Evidence

I woke up on my eleventh birthday to the sound of my father whistling. It was a rare thing to hear, and I came out of my room to see.

He wasn't in the house; he was out front cleaning the barbecue. Mom was laughing and joking with him, wincing only a little when she smiled, on account of the bruises on her eyes and cheeks.

She saw me peeking through the door and waved me over. I ran across the grass to her, but my father intercepted me. He said, "There's my birthday boy. Come here, Cody. Come here, Pudge," and hugged me. He smelled smoky and a little bit like beer, but I looked over his shoulder and saw he was still only on his first can. When I hugged him back, Mom smiled, her eyes wistful, the way someone smiles when they remember something nice about someone who’d died.

My father grilled corn and hot dogs and hamburgers that day. He sneaked up on us and took a picture while we ate. We laughed when he did, our mouths full of corn. It was a good day.

Mom printed the picture on the computer that night and gave it to me, and I pinned it on my bedroom wall.

Evidence

“You know where Lindsborg is?” Charlie asked. They had been talking for a couple hours, ever since Cody had decided not to shoot him dead on the porch.

Charlie had pulled off the highway around midday. He’d walked through the grass to reach the house, where Cody had waited for him with a shotgun cradled in his arms. Charlie had stopped at a respectful distance, his hands raised, and talked to Cody. It had taken Cody a little bit to answer, because he had become unused to talking out loud, but it wasn't so hard to remember in the end, and it came back to him quickly enough.

After a time, Cody sensed a kindness in Charlie and put the shotgun down. Now they were smoking three-year-old Marlboros and drinking warm Coors.

“Lindsborg? No,” Cody said.

“It’s in Kansas, settled by Swedish immigrants in the 1870s. My wife went there with her parents when she was a girl. She told me she loved it.” He sipped his beer and smacked his lips. He looked at the can and sighed, then took another drink, deeper than the last. “So, one Friday, I packed our luggage, picked her up from work, and told her we were going to Lindsborg.” He smiled. “It took us ten hours to get there, driving straight through. We listened to of CCR on that trip. You remember Creedence Clearwater Revival?”

“That an old band? I was twelve when the Change came.”

“Yeah. Yeah, they’re an old band. But I guess they’re all old bands now. So, you’re, what, fifteen?”

Cody shrugged. He didn’t know.

“Do you remember your birthday?”

“June 3rd, 2018.”

“Okay, so you just lost track. Today’s June 18th, 2033. You’re fifteen.” Charlie grinned and raised his beer can. “Happy belated. Cheers.”

Cody raised his own in imitation. “Thanks.”

“So,” Charlie said, “We got there at five in the morning, but we didn’t go to the hotel. We parked on Main Street, got out and explored. We looked in some shop windows and found a café that opened at eight. Cate found these checklists in a visitor’s kiosk, for a kind of scavenger hunt to locate these things called Dala Horses.”

“Dollar horses?” Cody asked.

“’Dalas’. No ‘R’. They were wooden horses that Swedish lumberjacks used to carve for their kids as toys. They were a big deal in Swedish culture. Lindsborg commissioned twenty-one of them—big ones, as tall as your chest—and placed them all over downtown. They gave them names like Salvador Dala and Dalalama Dala.”

Cody had no idea what those names meant, but they made him smile.

“The checklists,” Charlie continued, “listed all the horses, and challenged you to find them. Cate had us running around until eight. She wouldn’t give up until we’d found every last one. She was like that—obsessive—about everything. She didn’t know how to leave a thing undone once she’d started.”

“I bet that drove you crazy.”

“Sometimes,” Charlie said and smiled, a little sadly. “In a good way.” He paused for a few seconds, wiped his eyes. “We had breakfast when the café opened. Cate read to me from the visitor’s guide, talking about things we could do later. We went to a shop where they made Dalas—small ones. The shop owners put on a Dala-carving demonstration, then they let us pick one to paint and name. Cate named hers Dala Walla Washington.

“We walked around for a while after that, checked out an antique shop, a couple gift shops. We found an art gallery, filled with large, framed photos. They were all taken by a photographer named Jim Richardson. He worked for National Geographic.”

“National Geographic," Cody said. He knew that one, had found a copy when he looted a doctor's office in Bartlesville. The picture on the cover was of gorillas. "So were they pictures of animals?”

“A few. Most were of people and places. Ordinary stuff, like people sitting down to eat dinner, or a kid getting a haircut in a small-town barber shop, or a bunch of wildflowers in a field. One was of a guy sitting on a horse. But they weren't ordinary, you know? The way he did the lighting, or the angles he used--or... something he did, anyway--made them special. People, especially. He was great at taking candid shots of people." He paused. “He made you take notice of them; I mean, really see them. Like if they disappeared the next day, they would still live forever inside the pictures. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Cody said.

“We spent all day there," Charlie said. "We bought a bunch of the photos and had them framed. Mr. Richardson—Jim—was there, along with the gallery manager, and he talked us up for a while, telling us the stories behind the photos we bought.”

“That’s cool.”

“Yeah. He took a picture of me and Cate, too. We didn’t know he was going to do it. He’d left us while we were waiting for our photos to be framed, saying he needed to get something from the back. Cate and I were talking, and I said something that made her laugh. She had the best laugh. Her head would tip back, eyes closed, mouth opened—and it was like her whole face lit up. She was so pretty.” He paused. “And…and I had this lopsided grin on my face—I was so proud of myself for making her laugh—and I reached out to touch her arm, and that’s when Jim snapped the shot.

“He offered to develop the picture and hand it over to us before we left town. Cate said no. She wanted him to blow it up and frame it. He told her that would take a day or two, and she said that was fine. And she pulled our credit card out and paid for it right then and there. She said to take his time and just hold onto it; picking it up would be our excuse to drive out again another time.

“We left around closing time, strolled through downtown and looked through store windows, then went to dinner at the main restaurant there, The Swedish Crown. We had Swedish meatballs and dill potatoes with lingonberry sauce on the side, chocolate pie for dessert. Everything was delicious.

“After dinner, we checked into our motel. We’d been awake for thirty-six hours, but we stayed up and showered and watched T.V. for a while. She fell asleep in my arms during the eleven o’clock news.” Cody nodded, but Charlie didn't notice; he was smiling, his eyes far away. “I smelled the motel shampoo—one of those little sample bottles—on her hair. It smelled like honeysuckle. I took one of them with us when we left.”

“My dad used to say that motel stuff was cheap,” Cody said, then he felt bad for saying it.

If Charlie took offense, he didn’t show it. “Oh, yeah, sure it is,” he said, and grinned. “It didn’t matter, though. It was about the memory,” and he tapped the side of his head with one finger. “Like with the pictures we bought that day.

“On the drive home, Cate said she felt guilty about how much we’d spent on the pictures. I told her it was worth every penny.

“I told her they were our evidence of a perfect day.”

Cody suddenly felt very lonely. More than he felt over years of being alone, eating cold beans, coughing stale cigarette smoke, hiding from men with guns, buried under layers of blankets and Mom’s old sweaters in an unheated house during the Oklahoma winter.

“When you told her that,” he asked, “What did she say?” He found himself needing to know, hoping it was something sweet. Something loving.

“She didn’t say anything. She cried a little,” Charlie said, “Then she smiled at me like I was the only person in the world. We were doing 65 on a mostly empty freeway and she leaned across from the passenger seat and rested her head on my shoulder, and I smelled the honeysuckle smell on her hair. She rested it there for a while, then sat back in her seat and fell asleep, still smiling.”

He fell silent after that, looking into his hands. He was quiet for a long time. Cody didn’t know what to say, so he just waited quietly. After a while, Charlie said, “I’m starting to forget things about her.”

Cody lit up a cigarette and smoked it slowly. The silence between them stretched. He smoked the cigarette down to the filter, rubbed it out on the porch and flicked it away. “You going back?” he asked. “For the picture?”

Charlie nodded. He looked around him, across the acres of dead fields, at the deserted highway, at Cody’s decaying house. “You could come with me if you want,” he said.

“No,” Cody said. He didn’t know how to be with people anymore.

Charlie studied him, then nodded. He stood, brushed the dirt from his pants and walked to his car.

He returned with a camera and a tripod. Cody raised an eyebrow, dubious.

“It’s a Polaroid, one that has a built-in timer,” Charlie said. “Self-developing. I thought they’d stopped making them, but I found this one in a house in Tulsa. It works.”

It was close to dusk, and they were losing light, but Charlie figured out the right shot. He set the timer and ran to where Cody stood.

Charlie said he had set it for thirty seconds, but it snapped after ten. Cody wasn’t ready—cigarette still in his mouth, not smiling but on the verge of smiling--and jumped when he heard the snap.

Charlie winked. "Gotcha," he said and smiled, retrieving the photo and handing it to Cody.

Charlie asked Cody if it would be okay to hug him. Cody didn't know how to answer this at first and moved back a step. But when Charlie nodded and made to leave, Cody stopped him and told that that would be okay.

Charlie embraced him. It was the first time Cody had touched another human being since he was thirteen, since his mom died, and he cried for a while. Charlie held him until he was done.

"I'll stay there for a while, in Lindsborg. I’ll spend my days at Jim Richardson’s shop, so you’ll know where to find me," Charlie said. "In case you change your mind."

Then he headed to his car. Cody watched him as he drove away, until he disappeared into the skyline.

Cody looked at his photo, shook it to help it develop faster. If it was a good shot, maybe he’d pin it up next to the one of him and Mom, their mouths full of corn.

Or maybe he’d pack both pictures in a backpack and get in the Chevy and drive to Kansas.

He lit another cigarette, looked into the darkening red sky. He shook the picture again. It was almost done developing, clarifying itself in the last light of day.