Allegories of the Tarot Read Free Page A

scarf on her head and her teeth in a glass of water glared at us
over an Olympian selection of thirty-two different bingo sheets. The jowly caller taking off his cowboy hat and wiping sweat from
his brow on one sleeve. A black man in patched jeans and a pressed shirt, disappointed that he didn’t have a good bingo after
all.
    Not Eisenstaedt’s photos of V-J Day in Times Square or
Sophia Loren, but solid stuff, real humanity distilled onto film. Hansom Haddix
wanted none of that.
    Bored, I wandered to the snack bar and got a bottle of
Coke and a MoonPie. I really didn’t have the money for either. My ex-girlfriend
had wiped out my account to pay my share of the overdue rent and then dumped me.
(All of which had been about four hours after I told her I’d dropped out of
college to pursue my dream of being a photographer. You’re giving up a
marketing scholarship for THAT? I never got a chance to answer.)
    I walked back to the corner, realizing for the first
time that marshmallow could actually go stale. As I approached, a woman rasped
out “BINGO!” like it was her last breath.
    Hansom thumbed the shutter release button.
    He only shot one roll of film that night, just winners
and losers. No flash at all. Contrary to his usual habit, he took a single
picture of a scene before moving on to the next composition. “After each shot,
they hide. You have to be real particular and give them plenty of time to
forget you’re there before you take the next picture.”
    “Hmm.” I was too young and
maybe too worried for his sanity to engage him on this.
    Around eleven that night, we piled into the Chevy and
rode back to the motel we’d set up in. We drove under streetlights that had
been shot out, past boarded-up stores and three different First Baptist
churches, a slaughterhouse and a Rexall drugstore advertising two-for-one paper
towels.
    We’d rented two adjoining rooms. One of them we rigged
into a darkroom. Soon as we were inside, Hansom made sure the heavy black
fabric he’d stapled along the window frame and over the doors was still intact
and lightproof.
    Meanwhile, I got the temperatures right by floating the
gallon jugs of developer, stop bath, fixer, and clearer in a tub full of 68 ⁰ water . He came over to watch my work long
enough to be sure I did things correctly.
    I asked him again why we weren’t going to make any
prints.
    He dismissed the thought with a wave of his hand. “No
point.”
    “Then why did we take the pictures in the first place?”
    “Make prints later if you want. What’s important to see
is only on the negative.”
    Like so many of the things Hansom had told me today,
this made no sense at all. I let it go.
    Hansom took a quick inventory of where things were in
the room and switched off the light. I waited, smelling the vinegar stink of
the stop bath, feeling for the scissors and timer I’d placed on the motel’s
bureau.
    He had me withdraw the film, cut it, spool it onto the
reel, and put a lid on the developer tank. The lights blazed back on and we
both stood there blinking while I agitated the developer bath. Hansom kept
track of the time.
    “All the fancy new equipment we could be using, and we
might as well be making daguerreotypes. Is that what you’re thinking?”
    “Sir?”
    “I’ve seen the way you’ve reacted today. You think the
old man’s gone batty, don’t you?”
    “Not at all, I—“
    “Say it!”
    “I’m glad to be here, I’m not going to question your—“
    “Stop.”
    I stopped.
    “The stop bath, I mean.” His voice held an edge now. A
desperate tone had crept into his words. Something impatient and
very close to manic. I hurried to obey.
    Hansom didn’t speak another word until we’d finished
with the fixer, clearer, and distilled water wash. He snatched the strip of
film from me before I could hang it up to dry.
    “I started seeing them in my Las Vegas shoots,” he said,
inserting the still damp filmstrip hurriedly into the projector. His