Three and Out Page 3

Chapter Two: Photo Finish

  It’s almost funny now. All those old wives’ tales and fantasies just might be true. Some hideous thing could just possibly live under your bed. There just might be something hiding in the closet, waiting for your folks to go to sleep so it can come out and kill you. Stepping on a crack just might break your mother’s fucking back. Hell, I don’t know why it couldn’t be true. As we grow up we think leaving the stuff of childhood behind is the real answer, that reality somehow hurries ahead and leaves all the mystery to get lost in the clutter back there. But there is one thing I’ve finally come to realize right here and right now: there’s not a damn thing you can do about any of it.

  To set the record straight I’m just an ordinary guy with three Polaroid pictures. I turned forty yesterday. Was a teacher for almost ten years, a construction worker before that, and now it doesn’t even matter. Everything just sort of fell apart around me. And here I didn’t even know it until recently, or at least I couldn’t bring myself to actually admit it.

  But all that that doesn’t have shit on a shingle to do with those three pictures. This does: I got them on May 18, 1984. It’s stamped right on the back of each one of them in red ink, clear as the day I got them. And I don’t have to look at a calendar to know it was a Friday. I was a junior in high school, one week away from summer vacation and three months away from playing on the worst varsity football team my high school ever produced. But I couldn’t see that then, and that’s the great, biting irony of the whole thing now. Thinking I could somehow see the future, that I had some handle on it and could somehow bend it to my will. These, I guess, are the real mistaken ideas of youth.

  Lunch shift had just ended and I was hanging out during class change with a handful of buddies. John Stoetzel was there, along with Barry Thomas, Greg Billing, Ted Gray, a few others. Last I heard Ted was a corporate lawyer up in Baltimore, Barry either a plumber or electrician somewhere in town. Don’t know dick about Greg, but John’s a whole other story. He never made it through the first year of college, poor kid. Got killed in a car accident early one Sunday morning not two weeks into the first semester. Rumor has it he actually stepped free of the wreckage and was standing by the side of the road when some passers-by stopped to help. Found him with his stomach split open and his guts in a pile around his feet. Apparently he didn’t even know it until one of the girls started puking her guts up, and when he looked down and saw what a mess he was, he collapsed stone dead. And just like that his life was done. But when I see him now in my mind’s eye, he’s still the same, not a streak of gray in his hair or a line in his smooth, young face. Like a fly in amber, frozen like that for eternity. While the living keep grinding down.

  John and Ted had just peeled away to chemistry, and I’d left Barry and Greg debating whether or not skipping hated Ms. Green’s class was worth the worry. The commons area and hallways were packed with people either moving toward class, or (like me and mine) deciding whether or not to stay on campus at all. I shoulda just fucking left but I didn’t. No good deed goes unpunished.

  I was five steps up the staircase in B Building when the guy bumped shoulders with me in passing. I knew it was intentional from the get-go, but there was no way to do more than look over my shoulder as I was carried on up to the second floor landing. When I did manage to get out of the general flow of people, I caught sight of him on the bottom floor staring up at me, people pouring around him like a stump sunk deep in a shallow stream. Some indeterminately older guy, no one I’d ever seen before (or since for that matter) staring right up at me. Out of place as shit but nobody else even seemed to acknowledge he was there except to give him wide berth. His mouth turned up in a neat little smirk. And then he moved left into the crowd and was gone.

  So what?

  When I got home and tossed my letterman’s jacket on the bed the pictures spilled out. Well not spilled exactly. When I set the book sack down and went back to pick the jacket off the bed, they were all lying there right underneath. Upside down, all three of ‘em.

  I bent over and picked them up, not even making the connection just yet. Three Polaroid snapshots. Faked, I assumed, since somehow the person in them (as far as I could tell) was me. But older and nothing like I’d imagine myself to look. But me, nonetheless. Weird, sure; unsettling, yeah, a little. But really no more than that. Some kind of pointless joke.

  And that’s where I left it for the next eleven years.

  The first one was of me walking through some strange field surrounded on all sides by some of the scruffiest bunch of hoodlums you’d ever see. In the background a large metal shed-like building stood just off my left shoulder and a row of cheap temporary buildings were set off to the right. I hadn’t been looking at the camera either, as if someone had taken the snapshot on the sly. Just me and what turned out to be students (of a sort), frozen on that unknown, insignificant field in the middle of an equally insignificant day.

  Except that’s exactly where I found myself one mild afternoon eleven years later. Just walking along, minding my own business, when the sudden slamming knowledge tore into my mind. Never in youth would I have even considered myself a candidate for high school teacher. I was gonna be a doctor. My parents had said so. But there I was. Just like in the picture.

  I left campus immediately after handing my class over to one of our ‘rovers’ and my hands shook all the way to the filing cabinet where I knew I’d left them. It didn’t take long to make sure; the picture was as exact as a thumbprint. Even the cast of day was spot-on. But the scariest thing was that I’d never had the faintest notion of the moment’s approach until it was actually upon me.

  It took five more years for the second one.

  It was a drizzling morning, that one. Some lost Monday in September. I used to frequent this café once or twice a week. I was teaching remedial college English by that point and due to an in-service professor’s illness I’d been released from my meeting early. Having nothing better to do, I headed for the café.

  By the time I got there the rain had stopped. The sun was still grappling with a few lingering flaps of clouds but they’d soon be gone. The first snappiness of fall was in the air. The maples had just a tinge of red along their tips. I sat down at a table near the front door and started leafing through the college rag. I was halfway through the SEC report when something came out of nowhere and smashed my cup, drenching the newspaper and me in a shower of steaming-hot coffee. I fucking lost it. Failed to realize something was alive in my head.

  I’d just thrown the paper down and was scrabbling for napkins when the little girl came running up. She was breathing hard and if I’d taken the time I’m sure I would have recognized her right then. I sure as hell did seconds later. But I was too pissed off. She looked about seven or eight and the first thing that crossed my mind was why she wasn’t at school. The next thing was where were her fucking parents? But my hands were still busy in their pursuit of the napkins and when my eyes followed suit, I saw the tennis ball sitting in a puddle of coffee not a foot away. And even though she was reaching for it I got there first. The warning bell ramped up in my head even as I threw it across the courtyard, right over her outstretched hands and past a busboy with a tray load of empty glasses.

  And it was right then that I realized. The little girl, the ball, even the wrought-iron fence over my left shoulder that had only recently been installed. I practically heard the click! of the shutter as I let it go. The ball bounced off a speed limit sign no more than twenty feet away and as it ricocheted into the street I saw the dog. Her dog. Going after than damn tennis ball. She screamed his name right before he charged out into the street but there wasn’t a chance. I heard brakes squeal, a couple of people scream, a loud thump.

  I’m sure there were more than a few who wanted a piece of my ass right about then but I was in a world of my own. I was turned around and staring at the fence. Thinking. Feeling my world really come undone. Looking down at myself. Even the coffee stain on my shirt, the one I�
�d always taken for some weird design, was right where it should be.

  Again, so what?

  A guy in a field and a dead dog. Big fucking deal. I know. Even now I can’t believe it, those snapshots from Hell. But the third one was the kicker. When I got it I could have had no idea that person was me. There was nothing in my life at the time that would have even hinted as much. It didn’t matter that it was the grainiest, the one shot with the least shutter exposure. That wasn’t it at all. It could have been taken from a video still, as clear as the day it’d been filmed, and I still wouldn’t have had the slightest idea that that person was me. Even now I hide it from myself…or try to.

  You see, in high school I never had the slightest idea I was bisexual. I didn’t have sex with a man until almost five years ago and even now I’m never quite comfortable with myself on the infrequent occasions when I go over…

  The picture was taken in a Men’s Room. Once again, me with the blinders. And once again, I took no notice until the almost audible snap of the camera. Taken from above and behind, down toward the crown of my head, shirtless, pants down around my ankles with my back to the urinal.