by Addison Zeller
The Battlefield Photographer
He arrives with tools, a team of strong assistants, and a few who are less so, whom we could call apprentices, just as great artists were accompanied by apprentices who, for example, added a hand or a flower to their master’s painting, in the same way these youths attach a head or a leg.
He’s unfailingly kind. He pays for the lunches packed in their baskets. He smiles as they scamper beneath the gaze of his field glasses. To him, it’s like watching children build snowmen. Ruddy cheeks and out-of-breath antics. He pats his belly, laughs, consults his watch.
They arrange the subject according to his specifications, glancing up for signs of approval. His eye detects any compositional flaw. His nod rewards any corrective instinct. In high summer, it’s often necessary to swap one element for another, or realign a drooping head with the use of a rod, retractable, hooked, and easily insinuated into a nostril.
Apart from the camera and the studio accoutrements—solution bottles, honey-colored plates, spiking stands—they rely primarily on sets of measuring and alignment rods. With these rods strapped to their backs in tubes, they stumble over rocks and cornfields.
Sometimes they trip and skin their knees. He applies the ointment himself, and the bandage, and rubs the spot to make it better. It’s a familiarity he will allow. But when he thanks them, it’s as a group. It isn’t wise to single them out; they get high and mighty if you do. They strut around in front of each other. Sometimes even detach themselves to form separate companies, little flashes of light that appear and disappear with the summer heat.
He doesn’t resent them. It’s just another growing pain. Of course, he misses them, of course, he wishes they’d return.
Too often he views the disjected results in cluttered studios, where backroom doors open to reveal oxidized bedposts, attenuating wives, gray children.
In time, they grow desperate enough to procure uniforms, actors, and train tickets to some rural location, where they attempt a fraud. Without success! Actors never convey the right effect, or they produce a vulgar one, depending on the time of day, the heat, and their ability to resist the urge to pose.
When they return, as they inevitably do, slinking and cringing, he touches their shoulders, smiles indulgently, embraces them even, these dearly missed sons, straps the rods to their backs, speaks not a word. Watches intently, his smile fading, as they trudge across the snarled rocks and roots.
He parts the curtain and disappears into the camera. They stand back, upside down, to expose the assembled sharpshooter to the flash. A baby pine has sprouted between the spurs.
Incident Near Voronezh
First a local information service, then the national organs picked it up, official agencies of the highest party outlets, the heads of which were government ministers, their reporters junior civil servants. It arrived outside Voronezh in the midmorning. The local information official concurred with the schoolchildren’s report that it abruptly changed size, hovered over a copse of birches, and landed soundlessly in a hayfield north of the agricultural zone.
He had not witnessed the object himself, but when he arrived on the scene twenty minutes later, five after it left, he found scorch marks in the field and the air filled with mooing cattle.
Their aim was evidently apolitical, he said, adding, not without pride, that the visitors, who were slender and about six feet tall, had leaned for a long time on a fence, absorbing the view and seeming to remark to one another on the well-ordered fields of this agricultural zone, perhaps closing their eyes as they inhaled the midmorning air and smell of fresh-mown hay.
“If they had been Americans, as some of my colleagues allege, they would have taken out cigarettes to enjoy a calm smoke at this time, which they did not, taking out instead a pair of short, narrow tubes that they pointed without urgency, as if it were an act of dull routine, first at a cow, then at some dry furrows, and finally at a buggy clopping along in the fields. If the tubes did something, we don’t know what. We can only say that the visitors appeared to roll their shoulders, stretch their arms, touch their toes, and head back to the craft, which soon took off again, changed size, and slipped into the only cloud visible that morning.”
This matter-of-fact account, which appeared in all the approved organs, was followed over the weekend by a series of retractions—or qualifications, I should probably say.
According to the weather service of the University of Voronezh-Oblast, the afternoon had been drizzly; therefore, conditions were not precisely as they had been described, or had not remained so indefinitely.
The birch trees were examined by police officials, who upon climbing them could find no evidence that any branch had been clipped by a low-flying device, as one might have expected.
“Remember I have it second-hand,” said the local information officer, who had been strolling when it happened.
Upon inspection, the scorch marks proved those of a recently burned hay bale.
The local information official confessed he was surprised by the thoroughness with which the police officials investigated the birches and hay bale. He insisted, however, that the drizzle had been intermittent, as described in his initial report, which had obviously been pared down by the national media organs for reasons of style and concision.
“It astonishes me to see the vigor of these men climbing these trees,” he said, clicking his tongue as he folded his arms behind his back.
The police officials were amused by his comments. In fact, they had done almost nothing for days. They had to drag themselves out of bed to examine those trees. But of course they did not say this to him.
The Shooter
The Shooter is in the mountains: I saw the dogcart that carried him, the vast powder horn on the buckboard swaying, the rack of long rifles, the shoulders under a coat of skins, I don’t know what kind. Which is odd, because the buffalo is thoroughly exterminated here; the papers report it can hardly expect to exist at all, that particular species. It’s true, as men of science attest, that the will of a race must always bend toward survival—nothing but a dedicated plan of eradication from without can do much about that—but in the equation of distance alone, the chances now of an individual organism encountering another in all these mountains, attracting its attention across the wide valley, interrupted by so many jutting stones, and continuing, even by suicidal impulse, to join it, after who knows how many hours of effort, synchronized or otherwise, in a total copulation, which does achieve its typical purpose, the getting of a calf, and under the best conditions for getting a calf, its birth, and the subsequent ability of the calf to reach maturity, and the ability of the former calf, now mature, to encounter another in all these mountains, attracting its attention across the wide valley, are not statistically promising. A Shooter’s opportunities, then, can hardly be better, and in future seasons they will not exist at all. This must be an unendurable anxiety for the Shooter, and yet he carries on, paying his fare from territory to territory and watching the holes in his coat stretch out. Speaking as neither a shooter or a buffalo, I can’t understand such a dogged urge to persist, either as a shooter or a buffalo. In both cases, the stress must be immense, the nostalgia must tip into grief. The days of charging through long grass, delighted by the snort of comrades and confident in mating, are perhaps not even a memory for the species. The days of following the trail of the dead and sheared to your cart under the glint of a lantern must also feel remote. It’s strange how quickly it happened: when the Shooter was a child, the buffalo were infinite. The world’s nature changed suddenly—he could not have foreseen this. It’s said that out east they have no idea the buffalo is exterminated, word has only just reached them of that animal in the first place, its massiveness, its flavor, its superabundance, and it will be a long time, a lifetime, no doubt, before the truth is known, and it is finally understood to be limited, when even that’s incorrect: it is exhausted, but word has not reached them yet. In some respects, these are metaphysical concerns, to which we men of the west are sadly addicted. In a new country, one puzzles optimistically over one’s surroundings. Much the same happened to the Ancient Greeks when they discovered cubes. They were too young not to feel enervated by cubes. Here, nothing is really established yet, it is a fresh region of invigorating shapes, the buildings are of cheap materials, one looks back only a century or so, unless one is near a mountain, a pueblo, or a mound, but those hardly register for what they are, they’re too cubic, or in some cases conic. Of course, over time we begin to accept new concepts: the death of the buffalo, entropy, and so on. It’s no longer permitted in some houses to wear a hat at table, or rest your elbows there, or spit tobacco on it. Even the Shooter has learned to be polite in mixed company. He swears less frequently. He urinates with his back to others. He bathes if required to sleep in a hotel. He pomades his hair on Sundays. He’s hardly active at all when the moon’s oppressive, like a candle melting or a dog panting. He’s awake much of the time, dozing only restlessly, turning under his dark hides, not hot but uncomfortable, unrelieved, even if he sticks his extremities out in the black air. His nerves are exhausted. He lifts his rifle at a sound he knows is only a frog or an insect. Lonely gunshots follow, like a drunk singing himself home.
Addison Zeller lives in Wooster, Ohio, and edits fiction for The Dodge. His work has appeared at 3:AM Magazine, The Cincinnati Review, minor literature[s], and elsewhere.