A moldering shantytown of huts on the flanks of a dirt road, Porkpa was proud of its infirmary. With a dozen beds, a tiny lab, and its own ambulance, the clinic – a concrete box with a rusting tin roof, its walls painted ocher, pink, and teal – was the only “infrastructure” for miles around. In her first year at the clinic, most of Kate’s time had been taken up with pediatric care and midwifery, health education and vaccination. When the war heated up, the clinic’s priorities changed. By the time Burke’s helicopter crashed, killing the pilot, the clinic was a round-the-clock trauma unit, with gunshot and machete wounds at the top of its To Do list.
With his broken leg and second- and third-degree burns over ten percent of his body, Burke remained at the clinic for seven weeks. There wasn’t any reason to keep him that long, but neither was there anywhere for him to go. Four days after Burke’s ill-fated helicopter ride, the capital underwent a paroxysm of violence. Even if you could get there, nothing worked. Its ports were closed, embassies shuttered. Redemption Hospital was in ruins, pounded by mortars and looted by gunmen. Burke was better off in Porkpa.
Though “better off” wasn’t what you’d call ideal. The clinic was a makeshift operation at best, and infections were a constant threat. Medical supplies were scarce, and the staff – never large – wandered off as the war drew nearer. A month after Burke’s arrival, Kate found herself with a single nurse’s aide, nine patients who couldn’t be moved, and a security guard who could not have been more than twelve years old. There was nothing for Burke to do but get well or die.
When he was able to move around, he did what he could to make himself useful, sitting up nights in the doorway with a shotgun in his lap. Before long, he was changing bandages and helping out in the kitchen. His biggest coup was the generator. Everyone said it was dead – “Black smoke is death-smoke!” – but Burke didn’t buy it. He’d grown up on a farm, and on a farm you fixed things. The generator at the clinic was a John Deere. It was bigger than the one his father had in Nellysford, but it worked the same way and had the same problems. After tinkering with it for an hour, Burke saw that the intake port was plugged. Ten minutes later, it was purring like a cat.
In his spare time – and he had nothing but spare time – he made a chess set out of shotgun shells, plumbing supplies, and empty medicine bottles. It was ugly, but it worked. Kate was too tired in the evenings to take the game seriously, but since it was the only game in town – literally – they played nearly every night.
And as they played, they talked. He learned about her childhood in Ireland, her boyfriends at Oxford, and her love of medicine. As for Africa? “Where else can I deliver babies one day, and the next, treat guinea worm, gunshot wounds, and AIDS – not to mention the likes of you!”
He admired her clarity. His own situation was more ambiguous, and even embarrassing. Though only thirty, he’d spent most of his adult life traveling around the world, “taking pictures in all the wrong places.” That was the only way to get published if you weren’t known: You went where others wouldn’t go. To cities like Grozny and Algiers, Monrovia and Port-au-Prince. The kinds of places where the best hotel in town was the one with the most sandbags.
He was working with the F-Stop Cooperative in New York, and most of the time he loved it. The life. The people. The pictures. Flying in and out of places. Just being there. You get off a plane in a city like Algiers, and everything snaps into focus. Just like that – right there, right then! Be here now. It was a great way to get “centered,” because if you didn’t, you wound up in an orange jumpsuit with a knife at your throat.
So it’s like being one of those divers, she teased.
What divers?
The ones in Acapulco who jump off the cliffs.
He shook his head. I’m not a cowboy, he told her. It’s not just the bang-bang.
Ri-iighhht.
No, really! He’d worked as a reporter, and writing just wasn’t the same. Whatever you wrote, it was never quite right. There was always someone you hadn’t interviewed, or something you didn’t quite grasp. Photography wasn’t like that. A picture was a fact in a way that words on a page could never be.
Burke told Kate how he’d gotten started on a weekly newspaper in Virginia. The paper wasn’t unionized, so he’d worn a lot of hats: writing articles and editorials, taking pictures and doing page layouts. There was a police scanner in a corner of the office, buzzing and crackling, diodes gleaming. Word of a fire, a shooting, a crash, and he was out the door with his cameras.
How exciting, she yawned. A crash.
Well, yeah, it was! A lot of the time, Burke told her, he rode shotgun with the newspaper’s main photographer, an older guy named Sal, who said things like, “Never go anywhere unless you’re strapped.” He meant with a camera.
So you’re always ready to take a picture.
Well, yeah, Burke said, but it’s not just that. The real point is that having a camera with you – even a small camera – changes you.
Changes you?
He nodded. Makes you braver, he said.
How?
If you have a camera, you want to get the picture. So you stand your ground. Most people won’t do that. They see people running, screaming, they head the other way – it’s instinct – but a good photographer stays where he is. He waits for the image.
And if “the image” is a tidal wave?
Burke laughed. It helps to be a good swimmer. But he’d always had second thoughts about photography. Though he’d won a boxful of awards, and covered everything from a gypsy wedding in Siberia to the dragon-boat races in Macao, most of his work revolved around mayhem. An earthquake in Turkey, a mass grave in Kosovo, a beheading in Chop Square. After a while, you got used to havoc. It began to seem almost normal.
And that couldn’t be good for your soul, Burke thought. It was one thing to be an accidental witness, someone who just happened upon a scene, and quite another to stick a camera in a dying man’s face – as he had done on more than one occasion. There was something shameful about taking a picture like that. It made you complicit in the mayhem.
Sounds like bad karma, Kate told him.
Burke smiled. “Yeah,” he said, “something like that.”
Chess wasn’t their only diversion. There was an alfresco theater, of sorts, in the ruins and weeds of what used to be the post office. Each Friday night, a dozen metal chairs were unfolded and deployed before a badly damaged wall of whitewashed cinder blocks. An antique 8mm film projector sputtered to life, casting its spell along a beam of light, flickering with the vectors of moths and flying beetles. In the second month of Burke’s sojourn in Porkpa, he and Kate paid half a euro each to see Richard Burton in The Robe, John Wayne in Hatari!, and Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Where the films came from was a mystery.
What was not a mystery was the attraction that he and Kate began to feel for each other. Maybe it was inevitable. They were young. It was Africa. After the Michael Rennie movie, they made out like a couple of kids, sitting on a couch at the clinic. It only lasted a minute or two, then Kate pushed him away and, with a sly smile, suggested they go to bed.
But not with each other. She needed time to think, she said, then kissed him on the cheek, and left the room, slyly humming. It took him a while to recognize the song. “Just One of Those Things.”