The Wild Girl (4 page)
I no longer take photographs; I don’t need to make any more memories, I have more than enough to last. My health is poor, my heart bad; I wake up in the middle of the night short of breath to feel it fluttering weakly in my chest like a dying bird. I don’t have long to live.
Still, the imminence of death does not prevent me from hearing the continual click of shutters in my dreams, or from seeing the old images passing in my mind’s eye like a slide show. Quite the contrary. The old saw has it that as you grow older you can’t remember whether or not you took your medication five minutes ago, but you can remember with total recall something that took place fifty, sixty, seventy years ago. This is appallingly true.
It was my habit for many years to keep detailed notebooks of my travels and of my work. Journals are kept largely for the benefit of the journal keeper, in my case, as a way to chart my progress, or lack thereof, as a photographer. And if, as I believe, we define ourselves through our work, our professions, our accomplishments, these notebooks also serve to chart my progress, or lack thereof, as a human being, a matter which may be of little interest to anyone but myself.
I kept the following notebooks in the year 1932, the middle of the Great Depression, not only another era, but another lifetime ago. They describe a trip I made across the United States and into the Sierra Madre of Mexico when I was seventeen years old. It is another of my beliefs that our characters are forged at a very young age, and although our circumstances may certainly change dramatically in the course of our lives, our fundamental natures do not. All the self-improvement schemes, the twelve-step programs, the mood-stabilizing medications and therapies later, we are still more or less stuck with ourselves. And while these notebooks frequently reflect the innocence, callowness, and sometimes pretensions of a seventeen-year-old, when I read them all these years later, I am struck by how clearly I recognize myself, how much a part of me that odd, angry, heartbroken, hopeful, stupid boy still is. And not discounting the inevitable decay of body and mind that has taken place in the intervening sixty-seven years, I am struck by how little, finally, I have changed. The revelation that I go to my grave as the boy I once was and still am, and always will be, alone makes having preserved these notebooks all these years well worth it. In the same way, how extraordinary to be an old man looking back upon one’s youthful self, and reading in the very first paragraph as that youthful self looks ahead to his own old age. It is a bit like standing between two facing mirrors and gazing down the tunnel to infinity that they create.
My original working notebooks contained photographs, sometimes loose and sometimes pasted on the page. I’ve lost many of these images over the years, and for practical reasons, those that have survived have not been reproduced in this manuscript, although I may have referred to them from time to time in these pages. I’ve also deleted many references to photographic technique and equipment, simply because they would bore all but the most serious student of photography. Finally, the reader will notice that some entries are dated, others not. I don’t exactly remember the reason for these inconsistencies, but my guess is that especially during our brief time among the bronco Apaches in the Sierra Madre, I had no idea what the date was, and as we lived in an alternate reality there, it hardly seemed to matter.
Other than that, the following story is true—not as it is remembered sixty-seven years later through the gauze of time and memory, and related by an old man who might wish to aggrandize himself before his death, but exactly as it happened to a seventeen-year-old boy named Ned Giles in that long-ago year 1932.
Leaving Home
5 JANUARY, 1932
Chicago, Illinois
Tomorrow morning I leave Chicago, and so tonight I begin a brand-new notebook to record my trip. All the others, the dozens that I’ve kept since I was a little kid, I’ve decided to leave behind here, along with my old life. A new notebook for a new life. It’s bound to be a grand adventure, and maybe someday my children and grandchildren will want to read about it. Maybe when I’m an old man, sitting on the front porch in my rocking chair, I’ll want to read about it myself. I’m excited about going, but I have to admit that I’m a little scared, too. I have butterflies in my stomach tonight and I can’t sleep anyway, so I think I’ll just begin by telling how it is that I came to be leaving home in the first place.
I have been living alone in our house since the deaths of my parents over three months ago. It wasn’t until a week or so ago that anyone even noticed that I was alone here. I think people are a bit distracted; everyone has troubles enough of their own and what’s one orphan kid compared to all the folks who have lost their homes and are living out on the street?
My mother died in Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Hospital last fall. She’d been sick for over a year with the cancer. I didn’t really know it at the time, but my father was already under a great deal of pressure with his business. Pop was the first Studebaker dealer in Chicago, but I guess people haven’t been buying too many automobiles the past couple of years, and he got himself in a good deal of financial trouble. The last thing my mother said to me before she died was, “Take care of your father, Neddy, he’ll be lost without me.”
We buried my mother in the Oak Park cemetery on a cold, blustery October morning. All I really remember now about the service was the mourners all bundled up in winter overcoats, and the yellow leaves swirling on the wind. Ten days later my father put a gun in his mouth in the bathroom of our house and blew the back of his head out. I found him there when I got home from classes, sitting slumped over on the toilet. He left an envelope with my name on it propped up on the bathroom shelf. Inside there was a copy of his insurance policy and the keys and title to his new Commander Eight Roadster. There was a short note in the envelope explaining that I would be better off with the car and the money, and that he wished he could have left me more.
I’m sorry, son,
Pop said in his note,
but I just can’t go on without your dear mother. You’ve always been a good boy. I know you love taking pictures. Why don’t you buy yourself a good camera. Good luck, Ned. Love, Pop.
That was it. Pop’s final advice to me.
“Why don’t you buy yourself a good camera.”
I guess I sound pretty cold about it, don’t I? I loved my parents but I haven’t been able to cry for them yet. I guess when Mom died, I was too busy worrying about Pop. He was in pretty rough shape, drinking too much scotch and crying himself to sleep every night. But I never thought he was going to kill himself. And to tell the truth, I’m just so damn mad at him for it. What kind of father leaves his only child alone like that? I loved my father but I realize that he was a weak man. I think he had a responsibility to stay around and take care of us.
My uncle Bill, Pop’s unmarried younger brother, came out from California to help with the funeral arrangements, and to settle Pop’s insurance. I really don’t know him very well, but he’s a nice enough guy. I didn’t want to go live with him out there, and I don’t think he wanted me, either. So I lied and told him I was going to live with my mother’s sister in Cincinnati. Uncle Bill seemed pretty relieved about that, even though my mother doesn’t have a sister in Cincinnati.
“You just be sure to send me a card with your new address once you get there, kid,” he said. “You know if you ever need anything, anything at all, you can always count on your old uncle Bill.” He smiled as if he was kind of embarrassed about saying this, because, of course, we both knew that it was not so.
I’m a year ahead of my age in school, already one semester into my first year of undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago. And I hold a part-time job, or at least I did until just recently, at the Chicago Racquet Club, a private men’s club downtown. I’ve worked there in the summertime for years. I started out as a ball boy for the tennis pro, and later I worked in the clubhouse. I’ve done a little bit of everything at the club over the years. I’ve washed dishes in the kitchen, cleaned the squash courts and locker room, waited tables in the dining room. I’ve always been popular with the members because I’ve been there since I was a kid, and I’m quiet and polite, so that eventually the rich men forget I’m even there and speak as freely as if I weren’t. I liked working at the club and I knew that I was lucky to have a job in these times when so many people are out of work. It’s a funny thing, but most of the members don’t even seem like they’ve been much affected by the Depression. All of Chicago’s old founding families belong to the club—the Swifts, the Armours, the Cudahys, the Meers, the McCormicks—and the place is kind of like a big kids’ fort for grown-ups, where the rich guys can hide out together and pretend that everything is okay, that nothing outside their walls really exists. Which I guess is the whole point of a private club. It’s a whole different world in there and I feel it every time I walk through the doors. Paintings of hunting dogs and jumping horses hang on dark wood-paneled walls. The furniture is all plush leather and velvet, polished oak and mahogany. Beautiful Oriental rugs cover gleaming hardwood floors. It’s hard to explain but there’s a kind of comforting hush about the place that seems to mingle in the air with the rich smells of fine whiskey and Cuban cigars and choice Chicago beef searing on the grill in the kitchen. And even the sweet aftershave sweat of squash players just coming off the court seems so different from the sour sweat of workingmen gathered for an illegal pint at the neighborhood speakeasies.
If anything, the club members seem more gay than ever these days. They throw more private parties and drink more booze, and the drunker they get, the louder they defend the ruinous economic policies of their Republican hero, President Herbert Hoover. Our family is from a long line of working-class Democrats, but Pop always told me that it would probably be better if I didn’t mention this at the club. Not that those men would ever ask an employee about his politics.
Some of the members had seen my father’s obituary in the
Chicago Tribune
(I wrote it myself), and ever since they’ve been especially solicitous of me. Some of the men even slipped me envelopes of cash. It was a strange feeling to accept their gifts, as if I was being tipped for my parents’ deaths. But it’s been even stranger to come home after work these past weeks to our dark, empty house. Of course, it’s still full of my parents’ possessions, I haven’t changed a thing, and it still holds their smells, as if they’re just away on vacation and have left me in charge. One of my mother’s nightgowns still hangs on the back of the bathroom door and my father’s razor, and strap, and shaving cream mug still rest on the shelf above the sink. And I still catch myself thinking that they must have forgotten to take these things with them on their vacation. Only the faint stain left on the wall behind the toilet, and the small bullet embedded there, remind that they are not coming home after all.
After Pop killed himself, I started working more hours at the club, and I stopped going to class. I’ve always been a good student and academics have come easy to me, but to tell the truth, I’m really not much interested in school anymore. And so far university classes have seemed to me about like sorting through old scat to find out what the animals have been eating. All I really want to do is study photography. A few years ago, Pop bought me my first camera, a cheap box Kodak, and ever since then I’ve been obsessed with taking pictures. For the past two years I’ve belonged to an amateur camera club in the city. I’m the youngest member. We get together once a week to share ideas and technique, and to critique one another’s work. I even won a prize in a club photo contest. By the way, I took Pop’s deathbed advice, and after the insurance money came in, I bought myself a Deardorff 8×10 view camera, with a tripod and plate holders. It’s the most beautiful piece of machinery you’ve ever seen.
Which brings me to my trip. On the Sunday afternoon before Christmas, I had just finished working the lunch shift in the dining room at the club. It was one of those gray, gloomy winter days in Chicago, dusk already settling in at 4
P.M.
, the wind whipping up off the lake, carrying a load of wet, icy snow. I was just getting ready to go home when I noticed that the manager had posted a flyer on the club bulletin board.
THE GREAT APACHE EXPEDITION