The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,10

shot me a look of pure disdain and said “war pictures” over the cigarette smoke that curled up his jaw.

Frank began drinking more and going into town during the week. One of the nights he was gone, I went into his room to see the pictures. I expected they would be images of naked girls. I couldn’t tell what the first one was. In the middle of a gray, textured background was a black spot, like a hole or a rip in the negative.

The next few photos, all black-and-white, showed the rubble of bombed-out buildings, like the photos I’d seen of London but flatter, ashen to the horizon. Japan after the bomb. In one picture, an American soldier stood in the field of trash under a low, dark sky. Nothing stood higher than his knee. He grinned, holding up a bottle in a congratulatory toast, his left foot propped on a half-crumbled block of stone. What I first thought was a flutter of torn, singed paper sticking out from under the block was, when I examined them closer, two arms. One stuck straight up from the elbow, and the blackened hand at the end of it had only a thumb and two fingers. The other, much smaller arm, ended with a splay of bone at the wrist joint, no fingers. Bile stirred in my stomach, water in my mouth. I looked back up at the soldier’s smile. There was no way to be sure if he knew about the arms. But how could he have missed them?

The next one was similar, the same dark sky, the same lifelessness to the horizon. In the foreground, the GI from the other photo had been joined by four American GIs, all with their shirts open or off. They smiled triumphant and happy. Not a line on their faces. Their bare, hairless chests pallid against the background of sky. The next photograph showed more GIs, more smiles, and ashy lumps on the ground. The GIs were smaller, the sky lower and darker with each photograph as if the photographer had moved farther away with each shot.

The last photograph was a close-up of a Japanese woman, her eyes closed. Shown from the waist up, she lay on her side. From her temple down her jaw, her neck, and over one breast, the skin puckered in a strange way, halfway between the crispness of a burn and the swirled, glossy scarring that comes months later. Her other breast, the one she lay on, was smooth, the cylindrical nipple only slightly darker than her pale skin.

I thumbed back to the first picture. The gray textures resembled the delicate ash left when we burned garbage. The hole in the middle was shaped like a baby, a baby curled on its side—a baby-shaped hole with no light in it, no reflection, no texture. Nauseated, I put the pictures back. My hands trembled.

All night I saw those pictures, the baby, the woman, and the GIs. Such wholesome smiles amid the hell of destruction; they seemed like some new kind of evil. Yet their faces looked like mine, like the faces of my people.

Not long after I found the photographs, Frank came home late one night, cussing, stumbling drunk at the back door, and woke me. I went to help him, but when I got close, he grabbed me and pressed me up against the door frame.

“Betcha give it to that Cole boy. Gimme some,” he hissed, as he tried to find my mouth with his. My arm hurt where he gripped it, but he was very drunk. I got my knee up between us, pushed him backward down the steps, and bolted the door.

I found him on the steps in the morning. Stinking, muddy, and bloody from a scrape on his cheek, but sleeping like a baby. I kicked him to wake him up.

That afternoon I left my work early, walked down to the mill-village, and told Momma what had happened, showed her the bruise on my arm.

“His daddy was bad to drink. But I was—we all were—hoping the war would make a difference in him. Grow him up,” she told me.

I shook my head, remembering the photographs. “I think the war made it worse, Momma.”

“I reckon you could be right about that. Made things worse for a lot of people. Go get your daddy and have him drive you back. Tell him we need Frank down here in the mill-village more than you need him up there. He can