This Darkness Got To Give

by Dave Housley

  “Oh, Jesus,” Crabtree said. “What now?” His expression was somewhere between affectionate and truly concerned, and Jenkins was struck again at how young he was.

  “We’re going to pick up some backup for the trip,” he said.

  “Uniforms?” Crabtree said. “Plenty of them walking around anyway, right?”

  “No uniforms,” Jenkins said. “An old friend. Partner.”

  Crabtree stopped cold, looked at Jenkins as if he was seeing something for the first time.

  “That guy?” he said.

  So he did know. Of course he would know. Of course before they put him on this assignment, they would have told him to watch out, step careful, report back if…

  “Yeah.” Jenkins said. “That guy.”

  Chapter 24

  July 6, 1995. Maryland Heights, MO. Riverport Amphitheatre.

  Cain wasn’t sure if he was even going into the show, but he checked his watch anyway. They would be at least a few songs into the first set. He wondered what the first song was. They had been playing “Hell in a Bucket” a lot. He always hoped for “Iko Iko.”

  What the hell am I doing? he thought. There are much bigger things to be worried about.

  There was everything to be worried about.

  He pulled into the stadium—no traffic this late at night—and found a spot near the back of the lot, closer to the highway than he would have liked. He knew how the lot assembled itself, though, with the true heads arriving earliest, setting up their vans or cars or buses in the central spaces, near Shakedown or, if available, in the fringes down close to a river or some woods, the edges of whatever surrounded that particular stadium. A quick exit was not a priority: nobody was making a quick exit. Access to food and drink and drugs, proximity to the rest of the touring heads, and natural cover? Those were the priorities. Cain regarded the cars surrounding him. In-state plates. Hangtags. A dancing skeleton there, a dancing bear there.

  He sat behind the wheel. Should he even think about going in? In his pocket, his ticket, wallet, and the baggie full of doses. He closed his eyes, tried to let himself go blank. But no, he couldn’t feel the Dealer anywhere, couldn’t feel anything other than the pull of the show and the slight embarrassment that he would be back here, despite everything.

  It had rained and the parking lot glistened. The streetlights were hazy. As he walked toward the stadium, he could hear the dull thump of the band starting a new song, drums and bass coming together, guitars noodling their way toward a cohesive melody. What was that song? He kept his eyes on the stadium and picked up his pace. He passed the usual throng of kids and old hippies tending their wares—so serious they might as well have punched in—along with groups of frat boys pounding beers, teenagers changing a baby in the middle of the street.

  It was beautiful. It was ridiculous and flawed and maddening. It was home.

  How long had he been away? Two days.

  Two days, two bodies. And one cow.

  He had decided to get back onto tour and see if he could track down the Dealer. Certainly, there was something between them, some real and physical connection. Something more than physical, even.

  He wondered about the doses again. They could be the answer. Or they could kill him once and for all, which would be, he realized, a different kind of answer. The worst-case scenario, the reason he hadn’t so much as opened the Ziploc bag yet, was the simplest and most likely: that each dose would have the exact same effect as the original.

  He had to find the Dealer.

  The music was getting louder now and he recognized Bobby’s gruff voice. The tune was familiar. A Dylan tune. “Desolation Row.” He sped up.

  Something hit his back and he stopped. Was that a bullet? He took a few more steps and something hit him again. Not a bullet. He put his hands up, unsure, really, why he was doing it, but expecting nevertheless to see a police officer, or a whole phalanx of them lined up with guns pointed. After what he’d done the past few days…

  But instead it was the girl, tossing pretzels. She made a face at him, raised her eyebrows, and started walking away from the stadium. He followed her a few rows off Shakedown and into a little stand of trees. She looked around them carefully, and then hit him, hard, on the arm.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” she said. “What have you been doing? I’ve been worried…” She stopped. “Just where the fuck have you been?” she said.

  He wondered whether he could tell her. Certainly, she knew enough already, and hadn’t, to his knowledge, betrayed his trust.

  “I’m in trouble,” he said.

  She stared at him, then looked away. “Shit,” she said.

  For the first time since it had all began, Cain actually felt embarrassed. He’d been angry, sad, self-defeated, but now he actually felt himself blush, something he wasn’t even sure was possible anymore. Perhaps, he thought, it was the ghost of a blush, like a phantom limb. He had read the science, understood, at least as much as he wanted to, the changes his body had been through. He knew his brain was still the same, was just reacting to the needs of the body. And now the needs of the body had changed even more.

  There was something there, a clue to how this had all happened.

  “What kind of trouble?” the girl said. Her voice sounded tiny. The question didn’t sound like a question and Cain knew that she knew the answer. He looked at her and she looked away, pulled a beaten pack of Camels out of her back pocket and lit one with a Bic emblazoned with the AC/DC logo.

  “Nice lighter,” he said.

  “You know how it is,” she said. “You pick up whatever you pick up.” She exhaled. “So what kind of trouble?” she asked.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I have an idea but I haven’t seen you for forty-eight hours, so no, I don’t know exactly.”

  Her tone had changed. She had always been quiet, subservient, even. Cain looked at her. She was dressed in the camouflage shorts and a T-shirt with a picture of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. Her hair was long and starting to tangle into loose dreadlocks. He wondered how long it had been since she’d bathed. Her feet were bare and calloused. He realized he could see her ribs. No track marks on her arms, and he’d never smelled drugs on her, but she was clearly really living out here, had been for some time. He reminded himself again: she had never led him astray.

  “Why are you helping me?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to see this happen again,” she said.

  “Again?” he said.

  “Shit. Look,” she said. She glanced away and then met his eyes. “It’s my job.”

  * * *

  Cain had never let anybody in the van before. He squirmed behind the wheel, watching the girl settle in on the bench. She reached into her backpack and produced a small machine. She pushed a button and it whirred. “Piece of shit,” she said, and set it aside.

  “What’s…” Cain started.

  “So, where have you been lately?” she asked. “Sorry to be so blunt, but depending on the answer to that last question, and I’m pretty sure I know the answer, it’s time for cards on the table.”

  “I’ve been…” How to explain it? He looked at her again. She seemed older in the interior light of the van. Of course, he’d only seen her in moonlight before. Now, he noticed the lines on her face. Because of the way she dressed, the way she acted, and where they were, he had pegged has as a college student. It was so hard to tell for him anymore, his reference points were all screwed up, being on tour and having no recent personal experience to compare it with.

  The girl—woman?—picked up the machine and placed it her lap. She started typing. A computer, he thought. Small enough to fit into a backpack. No bigger, even, than a dictionary.

  “You’ve been…” she regarded the screen. “Well, you’ve been on quite the little side trip, haven’t you? Virginia, north into Maryland, west into Pennsylvania, where you make a little loop, and then wind up back here. If I were to—not that this machine could do it, mind you,
piece of shit that it is—but if I were to, let’s say, match this map up against unsolved homicides in the past three days…” She looked him right in the eye and he turned away. The doses were in the glove compartment. Tonight it would happen all over again. There were no cows in this parking lot.

  “You know what my condition is,” he said.

  She nodded. “I do. But I don’t know if I know everything.”

  “Neither do I,” he said.

  “That seems right, yeah. But still. I can’t help you until I know what you know.”

  He thought about the Dealer. Something told him they would meet again tonight, a low frequency in his brain had started registering—a soft but steady blip-blip-blip that might as well be a map of the Dealer’s own progress toward this very parking lot. “At this point,” he said, “I’m ready to ask you to chain me in the open until morning so I can be rid of all this. So yeah I’ll tell you what I know.”

  The woman sat up, clicked off the laptop.

  “But first,” Cain said, “there are a few things I need to know.”

  “I belong to an organization that is interested in monitoring and possibly resolving your situation,” she said formally, as if reciting something from memory.

  “What kind of…”

  “Something between the government and not the government. We are…I guess you might say, ‘off the books?’ I don’t have a card I can hand you. You can’t talk to my supervisor or anybody, really, and if that laptop doesn’t start fixing itself, neither can I.”

  Cain sensed that she was holding something back. She was giving him the official line, that was for sure. There was somebody who had given her these things to say, the computer she was so upset about, somebody out there who knew more than she did. In his head, the signal of the Dealer was getting stronger. Blip-blip-blip. “So your organization, then. What are you doing out here? How did you…” He realized that she’d shown up a day, maybe two, after the Dealer, after Cain had taken his dose and sealed his fate. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re with them. With him. The Dealer.”

  “Dealer? I guess that is what you would think,” she said. “He’s much more than that. Much, much worse.”

  “And this is your boss?”

  “Not anymore,” she said. She leaned closer, put a hand out and he pulled back. “I don’t think so, at least.” She looked out at the people walking by the van. “Shit, I guess I’m kind of making it up as I go along,” she said. “I’m not really happy with either side right now.”

  Cain was getting angry. She had known all along. He stood, knocked his head on the van’s low ceiling, and sat back down. He shuffled out from behind the wheel where there was more room. He needed to move, to walk. He wondered if he could fly in this condition—angry, desperate. It was part of all the folklore, but he had never actually seen anybody go so far as to leap over a fencepost.

  “I think you better calm down,” she said. “Your heart doesn’t pump blood anymore, but your body will still show the signs of human nervousness, of anger. Your adrenal glands still work.”

  Cain stopped his fiddling and looked at her. “You know things,” he said.

  “More than you, from what I can tell,” she said. “But that’s not unusual. Your kind. The lone-wolf type, I mean. You tend to move through life—your life now, after the change—without making any serious connections, which leaves you without much information at all about your condition. All you have is the movies and the books and whatever you pick up along the way, right?”

  He nodded. There were others? He was a type?

  “Probably didn’t even know you still had adrenal glands, did you?”

  He shook his head.

  “But you can feel them. Right now. That feeling. It’s adrenalin.”

  He opened his mouth to ask about the Dealer, if the blip-blip-blip that told him the Dealer was approaching was normal, if it was somehow adrenalin or heroin or something else the Dealer had put into him. He corrected himself: he had put whatever it was into himself, willfully and happily. He almost asked, but something told him to hold back. The girl had information—not just about the current condition, but about the condition in general. She hadn’t yet mentioned the connection with the Dealer, the thing, whatever it was, that had held him shaking and frozen in place the last time their paths had crossed. It was still there, just below the surface, a physical presence like an itch. Closer-closer-closer.

  “You’re wondering what I know,” the girl said. “If I’m hiding anything else. Whose side I’m on.”

  Cain nodded.

  “I know more than you,” she said. “There are things I can’t tell you. It’s just that simple.”

  “So why should I trust you?” he said.

  “Because you don’t have anybody else,” she said.

  Chapter 25

  July 6, 1995. Maryland Heights, MO. Riverport Amphitheatre.

  Cain slipped the doses into his pocket and followed the girl out into the parking lot. He thought about asking her if she knew what would happen if he took them, but then realized he didn’t want to know the answer.

  The parking lot lights crackled and popped. There were puddles where it had rained, the usual groups of people pulled into the usual circles, playing hacky sack or passing a joint around. They turned a corner and he could hear the hissing of nitrous tanks, could see lines of people snaking through the cars, waiting for a balloon or something heavier.

  To their right, the parking lot receded to an older lot that was roped off from traffic. Long cracks were formed into the macadam, like fissures in a desert floor. A few kids threw a Frisbee in the distance. The sound of Bob Marley pulsed from the somewhere close—a live recording that he didn’t recognize, “Trenchtown Rock” bouncing out across the abandoned lot.

  The hissing got closer and they walked along the nitrous line. Kids, jumpy and inexperienced, bounced from foot to foot. This was one of the things he didn’t like about the Dead’s newfound success. “Touch of Gray” got some radio play and suddenly all kinds of people realized they could make a thousand percent markup on a cylinder of nitrous oxide and a dollar bag of balloons. It wasn’t mind-expanding, had no history in the culture, the acid test or the Pranksters. It was straight dope—knock you on your ass and wipe your head clean stuff.

  He felt the baggie in his pocket. Who was he to talk about expanding consciousness or not. He had chosen oblivion, even for just a brief moment, and now he was this caricature of himself, the human parts giving way to the animal nearly every day now. He didn’t want it, but he had to admit that the past two times had been freeing. A release. He had spent so much of the past twenty-three years holding everything in, toeing the line, forcing himself to subsist on whatever he could scrounge, squirrels and rabbits and black market sheep’s blood and out-of-date Plasmatrol. He had gotten used to living in the margins, forcing down that part of him that had emerged since the change, the part that was hungry and stronger than nearly everything else around, the part that smelled blood in the air and shit on the wind, that sensed when it was going to rain or, twice in Southern California, when the earth was going to move. He was like a swollen balloon, always pushing out, relying on the thinnest layer to contain everything that nature would have rise.

  And the past few days had been different. He knew he had no choice and once it was clear that it was going to happen, he had simply given in, let it go, not so much enjoyed the ride as allowed momentum to pull him in a particular direction, had relaxed his defenses and permitted himself to be drawn into the undertow of the dose’s desire. He needed blood, and he would have it. Giving in to this basic need was as simple as breathing, once he finally let it go.

  Now, walking past the nitrous-eaters, staring at a greasy-headed kid in jeans and a button down accepting five-dollar bills, passing balloons off in exchange, Cain pictured himself leaping onto the moving van, not so much aiming himself at the boy’s neck as allowing it to happen. The hot blood pouring down his throat as t
he smirk and everything else ran out of the nitrous seller. He would be doing the world, the scene, the Grateful Dead themselves a favor. Wouldn’t he?

  “Come on,” the girl said. She pulled his arm.

  He realized he’d stopped, was staring at the nitrous dealer, who had in turn read something in his eyes and was frozen in place, one hand reaching out for a five-dollar bill, the other holding a red balloon fat with the drug.

  “The fuck are you doing?” the girl said. She tugged harder at his sleeve. Cain knew that he could do it. He could get away with it. The crowd would scatter. The police would be here soon. But soon enough? He could be in Ohio or West Virginia by the time they figured out what had happened.

  He felt the baggie in his pocket. If he took a dose, would he have that feeling all the time? The lack of boundaries, giving in to what he really was all along. Who I really am, he thought. That was the key to figuring this all out. Be who I am. He felt the rise in his body, like adrenalin, like heroin, but better, more focused. He could feel like this all the time.

  A tug on his sleeve and then thunk, a punch on his chest. “What. The. Fuck. Are. You. Doing?” the girl said. She pulled at his arm. The guy selling nitrous had gone back to handing out balloons and taking money. He glanced at Cain, turned quickly away, and put another five-dollar bill into the pocket of his shirt.

  Cain took one step and then another. He heard the normal sounds of the parking lot—the nitrous hiss and the music blaring out of cheap speakers.

  Behind a hedge, he saw a group of older Deadheads shooting heroin. Two men argued behind a T-shirt stand. Groups of high school kids roamed in baseball hats and collared shirts. He had felt it before, but he knew it now: there was an edge to the scene, something creeping. Three fans had been struck by lightning in DC. Even tonight, the gates had been crashed. Rumors that the band might actually have to cancel the rest of the tour. Maybe it was ending, he thought. Gate crashers and nitrous dealers and real criminals and kids who had never heard a song that wasn’t on the radio or the television. Maybe it was okay if it was ending.