The Deepening Shade

by Jake Hinkson

Sure, I’ll admit I like the surge of adrenaline I get when I’m on the job. Before I started in business, I did a variety of extreme things—skydiving, rock climbing—just to get the rush. But now I get the rush from the job.

  Sitting in Art Thomas’s bedroom that afternoon, I’d felt my pulse quicken as I heard the elevator down the hall. I didn’t know anything about the man other than his taste in home décor was impeccable. I didn’t know why someone wanted him dead. Maybe he molested their kid. Maybe his wife was a selfish asshole who wanted his will to kick in to effect sooner rather than later. I don’t know. But my heart was pounding when he turned the key in the door and came inside. When he walked across his living room, his shoes squeaking against his hardwood floors. When his head exploded, he hit the counter and died at my feet. My blood was pumping as I left his building and walked down the street, the sun on my face, people passing by, not paying a bit of attention to the thoroughly ordinary man walking by with a big cup from MacDonald’s. I could have been anybody. Art Thomas. Dale Hudson. Even Nathan Bannerman.

  I didn’t have anything against Art Thomas. I was there was an instrument of someone else’s longing. If not me, it would have been some other instrument. If Bannerman had thought of it first, and if he had the actual physical courage necessary to do it, no morality would have stopped him from doing what I did.

  So why shouldn’t it be me?

  C ASUAL ENCOUNTER

  The Craigslist thing started innocently. At that time, I was working as a tech writer for a company that designed educational software, and I needed something to do in my spare time. Like every other bored, stumbling-toward-middle-age married white guy, I decided I would learn to play the guitar. I went on Craigslist to find a cheap one, but then I drifted over to the Men Seeking Women section. Just to see what it was like. I rooted around in there for a few days, and then I took the leap into the section for Casual Encounters.

  It was a crazy place to be (and it felt like being in a place rather than just sitting on the couch looking at a screen). It was, simply put, a place where people were hunting for sex. Even if you figured that 99% of the posts were bullshit, that still left 1% of an endless ocean of indecency. And it was so raw. People weren’t coy. They wanted to fuck in the park at night. They wanted to cheat on their spouses. Women wanted to fuck in the broom closet at work, in public places during business hours, in restrooms at random gas stations. Some didn’t care what you looked like. Some wanted fat guys.

  I figured I’d post an ad on a lark. What the hell. It was all in fun. I’d never actually do… it. And I really, seriously thought I never would. How could I? Meet a stranger for sex? I’d only had sex with two people in my life. I’d post the ad just to get off on the thrill of doing it.

  And it worked. Just posting the damn thing sent a cocaine jolt through my body:

  Guy in his twenties looking for a high school or college girl for sexy fun times. Let’s get crazy.

  I felt like an idiot writing it. Sounds idiotic. Hell, it is idiotic. But that’s how people talk on there. That kind of asinine language is shorthand for I’m dead serious about this. I’m not trying to be charming. Contact me if you want to get fucked.

  A few days passed. Nothing happened. I actually got really depressed about that for a day. I’d check in every five minutes and…nothing. I couldn’t even get an anonymous stranger to flirt with me on the internet. What kind of loser fails at that?

  And I didn’t need the rejection right then. My marriage was barely functioning since I’d found out that my wife was having an affair. She was a shift manager at Barnes & Noble, and the dude she’d fucked was a waiter at a Mexican restaurant in the same strip mall. They went to a motel and put it on our credit card. Since she usually paid that bill, she thought I’d never see it. The motel made a mistake, though, and charged her three times for the same visit. Computer error. That same afternoon I was going through the drive-thru at KFC without any cash and had to use my card. When it was declined, I called VISA and some bored call center operator in Bangladesh told me, in so many words, that my wife was banging someone on her lunch breaks.

  We’d gotten through that—by which I mean the guy dumped her and she stayed with me—and I tried not to hold it against her. I mean, if I could have banged a waitress at a motel, I’m sure I would have. I’d stayed faithful because I didn’t have any other choice.

  But then a girl named Traci wrote me back on Craigslist and asked what I was up to.

  My stomach dropped. I wrote back and said Nothing. What about you?

  And that’s how it began. It went on for days. She was interested. She’d had sex like this before, and she loved it. Nothing serious. Just some fun. She asked how big my dick was. She said she could meet me. Then she said she was fifteen.

  When I read those words some distant door slammed shut. I was alone, but my face started burning like the whole world was watching me. I wasn’t sure how I got there. To be honest and up front with her, I told Traci I was thirty-two. I asked if that was cool. She said it was. The last guy was forty, she said. She liked older guys.

  I debated it. It was crazy. But, she’d had experience. Maybe even more than me. Plus, all the kids are doing it these days, right?

  We decided to meet the next day. My wife would be at work. Perfect. I’d pick Traci up, and we’d find a place. After I Googlemapped the nearest park that night, I could barely sleep. At midnight, I had diarrhea. For the rest of the night, I just stared at shadows on the ceiling and listened to my wife’s acid reflux. The next morning, I got up, locked the bathroom door and jerked off. I thought that would diminish the desire to go meet Traci, but it didn’t.

  After my wife left for work, I took a shower. I clipped my nosehairs and my fingernails. I put on clean clothes and splashed on some cologne that was a seven-year-old Christmas present from my mother-in-law. Then I drove over to the park. I rode in silence. I’ve never been as scared of anything in my life as I was that first time.

  I rode around the park. Every girl seemed to be Traci. She was a brunette with brown eyes. I saw a half-dozen girls who fit the description, but she said she’d be wearing a green skirt and a red tank-top. No Traci. I drove around for an hour. No Traci. I got out. Walked around. I got back in my car and went home.

  Her message was waiting for me. She’d chickened out.

  I told her I thought she wanted this.

  You’ve done this before, right?

  yes

  You don’t have to do it. You know that.

  i know but i want to. Its just im nervous.

  But you did it before.

  i was nervous then to

  After a while, we agreed to meet. This time, she’d meet me at the motel.

  ***

  The next day I wasn’t as scared. You can’t build up the same rush again. I was anxious, but my nerves had been shot the day before. I didn’t jerk off this time, either.

  As I was leaving, my wife was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at her laptop. I told her I was going to go to the mall and see if GameStop had the new whatever.

  She didn’t look up from the screen. “I might call you later to tell you to pick up some stuff at the grocery store,” she said. She double clicked on something. “Make sure you leave your phone on.”

  “Why would I have it off?”

  “What?”

  “Why would I turn my phone off?”

  She frowned at the screen and clicked on something. “Just make sure you leave it on,” she said.

  I said okay and left.

  I zipped through the city streets. I sped the whole way. I caught every yellow light. I got there at noon. I’d check in, text her, and Traci would show up ten minutes later.

  At the front, an elderly Asian man in a Superman t-shirt was working the counter. He took my card. Since my wife’s affair, I’d been in charge of the credit cards. Karma’s a bitch.

  The old man took down my information. He gave me a key attached to a piece of plastic with a fad
ed number 27 on it.

  I walked outside, around to room 27 and unlocked the door. There was the bed. I texted Traci: Room 27. Come and get me.

  ***

  The cop who arrested me was an attractive black woman with a square jaw and bemused eyes. Her name was Trenita Ohakim. I remember it from the trial. O-ha-kim. She handcuffed me while two other cops—both men—looked on, smirking. They didn’t take their job seriously. Or maybe they just thought I was the butt of a joke.

  I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even feel enough at that moment to cry. I said, “May I go to the bathroom?”

  “You’ll have to wait,” Officer Ohakim said.

  “I can’t,” I said. “Really. I think I’ll piss on the seat of your car.”

  She uncuffed me and one of the other cops led me to the bathroom and stared at me while I unzipped my pants and took out my pathetic dick. We stood there in silence.

  “Want me to turn on some water?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  Behind me, water splashed against the sink.

  ***

  They put me in the back of Officer Ohakim’s car. The seat was hot and smelled like old plastic.

  As she drove, I said, “I wasn’t looking for underage girls.”

  She didn’t say anything for a while. I wasn’t sure she heard me.

  When we stopped at a light, she leaned to her right as if she was looking at something in the seat beside her. She said, “You specified high school girls.”

  The light turned green.

  I looked down at my clothes. Jeans fresh out of the laundry. A red button-up shirt. I had picked them out because I thought Traci would find me attractive in them.

  My face burned.

  “Were you the one writing the posts?” I asked Officer Ohakim.

  “Yes.”

  I looked out the window. We were turning down my street.

  “Wait, why are we here?” I asked her. I broke out in a sweat. “Oh Jesus. Please don’t do this.” Tears surged to my eyes, but I held them back. “Please, officer.”

  “We have to seize your computer,” she said. “Is your wife still at home?”

  They knew I was married. Of course they did. This was happening. There was no warning. This was happening now.

  I started to cry. Not hard. Not sobbing. But there was no sucking it in.

  “Yes,” I sputtered.

  We stopped and one of the cops in the car behind us got out and walked up to Officer Ohakim’s window. He asked her, “Is his wife at home?”

  “Yeah.”

  He left and walked up the path to the door of our apartment and knocked.

  I looked away when the door opened.

  After a moment, Officer Ohakim said, “She wants to see your face, sir.”

  I turned. My wife was standing in our apartment doorway looking around the officer. When she saw me, she put her hand to her mouth and started crying. He had to help her steady herself against the doorframe. She looked fat and pathetic and stupid. I know, because I caused her to look that way. She had been sitting at the kitchen table looking like a regular person, and then a police officer knocked on her door and told her that her husband was under arrest for soliciting sex from a minor. I’d only been gone from the house about thirty-five minutes.

  He followed her inside. A few minutes later, he came back outside carrying my laptop. My wife came to the door and looked at me. She put her hand to her mouth just as she had before, just as if it was happening all over again.

  ***

  I was convicted, but I got released early after thirteen months. First time offender. Crowded jails. My lawyer argued that I was an idiot but not a monster and added that I’d already lost my wife and my job when the story hit the papers. The judge gave me an ass-chewing and told me to get out of his face and make damn sure I never came back. I’m on parole for five years, and I have to register as a sex offender everywhere I live for basically the rest of my life.

  Because I can’t reside within six hundred feet of anywhere kids play or go to school, I live out on the edge of the city. I sleep in a lean-to under an underpass and my only neighbors are two weepy child-molesters and an old man who did sixty years in prison for a string of rapes in the 1950s.

  Now that I have no friends, I spend my days talking to myself in my lean-to, obsessing over everything that fell apart. I don’t know how accurate my memory is anymore, though. I’ve thought about it so much, it’s like a picture that’s faded and crumbling at the edges.

  When I can work, I do day labor. Lately, I’ve been doing this job, sitting in this booth at this car lot. It’s a sweltering little box. The boss doesn’t allow us to watch TV or read on the clock. So I sit here and sweat and talk to myself for eight hours. It’s not hard work. In fact, it isn’t really work. Work would at least feel like something. This is just an endless nothing. I sit here and sweat and wait for nothing.

  Two days ago, near the end of my shift, I’m sitting here sweating when I see Officer Ohakim. She was with a guy. They pulled into my lot and parked and walked out past my box on their way to the restaurant next door. The guy was handsome, with amber skin and a shaved head. He wore a gray suit. Officer Ohakim wore a navy blue dress. Looked like a first date to me.

  As they walked past me, the man was laughing and saying, “I am for sure Roxy never said any such thing about you.”

  Officer Ohakim giggled. “Well, you are for sure wrong.”

  The man glanced at me and nodded. I nodded back. Officer Ohakim looked at me, smiled politely, and then when my face clicked for her, she stopped smiling. She stared down at her toenails. They were painted bright blue. She and the man walked to the sidewalk, and waiting for the light to turn, far enough away that I couldn’t hear, she leaned over and told him the only thing about me that anyone remembers anymore.

  T HE THEOLOGIANS

  It wasn’t bad enough that I totaled my car when I tried to drive it through my ex-girlfriend’s doublewide—now I had to attend these stupid meetings. The kicker was that the judge said I was getting off easy. I wasn’t going to prison for attempted murder. I wasn’t going to prison at all. Aside from the thirty-two days I spent in the lockup in Little Rock, all I had to do was complete a bunch of community service and attend weekly meetings for recovering alcoholics.

  That last part was the lawyer’s big brainstorm. She was a tired little woman in an old skirt and tennis shoes. She spoke to me for maybe five minutes before she walked into court and convinced the judge I was a drunk.

  When we walked out, I told her, “I’m not an alcoholic.”

  “Good,” she said. “Then the meetings should be the easiest part of this whole deal.”

  Since I didn’t have a car anymore, getting to meetings every week was a real pain. After picking up garbage in an orange vest on the side of the highway all day, I didn’t feel like hiking over to the community center for the AA meetings. Instead, I ended up going to something called Free At Last just down the road from my apartment. I didn’t think anything when I saw that meetings were held in the basement of a church, but once I got in there I realized Free At Last was a Christian drug rehabilitation program.

  I didn’t say shit at the first couple of meetings. I just sat there while people talked. They were a pretty sad bunch. One middle-aged woman was there because she rear-ended a school bus after an all-night bender. A young guy—younger than me—said his wife was tired of him passing out and pissing in their bed. And some other guy, twenty years sober, said he stopped drinking after he showed up drunk to a Christmas party and threw up all over someone’s nativity scene. In short, a bunch of losers. They all cried about what assholes they’d been, and then they all congratulated themselves on getting Jesus to clean up the mess they’d made of their lives. I guess Jesus even forgave the guy who puked in the manger.

  At the third Free At Last meeting, a woman I hadn’t really noticed before came up to me after the share time was over.

  “We haven�
�t met,” she said. “I’m Sadie.”

  We shook. “Ray.”

  “You haven’t said anything yet, Ray.”

  I shrugged. Sadie was tall for a woman, taller than me and half of the other guys in the room, with big hips and some paper-bag-brown hair she pulled back in a ponytail. She didn’t seem friendly exactly, just forward. I couldn’t tell if she was criticizing me or trying to pick me up.

  “No,” I said. I pulled at the bottom of my t-shirt, making sure it covered my gut, and stuck a thumb through the belt loop of my jeans. “To tell the truth, I have to be here. Court order.”

  “Hm. No kidding. That’s interesting.”

  I tried to remember something she had said at the meetings. She hadn’t spoken that night. She had just sat there, like me, staring at the floor while other people talked about pissing their life away on Jim Beam and Captain Morgan.

  I followed the rest of the group through the basement of the church and out the back door. It led into the parking lot. A couple of people had family or friends waiting to pick them up. The rest got in their cars.

  Sadie asked, “So what’d you do to get tossed in jail?”

  I stopped and stared at her. “That’s personal. You know? Private?”

  She nodded and looked around the parking lot. The last couple of people were leaving. That left only one car in the lot, a late-90s Nissan Altima with a chipped paint job and no passenger side mirror. Her car, I figured.

  “You walking?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Want a ride?”

  I almost laughed at that. This chick either wanted to save me or fuck me. “I don’t know you,” I said. “We just met.”

  “Yeah,” she said, digging the keys out of the pocket of her jeans. “But I have something I want to talk to you about. So, do you want to walk home or do you want a ride?”

  ***

  It turned out that she didn’t want to sleep with me or talk about my everlasting soul.

  She pulled up in front of my apartment building and rolled down her window and lit a Camel Blue. She offered me one, but I shook my head.