Norman Partridge - Slippin' into Darkness

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.

But the lousy excuse didn’t matter, because Joe Hamner was already heading for his front door. “Shit,” he began, tossing a string of curses over his shoulder. “I got to be on the yard at six. Get those assholes off your lawn. Hanks, or I’ll call the law.”

Todd Gould, the one-time track star, edged past Shutterbug. The yellow porch light reflected dully on Gould’s balding pate. “Man, you need to move to a better neighborhood,” Gould said through a smirk. “I couldn’t take having the black Charles Bronson for a neighbor.”

“Charles Bronson?” Derwin MacAskill followed Gould. “ Shee-it. You mean John Fuckin’ Shaft. He’s one bad mother-”

“Shut your mouth!” Griz Cody laughed, shouldering through the doorway.

And Joaquin “Bat” Bautista, bringing up the rear with six-packs of Bud Dry cradled in his big arms, added, “Well we can dig it!”

Ice cubes crackled as The Six Million Dollar Man poured three fingers of Jack Daniel’s into his glass, the brittle sound playing sharp and hard off the cement walls of his fortress of solitude. Echoes, he thought, staring at the door that separated him from the world. Damn straight. I’ll tell you about echoes, friends.

The man holding the glass of JD wasn’t really The Six Million Dollar Man, the once-popular 1970s television hero, but that didn’t bother him. He’d had several identities in his lifetime. When he was a kid, everyone called him Ozzy Austin. Even his mother had called him that, and she was the one who had placed another name on his birth certificate. That name was Steve Austin, and, as any trivia buff worth his salt was sure to know, Steve Austin was also The Six Million Dollar Man’s real name. It was the kind of puzzle that the man who was-and at the same time was not-The Six Million Dollar Man often explored during the hours when the world was lost in sleep. Two men could share a name, but that didn’t make them the same.

Slowly, he rotated his wrist, a tight grip on the cold glass of Tennessee’s finest sipping whiskey. Little trickles of moisture dripped between his big fingers. The liquor reflected dim fluorescent light from above, little waves rippling over ice with a magical glow.

Two fluorescent tubes were cold and dead. The other clung to life, buzzing unevenly, so that the room was one moment a simple basement with bad lighting, the next a fortress of solitude choked with shadows. First the live tube shone white as a neon bone, whispering an electric itch, then it dimmed to the color of an October sky, casting shadows without rhyme or reason, making no sound at all. Distracting, that, because it sent Steve Austin’s mind in search of some odd connection, and tonight he didn’t want to be distracted by the silly imaginings that annoyed him the way crazy dreams annoyed most people.

Broken and battered, The Six Million Dollar Man was locked away in Dr. Rudy Wells’s Six Million Dollar Man Repair Shop. Oscar Goldman had decided that his buddy’s brain wasn’t working quite right. Maybe that long-ago crash had done more damage than Dr. Wells had believed, or maybe the computer enhancements that connected Colonel Austin’s brain to his mechanical limbs were changing the cyborg hero into something dangerous.

But The Six Million Dollar Man wasn’t ready for the scrap heap. He waited for Oscar or Rudy, leeching electricity from the light, feeding on it until he was ready to wreak vengeance upon the unfeeling humans who had knitted his bones with metal, his brain with computer chips.

Steve Austin could see it all from the comfort of his La-Z-Boy recliner, his own handsome features replacing the pre-bloat charms of Lee Majors. Rubber skin over metal bone. Steel fingers wrapped around a NASA bureaucrat’s neck… The Six Million Dollar Man sipped whiskey, poured his thoughts into the hard hand of reality, and recognized the waking dream for what it was.