Shutter(25)

My nose felt hot, and my lips pulsed as I felt the trickle on my lip. Blood. Then blackness.





CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Kodak Ektralite 10

AT MY SEVENTH birthday party, I saved the oblong box from Grandma to unwrap last. Maybe it was a watch, like something in silver and turquoise. I ripped the tape and paper back to find it.

The Kodak Instamatic X-35F came in a bright yellow box with a roll of Instamatic film and a long, shimmering box of prisms— the flash. When I opened it, the instructions fell on my lap; I began to read them immediately, forgetting my birthday guests. The camera was a rectangle in brown and black, the back of it opening like a car door swinging wide. I opened the film packaging, inhaling the strong aroma of fresh plastic and stale factory air, and snapped the cartridge into place. The shutter button was on the front of the camera, on the right side of the lens. I peered through the viewfinder and watched as everyone—Grandma and Mom, Aunt Ruth, Travis, Mr. Bitsilly, and our neighbor Mrs. Bitsie and her dog—looked back at me, their faces wavy in the lens. I pressed the button.

“Rita is my favorite photographer,” Mr. Bitsilly said. Everyone laughed.

With the taste of cake and frosting still on my tongue, I walked the distance around my grandmother’s house looking for snapshots with my camera. The late summer afternoon provided a flood of marigold and magenta onto the otherwise dry, sandy ground of the reservation. Tohatchi framed everything in a sharp contrast of shades and color, of time and of atmosphere. The yellow blooms of Navajo tea stood stiffly, swaying along my grandmother’s fence line. I focused on my grandmother’s perfect white house alongside the moving tea stalks and snapped another photo.

From that point on, I took pictures of everything and everyone. It got to the point that my grandmother had to limit me to one roll per week.

“You are going to put your family into bankruptcy,” Grandma would say.

At first, I felt punished by my one-roll limit, but soon I realized that this was the ultimate way to wait for the perfect shot. My early photographs consisted of my usual reservation encounters—picking corn with my cousins, my grandma at her sewing machine, some men butchering a sheep, boiling fry bread in a hot black skillet. Eventually, I began to venture farther into the cliffs and canyons behind my grandmother’s house. The Chuska mountain range became the backdrop to hundreds of photographs as I searched and found Cheii the horned toad, Miss Bitsie’s wandering cows, and a few rusted cars from the ’50s and ’60s. I finally climbed to the top of a crested bluff near the highway and saw a dozen photographs emerging down below. I ran down the hill, the cuffs of my pants capturing sand by the handful.

I came to a halt by the highway. A black cat—dead only a few hours. He hadn’t started to smell or get stiff. I could not even see blood until I moved closer. I looked up the road, spotting a dark snake of black where the car had tried to swerve. I stood over the cat and snapped the picture, the first in a roll of twenty-four. Make that twenty-three, now.

I caught his full and strong body—his fur a deep black, darker than the highway, darker than anything I had ever seen. His eyes were open and looked straight forward. I rested my head on the hot asphalt and caught his gaze, the highway rising behind him: twenty-three, twenty-two, twenty-one. His tail had been flattened, his glossy fur matted and frayed at the edges of his injury. The camera flashed. Twenty, nineteen, eighteen. A dented brown pickup truck passed by, the inhabitants slowing down and watching me. I caught their faces. Seventeen, sixteen. Only fifteen left.

A delicate rain began to fall, neutralizing the heat of sand and asphalt, spreading a gilded and transcendent hue over the land. I stared at the cat again. His sharp, pearly fangs peered out from his open mouth. Click. Fourteen, thirteen. I darted across the desolate highway and framed the cat again, this time in the beam of light from the approaching storm.

Click.

WHEN MY GRANDMOTHER came back from town with a developed roll of film, I buzzed with excitement. I never knew whether the photos would come out until I could hold that waxy envelope in my hands and slip my finger beneath the fold to pull the sticky gum apart.

This time, my palms began to sweat as my grandma got out of the truck. She was not happy. She slammed the door, then grabbed my face and stared into my eyes.

“Dooda,” Grandma said. “No!” She dumped the photos on her kitchen table and glared at me. The envelope had already been opened. “Now we have to call the medicine man.”

Photo fourteen sat on top. I could make out the dead cat’s white fangs.

From the kitchen, I could hear Grandma on the phone. She talked to Mr. Bitsilly in Navajo, but they were talking about me, this much I knew. I also knew the visit to Mr. Bitsilly’s would be a waste of time. I loved Mr. Bitsilly, but his singing never made anything different.

That night, we sat on the dirt floor of Mr. Bitsilly’s hogan, listening to his raspy voice as he sang into the night air. Trails of sweet sagebrush smoke arose from the floor, escaping through the hole in the ceiling. He blew his hot breath through the bone pipe, pressing my hair back, and continued to pray and sing for me. My grandmother soon joined him in song. I wanted so badly to understand what they were saying, but my grandmother didn’t want me to know. She had once told me that my language would only get me in trouble. Suddenly, without any warning, Mr. Bitsilly rubbed his chin on my forehead so hard that it hurt. The pipe echoed in my ears and Mr. Bitsilly spit bone, hair, and blood into his handkerchief.