John Saul: Black Creek Crossing

But in the darkroom, he was alone with the pictures he’d taken, with no one waiting for him to mess up. Ever since he’d developed his first roll of 35mm film last June, and the teacher had looked over the pictures and pronounced them “not bad — not bad at all,” he had been hooked. All through the summer, he’d used whatever money he had to buy film, and he spent hours every week in the darkroom in the basement of the high school, developing pictures, experimenting with printing them, enlarging them and cropping them, playing with exposures, as he did with the camera as well.

The funny thing was, the more pictures he took, the more he discovered he liked looking at the world through a viewfinder and then bending its reality in the darkroom. But the amount of film he had to buy had become a problem. Then, a month before his birthday, his teacher gave him the solution. As they were looking over the three rolls of film Seth had burned over a weekend, Mr. Feinberg shook his head and said, “You’d better get a digital camera, Seth. At the rate you’re taking pictures, you’re going to need a student loan just for film.”

So when his birthday came around, all he’d asked for was a digital camera, and his mother had come through.

His only problem then was the small memory in the camera, which he’d dealt with by setting the resolution as low as possible, so he could take as many pictures as he wanted, and reshoot the good ones at a higher resolution.

Until today, it had been working out pretty well. But on his way home from school, he took pictures of some of the oldest houses in Roundtree, and when he got home and looked them over on his computer, he saw that most of them weren’t good, that the lighting hadn’t been right. But he expected that and knew he could go back another day and take the good ones at a higher resolution. It was the shot of the old house at Black Creek Crossing that presented a problem he couldn’t resolve.

When he brought it up on the screen, there was something wrong with one of the upstairs windows. It looked out of focus, though the rest of the picture was in focus. How could one window on the second floor not be? As he looked closer, he wasn’t sure. Maybe it wasn’t out of focus; maybe it was just a shadow, or a reflection. But the sun wasn’t shining on the front of the house, and even if it was, where would a shadow have come from? And if it was a reflection, it should have been mirroring something outside the house. But what?

Seth fiddled with the picture, using the controls in the program first to zoom in on the window, then to try to sharpen the image and increase the contrast. But no matter what he did, the area of the window wouldn’t come into focus, wouldn’t sharpen up like the rest of the picture. Not that the rest of the picture was all that sharp once he’d blown it up, because of the low resolution, which was fine if he was just going to look at the pictures on the computer screen. They might even print okay, if he didn’t try to make them much bigger than three-by-five; they weren’t much different, after all, from the contact prints he’d made from the innumerable rolls of 35mm film he shot before he got the digital camera, most of which he’d never bothered to blow up at all. But with film, if he’d found something like he was now seeing in the photo of the house on Black Creek Road, he’d have been able to enlarge it until he knew exactly what it was, instead of having it turn into a bunch of pixels that didn’t form into anything at all.

Seth began experimenting with the color controls, thinking the image might be clearer in black and white, when his father’s second rap on the door — much louder than the first — broke his concentration. Then the door opened and his father came in.

Blake Baker’s eyes darkened. “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.

“Just working on some pictures.”

“ ‘Just working on some pictures,’ ” his father repeated mockingly. “What kind of pictures?” He moved closer to the computer, and Seth could see the suspicion in his eyes.

“Just some houses,” he said.

“Houses? For God’s sake, Seth! You’re fifteen! What are you doing taking pictures of houses?”

Seth said nothing, knowing that whatever he said would be wrong.

“Chad Jackson and a bunch of his buddies are out in the street playing softball. How come you’re not down there with them?”

“I was just working on my pictures—” Seth began, but his father didn’t let him finish.

“Not anymore you’re not,” he said, reaching out and switching off the computer. As Seth helplessly watched his unsaved images vanish from the monitor, his father said, “You’re going to go down there and play ball with your friends like a normal kid, understand?” Seth felt his eyes begin to burn, and he bit his lip. “Understand?” his father repeated.

Knowing there was nothing to be gained by arguing with his father, Seth stood up and started downstairs, his father’s words echoing in his mind.

… play ball with your friends…

Didn’t his father know he didn’t have any friends?

… like a normal kid…

Was that what his father thought? That he wasn’t normal? Just because he wasn’t like the rest of the kids, did that mean he wasn’t normal?

Seth grabbed a jacket off the hook by the front door, pulled the door open, and went out into the fall afternoon. But instead of trying to join the game in front of the Jacksons’ house down the block, he turned the other way.

If he hurried, there might be just enough light to see whatever it was his camera had caught in the upstairs window of the old house at Black Creek Crossing.

“Tell me you’re kidding,” Zack Fletcher groaned, his dark eyes fixing on his mother, the Kentucky Fried drumstick in his hand quivering at the halfway point between the plate and his mouth. His expression was a combination of disbelief and something that resembled panic. “Please, Mom, tell me you’re kidding.”

“Why would I be kidding?” Joni Fletcher countered. At the far end of the table, Ed had also stopped eating, and though his face was impassive, there was a flatness in his eyes that told her he shared their son’s lack of enthusiasm for the news she’d just given them. “I don’t see why you’re so surprised,” she went on, deciding to concentrate on Zack first. “It’s not like your aunt Myra and I haven’t been talking about them moving here for years. And the house is perfect for them — absolutely what they’ve been looking for.”

Zack rolled his eyes with the disdain typical of a sixteen-year-old who has recently discovered that his parents know nothing about anything. Shaking his head in disgust, he returned his attention to the chicken.

Ed, on the other hand, chose to respond on behalf of both the males in the house:

“As far as I know, they haven’t been looking for a house at all,” he said. “Seems to me it’s been you who’s been doing all the looking.”

“I’m a real estate broker, remember?” Joni reminded him. “It’s my job to look at houses and match them up with people.”

“Couldn’t you match them up with people who are actually looking for a house?” Ed replied. “And can afford one?”

Joni decided to ignore the first question. “They can afford the one I found today.”

“Must be some house,” Zack observed darkly. “Does Uncle Marty even have a job?”

“Do you?” Joni shot back, fixing her son with the kind of look that up until a year ago would have silenced him. Now he only shrugged.

“I’m only sixteen, remember, Mom? What do you want me to do, drop out of school?”

“When your father and I were your age—” Joni began, but Ed didn’t let her finish.