Freckles, Part 4

I have had one request for me to continue Freckles. Which, by the way, is all I need! So here it is, the fourth installment in a planned series of 3. Sigh.

So, not a bull fighter. In fact my calling was something entirely new. In 2010 it’s hard to find anything new; most things are third generation at least. And more than that, I was unique. Blazing a trail, a modern day Lewis. Or Clark. Whichever was better. But early on we were still finding our way. And as a 9 year-old boy I could never have imagined the strange path my life would take.

My suspicions were confirmed: we had picked up a trail. With a hard copy of Mr Tonkin’s face, it was a simple matter to draw and decode his freckle map. As Cory’s freckles had led us to Mr Tonkin, so did Mr Tonkin’s freckles lead us to Jessie Masterson, eventually. Our difficulty once again was in the fact that the freckles provided us with a location, not a person. A high school girl who worked behind the counter at the Kilgore street corner dairy Fridays after school and all day Sunday, Jessie was a hard one to pin down. Several fruitless afternoons were spent lurking around the dairy awaiting signs of freckles. By the third day the elderly owner had convinced himself that Cory and I were trying to rob him and he chased us out with vague threats to call the police and/or our parents, interspersed with healthy doses of profanity. Undeterred, we mustered our courage and returned, luckily just in time to catch Jessie about to begin her shift.

I could tell within moments of speaking to her that she saw us as just two goofy kids, playing around. But she was prepared to humour us, so that suited our purpose fine. Our experience with Mr Tonkin had proven that the disposable camera was an indispensible piece of equipment for our task, probably even more so than the permanent marker. To think that complete strangers would happily let us ‘join the dots’ on their faces was rather naive. To have a photo taken by two strangers wasn’t exactly normal either, but our chances of success were upped considerably. Jessie was old enough for her features to have begun their bloom into a beautiful adulthood and young enough to luxuriate in the attention. Her wavy red hair stretched halfway down her back and framed her face like one of those rings of fire that lions jump through. But there was nothing leonine about her face. Her lips were soft and prone to curling up in a quick, cheeky grin as she spoke to us.  Thinking us nothing more than young admirers, she was more than happy to not only provide us with a photograph but to pose stylishly for it. I still have the photo of Jessie Masterson, one leg tucked demurely behind the other as she leaned against the dirty white walls of the Kilgore street corner dairy. Starting with her, I began to print two copies of each photo, one to mark the freckles and one to keep. What happened to her I do not know.

Nowadays we keep a database so we can maintain contact with all of our ‘freckles’, which has become both a name for the group as a whole and the feature that makes them of interest to us. 

Together, Cory and I collected 46 more pieces of the puzzle before the day when the inevitable happened. You can only photograph strangers for so long before you get on someone’s bad side. A young mother took offense at Cory and I trying to surreptitiously photograph her stroller-bound toddler. And she called the police on us. For some reason they did not believe that our motives were pure. With the agreement of our parents, who had been putting up with our freckles obsession for many years now, we spent a night in the cells. That was where Cory told me that he was done. He no longer wanted to catalogue the freckles of the world with me. I begged. I pleaded too, but to no avail. By the time my Mum came to pick me up the following morning, Cory was already gone. 

Our friendship would not recover.