The Tin Can Tree (22 page)

“Outdoors, if you like.”

“I’d rather the living room.”

“All right,” James said. He opened the door of the darkroom and led the way to where his cameras stood. “You got to be quiet, though, because that’s where Ansel’s sleeping.”

“
Now?
”

“It’s one of his dizzy days.”

“Oh, cripes,” said Simon, and he started walking in circles again. He put the heel of one boot exactly in
front of the toe of the other, and keeping his balance that way made him fling both arms out and tilt sideways slightly. “It’s a bad day for
everyone,
” he said. “I declare.” He seemed to be walking on an imaginary hoop, suspended high above the ground.

James had seen the kind of portraits that Simon and Janie Rose liked best—the ones taken against a dead white screen, with the faces retouched afterwards. He favored a homier picture, himself. He left the screen behind and brought only a couple of lamps, not the glaring ones, and his favorite old box camera. “We’ll put you in the easy chair,” he told Simon. He had given the camera to Simon to carry, and Simon was squinting through the view-finder as he walked. “Do you want to be doing anything special?”

“Yes,” Simon said. “I want to be smoking a cigar.”

“Be serious, now.”

“I am serious. You asked me what I wanted to be doing. Well, all my life I’ve been waiting to get my picture took with a cigar. I been counting on it.”

“Oh, what the hell,” said James. He set his lamps down and went over to the living-room mantelpiece. From the old wooden cigar box that had belonged to his grandfather he took a cigar, the fat black kind that he smoked on special evenings when no one was around to complain. “Here you go,” he said. “But don’t you light it, now. Just get your picture took with it.”

“Well, thank you,” said Simon. He crossed to the easy chair, giving Ansel a sideways glance as he passed, but Ansel only stirred and didn’t wake up. “He don’t know what he’s missing,” Simon whispered. “Me with a cigar, boy.”

“It’ll all be recorded for posterity,” said James.

While James was setting up the lights, Simon practiced
with the cigar. He opened it and slid the paper ring off, and then he sat with his elbow resting on the chair arm and his face in a furious frown every time he took a suck from the unlit cigar. “I’m getting the hang of it,” he said, and looked around for an ashtray to practice tapping ashes into. “When do you reckon they’ll let me smoke these for real?”

“Never, probably,” said James. “Always someone around that objects to the smell.”

“Ah, I wouldn’t care. I’m going to start as soon as I’m out on my own, boy. Soon as I turn sixteen or so.”

James smiled and tilted a lamp closer to Simon. He had been listening to Simon for some years now, and he had a mental list of what he was planning to do at age sixteen. Smoke cigars, take tap-dance lessons, buy his own Woolworth’s, and grow sideburns. Janie Rose hadn’t even been going to wait
that
long. She asked her mother weekly, “Do you think it’s time I should be thinking of getting married?” And then she would smile hopefully, showing two front teeth so new that they still had scalloped edges, and everyone would laugh at her. James could see their point, though—Janie’s and Simon’s. He couldn’t remember that being a child was so much fun. So he nodded at Simon and said, “When you turn sixteen, I’ll
buy
you a box,” and Simon smiled and settled back in the chair.

“Might not wait till then even,” he said. “You never can tell.”

“Well, I would,” said James. “Tobacco stunts your growth.”

“No, I mean to go out on my own. I might go earlier.” He stuck out his tongue and flicked an imaginary piece of tobacco off the tip of it. “I been thinking where I could go.”

“It’s kind of early for that,” James said.

“I don’t know. You know Caraway, N.C.?”

James stopped fiddling with his camera and looked up. “What about it?” he asked.

“I just thought you could tell me about it. If that’s where you are from.”

“Nothing to tell,” said James.

“Well, there’s hats with feathers on them, and them gold earrings the boys all wear. Do you think I might like that town?”

In the view-finder his face was small and pointed, with a worried line between his eyes. He was leaning toward James with the cigar poised forgotten between his thumb and forefinger, and in the second of stillness that followed his question James snapped the picture. “That’ll be a good one,” he said.

“Will I like Caraway?”

“I don’t see how. Do you ever see
me
going to Caraway?”

“Well, the boys wear gold earrings,” Simon said again, and he sighed and rubbed the top of his head and James snapped that picture too.

“Sure, the
boys,
” he told Simon. “They’re the worst in the state, Caraway boys. Got tight little Church of God parents. All they want to do when they grow up is come somewhere like Larksville. What you want to do in Caraway?”

“I could board with your family,” Simon said.

James looked up from his camera with his mouth open and then threw back his head and laughed. “
Hoo!
” he said, and Ansel stirred in his sleep at the noise. “I’d like to see that,” he went on more quietly. “Would you turn sideways in your chair now, please?”

Simon turned, but he kept his eyes on James. “
Ansel
says—” he began.

“
Ansel
don’t know.”

“Ain’t he
from
there?”

“He don’t know.”

“Well, anyway,” said Simon, “I could go and look it over.”

“Your mother would love that. Now, quit watching out of the corner of your eye, Simon. Look at the fireplace.”

“Do you think she’d miss me?” Simon asked.

James clicked the picture and stood up, squinting at him sideways to see which way to turn him next.

“I think my mother’d say,
‘Who
you say’s gone? Oh,
Simon!’
she’d say. ‘Him. My goodness. Did you remember to bring the eggs?’ ” He sat forward again then and frowned at James, twining the cigar over and under the fingers of his left hand. “You see how it’d be,” he said.

“You know that ain’t so,” said James.

He stepped a little to one side and got Simon focused in the camera again, all the while waiting for the argument to continue. But it didn’t. In the square of the view-finder Simon suddenly sighed and slumped down like a little old man, staring abstractedly at the wet end of his cigar. “Ah, hell,” he said. “It don’t matter.”

That made James look up, but he didn’t say anything. Instead he snapped the picture and frowned over at the lamps, measuring how much light there was. “Outdoors would’ve been better,” he said finally.

“I also hear,” said Simon, “that they sing all night in the dark. And them plumed hats, why, even the mules wear them. With holes cut for ears.”

“Look over toward your left,” James said.

“There’s six buses going there a day, Ansel told me.”

James folded his arms across the top of the camera and watched Simon a minute, thinking. Simon stared straight back at him. In the light from the lamps his eyes seemed black, and it was hard to see beyond the flat surface of them. His chin was tilted outward a little, and his lashes with their sunbleached tips gleaming were like curtains over his expression. Who knew what was in his mind? James uncrossed his arms then and said, “Put your cigar away, now. This last one’s for your mother.”

“Aw, my mother won’t even—”

“She wants a picture she can show to the relatives. What would they think, you with a big fat cigar in your hand?”

“She won’t—” Simon began again.

But James said, “You’re growing so much, this summer. She wants to get you in a picture before you’re too big to
fit
in one.”

“She tell you that?” asked Simon.

“Why, sure.”

“She ask you out and out for a picture of me?”

“Sure she did,” James said. “She said, ‘James, if you got time, I wish you’d snap a picture of Simon. We don’t have a picture that looks like him no more.’ I said I’d try.”

“Well, then,” said Simon after a minute. He rose and crossed over to the mantelpiece, where he laid down the cigar. When he returned to his chair he settled himself very carefully, tugging his jeans down tight into his boots, running both hands hard through his hair to smooth it back. He looked more posed now; the relaxed expression that he had worn in the other pictures was gone. With both hands placed symmetrically on the
arms of the chair, his back very straight and his face drawn tight in the beginnings of a smile, he stared unblinkingly into the lens of the camera. James waited a minute, and then he pressed the button and straightened up. “Thank you,” he said formally.

“Oh, that’s all right.”

“I’ll have them for you this afternoon, maybe. Or tomorrow, early. Perle Simpson is coming by for a passport photo and I want to take that before I start developing.”

“Okay,” said Simon. He stood up, frowningly tucking in his shirt, and then suddenly he looked over at James and gave him a wide, slow smile, so big that the two dents he was always trying to hide showed up in the center of his cheeks. “Well, I’ll be seeing you,” he said, and sauntered on out, slamming the screen door behind him. When James went to the window to look after him he saw him in the front yard, picking up the bicycle he hadn’t ridden for days and twirling the pedal into a position where he could step on it. The buttercup still hung in the spokes, its little yellow head dangling drunkenly from the front wheel and its withered leaves fluttering out like banners when Simon rode slowly off. He rode in the direction of the Terrys’ farm; he would be going to see the tobacco pickers, the way he used to do.

When Simon was out of sight, and when James had turned and seen that Ansel was sleeping still, he himself went out the screen door and down the long front porch. The Pikes’ window shades were up now. He peered in through the dark screen door and saw Mrs. Pike at her sewing machine, not running it at the minute but sewing by hand on something that was in her lap. “Mrs. Pike,” he called gently. She lowered the sewing and looked up at him, her mouth screwed up
and lopsided because of the pins in one corner of it. “Mrs. Pike, can I come in a minute?”

“Joan’s handing tobacco,” she said. Speaking around the pins made her seem like a different woman, like that waitress at the Royal Crown who always had a cigarette in her mouth when she talked. “Did you want to see Joan?”

“Well, no, I just wanted to tell you—” said James. He pulled open the screen door and stepped just inside it, even though he hadn’t been asked. “I took a picture of Simon,” he said.

“Oh.”

“Sitting in an easy chair.”

“Well, that’s real nice,” said Mrs. Pike, and bowed her head to nip a thread off the dress she was sewing.

“Well, I took it
for you
, Mrs. Pike.”

“That’s real nice of you,” she said again. She held the dress up at arm’s length and frowned at it. James shifted his weight to his other foot.

“What I actually told him,” he said, “was that you
asked
for it. Asked me to take it for you.”

She lowered the dress to her lap again and looked over at him, and James thought that surely she would say
something
now. But when she did speak, all she said was, “It must be right hard, taking pictures of children”—politely, as if he were a stranger she was trying to make conversation with.

James waited a minute, but she didn’t say more. She had lowered her head to her sewing again, fumbling at it with quick, blunt fingers and absentmindedly working the pins from one side of her mouth to the other. So he said, “Well, ma’am, not really,” and then turned and quietly let himself out the door again. All the way down to his end of the porch he kept thinking of going back
and trying once more, but he knew already it wasn’t any use. So he entered his own part of the house and then just stood there a minute, thinking it over, watching Ansel as he slept.

T
he things Joan Pike owned in this world could be packed in two suitcases, with room to spare. She was putting them there now, one by one, folding the skirts in two and laying them gently on the bottom of the big leather suitcase her father’s parents had given him to take to a debating contest fifty years ago. Her own suitcase, newer and shinier, stood waiting on the floor already filled and locked. She had saved out her big straw pocketbook, which was hard to pack and could hold all the things she might need on the bus. It stood on the floor, with one corner of a Greyhound ticket envelope sticking out of it. The ticket she had bought this morning, after spending all of Wednesday night lying in bed rolling up the hem of her top sheet while she thought what to do. She had ridden into town for it on Simon’s bicycle, and come back with it hidden inside her white shirt. Nobody knew she was going.

When her closet was empty she cleaned it out carefully, picking up every stray bobby pin and button from the floor and bunching the hangers neatly at one end of the rod with the hooks all pointing the same way. Mainly she wanted to save her aunt the trouble, but also she wanted to go away feeling that she had left a clean sweep behind her—not a thread, not a scrap of hers
remaining that she could want to return for. She would like to have it seem as if she had never been here, if that was possible. So she closed the closet door firmly and turned the key in its lock. Then she began on the rest of the room.