Their smiles glowed. Girls were different back in the seventies. At least these girls were different. A little more innocent. Not much, but just enough. They weren’t like the knowing nineties girls with caked-on vampire makeup who visited Marvis’s camera shop to pose for their senior portraits. And they weren’t at all like Shelly Desmond, who dressed like an MTV exec’s idea of a bad girl. When she wore any clothes at all, that is. No, Shutterbug’s girls would have died of shame in Shelly Desmond’s skin. They were daddy’s princesses, and they behaved as such. In Shutterbug’s photographs they wore princess smiles untouched by the cold hand of life.
At eighteen, Marvis had believed that his camera was the only thing that could get him close to that kind of girl. His tongue was more tin than silver, and he certainly wasn’t a jock. His father despised athletics, believing that too many promising black youths crippled themselves playing stupid games that didn’t mean anything. Chess club was as exciting as it got for Marvis.
But the kid everyone called Shutterbug could make wonderful pictures. He told his girls that he was going to grow up to be a fashion photographer. And they believed him, just as they believed that they were going to find careers as models or actresses. Marvis snapped some of them so often that he memorized their entire wardrobes, learning which blouses went with which skirts, which sweaters or T-shirts were acceptable with bell-bottomed Levi’s. Even now he could remember their shoes—mostly those awful cork platform things that girls had worn in the days of disco—though recalling the range of a girl’s footwear after all this time seemed a little sick, even to Marvis.
But he was never Marvis to those girls. He was Shutterbug. It was a whitebread name he could hide behind, a nickname that would have fit a friend of Marcia or Jan on The Brady Bunch, a name that got him past the vigilant mother or father who answered the kitchen phone, securing passage to the ear of the girl who lay on her bed with a pink Princess extension balanced on her flat white stomach.
Even now, eighteen years later, he had to smile at his ingenuity. A whitebread princess’s parents would have been naturally suspicious if their daughter had received a call from someone named Marvis. The kid everyone called Shutterbug couldn’t believe that his father hadn’t recognized that simple fact. The old man had certainly considered Marvis’s voice and diction, because he had taken the time to beat the neighborhood street talk out of his only son. But he’d missed the name—Marvis—a real tip-off to any bigot.
Marvis grinned at the very idea of his father making a mistake. Maybe the old man had been human after all.
Marvis still used his voice to make business contacts on the telephone, just as he still used his camera to make social connections.
The camera had brought Shelly here tonight.
No, it wasn’t the camera. The money brought her here.
Marvis laughed. “Shut up, Shutterbug.”
He opened the bedroom closet. Two shoeboxes were shoved toward the back of the middle shelf. He opened the box on the right, razored a couple of lines onto a cosmetic mirror for Shelly, then did a few discreet toots of his own with a gold coke spoon that he kept in the box.
The rush caught him and his eyelids fluttered. He was nowhere for a brief instant, and then he was staring down at a bent photo jammed in a box of high school junk. It was a shot of the cheerleading squad that he’d snapped in his senior year. Five beauties in the foreground, in the background—barely visible through a biology lab window made nearly opaque by hard afternoon sunlight—a young man’s silhouette. Faceless, but anyone who looked closely enough to see the solitary figure knew instinctively what the young man was watching.
Voyeurism. Some things you didn’t have to see clearly to know what they were. Or more simply put, Marvis thought, it takes one to know one.
Not that anyone would notice the young man’s silhouette now. The photo had been ruined long ago at the direction of the editor of the 1976 yearbook, a real ice princess named Amelia Peyton. Well, the order had come from the vice principal himself, but Amy Peyton had obviously enjoyed passing it on. Shutterbug had been forced to excise—that was the vice principal’s word—the face of the cheerleader who’d been kicked off the squad. He had backed the hole with some black mounting paper, and once that was done the viewer’s attention was invariably drawn to the stark nothingness of the black pit.
Minutes ago, in the living room, Shutterbug’s eyes had been drawn to the ebony eight ball and the pocket of shadow on the pool table in just the same way. And before that, an equally strong, nearly magnetic pull had drawn his gaze to a face lost in shadow behind a curtain of blonde hair.
The face of a ghost.
No. Only the face of Shelly Desmond.
Marvis closed the closet.
The faceless ghost was gone. Hidden away.
Shelly was in the living room.
Suddenly, Marvis wanted to be with her.
* * *
Barefoot now, wearing only a black silk robe, Marvis returned to the living room, and Shelly.
The girl had stacked the scattered videos, save one, on a shelf above Marvis’s stereo. The other cassette was playing in the VCR. Shelly lay on a throw rug in front of the 32” Sony television, a video remote held in her hand, studying her mirror image. The two Shellys moaned in unison. Marvis had to smile. To think that, even in shadow, he hadn’t recognized Shelly’s busy fingers.
Shelly hadn’t noticed his presence. He set the coke-lined mirror on the edge of the pool table and watched her. There was almost something innocent about her unconscious nudity.
But there was nothing innocent about the girl on the screen.
And he’d never feel the same way about her, anyway. He knew that. He’d never desire her in that crazy, unquenchable way. That was the hell of it. Shelly’s eyes were wrong. They were green, not gray. And her hair was wrong. It was straight and uniformly pale, not curled and frosted, as the girl’s hair had been on that night in 1976. That girl, whose face had been excised from the 1976 Lance & Shield, she’d had a wonderful smile, too, one of those Mona Lisa smiles that were as good as a whispered secret you could never forget even if you wanted to.
The girl with the excised face had been the main attraction in the first erotica Shutterbug photographed (Shutterbug never called it porno—that was déclassé, one of the first words you learned to avoid when you got involved in the industry). A little 16mm job he had done at eighteen. It had been a complete surprise, that film. Nothing he had ever planned to do, but those fifty feet of 16mm had started him on the road to fortune, if not fame.
And now that girl was dead. April Destino was gone from this vale of tears. Shutterbug had read about it in the paper. OD’d, or a suicide, or something.
But tonight he’d seen her ghost.
A shiver of excitement sizzled the length of Shutterbug’s spine. He smiled, amazed that he was actually old enough for nostalgia. He hadn’t watched that loop of film in quite a while. He used video these days, but he still had the 16mm equipment around. The old Bell & Howell projector was in a closet upstairs. The screen was in the basement. And the film itself, where the hell was it?
Shutterbug grinned. Amazing. He had a hard-on, and Shelly hadn’t even touched him.
Amazing. He’d take care of Shelly, just the way he wanted to. Do her right there on the pool table. Then he’d get rid of her, make a little popcorn, and have a retrospective of the early works of Marvis Hanks, Junior. That’s exactly what he would do.
He ran a finger along a stack of CDs until he found the one he was looking for. Some good old seventies whitebread music, the kind they used to play on KFRC. Forgotten names like K.C. & the Sunshine Band, England Dan and John Ford Coley, and Janis Ian.
The CD rack whirred open at the touch of a button. He studied the selections listed on the silver face of the disc. “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight.” That’s what he’d play, just for the irony.
Something thumped against the bay window.
The CD box slippe
d from Marvis’s fingers, cracked against the floor.
Outside, someone laughed.
Marvis glanced at the closed drapes. Stared at Shelly
Her eyes were as big as saucers. “I didn’t tell anyone,” she said. “No one knows that I’m here…. Not my parents. Not my boyfriend. I…. I did just like you said, Marvis. I didn’t tell— “
All he had to do was twist his head. Shelly grabbed her little backpack, unzipped the bottom compartment, pulled out a top and a pair of shorts, all the time moving across the room and into the kitchen.
Shelly was moving fast, but Marvis was moving way too slow.
Again, something thumped against the window. Again, someone laughed.
Marvis turned off the television. He summoned his courage and opened the drapes.
The slamming sound startled him, and he glanced toward the kitchen. The door to the side patio didn’t catch, swung open again.
Shelly was gone.
Had someone come in the side door and snatched her? Or had she been so frightened that she ran off? Did she know something?
Had she told someone? Had she sold him out?
Time would tell. It was very quiet. Marvis stood before the window, waiting for some answers. The front lawn was a sloping slab of blackness in the still night. His Jaguar sat in the driveway, a sleek silhouette. He framed the shot through the wood-bordered pane of the Anderson window without consciously knowing he was doing it. Second nature, and natural as could be—a picture, a rectangle of glass, and a wooden frame. The light behind him was just strong enough so that his reflection was visible on the glass in the foreground, the ghost vision of the living room sharper than the world outside.
And then it was there—in the background on the other side of the nearly opaque window, on the lawn of slate—a man’s silhouette.
Someone was out there. Someone who laughed.
Marvis couldn’t see eyes, but he knew the stranger was watching him.
Some things you didn’t have to see clearly to know what they were.
No still photo, this. No frozen frame. This figure moved, but Marvis couldn’t. He stood rooted in front of the expensive window, watching the dark man advance through his reflection.
Suddenly, Marvis’s reflection became a black hole as deep and empty as the missing face of April Louise Destino in that old photo.
A ghost’s face flew at Marvis from out of the blackness, coming fast. Coming so very fast.
But this face was not a black shadow. It was dead white.
White as a negative image of the black hole that had replaced April Destino’s face in the old photograph.
White as a negative image of an eight ball.
1:31 A.M.
The ghost thumped against the window and fell away.
Marvis staggered backward, gasping.
Now there were other figures on the lawn. Four dark silhouettes. Ghosts sailed above their unseen faces, trailing ectoplasm through spidery branches.
The night opened and another ghost flew toward the window.
Thumped against the pane.
Marvis blinked.
Impossible.
Impossible! It thumped against the pane!
The ghost was nothing but a roll of toilet paper!
Outside, laughter broke the silence. The sharp sound, still familiar after all these years, touched Marvis in a secret place that even the saddest songs of his youth couldn’t reach. He hadn’t been this frightened in a long, long time. Fear was peeling his confidence layer by layer, like the skin of an onion, searching for the nervous kid that was still locked in his heart.
Four ghosts from the past stood on his front lawn. Above their heads, hanging from the limbs of fruitless mulberries planted by Shutterbug’s father, toilet-paper streamers danced on the warm April breeze.
Tonight the star of Shutterbug’s first 16mm short lay six feet under, and he knew with sickening certainty that this visit had something to do with her death. “Hey, Shutterbug, wanna go to the movies?” Once more, fugitive laughter chain-sawed Shutterbug’s confidence. These idiots were going to get him into trouble. Real trouble. Raising hell in the middle of the night. Talking about movies. Screaming about movies so everyone was sure to hear—
“C’mon, Shutterbug. We ain’t got no projector. We ain’t even got no movie. We knew your ass has got ’em both.”
“And popcorn! I bet you’ve got some gooood popcorn in there, too, and some goddamn real butter! C’mon, Shutterbug! Let’s go to the drive-in!”
“Yeah! Let’s go to the drive-in! Let’s have a world-fucking premiere!”
“C’mon, ’bug. We already got the beer!” Drunken cheers followed the last comment. Shutterbug’s fingers were frozen on the drape cord. Porch lights flared across the street. First at the Hamners’. Then at the Irbys’. Finally, at Mrs. Prater’s.
“Lights! Camera! Action!” came the cry from the front yard.
An empty bottle shattered on the cement driveway, just short of Shutterbug’s prized Jaguar. Shutterbug backed away from the window and bumped into the pool table. The cold brass frame was like dry ice on his palms. He turned quickly and caught the eight ball just as it was about to drop into the side pocket. He squeezed it, and it was so cold and so perfectly round and smooth in his hand that he had to drop it before he surrendered to the temptation to throw it through the window, at the men outside.
Anger had eclipsed his fear. And suddenly he was standing in the kitchen, hovering over the telephone without even remembering the trip from the living room. Jesus, he was frazzled. 911. That’s what he needed to do. Just dial it. Let someone else handle this. The cops. People like his father would know how to handle—
The doorbell chimed. Once. Twice. And then did nothing but chime.
“Ding dong the bitch is dead! C’mon! Let’s celebrate! Open up, Shutterbug!”
No, he couldn’t call the cops. They might want to enter the house. Once inside, they had the right to look around, didn’t they? That could spell disaster. And besides, Shutterbug’s uninvited visitors were drunk. They might tell the cops about the old 16mm loop. Or worse, they might make real trouble—insult the cops, force them to bust some ass or make some arrests. Shutterbug shook his head. He couldn’t let that happen. If he did, the idiots on the front lawn would be ticked at him for real.
And then they would most assuredly return on another night.
Shutterbug’s anger subsided. The forgotten fears of his youth resurfaced. He remembered the way the men on the lawn had treated him when they were boys. The bullying and the taunts he had endured, and all the rest of it. And now these same bullies were older, probably—most certainly—meaner. Now they were men, capable of so much more.
But Marvis had changed, too. He wasn’t a skinny punk anymore. He might still think of himself as Shutterbug, but now he was truly Big Marvis Hanks’s son. He had grown since high school. Put on some muscle. Health club membership and Bay to Breakers every year and all that.
The guys on the lawn had spent the intervening years drinking beer, going to seed.
Marvis weighed the situation, but he couldn’t convince himself that anything had really changed. The old fears were too strong. Besides, there were four of them. He reached for the phone. It rang before he could touch it, and he hated the terrified little gasp that escaped his Nautilus-constructed chest as he snatched up the receiver.
Mrs. Prater’s voice came at him in a trembling whisper. “Mr. Hanks? Are you all right over there?”
Shutterbug wanted to say, No, I’m not, but he I couldn’t do it. He couldn’t start the ball rolling. The last thing he needed was a cop on his doorstep when the video decks were whizzing busily in the basement, making copy after copy of Shelly Desmond’s latest porno sampler.
Erotica, dammit! Shutterbug corrected himself, only barely trapping the words inside, sparing old Mrs. Prater’s tender ears.
“Mr. Hanks. You there, Mr. Hanks? You want me to call the cops?”
The men were pounding on the front door now.
“Babalu! Babalu ay yaaayyyy!”
“C’mon, ’bug! Fuckin’Ayyyyyyy!”
“No, Mrs. Prater. Don’t call anyone.” Shutterbug barely whispered the words. “But thank you. And I’m sorry to wake you. This is all some kind of joke. Some old friends are a little drunk and they’re having a good time and….Well, I’m sorry the party got out of hand.”
Shutterbug hung up before Mrs. Prater could say another word.
He reached the front door in four long strides. Opened it. Recognized their sagging heavy faces, not at all like the faces he had photographed in 1976. Griz Cody. Todd Gould. Derwin MacAskill. Joaquin “Bat” Bautista. Members of the A-Squad Four jocks, each chosen as the best in his particular sport during Shutterbug’s senior year. One from football, one from track, one from basketball, and one from baseball. Shutterbug remembered the yearbook picture—four young guys, glowing grins, letterman jackets heavy with patches and medals, thumbs locked in frayed Levi’s belt loops. Bell-bottom jeans and shiny black boots.
“Hey, ’bug!” Griz Cody raised a fat hand, and Shutterbug was slapped five for the first time in eighteen long years. The simple slap was a one-way ticket to 1976.
Cody’s fingers curled, as if he were ready to grip an eight ball. “It’s showtime!” he laughed.
“Hanks!” The voice came from the other side of the street, and the men on the porch turned as one, “Hey, Hanks! You got trouble over there?”
The thick-shouldered black man who had spoken was dressed in his pajamas. He stood in the amber glow of a streetlight, a Louisville Slugger grasped in his big black hands.
Marvis recognized his neighbor, Joe Hamner.
“No trouble, man,” Derwin MacAskill said. “We just comin’ to visit our old homeboy here, is all.”
“That’s right.” Shutterbug tried to sound a little drunk but couldn’t pull it off. “No trouble, Joe. Sorry to bother you…. We didn’t mean for the party to get out of hand.” The excuse now seemed welded to his lips. It just kept popping up, and it made him feel as if he were a little doll. Someone was pulling his string and the same words kept spilling out. The Shutterbug doll. It apologizes. It wimps out. It sweats. Smell its fear.
Slippin' Into Darkness Page 2
