Toby Olson - Seaview

THERE’S A PLACE IN DOWNTOWN JEROME, ARIZONA, UP above the post office on the main street there. It’s open there, a kind of upper-level courtyard, with pillars and six benches, where you can sit and watch the traffic, and if you look up and across and up a little more you can see parts of the sky from those sitting places. I used to sit there when I was a boy. I lived over there for a little bit. The old, retired miners from Jerome copper mine used to sit there also. They waited for their checks there.

The checks would come down below in the post office, and from up above there they could see the truck coming with the mail and their checks. When the trucks would go out of sight up close to the building under them, they would wait a while, and then they would go down to their boxes and get their checks. And so I would sit there with them, usually five or more of them at a time, though sometimes less. They would cough and spit a lot. There were spittoons up there to the sides of the benches. These old men had that lung disease, and I think that they sat up there because they found it hard to get used to being inside a structure and still being able to see pieces of the sky and the other things outside. There were no windows in the mine to speak of. Maybe they liked to sit there and thought they would get used to what happened for them when they did it if they did it long enough.

It’s maybe six months that I did that, and the old men would come and go. When they didn’t come on the right dates, I guess I kind of figured that something must have come up. When they didn’t come for quite a while, I guess I figured that they wouldn’t be coming there again. I guess I was right about that. One time there was a period of time when an old Chinese-type fellow was coming there. He was very old, and he had a braid down the middle of his back. The braid was very thin, and he didn’t have too much hair in it. He did about the same amount of coughing and spitting as all the others. His coughs, however, used to really rattle a lot in his throat, and when there were other old men up there with us, they didn’t seem to like to look his way too much.

That old man looked at me a lot those times, and he looked at other things a lot too. There was a cat that came up there sometimes, and he looked at that cat a lot. He looked a lot and closely at people who came up there who were not old men, and when people stood in a window across the street from the benches, on the second floor, he would look closely at them also. He didn’t spend much time looking at the sky above. One day his looking got to me in some way. He was on the same bench I was on, and I spoke to him.

Now I was young and somewhat arrogant in that time, and I spoke to people who I did not fear somewhat sharply at times. That way of speaking I guess had become a habit, and though I didn’t mean to do so, my speaking came out sharply when I spoke to that old Chinese man. What are you looking at, old man? I said. He had been looking past me at a young woman who had come up there to get some air and was leaning against the railing that surrounded the courtyard, her face and chest pushed out, watching in the windows across the street. He could see the side of her body and the side of her face from the way she was standing. I thought this was so, since I had looked over at her myself, and she had been standing that way for quite a while, and I thought she was still like she had been. He looked away from her when I spoke and looked at my face. From the way we were, he didn’t have to move his head. He only had to shift his eyes a bit. He coughed a little and swallowed. His rattle was rather quiet that time. It was like hollow sticks hitting each other if you hung them in a tree in the breeze by fishline. That’s a thing to do to keep certain birds away.

Well, I was looking at the face of that woman, young man, and the way she puts her body when she stands there, he said. Now I’m looking at your face. Lookie here, he said. And he reached into his baggy trousers and took out a brown envelope with a window in it. I thought it was one of the envelopes that they delivered the old men’s checks in. From inside of the envelope he took out about a couple of old pictures. Two were photographs of a kind they used to take a while ago, and one was a new kind of color one. Lookie here, he said, and he handed the pictures to me. The two older ones were not as old as I thought they were. They were pictures of him taken maybe ten years before that time.

He was standing with a couple of other men, in his mine gear, in front of the dark mouth of a mine shaft. The other one was more recent. He was alone in that one. Behind him were trees with sky above them; he was wearing Sunday clothes.

He just sat there and looked at me while I looked at the pictures, and after a while I started to feel a little fidgety, and I said to him, I don’t understand this business. Well, it’s this way, he said. You see the way I’m standing in that one, kind of leaning forward, pushing my face out at the camera? Now look at that young woman over there. You see what I mean? Now you can’t see it, but in this other one I’ve got a face on that’s somewhat like your face is when you sit up here and look around. Now we don’t look alike, you know, and I don’t look like that young woman. But we’ve all got these ways of standing and looking around inside of us somewhere.

I thought he was going to continue on there, but he didn’t. He just stopped talking and looked at my face. I began to get it then. I looked back at the pictures and at the young woman, and I could see it. And I could remember seeing my own face in a mirror, and when I looked up at him, he put his face to the side, so that I could see his cheek and the curve of his nose, and he squinted out a bit. This last move of his was a little funny, but it was not really so. I could really see what he meant. He was copying me looking around, but I got it that he couldn’t have done that if he hadn’t had the way of doing it inside of him when he did it.

Now look around, Melinda dear. You can find a gesture of yours, or a way of setting your head, or a hand manner while talking. Maybe in that man over there or those two kids playing around there. Maybe that dog does something familiar to you that you might have done, that can give you a laugh or two. When dogs run in packs sometimes in summer evenings, sniffing around and going into yards and gathering, inquisitive beyond their good reason, they might do what you did as a child way back and maybe you can see something in it. And though it might seem farfetched to say it, it may be there are things to find that are going to stay here a while after you are no longer staying here even in these trees around here and the way maybe some of the stones here have been made as they are over time by the same kinds of things that contacted you during this time that you’ve been here: sun, wind, cold weather, saltwater. That is a long thing to say, and it winds me, but maybe now you could look up here and into my face some.

She did look into his face then, lifting hers from his shoulder. She had been looking where he suggested by his words that she look as he spoke to her. She turned some in her seat, facing him, and he released her but kept his hand on her shoulder, his forearm touching her neck. When her eyes got to where his face was, he smiled slightly, and then he slowly turned his head to the side, into profile. He kept his eyes in her eyes as he moved his head, making sure that she was watching, only releasing them when his head was almost fully turned. Then he pursed his lips and raised his chin a little. It was a thing she did often, she realized, when she saw him do it, when she was looking at things she felt some mild disapproval about, and as he did it she laughed lightly in a warbling way, pressing back against his forearm with her neck. Then, without turning his head back, he lifted his other hand from his lap and placed a finger beside his nose and slowly traced an age line that ran from it down to the corner of his pursed mouth. She lifted her own hand and felt a similar line in her own cheek, shallower and less mature, but running the same way. Then he turned back to her.