by Brian Hodge
Clay was still conscious of it, though. Agreeing with what I said about subject matter in my stories, he said how a lot of the photos he took stayed with him. He was still thinking about the crash.
We tied things up quickly, Clay wanting to get back to the darkroom with his rolls of film — I couldn't help but think of how one roll was staged, the other mercilessly not — and I had to get back to a story I was working on about my days doing PR work for an Elvis impersonator, "Only The Dead Know Graceland."
As we walked back to Loudon's Sentra, I saw the woman and her children following closely behind. Clay was just starting the defogger and wipers when a van pulled into the lot. A flash of lightning illuminated a sky as dark as night now. I thought of lungs filled with cancer, just to avoid a bad feeling. The driver of the van stopped alongside the woman and spoke to her.
Somehow I knew what was going down. Maybe Clay did, too, though I never asked him. He had gotten it all down in the paper for the 18 January edition. The neighbor knowing where to find the wife of the maimed man, how she took the kids out for burgers every Tuesday after Morgan the Pirate Preschool had let out its classes. How the neighbor had been one of the gapers back at the scene, not knowing at first who the victim was because he was driving a different company van that day, and then how she learned that it was her friend's husband after one of the firemen mentioned his name to the responding beat cop.
Loudon didn't care that the downpour was soaking his camera. We both had our jobs to do. The lightning flashed again and the rain battered my face. The wind came in from the lake and already the simple act of opening my mouth to breathe made it feel like my face was rictusing.
There was a low rumble of thunder, but the next flash came from Clay Loudon's Konica. When I shut my eyes, the image remained. The horrified woman, her mouth sliced open by a scream, her children staring up at her...
As clean and neat as any passage I could ever hope to write in my career.
Chicago:
16 January 1990
Things We Do At Night
The first I had heard Cousin Slick talk about it was when he'd come up to Chicago a few summers back for a wedding, one of those get-togethers with one side of the family that we only saw at such functions. He was actually in town for the reception, to be held in a bar outside of Joliet, (the newlyweds in question having opted to get married at City Hall and have the latter festivities in a central position where both branches of family could get together).
He told me about this new fascination of his while we were driving down the Stevenson Expressway the night before the reception. It was Friday: driving down the Interstate, Loop-bound, in Slick's Jimmy, the sky clear, the moon full. To the northeast, the downtown buildings were like a Hubble telescope view of the center of the galaxy. The Jimmy stayed a constant 55 mph, and we were nearing the Damen overpass when Slick started in on his newfound enchantment with events nocturnal. Enchantment was the correct word, as I could see it in his eyes as he spoke with his soft, Southern drawl.
We were heading downtown because the night was clear and the moon was full. Let everyone else on the Southwest Side sleep snug in their air-conditioned bungalows. We were going to take moving pictures, as we called it.
It was my idea to go off like this, but Slick had broached the idea because he knew I was a night owl as much as he was. I'd be up all hours of the night writing my stories, sitting in all-night diners when I lived in Denver or riding the elevated lines back here. I could get by with very little sleep, yet the daytime hours left rte with a touch of manic-depressiveness. If I weren't working my day job, regardless of the season, I would putter around my apartment or nap in the afternoon until I heard the impatient horns of rush hour in the city.
What I did best, I did at night.
And this is what Slick talked to me about, the way he was starting to see things back in Louisville. The manner of which he was learning about the things we all do at night, be it our best or simply the most adequate for the given moment.
We do think very much alike; the previous Christmas the card I mailed him had a return address from Dr. Kervorkian, the guy who assists suicides in Michigan. The night before he received it in the mail, Slick had dropped off one addressed to Dr. Chicago also from the erstwhile Doctor K. Great minds, and all.
Although he spoke of different places, separate situations, Slick's observations were the same as mine as it related to the trite rituals of the singles' bars on Rush and Division, the attempted trysts of nightclub attendees further north towards Clark and Lincoln.
See, what it is, we both like to watch.
I'm a writer, and describe what I observe. I can be quite subversive in how I gather my information. Slick had discovered a better way, down in Kentucky where buildings in even the most populated area were not as dense and cramped as Chicago's. He had picked himself up a state-of-the-art police surveillance camera that had capabilities of zoom times sixty-four. That was incredible for daylight, but for what we wanted to film, there could be little light. The best we came up with was ten times on the zoom, which turned out to be just fine.
We skirted the inner Drive and crisscrossed Fullerton Avenue to no avail. Slick was looking for a nice, buxom jogger, but it was just too late in the evening. We did come across an underage girl fresh from the Greyhound station blowing a guy in the back of Club Mansfield and shot about three minutes of film, black tape over the red light on the front of the camera.
Later, we drove up Western Boulevard, Slick curious after I told him about this one woman who lived in an apartment by Viaduct Joe's. I used to live out that way just after coming back to Chicago, the circumstances of why I left Denver being another story altogether.
The woman was in her mid-twenties, long black hair down past her shoulders. Had a couple kids or babysat for some. We were able to watch her caddy corner through a window from a porch we were sitting on. The young children were asleep, and if they were hers, there was little indication, if any, that there was a husband or boyfriend.
I had discovered her, and the things she did at night, by accident. Then by observing. Everything about her I have described in a story published in Boner Monthly back in 1992. She hadn't changed a bit — in habits or looks — as Slick set up his camera.
For over an hour, we took turns watching through the grey lens as she walked naked around the kitchen, washing dishes and ironing a blouse, finally coming out the back door to sit on the porch steps and quietly eat a taco, her breasts exposed to the alleyway.
The flipside of weddings was funerals when it came to family get-togethers. I took a Southwest flight out before the rest of the family up north, and Slick was there at Standiford Field waiting. It's not like we were heartless in what we did first, this was after speculating on the various stewardesses and late night mid-week flyers and what they might be doing as soon as they left the airport.
And so it was that Slick and Dr. Chicago were again together, loose to the night via the Gene Snyder Expressway. My cousin told me about a particular vision he had come to observe much like the taco-eating nude back on Western Boulevard. Better still, she was a jogger.
I'll have to give a kind of geography lesson here, as much for myself as for you. See, I know Chicago like the back of my hand, and even though some of you out there in, say, Portland, Oregon or Thalmus, Indiana might not know — or care — that I've screwed up the name of an intersection or some such detail, it still bothers me. Every time the story gets reprinted without my having a chance to correct it, reading it is like having a hangnail. Not much to be done about it. In this case, though, it will make things clearer for you, on how absurd it all fell out. And of the repercussions my cousin and I might have to deal with.
It used to be, there was nothing but farmland and horse stables between Louisville and Shelbyville. Developers came in, just as they have here in Illinois, and purchased large portions of land, and created courts of six-figure homes. All of these subdivisions were part of Shelbyvil
le, but had headings like Ken Acres or Bonnie Brae. By using this type of designation, one could be spared the embarrassment of stating his address as Tater Run or Pope Lick Roads.
Slick and I, good old Doc Chicago, for crying out loud, drove down Old U.S. 60 and onto Connor Station road. During the day, strays and juvies at the Whitney M. Young Residential Manpower Center, which was the equivalent of the Audy Home back in Chicago, would have kept any female — jogging or otherwise — from sashaying anywhere near the airheads working the fields or picking up litter down around Taggert or Finchville.
But this was well past shutdown for the "Young-uns" — as the j.d.'s were nicknamed by the Kentucky State Police — and the night belonged to others. The way things are, sometimes things we do, we do at night only because it is the safest, most secluded time. Or so one would think.
The jogger certainly must have.
As we drove past a specific house, and by this I mean a home set half a football field back on a lawn of rolling bluegrass, Slick pointed out that this is where our unknowing video subject lived. The place might have had horses at one time, one could suspicion because of the double-tier fencing and dirt pathways winding past the south side of the two-story house.
"Palatial digs," I said, and my cousin looked at me as if I had been watching too many reruns of The Rockford Files. He had developed the family trait of all the Stelfreeze's, and was rolling his tongue between his teeth and lower lip. The lone streetlight to the east made Slick's red beard seem even thicker and darker.
"There she is, cousin." Slick pointed up the road some, where a definitely female figure was moving side to side, hands on generous hips. I thought immediately that this woman had one fatal ass, boy howdy. "Daddy gave her this place when she turned twenty-one, granted she continued on to grad school at UK."
I believed him; the same kind of thing occurred in the north shore suburbs of Chicago, populated by John Hughes' celluloid families like those in Home Alone and Risky Business. Only down here it wasn't Fabergé eggs and Chippendale furniture, but sprawling acreage under an aqua sky swimming with a million stars.
Even before I saw her better, I wondered if the woman — her name was Misty Radin — strolled the grounds naked. Surely, she was a natural blond.
While I was caught up in my speculations, Slick had properly focused the zoom lens, the attachment protruding from the camera like something from an Arnie Schwarzenegger film. No way she was going to see us; hell, she wasn't even turning to look back. Routine down pat, she was the only one who did things at night on Connors Point Road, or so it seemed. Slick gave the camera over to me to have a look-see; slapping in a Tractors CD in the meanwhile. They sang about their baby liking to rock like a boogie-woogie choo-choo train as I lost myself in this vision.
Blond hair down to the shoulders, pulled into the kind of ratty ponytail only a complete fuckhead would think was ugly. Purple tube-top that held the firmest set of co-ops I've seen since, well, Indianapolis. And this was only in profile as she did her bending exercises. I read the timer off the screen and saw there was almost eight minutes of tape already. Panning down her back, silently wishing to see up this close in color, following her spine on down to the dimples of her ass right above the spandex shorts.
When she started running, her legs moved like pistons. I turned the camera back over the man in charge. Twelve minutes later, she passed out of view over the old bridge. The dilapidated structure ran over an ancient stretch of train tracks and was soon to be replaced by a newer, concrete expanse.
Slick told me that the woman would soon be turning around and making a return trip, and if we sat there, we'd be able to watch her jog past in profile, blond ponytail sashaying in time with her rump. But we had to be careful, what with the Young 'uns in the area at different times. Boy howdy, her ass did move, though. I watched the film as my cousin put the pickup in reverse and we went on to one last thing before heading into town to ready for the funeral. Although, if there had been more time, we'd have taken a slow drive around Long Run Park, to see what other couples might've been going through the nocturnal motions.
What we did next was drive down U.S. 60 again, this time to Flat Rock Road. My grandparents owned ninety acres out past the cemetery where the quote-unquote colored slaves were buried. When I was a kid and we still lived in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago, this part of farmland was called Anchorage. Now, even though it is still farmland that side of U.S. 60, the address is considered to be Louisville. Ah, progress. Anything that would bring potential buyers, I suppose.
What we did should've set anyone's opinions of the two of us straight, except for what happened on the way back, when we were going through Simpsonville. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
So there we are at the Stelfreeze farm, empty and cold because my paternal grandfather was living in Carrolton three years now and my "step-grandfather" was in a nursing home. You're probably thinking, we were there to film something going on in, say, the farmhouse past the big creek. Or maybe some weird ritual that some of the other farmers might do at night. Well, we didn't do anything like that at all.
Slick and I retrieved an item from atop the Coldspot refrigerator that my grandmother had owned since the late sixties. One of the only electrical appliances in the five room house, certainly one of the first. The farm still had an outhouse often populated by hornets in summer and wolf spiders in winter. It was a small ornament, shaped like a bird feeder. He had told me that he had made it for her when he was in fifth grade, and her name and the year, 1968, was etched into the bottom. We decided to place it in her coffin so that, in the event she went to heaven and could not recall her name, the Lord could turn over the bird feeder and remind her. I had even played around with lyrics in my mind, thinking it would make a great country song for Randy Travis or John Michael Montgomery to sing. Dear Lord, her name is Grace, if a look of confusion comes over her face, please remind her dear Lord of the woman she was, and that to us she will always be Grace. That's as far as I ever got on that one, folks. I still think someone could have assisted me to make it a proper tearjerker, though.
We closed up, locking the screen door, even. The bugs that had gathered around the enclosed porch's mesh frame slowly dispersed. Slick slowly panned the property, for no real reason. Maybe it was just so we could linger there a few more minutes. But then we realized how late it had become, and even with light traffic we still had to go all the way to the other side of Shelbyville proper.
If only we had gone to Long Run Park and watched underage kids rut in the dewy grass. I've looked at my maps a dozen times, we'd have then been farther north, and most likely would have taken Pope Dale Road to Route 362 and arced back toward where the family had gathered on nondescript Cherry Lane. Instead, we simply retraced the route we had taken. And by doing so, discovered the mangled body on the road. The mangled body belonged to Misty Radin, the ponytailed jogger of our dreams.
Obviously she had been struck by a car; one leg now had three visible joints, her breasts were exposed from where the gravel had torn at the purple tube top. We didn't have time to speculate on the whys and hows, though, because things took a turn for the worse immediately. We did know that the body hadn't been discovered because we certainly would have heard sirens in the quiet Kentucky night.
The scene of the accident was near Webb Road. We were driving too fast past the next intersection, at Colt Run Road, when the flashing lights appeared. A fucking Simpsonville copper had clocked us speeding.
This in itself was laughable, almost unbelievable. Feature this: Shelbyville is small enough at population five thousand. Simpsonville was out of a Jim Thompson novel. Pop. 642. Took up less than a half-mile of U.S. 60. The police force was all of three cops, far as I had ever heard. Did the cop know about the dead woman yet? Neither of us had to say it. We had a videotape thirty minutes long, the better part of it involving Misty Radin R.I.P. jogging.
As calmly as a man dismantling a bomb, my cousin asked me to pop th
e glove compartment. "He didn't radio pulling us over," Slick told me as I saw the pistol slide to the front of the open drawer, along with CDs by Sheryl Crow and Dick Dale & The Del-Tones. "Only one thing to do." I looked at the video camera as he palmed the gun. The cop took one in the face when he was a foot from the car. There was little doubt the gunshot had been heard, but we calmly continued on down U.S. 60, taking one small detour. Driving past Hill-N-Dale to a small business park, my cousin and I removed the back plate from the truck, battering the frame to make it look as if the plate had loosened with wear. In Kentucky, you had only to display one plate; Slick's front one advertised the Shelby County Rockets.
We were late by quite a bit when we arrived at Cherry Lane and most everyone was in bed. Both our mothers stared at us like we had little concern for death, that we must've been at Trixie's, or some other strip joint in Louisville.
Doing the things we do at night.
The next morning, we buried my grandmother.
That was two years ago next month. I'm back in Shelbyville again, my grandfather having passed on after suffering through two strokes since the first days of 1995. The killing of the Simpsonville cop has stayed unsolved, although one of the many rumors surrounding the death scene's proximity to Misty Radin's was that the two were in some way involved in illicit activities, sexual or otherwise.
It was me and my five male cousins, waiting in the back room of Shannon Funeral Home. Pallbearers in a room of history. Ancient photographs on the brick wall, traffic on Main Street moving slowly by. Slick yawned outright; I was able to conceal mine by pretending my neck was spasming. Working on three hours of sleep, we'd been with a couple of women the night before. And yes, they were still alive, though probably allowed the luxury of sleeping until noon, as they worked at Trixie's.
"Out late, huh?" One of the married cousins asked, looking a bit wistful. In the other room, everyone was enraptured by whatever song was being piped in.
