Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

If Harvey hadn’t encouraged me I would not have taken the picture. But he saw it as his favor to me. I could not disappoint him. I felt terrible taking those pictures, for the Indian had seen my camera and he started overdoing it, tormenting the exhausted creature, and I thought: I didn’t come all this way for people to pose for me.

The pictures were fakes, they dignified the Indian, they gave him a dragon slayer’s drama. If I’d had the nerve I would have taken a picture of the alligator slithering headlong in terror back to the safety of its pool, or the Indian sticking his muddy claws out for Harvey’s five bucks.

“What I’d like to see,” said Harvey in the Nash again, “is some old gator eat one of them rasslers.”

“That’s more like it,” I said. “What about Carney instead of an Indian?”

“Then we’d be out of a job,” said Harvey.

“That’s what I want to be,” said Hornette. “Out of a job.”

Harvey glared at her and said, “Shut it, honey.”

“I’m told he’s a patron of the arts,” I said.

“If arts means hell-raising, he’s a patron all right,” said Harvey. He parked at a roadside stand. “Want an ice cream?”

Hornette and I stayed in the car while Harvey went for the cones. I wanted to know more, but didn’t know where to begin. Like the others at Mrs. Fritts’s they were not very bright, and yet their combination of good will and guilelessness made them appear more mysterious than they really were, as if they were hiding something. Simple good humor can look like the ultimate pretense.

“No one likes Carney,” I said, groping for an angle.

Hornette shook her head.

“The Pig Dinner,” I said. “What in hell’s the Pig Dinner?”

“It’s coming up.”

“Ever been to it?”

“Honey,” said Hornette, “we’re it !”

“Tell me then.”

“You never seen nothing like it,” she said. “There ain’t nothing like it.”

“That’s what Harvey said about the alligators, and I didn’t think much of them.”

“This is worse than the gators. I couldn’t tell you about that Pig Dinner if I wanted to. There ain’t words for it, or if there is I don’t know them.”

“Indescribable?”

“You said it.”

“Just the thing for my friend here.” I patted the Speed Graphic on my lap.

Hornette closed her eyes and said “Yipe!”

“You can help me,” I said. “You will, won’t you?”

But before she could reply, Harvey came back to the car with two cones. He gave one to me, and after licking the ice cream from the other he passed Hornette the empty cone to crunch.

“You go on and eat, Maude,” he said. “We got to look after our bodies.”

FLORIDA’S HOT EYE was shutting on the Gulf, confining us in a black after-image. We were on the porch, sitting together on the glider, kicking the floor. The regular swinging was like thought.

Hornette said, “You don’t know what you’re asking, girl.”

“What am I asking? Tell me, and I won’t say another word.”

She gave the porch an emphatic kick. “Carney don’t want you to see it.”

“That’s the point,” I said. “That’s why I want to.” Hornette considered this. She said, “I can’t help you.”

We rocked in blind night.

“So you do everything he says.”

“I do not,” she said crossly, making her eyebrows meet.

“Then help me,” I said. “Get me in — or else tell me what I’m missing.”

“I ain’t talking,” she said. She braked the glider by stomping on the porch. She looked around, then whispered, “You’ll have to see for yourself. But it sure ain’t going to be easy.”

The next morning, Mr. Biker knocked on my darkroom door. “Maudie!”

“Don’t come in — I’m processing!”

“There’s someone wants you out on the porch.”

I finished off the negatives (Boca Grande, alligator wrestler, swamps, and a nice one of a dog in a green celluloid eyeshade being walked by a tubby man wearing the same get-up on his head). Downstairs, I saw Mama on the glider.

“Maude,” she said, “who was that extraordinary man?”

“That’s Mr. Biker.”

“Is there something wrong with him?”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“He’s terribly small,” she said. She frowned at the porch. “If I’d known it was like this I would have made other arrangements for you.”

The voice of the patroness; but I let it pass. “I like it,” I said. “I’m going to town here. I’ve fixed up a darkroom in the attic. Mama, why are you dressed like that?”

She wore smoked glasses, a wide-brimmed hat and gloves. Instead of her usual handbag she was carrying a wicker basket.

“This is my traveling outfit. I’m taking a trip,” she said. “Coral Gables. That’s why I stopped in — I thought you might want to come along.”

“What about Papa?”

“He never comes.”

“You’ve been there before?”

“Every year,” she said. “Papa stays behind for the dinner.”

“Why don’t you go to the dinner?”

“Don’t be silly.” She tightened the strap on her basket. “It’s all men. I wouldn’t like it. It’s just Carney and his men friends. Besides, we’re not allowed. The Pig Dinner’s famous for that.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“That’s how special it is,” said Mama proudly. “Now how about it? Coral Gables — just the two of us.”

Come on, daughter , she was saying. Put that old camera aside and start living . But I had made my choice.

“No thanks.”

After she went away Mr. Biker looked rather curious, as if he wanted to ask who she was. I wanted to be spared having to deny that she was my mother, or to explain that I had taken this trip to prove to my parents that I wasn’t theirs. If he had asked, I would have said, “She’s another Guggenheim.” He didn’t ask. He was small, but he was a real gentleman.

And he had, as I saw, other things on his mind. A change had come over the boarders. The people who had been so nice to each other, and just grand to me, got in the grip of a kind of tension. They quarreled, complained to Mrs. Fritts, slammed doors, that sort of thing. Brainless anger: they weren’t smart enough to argue, so they banged. Mrs. Fritts said nothing. When there was trouble, she studied the messages on her poker-work mottoes. One lunchtime, Digit smacked a ketchup bottle so hard with the finger he used in his act it flooded his scrambled eggs in red goo. He cursed it and flung the whole plate out the window, which mercifully was open. Then he went off, banging.

“He jess thew it out the winda,” said Orrie.

“Shit on him,” said Mr. Biker. He picked up the ketchup bottle, and seeing that it was nearly empty, said, “We ain’t got but one of these.”

“Don’t mind them,” said Mrs. Fritts, taking her eyes from YE ARE OF MORE VALUE THAN MANY SPARROWS. She breathed at me, “It’s the Pig Dinner.”

Mr. Biker looked smaller, Orrie more mangled, Digit fretful and foul-mouthed. The acrobats paced back and forth and threw themselves into chairs. This was the frenzy of circus folk; I had forgotten they were performers. Under pressure they had become grotesquely grumpy; they carried violence around with them; there was a threat of danger in their silences. And they excluded me: it was like blame, as if I represented that other world, the public, and was responsible for them making fools of themselves. At night, in my darkroom, I heard shouts and the sound of crockery smashing and “I ain’t doing it!” and “You gotta!” and little wails, like a child trapped in a chimney.

For my own peace of mind I printed pictures: Boca Grande, the boogie-men, the rain, Green Eyeshades; and when I heard the screeches I turned on the faucet hard to drown them. It was so strange: the loud footfalls in my ears and those peaceful footprints in my pictures. But that contradiction showed me how far my work had diverged from my life. “You still serious?” said Hornette the next evening.