The Last of the Winnebagos Read online

  It was Katie.

  She held up the eisenstadt. “You forgot your briefcase,” she said.

  I stared blankly at it. I hadn’t even realized I didn’t have it. I must have left it on the kitchen table when I went tearing out, running down little girls and stewed roadworkers in my rush to keep Katie from getting involved. And here she was, and Hunter would be back any minute, saying, “That shoot you went on this morning, did you take any pictures?”

  “It isn’t a briefcase,” I said.

  “I wanted to tell you,” she said, and stopped. “I shouldn’t have accused you of telling the Society I’d killed the jackal. I don’t know why you came to see me today, but I know you’re not capable of—”

  “You have no idea what I’m capable of,” I said. I opened the door enough to reach for the eisenstadt. “Thanks for bringing it back. I’ll get the paper to reimburse your way-mile credits.”

  Go home. Go home. If you’re here when the Society comes back, they’ll ask you how you met me, and I just destroyed the evidence that could shift the blame to the Amblers. I took hold of the eisenstadt’s handle and started to shut the door.

  She put her hand on the door. The screen door and the fading light made her look unfocused, like Misha. “Are you in trouble?”

  “No,” I said. “Look, I’m very busy.”

  “Why did you come to see me?” she asked. “Did you kill the jackal?”

  “No,” I said, but I opened the door and let her in. I went over to the developer and asked for a visual status. It was only on the sixth frame. “I’m destroying evidence,” I said to Katie. “I took a picture this morning of the vehicle that hit it, only I didn’t know it was the guilty party until a half an hour ago.” I motioned for her to sit down on the couch. “They’re in their eighties. They were driving on a road they weren’t supposed to be on, in an obsolete recreation vehicle, worrying about the cameras and the tankers. There’s no way they could have seen it in time to stop. The Society won’t see it that way, though. They’re determined to blame somebody, anybody, even though it won’t bring them back.”

  She set her canvas carryit and the eisenstadt down on the table next to the couch. “The Society was here when I got home,” I said. “They’d figured out we were both in Colorado when Aberfan died. I told them it was a hit and run, and you’d stopped to help me. They had the vet’s records, and your name was on them.”

  I couldn’t read her face. “If they come back, you tell them that you gave me a ride to the vet’s.” I went back to the developer. The longshot film was done. “Eject,” I said, and the developer spit it into my hand. I fed it into the recycler.

  “McCombe! Where the hell are you?” Ramirez’s voice exploded into the room, and I jumped and started for the door, but she wasn’t there. The phone was flashing. “McCombe! This is important!”

  Ramirez was on the phone and using some override I didn’t even know existed. I went over and pushed it back to access. The lights went out. “I’m here,” I said.

  “You won’t believe what just happened!” She sounded outraged. “A couple of terrorist types from the Society just stormed in here and confiscated the stuff you sent me!”

  All I’d sent her was the vidcam footage and the shots from the eisenstadt, and there shouldn’t have been anything on those. Jake had already washed the bumper. “What stuff?” I said.

  “The prints from the eisenstadt!” she said, still shouting. “Which I didn’t have a chance to look at when they came in because I was too busy trying to work a trade on your governor’s conference, not to mention trying to track you down! I had hardcopies made and sent the originals straight down to composing with your vidcam footage. I finally got to them half an hour ago, and while I’m sorting through them, this Society creep just grabs them away from me. No warrants, no ‘would you mind?,’ nothing. Right out of my hand. Like a bunch of—”

  “Jackals,” I said. “You’re sure it wasn’t the vidcam footage?” There wasn’t anything in the eisenstadt shots except Mrs. Ambler and Taco, and even Hunter couldn’t have put that together, could he?

  “Of course I’m sure,” Ramirez said, her voice bouncing off the walls. “It was one of the prints from the eisenstadt. I never even saw the vidcam stuff. I sent it straight to composing. I told you.”

  I went over to the developer and fed the cartridge in. The first dozen shots were nothing, stuff the eisenstadt had taken from the back seat of the car. “Start with frame ten,” I said. “Positives. One two three order. Five seconds.”

  “What did you say?” Ramirez demanded.

  “I said, did they say what they were looking for?”

  “Are you kidding? I wasn’t even there as far as they were concerned. They split up the pile and started through them on my desk.”

  The yucca at the foot of the hill. More yucca. My forearm as I set the eisenstadt down on the counter. My back.

  “Whatever it was they were looking for, they found it,” Ramirez said.

  I glanced at Katie. She met my gaze steadily, unafraid. She had never been afraid, not even when I told her she had killed all the dogs, not even when I showed up on her doorstep after fifteen years.

  “The one in the uniform showed it to the other one,” Ramirez was saying, “and said, ‘You were wrong about the woman doing it. Look at this.’ ”

  “Did you get a look at the picture?” Still life of cups and spoons. Mrs. Ambler’s arm. Mrs. Ambler’s back.

  “I tried. It was a truck of some kind.”

  “A truck? Are you sure? Not a Winnebago?”

  “A truck. What the hell is going on over there?”

  I didn’t answer. Jake’s back. Open shower door. Still life with Sanka. Mrs. Ambler remembering Taco.

  “What woman are they talking about?” Ramirez said. “The one you wanted the lifeline on?”

  “No,” I said. The picture of Mrs. Ambler was the last one on the cartridge. The developer went back to the beginning. Bottom half of the Hitori. Open car door. Prickly pear. “Did they say anything else?”

  “The one in the uniform pointed to something on the hardcopy and said, ‘See. There’s his number on the side. Can you make it out?’ ”

  Blurred palm trees and the expressway. The tanker hitting the jackal.

  “Stop,” I said. The image froze.

  “What?” Ramirez said.

  It was a great action shot, the back wheels passing right over the mess that had been the jackal’s hind legs. The jackal was already dead, of course, but you couldn’t see that or the already drying blood coming out of its mouth because of the angle. You couldn’t see the truck’s license number either because of the speed the tanker was going, but the number was there, waiting for the Society’s computers. It looked like the tanker had just hit it.

  “What did they do with the picture?” I asked.

  “They took it into the chief’s office. I tried to call up the originals from composing, but the chief had already sent for them and your vidcam footage. Then I tried to get you, but I couldn’t get past your damned exclusion.”

  “Are they still in there with the chief?”

  “They just left. They’re on their way over to your house. The chief told me to tell you he wants ‘full cooperation,’ which means hand over the negatives and any other film you just took this morning. He told me to keep my hands off. No story. Case closed.”

  “How long ago did they leave?”

  “Five minutes. You’ve got plenty of time to make me a print. Don’t highwire it. I’ll come pick it up.”

  “What happened to, The last thing I need is trouble with the Society’?”

  “It’ll take them at least twenty minutes to get to your place. Hide it somewhere the Society won’t find it.”

  “I can’t,” I said, and listened to her furious silence. “My developer’s broken. It just ate my longshot film,” I said, and hit the exclusion button again.

  “You want to see who hit the jackal?” I said to Katie, a
nd motioned her over to the developer. “One of Phoenix’s finest.”

  She came and stood in front of the screen, looking at the picture. If the Society’s computers were really good, they could probably prove the jackal was already dead, but the Society wouldn’t keep the film long enough for that. Hunter and Segura had probably already destroyed the highwire copies. Maybe I should offer to run the cartridge sheet through the permanganate bath for them when they got here, just to save time.

  I looked at Katie. “It looks guilty as hell, doesn’t it?” I said. “Only it isn’t.” She didn’t say anything, didn’t move. “It would have killed the jackal if it had hit it. It was going at least ninety. But the jackal was already dead.”

  She looked across at me.

  “The Society would have sent the Amblers to jail. It would have confiscated the house they’ve lived in for fifteen years for an accident that was nobody’s fault. They didn’t even see it coming. It just ran right out in front of them.”

  Katie put her hand up to the screen and touched the jackal’s image.

  “They’ve suffered enough,” I said, looking at her. It was getting dark. I hadn’t turned on any lights, and the red image of the tanker made her nose look sunburned. “All these years she’s blamed him for her dog’s death, and he didn’t do it,” I said. “A Winnebago’s a hundred square feet on the inside. That’s about as big as this developer, and they’ve lived inside it for fifteen years, while the lanes got narrower and the highways shut down, hardly enough room to breathe, let alone live, and her blaming him for something he didn’t do.”

  In the ruddy light from the screen she looked sixteen. “They won’t do anything to the driver, not with the tankers hauling thousands of gallons of water into Phoenix every day. Even the Society won’t run the risk of a boycott. They’ll destroy the negatives and call the case closed. And the Society won’t go after the Amblers,” I said. “Or you.”

  I turned back to the developer. “Go,” I said, and the image changed. Yucca. Yucca. My forearm. My back. Cups and spoons.

  “Besides,” I said. “I’m an old hand at shifting the blame.” Mrs. Ambler’s arm. Mrs. Ambler’s back. Open shower door. “Did I ever tell you about Aberfan?”

  Katie was still watching the screen, her face pale now from the light blue one hundred percent formica shower stall.

  “The Society already thinks the tanker did it. The only one I’ve got to convince is my editor.” I reached across to the phone and took the exclusion off. “Ramirez,” I said, “wanta go after the Society?”

  Jake’s back. Cups, spoons, and Sanka. “I did,” Ramirez said in a voice that could have frozen the Salt River, “but your developer was broken, and you couldn’t get me a picture.”

  Mrs. Ambler and Taco.

  I hit the exclusion button again and left my hand on it. “Stop,” I said. “Print.” The screen went dark, and the print slid out into the tray. “Reduce frame. Permanganate bath by one percent. Follow on screen.” I took my hand off. “What’s Dolores Chiwere doing these days, Ramirez?”

  “She’s working investigative. Why?” I didn’t answer. The picture of Mrs. Ambler faded a little, a little more.

  “The Society does have a link to the lifelines!” Ramirez said, not quite as fast as Hunter, but almost. “That’s why you requested your old girlfriend’s line, isn’t it? You’re running a sting.”

  I had been wondering how to get Ramirez off Katie’s trail, and she had done it herself, jumping to conclusions just like the Society. With a little effort, I could convince Katie, too: Do you know why I really came to see you today? To catch the Society. I had to pick somebody the Society couldn’t possibly know about from my lifeline, somebody I didn’t have any known connection with.

  Katie watched the screen, looking like she already half-believed it. The picture of Mrs. Ambler faded some more. Any known connection. “Stop,” I said.

  “What about the truck?” Ramirez demanded. “What does it have to do with this sting of yours?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “And neither does the water board, which is an even bigger bully than the Society. So do what the chief says. Full cooperation. Case closed. We’ll get them on lifeline tapping.”

  She digested that, or maybe she’d already hung up and was calling Dolores Chiwere. I looked at the image of Mrs. Ambler on the screen. It had faded enough to look slightly overexposed but not enough to look tampered with. And Taco was gone.

  I looked at Katie. “The Society will be here in another fifteen minutes,” I said, “which gives me just enough time to tell you about Aberfan.” I gestured at the couch. “Sit down.”

  She came and sat down. “He was a great dog,” I said “He loved the snow. He’d dig through it and toss it up with his muzzle and snap at the snowflakes, trying to catch them.”

  Ramirez had obviously hung up, but she would call back if she couldn’t track down Chiwere. I put the exclusion back on and went over to the developer. The image of Mrs. Ambler was still on the screen. The bath hadn’t affected the detail that much. You could still see the wrinkles, the thin white hair, but the guilt, or blame, the look of loss and love, was gone. She looked serene, almost happy.

  “There are hardly any good pictures of dogs,” I said. “They lack the necessary muscles to take good pictures, and Aberfan would lunge at you as soon as he saw the camera.”

  I turned the developer off. Without the light from the screen, it was almost dark in the room. I turned on the overhead.

  “There were less than a hundred dogs left in the United States, and he’d already had the newparvo once and nearly died. The only pictures I had of him had been taken when he was asleep. I wanted a picture of Aberfan playing in the snow.”

  I leaned against the narrow shelf in front of the developer’s screen. Katie looked the way she had at the vet’s, sitting there with her hands clenched, waiting for me to tell her something terrible.

  “I wanted a picture of him playing in the snow, but he always lunged at the camera,” I said, “so I let him out in the front yard, and then I sneaked out the side door and went across the road to some pine trees where he wouldn’t be able to see me. But he did.”

  “And he ran across the road,” Katie said. “And I hit him.”

  She was looking down at her hands. I waited for her to look up, dreading what I would see in her face. Or not see.

  “It took me a long time to find out where you’d gone,” she said to her hands. “I was afraid you’d refuse me access to your lifeline. I finally saw one of your pictures in a newspaper, and I moved to Phoenix, but after I got here I was afraid to call you for fear you’d hang up on me.”

  She twisted her hands the way she had twisted her mittens at the vet’s. “My husband said I was obsessed with it, that I should have gotten over it by now, everybody else had, that they were only dogs anyway.” She looked up, and I braced my hands against the developer. “He said forgiveness wasn’t something somebody else could give you, but I didn’t want you to forgive me exactly. I just wanted to tell you I was sorry.”

  There hadn’t been any reproach, any accusation in her face when I told her she was responsible for the extinction of a species that day at the vet’s, and there wasn’t now. Maybe she didn’t have the facial muscles for it, I thought bitterly.

  “Do you know why I came to see you today?” I said angrily. “My camera broke when I tried to catch Aberfan. I didn’t get any pictures.” I grabbed the picture of Mrs. Ambler out of the developer’s tray and flung it at her. “Her dog died of newparvo. They left it in the Winnebago, and when they came back, it was dead.”

  “Poor thing,” she said, but she wasn’t looking at the picture. She was looking at me.

  “She didn’t know she was having her picture taken. I thought if I got you talking about Aberfan, I could get a picture like that of you.”

  And surely now I would see it, the look I had really wanted when I set the eisenstadt down on Katie’s kitchen table, the look I still wanted, e
ven though the eisenstadt was facing the wrong way, the look of betrayal the dogs had never given us. Not even Misha. Not even Aberfan. How does it feel to be responsible for the extinction of an entire species?

  I pointed at the eisenstadt. “It’s not a briefcase. It’s a camera. I was going to take your picture without your even knowing it.”

  She had never known Aberfan. She had never known Mrs. Ambler either, but in that instant before she started to cry she looked like both of them. She put her hand up to her mouth. “Oh,” she said, and the love, the loss was there in her voice, too. “If you’d had it then, it wouldn’t have happened.”

  I looked at the eisenstadt. If I had had it, I could have set it on the porch and Aberfan would never have even noticed it. He would have burrowed through the snow and tossed it up with his nose, and I could have thrown snow up in big glittering sprays that he would have leaped at, and it never would have happened. Katie Powell would have driven past, and I would have stopped to wave at her, and she, sixteen years old and just learning to drive, would maybe even have risked taking a mittened hand off the steering wheel to wave back, and Aberfan would have wagged his tail into a buzzard and then barked at the snow he’d churned up.

  He wouldn’t have caught the third wave. He would have lived to be an old dog, fourteen or fifteen, too old to play in the snow anymore, and even if he had been the last dog in the world I would not have let them lock him up in a cage, I would not have let them take him away. If I had had the eisenstadt. No wonder I hated it.

  It had been at least fifteen minutes since Ramirez called. The Society would be here any minute. “You shouldn’t be here when the Society comes,” I said, and Katie nodded and smudged the tears off her cheeks and stood up, reaching for her carryit.

  “Do you ever take pictures?” she said, shouldering the carryit. “I mean, besides for the papers?”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be taking pictures for them much longer. Photojournalists are becoming an extinct breed.”