The Reckoning

light would have been painful if not for the checkered shawl draped across her head and shoulders. They walked in silence for another half mile or so, the straps of her camera bag creaking. The air smelled of water and sewage. The trail seemed to go on forever.

Then, far off in the sheets of heat, Molly caught sight of the gypsy man. By now she had no sense of direction, no idea where the road was or—looking back—where the excavators were harrowing the earth. She fastened on the gypsy as if he were a magnetic north. It felt like she was traveling in circles around him.

“There he is again,” she said, pointing.

Kleat squinted across the fields. “Him,” he said.

“Who do you think he is?”

“There are always stray dogs around the bones. I told the captain it was a mistake encouraging him. This is a recovery, not a lonely-hearts club.”

“Duncan said he might be a drug addict or the son of a missing soldier.”

An expression came onto Kleat’s face, as if she were joking. “But that is Duncan,” he said quietly.

She brought her camera up and telescoped the figure through her lens. There was the mane of brown hair and the sparkle of his steel briefcase. Duncan was walking along the top of a paddy wall with a long stick in one hand, poking at random.

She lowered her camera. “I didn’t know.” She couldn’t think what else to say.

A stray dog? Kleat didn’t make any attempt to apologize. She didn’t say anything. Suddenly she didn’t know whom to trust. In this flat land that seemed incapable of hiding anything, everything seemed concealed.

3.

It was a story to sweat and bleed for, and she did both over the coming weeks, down in the trenches, under the sun, earning her way into the family of them.

She was a photographer first, a writer second. The lens was her habitat. It was her sanctuary. Prose came more slowly. It always came after the picture.

The afternoon the Times editor called to assign her the story, Molly had gone straight to Mike’s Camera and maxed out her credit card on a digital Nikon with all the bells and whistles. She had wanted it forever, but could never justify the sticker shock, over $10,000. Now that she was going national, though, she figured the camera would pay for itself.

With digital you could edit the image and change the look, even turn color into grainy black and white, as she’d contemplated, to evoke a ’60s ’Nam-scape. It would give her the ability to mimic the great war photographers, Henri Huet and Tim Page and Larry Burrows and Kyochi Sawada and Robert Capa, all without lugging blocks of Velvia and Kodak through the tropical heat.

The camera was unlike any she’d ever owned. It was more than the usual sum of lenses, filters, and film, more than a boxful of memories. Its instant recall made it both a tool and a communal event.

On a hunch, she had brought a pair of five-inch barber’s scissors. Her dad—her stepfather—had been a barber. Never underestimate the value of a free haircut. The scissors paid in aces with the recovery team. People flocked to her tent in the evenings. While she trimmed their hair, they talked about music, sports, movies, and home. She shared anything they wanted to know about photography, from the rule of thirds to underexposing one f-stop for the midday glare. Also she showed them her camera, and that was the real icebreaker.

With a flip of a switch, they could see themselves the way she saw them. She flipped the switch. The display lit up.

Here was their dig, and in the distance nut-brown children wrestling on water buffalo, National Geographic country as far as the eye could see.

Here were the faces of RE-1, black, white, and brown, all rendered one color, the color of Cambodia’s dirt, the color of blood oranges. Here they mined the earth, here they shook it through screens with quarter-inch mesh.

Here was the captain in repose, toasting her with a bottle of warm grape Gatorade while he smoked his evening Havana and read one of her Vogue magazines. He was smart and freethinking, a postmodern soldier who reveled in not carrying a weapon, and lived to raise the lost souls from the dirt.

There was Kleat, a dead end. The brother angle would have been so sweet. But after the first week of him, she knew there was no way around his hatred of the people and the land. Kleat treated Cambodia like a curse or a disease. There was no way she could turn his bile into nobility, and so Molly had dropped him from her story and started framing her shots to exclude him.

And here was Duncan, who was not part of her story either. But she could not keep her camera off him; there was something she liked. Here he stared into a dark square hole covered with grid strings, like a scout about to leap into the underworld. Here he stood among the laborers, head and shoulders above them, spinning some hilarious joke in fluent Khmer. Here he sat on his briefcase with his sketchbook on one knee, drawing faces and scenes and artifacts that no one was allowed to see because of his shyness.

She peeked into his tent one afternoon, and was startled by its austerity. It was bare except for a black Ace comb and a toothbrush tucked in the wall pocket. He slept on the ground without sheets or a sleeping pad or a mosquito net. He owned nothing but the clothes on his back and whatever he carried in that briefcase.

Here was their base camp, a hodgepodge of wall tents, pup tents, and her North Face dome. They had pitched their camp where a village once stood, not knowing that for some reason the locals thought it haunted.

They used a clothesline strung between trees for their occasional volleyball games. Barbecue ball, she called it. Roasting the weenies. Almost six feet tall, she played like a gladiator, six-packing the ball into the faces of husky trash talkers. She bloodied noses, made kills, tooled them mercilessly…and they loved her for it.

Not unnaturally, so far from home, they began to court her. It was nothing personal. After she sliced herself on a piece of the wreckage, the special forces medic who stitched her thigh proposed marriage. Another Romeo braved the mosquitoes and recited Shakespeare to the wall of her tent at night. One morning, Kleat caught her shooting him. He rose up from his washbasin, the water dripping from his salt-and-pepper chest hair, and opened his arms to her.

She felt like a hypocrite, keeping them at bay. After all, day after day, she stalked them intimately. But that was the way it was. Molly didn’t tell them about one bad night in Oklahoma long ago. She just gave them her policy: no hookups on a shoot. And went on seducing them for her camera.

Each night, she downloaded her day’s harvest into a digital wallet, a portable hard drive, and cataloged her shots and watched her story grow. While the soldiers listened to Dr. Dre or Beethoven, read paperbacks, or played Game Boys, she lay on her back in the dark of her tent and the images lit her face. The wallet became her dream box. Some nights she couldn’t tell if she was awake or dreaming with the crickets going wild outside under the Cambodian stars.

Among professionals, the purists argued that digital wasn’t pure. The geeks argued that there were still bugs in the machine, and there were, in hers at any rate, some serious gremlins in some of the shots. She became aware of them gradually.

Within a week of arriving, Molly had gotten their labyrinth memorized, and made a habit of waking first each morning, before dawn, to visit the dig site. Every day the site grew longer. There was nothing much to do at this hour. Night still pooled in the holes. It was too early for the teams to work and too dark for her to shoot. But it was cooler then, and she had her best privacy. She wandered along the cut-open earth, alone with her thoughts in the gray mist. But not quite alone, she began to realize.

Ghostly figures ambled across the fields, distant and only half visible above the ground fog. She supposed they were villagers. Some wore kromas over their heads or around their necks. Some carried mute babies.

By five the sky would start to gain color. Roosters crowed far away. She could practically taste the wood