My body slants under the weight of flash bulbs resting against my hip. The man from table nine exits the men’s room and grabs my free arm.

“How about another celery champagne for my lady?” he asks and points to his regular table near the band.

He has never seen me with a tray in my hand, only a camera. I am a camera girl, not a waitress. In his world, would I ask him to take out my garbage? But I can’t say this so the dance continues. He has been to Oscar’s Seventh Heaven countless times, each time in a different shade of chalk stripe suit. I call him “the incumbent,” because he, and only he, thinks he should be able to sit at table nine. If anyone else sits there before he arrives, he shouts and waves his arms, pleading as if at a campaign whistle stop and lists the reasons why the man sitting there is unworthy of his seat.

“Sorry, “ I say and stretch to my full height. “I’m just the camera girl. I’ll send your waitress over.”

The incumbent stares, as if trying to place me, then nods. I am used to being the person that the patrons stop and question because I appear safe to white folk. I am fair. This is hard to see under dew-drop chandeliers and candlelight—but fair no less. The white soldiers, like the incumbent, are willing to come to a club like Oscar’s Seventh Heaven and mix with black folk because the jazz is beyond compare here. Tonight Billy Tolles and the Savoy Boys have come down from Seattle. It is a marked event even the incumbent doesn’t want to miss. I watch him slide past the round tables covered in velvet. He sits with a woman and another man.

The woman rakes her fingernails against the back of his neck.

The incumbent motions to me and I answer his cue, sashaying through the crowded tables.

“You’re Bert’s sister, right?”

“Half,” I say, uncomfortable with the attention. I sling the bag of bulbs behind my hip so I can nail the shot. “Now smile.”

I focus and trip the shutter. The area illuminates as if hit by a comet.

“Bert told me but I guess I paid it no mind,” he says, rubbing his eyes.

Bert is my brother, although unlike Bert’s father, my daddy was white—something our mother chose never to explain. When Bert got this job as manager of Oscar’s Seventh Heaven he suggested me to the owner because they needed camera girls. I was small and nimble and I knew how to be black or white, perfect for photography. He said it’s the only place where you can get paid for not being.

“How do you know my brother Bert?” I ask.

“Aw, just from here,” the incumbent says. “And from after here. He likes to play games and I help him find games sometimes.” He stares at me hard. “Last night I think I found for him the last game he will ever play. Your brother is not long for this world, Evelyn. He is bad at poker, very bad. He just doesn’t know his place now, does he?”

The sax solo cuts him off. The notes are fat and good enough to eat.

“What’s your name?” he asks in the pause before the drums return.

“Evelyn,” I say without any What’s Yours?

The incumbent’s date moves closer to him and smiles in a condescending way as if I’d said Can I instead of May I.

“Tate’s a flyer,” she says and runs her fingers through the lapel of his suit. “Tate flies, what are they called, darling?”

“Lockheed Lightnings,” the incumbent answers, and then points to the other man at the table, his buddy in the cavalry tweed suit. “And this one just got his notice—Yes ma’am, time to RSVP to a little man in a top hat named Uncle Sam…”

Cavalry tweed nods, his body crumpled. He is clearly enduring the evening. He reaches for his scotch, diluted streaks of pale yellow, shaking the glass to distribute shards of ice. I think I’ve seen him in North Beach, at the Venus Club, or Club Lido, perhaps the Chinese Sky Room.

“Drink up, Mel,” Tate the incumbent says. “They don’t have scotch in a P-38.”

I’d like to hear more about potential life outside of Oscar’s Seventh Heaven but I can feel the hot eyes of my brother from the stairwell above, boring through my polyester dress. I’m only supposed to linger if I sell additional pictures. I sink to my knees and focus a worm’s eye perspective on the shot. I put the woman in a couple with both Tate and Mel.

Experience and my own history have taught me that you can never really know who belongs to whom.

“I’ll be back in a flash,” I say as Mel holds his empty glass aloft for a refill. I leave the floor.

I linger at the bottom step of the stairwell leading to the darkroom and look back to the main floor, covered with smoke. I can’t see tonight’s headliner, Billy Tolles and the Savoy Boys, but I can hear them and I mouth to myself, number 98. Before I was a camera girl for Oscar’s Seventh Heaven, I was a Number Please Girl on Central Avenue in LA.

People sat at their tables with their phones and called me at the switchboard saying please play number 22 or I have to hear number 111 pronto and I’d have to know that number 22 was Jimmy Lunceford and His Orchestra and that number 111 was Lester Young. Now it’s hard for me to hear anything without translating it into a number first.

Rhonda rounds the corner from the kitchen with her tray of Circle A gingerales. She galumphs because sobers tip less than drinkers but all these ads for Circle A—official drink of the armed forces—has got people drinking up. She takes to writing orders on slips of paper and tucking them into a garter belt she keeps wrapped around her wrist. She’s the tallest girl in the club, one my mother would call “horsey.” She pays her torso no mind and often wears hats if only to make people look at her head first before descending the inevitable slope of her legs.

I angle my head towards the incumbent’s table and say to Rhonda,

“They’re getting restless at table nine for another round.”

Rhonda looks down and kicks my ankle. “Girl, when I see them, I see them.”

“I would hurry if I were you. He’s flush in more ways then one. Face and wallet.”

Rhonda kicks my ankle and shows me a pink patch of skin behind her ears. It looks crusted from a burn.

“The lye,” she says. “Burned half my head trying to straighten my hair. When I run around and sweat, it hurts like crazy.”

Camera girls make nowhere near what waitresses make. I’ve never liked that. But I also have never really thought about the price of upkeep.

I ascend one step to blow on her head.

“You wouldn’t know anything about it, would you?”

I stop blowing because now she is going to launch into it, because in her world I am the only one to rail against.

“Yep for sure,” she says. “You ain’t blacker than this here coaster.” She unearths a black coaster from one of the ginger ales and rolls her eyes east and west. That is the thing about being as fair as I am. You have a passport to both countries but in the end, no one will ever let you stay permanently.

Rhonda drops the coaster at my feet and marches through the stone portal leading to the room where it all happens.

My brother Bert yells down for me again. Last week I waited too long before we could process the rolls and the customer left and we got shafted.

My bedroom wall is full of prints of soldier faces too drunk to remember that they had paid for photos.

“Right,” I say, but then I see Keith enter the club through the stone portal. He takes a seat at the bar and chops the counter, nearly knocking the blue vase and white lace runner off the table.

I edge closer and finish my roll with a profile and a shot of his hands, chipped nails from work on the line at the Bethlehem Steel. He makes aircraft doors to shield against Japanese bullets. I shouldn’t be taking this photo, we don’t make money from civilians, but if he is in the club, I always like to finish off my roll with an image of his face.

“Hey Evelyn,” Keith says and grips my waist in a hug. He is pure granite and I’m surprised that he has any muscle rotation at all. “Can you guess how many we’ve got in the shipyard now?”

“My brother told me eighteen thousand.”

He slaps the bar.

“That’s right. That means the state of Louisiana has sent every last black man here to work.”

“Is that right?” I ask.

“That is right,” Keith says. “And if you got yourself out of that potato sack they make you wear and started hawking some crayfish you’d have yourself some real money.”

I squat and take a quick shot of his chin. His eyes fascinate me, the sockets so deep a whole tennis ball could fit inside.

“Let me tell you about supply and demand,” I say. “There ain’t no silver out there. It all goes to the army so no one can take pictures. But there’s a whole ocean out there. Anyone can catch a fish.”

Keith holds his hands in front of his face as if to ward off a blow.

It is a game we play. Obviously Big afraid of Obviously Small. I just like Keith. Always have. Everyone has their kryptonite—like the man in the Sunday funnies—and Keith is mine. This is why: I have never met anyone so at ease with himself. Not graceful, not measured, but at ease. Whereas I, I carry my camera with me like a bizarre Venetian mask.

“Where you living now, Evelyn?” he asks, tapping a beat against my cheek.

“Up the hill.”

“Holy Hill? With all those Russians and their churches?”

I think I have him for a moment until I see his head bob away from me. I turn to see Rhonda’s backside returning to the kitchen.

“How about a tip,” I say in a sad attempt to recapture his attention.

“I don’t make money off shots of you.”

Keith drops his hand from my face. “From what I hear, your family doesn’t get good tips.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I can tell you this much, your brother didn’t pick Count Fleet at the Preakness and he should have,” Keith says and reaches behind his ear to see if a cigarette is still there.

“Don’t get me started on horses,” I say. “Bert already lost half his life betting on horses last year.”

Keith smiles with the corners of his mouth. But it isn’t funny. My brother has a six-inch scar on his belly from past gambling debts just to prove how unfunny it is. Keith nods.

“He’s in bad this time, Evelyn. Watch out. You’ll be surprised when you see him. Someone already beat the tar out of him tonight.”

As if on cue, I hear Bert’s voice from the darkroom above. Evelyn, we’ve got to move on this. I leave Keith to rummage behind the bar for a smoke as I ascend the stairs. The band has left Let Me Off Uptown for Lyonnaise Potatoes and Some Pork Chops.

The darkroom door is made of thick fir. I strike it hard but it only makes a tinny sound. Two strikes back let me know it is safe to enter Bert’s sanctum. The darkroom is lined with green on one side and black on the other. When I drop the bag of bulbs on the floor I suddenly feel weightless.

My photos taken earlier that night hang in clothespins above the fixer: the couples in their match trousers and harmonizing slacks and air blue Stetson felt hats. The flash has cast a floury gauze on the black faces but everyone looks happy and that’s what will, in the end, sell.

My brother Bert stands under a rose light. His tongs push another print over the lip of the fixer tray and into the sink.

“You’re gonna have to move faster,” Bert says. “I love you, but you just gonna have to move faster.”

“I can’t help it if Rhonda corners me about not being black enough. Sometimes I just wish I could jump in the fixer tray and come out darker.”

“That wasn’t Rhonda you was talking to, that was Keith. As for Rhonda, she’s working two jobs and she is tired as hell. I’m gonna have to pick up a third job myself.”

I think of Bert spending his days at the train depot shining shoes and his nights here managing and the sliver of time in between.

“The cook could give us the kitchen grease he gives to Rhonda to take down to the butcher. That’s free money.”

“Let’s not fight amongst ourselves,” Bert says.

I’d feel differently about his concern if he hadn’t slept with Rhonda and softened his sense of priorities.

Bert enlarges a print and soon I see table six, an octopus of couples, and he makes ten copies. He looks at my camera and adjusts the speed two stops faster. I knew to change it but I’m not allowed to touch the settings.

I wait for Bert to work. In the developer tray, Tate, the incumbent, and his friend Mel, in the cavalry tweed with his glum face, appear.

I point to Mel and say, “He just got drafted.”

“Can’t be,” Bert says. “I’ve seen that guy before walking down Market Street with his kid. The navy don’t take fathers.”

“Didn’t you hear?” Sometimes I don’t think Bert ever leaves the darkroom. “That don’t matter anymore. They’re drafting fathers now.”

“He looks like he’d give anything not to go,” Bert says, staring at the tray.

But Bert is not sympathetic. He is plotting.

“Can I open the door now?” I ask.

Bert nods and continues to stir the prints in the wash bath.

Bert lifts his chin to the light and it is then that I see the letters BAC embedded in charcoal against his neck.

“What the hell is that?” I scream.

“Couple guys this afternoon. They wanted their money and no surprise, I didn’t have it. So they up and branded me.”

“How the hell did they find a branding iron around here?”

Bert bites his lip hard. “See, this is when I know you really are my sister. You don’t ask why something like this could happen, you only
marvel at the how…”

It is pointless. I won’t get any information out of him now; he is resigned, just like Mel, the recently drafted.

I scoop up a set of the prints on the clothesline, divide them by table, and use my back to jimmy the door open. I try not to let him hear me cry.

“Hold on,” Bert says and points to the image of Keith in the fixer. “Why do you keep wasting film on him?”

“I don’t know,” I say and return to the light before he can mouth off on me. But I do know. We always do to others what we wish they’d do to us.

Table nine buys twenty dollars worth of photos which means I get five. At table six, a sergeant shells out thirty dollars and all the women look at the print and cry. The men lead their ladies to the dance floor in an attempt to make everyone forget that they will be shipped off in the morning. The men do not cradle their women in their arms, they clutch them, as if the women will turn fluid before they have a chance to relish every contour. In the end, it will be my photos on this final night, clutch night, that will fill the lockets, accompany the obit.

The hour and minute hand coincide at twelve and I know I only have two more hours to make my keep. The WAACs at table five join the couples from table six to form a huge circle and everyone kicks and sways doing the Fat Apple.

I stare at their skin, not because it is white, but because it is clear.

The group is the visual equivalent of the recruitment ad: good health, excellent character. But my ad is different: take a Kodak with you.

I’ve filled another roll; time to return to the darkroom. When I ascend the stairs and rap on the door, there is no answer. I go inside and remove the camera-back and start pushing the roll through the reel, filling the tank with developer and water, readying the fixer and then I can’t help myself because I know I’m going to process this without Bert come hell or high water.

I keep waiting for Bert to barge in and scream at me but he never appears and I am happy. The contrast on my prints is spot-on this time and I hang each one on the clothesline with pride.

I hear a tap at the door and I tap back twice but there is no answer. “Evelyn, if you’re in there, come out quick,” Rhonda shouts.

So I do. Rhonda presses my forearm so I know something is wrong. She never touches me. Fingers I’d always imagined to be soft are scaly.

We descend the stairwell together. I can see Bert standing in front of the bar with a man in a black zoot suit. Bert’s plastic gloves still encase his hands and his smock wrestles against his knees. The smock is covered in blood and he looks like a butcher but butchers don’t have blood coming from the insides of their aprons. Bert looks at me and mouths “I’m sorry.” Then he yanks at the stopwatch dangling from the hip pocket of the stranger in the black zoot suit. The watch chain breaks in his hand and he throws it to me. The watch is embossed with the letters BAC.

“Sweet Jesus,” I yell, following a beat-up Bert as he walks to table nine.

“Bert, God almighty, Bert, you can’t go in there,” Rhonda yells.

Bert ignores everyone. He walks until he stands in front of Mel, the recently drafted man in the cavalry tweed suit. Mel, as if seeing his future, laughs until he barks.

“If you give me your draft notice, and your wedding ring,” Bert says,

“I’ll take care of the rest.”

Tate and Mel stare, haunted.

“I think,” Tate says. “They’d notice the difference between you and Mel. Even the Japs could do that.”

“Bert, don’t,” I say, but I feel Keith’s hand at my hip and Rhonda’s hand at my shoulder.

“I run the darkroom,” Bert says. “I can make my own ID.”

Suddenly the gauze lifts from Mel’s eyes and he slips off his wedding ring and folds a pink draft notice into thirds and hands it to Bert.

“Who will know,” Bert rhymes with the band’s triplet beats, “Just another Negro…who will know…just another Negro.”

“Sure enough,” Rhonda says, “Sure enough.”

As the man in the black zoot suit lurches towards him, Bert jumps on the stage in front of the GK drum kit and runs through the back door, all it seems, in two-four time. My brother is so sweet Jesus graceful and I will never see him again. I do what I have always done, this time, with Keith pressed against my waist, a human tripod, I am going to take a picture.

The picture I take then, the last to be developed that night, no one buys. In the foreground, Rhonda collects the empty glasses at table six.

The background betrays Mel, in cavalry twill, finally smiling. His mouth sings along with the tune about people sitting on orange crates, but his lips are too diffused to tell whether he is on the word love or melody.

Lisa Ryers was born in Germany in 1968. She received her BA from Brown University and her MA in creative writing from San Francisco State. Her photography has been shown in San Francisco, Tucson, and Prague. Her published stories and articles can be found on www.lisaryers.com.