Norman Partridge - Slippin' into Darkness

She stepped out of the jail and strode across the basement floor, the little gold ring on her toe clicking with every other step. Her fingers snapped for cash. He didn’t have any, so he wrote her a check on the camera shop account and marked it “refund.” April thought that was really funny. She laughed and laughed, her naked shoulders shaking so violently that he imagined he heard her bones rattling.

Then she got serious. Put on the horny jailbird act. Really went to town. So horny and stuck in a cell with no men around at all, that’s how horny she was. She was a high school princess and used to getting what she wanted, after all.

And suddenly the eight ball was in her hands, and a pair of eyes the color of prison bars locked on Shutterbug’s lens.

Yeah. That was the real April Destino, the girl a blind nutcase like Steve Austin had never seen. Shutterbug drew the living room drapes, lay down on the overstuffed couch, remembering that night with April. He connected a few dots. Coke at the party, more coke at April’s. Drinks at his place.

Sure. He had been wrecked when April visited his house. That explained her weird message in his yearbook. No wonder he hadn’t remembered it. April must have found the book and scribbled the inscription on the night they’d done April, Part II. Simple. And he had discovered it years later, believing it to be some supernatural message from a dead woman.

Mystery solved. Dead was dead.

And if dead was dead, if April was truly gone, he sure as hell hadn’t seen a ghost last night. Unless ghosts were made of too much beer and too much coke.

Too much of a good thing was indeed too much of a good thing. It was that simple. Like the spiked punch April had guzzled at Todd Gould’s party back in 1976. But now it seemed funny. Seeing things. Getting scared. Imagining nightmares under the bed, in the closet, or on a lonely road.

Shutterbug’s mind continued to drift. His memory replayed the phone call he’d taken at the shop, the car parked in Joe Hamner’s driveway. Puzzling mysteries, not as easy to explain away as a ghost story. He searched for connections, and his thoughts turned to April Destino, and to Steve Austin.

He lay there, hoping that everything would come to an end, and knowing somehow that he had plenty of time to think before that was going to happen.

Derwin MacAskill wanted to lie down, but he too damn busy mowing lawns.

Six lawns mowed in one hot April afternoon. Shit. Sweat on his back and itchy grass sticking to him like stink on shit. Damn. If April was this hot, there no telling what kind of misery May and June would bring. He didn’t even want to think about July, let alone motherfuckin’ August.

So he mowed lawns. Smelled gasoline. Scooped and bagged countless dog turds. Listened to James Brown get real funky on the Walkman with the duct-taped cassette door. Good old seventies Superfly kind of riff called “The Payback.”

Get down Soul Brother Number One. James was indeed one crazy mother. Did his time cool and clean after runnin’ up against the Man. A real-life wildman.

Oh, there were others out there like James. Derwin knew that, and he also knew that most wildmen weren’t even famous. He should know. He ran with three of them. Crazy rat-soup eatin’ motherfuckers, always doing weird shit. Like last night at the drive-in.

And then that other shit at the cemetery. He didn’t even want to think about that insanity. Except for the sight of old Marvis Hanks screaming like some nutty bitch when that downed caretaker grabbed his legs, that shit wasn’t funny at all.

That shit was plain weird. Someone digging up a dead body, taking it who knows where. Doing who knows what with it.

Weird.

James Brown screeched, and so did Derwin. Clapped his hands, spun, caught the lawn mower on the return.

A mystery man bustin’ up some caretaker who caught him in the act, right there in the cemetery. Bashin’ in the old honky’s head with a shovel or something, just bashin’ and bashin’…

Derwin knew that was wildman kind of shit.

Especially fine wildman kind of shit.

The cop who robbed graves and busted up caretakers had a slow, fairly uninteresting afternoon. Tires slashed down on Bergwall. A fist fight at a grocery store on Springs Road-shoplifter versus checkout girl, and the checkout girl was a bruiser with an undefeated record of eight and oh. And don’t forget the piece de resistance, a hit-and-run driver taking out three front yards on Rollingwood. Uprooted trees of various description and value, bashed mailboxes. Two victims-a ceramic troll and a cast-iron jockey.

Steve felt more empathy for the troll and the jockey than for the people he interviewed in conjunction with each call.

At least, that was what he told himself.

Griz Cody wished that the whole world were dark, because his hangover had him closed down good.

First off, he called in sick. No hassle there. But then his wife started bitching, and she was a pro. She made a special trip out to the garage just to check out his truck. She said that he better do something about it if he was going to stay home, cheesin’ off his job, because he wasn’t going to use her car. Not this time.

He didn’t mind her bitching. Not really. It meant he could spend the day in the garage. Nice and quiet out there. Cool cement and the greasy smell of tools. There was even a six-pack waiting in the old fridge.

He made the trip, had a couple brews. But he couldn’t shake his surly mood.

Damn truck. A big scratch zigzagged across the blue hood. Shutterbug’s projector did that. Busted headlight to go along with the scratch. Front left. The drive-in gate did that when he bashed through it.

But it wasn’t the truck that pissed Griz off. And it wasn’t his wife harping at him. The memory of last night ate at his guts. The damn movie ran through his brain, an ugly, unvarnished record of his impotence. A cold picture of him pinching that damn cheerleader while the other guys laughed looped through his thoughts like a snake crawling over one of those figure eight things.

A Moses strip, that’s what those things were called. And like that was part of the problem. On top of everything else, everybody thought that he was stupid. An egghead like Shutterbug probably thought that he didn’t even know what a Moses strip was.

Shit. All this stuff ruining his day. A hangover. The scratch on his truck, and the busted headlight. The guys laughing at him and his limp little dick. The Moses strip.

Him having an ugly wife-that was the Destino bitch’s fault, too. Once word got out about his limp dick and the pinching and everything, all the babes had avoided him like he was a fag or something. It was all that bitch’s fault. Him having an ugly wife and everything else. Every little bit of it.

Todd Gould woke up feeling just fine. He ate a big breakfast and went to work at his father’s furniture store. He thought about selling furniture.

For a few hours, Amy thought about doors, and how much trouble they could be. She decided that locksmithing would have made for a rewarding career path, and she wondered why her high school counselor had never suggested such an option. Add one more to the list of male-dominated professions requiring attention.

Finally, she couldn’t stand to look at the door anymore. The scored grain spoke of the wood’s age, and she began to think that she might be trapped in Steve Austin’s basement for a very long time, indeed.

So she stared at April’s corpse instead. The oddest scenario formed in her head, and she knew it was a result of reading too many Barbara Michaels novels. She imagined herself as an archaeologist trapped beneath a pyramid by a sudden cave-in, pushing forward in the face of danger, undaunted, discovering the burial vault of a forgotten Egyptian princess.