The Last Good Day Read Online Free Page B

trying to assure him that they were both still robust and strong enough to somehow survive the long winter ahead. She took the picture and then slowly lowered the Canon, knowing that her morning had just been made.
    An instructor at Pratt had once quoted Balzac to her: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” In her heart, she knew that behind every good picture she’d taken there was an invasion. Certainly she should’ve asked their permission. Usually, she would have. In the rest of her life, she tried to be a decent, sensitive person. But damn, that was going to be a good shot. She could already see where it would hang in her show in the spring. Maybe a little Walker Evans in the composition, but it told its own story. It said, This is what it’s about. It said, You go until you can’t take it anymore, and then you keep going. It said, You walk over mountains, hang over the sides of boats, crawl across the desert with your kidneys shriveling up like chestnuts, and have yourself sewn into the upholstery of vans smuggling you across the border because that’s what a man does. He endures. He persists. So here they were, still hustling, still squeezing one another’s arms for encouragement and trying to scrape together a few crumpled dollars to send home.
    All right, fine. She’d ask their permission so her conscience could take five and stop bothering her. She stepped down off the crate and hoisted the canvas camera bag up onto her shoulder. Two cameras dangled from straps around her neck, the old Leica M6 and the beloved Canon. She was a small woman with a lithe gamine body, delicate wrists, and slender ankles, but she’d gotten used to lugging heavy pieces of equipment long ago. Nowadays, she was traveling lighter, stuffing her black-and-white cartridges into the pockets of her red barn jacket.
    She moved out from behind the Dumpster and started up the block, feeling the full warmth of the autumn sun on her face. “Hola!” she called out, flicking long straight raven-black hair over her shoulder.
    The Aztec warrior with the Beatle mop stared down the block at her, moving his eyes from her face down to her camera and then back up again. It was always interesting to see what her subjects would react to first—the woman or the camera.
    “Que pasa?” She drew closer, trying to look small and nonthreatening.
    A few of the men regarded her curiously. Others slipped right to the back of the crowd, clearly not wanting the immigration authorities to see their photographs.
    “You make a nice picture today?” The Aztec mop top smiled knowingly.
    “Oh, you saw me?” She fiddled with the f-stop in embarrassment.
    “I see you out here before. Why you want to take our picture?”
    At close range, he had a young man’s face with an older man’s experience imprinted on it. A short brow, an Indian nose, Eskimo eyes with fine lines fanning out around them, windburned cheeks. A good photographic subject. Especially with the incongruous “Vassar” printed across the front of his sweatshirt.
    “Perdón,” she said. “Mi español es muy patético.”
    “Is okay. I know English very good.”
    “I’m a professional photographer.” She glanced down at the Leica, making sure its lens cap was off as well. “My name’s Lynn Schulman.”
    “Jorge.” He stopped and corrected himself. “George.”
    He offered his hand with a polite little bow. She saw agitation spreading among the men behind him as the sun cleared the rooftops and the possibility of finding work faded.
    “Where you from?” she asked.
    “Guatemala.”
    “Well, George from Guatemala, I’m doing sort of a special project,” she said. “I’m just going around town, taking pictures of different scenes.”
    His chin drew back into the rest of his face as he struggled to understand her. It seemed so self-indulgent to explain that she was putting together a gallery retrospective, featuring pictures of her hometown then and now.
    “See, I’m