Christopher Bohjalian: The Double Bind

“Honey, I’m home…less!” Katherine roared suddenly, parroting Bobbie’s common cry-a sitcom dad amped on methamphetamines-when he would arrive at the shelter to see if any of the staff he knew were on duty that day. Apparently, he had used that line even when he really was homeless, when he first appeared at the shelter more tired and hungry than he’d ever been in his life. Even then he was no skittish stray cat.

Slightly paranoid and subject to occasional hallucinations? Yes. Skittish? No.

“He used to give me so much grief-”

“Good-natured, I hope,” Katherine said.

“Usually. Whenever he was hanging around the shelter and I was here he would tease me for being so green. I remember when we met he thought I was still in college. Couldn’t believe I’d been out for a couple of years.”

“He share with you any patented Bobbie Crocker wisdom?”

“Let’s see. He said I was too young to know the first thing about life on the streets. He told me the only truly safe drinking water left in Vermont was forty miles away in some spring that fed the Catamount River. He told me that Lyndon Baines Johnson-yes, the president-was still alive, and he knew where. He claimed he’d once partied for a weekend with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. And he said he grew up in a house that looked out across a cove at a castle.”

“I loved that man’s fantasies. So many of the people we meet think they’re Rambo or the pope. Or they have millions of dollars hidden in Swiss bank accounts. Or the CIA-or Rambo, the pope, and the CIA-are after them. Not Bobbie. He dreamed of castles. Gotta love it.”

“Well, he did see the devil,” Laurel said.

“Excuse me?”

“He only mentioned it to me once. But he told Emily, too. One time he saw the devil.”

“Did he say what the devil looked like?”

“He looked like a person, I think.”

“Anyone in particular?” asked Katherine.

“Someone he knew, I’m sure. But that would be a question for Emily.”

“How serious were the drugs he was taking when he saw him?”

“Maybe the devil was a woman.”

“Or her?” Katherine said, correcting herself.

“I’d say very serious. You don’t see the devil on Thunderbird.”

Katherine smiled ruefully, tilting her head back toward the screen in the one tiny window in Laurel ’s office, hoping to catch a wisp of the wind. She was, it seemed to Laurel, summoning a memory of the man herself. Bobbie-and he was always Bobbie to the social workers and the residents of the Hotel New England-was a human skeleton when he arrived at the shelter, but he recovered quickly: One of the side effects of his antipsychotic was weight gain. He never became truly rotund, but within three or four months he had regained the paunch of the poor who live on fast food and the carb-laden breads and pastas that were heaped onto plates at the emergency day station and the Salvation Army. Food heavy enough to help the hungry feel full and keep warm. Lots of peanut butter. He’d shrunk with old age, but he still had presence and bulk. His face was hidden up to his eyes with a white beaver beard that retained a few small patches of black, but those eyes were what everyone noticed because they were deep and dark and smiling, and his eyelashes were almost girlishly long.

“He was quite a character,” Katherine purred after a moment. “Did you know he was a photographer?”

“I know he said he was,” Laurel answered, “but I don’t think there was much to it. I assume it was a hobby or something. Maybe a part-time job he had before his mind went completely. Shooting class pictures at elementary schools. Or babies at Sears.”

“There might be more to it than that. Bobbie didn’t have any cameras or photo stuff in his room, but he had these. Look in the box,” Katherine said, waving languidly down at the carton at her feet.

“These being…?”

“Pictures. Photos. Negatives. There’s a ton in there. All very retro.”

Laurel peered around the side of the desk. Katherine pushed the box toward her with her foot, so she could reach it and pull apart the top flaps. The first image Laurel spied was an eleven-by-fourteen black and white of easily two hundred teenage girls in identical white button-down shirts and black skirts on a football field playing with Hula-Hoops. It looked like it was some sort of halftime extravaganza: Synchronized Hula-Hooping, maybe. The next one, based on the modest two-piece bathing suit the subject was wearing, was from that same era: A surfer girl was posing atop her surfboard on the beach, pretending to ride an actual wave. Laurel picked it up and saw scrawled legibly on the back in pencil, “Real Gidget, not Sandra Dee. Malibu.” She thumbed through a few more, all black and white, all from the late 1950s or early 1960s, until she came upon one she thought might have been a very young Paul Newman. She held it up for her boss and raised her eyebrows.

“Yup,” Katherine said, “I think it’s him, too. Unfortunately, there’s nothing on the back. No annotation or clue.”

She put Paul Newman back in the box and pawed briefly through the prints. Toward the bottom, she discovered long strips of negatives, none of which had been placed in sleeves. Like the photos, they had been dumped unceremoniously into the carton.

“And you think Bobbie Crocker took these?” she asked Katherine, sitting back in her chair.

“I do.”

“Why?”

“They were in his apartment,” Katherine said. “And when he was brought in off the street last year, he had this old canvas duffel with photos in it that he insisted were his. I assume most of these were in it. He wouldn’t take a bed until he was sure that the lockers were safe-that his locker would be safe. He was literally going to sleep with them, but there were only top bunks left in the shelter, so he couldn’t.”

The homeless often brought an object or two into the shelter of totemic (and, to them, titanic) importance-that single item that either reminded them of who they were or what their life had been like before it began to unravel. A certificate from a spelling bee they’d won as a child. An engagement ring they’d been unwilling to pawn. A teddy bear-and even the veterans from the Vietnam and Gulf wars sometimes had a stuffed animal with them. Laurel had seen plenty of family snapshots in the mix that was checked into the lockers, too. But she’d never before seen anything that resembled either serious art or professional accomplishment. And she had taken enough photography courses and snapped enough pictures herself to know with confidence that these photographs were interesting from both a journalistic and an artistic perspective. She thought it was even possible that somewhere she had seen the image of the teen girls with their Hula-Hoops-if not this exact photograph, then perhaps one from the same shoot.

“Couldn’t someone else have taken the photos and given them to him?” Laurel asked. “A brother or sister, maybe? A friend? Maybe somebody died and left them to him.”

“Go talk to Sam,” Katherine said, referring to the manager who had been on duty the night Bobbie Crocker had arrived. “He knows more about Bobbie than I do. And talk to Emily. I’m pretty sure he’d told them both he was a photographer. Of course, he wouldn’t show them the pictures. Not ever. Apparently, no one could see them-or else.”

“Or else what?”

“Oh, who knows? Welcome to Bobbie’s World. Emily managed to sneak a peek at the pictures pretty soon after he first arrived, just to make sure that he wasn’t some horrid child pornographer. But you know how busy Emily is. The woman’s life is chaos. Once she saw they were innocent, she didn’t think about them again until she was going through his room with me yesterday.”