By Scott Sullivan
Editor
What the Dove
Delivered
A sign outside Gun Lake Casino read words broken into illumined pixels: BONANZA BUCKS. I pumped gas in my tank at the Mobil station across the street and another picture formed.
As a boy in my basement, we had a slot machine with nickels in a bowl to keep feeding it. Most had Jefferson heads with Monticello tails, but Indian/buffalo disks that dropped into coin slots clinking disengaged the right arm too.
When we pushed it down, three wheels bearing fruits — bananas, cherries, apples or BAR-BAR-BAR — spun, then came to rest, matching randomly. Three BAR-BAR-BARs disgorged mini-jackpots.
No one won or lost because the machine’s back opened and you could reload it with recycled nickels until time vanished or Mom called downstairs food was ready.
Car full of fuel, I could drive home … wait: Carter had brought me two videocams, but only one had a memory card in it. At the end of our Lawless Park shoot I’d forgotten and given him just one back. I checked in the back seat. Yup, the full one had fallen on the floor, buried under rain gear.
I punched Carter’s cell phone number. “Where are you?”
“Eastbound I-94, near Battle Creek,” he answered. “Art expects cards by dark.”
He meant Art McCafferty, Great Lake Sports Publications founder, waiting home near Ann Arbor to edit our Sandhill Crane All Trail Run videos into a multi-part YouTube package and post the schmear online ASAP.
“I only gave you back my empty camera. Know a place in Kalamazoo we can both backtrack, meet to eat and I’ll give you the good one?”
“There’s a Fazoli’s on West Main,” Carter offered.
“It’ll take me about a half-hour to turn around, get semi-lost before finding, and meet you there.”
Carter was eating a plate of pasta when I pulled in. “Sorry,” I greeted him and looked out the windows. Fall trees shone and framed a Fifth Third Bank ATM. “Rain’s stopped.”
“Not yet in Ann Arbor. But Michigan’s winning now.”
“Big,” I said. We had both been listening to the Indiana-at-Michigan football game on the radio. “Caesar salad,” I told the waitress.
“Get anywhere with the Bible metaphors?”
Bored last night, waiting for Carter to arrive at the Three Rivers Super 8, I’d pored through a Gideon’s Bible and lit on the Noah’s flood story. God’s condemnation of men He’d created, as all our thoughts were evil, had inspired Him to wash the earth with baptismal water, then try over, like reusing slot machine nickels.
“Can BONANZA BUCKS pixels be reassembled?” I asked Carter.
“Huh?”
“The casino sign, where I turned around when I called you, said that.”
“When you drive home,” Carter said, “look and see.”
“Lot’s wife turned into a salt pillar when she did that,” I said. “I’m afraid I’ve left Art a mess: disjointed images made more so by voiceovers turned inaudible.
“So make a map for him.”
I quick checked my cell phone screen. “Google shows if we turn south on Sage Street a block east we get to Nirvana Center. It’s a cannibas store. Bliss Salon’s beyond that …”
“You kept talking about Satori Salon in Jones,” he said, “near the Rainbow Farm. Did you stop there this year?”
“I was in a rush to get home.”
“So no Satori story, no Bliss, Nirvana … Three hours later, you’re still not home.”
“Some say light is made up of waves,” I said. For photographers, digression is the point. “Others, particles. Maybe it’s waves of particles.”
“Maybe it’s nothing like that at all.”
“Riding waves in an ark full of animals,” I riffed on, “Noah sent forth a raven, then a dove two times. On the second she brought back an olive leaf; soon the vessel came to rest on Mount Ararat.”
“Last night you talked about New and Old testaments being in accord,” he reminded me. “You suggested God erred making man, so He’s punished us — Adam, Job, Noah … your own Jesus — since then?”
“Mine?”
“If sons are punished for their fathers’ sins, does it not stand we’re rewarded also? Pain, death, energy, love … Now it’s clear,” he said.
“Yes. The casino’s a sign for me.”
Dad’s Dad had built him a toybox, varnished it and painted the word “John” on it. My father kept it in the basement beside the slot machine. Mom filled Dad’s old toybox with disguises and masks for my brothers and me to use.
A wide door opened further along the back wall onto a darkroom with sinks, tray and jugs of chemicals. Shelves held tins of bulk Tri-X film and boxes of photo paper. On the counter stood an enlarger and round-faced, ticking timer …
“Why are safelights red?” I asked Dad.
“We can see under them,” he said, “but they don’t expose light-sensitive black-and-white paper and film we work with …”
“Meaning?”
“Victory is achieved on a different playing field than we think.”
Carter took my memory card. “Want the camera too?”
“Sure,” he said.
Driving northbound once more home on 131, the Gun Lake Casino sign rose again. Now its pixels were reassembling into sequences:
RING IN THE RICHES
FREE PLAY FRENZY
JACKPOT PARTY
Ten miles north the freeway began to fissure, spreading like a delta into a cloverleaf I could navigate. Bearing right-right-right on each split towards Holland circled 270° west towards — I’d been away 24 hours — home.