On a brisk October evening, something other than a crushed beer can sparkled at me as I walked my dog down Whiskey Road near the creek. Usually the caliche road is nothing but shades of grey, white, and brown, with the occasional splash of a blood stain or silver and blue aluminum. That night, I spied something black and white and purple.
We stopped, of course, the dog and I. Novelty doesn't come often enough for us out here. It was a photo strip, one of those series of pictures that are taken in a booth, the kind you find in some bars, amusement joints, and my personal favorite: at an ice cream store in the big city. The booth's occupants in this case were a couple, a young man and woman, who were obviously pretty tickled with each other. Possibly even tickling each other, judging from the shots.
We'll call them Bubba and Cissy.
They were both smiling in every frame, although Bubba appeared a tad more stoic than Cissy in two instances. He stayed in place, squarely on the bench, while her image moved from beside him, to overlooking his forehead, then to his other ear, and of course, the standard side-by-side-ear-to-ear-grins-with-your-eyes-too-wide shot. Nothing unusual in this strip of pictures, nothing naughty. But its location, on the side of a dusty country road, was poignant.
Did it fly out the truck window as they sped away from the dancehall, down the hill toward the slow-moving creek? Perhaps Cissy and Bubba quarreled soon after their happy photo booth lark. Had Cissy walked the same path I do every day and discarded this souvenir of a night she wanted to forget? Was Bubba one of the guys who gather in the ravine next to the creek, scattering glass and aluminum remnants of what young men do, and did he cynically toss it after being teased by his buddies?
Maybe the couple met here, at the creek with its barely audible gurgle, banks of lily pads, and stumbling turtles, to talk one last time. Bubba offered to return the photo strip she'd left in his truck. Cissy insisted he hang on to it. He reckoned there was no safe place to keep these images that reflected his longing. All the reminders he'd ever need were branded in his brain. He wished even those would evaporate.
So there it lay the next day. Light and film and paper and carefree smiles, covered by more dust with each passing pickup.
Even in The Sticks, on roads that see maybe 20 vehicles on any given day, things don't stay the same for long. When I returned the next day with a camera -- to get a shot of the sad little purple and black and white memento -- all I found in the waning light of sundown on the colorless road was blue.
Bubba and Cissy were gone.
Postlude:
Turns out the end of the story came a week later.
Another day, another jog down Whiskey Road, and out of the corner of my right eye, there it was: the photos of Bubba and Cissy had returned. I excitedly dragged the dog back to the house to fetch my camera and raced back to avoid losing my story’s inspiration again. Shooting photo after photo of the images, I realized all the details I’d conjured up incorrectly in my first account. The “purple” cast was more pink. There was no black, only deeper magenta.
But even more intriguing to me was how I’d remembered the couple’s faces – and been wrong. With digital shots to aid my memory, I saw no stoicism in Bubba’s smile. Cissy’s face didn’t seem to be clamoring for attention. They were both simply looking at the camera, faces side-by-side, occasionally caught off-guard with half a grin, but smiling every time.
I was tempted to take the strip home with me (my folks will laugh and recall how I rummaged through neighbors’ garbage for usable room décor), but it seemed to me that Bubba and Cissy are destined to be together forever down by the creek on Whiskey Road.
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