Salvation Boulevard by Larry Beinhart Read Free Book Online Page A

geography, business and environmental geography, and introduction to feminist geography.
    The house was relatively small, built in a southwestern style and done up that way inside too. What you call mission furniture, or something like it, sparse with lots of wood showing. A rug with the colors of desert sand.

    â€œAside from that,” she said. “I don’t know what else I can tell you.” It was dismissive, conversation ending, putting up defenses, yet something in her tone said the opposite, but suggesting, somehow, that there were secret doors, hidden here and there along the walls.
    There were several photographic prints on the wall and two small paintings. To keep the interview alive, and maybe find one of those openings, I walked over for a closer look at the most striking of the photos, a desolate landscape, glossy black stones in the foreground leading to a field of sand, dark gray mixed with brown, with an orangered river of fire running through the center and off into the distance.
    â€œA volcano?” I asked. “Lava flowing?”
    â€œNo,” she said. “It’s a river.”
    â€œOh. The photographer manipulated the color,” I said, guessing.
    â€œThat’s the color, the real color. It’s waste. It’s the runoff from a nickel mine, and that’s what it did to the river and the land.”
    On the opposite wall there was a set of five photographs framed together on a single panel. All had been taken from the same high angle, looking down at a McDonald’s. I said, “May I?” and went to look at those more closely. The series went from morning through night. Each was a multiple exposure over a fifteen-minute period, the aperture set so that the cumulative shots of the restaurant combined to make it seem solid and bright, the way a McDonald’s always does. But the figures that passed in front of it had only been given a fractional exposure, so they appeared like specters, dim and semitransparent. The dusk and night shots were even more dramatic, full of bursts of light from passing cars, their headlights leaving washes on the building and illuminating some of the people, as if they were flash attachments that let you catch ghosts on film.
    She followed me, and from close behind me she said, “It’s from one of my studies.”
    â€œDid you shoot it?” I asked.
    â€œNo. I had it done. The hottest application of geography these days, so there’s grant money for it, is commercial traffic patterns. But the photos turned out to have their own aesthetic.”

    I turned toward her as she spoke. Her gaze was on me, and our eyes met.
    There was a whistling noise from the kitchen.
    â€œWould you like some tea?” she asked. “Green tea or some other kind? Or water? Or a drink?”
    â€œTea would be fine, and I’ll have whatever kind you’re having.”
    â€œGreen tea,” she said. “It purifies the blood.”
    â€œYou think that’s true?” I asked as she moved toward the kitchen.
    â€œThere was a study,” she said. “It proved that if you’re a Japanese fisherperson and you drink six cups a day, you’ll live longer than a fisherperson who only drinks one cup a day.”
    I followed her and, when she went in, watched her from the doorway as she busied herself. She took out a Japanese tea set, glazed the color of iron, the pot with flat sides and curved edges, the cups without handles. Her gestures were neat and tidy. Precise and very concentrated.
    She was working very hard at being in control and self-possessed, at making everything seem casual and normal.
    But it was taking so much focus to do so—first on the pot, then on finding the tin with tea leaves, then opening it—that she blocked out the sound and had even forgotten that it was the whistle that had summoned her until it rose in volume and pitch to a shriek that pierced right through her wall of