![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theladywandererIt's the summer of 1979, the sun is shining, AC/DC is on tour, Missy Perkins has her first real photography gig, and there's something in the water at Loon Lake.
for
NOTE:
—Imogen, Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Act IV, scene ii
Our courtiers say all's savage but at court:
Experience, O, thou disprovest report!
The imperious seas breed monsters[...]
~~~
Loon Lake, Wisconsin is an improbably placed body of water, for both people and the loons.
A woman in a pressed blue suit explains this to Shiloh, pointing at stiff pieces of cardboard with diagrams that say things like 'migratory patterns', 'average temperature', and 'seasonal rainfall', the padded shoulders of her jacket quivering in counterpoint to her gestures.
"I see," Shiloh says when the woman pauses for breath. She doesn't see, but that hardly matters. She's here, in this office, talking to this lady, sweating through her second-best pair of hose and doing her utmost not to chew her roommate's lipstick off because she's damn good with a lens, not because she's intimately familiar with the movements and lifestyle of the common loon. However, if fifteen years in the pageant circuit had taught her anything, it was that hairspray was a godsend, fake boobs always showed, and it was a good idea to pretend interest in whatever was being said to you, no matter how much you'd rather be at home, sitting down, and wearing significantly more clothes.
After this reassurance, the lecture continues, with—Shiloh leans over, catches the edge of the name-tag clipped neatly to the hem of the woman's jacket—Ms. Coleman going into the ecology of the area surrounding Loon Lake, the general likelihood of bear attacks (refreshingly high, apparently), and the travel arrangements that have been made for her, her equipment, and the guy from CBS who's being sent along with her.
"—and I suppose that's everything," Ms. Coleman finishes, looking a little lost at having nothing else to say. "If you have any questions, feel free to call me here, or the main switchboard, both numbers are on the card I gave you. If you can't find a place that does long distance, don't worry about calling collect—so long as it's for the job, the magazine has you covered."
"Thank you," Shiloh says in response, even though the prospect of finding anyone rich enough to have a long distance telephone in rural Wisconsin is laughable, no matter how many quarters she packs.
"Well then." Ms. Coleman taps her diagrams into a neat pile, then stands up. Shiloh follows suit, awkwardly grabbing at her purse and the small notepad she'd been scratching such relevant things as 'loon lake', 'what is a loon', and 'more of a samba then a jive' in modified short-hand throughout the meeting. "We'll see you again in a few months, Ms. Perkins, and the very best of luck to you."
"Thanks," Shiloh says again, and after a half-hearted handshake from Ms. Coleman, leaves into the sticky July heat of Washington, D.C.
~~~
It's the summer 1979, the sun is shining, AC/DC is on tour, and Shiloh "Missy" Perkins, Miss Texas 1976, has her first real professional photography gig. It's nature photography (which is her passion) of loons (which isn't), but it's for National Geographic, so Shiloh would've said yes to taking pictures of trash if they'd asked it of her.
She'd explained that to Eli the last time he'd come up to visit her a few months ago, though he'd been skeptical, to say the least.
"And what's this for, again?" he'd asked, sitting at her kitchen table and flipping dubiously through the thick packet of legalese she'd been sent to sign before she actually went anywhere and did anything.
"National Geographic," Shiloh had repeated, searching through the junk drawer to the left of the sink for a pen that wasn't dry, glitter, or free advertising. "CBS as well, technically, they've got a videographer coming up the second week."
"For ducks?" Eli's voice had implied that if his sister was getting paid to take pictures of ducks, NatGeo could at least send her somewhere nicer than Wisconsin
"Loons," Shiloh had corrected. "Technically yellow-billed loons, who aren't even supposed to be this far south."
Eli had looked up from the papers, the morning sun glinting off his glasses. "The difference being?"
Shiloh had shrugged. "Neither of them are geese? Apparently, this lake is wildly outside of the loons usual range, yellow-billed and otherwise, but there's enough of them there anyway that the locals named it after them.
"Plus," she'd added, grabbing a black ballpoint and hip-checking the drawer closed, "I'm getting paid a lot more to take pictures of them than I am anything else, at the moment."
"Right." He'd still sounded skeptical—Eli excelled at skeptical, he'd gotten it from their mother—but it'd been more in a "these rich people" way than a "they're planning to murder you" way, which was something.
Baby steps, Shiloh thinks, a week and a half out from Mrs. Coleman's office, ankle deep in spring mud, and waiting for the sun to rise. My whole goddamn life has been nothing but baby steps.
~~~
She doesn't get anything that day.
Oh, to be sure, she gets some things, but none of them are the loons she's been sent for. There's half a roll of a bear cub and its mother, a few snaps of a deer standing frozen in the mist, and a whole lot of blurry maybe-loons that seemed to be primed to take wing whenever she's not looking.
The hotel, when she gets back to it, looks more like a motel in the fading light; a haphazard line of rooms joined together down a thin ribbon of cracked asphalt, with a wheezing ice-machine blocking the sidewalk nearest the door. LOON LODGE burns bright and neon, the "O"s flickering occasionally, throwing the parking lot into sharp, red-tinged relief. Shiloh spares one thought to how very much it looks like a serial killer's paradise, before going to her room—all expenses, such as they were, paid by the magazine—and letting herself in.
She drops her gear on the rickety table by the door, the maybe-Formica top creaking under the weight, and heads over to her suitcases to dig out one of the pre-paid overnight-express envelopes NatGeo had sent her up with. One of the many, many benefits of shooting in the middle of nowhere is that the only darkroom setup for a hundred miles belongs to the State Police—and they're already sharing it with five counties worth of local LEOs and grocery stores—which means that Shiloh gets to ship her film back to the Midwest office in Chicago at the end of each day and hope and pray that nothing gets lost, overheated, overexposed, or broken along the way.
Today's envelope gets the three rolls she went through—even though they're loon-less, they're still good work—and a scribbled note to CJ at the photo lab to make sure she ran the contact sheets for the second roll at a bit of a higher exposure, to account for the light before she seals it up to drop off at the main desk in the morning.
~~~
It goes like this:
Shiloh wakes up twisted in the thin, worn sheets of the hotel bed, feeling vaguely like she under-slept even though it's been a solid eight hours since she dropped off. She showers, packs up for the day, swings by the continental breakfast in the main lobby, and makes it out to the lake by seven, when the pearly grey of dawn is just starting to inch over the horizon.
She takes pictures, buckets of pictures, a convenience store aisle's worth of film whirring for the briefest of seconds in the sun before spinning away into the protective darkness of the canister. Shiloh sees none of them after they leave her hands, but CJ calls from Chicago to say she's gotten her envelopes, and O'Malley calls to review the contact sheets and test photos he's seen, so it's not like Shiloh has no idea what's waiting for her once she finishes up here.
The third day, she actually starts to get photos of loons, capturing them in a thousand different forms: half-in half-out of the water, trailing droplets that catch the morning sun; black shadows against the rippling surface of the lake; clear arcs of wing, feathers, feet, and neck against the verdant blur of the trees behind them; zoomed in shots of a group of birds looking stupefied and dumb when a fish eludes them, their indignant honks almost audible through the clear plastic of the film.
She takes a couple rolls for herself, wandering around the parking lot of the hotel, the picnic areas scattered along the lakeshore, the long, low strip of businesses and fast-food places strung out like a half-finished, fraying chain of neon and cement, telephone wire and sodium lamps along the bleached-out highway. Shiloh switches between the moody crispness of black-and-white and the almost-garish explosion of Kodak color, two cameras slung around her neck and lenses stuffed into her pockets as she tries to grasp everything Loon Lake has to offer through the small, slightly smudged box of her viewfinder.
~~~
On Saturday, two days before the videographer from CBS arrives, O'Malley calls just as she comes back from grabbing dinner and tomorrow's lunch from the sort-of-Chinese place at the very edge of the chain-link sprawl of industry clustered along this portion of the highway. It's Chinese the same way canned spaghetti is Italian, but it's hot, filling, and most importantly, according to the desk clerk, just as good (if not better) on the second day.
Shiloh's bagging up a carton of what claims to be General Tso's chicken along with a container of rice to put in the mini-fridge when the call comes through, and she picks it up while digging through the take-out bag for a packet of utensils, the extra-long cord trailing over the carpeted floor.
"Shiloh Perkins speaking—" she manages to get out, before O'Malley runs right over top of her.
"Perkins," he bellows, nearly whiting out with static. "The hell do you think you're playing at?"
"Huh?" Shiloh says, intelligently.
"You can't just send me shit like this," O'Malley continues as if she'd never spoke. "We're a professional outfit, you're out there to do a job, not waste my time with woo-woo bullshit."
"Woo-woo bullshit?" Shiloh repeats. "What woo-woo bullshit? I've been out here for days, I have mud places you wouldn't believe, I talked to you yesterday, you know this—"
"Yesterday I hadn't seen these!" O'Malley shouts down the line. There's an echoing flap, as if he's shaking a stack of the test 5x7s CJ's been making up for her. "You're down there taking pictures of birds for National Geographic, Perkins, not making up lake monsters for the fucking National Enquirer!"
"I am doing no such thing—"
"You are! I have it! Right here!" She can hear him hit the solid wood of his desk with the flat of his hand, the sound muffled through the phone line. "A whole goddamn stack of moderately okay pictures of birds—we'll talk about your framing issues later—except half of them have fucking Nessie slithering through the background! Curse the limits of modern technology and the postal service, or I'd show you right now instead of having to keep goddamn saying 'lake monster' to you, as well as kick your ass."
"Barnaby," Shiloh says, as fast and confidently as she can, knowing that she only has about thirty seconds before he clocks that she used his first name and flips his lid a couple more times. "Barnaby, I swear, I have no idea what you're talking about, okay? Everything is birds over here, I'm dreaming about them, I hear them in my sleep, I can spot the differences in loon varieties at fifty paces by this point and I promise, I swear, I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about."
"Bah," O'Malley says. "Fine, sure. Get your bird shit, make nice with the CBS guy, then haul ass back here to Chicago. Maybe once you're here you can explain why the hell this thing keeps showing up in your shots."
"Sure," Shiloh says, almost breathless with relief, "sure."
"Oh, and Perkins?" O'Malley adds, right before he clicks off. "Only my mother calls me Barnaby."
The reedy half-hysteria of her laugh echoes with the dial-tone.
~~~
The CBS guy shows up on time, and brings with him a six-pack of beer that doesn't have "lite" anywhere near it, for which Shiloh is inordinately grateful. Loon Lake sells alcohol out of one general store and two dubiously licensed bars situated catty-corner to each other about a half-mile from the hotel, and none of them seem to sell anything aside from below bottom shelf liquor and beer pale enough to double for lemonade.
"Bless you," Shiloh says when he drops by after getting his shit sorted in the way of lodging, brandishing a glass bottle still sweating from the icebox. "They didn't give me your name—"
"Abner T. Jones," says the same, pushing back a worn baseball cap to itch at his hairline. He doesn't look like an Abner, doesn't look anything at all like the A/V guys she's worked with before, what with the scruff, worn-in hiking boots, and two-inch afro puffing out from under the sides of his hat, but she knows better than to discount someone because they don't fit the mold.
"Shiloh Perkins. What's the T stand for?" she asks, stepping back to wave him into her room.
"Nothing better than Abner," he replies, "which is why I don't say it."
"Fair enough," Shiloh says, letting the door fall shut on its own while she goes to look for a bottle opener.
~~~
They go out in the morning, before the sun rises, and Shiloh shows Abner the look-outs she's found, the angles, the places where the water and the light cooperate and the loons are the only frustratingly inconstant variable. He sets up a camera that's almost the size of a toddler, the legs of the tripod supporting it sinking solidly into the mud at the water's edge.
"Do you need any help?" Shiloh asks, looking at the set-up dubiously. She doesn't know a lot about film when it's moving, but she's pretty sure nothing that expensive should be listing quite so noticeably to one side.
"Nah, I got it," Abner replies absently, squinting into the lightening grey of pre-dawn. "It doesn't look pretty on this end, but trust me, me and my baby have done this before." He pats the side of the camera, coincidentally knocking it a tad more level.
"Alright," Shiloh says, and leaves him to it.
~~~
Abner, as far as she can tell, doesn't have any problems with O'Malley's lake monster.
Then again, she herself doesn't think she has any problems with any sort of lake monster, O'Malley's or not, but she's also getting increasingly terse phone calls from Chicago at the end of the day, so who knows. CJ had mentioned that she's started pulling anything that looks "hinky" before O'Malley sees it, and she gets the feeling that the non-hinky stack is getting smaller and smaller as O'Malley gets louder and louder.
Maybe CBS likes Nessie, she thinks as she tries to do something innovative with the rule of thirds, or at least thinks they can leave it on the cutting room floor if it happens to show up.
"Film," she mutters derisively, and then goes over to see if she can get the right zoom to capture the light refracting through beads of water caught on the spiny heads of cattails.
~~~
Wednesday night finds her three watered-down spritzers—from the shadier of the two bars—in and wandering the edge of the lake. Her boots are caked with mud, and the hems of her jeans are coming loose from where they're stuffed into the tops, but her footing is still solid, still sure.
Shiloh gets to a point where the lake bed curves just enough to cut off the view of what constitutes Loon Lake's main drag, the pinpricks of stars suddenly snapping into focus. She can see Orion, barely, and the long arch of one of the Dippers—she's never been certain which. The wind shushes in counterpoint to the rise and fall of insect life, the soft hoots of a distant owl running descant. It's beautiful, out here in the dark, even if—perhaps especially since—she doesn't have the weight of a camera and the expectations of Barnaby O'Malley slung around her neck.
Maybe that's why—in addition to the cumulative effect of the spritzers—when she sees the bright, blinking lights of a plane arcing overhead, she decides to treat it as the closest thing to a shooting star she's ever seen.
"Please," she says, Texas creeping into the vowels and dragging them down, "Please. Whatever's out there—hell, I don't know if anything is, but—"
Shiloh sighs, head dropping back on her shoulders, tracing the path of the plane north. "I need this. This place needs this—you think loons are popular enough for anyone to send someone like me back if nothing turns out to be usable?
"God," she snorts, turning back towards town, "I'm talking to a fucking lake, one that may or may not have a monster in it. But if you're listening...please. Take a day, visit a friend, leave the lake—or at least my lens—to the loons."
Shiloh starts making her way back towards her hotel; somewhere, in the darkness behind her, something splashes the surface of the lake with a dull thud, sending a spray of water sprinkling across her back. She doesn't turn around, just raises an arm in silent acknowledgement.
~~~
On the last day, while Abner's half submerged in the lake, camera whirring and wrapped in plastic, she gets it: a whole roll of loons rising off the surface of the water, trailing bright sparks into the blue wash of the sky.
When the pictures develop, here's no lake monster in sight.
