New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Television game show hosts -- Fiction
"There's nothing down to the end of this road," the cab driver said,
"It's a dead-end."
"So am I," Lennox grunted.
The road ended in a small circle of pits and ruts. Around it was half a
mile of dry brown marsh reeds rustling listlessly in the light breeze.
Beyond the marsh was the steel grey of Great South Bay. A rotting
boardwalk led from the circle to a large shack built at the edge of a
narrow creek that wound out through the marsh to the bay. The house
was weathered silver, the windows had long since been burst in, the
shutters had been blown away.
Lennox got out of the cab and walked down the boardwalk to the shack.
When he reached the door, his hand automatically lifted high to grasp
the doorknob. His lips twisted at this memory of the childhood flesh.
He lowered his hand, pushed the door open and entered. For a paralyzing
moment he thought his dead father was standing inside the house. Then
he looked closer and saw that it was a stranger, a tall, thin man with
white hair, fussing with a camera on a tripod.
"God has answered my prayers!" the photographer exclaimed. "Can I
trouble you for just a moment, sir? Look here...." He pointed. The
seaward wall of the house had collapsed. The marsh, the sea and the sky
were framed in broken, silvery timber ends.
"A perfect L composition. Verticals on the left; horizontals below. The
eye is led in to the middle distance from any corner. Quintessential
desolation. But there's a fundamental weakness on the right. You see
it?" The photographer darted to a heavy square stud and rapped it
sharply at the precise spot where Jake's slicker used to hang. "This
must be broken. What I need is a shoulder. Someone outside, leaning
against this post, staring out to sea. We don't see him, of course.
Just the part of the back and the shoulder carrying the eye back to the
center. You don't mind?"
The photographer led Lennox to the stud, positioned him, and rushed
back to the camera, chuckling and twittering. Lennox stood there,
staring at the marsh, the creek, the remnants of the dock where his
father's clam boat had been moored. He was filled with hatred and shame.
"Thank you, sir. Thank you so much," the photographer called. "If you
only knew how many weeks I've been waiting for this light. And then to
have you come along just in time.... What brought you, h'mm? Are you an
angel or a photographer?"
"I was born and raised here," Lennox answered. "As a matter of fact, I
think I own this place."
"My dear sir! Am I trespassing?"
"Yes," Lennox said. "We both are."
He returned to the cab and drove back to the Bay Shore docks. There he
sampled the Irish again until the pilot hurried him into the plane. He
had been phoning up and down Long Island and the fog was closing in
rapidly. By twelve-thirty when they were over The Rock again, it had
covered the river.
"We can't get in here," the pilot muttered.
"What do we do? Head for Spain?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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