Once We Had a Country by Robert McGill Page B

two are close,” said Wale. “Or you used to be, at least. Maybe you’d want to look out for him.”
    Maggie didn’t reply.
    “Well, if you do go, tell me,” said Wale. “I might come over and look you up.” He grinned at her, and she decided he was probably insane.
    In silence they exited the train and rode the escalator to the surface, Maggie worrying the whole way up that he was going to say something else she’d have to deal with. It was a relief when they reached the cold air outside, but Fletcher was nowhere to be seen.
    “He said he’d be here,” she explained, unable to hide her unease, needing to be out of Wale’s company. He seemed to think she was only concerned about Fletcher’s welfare.
    “You’re really stuck on this guy. It’s not for his money, is it?”
    Even though he said it jokingly, Maggie scowled. She often worried about the Morgan family’s wealth, not because people like Wale would think she was a gold digger, but because her father might feel self-conscious about his own money problems.
    It was only another minute before Fletcher arrived. He seemed taken aback to see Wale with her, and she found herself saying that the two of them had run into each other on the subway. Wale winked at her, and immediately she regretted the lie. As he said goodbye and started away from them, she could imagine him growing ever bolder with her, not caring what Brid or Fletcher thought, until there was some confrontation and Maggie got blamed. The next time she and Fletcher met up with Brid, though, Wale wasn’t there. He’d re-enlisted and shipped out to Vietnam, beating her father to Indochina by a good four months.
    Between the hours of gardening, cleaning, and making dinners, Maggie retreats to her camera. She films George Ray atop a ladder as he tends the trees, a transistor radio in his shirt pocket piping music to him through an earphone. She captures Fletcher and Wale on the farmhouse roof with their hammers flashing. From the creek bank a mile downstream, she films them and Brid swimming in a shady pool beneath an old concrete dam, while water passes over the edge in a smooth, clear stream and an empty bird’s nest bobs in an eddy. Across the road, the church’s steeple pokes up from the horizon, scratching a human presence into the sky. Pauline sits cross-legged on the bank in her pink swimsuit, collecting pebbles for a tiny, slowly growing cairn.
    By now Maggie has recognized that when the others are conscious of the camera, they each have their reactions. For Brid, to be filmed is an affront, as though someone hascalled her a dirty name. Wale tries to escape, so that often there are only blurred glimpses of him quickening away like a sasquatch. George Ray is almost as elusive, cloistered in the barracks when he isn’t working. Those times she does catch him out, he acts embarrassed. By contrast, Pauline squirms her way into every shot she can, dancing and hamming. A camera appears and the world rearranges itself in response. Fletcher alone changes not a bit, as if he’s been exposed to cameras all his life.
    With each person, it’s the private moments Maggie’s after. She doesn’t want self-consciousness; she doesn’t want performance. In daydreams she imagines aerial shots that would let her study everyone at her leisure, unobserved, but in practice she’s limited to filming from ground level, so she stays on the periphery and wills herself to be part of the landscape, carrying the camera even when it’s turned off, hoping others will become less sensitive to its presence.
    It would be easier to blend into the scene if more people were around, but no one else arrives. Even Frank and the girls next door remain absent from the lawn in front of the mobile home when Maggie walks by. As the middle of July approaches, Fletcher’s optimism about the farm starts to dwindle.
    “A hundred thousand draft dodgers in this country and we can’t get one of them,” he complains. He stays up