Slippin' Into Darkness

by Norman Partridge

  April only smiled. Over the years, her eyes had lost that special shine. They had come to resemble silver coins that had passed through too many hands. “I had a crush on you in eleventh grade,” she admitted. “Junior year. Remember Mr. Parker’s art class? You were cute, wearing that shirt with your dad’s name stitched above the pocket. Cute and quiet…real quiet. Maybe I had a dream about you. I dreamed about a lot of guys. But you know—good girls, we were never supposed do more than dream.”

  Her eyes darkened to a gunpowder gray and her smile became as thin as a fuse. “I wish I could remember my dreams. I wish I could tell you about them, because I know that’s what you want to hear. But I don’t have dreams anymore. I only have nightmares.”

  That was all she would tell him that first time. But he didn’t need to hear any more, because he still noticed little things, and sometimes he could even figure out what they meant. April’s bookshelves made an interesting study, for instance. Worn paperbacks on sleep and dreams wedged in with books about psychic phenomenon and ghosts and UFOs.

  Months passed before he found the strength to tell April that the dream still seemed real to him, and that life didn’t seem real at all. He didn’t want to hurt her, so he kept that to himself until she pulled it out of him. Even so, he hated himself for telling her. After all, what could someone say if you told them that you had made love to them in a dream when you were seventeen years old, and doing it in that dream was more meaningful than doing it at thirty-something, in real life? How could you say that to a woman without cutting out a piece of her heart?

  The whole thing was more than a little crazy, but Steve had decided long ago that he was more than a little crazy. Many years had passed since high school. It seemed forever since he had struggled with a test, or caged beer from a 7-Eleven clerk, or sweated over the numbers posted on a baseball scoreboard. But his mind still worked the same way. He knew that he was still crazy after all these years, if functionally so, and it was just too damn bad you couldn’t get something useful for that, a license plate that would allow you to park in handicapped zones or something.

  But April was a little crazy, too, and that made it okay. She had horrible nightmares. Her nightmares, like Steve’s dreams, gave way to insomnia. One of her Johns was a doctor, and he settled his account with downers and uppers and birth control pills and whatever else she wanted.

  She shared the sleeping pills with Steve. Most of them didn’t work. One kind, Halcion, did. A little white wonder, that pill. Steve swallowed one for the first time on a December afternoon, and he dreamed his first dream in nineteen years. He dreamed in April Destino’s bed, on a long winter afternoon, locked in April Destino’s arms. It was a drug dream, not a natural dream, but it was real.

  He returned to the meadow ringed with black pines, and April. He dreamed away a season of afternoons in the arms of April Louise Destino. The April who lived in a cramped little trailer became his dreamweaver, leading him to the girl he loved with a trail of little white pills, lying with him in a bed with dead springs.

  Even through the white Halcion haze, he knew that. Living and breathing, April Destino was there with him, searching for safety in the comfort of his arms.

  Asleep.

  Searching for his dream. Running from her nightmare.

  2:49 A.M.

  They were in Shutterbug’s bedroom.

  Griz Cody stood before the dresser mirror. He raised his sweatshirt, exposing a startlingly white roll of fat dappled with a red welt that was roughly the same configuration as a beer can. Griz squirted a gob of Sportscreme into one large paw and massaged his jiggling flesh, moaning with pleasure.

  Bat Bautista sat on Shutterbug’s bed, twisting his head from side to side, wincing at the little popping sounds made by sore vertebra. “Damn,” he said, “now I’m going to have to go to the chiropractor for sure.”

  Leaning against the doorjamb with a beer in one hand, Todd Gould laughed. “Shit, you did okay when Shutterbug hit you in the head. It was the punch to the belly that gave you trouble. That cheeseburger wasn’t any prettier coming up than it was going down. You should try chewing sometime, Bat.”

  “Cheeseburger ain’t what did it.” Derwin MacAskill pointed a thick finger at Bat. “You Filipino boys just can’t take it in the belly. Eat too much of that lumpia and shit, all those veggies that look like little worms.”

  Bat Bautista only twisted his head in reply, listening to a private chorus of firecracker pops.

  And Shutterbug drank it all in, thinking just a little wryly. So, this is what I was missing all those years. This is what it’s like to be one of the boys.

  Shutterbug sat on the floor. He’d changed from the black silk robe to jeans and a Perry Ellis shirt and his comfortable loafers, and he was busy digging through some boxes in the bottom of his closet. He reached for his beer, tipped it up, and allowed a quarter of the can’s contents to tickle over his throat like cold fingers of satisfaction. He had downed four brews in less than twenty minutes, and that was a personal best. Usually he required at least twenty minutes to drain a single beer, and his choice was certainly never a beer brewed in the United States of America, let alone a beer that came out of a can. But after having his home invaded by four drunks, after watching a volley of beer cans destroy his stereo, after downing Bat Bautista with two punches, and after realizing that he was actually going to live to tell the tale of this night, Shutterbug felt that he deserved a little something that would take the edge off.

  One by one, Shutterbug uncoiled the headers of a dozen old 16mm loops. He held each spool to the light and examined the first few frames while the patter continued behind him. The voices of the four men were slow and easy and the subject matter was unrestrained, as if Shutterbug were a regular part of their conversations.

  And Shutterbug found that he was actually enjoying the conversation. Some of that could be blamed on the beer, but not all of it. Even the rude jokes brought quiet laughter to his lips.

  Amazing. The A-Squad was actually in his house. In his room, staring up at the wall of eighteen-year-old faces that Shutterbug had maintained since high school.

  Griz Cody unbuttoned his pants, dropped them, and sank into a small chair that creaked as it accepted his bulk. He went to work on his hairy knees with the Sportscreme, but his movements were automatic—his attention was really focused on the young faces mounted on the wall. “Man,” he said, “those sure bring back some memories.”

  Derwin gave a low chuckle. “Damn straight. It appears old Shutterbug had hisself a taste for the white girls.”

  There it was, blunt and honest and right out in the open. And they all laughed about it. Horny, dark laughter followed by an awkward silence, which was finally broken by a question from Todd Gould. “How come you did it, Shutterbug? I mean, how come you kept those pictures up there, all these years?”

  Shutterbug stared at a frame of film. The light muted behind it, the colors not what they should be. A class picnic in the Berkeley hills, girls wearing bikinis, the scene locked in murky twilight instead of summertime brightness. He twisted the film onto the spool and snapped the plastic lid over it, the sound as sharp as the crack of Bat Bautista’s vertebra. “I don’t know why I kept them,” Shutterbug said, answering honestly. “Maybe I left them up there because I couldn’t bring myself to take them down.”

  Todd scratched his forehead, which had been much too low at eighteen. His receding hairline actually made him look more intelligent. But looks were deceiving. Shutterbug knew that. He tipped back his beer, let another generous swallow slide down his throat. He felt like an ass. Certainly, he had said the wrong thing.

  Then Derwin spoke up. “Yeah, I know what you mean, man. It’s the shits gettin’ old. Lost my job at the shipyard last year. Now I’m living in a shack behind somebody’s house—probably used to be some kid’s playhouse. Me and a lawn mower that I make the rounds with every day. Shit, I even got me a kid’s job.” He laughed bitterly, killed his beer, and crumpled
the can. “And you know what I got on the shelf above my bed?”

  “What?” Shutterbug asked.

  “Fuckin’ basketball trophies. They ain’t worth a damn. Every one of ’em peelin’ those thin gold coats. Either that or they’re gettin’ tarnished. But I keep ’em, all the same. Like they tell me I did something once.”

  Bat laughed at that. “You got that one right. A couple of months ago, me and the wife got into a real pisser of a fight. Woman couldn’t even understand what made me mad. See, she took one of my baseballs and played catch with the kids. The only problem was that it was the ball I used to pitch that no-hitter when I went all-city in our senior year. It was autographed by everyone who was on the team. And my wife and the kids scuffed up the damn thing, throwing it around the street. Man, I went ballistic, and she just didn’t get it.”

  “No doubt about it,” Griz Cody said. “Definite grounds for a D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” He spelled the last word out with a nasal twang in his voice, the way a country singer would, and everyone laughed.

  “Yeah…well…”Shutterbug wondered how far he should go with this. “I guess these pictures were my trophies.”

  “They’re one hell of a lot better lookin’ than a pot-metal football player,” Griz said, doing a stiff imitation of the running back straight-arm pose that most trophies portrayed.

  Derwin struck a frozen basketball free-throw pose. Bat followed with a pitcher’s windup. Todd puffed out his chest, straining toward an imaginary finish line. Everyone laughed, including Shutterbug, who suddenly felt that he was in the company of a bunch of gone-to-seed mimes.

  Todd asked, “Who wants another beer?” and the jocks nodded as one.

  Shutterbug unspooled another roll of film.

  “Marvis, how about you?”

  The man with the reel of film in his hands came up short. Marvis. That’s what Todd had said. Marvis. Not Shutterbug.

  “Yeah,” Marvis said, smiling. “That would great.”

  * * *

  They were having a real big, macho, male-bonding time of it. Marvis was wondering if he should invite them into the back yard, where they could strip naked and pound drums and howl at the moon like a bunch of crazy yupsters.

  He resisted the temptation. Instead, he continued sorting through the 16mm loops, but finding the right one didn’t seem to matter much anymore.

  “Y’know,” Bat said, still staring at Marvis’s gallery, “those were some good times, back then. Shit, I wish you wouldn’t have broken that CD player, Griz. It would have been good to listen to some of those old tunes.”

  “Not that white boy music, though,” Derwin said. “I couldn’t take hearin’ that nonsense again.”

  “Man,” Griz said, “you’re about the biggest racist I know.”

  “Oh yeah? I s’pose you liked listenin’ to all the songs about white girls and dead horses named Wildfire and shit.”

  “Well, it was better than ‘Jungle Boogie.’ ”

  “Shit if it was. That wasn’t nothin’ compared to ‘You Light Up My Life.’ ”

  Griz sang, “I’m gonna boogie-oogie-oogie’ til I jes can’t boogie no more….”

  “You’re havin’ mah baybeeeee—”

  Griz laughed, spitting beer. “Okay…okay…Igive up…”

  Derwin wasn’t done yet. “—what a lovely way of say in’ how much you luuuvvv meeeeeeeee….”

  “Okay! Okay!”

  It was quiet for a few seconds.

  “Damn,” Todd said. “I wish the CD player wasn’t broken.”

  “Yeah,” Derwin agreed.

  Griz Cody nodded.

  * * *

  One by one, they rated the girls on the wall. Both Bat and Marvis had attended the fifteen year reunion, and they took turns detailing what had happened to each girl as she grew older. Plenty of positive and negative adjectives were thrown around. Speculation was made concerning the possibility of breast enhancement and liposuction. It was decided, in general terms, that there was a desperate need for electrolysis professionals in this day and age, and for a time the conversation turned to the outstanding prospects a seasoned professional could expect in a seemingly competition-free environment.

  Bat finally grew weary of that line of conversation and returned to the original subject. “That Amelia Peyton, now she was fine. I never even noticed her in high school. Back then she was trying too hard to be like everyone else. Just another April Destino clone. But now…I got one look at her at the reunion and my wife got mad, told me she thought she’d need a winch to get my tongue back in my mouth.”

  Marvis eyed Bat—his little-old-man gut, his dirty fingernails. The very idea of Bat Bautista with Amy Peyton was ludicrous. A guy like Bautista wouldn’t have idea one of how to get with her.

  The words came out of Marvis’s mouth automatically. “Amy isn’t bad.”

  “Whoa!” Derwin said. “Is this the voice of experience, Marv?”

  Marvis didn’t answer directly. “It wasn’t as if we had a big affair or anything. I only saw her twice, when she was between husbands. She worked at the bank across the street from my camera shop, and we kind of hit it off. I took her out to dinner one time. A real nice place up in the Napa Valley. I picked the right wines, ordered for her. She liked that. Then the other time I took her to a photography exhibit over in San Francisco. I knew the photographer, and we went to a private party at the Mark Hopkins afterward and—”

  “Yeah,” Griz said. “Okay. I don’t want to hear about silverware and place settings. What I want to know is…did you chop her beef?”

  Marvis laughed. Did you chop her beef? How delicate. “That’s why you guys would never get a woman like Amy.”

  The four jocks were speechless. Marvis felt wonderful. Every one of them was dying for a little taste of Amy Peyton. Every one of them was dying for something he’d had. They were envious, and it showed. Serious salivation—it was practically dripping off of them.

  Derwin, who lived in a shack and mowed lawns for a living, stared at Marvis’s bedroom furnishings as if he were calculating the cost of every stick of furniture. Griz Cody sat there, too fat and too ugly and too crude to attract any woman. Todd Gould, with his perpetually wrinkled brow, thumbed through Marvis’s photography books as if they were written in hieroglyphics—just another anonymous balding guy who didn’t have much upstairs in more ways than one. And Bat Bautista, who spent his evenings with a fat wife and kids who irritated him, was the perfect picture of a guy who would never get a taste of a woman like Amy Peyton in this lifetime. They were flat-out, locked-jaw envious. And it was wonderful. Marvis grinned at them, thinking, Oh, how the mighty have fallen. He didn’t pass up the opportunity to rub it in. “Amy is a high-strung lady,” he concluded somewhat mysteriously. “Okay—in every way—but not someone I wanted to get involved with long-term.”

  Amazing, those words spilling from his lips. Marvis had never before thought of himself as a master of understatement. In truth. Amy Peyton had three topics of discussion: money, Amy Peyton, and money. It had taken Marvis all of two dates to figure that out, after which he stopped returning her calls.

  But he wasn’t going to share that information with the A-Squad. He preferred to allow their filthy imaginations to take the ball and run with it. He grinned.

  “Just look at this shit-eater,” Derwin said.

  Well fuck me.” Bat Bautista shook his head. “Marvis Hanks. Man, you’ve changed. I mean, I always knew you had some guts, deep down inside you. It took some guts not to give up that film of April when we came looking for it. And it took some guts not to spill your guts about what happened that night in Todd’s basement. I mean, you could have sunk all of us if you’d ever turned over that film to anyone. Even to your father—he was a cop, right? You could have given it to him, knowing that he would have found a way to protect you. You could have screwed us, big time.”

  Marvis smiled at Bat’s misguided worries. He never would have turned over the film. If he’d done that, it would have
been gone forever.

  Bautista’s eyes were red with beer and fatigue. Words spilled from his lips in a thick blur. “And now you’re screwin’ fine women like Amelia Peyton. Drivin’ a Jaguar. Got your own business—”

  Marvis shrugged. “It’s just the breaks of the game. I got lucky.” But he didn’t mean what he said. What he really wanted to say was. Take a long look at what I’ve got. See what idiots you’ve been. See how miserably you’ve screwed up, while old punk Shutterbug, old skinny Shutterbug who you used to bodyslam on cement floors, little old faggot Shutterbug who couldn’t book a ride on April Destino’s train, look what’s become of him.

  Suddenly Marvis was ready to tell them everything. How much money he had, and how he earned it, and how much of it he didn’t dare show. Forget the Jag—he longed to brag that he could easily afford a Testarossa. He ached to tell them about the teenage girls; he wanted to describe in great detail how Shelly Desmond peeled off her clothes in front of his video cameras, and how she did each and everything that he told her to do.

  What would they say if he spoke of those things? How would they react if he told them about the leather mask scarred over with silver zippers that he wore on the dangerous nights when he joined Shelly in front of the camera?

  He wanted to find out in the absolute worst way. He stood staring into the closet, his gaze aimed at two shoeboxes shoved toward the back of the middle shelf. His hand went to the one on the left, the one that held several neatly sorted stacks of twenties and fifties. But ultimately his fingers settled on the box on the right.

  Yes. The statement would be just as clear. He opened the box and tossed a Ziploc bag heavy with cocaine to Bat Bautista. “You fellows brought the beer. Here’s dessert.”

  To a man, the A-Squad whooped and hollered, just as Marvis had expected. Derwin ran to the kitchen, returned with a spoon, carefully dipped it into white powder, and snorted. A stupid grin spread on his face, his black nose powdered white. “This,” he said, “is living.”