I owe this “someone” an apology, but I don’t know him any better than I know you. I’m certainly not going to start writing notes to two strangers. For now, this is the best I can do, and I’ll just have to hope that the guilt catches up.
Have you ever heard of Kevin Carter? He won a Pulitzer for a photograph of a dying girl. It’s a pretty famous photo, so maybe you’ve seen it. A little girl was starving in the Sudan, trying to reach a feeding station. She needed to stop to rest because she was barely more than a skeleton held together by a stretch of skin. She needed to rest because she wasn’t strong enough to get to the food in one trip.
So she rested in the dirt, this tiny little girl, while a vulture sat nearby, waiting.
Do you get it? Waiting. For her to die.
I think of that picture sometimes. Of that moment.
Sometimes I feel like the girl.
Sometimes I feel like the bird.
Sometimes I feel like the photographer, unable to do anything but watch.
Kevin Carter killed himself after he won the Pulitzer.
Sometimes I think I understand why.
I need a cigarette.
Moths flutter around the porch light, pinging against the glass bulb. It’s almost midnight on Thursday, and the neighborhood is nearly silent.
The house behind me is not. Alan, my stepfather, is still awake, and my mother’s out with friends, so I’m not ready to go inside yet.
Alan doesn’t like me much.
Trust me. It’s mutual.
The letter had been sitting in my back pocket all night. I have no idea when she wrote it, but it had to have been within the last forty-eight hours. It wasn’t there on Tuesday night, because I looked. Melonhead was riding me then because I was late, and no one ever wants to hear my excuses.
“I had detention,” I said when I finally showed up.
He was pouring fuel into one of the mowers in the equipment shed. It was hot as hell in there, and his shirt was sticking. The space isn’t all that big, and it always smells like a mixture of cut grass and gasoline. I like it.
I didn’t like the way Melonhead looked at me, a disgusted glance, as if I were just another slacker.
“You can make up your lost hour on Saturday,” he said.
“I can make it up on Thursday.”
“No, you’ll make it up on Saturday.”
I held up my slip. “I’m only assigned to work Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
He shrugged and turned toward the door to the shed. “You’re assigned to work from four till eight. It’s ten past five. You can make up your hour on Saturday.”
“Look, man, I can stay until nine—”
“You think I want to stay late for you?”
Of course not. He wanted to get home to his wife and kid so he’d have more stories to bore me with next time. I punched the wall beside my mower and swore. “You think I want to be here at all?”
He stopped in the doorway, and for a second, I wondered if he was going to take a swing at me. But he looked at me, and his voice didn’t change. “You should be grateful to be here. If you want me to sign your slip for eight hours, you’ll show up on Saturday.” Melonhead began to turn but paused. “And watch your language. I don’t want that talk here.”
I opened my mouth to fire back at him, but he just stood there, sunlight at his back, and I knew he’d be on the phone with the judge in a heartbeat if I pushed it.
I hate that he can hold this over my head. I remember the sentencing, thinking that mowing a cemetery would be easy, that no one would hassle me. I didn’t realize this program would involve a guy who’d get a power trip from ordering me around.
I half crumpled the slip in my fist. “You can’t make me work on Saturday.”
“If you don’t like it, show up on time.”
Tonight I showed up early, hoping I’d earn a gold star and a free pass. No dice. But I did find a letter from the cemetery girl.
Part of me wonders if I’d be better off without it here in my hands. It’s depressing and intriguing and frightening all at once.
I don’t know the photograph she’s talking about. I didn’t know the first one, either, with the scream and the flowers and the blood and the gun. I almost don’t need to see them, because her words zoom in on the details with a painful focus.
But now, reading her lines about the vulture and the little girl, I want to go look it up.
The side gate rattles, and I fold the letter up to slide it under my thigh. I’m expecting my mother, but then I hear the sniff, and I know it’s Rev. He’s allergic to everything, including most people.
“You’re out late,” I say. Rev is more likely to drag me out of bed at six in the morning than to come calling near midnight.
“They took in a baby this afternoon. She won’t go to sleep. Mom says it’s separation anxiety. Dad says she’ll settle soon. I said I needed to take a walk.” He’s not irritated. He’s used to it.
Geoff and Kristin are foster parents. They live on the other side of the block, but their backyard is diagonal from ours, so we’ve always gotten a firsthand look at the kids who roll through their house.
Rev was the first. He showed up ten years ago, when he was seven and scrawny, with Coke-bottle glasses and allergies so bad he could barely breathe. His clothes were too small, and his arm was in a cast, and he wouldn’t speak. Geoff and Kristin are the nicest people on the planet—they’re nice to me, and that’s saying something—but Rev ran away from them anyway.
I found him in my closet, curled up in the back corner, peeking at me through shaggy hair while clutching a ratty, old Bible.
I had a box of Legos in there, so I thought he was there to play. Like kids routinely showed up in my closet or something. I don’t know what I was thinking. I folded myself in there with him and started building.
Turned out he was scared of Geoff and Kristin because they’re black. His dad had told him that black people were evil and sent by the devil.
The irony here is that Rev’s dad used to beat the crap out of him.
He usually quoted the Bible while he did it.
Geoff and Kristin adopted Rev five years ago. He says it was no big deal, that they’d been the only parents he’d known for years anyway, and it was just a piece of paper.