Norman Partridge - Slippin' into Darkness

It had happened in Todd Gould’s basement. January, 1976. Blowout party to cap the end of football season. Todd’s parents gone. Bat Bautista’s spiked punch flowing freely. Everyone blitzed to the max. The basement door locked, the six of them there in a room that smelled like old newspapers and unspoken secrets.

The basement was split into two sections. The back half was a tangle of shadows and castoffs from the furniture store owned by Todd’s dad, and the other half, the section nearest the stairs, was a game room equipped with a pool table and old pinball machines that had been restored by Todd’s brother.

April lay on the pool table, so wasted on spiked punch that Shutterbug didn’t know if she was conscious or not. He was filming the things the guys did to her, one after another. They wanted him to film it. Hell, they probably would have kicked his ass had he had mustered the nerve to refuse. But he didn’t refuse. He had a hard-on and that particular six-inch portion of his anatomy was doing his thinking for him. He was excited about filming April. He had never been able to photograph her-apart from the shot of the cheerleader squad for the yearbook-and it was just too much to believe that he was actually getting her like this, forever, right down on film. First Bat, then Todd, then Derwin, then Griz, and maybe, if they were in a good mood, maybe they would let him…

It didn’t happen that way. Things never got that far. Griz Cody was too fucked up to get it up. His little dick hid under a fold of fat, because he was too fat even then. And he tried to make a joke out of it, slapping his dick against April’s thigh. And when no one laughed at that he pinched her, again and again, so hard that his fingers left red welts on her tanned flesh, so hard that her eyes came open and they were the color of a storm and she was suddenly with them in the basement, back from whatever hazy dreamland she had been visiting.

“Seven motherfucker!”

Griz’s fingers pinching the milky flesh of April’s breasts, almost as if he were jealous. The violent sound of his teeth clacking menacingly as his face moved over her nipples.

Shutterbug stepped forward.

The bank of movie lights playing over the shadows at the back of the basement as the camera falls to the pool table.

Shutterbug grabbing Griz Cody. “No!”

Bat Bautista’s fist smacking Shutterbug’s jaw.

The cold taste of cement floor.

“Eight motherfucker!”

April fully conscious, screaming bloody murder. Shutterbug swimming breathlessly through a deep underwater haze, the awful sound of April’s protests tearing over his skull like a hacksaw blade.

Trying to get up. Falling. Griz Cody’s face floating over his (like a big white moon like a cue ball), a little trickle of blood on Griz’s fat lips and an eight ball locked in his chubby grip. “C’mon, Shutterbug, it’s showtime! Get your ass off the ground. We want this in living color.” Shoving the eight ball in Shutterbug’s face. “I’m hitting the pocket, ‘bug!”

Hands on Shutterbug, pulling him to his feet. The heavy Kodak jammed in his hands and Shutterbug not even able to stand. Movie lights bleaching shadows, bouncing off the walls and broken furniture masked with dust. Shutterbug leaning against a pinball machine for support, the metal frame cool against the throbbing divot on the side of his head.

Todd and Derwin and Bat and Griz had been laughing then.

They were laughing now.

Laughing at him.

Shutterbug lay on the floor, his silk robe hanging open.

“Look at that bratwurst.” “Looks like a smoked bratwurst.”

“Shit. Looks more like a shriveled-up breakfast link to me.”

“Nine mother-”

There were no hands on Shutterbug now.

He was in his own house, and the year was 1994.

“ -fucker! Hey, Shutterbug’s gettin’ up!”

He was up. And Bat Bautista was in the kitchen, Shutterbug’s kitchen, not paying his host the slightest bit of attention. Bat was too busy chugging a Bud Dry, his head tipped back like a fucking-A tough guy.

Bautista’s white T-shirt barely contained his gone-to-seed belly.

Marvis’s muscles danced like snakes under his black silk robe. He looked like a boxer ready to go to war.

Bautista’s Adam’s apple ceased its bobbing. The beer can was empty. Bat crushed the can and started to lower it. His eyelids were fleshy hoods and there was a smile on his face.

He belched magnificently.

Three steps and Marvis was there. His left fist sank into that big belly, and Bat’s eyes popped open, a couple of eggs ready to do a Humpty Dumpty-nothing but startled whites. And then Marvis’s right fist came across, clipping the big man’s jaw.

Marvis felt the punch all the way up to his shoulder, and he found that the sensation was completely satisfying.

When the sensation faded, he saw that Bautista was down.

Griz Cody was passed out on the floor and made no comment, but Todd Gould-who had dispensed with the surf music in the heat of the moment-screeched a rebel yell.

“One motherfucker!” Derwin MacAskill chanted. “Two motherfucker!”

Bat Bautista didn’t rise. He lay on the floor, resembling nothing so much as a great heaving fish gasping its last on a bone-dry pier. He retched. Bits of cheeseburger and warm beer spilled out of his mouth and puddled on the gleaming tile in Marvis Hanks’s kitchen.

Marvis frowned. Ten bucks per square, that tile.

And then Derwin MacAskill slapped Marvis five, and it was the second time that he had been slapped five in eighteen long years.

“Ten motherfucker!” Derwin shouted. “Damn, Shutterbug! Damn!”

“C’mon, Doug, of course I recognized you,” Amy lied, staring at the steering wheel instead of the fat man sitting in the Mercedes’ passenger seat. “It’s just been so long…”

Doug Douglas sulked. “Darlin’,” he said, “you can’t hide your lyin’ eyes.”

Amy suppressed a sigh. Doug still had the insufferably whiney voice of a wounded teenager, but now it was so…well, it was so completely and utterly insulated. “That’s a little melodramatic, Doug,” she said.

“No,” he said. “It’s a song by The Eagles. I guess you don’t remember it, either.”

Amy’s cheeks flushed with sudden anger. “Oh, I remember plenty. I remember that there was a time when you didn’t recognize me. I haven’t forgotten-”

“That’s enough!” He shoved the camera in her face. “Remember this! I’m in charge here!”

Amy took a deep breath and regrouped. “Doug, I…I don’t want this to go the wrong way. No matter what you think, I don’t want to hurt you or make you angry. I did enough of that, and I’ve always felt bad about it.” Amy reached out, almost touching the camera slung around the set of double chins that eclipsed Doug Douglas’s neck. “We have to talk about this. We have to talk about my husband. He’s not a nice man. He hired you because-”

Doug Douglas swatted Amy’s hand. “That’s what you want to talk about,” he said, every inch the petulant teenager. “ I was talking about a song. You interrupted me. The song is about a lonely woman who drifts between a young lover and an older husband. The song is about the woman’s problems, not her husband’s.”

“Then my husband didn’t hire you?”

Well, duh. You’re pretty slow. Amy.” Snorting, Doug sized her up with a cutting glance. “Pardon me. Ms. Amelia Peyton-Price. What a mouthful. I should have guessed you’d end up with one of those hyphenated names.” He chuckled, and his chins did a little dance. “Let me ask you, Ms. Amelia Peyton-Price. What happens when a kid with a hyphenated name grows up to marry another kid with a hyphenated name? Not that I expect you to have kids, you understand. Not with old Pricey anyway. But what happens? Do little Miss Peyton-Price and Little Mister Destino-Douglas end up Mr. and Mrs. Peyton-Price-Destino-Douglas?”