Jonathon King - A Visible Darkness

The sun was high and white and the wind had set down a corduroy pattern on the ocean surface. From this height the varied water depths showed in shades of turquoise, cerulean and then a cobalt blue that spread to the horizon. The narrow strip of beach had shrunk since the last time I'd visited. The tide and wave action had eaten away at least fifteen yards. I didn't relish the idea of doing three miles in that soft sand. The thought of it made me lean into the rail and stretch my calves. But some of my best grinding came while I was running or paddling, and it was going to take some grinding to determine where to go with Billy's dead women.

I went to the guest bedroom, found some running shorts, a T-shirt and the running shoes that Billy held here for me. I changed and poured another cup of coffee, and carried it to the rail. The wind was stiffening. I swung a heel up on the rail and stretched. Bent. Counted. Swung the other leg up.

Would someone kill old women for money? Of course.

How would he know who to kill? Inside job. List of names.

Do it himself, or contract it? Money guys don't do the dirty work.

How does the racial angle fit? It might never fit.

I still wasn't sold on the whole premise and now I was bringing Richards into it. It was how conspiracy theories were started. Look out Oliver Stone.

I put my palms on the floor, propped my toes on the seat of the chaise lounge and did fifty pushups. The blood was singing in my ears when I stood up and exhaled. I took a deep swig of coffee. Time to plow the sand.

Eddie felt the cop car turn around. He'd watched it pass, keeping his head down, pushing his cart, willing himself invisible. But after the green and white prowl car had passed by he heard the wheels slow and then crunch the stone, first on one shoulder and then the other. He heard the U-turn and now he thought he could feel the heat of the engine on his back.

The chrome bumper pulled even with him, then the green fender, then the white, smiling face.

"Hey, junk man," said the young officer in the passenger seat. Eddie said nothing.

"Wassaaaaap?" the officer wailed, his tongue sticking out, his partner grinning.

Eddie had heard the blatting before, followed by laughter. He wondered why only white people did it.

"I do not know," Eddie answered and stopped his pushing.

The prowl car stopped with him.

"What you got in the cart today, junk man? Anything in there you shouldn't have?"

Eddie had talked with the police before. Most of the time they left him alone. They never hurt him. The one time he'd been arrested was for burglary when they found a half dozen potted plants in his cart. He'd just picked them up out of someone's carport. He was planning to sell them but the police stopped him and said they were stolen. They took him in when he said he didn't know where the plants came from but promised to put them back. He had no money for bail, so he spent sixty days in the county jail.

Eddie didn't mind jail. The food was good and after a few days they put him on a special floor the guards called the forensic unit. That's where Eddie met the doctor. They'd had some good talks. The doc had taken care of him.

All the guards were good to him and he did whatever they told him. One day a prisoner had broken a toilet and a work crew came to bust up the porcelain and chip out some of the concrete. They filled a huge trash can and the guards laughed when two of the workers couldn't drag it away.

"Eddie," the guard called out. "Come carry this out into the hall for these gentlemen."

Eddie put down the mop he'd been using and walked over. He bent and gripped the sides of the can and hefted it up onto his chest and walked it to the hall while everyone stared. He'd lifted heavier things. The guards smiled and were even nicer to him.

Another day a prisoner started screaming in his cell, crazy like, threatening to burn up his mattress with a pack of matches. He was strong and wild. The guards told him to throw the matches out but he spit at them through the bars instead. Two of them looked at each other and then the one said:

"Eddie."

It was the guard that was always asking Eddie for help. "Go in there and get the matches, Eddie."

The guard sat at his desk and listened to the heavy thumping, the sound of bone against bars and thick muscle against concrete. Eddie came back out with the matches and put them on the desk.

"Thank you, Eddie."

"Yessir," he said. Eddie had crushed the bones of a strong man's hands before.

"You don't have anything in that cart from Sue and Lou's Restaurant, do you junk man?" The young white officer was still talking, but neither he nor his partner had gotten out of the car, and Eddie knew if they didn't get out of the car it was going to be alright.

"Because somebody helped themselves through the back door over there last night," the officer said.

Eddie knew. He'd been through that alley and saw the busted lock on the door but he had pushed on by. No need to get caught up in all that now.

"I do not know," Eddie said.

"You do not know, huh?" the young officer repeated. "That might be the truest statement I've heard today."

The officers looked at each other, proud for some reason of their words. "You be cool, junk man," said the partner as they pulled away.

Eddie watched until the taillights disappeared and then pushed on.

"I know lots of police," he whispered to himself. "I talks to them all the time."

Eddie reached deep into his pocket and fished out the watch that he never wore on his wrist. He checked the time. Now he was late.

He turned down Twenty-ninth and quickened his pace. The cart rattled over the rough macadam. At Sunrise Boulevard he scanned the busy street. Rush hour. Working people leaving downtown on the east side heading west to their nice homes out in the suburbs. They kept their eyes on the cars in front of them. They stopped only when the red lights held them. It was like a train moving through an ugly patch of landscape and no one on board cared about the view.

Eddie's eyes were on the Bromell's Liquor Store across the street. It had been there since he was a child, sitting back off the main road, a broad parking lot on two sides. Even when they repainted the outside of the building some new yellow or purple color, the walls always seemed dingy, the dirt and grease somehow seeping back through the fresh color like a weeping wound through a bandage. Its present color was an odd orange, like a Mexican cantina, Eddie had heard someone say.

The young ones were hanging in their usual spot next to the pay phones. Yapping. Calling each other nigger and laughing at whoever it was today that had to be picked on. The older men pulled up in their Buicks or the Cadillacs with the sprung bumpers, limped in and came out with bottles in paper bags. The working men arrived in pickups with the shiny toolboxes in the truck beds. Eddie remembered when white boys with a Confederate flag pasted in the rear window were the only ones who drove such trucks. The world had changed.

Finally Eddie let the front wheels of the cart down off the curb and pushed his way across four busy lanes of traffic. No one honked. No one jammed on their brakes or cussed out the window. Eddie was invisible.

At the far edge of the parking lot he stood in the shade of a sprawling willow and waited. Without looking up he saw everyone who entered and left, matched them with cars, noted their clothes, paid particular attention to their hands: big or fine boned, stuck down in pockets or dangling at their sides.

When the bronze-colored Chevy Caprice pulled in, Eddie watched the man get out, sweep the area without stopping his eyes at the willow, and then stride into the store. Once he was inside Eddie moved.