Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

I didn’t say that my parents were there. I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed of them.

“He’s got a money machine up north,” said Mrs. Fritts. “But that’s all he’s got. Am I right, Biker?”

Mr. Biker, in his kiddie’s drawers, kicking his feet on the sofa, said in a high voice, “Something wrong with that boy!”

“Have you been over to his house?”

“Once a year. But that ain’t no house.”

Orrie came into the room, his fins flapping.

Mr. Biker said, “She wants to know about Carney.”

Orrie pushed his lips apart with his teeth and made a horrible face.

“See what I mean?” said Mrs. Fritts. “Now you keep away from there.”

Warning me about my own folks. I said, “I thought I might go down the coast to Boca Grande, too. Take some pictures. The sourbob trees. The old socks. The people crabbing.”

“What?” said Mrs. Fritts. She opened her mouth for my answer.

“The Indians and whatever.”

“That’s more like it,” said Mrs. Fritts. She spoke again to Mr. Biker: “She wants to go down to Boca Grande.”

“More like it,” screeched Mr. Biker. “But there ain’t nothing in Boca!”

He was wrong, of course. Boca Grande was a beautiful ruined town with sand on the tufty streets and crumble-marks all over the Spanishy buildings and decayed grillwork. In front of a grand old house a boogie-man sculpted a green urn in a hedge with his clippers. There were palms and clumps of hibiscus and fruit ripening in the still sultry air, and a fish and smoke smell that I badly wanted to photograph.

“Better shake a leg,” said Harvey, who had driven me down in his Nash with Hornette. “Looks like it’s going to rain.”

“Really?” I said, because it was sunny. But he pointed out the storm sliding darkly in from the Gulf like a blimp in a shroud. “I think I’ll wait for it.”

Harvey laughed and kept telling Hornette he’d never seen no photographer wait for no damn rainpour. When it started crackling on the tin roofs and swishing the shutters and flooding the street — so loud Harvey was hollering in my ear — I set up my Speed Graphic under a storefront’s awning and did the children on the opposite veranda watching the darts come down and the electrocutions overhead.

It was gone in minutes, leaving drops still streaking in shining threads, but by then it had turned into a Walker Evans, so I suggested we move on before it became an Ansel Adams. We went to the potash depot where there were boogie-men with rags on their heads. I did them walking among the palms, their bright footprints in the sodden sand. The rain had not seeped down far and just under the dark surface it was dry where their feet pawed it into patterns. They were rather silent, these blacks, and wouldn’t come near me, although they could see what I was doing.

Some of these depot pictures I planned as reading pieces, time exposures with secrets. There were bushes and trees and shadows, and I hoped they would appear as tropical landscapes, quaintly pretty coastal scenes. Then, only after the viewer started reading them would he see twelve black sentinels, some as stumps and some as trees; chickens, footprints, shacks; clutter that wasn’t flowers; potash dust, dead white, that wasn’t sand. Not a statement — no summary — but details leading onward to a jigsaw of episodes until everything that had looked familiar was strange. I used quaint arrangements to reveal depths of disturbance.

But I had sucked all the light out of it and after a while could not see it to save my life. Boca Grande didn’t exist anymore: it was in my camera.

“This is for you, Maude,” said Hornette as we got into the car. She gave me a candy bar she’d bought in town.

Harvey turned the car south, along a swampy road where reaching vines had yanked down the Burma Shave signs. I said, “Aren’t you going to have one yourself?”

“I got to take care of my teeth,” she said. She smiled nicely at me. “For my act. Sometimes I hang by them, see.”

She looked a bit embarrassed. It was the first reference she had made to her circus act.

Harvey said, “Circus folk got to look after their bodies. If you don’t you can get killed. It ain’t easy, down here in winter quarters. You get rusty. But Hornette, she looks after her body, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. And I had noticed how at Mrs. Fritts’s they didn’t smoke and drank only Doctor Pepper and cherryade and went to bed early. “But what if you want to have children?” I said. “What happens to your act then?”

Hornette giggled and Harvey almost busted a gut.

“Why, this here’s my little sister!” said Harvey, and he reached under her and pinched her bum.

Hearing that, and knowing they slept in the same room, probably the same bed — why not? — I grew melancholy and remembered Orlando. I envied them their happiness until I realized I was doing this for him. At the end of all this picture-taking lay Orlando.

“Where are we headed?” I said.

“Gator farm,” said Harvey. “You never seen nothing like it.”

I said, “But this is all fantastic. It’s wild. No one’s in charge here.” and I thought: Those water lilies aren’t getting paid by Jack Guggenheim to gleam, so why should I?

“You can show them Yankees what a wild old place this is,” said Harvey. “They won’t believe their eyes.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Beautiful looking ,” he said, driving slowly and regarding the swamp. “But people go in there for a weenie roast and you never see them again. It swallows you up. Don’t it, Hornette?”

Hornette was saying “It sure is” and “It sure does” when I steered the conversation to Carney. They both went quiet and sort of exchanged glances without looking at each other.

Finally, Harvey said, “That Carney’s the worst.”

“That’s what everyone says, but how do you know?”

“He’s a shareholder. He’s bigger than Millsaps himself. But he’s a whole lot meaner.”

Hornette pushed her knees together and seemed to sulk.

“He’s putting up a tent,” I said. “In his yard. It’s one hell of a big tent.”

“That’ll be for the Pig Dinner,” said Harvey, but his expression betrayed nothing. Pig Dinner? I thought he might say more. He didn’t. A few miles further he pulled in beside a painted shed and said, “Here we is.”

The rain had been here and passed on leaving puddles and damp silk over everything. A muddy Indian — a Miccosukee of the Creek Nation — splashed over to us and while Harvey bargained with him I went with Hornette for a look at the alligators. Big and small, they were submerged to their nostrils in a filthy pool. They were watched over by some Indian children in rags who looked away when I did them. Harvey joined us and said, “You choose one, Maude. It’s your treat. Pick a fat one.”

They were well made, with thick seams and rivets and stitches and plates, and dragon spikes on their tails. I chose a likely one, and the children slipped ropes around its snout and dragged it into a shallow slimy pit where a Miccosukee stood in his underdrawers.

“What’s he going to do?”

“Rassle it,” said Harvey. “Look at them bubulous eyes.”

The Miccosukee kicked it in the belly and danced around it in the mud until the alligator lowered his head and came at him. Dodging the jaws, the Indian got down beside it and flipped it over like a log: it resisted for a second, then trembled and clutched the Indian gently in its glove-like feet. There was no strength in its shimmying or even the flop of its fat tail. The Indian grunted and changed his grip. He was not wrestling the alligator but simply punishing it with his greater cunning, and this was what I wished to show in my picture — the unequal struggle: the crusted mud on the Indian’s back making him look like a hideous reptile, and the cracked white belly-flesh of the alligator, and the loose skin at its throat, the human pouches of its defenseless underside.