This Darkness Got To Give

by Dave Housley

  He had heard of people who could see these on others but never really believed. The sixties had been enough to turn him cynical about all kinds of things, and the change was enough to cement it in him for good. He turned his focus to the person directly in front of him, a young kid of maybe twenty in cutoff jeans and shaggy hair. He was barefoot but had tan lines on his arms and was still wearing a watch, and a sickly, blood red glow hung off him. Cain didn’t know what it meant but he knew it wasn’t good.

  He scanned the crowd slowly, a kaleidoscope of red blue orange green yellow purple. It was amazing, beautiful, the first time he’d felt truly out of his head since he had made the change. He wondered if it was the dose—of course it was the dose, there was nothing else to account for it. He remembered the dose in his pocket and before he could even think about it he was putting it in his mouth. It felt like something was ending, something was beginning, and he was ready for whatever came along first.

  Purple yellow green orange blue red purple yellow green orange blue red. Before the change, he had taken plenty of drugs, more than his share, even, for the Sixties, and he had been plenty wasted but had never had this kind of experience, as if a layer only he could see had been added on to reality. The word came into his head, one he’d only used ironically or spat like a curse: it was psychedelic.

  “Yeah, I was wondering what was going to happen if you took that.” Cain jumped. He turned slowly, looked down toward that familiar voice, and Padma came into view. She was smiling but shaking her head, too, as if she’d caught a puppy tipping over its water bowl. A blue green purple swirl came off her and he recognized what he was seeing for the first time as pure energy. Good energy.

  Cain struggled to speak. “Wha…” he started, surprised by the croak in his voice, the feeling of vertigo from looking down at the diminutive girl. Woman. Scientist, he corrected himself. What the hell was she, anyway?

  She smiled. “Jesus,” she said. “You should see the look on your face.”

  Cain smiled and scanned the crowd. The band was playing one of the newer Hunter/Garcia songs, Garcia singing in his sweet, creaky tenor about roads, his guitar lightly noodling flourishes between the choruses.

  “Like you’re twenty-five again or something,” Padma said. “Or, what would that really be? Back to, what, ‘65?”

  Cain looked over the crowd. Everybody was dancing as Garcia shifted the song toward its ending, and the crowd moved like a thousand pistons firing all at once, up and down and side to side and kinking off at crazy angles and all of it moving in perfect synchronicity with the music that poured down from the stage like a rising flood, enveloping them in its warm embrace. Cain was vaguely aware of the girl to his left, of the band on the stage, the rainbow-auraed dancers that jittered and cheered and lay on the infield grass.

  Something was pulling at his arm. He felt it lightly and then hard, more urgent, and his brain processed the feeling—something is pulling at my arm—before he thought to turn and find out what was happening. It was the girl, of course, Padma, yanking him toward the back of the infield, away from the stage. The drums started in with a New Orleans beat and Cain stopped. “I know you’re tripping right now, at least a little bit,” Padma said. “And I’m sorry to pull you away from the infield, but we really need to get outside and see what’s happening. We really need to find Portis and make this right.”

  “But I’m…” Cain said, fumbling for the right words.

  “You’re tripping,” the girl said. “Well, that and certain chemicals in your body are reacting to an agent in the drug, kind of opening up, ‘becoming actively receptive’ is how Portis phrased it.”

  “Receptive to what?” he asked.

  “It’s complicated,” she said. “For now, the only thing that really matters is you’re receptive to Portis, and he is receptive to you.”

  Chapter 50

  July 9, 1995. Chicago, IL. Soldier Field

  Jenkins leaned against a tree and watched the kid talking to the federal. Things were starting to make sense, the data he didn’t even know he’d been assembling was forming the outline of a crude story. He had been the one to call for an inside man, and he’d gotten it. They just hadn’t told him about it, and the man they sent was more of a boy. Fucking government. Still, the kid had been there, on the inside, and he had something, could tap into the same wavelength Portis was using to control the biker. The kid he could work with. The federal was another matter altogether. The guy just reeked of authority, of paperwork and we’ll-take-it-from-here. Jurisdiction. Jenkins was used to being the one delivering that particular speech.

  He watched the uniforms processing the scene—slow and steady, just like they were trained. Even with the lights going, officers milling around and others asking questions, these kids still streamed through, wasted and oblivious. They’d had to station men at either side of the scene, directing traffic around it like a fender bender. God, he was ready to move on from this case, catch a normal serial killer or a sex offender or something from good old organized crime. The sounds and the smells and the mystery federal agencies, these kids wandering around in a druggy haze, it was all getting old.

  He closed his eyes and leaned back, then opened them and prepared to get up, when something registered as familiar in his brain. That sound. A laugh. He stood and looked behind the tree, where a steady stream of people wandered to and from the stadium. David?

  The boy was weaving slightly. Drunk or high. He was laughing at something, leaning on the shoulder of a young girl with long blonde hair and a hippie dress. There was something off with the scene, something more than seeing his son in this altered state. Jenkins clung to the tree, kept himself hidden from view as much as possible, and watched the group, two boys he’d never seen before, three girls in shorts and tie-dyes.

  They looked so young. Like children dressed up for Halloween. He flashed on images of David: walking into kindergarten for the first time, bounce-houses and birthday parties and travel team soccer. And the boy had inherited so much of Jenkins’ own baggage—the too-thick hair and the barrel chest, the habit of walking a few steps behind the rest of the group, even the way he leaned over to whisper to the blonde girl, smiling and shy but more careful than afraid. It was like watching surveillance tape of himself, like hearing his own voice on a tape recorder for the first time.

  But it was more than that, too. What was it? What was off with the situation?

  It hit him all of a sudden, like a billy club in the gut. He couldn’t believe it. Jenkins leaned his back against the tree and listened to the sounds of the group passing close by. He settled slowly, letting the bark scrape against his back, the smile spreading across his face despite everything that had happened on this day. He almost couldn’t form the words in his brain, but every piece of the data, every aspect of the situation pieced together to form one conclusion and he knew in his gut that it was true: David was happy.

  Chapter 51

  July 9, 1995. Chicago, IL. Soldier Field

  Nutter pretended to be talking into the radio, watching the local police go about their business, orderly and fairly calm for the situation. Still, he saw them bunching in groups and knew that if he could somehow make himself invisible and drift into their huddles, he would hear the word whispered like a curse, passed from man to man like an airborne virus: “vampire.”

  He felt ridiculous, mouthing a report into his car phone, his meaningless words sinking into the government-issue upholstery like smoke, but he needed time. He needed to think. If what the kid was telling him was true, if the pieces really did fit together this way, then the worst-case scenario had come true and the project had changed, or not so much changed as expanded. Now he needed to find the sick vampire and save his own ass, all without actually telling anybody exactly what he knew, what his own role had been in Ultra and Portis and the death of the poor kid’s parents, all those years ago.

  Jesus, nothing was ever over. He was two years away from a pension and still here he
was, sitting ten feet from a murder scene, watching cops joke and sip coffee and whisper rumors about fangs and stakes and silver.

  The kid was wandering around, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer, and Nutter wasn’t sure if he was still on the job or checked out and then realized that in either case, his instincts had been right. The kid was perfect for this particular job, and he’d proven his worth more than once already. The fact that nobody could tell that he’d just walked out of an official briefing was pretty much the point.

  Jenkins was another matter. He had almost recruited Jenkins and remembered being impressed with the man’s file. He’d been a top performer on the partner experiment and if Havranek hadn’t gone out the way he did, Jenkins would have been one of the first selected for the project, could have had a real role on this one. But he had done well without the project, had closed his fair share of cases, moved up the ranks on his own, had taken, if Nutter was right, all of the wisdom of the old man and applied it to “straight” cases. Now he was leaning against a tree with a strange smile on his face and Nutter wondered whether he too had gone local, bought a joint or a pill or a bottle and checked out. You couldn’t blame him if he had.

  But now he was standing up, making his way toward the car. Nutter had forgotten that he was faking a report and realized he’d just been sitting there, holding the car phone up to his ear, staring out at the crowd like a tourist. As Jenkins approached, he put the phone back into the receiver and took out his files. He opened to a page and started writing.

  Jenkins got closer and Nutter affected an annoyed air, rolled down the window.

  “Is this important?” Jenkins said, indicating the notebook.

  Nutter closed the book. The guy was starting to get on his nerves now. He looked awful. Not just the usual grind of the job, but something else, probably the past few days. He had bags under his eyes that were starting to turn black, stubble coming in patchy and gray on his face. The eyes were tired and glassy, an intelligence shining behind them, but through a veil of weariness that worried Nutter. This was their best man on the ground, but was he up for what was going to have to come next?

  “What were you smiling about over there?” Nutter said. Sometimes it worked to get somebody off balance, see how they reacted, if their head was still in the game enough to finish.

  Jenkins seemed to be considering the question. He put both his hands on the window and Nutter fought the urge to move ever so slightly in his seat to accommodate the altered dimensions between them, but he’d been giving orders for more than three decades and hadn’t forgotten everything he learned in his graduate psychology classes. He shifted in his seat, moved a few inches closer to the door, put his own arm on the window as Jenkins retreated.

  “Weirdest thing,” Jenkins said. “I saw my kid.” He smiled again and shook his head. “I should be on the phone with his mother right now. I should be so pissed. I should be…” he stopped talking, held his hands up to indicate that he didn’t understand why he wasn’t doing any of these things. This was not where Nutter thought the conversation was going to go, but it was useful enough. “But, I don’t know,” Jenkins said. “He just looked so goddamn happy. Carefree. It was the first time, to be honest, the first time I thought that…” he fell off. “But you don’t need to hear all this,” he said, his voice moving effortlessly back into the casual disregard of a lifetime policeman. “Sorry about that.”

  “No,” Nutter said. “What were you going to say?” At the very least, he’d have an idea where the guy’s head was, if he was likely to cause trouble.

  “Ah, nothing, really,” Jenkins said.

  His guard was back up. Good, Nutter thought. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s talk about how we end all this tonight.”

  Chapter 52

  July 9, 1995. Chicago, IL. Soldier Field

  Pete wandered along Shakedown, stopping every now and then to look at a T-shirt or buy a beer. He smoked a cigarette somebody had handed him, lit, without him ever asking. He hoped it was only a cigarette—Sunny had told him to never accept something if he couldn’t tell what it was, especially a cigarette and especially lit, something about doses in the filter or packed into the smoke, but that seemed like a lot of work to dose somebody you didn’t even know, and Pete wasn’t sure if that would be the worst thing right now anyway.

  What could be worse than what he’d seen over the past few days?

  What could be worse than hearing that your only real friend was actually a government plant sent to watch over you, to evaluate your potential for a job that only a few people in the world knew existed? He wondered how much of it had been an act and how much had been real. He realized he’d probably never be able to know the answer to that question.

  He wondered what else he didn’t know, what variation of the truth he’d just been told in Nutter’s car. He’d been lied to, one way or another, his entire life, and the only thing he knew for sure was that it would be foolish to take all this information and come to the conclusion that now, this time, finally, he should trust that he was being told the truth. What did Jenkins call it? The data? The data strongly indicated that everything he’d been told was a lie, and everyone he knew had been lying to him about something every day of his life.

  He finished a Beck’s and put it in a container overflowing with every manner of beer can and bottle. A girl in a flowing blue dress said, “Right on,” and handed him a Budweiser. He nodded and continued on. He was starting to feel a little weird and hoped it was just the beer and exhaustion and not a dose. He tried to remember how to get back to the crime scene. Jenkins had told him to stick close. He wasn’t even sure if Jenkins outranked him, who he should be listening to in this situation—surely everybody on the site outranked him in some way, including the twenty or so police who had descended on the scene. He was a rookie and the fact that nobody called him that was just more evidence that he didn’t belong—he was a low-level operative for a division that nobody knew about, that had almost no structure, that would send a kid of twenty-four out into an active crime scene with two weeks of training and no way to communicate with his superiors. He had been an idiot to think that this was real, that they had trained him, that he’d been anything other than set up all over again. How did the Dead song go? “Set up, like a bowling pin, knocked down, it gets to wearing thin…”

  All along Shakedown, people badgered him to buy one thing or another, beads or shirts or grilled cheese, nitrous and weed and shrooms. He stopped and chugged a beer and then bought another from an old hippie selling them out of a suitcase lined with watery ice.

  He was starting to feel the beer, or maybe there was something in that cigarette. All around him the voices were crying out: shrooms doses T-shirts necklaces shrooms doses. His vision was starting to go weird around the edges, as if he was looking through a lens that was cracking along the outside perimeter. He turned his head to the left and the effect moved with him, a brownish yellow tint now smudging his peripheral vision.

  In front of him a girl was selling T-shirts imprinted with cartoon characters. Calvin and Hobbes, Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, and Charlie Brown dancing into a setting sun. Most of her shirts were white, but off to the side she had a few tie-dyes, and Pete found himself drawn to a purple and pink one hanging off a wire attached to a branch of the nearby tree. He put his face up to it, smelled it, pulled back, and stared. The purple was so…purple. He’d never seen any purple more purple. It was the baseline, the formulary essence of purple.

  “Whoa,” he said, and then giggled at the sound coming out of his mouth, scratchy and faraway. “Do you see that?” he said to the girl.

  “That one is ten,” she said.

  He focused in on the purple and then pulled back. Ringing it was a smaller, subordinate circle of pink, its tendrils edging lightly into the purple with a delicacy that seemed hesitant, courtly even. He knew that the purple was female and the pink was male. Interesting, he thought, when you really see it—really see—it’s not what they
told you it was all along. It’s something more, something rooted in the earth and time and history as sure and obvious as a redwood.

  This is true, he thought. Finally. Something that nobody can ruin for me. He held the T-shirt in front of him and put it over his head and could feel the purple and the pink falling into him now, like rain, their ancient knowledge seeping into his pores and into his blood, his…what was the system called? Endocrine.

  He let the truth of the colors fill him up and he flashed on everything that had happened so far, everything he had learned, and all of a sudden it was so obvious. There was only one person who had been straight with him all along. “If it’s meant to be it will happen,” she had said, and he knew it was the only really, honestly true thing he had heard in the past month.

  From somewhere faraway he heard somebody say, “Ten bucks,” and then he felt something poking at his leg and he wondered if the purple and pink were somehow working themselves out through a hole in his leg, but he didn’t remember a hole. My ankle, he thought. How could they move through my ankle? What will I do without that truth? He took the shirt off his head and heard the sound again. “Ten bucks, asshole!”

  He opened his eyes and noticed the T-shirt girl poking his ankle with a stick. Thank goodness, he thought, it’s still in me. He opened his wallet and found a twenty, let it drop on the ground, and wandered back into Shakedown. He kept the T-shirt over his head and allowed the pink and the purple to guide him.

  He wandered through the parking lot, noticing the colors. A young guy with dark glasses and a mop of curly hair gave him a high five as he walked past with a group of people heading toward the show. They were laughing and shouting and Pete turned to watch them go. He thought about following them into the show. They were going to have the night of their lives, he thought. It was going to be beautiful.