasy will take over if I allow it. I remind myself that while Rosita finds beauty in broken bodies, that doesn’t mean she wants mine. At least not outside the pages of her project.
“Can we finish looking at those photos?” I ask.
It’s clear my newfound interest perplexes her, but Rosita opens the laptop, clicks some keys and hands over the computer.
“This is a man I interviewed in Delaware,” she says.
The man’s face has melted. Nose reduced to nothing but a mound with surgical bore holes. Lips absent, eyes boiled away and covered by grafted flaps of skin harvested from volunteers or other parts of his body. This donor flesh looks smooth and fresh. It begs to be touched. The man sits on a plaid couch in his living room, nude and perfect from the nipples down. In several of the following shots, Rosita focuses on his feet. Long-toed and wide-arched, covered in hair like a hobbit.
“He likes to rub them together since the accident,” she says, pointing at the furry feet. “It makes him calm to feel the hair, but he said it also makes him nostalgic about the hair on his head. That’s the word he used, nostalgic. Like he was talking about an old job and not missing part of himself. His wife used to love his curls.”
I pick up on the phrase “used to love.” It makes me wonder if any of that love was salvaged. If his wife’s admiration has been transplanted to the wiry hair atop those feet. Perhaps, when they’re lying in bed together, she rubs her smooth calves against the coarse strands. Perhaps the man’s bed is empty. His wife sleeping curled around a new man whose sight won’t allow her features to be lost in the fog of memory.
“Most people cringe when they see him,” Rosita says.
“What happened to him?”
“Chemical burn in a factory accident.”
I consider the toxins floating down my own stream. “Tell me some more of these stories.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, the history of the people is here, some of their own words, but that isn’t the same. Tell me about meeting them.”
I watch Rosita try to transport herself back to that distant morning when she rang the faceless man’s doorbell. She looks at the tiny details in the margins of the photo. The brick wall behind the couch. The mug of tea on the coffee table and the invisible ghost of steam that couldn’t be captured by the camera. Hours pass while Rosita narrates the lives behind each picture. She shares the jokes the men made, the women who laughed or cried, the spouses who stayed and the spouses who left and those who’ve never had another who loved them. Explaining the moments of silence is hardest. Like the steam from that coffee cup, there are things the camera can’t capture, things words can’t make clear.
THE LOCALS
Day Two of the Contamination
We’ve gone through six different interviews when the first of the locals arrive. They cross the creek like a defeated army, a sad procession of old men and women migrating slow from the far shore, ferried in the back of pickups that surge through the water. With so few trucks, the drivers are forced into return trips to collect fresh groups. One man wears waterproof waders that come up to his chest and wades across with a little girl riding piggyback atop his shoulders, her stuffed bear clutched tight over her mouth. I watch out the window, concerned the girl may drop the teddy, but both she and the bear make it unharmed.
Rosita squats on the porch snapping pictures. When she notices me, she holds up the camera. “If this makes you the least bit uncomfortable, I’ll put it away,” she says.
Both of us know the moment deserves documenting. Rosita focuses on the children. None of them laugh or play. Either they’ve been strictly warned of the dangers or realize whose house they’re approaching. They must know the rumors. Local horror stories about the twisted mountain man who lives in these woods. The adults will be whispering worse to one another. I wonder how many of Coopersville’s residents will be too afraid to show up on my doorstep.
Sheriff Saunders isn’t present, but two of her deputies keep things orderly. They herd the men and women across the field, guide them to the well where a line has formed to fill improvised receptacles. Two-liter bottles of Coca-Cola with wrappers still attached. Empty jugs still containing the white film from milk since it is unsafe to rinse them clean. A few even have funnels to assure every drop is collected. Some of the kids whine as they wait, but the parents stroke their hair, tell them to be thankful and polite. One man strikes his unruly child, but the deputies put an end to it before the disgruntled crowd can turn on him.
Rosita moves closer for better angles. I know she sees my two fingers holding the wooden blinds open to look out on this bizarre assembly. She gives a little tilt of her head meant to coax me outside, so I close the blinds. There are too many. Just like those nights onstage. They need nourishment, but that doesn’t mean they want to see me. Charity is hard enough on country people. Receiving it from someone like myself would only be added insult. There are also the children to consider. Those I didn’t frighten would be full of questions their parents won’t know how to answer. I’ll be even more frightening to the children now that the sun is down.
I peek again against my better judgment. Rosita gives another wave before going back to her pictures, but that isn’t the end of it. After a few more minutes, she opens the door as predicted, stands in the kitchenette where I sit looking at her photos of the mutilated man from Delaware.
“How long you gonna peer out the window like this?” Rosita asks.
“All Goddamned night if I want,” I say.
“You need to come outside and make these people feel welcome.”
“You’re mistaken if you think I can make them feel welcome. Just let them drink in peace.”
Rosita snaps the laptop closed so fast the screen almost catches my fingers. “You know what’s amazing about these pictures?” she asks.
“What?”
“All those people like you, or worse off, and none of them were so ashamed.”