The Deepening Shade

by Jake Hinkson

  “I guess,” I said.

  “But she was alone that night, so me and Daniels just plopped down and started buying her drinks. We were drinking, too, of course, but McKenty was pouring it down like a sink. She held it pretty good, too, but she was kinda bummed out the whole time. Which wasn’t like her, you know? She was always a good time. It wasn’t just that she was easy, although I guess that’s what we mostly cared about, but she was pretty cool, too.”

  “Cool how?”

  He frowned and shook his head. “I mean, she could be pretty funny. And she was always talking up Raleigh-Durham like it was this great place and telling you cool stories about her grandpa who used to be some kind of Appalachian moonshiner. Stuff like that. And she was good at darts.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He watched Vanessa Sanchez loading up her plate with kiwi and strawberries. I didn’t want to say anything, but I didn’t want his mind to wander too far, either.

  “Okay,” I said again. “So what happened that night with McKenty at the bar?”

  He waved it away. “The past. I shouldn’t trudge it up.”

  If I were nice I would have let it go there, but I guess I’m not nice. I wanted him to finish. I pulled out my ace card. “I thought you were giving me the rundown on Jesus,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Or is Christianity just all cookouts and bumper stickers?”

  It was an asshole thing to say, but Randy looked like I’d thrown cold water on him. “No, man. Jesus is the real deal. I mean, there ain’t nothing more real.”

  “Then come across with the story, man. What happened with McKenty?”

  He sighed. “We got her drunk. You figured that already. She was real sad and just wanted to drink, I guess, so we kept pouring the drinks down her. That lasted till about closing time. She was slobbering then, just barely awake, and we took her for a drive. We went down to this sort of junkyard place by a stream at the far end of the airfield. It was gross down there. The water was all yellow and dirty from the rusted metal and stuff.”

  I nodded. A guy from accounting started playing around on a piano by the stairs.

  Over the opening bars of “O Holy Night,” Randy said, “We had one of those green army blankets. It was heavy duty, real scratchy and uncomfortable. We laid it down by some old tires.”

  He shrugged.

  I waited.

  “You know,” he said.

  I shook my head.

  He nodded. “Come on, you know.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t.”

  “We had sex with her.”

  I sipped my wine.

  He stared down at the floor. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this. She wasn’t even really sure what was going on. After we got done she was kinda halfway awake and she started throwing up in that nasty water.”

  I sat back on the sofa. Randy looked at me. “Pretty awful,” he said. “Pretty bad. We took her back to her apartment. She lived off base with this other girl. We dropped her off.”

  “Did you see her after that?”

  “Sure. Every day. She never said anything about it.”

  I shook my head.

  “Yeah,” Randy said. “I felt bad about it. I did. Messed me up for a while there until I met Jesus. I needed him to help me with the guilt.”

  Something seemed off about him. He’d sounded like he felt guilty up to the moment he’d said he felt guilty, but then he sounded like he was reading it from a sheet of paper.

  I had a hunch. “Guilty for what?” I asked.

  “For what we done, what I told you about.”

  “But which part exactly?”

  He rubbed his thick neck and sighed. “All of it. Drinking, sex.” He shook his head. “Two guys… We didn’t touch each other, don’t get me wrong. But two men seeing each other like that, that ain’t right.”

  “I see,” I said. “What about her being drunk?”

  Randy held out his hands. “Yeah, I don’t feel good about that, but McKenty was kinda the type for that, you know.”

  “The type to be raped?”

  He shook his head. “Whoa. No, dude. No. We didn’t…we didn’t do that.”

  “It sort of sounded that way.”

  He shook his head and his big hands closed into fists. He leaned close to me, and I could see a small scar cutting across his left eyebrow. “No no no. You heard it wrong or something. She wasn’t fighting nobody off. She wasn’t saying no. And she wasn’t the kind to say no, you know what I mean? If she had been sober she would have been the kind of girl to rock and roll on a deal like that.”

  “Like you.”

  Randy leaned back and took a deep breath. “Thing is, I was under the influence of the devil.”

  “C’mon, man…”

  “You don’t believe in the devil?”

  “No.”

  He looked at me like I was a cancer patient smoking a cigarette. “Jesus believed in the devil,” he said. “Believed in him, talked to him, fought him.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Sure as you’re sitting there.”

  “You’re as sure of the existence of the devil as you are of the fact that I’m sitting here.”

  “More.”

  “More?” I said. The word dropped out of my mouth like a turd.

  “Yep. Cause the Bible says it.”

  “It says a lot of things, Randy.”

  He shook his head and waved my words away. Again he moved close to me. “Look, I’m cool having this discussion with you. I don’t mind telling you my story. I told you I was a sinner, but I’m redeemed. I fell a long ways, but Jesus pulled me up even higher. He had to reach far down into the pit of sin to pull me out, but he did. He did. He pulled me up and lifted me high.”

  “You sound like a preacher.”

  Randy shrugged and leaned back and wedged his hands into his pants pockets. “Calling it like I see it. No sugarcoat.”

  One of the techies, a blonde named Kerri, stumbled over to us a little buzzed and sat down on the coffee table. She slipped off her wobbly heels and put her bare feet on top of my shoes.

  “I can read palms,” she said, reaching for my hand.

  I let her look at it, but Randy was already standing up.

  “Good love line,” Kerri said. “You’re going to marry soon.”

  “I doubt that,” I said.

  Randy paused at the elbow of our supervisor, thanked him for the party and headed out the door.

  Kerri tickled my palm.

  I turned back to her and smiled.

  She said, “What happened to the R Man?”

  “Went home.”

  “He’s nice,” she said. “I like him.”

  “He loves Jesus,” I said.

  “Hey, don’t we all?”

  “No,” I said.

  Kerri blinked a few times, let go of my hand and poked a long pink fingernail into my kneecap. “Well, he loves you, buddy boy. He loves all of us.”

  “Do you really believe that?” I asked.

  She smiled, but it only made her look kind of sad.

  “It’d sure be nice,” she said.

  A FTERMATH

  When the robbers burst in at twelve past twelve on this bright August afternoon, Marianne doesn’t notice. Leaning over the tabletop, ignoring her lobster sandwich, she is explaining commodities futures to a potential client. Focused on making her argument, zeroed in on her goal, Marianne does not see that people around her are raising their hands. Conversations lurch and sputter. People begin pulling out their cell phones and holding them in the air. Only when the client breaks eye contact and gasps does Marianne turn to see three men with guns stomping among the fine linen and issuing orders.

  Marianne has never been in such physical danger before, but she knows in that instant she is a coward. She pulls out her cell phone from her suit’s breast pocket and holds it aloft and looks at the most distant corner of the room. Her concentration flees as far aw
ay as possible.

  “Don’t worry folks,” one robber says. “Everyone stay calm and this will be over in a couple of minutes. One of us is going to take the cell phones and one of us is going to collect the wallets. You’ll get your cell phones back at the end of this. Everyone stay calm.”

  The man coming around to collect the cell phones in a black trash bag is composed, even polite. He wears a plastic mask of some kind, though Marianne can’t bring herself to look directly at it when the man gets to her. Instead she stares at a drop of condensation on her water glass as a voice, raspy and deep and measured, requests “Cell phone, please, ma’am.” When Marianne hands it over, the man snaps it out of her hand and drops it in the bag. Then he moves on.

  Another man comes around to collect wallets into another plastic bag. He wears a similar mask, but it seems too tight. He breathes heavily through the slits in the mask and doesn’t say anything as he takes Marianne’s wallet.

  Like a child squeezing her eyes shut to avoid the dark, Marianne continues to focus at the condensation as it drips onto the linen and soaks into the cloth.

  Then the oddest thing happens. It happens so slowly, Marianne is forced to see it.

  A few feet away from her, an older woman in a business suit, with short gray hair and large red earrings, sticks out her foot and trips the polite robber with the cell phone bag. Then she yells, “C’mon Bill”—speaking perhaps to the terrified little man trembling beside her—and tries to jump on the robber.

  It’s such an absurd attempt at heroism it angers Marianne. The robber knocks the older woman to the floor, and everyone in the restaurant seems at once to gasp. No one moves to help the woman. No one moves at all. Even the other robbers stop. The polite robber stands up and takes a step toward the woman. She is on her hands and knees, struggling to get to her feet. The robber points his gun at the back of her head and pulls the trigger.

  ***

  Everyone has jumped and people are screaming and the woman lies dead on the floor. Marianne, realizing she has a drop of blood in her eye, wipes it away.

  ***

  The police question everyone. The robbers have fled in a blue Windstar with New Jersey license plates. They dropped the bag of cell phones at the edge of the parking lot, one investigator explains, to avoid the GPS.

  Marianne leaves after she is questioned, but she doesn’t go back to work. She doesn’t say a word to her lunch companion. She doesn’t have a wallet or any money. She walks to her car, but the thought of sitting down makes her stomach lurch.

  She keeps walking. The riverfront is nearby, so she wanders over to it. The water is idle.

  What was that woman thinking? C’mon, Bill.

  Who was she? What had led her to that moment? A lifetime of idiocy, perhaps. Maybe she was the stupid person at work who’d always thought too highly of herself.

  Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe she was an amazing human being, one who’d overcome a lifetime of troubles, who’d always come out on top because of pluck and daring.

  Either way she is dead now.

  Along the Navesink Riverfront people idle, shift, run. Mothers and fathers watch children playing on a swing set. Leaning against the long black railing, two teenagers are locked in an undulating kiss. One old man sits alone on a bench, rubbing his moist eyes.

  Marianne walks up to the railing and stares down at the placid surface of the water.

  C’mon, Bill.

  She climbs over the railing, walks through the weed-pocked mud to the water’s edge. Her shoes sink, her slacks absorb the muck. She wades into the water. The mothers and fathers point at her. The couple stops kissing. She wades further in. The mud sucks away one shoe. She wades out until the water, still and calm, rises to her waist. She stares down at the clouds swaying in the river. She slaps the water gently and watches the sky ripple.

  T HE EMPTY SKY

  It’s a darn curious thing to go your whole life without children, only to find yourself stuck in a nursing home across the street from a daycare. I sit outside most days with the other old folks, and we watch the children play. Most of the time, it don’t bother me.

  But I couldn’t sleep last night on account of my shoulder hurting. It’s the shoulder that’s pained me off and on since I fell off our porch the winter I was pregnant. I never had my baby because of that, and even though that was sixty years ago, and I never got to see him, I can still remember how he felt growing inside of me. I been thinking about that today, so I stayed inside.

  Some folks say I been alone since I lost my baby, but it’s a fact that Jesus has been faithful to stay with me. I ain’t saying that I ain’t strayed from him, because I have. I’ve strayed terrible at times. But it’s a testament to the sweetness of Him who saved me that He’s never left me.

  Course now, we always have had evil. It ain’t just me. I never knew my Momma or my Daddy because they left me with Margie when I was five, and Margie always told me that they had to split up over Daddy’s drinking and wickedness. Margie said Momma never did want any child anyway but at least felt strong enough for me to leave me with a good Christian family.

  I lived with Margie and her husband and their three boys in a little sharecropper’s one-room in the middle of a hundred acres of strawberries. There was only one bunk in the place—one for Margie and her husband. Me and the boys slept on thick quilts on the floor. We had a little table with two chairs and a gray wood-burning stove with black splotches around the door. I was only about five when I come out there, but I remember on my first day, I sat out in the dirt, between the long rows, and ate Margie’s strawberries, red and green and all sour-sweet, till I was sick.

  Her husband didn’t go with us, but Margie took us kids to the Higher Living Baptist Church ever Sunday. Although she was never too sweet with me, she wasn’t too mean neither, and she brought me up right. She never paid me no special attention because, after all, I wasn’t one of her own and because she said she never wanted a girl no ways. The day I met her, she already had some gray in her hair, but thirty years later, on the day she died, she still had a few black hairs in there, too. Her face was always strong as a Indian’s, and she hoarded her smiles like they cost her money. I never felt too sweet about her when I was a child, but I always respected her.

  When I was twenty-one, and still living with Margie, I met Ezra. He was only sixteen, but he was a man of God if ever there was one. He had this thick black hair and clear blue eyes and a voice that was as clean and pure as any singer I ever heard. Some nights, our preacher would ask him to say a few words, and Ezra would start preaching, and you’d swear the apostle Paul himself was standing there.

  One day, walking home from church, I told Margie, “Boy, that Ezra can preach, can’t he?”

  “He’s got the Spirit of the Lord,” she said nodding. “He’s partial to you, too, Clara.”

  “Oh, he wouldn’t look at me,” I said. “I ain’t nothing to look at.” Even while I was saying it, though, I could feel my skin start to goose pimple under my sweat.

  “He’s mighty young,” she said, “but he’d make a good husband.”

  “He sure would,” I said, and something about the way I said it made her laugh.

  It was the very next Sunday that he come up to me after service. He was already tall. He smiled down at me and his kind blue eyes was sparkling like a creek in winter-time. I don’t suppose anybody short of Jesus ever had eyes that was softer and prettier than Ezra’s.

  “Can I walk you home, Clara?” he asked, fiddling with the spine of his Bible. “I unnerstand if you need to go with Margie and them.”

  “No,” I told him, “I’ll go tell her you’re walking me home. She won’t mind on account it’s you.”

  We was cutting across a field to get to my road when Ezra stopped and looked down at the grass. It was a little high, up to our ankles, and I was so dumb I thought at first he’d seen a snake or something.

  “Ezra…”

  “Clara, can I tell you som
ething?”

  “Ezra, you all right?”

  He looked up at me and took his coat off and there was sweat rings under his arms and he smiled all shy at me. I walked over to him and put my hand on his thick arm.

  “I know you think I’m just a boy,” he said.

  “I don’t think that,” I told him. “I think you’re a man, a good man of God.”

  “Do you think I could come to see you tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” I said taking his hand.

  The next week or so was the happiest days of my life. We was so fond of each other and ever body talked about us. Ezra came up to the house to see me ever other day, and he and I would stroll through the strawberries and hold hands and talk about the future.

  He’d say he loved me.

  Oh! and the shock that would give me ever time! Ever time was just like the first. I’d stare down at the wiry green vines at our feet and tell him, “I love you, too, Ezra.”

  “I’m gonna be a preacher,” he’d say.

  “You’ll be a fine one,” I’d say.

  “Preacher needs a wife,” he’d say, looking away from me and even though I never said nothing to that, I knew he was tilling the ground to ask me. I wasn’t going to say nothing about it till he did, though.

  The more we was together, the longer walks we’d take until one day we went past the strawberry fields and to the woods. We sat in the shade of a tired looking dogwood, swamped in the old thick humidity, and Ezra reached over and kissed me for the first time. He put his hand under my chin and lifted my head a little and kissed me, and I put my hand on his round shoulder.

  “I love you, Clara.”

  “I love you, too,” I said.

  “I want us to be pleasing to the Lord.”

  “Oh, I want that too, Ezra,” I told him, folding my hands in my lap.

  “I want our love to be between God and me and you. The three of us. I want the two of us to be in Christ and our union to be the mouth that speaks His message.”

  I smiled. “You’re preaching, Ezra.”

  His face was scruffy because he hadn’t shaved since Sunday, and he scratched the hairs on his chin. “I know,” he said. “I don’t mean to preach, Clara, but I want us to serve Him together.”