The Bridge Survey Ended With My Camera Under His Boot

Brock Hensley hired me because he thought a man with bells on his kite would be cheap.

"Four hundred eighty dollars for bridge pictures?" he said. "Does the bridge get to keep the kite?"

I waited beside his scrap scale until he stopped laughing.

At sixty, I was a white man with a long, pale face, thin gray hair, and one shoulder lower than the other from carrying camera cases.

I made my living as a kite-aerial survey photographer. Roofers, land buyers, and engineers paid me for views from above. I marked wind speed in a field book and used a timed shutter on a small film camera.

I also sewed tiny brass bells into damaged kite tails. They added almost no weight. A changed sound told me when a patched tail had begun to tear.

People liked that less useful explanation better: I was peculiar.

"Half now," I said.

"One hundred twenty. Rest when I see the prints."

I changed the payment line and made him initial it.

Brock was a broad white man of forty-six, with a shaved head, pink cheeks, and a gold tooth that showed when he grinned.

He owned a scrap yard outside Paducah, on the Kentucky side of the river. He wanted pictures of the Ohio River bridge and the approach near his land. He said a buyer needed proof that trucks could reach his gate.

His warehouse stood between the scale and the river. On my sketch, he drew a hard box around it.

"No reason to look there."

"Then I'll launch west of it."

He paid me six twenty-dollar bills.

Before I left, his scale clerk brought out a form for Brock to sign. The man's name, Leon Mercer, was sewn above his shirt pocket.

"The weights still don't match," Leon said.

Brock kept smiling.

"You weigh too much yourself, Leon. Start there."

The clerk went quiet.

That afternoon, the river carried flat brown water beneath a pale sky. I spread my blue survey kite on a strip of grass and checked the bridle. My spare spar had a hollow center and rubber end plugs. I had learned years before that a film canister fit inside it.

A camera could fall. A client could grab it. My habit was to put an exposed roll somewhere separate before I packed.

I wrote 2:18 in my field book and let out line.

The camera cradle climbed. Every twelve seconds, its motor made an exposure. Below the bridge, a towboat pushed a row of barges into the slow bend.

Then the wind shifted.

My kite slid east, past the angle I had marked. I walked backward and worked the line, but the cradle passed above Brock's warehouse roof.

From where I stood, I could see part of its back lot through a gap in the fence.

A green truck waited there. Two men held Leon by his arms.

I thought they were helping him until he planted both feet and pulled away.

"Hey!" I called.

The truck door shut.

One of the men looked up.

I hauled in line so fast it burned through my glove. Behind me, a gate rattled. I heard Brock shouting my name.

The kite landed in the grass. I set the cradle between my knees, wound the film back, and opened the camera. My fingers knew that job even while the rest of me shook.

I slid the canister into the spare spar and pressed the rubber plug home. Then I tucked the spar through the loose sleeve along the kite's sail.

Brock reached me before I could close my case.

"Taking a look down on me?"

His easy grin was gone.

"The wind moved. There were men behind your building."

He pulled the camera out of my hands.

"Old fool can't even steer his own toy."

He dropped it onto the concrete lip of a drainage ditch. His boot came down twice. The lens cracked. The back sprang open, then folded under his heel.

He flung the camera into my case without picking through the pieces.

"Hope those pictures were worth it."

I bent to gather the pieces. I kept my face turned away from the kite.

"You owe me for that."

He laughed again, but it sounded forced.

"Send a bill. Give the judge a bell, too."

I drove home with my broken camera on the seat and the kite stretched across the back. At every turn, its tail gave one small note.

I parked behind my house and carried the sail indoors before I touched anything else.

By six, I had written down the whole visit. I sealed the camera pieces in a grocery sack and stapled Brock's signed order to my repair folder.

I had just reached for the spar when someone knocked.

A woman stood on my porch holding a missing-person flyer. Leon Mercer's work picture filled its top half.

"Mr. Fenwick?" she said. "I'm Estelle Price. His sister told me he was expecting trouble."