Photo Machine
thomas wells
“... On page 146, chapter four begins. And for those of you who were not listening, we are looking at the One Nation text. It is vitally important that we all follow along in the oral reading because there just may be little quiz over this.”
Groans were heard and supportive groans echoed the sentiment. Miss Rand paused for emphasis while the coarse brown surfaces of desks were lifted and the noise of 5th graders foraging through papers and books filled the room. Her eyes followed the sounds of breathy voices like magnets.
Dale enjoyed staring out the window like a deer. The soft cheeky head turned on the thick torso and the brown eyes seemed tired. He seldom looked at any particular thing outside, just the totality, but he had become thoroughly acquainted with the playground. Dale thought the whole paved surface looked like an aerial photo of the desert. The glassy wet swings and jungle gym were mammoth H.G. Wells monsters over the map.
Miss Rand was giving him a wax-melting glare. How long had she been doing that, he wondered. Then he noticed someone reading out loud. Two or three seats in front of him, the reader wedged his face into the center of a book.
Dale fished for his book with great energy and frenetically leafed through the pages. It was vital that he make Miss Rand believe he knew what page the class was reading. Actually, he wasn’t even sure of the chapter, but to admit this publicly would have certainly been offering painful ammunition to public enemy number one.
She was still staring at him as he stopped arbitrarily in the text. Dale smiled as though he had found his place and that the discovery was magically enlightening. He tried to make his face appear attentive, methodically rolling his eyes over each line.
At last! She looked away. The muscles of his body relaxed like wet clay from a mold. He was surprised at how he had tightened them. The students before him rattled off the words in monotone solos. All the words seemed like pieces of concrete breaking away from high walls.
Amy Warner sat right in front of Dale. As she read, he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep bluffing much longer. A new strategy was required.
“I could do somethin’ real weird,” he whispered to himself. “Miss Rand expects it. Maybe she’ll even think it’s funny.” The class would forget about him being lost and remember only that he was funny today, he thought. Dale readied himself.
“... and so the next President of the United States was Andrew Jackson,” Amy read. “He was born and raised in...”
“a pig pen!”
He blurted with great force. A wave of laughter rushed from the back to the front of the room. Some of the children were rocking backing and forth in their seats. Others clapped their hands or stared at him in amazement.
Miss Rand had already jerked her head from the page and the sockets of her eyes were spread wide open like entrances to caverns filled with macabre descriptions. She slammed the textbook on her desk and the impact created such a horrid crash that all pleasure, all hope, and all human life were extinguished. The death terror was her power and the class agonized over the lingering punishment. She approached the demon.
“I can make this quiz a little longer if you like. Perhaps you would prefer to stay after school and take it.”
She thrust her jaw forward. Someone in front said no and a chorus of nos followed.
“Well then! Maybe you ought to at least TRY to act like normal, grown up 5th graders.
“When you get into the sixth grade, the teachers won’t put up with this! They simply will not tolerate it! And now, I won’t either!”
Everyone could tell that this last remark was the end of the first movement.
“As for you young man, you know I’ve tried to get you to work in this class. I’ve kept you after school to finish your work. I’ve sent notes home to your parents about your misbehavior. And it’s all been to no avail. You won’t pay attention. You don’t try. You scream idiotic remarks in front of everyone in class. You can’t keep your desk neat. You clown and misbehave in the lunch line. You forget your assignments! You...”
He examined his hands while the whole class focused in on him.
“ What do you think others think of you? Answer me! What do you think your classmates think of you?” “I don’t... I don’t know.” Dale’s cheeks were flushed as he answered.
“You don’t know, huh. Well, I’ll TELL you. They don’t have a whole lot of respect for you, my friend. Your classmates don’t think you’re very much of a man... Why can’t you be like anybody else in this class?”
She bent over his desk and stared at him as though he might have some relation to a strange micro-organism.
“Well, (sigh) I give up. I’m at my wit’s end.” She threw her arms around colorfully. “I’m sending you home.”
Dale tried to read the note pinned to his shirt pocket by the teacher, but since he was viewing it upside down, all of the letters just looked like fire. The class studied Dale more carefully than they had ever studied anything in that room.
With his final instructions he walked out of the door, and some of the children were not sure why they felt sorry for him. Others would talk at recess about how Miss Rand had been unfair that day. Many of them thought Dale was dumb for getting in so much trouble.
He couldn’t feel his feelings as he walked down the dark hall. He passed a hissing radiator and remembered that it would be cold outside. He dug his hands into his coat pockets fingering the mittens, and then pulled both of them out at the same time. The insides of his pockets stuck out like tongues.
Turning the corner, he counted all 23 crudely cut turkeys along the bulletin board so carefully displayed by the first graders. He caught a whiff of paste, passing by the door to the third grade class.
The teacher sang the song of instruction, a song every teacher learned somewhere. It was Mrs. Barnard. Dale was her pupil two years ago. She once told him that his drawings were very artistic and that someday he’d be a fine artist.
He was so proud of this that he told his mother who then saved all his artwork in a scrapbook. What would Mrs. Barnard think of him after this? Dale knew teachers communicated things secretly to other teachers. Would Miss Rand blab to his 3rd grade teacher about this mess?
“She probly will,” he said out loud.
That would probably make Mrs. Barnard change her mind about him being an artist. At first this thought jarred loose something that was liquid inside.
Then he whispered to himself, “Oh well, she would-a found out that I wasn’t so good sooner or lader. Yuh can’t fool people about yerself ferever.”
Pulling his coat collar up around his ears, he exited through the main doors. The cold drizzle which had formed lakes on his aerial map made him lonely and he decided to head for home.
Dale was relieved that his father was out of town and wouldn’t be back until late, but his mother would surely fly into a rage when she heard about this. She normally greeted him warmly at the door. Dale imagined the transition that would occur in his mother’s face as she examined the note pinned to his breast.
It would be like a high speed film of a rotting log. But he wouldn’t see his father until the next day, and so his father wouldn’t get nearly as mad. Dale’s problems in school were always subjects that required long talks with his father.
Dale was certain he couldn’t do anything worth doing, so he avoided quarrel with himself. He knew his father knew he wasn’t much good either, but his father always acted like he expected Dale to do better because Dale guessed that was what parents were supposed to do.
He wondered what the teacher meant when she said that the class didn’t think he was much of a man. She must be right, he thought, or else he’d know what she meant.
He thought about what men did: Men worked. Men were serious all the time. Men concentrated real hard about things, and men sweated at their work. Men were tough and NEVER afraid.
He was sure he wasn’t any of those things. Then remembering that sometimes he could be tough, he decided that this was probably a pretty good time to keep from crying. Ashamed to face his mother, Dale concluded that she would never say he wasn’t much of a man even though she d be thinking it.
There was one place that he could go where things would be all right. At the giant Buggs Drugstore on Kaswell Road in downtown Kaswell there was a photo machine. The machine amounted to a booth with curtains and a stool inside, in front of a camera lens. Dale had pretended to be on TV in the booth, and nobody bothered him very often.
The urge swelled inside him, leaving no room for worry. It would take him longer to reach Buggs than it would for him to simply to go home, but going home wasn’t so simple.
Kaswell was a busy street. Dale watched the traffic carefully, remembering when his mother wouldn’t allow him to come downtown alone. Buggs was a massive A-frame that sold a lot more than medicine. His father once said it was the biggest goddamn drugstore he d ever seen.
In the past, Dale had spent much of his time looking at toys and pets, never failing to purchase 4 or 5 pieces of caramel in the vast candy department.
The photo machine was near the small cafeteria where Dale could always smell French fries. They had big glass urns designed to show customers the orange juice and grape juice that was being squirted around in them.
He smiled to see his machine sitting silently in the corner, and checked his wallet to see if he still had the given him as lunch money for that week. He would do without his lunch, he resolved quickly.
The busy store streaked about him as he examined the snapshots on the outside of the booth. These were photos of handsome, smiling people. They must have had their pictures taken inside this photo machine because they looked like ordinary, handsome people and not like models, he thought.
Dale wondered how they arranged to have their pictures put on the walls of the booth. A layer of transparent plastic held them in place, and the poses were in sequence on narrow strips of paper.
He stepped into the booth and adjusted the curtains behind the stool. Then he moved the stool up, inserted a quarter in the slot, and sat down to face the tiny lens. It looked like a cold fish eye, but it was an audience to Dale. Below the lens was a red light which indicated when the photograph was being taken.
Waiting for the red light excited him all at once like a growing rush of applause. The photo machine was softly humming with an occasional mysterious click. The jerks and shifts of his chubby body became animated with thrill.
The bliss moved up and down his backbone, and the muscles in his round bottom were automatically tightened and relaxed, making him appear to bounce up and down on the stool. His cheeky face swelled with contentment and he now was the craziest clown that HE ever knew.
The red light flashed. He was on the air. Dale was ready with head cocked and mouth spread wide. His hands were held his eyeballs were rolled grotesquely upward. The light clicked off. He prepared for the shot by creating a new pose.
Knitting his brows, he thrust his chin forward, exposing his lower teeth. His neck muscles were pulled rigidly by their own strength. The eyes peering from the stiff face were those of a madman. The light flashed, the shutter opened, and it was recorded.
In his next contortion, Dale spread his cheeks into an inhumanly wide grin. His lips were stretched open and his teeth were clenched. Crossing his eyes, he pulled his ears out with his hands. Each frame recorded its own unique funny face until all the pictures were taken.
Dale s exhilarated giggle was filled with anxious prospect as he waited for the six photos to develop. As they finally appeared from an opening on the side of the machine, he was swept away with laughter.
The little body shook so hard that it bent over and propped a hand against the machine. The eyelids squeezed out the tears like holes in a juicy tomato.
There were more pictures that afternoon. One series began with nothing but the very top of his head. In the next picture his forehead and eyebrows appeared. By the third frame, his entire face emerged in full contortion. The fourth frame showed him sinking again, and in the last picture his entire head was gone. Only his hand and forearm were present, with the hand held upright appearing to grope at nothing.
Then Dale checked his pocket once again for any remaining change. He had been at his game for several hours and hadn’t realized how late it was. All his money was used up. There was no putting off the pain now, he had to face his mother. The clock at the cafeteria was terrifying but definitely registering 6:25, as he raced toward the doors and the darkened parking lot.
He stormed awkwardly up the front steps to his home, huffing and puffing from what seemed like the longest run of his life.
“Come in here Dale.”
The sound of his mother was like the dry earth before a storm.
“Oh (huff) hi Mom.”
“Come IN here son,” No, not his father!
“We want to talk to you.”
Both heads were now present at the glowing doorway. He hadn’t considered the possibility of his father coming home early. Dale felt like a fawn in a forest fire.
He used to be spanked; would he be spanked now? Sometimes they yelled at him; what kinds of things would they yell at him? He had failed again. He had hurt them.
“Hi Dad,” Dale forced.
The silent wrinkles of his father’s face were too weary to show his anger.
“Where is that note Miss Rand gave you?”
Dale felt his father’s words drill him. His mother shut the door with a firmness that underlined the shock. They knew everything. He couldn’t break the news slowly.
He had forgotten about the note. He unzipped his coat and looked down at his chest. It was gone. Only the pin hung from his pocket. How could he be so foolish, they asked. He confessed to every sin. He had done wrong that day at school. He understood that. No, he wasn’t very grown up for a boy his age. Yes, he was ashamed, very, very ashamed. The lecture lasted several hours.
Dale was sent to bed with no supper, there would be restrictions for the rest of the month. He had no stomach during the lecture, but once in his room he discovered his starvation.
It was true, he thought as he lay in his dark room, that he couldn’t do much of anything right. But he had always known that. He didn’t normally cause people this much trouble. He wasn’t one of Miss Rand’s “trouble makers”. Even though he couldn’t stand her, he wished she liked him more than she did.
Dale wondered if he would ever be able to accomplish anything. Maybe he could if he never did anything that was too complicated. Maybe he could be a ditch digger or something. Maybe he could just run away altogether, and find a place in the woods somewhere. It would be a place with nobody around, nobody to expect him to do or be anything.
Suddenly Dale rose in his bed. His parents were speaking in low tones over the sound of the television. A slit of light from under the bedroom door showed him his clothing. He dressed silently, and his movements were deliberate.
If he could just get back to that photo machine, he thought, everything would be o.k. He fumbled with his piggy bank for money, but there was nothing. Well, that was all right, he assured himself. He could borrow a quarter from somebody in the store. It would work out because it had to.
He grabbed his coat and slowly raised the squeaky window. Fear made him pause at the window ledge. Still toasty from bed, his skin quivered at first blush with alien night air.
Now it was only important that he return to the machine. If he had his picture taken one more time it would all be o.k. He had never run like this before and his lungs were filled with phlegm. As he coughed and puffed, he gave in to an impatient walk. His mouth and nose steamed under the street lights.
The dark continent of empty parking lot said it. He denied the dimmed store the reality of being closed. While he was straining at the door handles, the pale glow of glass counters inside made the shadowy photo machine undetectable.
Dale was pressing his face against the glass, flattening the softness of his face evenly over the surface. Slowly the image imparted clear moist splotches to the glass where droplets were released, tracing thin channels down the door.
