8

THE TRAILER COURT WAS IN GLENDALE – drab rows of dilapidated mobile homes, overflowing Dumpster bins at the end of each row, gravel in front of each trailer, no grass anywhere, no trees, just a few flower boxes here and there, spindly marigolds and geraniums drooping over their rims. Coltrane drove down to the third row and turned left, passing an elderly man wearing suspenders over a T-shirt and carrying a basket of laundry toward a clothesline at the side of his trailer.

Halfway along, Coltrane reached a small playground, stopped the car, got out, and approached the playground’s rusted waist-high chain-link fence. The swings and the teeter-totter were tarnished and unpainted. The ground was like concrete. A thin black woman pushed a young boy in a swing. The woman’s dark hair hung in half a dozen braids. She wore sandals, wrinkled shorts, and a red pullover, which, although faded, was the only bright spot in the trailer court. As the boy stretched his legs to give more force to his upward momentum, the soles of his running shoes were visible – and their holes.

The woman narrowed her eyes toward Coltrane, then returned her attention to the boy.

“Hi,” Coltrane said.

She didn’t answer.

“I used to live here,” he said.

The woman stayed silent.

“Every once in a while, when I’m in the neighborhood, I come back.”

The woman shrugged.

“My mother used to push me in those swings,” Coltrane said.

“You want something?”

“I’d like to take your picture.”

“Why?” The woman tensed.

“Somebody once took a picture of me and my mother exactly where you’re standing. I’d like to feel what the photographer felt. I’d like to try to take the same picture.”

The woman looked baffled.

“Go back to what you were doing. I won’t bother you. I’ll just take one picture and leave.”

The woman’s gaze faltered as she struggled with her suspicion. At last, after another shrug, she returned her attention to the boy and started pushing him again.

Coltrane selected a fast shutter speed to avoid blur, then peered through his viewfinder. Knowing that Packard’s camera was too awkward for this situation, he was using his Nikon. Through the viewfinder, in miniature but somehow intensified, the woman pushed. The boy went up in the air, then swung back down. The woman gave another push, her body leaning into the motion. The boy looked up, as if his goal were the sky. As he veered back down, Coltrane adjusted the focus. He readied his finger on the shutter button. There wasn’t any question about the position he wanted them to be in. He had studied that position thousands of times in the photograph that had made him want to be a photographer.

In Sightings, a book that Packard had written about photography, the master had devoted a chapter to his theory of anticipation.

Once you see the elements of the image you want, it’s too late to release the camera’s shutter. By the time you do, those elements will have changed. In that instant, clouds will have shifted, smiles will have weakened, branches will have been nudged by a breeze. It is the nature of life for things to be in motion, even if they do not appear to be, and the only way to capture the precise positioning of your subject as you desire it is to study your subject until you understand its dynamic – and then to anticipate what your subject will do. The photographer’s task is to project into the future in order to make the present timeless.

Do it now, Coltrane thought. He pressed the shutter button, and in the ensuing millisecond, as the camera clicked, the woman and the boy achieved perfect balance. Through the viewfinder, time seemed suspended. Coltrane sighed and lowered the camera. The boy reached the limit of his upward glide, hovered, and began to descend. Time began again.

“Thanks,” Coltrane said. “What’s your name and address? I’ll send you a couple of prints.”

“Do I look that stupid? You think I’m gonna tell you my name and address?”

Coltrane’s spirit sank.

He turned from the playground and studied the trailer behind him. The three concrete steps to its entrance were cracked. The screen had been torn from the bent aluminum door. One of the windows had cardboard in it.

He crossed the gravel lane. The bent door creaked when he opened it. The metal door behind it shuddered when he knocked. He waited, not hearing any sound. He knocked a second time but still didn’t get a response. When he knocked a third time, he started to worry, only to see the door open and a stooped, wrinkled black woman with short silver hair frown out at him.

“You.” The woman clutched a tattered housecoat to her chest. “Where you been? Ain’t seen you in a couple of months.”

“I was away on several business trips – out of the country.”

“Got to thinkin’ somethin’ had happened to you.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, it did. Is this a convenient time?”

“The same as before?”

“Yes.”

“Get it over with.”

Entering, Coltrane smelled ancient cooking odors. He faced an oblong living room filled with tattered furniture. To the left, a fold-down card table had a jigsaw puzzle on it. Farther to the left, a counter separated the living room from the murky kitchen.

It seemed barely yesterday that he and his mother had stood where he now stood, the door open behind him, sunlight gleaming in, when his father had turned from playing solitaire at the kitchen counter and raised the gun toward his mother’s face.

Coltrane heard the shot slam his ears. He gaped at his mother falling, at the blood around her on the floor. He stared down for the longest time.

Finally, he raised his head and turned to the elderly woman. “Thank you.”

“What do you get out of this?”

“I’m not sure.” Coltrane gave the woman three hundred dollars.

“Real generous this time.”

“Well, I’m going through some changes. I might not be back.”

9

SCHOLARS ANALYZING PACKARD’S CONTRIBUTION TO photography had documented the location of each house in his series, but Coltrane never knew what he was going to find when he reached each address. Some of the houses no longer existed, variously replaced by an apartment building, a four-lane street, and a supermarket. Others had been renovated, their facades altered to the point where they weren’t recognizable. A few had been maintained. Most had decayed. But if finding them wasn’t difficult, locating the spot from which Packard had photographed them turned out to be almost as arduous as figuring out the vantage point from which he had photographed Falcon Lair.

In the following two weeks, each of Coltrane’s setups – in locations as various as Arcadia, Whitley Heights, Silver Lake, and Venice – turned out to have a story behind it, some as poignant as his meeting with Diane, others comic or repulsive or ennobling, and in two cases violent. In Culver City, he lugged the view camera, its tripod, and its bags of equipment to the top of a warehouse that had not existed when Packard took his photos. In Gardena, he paid for permission to shoot from an upstairs bedroom window of an eighty-year-old widow’s house. Other places, he photographed from an alley, a school yard, the side of a freeway, and the back of a pickup truck. He escaped a pack of vicious dogs. He saved the life of a drug addict who had overdosed in a drainage ditch. He talked his way out of a confrontation with a street gang. He met a blind novelist, a one-armed songwriter, and an aging actor who had once played a policeman on an ensemble TV show and was now an insurance salesman. He took pictures of everything.

Some nights, he got home too late to call Jennifer. Other nights, he had so much work to do in the darkroom that he kept the conversation short. “I’ll tell you all about it when I’m finished. I’m afraid I’ll jinx this if I talk about it or interrupt it. I haven’t felt this involved in an awfully long time. The project’ll be done soon. Then we’ll go away for a couple of days. Up to Carmel. Anyplace you like.”