Robert Coover - John's Wife

Here, meanwhile, are some other photos from Gordon’s albums, taken over the decades of his career as the town photographer: (1) On the sidewalk in front of the wide plateglass window of a simple one-story stucco structure filling the space between two older two-story buildings, one of brick, the other covered with imitation stone siding, a woman turns back to watch her leashed dog, a terrier of some sort, sniff at the sidewalk sandwich board announcing a turkey meatloaf and “cheese spuds” special, together with (“Hey Sweet Stuff!”) homemade green apple pie with a cinnamon crust “all la Mode.” The rainbowed lettering on the plateglass window reads SIXTH STREET CAFE, and there are two or three indistinct faces behind the window looking out, one wearing a baseball cap. Posters in one corner of the window announce the junior class play and the high school football schedule. The woman, slender, young, or probably young, is dressed in light wool slacks, turtleneck sweater, and an open anorak, and is watched by an older square-headed man in droopy white overalls with a clipboard in his hands, who stands with his back to the camera at the right of the picture, near the hood of an old Ford pickup parked at the curb; he seems to be taking inventory of the items in the window of the hardware store beside the cafe. A sign above the handle of the cafe door between them, clearly legible, says GIMME A PUSH, I LOVE IT! The glass of this door has been cracked and taped. The building on the left of the picture, the one with the artificial siding, has a sign in its window that says CLOSING DOWN SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO! but this sign may have been there for some time; the building itself looks long since abandoned, casting an eerie shadowy emptiness on that side of the picture toward which the woman and dog are proceeding. The photo would appear to have been taken with an ordinary 50mm lens from across the empty oil-stained street, perhaps through a window. (2) A dark shallow puddle in what looks like an alleyway pothole reflects the corner of a brick wall or building and a creosoted pole, probably a light pole. In the stripe of pale light between these two imaged objects, rising (or falling) in their reflections like canyon walls, the surface of the puddle is broken by the tips of three larger stones, barren islands in the puddle’s dead flat sea. Bits of litter — cigarette butts, a bottle cap, gum or candy wrappers — lie scattered randomly about the rocky shores of this miniature sea like unplanned settlements, or their ancient remains, for nothing here seems alive. The only object in the photograph out of scale with this modeler’s perspective is the twisted bicycle wheel, its spokes broken and bent, only partly seen at one edge of the picture. It is vaguely abrasive, an irritant, like one idea rubbing up against another. It suggests that there is another picture, incompatible with this one, lying outside the one being seen; it suggests that there is always another picture lying outside the one being seen, that the incompatibility is irresolvable. (3) In a supermarket, a woman, possibly the same woman seen with the dog in the previous photo, though with longer hair now and dressed in pedal pushers and a sleeveless flowered blouse, squats to eye level with a small boy. Together they hold a tin can of something. Perhaps she is giving it to the boy to put into the shopping cart overhead. Or perhaps the boy has taken it off the shelf and she is putting it back. Her hair falls loosely over her back and bare upper arms, revealing more by seeming to conceal, just as her summer clothes, decorously loose-fitting, conceal as they seem to reveal: even where the heel of her shoe digs into one cheek of her buttocks, for example, there is no hint of the flesh beneath the cloth. The near aisle, the woman and the boy, the shelves behind them, the aisles beyond, all seem to be on much the same plane, suggesting the use of a telephoto lens. Into which the small boy is, wide-eyed but without expression, staring. (4) A heavy man in a plaid shirt and workpants sits on a straightback wooden chair in what seems to be the timbered inside of a rude garage or workshed. There are rough-hewn shelves overhead on which sit a row of gallon paint cans, most showing thick dull drips down the sides, though some with fresh spatterings, and next to them are crusted bottles of turpentine, small cans of stains and varnishes, a galvanized bucket half-concealing an old license plate pinned up behind it, and at the edge of the frame, a grimy dried-out fruit jar with the wooden handles of paintbrushes sticking out like black rabbit ears. The wooden wall beneath is damply stained as though a can of dark paint had been thrown at it. An old truck tire hangs there, draped by the twisted coils of a rubber garden hose, so long hooked on that spot above it that it comes to a sharply creased V over its nail. The man holds a double-barreled shotgun between his legs with unmistakable suggestiveness, stock between his knees, thumbed triggers at the crotch, barrels in his mouth. The top of his head is gone, though bits of it can still be seen on the underside of the shelves above and on the wall and elsewhere. The license plate with its meaningless sequence of letters and numbers seems to serve or to wish to serve as a kind of title for this photograph, but the title of the thick album in which it is archived is “The Environment of Violent Departure.” (5) The front of the photographer’s own shop, seen from the front corner, has been stove in by a panel truck belonging to the town paint and wallpaper store, according to the princing on the side. The truck, rearing up on its back wheels like a springing animal, is about halfway into the shop, and glass and photos and other odds and ends lie scattered about like bomb debris, but the driver’s seat is empty. A short stout policeman in shirtsleeves, suspenders, and gabardine twill trousers tucked into polished boots, back to the camera, ponders the mess with hands on hips, the closely shaved roll of fat on the back of his neck, under the cap, faintly flushed as though with exertion. The two top-floor windows have been shattered as well, and in one of them a young woman stands, gazing placidly down upon the policeman, her hands at her blouse buttons. The two windows are browed with decorative lintels and so give the whole building, with its crenellated parapet, hinged sign in the middle, and gaping mouth below, the look of a startled human face, obscenely assaulted.

Mad Daddy Duwayne. Just went berserk that day Pauline moved out of the trailer and into the photographer’s flat above his shop. He turned up in the street outside, red-eyed and bristling with weapons like a maniacal one-man assault team, and started blasting away, as though the building itself was something alive he was trying to kill. Sometimes he howled like an animal, sometimes like a preacher, bellowing then about the Whore of Babylon and God’s great rod of wrath and the desecration of the temple, by which he probably meant the farewell message she had left scrawled on the toilet wall of the old trailer, and about the Day of Rapture (which he always pronounced as “Rupture”) coming to cleanse the earth of false prophets and graven images and other dreadful abominations, otherwise just bellowing. Of course, Pauline had heard it all before, especially about the rod of wrath and the black stinking pits of hairy hell, Daddy Duwayne’s theological specialties. She was alone in the building, Gordon having locked her in for safety’s sake when he went off to photograph the funeral of the doctor’s wife, and after her crazed daddy drove her away from the second-floor windows with his glass-splattering gunfire, spitting out his rabid thou-shalt-nots like foaming swearwords, she just went into the back bedroom where Gordon had been taking her picture, shut the door, and lay down on the old iron bed up there. She closed her eyes and listened to Daddy Duwayne carry on down in the street like it was the soundtrack from some old TV movie playing somewhere else, a trick she used to use in the trailer park to distance herself from his bruising exhortations. Sooner or later, she knew, he’d be in to get her and drag her out and then whip her down the street all the way home like he always did whenever she tried to run away. And she didn’t think the photographer would come to take her back either; nobody ever stood up to Daddy Duwayne, he was too crazy. The bare mattress she was lying on had a kind of stale antiseptic smell, strange to her but not unpleasant. A lot nicer anyway than the trailer’s garbagey old-socks stink with its infested floor-mat for a bed and its damp reeking toilet, small as a coffin, where he sometimes locked her up while he went out to spirit up the dead, as he called getting drunk. There was a long silence then, just like those times in the toilet. The shooting stopped. The shouting. Her hopes were not raised by this. She had learned long ago to distrust such peaceful pauses. She waited for the door to open and the bad part to begin. Instead there was a tremendous explosion and the whole building shook like maybe her daddy was right about it being the Day of Rupture after all, and she didn’t know if she fell off the bed or leapt off, but she found herself on the floor on all fours, gaping at the door which had popped open by itself and expecting anything to come through it, maybe Jesus himself, or even worse. Nothing did. There was just the slow settling of plaster dust all around. She heard sirens. By the time she had crept through the broken glass to the front window and peeked out, they were carrying Daddy Duwayne away from the smashed-up panel truck on a stretcher. Out cold but under guard. He hadn’t seriously hurt himself, as it turned out, but once they got ahold of him, they never let him go, so she couldn’t help but have a soft spot in her heart for Otis after that. Daddy Duwayne got charged with a whole catalogue of crimes, just about all the Commandments getting mentioned, and all of which he was guilty of many times over, except maybe the charge on this occasion of attempted murder, which was a little unfair. Her daddy knew how to shoot. If he had seriously wanted to kill something, he would have.