The Deepening Shade

by Jake Hinkson

  “Yes.”

  I pulled out of the parking lot. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Me and Wendy met this guy at the liquor store—”

  “That’s fucking great,” I said. “You met a guy at the liquor store.”

  “And we went back to Wendy’s apartment.”

  I felt the skin on my neck and back tighten up.

  Janie looked down at her hands. “We were hanging out and drinking, and he started getting loud. He and Wendy started having a fight, but then they made up and went back to her room. I was watching TV. They were in her room having sex.”

  I hurried through a yellow light and adjusted my rearview mirror to see if there were any cops around.

  “I fell asleep on the couch,” Janie said, “and then I woke up, and he was there.”

  “Who is this guy?”

  “I don’t know. He said his name was Gene.”

  Wendy’s apartment complex was a big place that stretched out over a city block. I’d dropped off Janie there a couple of times, so I knew where I was going, but I pulled into the Walmart parking lot across from the complex and parked at the far end, away from Wendy’s apartment.

  “Her apartment’s down there,” Janie told me.

  “We’ll walk it,” I said. “First, you tell me what happened. This asshole woke you up. Then what?”

  She looked down at her small, thin hands. I looked at them too, and I don’t know why, but just then I remembered teaching her how to snap her fingers when she was little.

  “He wanted me to, uh, give him a blow job,” Janie said. She was embarrassed to even say the words, and then her face went flush and one by one, tears fell from her eyes.

  “You fought him,” I said.

  She shook her head. “No.”

  I stared at her.

  “Oh.”

  “Then Wendy came out and found us, and she was really mad and drunk and she started yelling at him. He started yelling at her. I said that maybe I should leave, but they both ignored me. Then he hit her and things got really scary. Wendy lost her mind. She started yelling, and he hit her again, so I ran over and hit him, too.”

  She stopped and looked out the window. The sky was black and clouded over. There was no moon and no stars.

  “What happened then?” I said.

  She shook her head. “It just got crazy. He had this gun in his coat, a little gun in his pocket, and when he pulled it out I just…ran. He grabbed me and threw me in the kitchen. Some steak knives fell over.” Her tears hit her jeans, and she wiped them away. “And I guess I picked up one and stabbed him.”

  “You ‘guess’ or you did?”

  She nodded as if to answer. Then she said, “Wendy sent me to get you.”

  We got out of the car and walked over to Wendy’s apartment. It was quiet as we walked down an alley between two rows of townhouses. Wendy’s apartment was in a cluster of single-bedroom apartments. Her place was on the bottom, at the end facing the dumpsters, so we came at it from the back alley. We didn’t see anyone except a scrawny tomcat digging into a crumpled up Arby’s bag.

  I tapped on Wendy’s door.

  After a while, a tiny voice said, “Yeah.” I looked at the peephole and saw it go dark as Wendy leaned in to look at us.

  The door opened, and Wendy hid behind it in the darkened hallway. The only light in the apartment came from the kitchenette. When Janie and I walked in, Wendy shut the door. She was a tubby girl with flabby tits boosted up through the low neckline of her shirt. At twenty-five, she still had acne. Right now, though, except for a swelling black eye, she was as white as a toilet seat.

  “Elizabeth,” she sighed.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  She started crying.

  “Christ,” I muttered. The apartment wasn’t big, so I moved in the direction of the light. Around the edge of the refrigerator, I saw a cowboy boot peeking out. Then I heard a wheeze of breath, and the boot moved.

  The two frightened girls behind me both gasped. They huddled against the front door.

  I stepped into the kitchenette and found the man lying in a sticky mass of piss and blood. It smelled foul. His face was covered in blood, and I couldn’t tell how old he was. One of his eyes was plastered shut with drying blood, but his other eye was open and staring at the kitchen light like it was the face of god.

  “Why haven’t you called an ambulance?” I asked.

  The girls started crying again, and I told them to shut up. I rubbed my face and squatted down beside the dying man, trying not to step in the blood and urine. His small black revolver had skittered into the corner and lay there against the trashcan. Looking down at his face, I didn’t feel a goddamn thing. I wasn’t terrified, horrified, or anything at all.

  I tried to think it through as calmly as I could. We could get rid of the body, dump it somewhere, and then hope he didn’t get traced back here, but the more I turned that idea over in my head the less sense it made. The cops would trace him back here. It stood to reason. The girls met him at a liquor store. The manger would remember them. They were probably on security cameras.

  “You should call the cops,” I said.

  “No!” Wendy cried. She rushed to the edge of the carpet, not touching the tile in the kitchenette. “They’ll…we’ll be in trouble.”

  I stood up. “You got a dying man here,” I said. “What do you want to do, bury him in the woods? You think they won’t look for him? You think they won’t find him? He’s not dead yet. If we save him, this won’t be as bad. It’ll still be bad, but, god, it won’t be murder. It was self-defense.”

  Wendy glanced at the kitchenette counter beside me. She tried to act like she hadn’t, but she was too stupid to be subtle. I looked down and saw it. Next to a folded green Army jacket was a man’s wallet. I stared at it for a long time.

  Then I looked back up at the girls. Behind Wendy, my sister slid down to the carpet as if her legs were useless. She hugged her knees to her chest and stared at the floor. She nodded.

  “We tried to steal it,” she said.

  Wendy swung her head toward Janie, but she didn’t say anything. When she looked back at me, I saw all of it there on her stupid face. They’d tried to get this guy drunk and rip him off.

  I closed my eyes. I could hear the guy’s breathing. I could hear Janie, too, as she rocked back and forth against the front door.

  I told Wendy to call 911. “Tell them he attacked you,” I said. “Cry. Cry a lot. Then hang up, even if they tell you to stay on the line.”

  Without another word, Wendy dialed 911 and went to pieces talking to the operator. She even flubbed her own address a couple of times before she got it right. She rubbed her pimply chin, and Janie stared at the floor and rocked back and forth. I watched both of them and waited, knowing that we had to call the cops, but also feeling a sick rumble in my stomach tell me that we couldn’t let this guy report his side of the story. When Wendy got done talking to the operator, I told her to wait by the door with Janie.

  I walked back into the kitchenette, made sure the girls couldn’t see me, and looked down at the man. He wore a flannel shirt and blue jeans, both of which were soaked through with blood. Red bubbles popped out of his left nostril every few seconds. I reached down and pinched his nose. He jerked a bit, but he was so near death he couldn’t even lift his arms. In thirty seconds or so, he was dead.

  I checked my shoes, arms, legs. The only blood on me was on my thumb and forefinger. I hurried to the bathroom and rinsed them off in the toilet and then flushed the dead man’s blood. I washed my hands with a sliver of soap from the shower, and when I was done, I flushed the soap.

  I went back out to the girls. They were both standing and staring at me like befuddled old women. I picked up the dead man’s wallet, careful to touch it at the edges, and put it in his coat.

  “I’m leaving,” I said. Janie opened her mouth, but I raised my hand. “We don’t have any time to waste. Shut up and listen. If they know I was here t
hen they’ll know you came and got me. That just makes you look bad. That’s second-degree murder. At least. You guys have to tell the story. You were hanging out with this older guy. He got rough and brought out a gun. You fought back, and he ended up stabbed. You were in shock. You didn’t know what to do. Finally, you called 911. He died before they got here. That’s it. I wasn’t here. And you didn’t leave.”

  Wendy said, “What if—”

  “There’s a thousand what if’s,” I told her. “Stick to that story no matter what. Be as nonspecific on the time as you can be, but don’t specifically lie.”

  Janie nodded.

  Wendy said, “Okay.”

  I stepped to the door, and Janie reached out and took my arm. I looked at her and patted her hand. “Just stick to the story,” I said.

  I slipped out, crept back down the alley and went to my car. I was back at The Fur Trap in a few minutes.

  “How’s your dad?” Ralph sneered when I walked backstage.

  “He’s okay,” I said taking off my sweatshirt.

  “You’re full of shit, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Who was that girl, really?”

  “My coke connection,” I said, shimmying out of my jeans.

  “Get out of here. It was not.”

  I shrugged and walked over to the mirror to put on some makeup. He walked up behind me. I stopped what I was doing and looked at him over my shoulder in the mirror. He was staring at me, thinking hard about something. I hated that sleazy little motherfucker.

  “Where’d you go?” he asked.

  “Nowhere,” I said. “I’ve been here all night. Out in the parking lot doing blow.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  He stared at me, his little blue eyes like pieces of ice. Maybe I didn’t come across as nonchalant as I thought. “Okay, Dixie Delight,” he said, “but you owe me.”

  “What do I owe you?”

  “I don’t know yet. Depends on where you really were for the last hour. You might owe me a lot.”

  “I told you where I was.”

  He nodded. “Sure. Let’s just call it a rain check, okay?”

  “What do you want, Ralph? Private dance? Sloppy blowjob back in your office? You ain’t getting either one, you know.”

  He smiled an ugly smile. “You ain’t my type, Dixie. I like decent girls. I’ll tell you what though, when I start that online sideline next month…you might think about what you owe me.”

  He patted my shoulder and walked away. For a while, I sat there in the empty backroom, staring at the door. Then I looked at myself in the mirror. I don’t know what I saw. Not a murderer. Not a stripper. Not even an older sister. I just saw a worried woman. I stared at her for a second, and then I caked some makeup on her face.

  T HE GIRL FROM YESTERDAY

  She was pregnant but terribly underweight at the same time, with a black eye starting to go purple and hunger chapping her bruised lips. The guy with her didn’t look like the type of guy to knock around a pregnant girl, but you can never tell. He was balding and quiet, wearing dirty black slacks with holes in the knees. I was willing to bet they were both dressed entirely in clothing they’d picked up at shelters like ours. The guy looked fifty or even sixty. The girl was about nineteen.

  I was hanging up my office phone as they sat down at one of the long tables. I’d been watching them since they walked in the door. It was noon and the shelter was full of drunks trying to hold off their drinking until after lunch. My partner, Betty, was in the kitchen and I could see her through what had once been the order window when our mission was still a restaurant. Her graying hair was pulled back in a no-nonsense ponytail—just like mine—and she was barking orders at someone behind her in the kitchen. When she yells, Betty still looks like the twenty-year-old girl I fell in love with.

  I got up and walked to the door of my office. The pregnant girl and her man sat down at one of the tables by the exit. The volunteers from the African Methodist Episcopal Church, most of them teenagers, were passing out the bowls of stew. A kid named Nate—a nice kid with a big funky afro—was cutting up pans of cornbread into little squares. He was cutting them up too small, probably because Betty had told him the day before that he was cutting them too big. He loaded the slices onto a tray and started passing them out. The pregnant girl ate her little square of cornbread as soon as Nate handed it to her.

  I was smoking a cigarette. Betty didn’t like me to smoke and especially didn’t like me to smoke in the shelter, but I…well, I don’t have a good way to finish that sentence. I guess I’m ornery sometimes, but if you’re in the sad business of trying to reduce human suffering, much of it self-inflicted, you’ve seen enough hunger and sorrow—and you’ve taken enough punches in the jaw by quivering junkies who don’t care if you’re old enough to be their mother—to get a little ornery sometimes.

  I mashed out my cigarette and dropped it in a Coke can. The pregnant girl was tearing into her stew, but the old guy with her just stared at the tablecloth.

  I walked over to their table.

  The girl didn’t stop eating, and the old guy didn’t stop staring at the tablecloth. He wasn’t drunk though. I can spot a drunk from many miles away. His problem was that he wasn’t right in the head. I see a lot of guys who aren’t right in the head, too.

  Lonnie, a regular who’s drunk twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours, was sitting next to the girl. He was wearing red sweatpants and a brand new t-shirt with an American flag on the front.

  “Howdy, Marie,” he said.

  “Lonnie,” I said. “How goes it?”

  “Pretty well. Stew’s hot.”

  “Betty keeps the pots burning,” I said.

  “She don’t like me,” Lonnie said.

  I shrugged. Betty probably didn’t like Lonnie. “She got up this morning and spent the day making you stew, didn’t she?” I asked. “What were you doing at nine o’clock this morning?”

  Lonnie smiled a gappy grin. “Sleeping down by the river.”

  “Drunk?”

  Lonnie shrugged. “Beats thinking.”

  The girl and her man had not changed what they were doing this whole time. She finished her stew and reached for his. He didn’t flinch as she took it. She patted his shoulder and started into the stew.

  I sat down.

  “Hello,” I said to her. I could tell he wasn’t much of a talker.

  She nodded and kept eating, getting faster at it like she thought I might take it away.

  “Marie Porter,” I said. “I run this place with my partner Betty.”

  The girl nodded.

  “What’s your name?” I asked. No harm in asking.

  “Rita,” she lied. She took a long pull off of her glass of water.

  I nodded. “Haven’t seen you here before.”

  “Passing through,” she said.

  “Who’s your friend, Rita?”

  She put down her spoon. “Why are you asking me these questions?”

  I shrugged.

  She looked at the old man. He was a dirty character. Grime filled the grooves of his rough face. Now that I was closer to him, I was pretty sure he was actually younger than I’d first thought.

  Without taking his gaze from the tablecloth, he touched his forehead, and I noticed for the first time some bruises at his receded hairline.

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. One of his eyeballs was bloody.

  The girl looked around as if she was starting to get scared.

  “Why don’t we go sit in my office?” I said.

  The girl wasn’t happy about it and looked at the old man for a sign of what to do. He touched his forehead again and tears welled up in the girl’s blue eyes.

  I led them to the office. The old guy shuffled, but the girl had a bizarrely quick step, as if she’d been walking so long she’d forgotten she was pregnant.

  I motioned at the two chairs in front of my desk an
d walked around it, sat down and closed the spread out newspaper. I dropped it beside my swivel chair.

  “What happened, Rita?”

  “We were attacked a couple of days ago.”

  “Attacked where?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Downtown. We were coming up here from Texas and our car broke down.”

  “Where were you going?”

  “North.”

  “I assumed you were heading north if you came up from Texas,” I said, “but where up north?”

  She looked at the old man as if she expected him to answer. She tapped her stubby, dirty fingernails on the seat, and he didn’t move. “He hasn’t been right for a couple days,” she said.

  “So what happened a couple of days ago?”

  “Our car broke down. He couldn’t fix it because he didn’t have the right part. The Lord led us down to the river.”

  I nodded. Between the two of us, Betty is the religious one. Before we got together she made something exceedingly clear. “I’m going to serve god until the day I die,” she said. Betty believes in god. I believe in Betty.

  I asked Rita, “What happened at the river?”

  “We slept there a couple of days.”

  I nodded at the old man. “What’s his name?”

  She looked at him. He was staring at my desk like it was whispering something to him he couldn’t quite hear.

  Rita said, “He is the one the Lord calls The Revelator.” When she said it, she sounded like an automated phone operator.

  “I see,” I said. “So you and the, uh, Revelator here were down at the river and then what?”

  “A man came,” she said.

  “Who was this man?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not sure. The Revelator was suspicious of him from the beginning.”

  “Was he a homeless man?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We had seen him a few days before,” she said, letting out a sigh that was all exhaustion and no attitude. Then, “We were getting food out of a dumpster behind a restaurant, a Mexican food place. This man came out of the back door and told us to go away. The Revelator told him that as God had fed Elijah in the wilderness, causing the ravens to bring him meat and bread, that” she tumbled over the words “that he, that God would provide for the Revelator and his bride. The ravens would come for us.”