The Reckoning Read Online Free PDF Page A

way into the family of them.
    She was a photographer first, a writer second. The lens was her habitat. It was her sanctuary. Prose came more slowly. It always came after the picture.
    The afternoon the Times editor called to assign her the story, Molly had gone straight to Mike’s Camera and maxed out her credit card on a digital Nikon with all the bells and whistles. She had wanted it forever, but could never justify the sticker shock, over $10,000. Now that she was going national, though, she figured the camera would pay for itself.
    With digital you could edit the image and change the look, even turn color into grainy black and white, as she’d contemplated, to evoke a ’60s ’Nam-scape. It would give her the ability to mimic the great war photographers, Henri Huet and Tim Page and Larry Burrows and Kyochi Sawada and Robert Capa, all without lugging blocks of Velvia and Kodak through the tropical heat.
    The camera was unlike any she’d ever owned. It was more than the usual sum of lenses, filters, and film, more than a boxful of memories. Its instant recall made it both a tool and a communal event.
    On a hunch, she had brought a pair of five-inch barber’s scissors. Her dad—her stepfather—had been a barber. Never underestimate the value of a free haircut. The scissors paid in aces with the recovery team. People flocked to her tent in the evenings. While she trimmed their hair, they talked about music, sports, movies, and home. She shared anything they wanted to know about photography, from the rule of thirds to underexposing one f-stop for the midday glare. Also she showed them her camera, and that was the real icebreaker.
    With a flip of a switch, they could see themselves the way she saw them. She flipped the switch. The display lit up.
    Here was their dig, and in the distance nut-brown children wrestling on water buffalo, National Geographic country as far as the eye could see.
    Here were the faces of RE-1, black, white, and brown, all rendered one color, the color of Cambodia’s dirt, the color of blood oranges. Here they mined the earth, here they shook it through screens with quarter-inch mesh.
    Here was the captain in repose, toasting her with a bottle of warm grape Gatorade while he smoked his evening Havana and read one of her Vogue magazines. He was smart and freethinking, a postmodern soldier who reveled in not carrying a weapon, and lived to raise the lost souls from the dirt.
    There was Kleat, a dead end. The brother angle would have been so sweet. But after the first week of him, she knew there was no way around his hatred of the people and the land. Kleat treated Cambodia like a curse or a disease. There was no way she could turn his bile into nobility, and so Molly had dropped him from her story and started framing her shots to exclude him.
    And here was Duncan, who was not part of her story either. But she could not keep her camera off him; there was something she liked. Here he stared into a dark square hole covered with grid strings, like a scout about to leap into the underworld. Here he stood among the laborers, head and shoulders above them, spinning some hilarious joke in fluent Khmer. Here he sat on his briefcase with his sketchbook on one knee, drawing faces and scenes and artifacts that no one was allowed to see because of his shyness.
    She peeked into his tent one afternoon, and was startled by its austerity. It was bare except for a black Ace comb and a toothbrush tucked in the wall pocket. He slept on the ground without sheets or a sleeping pad or a mosquito net. He owned nothing but the clothes on his back and whatever he carried in that briefcase.
    Here was their base camp, a hodgepodge of wall tents, pup tents, and her North Face dome. They had pitched their camp where a village once stood, not knowing that for some reason the locals thought it haunted.
    They used a clothesline strung between trees for their occasional volleyball games. Barbecue ball, she