believe he'd shot them. But he had.
This commando type, who killed and laid booby traps and ambushed enemy patrols, spent his spare time taking sympathetic pictures of Vietnamese kids.
'We became friends. He taught me about war, and I taught him about photography. He was with me when I shot my Piet@.
'Since he lives out West we don't get much chance to see each other. But the friendship's very close. He's become a professional photographer, he's married to a Vietnamese girl and he's got a houseful of terrific kids. I want to go out there now and see him. He's the only person I know who can tell me whether this thing can work. If he thinks it can, I'd like him to participate. Of course I need your permission for that.'
She didn't say anything for a while. Then she asked me how good he was.
'The best,' I said.
'Straight. Fearless. First-class strategic mind. If he joined us he'd be like a hired gun, which, considering Darling's resources, is something I think we need.'
'What would we give him?'
'A full third share-. I can't see offering him less.'
'A third-that's a lot of money.' She hesitated, 'On the other hand, a hundred percent of zero is zero, isn't it?'
'What do you think?' I asked.,I think you should go see him, the sooner the better.' She stopped walking.
'Hold me, Geoffrey.' I held her.
'Now kiss me the way you did that time at the cemetery.'
I kissed her.
'Harder, Geoffrey. Please, as hard as you can.'
I kissed her hard.
'Bite me.'
I bit her.
'Oh, that's good,' she said, 'very good. Now take me back to your room and screw my brains out.'
As we started back to the Spanish Moss the palms swayed wildly in the wind.
3
Is it not the task of the photographer…. to reveal guilt and point out the guilty in his pictures?
It had been two years since I'd last seen, Frank Cordero. He'd come up to New York with his portfolio of photographs looking for a gallery.
He'd crashed in my loft, then made the rounds in his worn old boots and coWhoy hat. People gushed over his work, oohed and ahed, told him his pictures were 'fascinating.' But in the end no gallery would take him on.
The night before he flew back to New Mexico we went out together and got quietly drunk. He wasn't mad or bitter, held no rancor for the New York dealers, and had no intention of changing his course.
'they don't think they can sell me here-fine, they ought to know.
Meantime I'll keep on working, and sell what I can in Santa Fe.'
Though he'd been badly disappointed, he showed more concern for my problem than for his own: 'What are we going to do about this block of yours, Geof? How're we going to get you back on the track?'
He was the most loyal friend I ever had. And so, when I saw him smiling at me in the Albuquerque airport, tanned and lean, his short black beard beginning to gray, the crow's-feet around his eyes etched a little deeper than I remembered, I was moved to feel that at last I was with the one person on this earth I could truly trust. And that was a relief after the weird scenes I'd been through in the weeks since I'd met Kimberly Yates.
He embraced me, grabbed my camera bag, hustled me out of the airport. A few minutes later we were in his battered Land Rover heading east on the Interstate, the raised road that slices through the center of Albuquerque.
The city flew by below, a grid of endless commercial strips, while the sky arched above like a giant hemisphere of deep blue silk stretched taut.
It was a Big Sky-as they say out West.
We left the city, curled around the back of Sandia Mountain and there confronted an amazing pile of clouds, soft white bulbous billowy things, pouring into the valley.
'Good formation,' Frank said. He glanced at me.
'Red filter?'
We laughed remembering the days in 'Nam when I'd taught him how a red filter can turn a blue sky black, making a dramatic background for scenes of war.
He glanced at me again.
'It's serious, what's brought you out?'
'Pretty serious,' I agreed.
'We'll give you a day to get used to the altitude. Then we'll talk about it,' he said.
It felt good to be in the West. I could get high on the pure rarefied air, so much dryer than the tropical haze that clung to the Florida coast. And the dusty esert tones were a fine relief from the hot saturated colors of the Keys. Perhaps best of all the faces of the people looked real. they were in touch with the Ian. For a while, driving in silence with Frank, I wondered whether I'd been corrupted by the hothouse atmosphere of Key West. Blackmail photographs of a sexual voyeur-suddenly all that seemed far away.
Past Sandia we turned north, past dry fenced fields crisscrossed by guileys and sparsely covered with desert grass. Then we drove through the old gold-rush town of Golden, where piles of stones, ruins of buildings, were spread about on either side of the road.
We stopped in Madrid for a beer in the local saloon. Ten years before, when Frank had first brought me there, Madrid had been a ghost town. Now it was a thriving village. But still there were haunting visions: rotted-out old houses strangely illuminated by the dying sun, and the hulks of forsaken automobiles with cryptic slogans emphatically scribbled on their sides.
It was late in the afternoon when we reached Galisteo. Mai must have seen us coming. She emerged from the house when we drove up, wearing a faded work shirt, jeans and hand-tooled boots. She smiled at me, the same marvelous smile that had driven me to distraction in Saigon.
'Howdy, stranger,' she said.
I rushed to her, grasped her up, whirled her around in my arms.
'Geof-Frey, Geof-Frey!'
Then a bunch of handsome Eurasian kids crowded around.
Frank introduced them, three girls, Ali, Jessie and Meg, and the smallest, a boy, Jude, who gazed at me shyly while clinging to his mother's waist. Ali, the oldest, h@d-Mai's willowy Vietnamese figure and the swelling breasts of an American teenage girl. She stood against Frank, who placed his hands protectively on her shoulders, while I distributed the funky Key West T-shirts I'd brought them all as gifts.
When the kids had gone to their rooms to start their homework, Frank showed me the improvements he'd made in the house. It was an old adobe set in a two-acre field, a ruin when held found it and bought it cheap.
He'd rebuilt slowly, adding rooms as the family grew. In the years since I'd seen it, he'd added one for Jude and enlarged the back building, Mai's studio and foundry. His own studio and darkroom were in Santa Fe, twenty miles to the north. dinner: a rich beef Mai had prepared a Vietnamese broth called phu, crisp spring-rolls, cha-gio, and thin slices of barbecued pork served with mint, lettuce leaves and delicate rice-flour cakes. The accompanying nuocmam sauce perfumed the dining room and brought back memories of warm mellow evenings in Saigon.
'Mom usually cooks Mexican. Makes a mean chili,' Ali said.
