Page 17 of The California Dreamers

16

Leica DRP

1983

El Zafiro, California

Fourteen years old

The night of the Triton camera

“I got some great shots on the pier,” the boy said mournfully. “The light was epic today.” This last part was soft, and wasn’t said so much to me as to the sky.

The boy hurried off in the dark, the camera strap around his neck attached to nothing.

***

It was only me and the dying fire.

I’d watched the camera fall. Cap had been busy monitoring the kid’s face, savoring his dismay, and then, perhaps, feeling a pang of regret for causing it.

Not me. My eyes had been on the camera. I’d seen it bounce off Dyl’s serving of abalone, a translucent pink-white trampoline, into the safety of a large, mottled shell.

The flames had died in the misty air, and the spent logs on the camera’s side of the pit looked like little gray-white crocodile backs, crosshatched and still. It was an impulse, as impossible to resist as whatever made Cap toss the camera.

I grabbed our log separator and poked. Surely it was ruined, a melted glob of plastic. But I wanted to see it, this thing that Cap had destroyed so ceremoniously.

Then—a bit of orange, near the edge of the pit, that wasn’t flame. The film in the camera’s window. I prodded the camera over the stone ring, onto the sand.

I’d imagined the camera popping open, film and camera a black-and-orange puddle from the heat, but it was intact. I tapped it fast with my index finger, and it was barely warm, so I picked it up.

Maybe the pictures the boy took are even okay , I thought. I could get his film back to him, somehow. Take a bus to his college… The silver timer gadget screwed into the side, to take pictures of yourself, the boy said, was cool and smooth. I examined the dial, which let you set the timer for ten seconds, twenty, thirty, a minute. There wasn’t even a speck of ash obscuring the numbers.

Even the camera name, Leica DRP, and a little blue-and-yellow label on the bottom—University of California San Diego Communications Dept.—were unwarped.

It’s like the camera was hiding in a little A-frame hut made out of the two abalone shells.

Waiting for me to claim it.

I knotted a shoelace around the camera and hid it deep in the Gull’s double rear door, below my bunk, securing the top end of the shoelace to a long bolt. It was enough, at first, to know the camera was mine.