The tape came off easier than he thought. It had been on so long it had given up.
There were four things inside.
A baseball patch. Round, felt, with a stitched border, a little pickax crossed with a bat. WARREN LITTLE LEAGUE, it said around the edge, and in the middle, COPPER KINGS. He knew it before he even thought about it. It was the patch on the boy's sleeve. He had looked at that picture so many times now he could have drawn it.
A Greyhound ticket stub, soft as cloth. TUCSON — SEATTLE. ONE WAY. MAR 6 1966.
A small white card, folded once. SELECTIVE SERVICE SYSTEM, it said at the top, and below that, typed, the name. Carter W. Abbott. A date of birth: October 3, 1945. His father's birthday was October third. They had cake every year, German chocolate, and his father pretended to be surprised.
And a little paper sleeve, waxy and see-through, the kind Mrs. Abbott had said the negatives came in. There was one strip inside, three frames long, cut ragged at one end as if somebody had done it in a hurry.
He held it up to the shop light.
Everything in it was backward. The dark parts were light and the light parts were dark, so that the faces looked like ghosts, white-haired and black-eyed. But he could see what it was. A counter, like a store counter, and a woman behind it, leaning on her elbows, laughing at whoever had the camera. Three frames of the same woman laughing harder and harder, like the person holding the camera had kept saying something funnier every time.
The print is only a copy, she'd said. You lose the negative, it's gone.
His father had known that. His father had taken the negative.
"Carter? You find it?"
He jumped so hard he dropped the stub. The screen door banged. He shoved everything back into the box, the stub and the card and the patch, and the negative sleeve, which he slid in too fast so that it bent at one corner, and he jammed the box into the drawer and kicked the drawer shut and came around the bench holding up the fuse like a trophy.
"Got it."
His father took it and looked at him. Just for a second. Then he looked at the drawer.
"Thanks," he said, and went to fix the cooler.