The Slide: A Novel

by Kyle Beachy

  I moved from the couch to the breakfast counter and watched my father, who tonight for whatever reason was cooking. I tried not to read into this or see it as practice for bachelorhood. He had a dish towel draped over his left shoulder and an oven mitt on his right hand. It took opening three cabinets before he found the serving dish he wanted. As he cooked, he drank from his old law school beer stein.

  I poured myself a glass of whiskey and went back to the couch. The weatherman mentioned a possible break in the heat but said not to hold our breath. From my seat I could see a stack of mail sitting on my father’s desk. And what if one of the envelopes contained the pictures? What if they were accompanied by a note, a collage of mismatched letters cut from magazines, glued messily back into demands? Holding the remote with a straight arm, my mother began slowly climbing through the channels.

  At dinner, my father and I spoke about baseball while my mother shook salt over her entire plate. The food was passable and I think better than she would have liked to admit. Now that I had my own scandal, every minute inside this house had become charged with implication, as if the rise in our calamitous prospects had given us something to look forward to. Was this instinctual, this secret desire for things to go wrong so we’d at least have guiding principles for what to do next? The three of us drank our alcohol. At any second it was all liable to crumble into a cloud of dust.

  Much later, I found myself awake and made my way back downstairs. In the living room, I sat in my father’s chair and listened to the wheels spinning in the shadows, the secret machinations whirring away.

  It seemed my parents, likely distracted by their marital catastrophe, had forgotten to turn off one of the outdoor lights. I crossed the room for the switch but stopped when I saw my mother out there gardening. The clock read 2:30.

  I stood at the window and watched. She was down on two knees as if genuflecting to some pagan feminine earth spirit. She was barefoot and wearing her purple nightgown, wristbands on each arm. Who knew what cruel circus of thought might possibly be going through her mind. She had a trowel in her hand and was stabbing into the soil to get at something that wouldn’t budge. I stood until I couldn’t watch anymore, then a little longer. I left the light on for her, though I doubted she really even needed it.

  august

  two

  the heat had become something you wouldn’t even discuss. It was three digits—what else was there to say? The city’s old population was passing away at an alarming rate. As these tragedies grew more common, the news gradually eliminated their segments on heatstroke victims, interviews with surviving kin. In their place we had all variations of expert advising us on how to stay safe in what one network termed Radical, Perilous Heat and another, simply, The Danger Zone. How comforting the advice of these authorities, how nice to sit and listen to their simple, organized precautions.

  We were two and a half games behind the first-place Cubs in the National League Central.

  My mother cultivated her therapy of voluntary service. Without fanfare or even announcement, she joined a civilian group that drove Econoline vans through low-income neighborhoods with small bottles of water and battery-operated fans. This was a massive step forward from wrapping Christmas gifts at the Galleria for children’s charities. The more selfless her volunteering, the harder it was to continue seeing her as the villain of this domestic drama.

  The meeting was to begin at midnight. Once the sun went down, I covered myself in mosquito repellent and set off walking vaguely in the direction of Stuart’s. Since I blamed at least some of my behavior on the place that had raised me, perhaps moving through it at the ground level could provide the logic for my defense. I began along familiar roads, blacktop, beneath overhanging trees, elm, and cars, mostly silver. I left the neighborhood by the less decorative back way, taking the pedestrian bridge halfway across Forest Park Parkway. I gripped the chain-link fence that rose ten or so feet from the waist-high concrete barrier. Occasional white lights sped toward me, red lights sped away. Four lanes total. I had never even considered the consideration of suicide, but this struck me as exactly the sort of spot where it could happen, provided one made it over the fence. A fair, reasonable challenge for a final small triumph at life’s end. Down the road, I spotted a police cruiser hidden in the shadows waiting for speeders. I walked quickly away.

  The photographs were in my back pocket, and with each step I felt them rub against my thigh. Otherwise, my attention was focused fiercely outward on whatever answers might emerge from this exterior world. Flooded by yellowish gaze of streetlight, the colors appeared suddenly retouched, somehow more essential. The forms of buildings struck me as more relevant than ever, each different manner by which lines met and diverged, framing other shapes within. It was as if some hand had reached out and spun the city’s master dials clockwise: resolution, volume, contrast, brightness. The menacing dark, empty enclosures inside common garden ivy, a sidewalk seam tall enough to trip over. Everything was here, the facts of the world, the truth of details.

  I crossed a street and entered Shaw Park under the watch of a gazillion cicada eyes and the tidal pattern of their call. Skee-her. The park was empty of course, municipal sporting fields and water houses abandoned at dusk. Skee-her. I sat against a tree and felt the bark press some fractal design into my back. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to find here. Some dark rendezvous, perhaps, any variety of nefarious nighttime business, something to make my own moral decay seem tame in comparison. But I was in the wrong part of the county.

  After an hour, I stood and brushed myself off, then continued across the park and eventually along a series of dark, quiet streets while details continued to scream my name. Soon I came upon what appeared to be teenage boys and girls in a circle of chairs in the yard of a modest brick home. There was one man sitting among them, light-haired and boy-faced, with the enthusiastic demeanor of faith. It was a youth group meeting. He wore a collared shirt and khaki shorts and leather sandals.

  “Good evening,” he called as I passed. I paused and nodded back. Then one of the young men stood from the chairs and walked crisply to meet me. I saw others in the group smile to one another at his enthusiasm. I reached back to make sure the pictures were secure in my pocket.

  “Are you lost?” he asked, and I suspected he wasn’t speaking of geographical bearings.

  “Not really.”

  I waited for what he would say next, but instead he stood there, weirdly silent, smiling, and big-eyed. Was this how people found religion? Were they awkwarded in?

  “What are you doing out here? It’s so hot.”

  “Our group prefers to meet under His watchful eye. It allows us to look back up at Him too.”

  “And marvel?” I asked.

  “That’s right.”

  Behind him, some of the others raised hands in greeting. I nodded and continued down the sidewalk.

  The pool house was dark, as was the pool itself. I could hear voices, though, a series of syllables wrapped in our Missouri cadence of reluctant twang. As I got closer I saw them: beastly ogre, lithe vamp, and fallen sage.

  My God, did I smell awful.

  I shut the fence gate behind me. The deck was dry. I stepped over the rafts and recliners that had been dragged ashore and took a seat at the table with my three arbiters. Gray faces, shadowed. They had stopped talking when I reached the gate, leaving a silence of the sort I could tell was my responsibility to break. Marianne pulled on her cigarette and we heard the crispy burn of tobacco and paper backed by the slosh of pool drainage system. My eyes went from my old friend, shirtless and weary-eyed, to the girl and her long, knobby-knuckled fingers raised to hold her smoke. I brushed a mosquito away from my face and looked at Edsel. Countenance of cardboard.

  “These pictures are nothing. You’ve got nothing.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” he said.

  The beard had grown back into something thick and bushy. I maintained steady eye contact and labored to project calm disinte
rest. He leaned back in his chair, raised his hands to his head, elbows out. He wore a T-shirt with cutoff sleeves, those ridiculous arms flexing convulsively. How selfish and paranoid his arms were tonight, hoarding strength like this, taunting our own meager limbs.

  Marianne reached for the ashtray and snuffed her cigarette. “Just to be clear, Potter, anyone over twenty-one who has sexual intercourse with a person less than seventeen is guilty of statutory rape in the second degree.”

  “Didn’t ask. Did not ask you a question.”

  No shadows could conceal the truth of tonight’s caucus. Stuart lit another cigarette and passed it to her. I knew of this girl’s drive to alienate wealthy, generous Stuart from his closest male friend. Lithe and prettier than I had previously admitted, she was circling, closing in on her lame, confused kill.

  “You should know also that our state of Missouri defines sexual intercourse as any penetration, however slight. Whether or not there’s emission.”

  “Don’t like you,” I said. “Never have. Don’t trust you. Don’t like looking at you. Don’t think I’d mind if you disappeared forever.”

  “That’s plenty,” Stuart said.

  In the moments that followed, there was momentum gathering. I was certain we all felt it. The force had been revealed the first time I saw the photographs at the game. Plain envelope opened to reveal images of stark confirmation, heavy iron ball set into motion along this steady downhill road. And now details were falling into place, exit ramps were closing, alternatives erased as part of this narcotic certitude.

  I felt something tickly on my arm and waved it away. If the lights were indeed turned off to keep away mosquitoes, why wasn’t the citronella candle lit? I waved away another one.

  “We’re looking at a blackmail of the classic model,” Edsel said. “Industry standard.”

  I could sense a smirk beneath the beard. As with Marianne, there was little ambiguity to the ogre this evening. I had told him I feared him and I meant it in every possible way. He was first and foremost an asshole, but he was also a plotter, a man who found happiness in the creation and performance of schemes, which admittedly required commitment and a strong sense of organization.

  “I will give you a list of demands you will have to meet. You don’t meet them, the pictures will go first to your father, then to Derrick Hoyne, former State Senator John Dunleavy, the Ladue police department, and whoever else I can come up with.”

  “You conniving son of a bitch.”

  “All the names you want, bucko. Blow off steam.”

  Time passed loudly. How foolish I’d been to think the spinning I had heard these past nights, that not-unpleasant whirring from the shadows, was plot. Such was my inexperience with the device. In actuality, that sound was freedom, rotating contingencies, the many things that might but might not come to be. Now options were being dislodged from the spin, launched into darkness, leaving the ambient grinding of something increasingly certain, the grating clatter of truth and consequence and impending doom.

  “What do you want?”

  “The big ones are your car and ten thousand dollars. Few other trifling items for posterity.”

  “The car’s not in my name, and I don’t have anything even close to ten thousand dollars.”

  “Should start work on a list of people who might.”

  Stuart and Marianne were momentarily put on display by the quick orange bloom of his lighter. My friend would not look at me. It occurred to me the darkness around us might have been less about mosquitoes and more about shielding me from the memories of this place, to render what was familiar foreign. I wasn’t sure whether this was something he did to make this easier on me or something he did so I wouldn’t feel compelled to stay very long.

  “But it’s still the pool house, isn’t it?” I said, and reached down to remove my shoes and socks. I walked to the pool’s edge and lifted off my shirt before falling into the black water. I let myself sink naturally, then maneuvered myself deeper until I reached the cement floor, where I searched blindly for Audrey’s starfish, canvassing the pool’s deep end with waving hands. My lungs began to ache. It was not here. Of course not. But how many legs did it have by now? Three still? Were there three when it came in the box? Did she have the other two? Had she kept one and given one to Carmel? I kicked to the surface and gasped for air.

  Out of the pool, I stood dripping at the table. I held my shoes in one hand and my shirt in the other. Stuart’s face was invisible, Marianne’s slightly reddened behind burning cigarette, and Edsel’s a dark mingling of hair and evil intent. It was as if he had split me open and shined a flashlight inside, then extricated that core of human sin we all spent lives working to contain.

  “You and your filthy ogre shit. Your victorious filth and what have you got. You dick. You ogre dick piss shit cock suck. What’s it all now? You fuck. You fucking fuck. Ass fuck you in the fucking mouth you shit.”

  Marianne stood from the table and laid a long finger onto Stuart’s shoulder. Together they stepped into the pool house without a word, while Edsel remained seated, comfortable in his certainty that nothing I did could ever cause him harm. Such dedication to personal ascent, such drive. Such dedication to himself, dominating. Amazing to think we were technically the same species. So terribly big.

  It took an hour to retrace my route home. It would be several more before the sun came up, but I had no interest in opening the door and climbing those familiar stairs. I stood in the driveway looking at my car. Zoe’s Jetta was missing, out for Friday night rampage of teen carelessness, throwing herself around like some rubber ball. Maybe parked somewhere with Jeff. Luke.

  I drove to the Rocket Slide. I parked facing the playground and reclined my seat, breathed deeply until the grinding sound had subsided enough that I could fall asleep.

  I woke to the screams of children. I sat and listened to their yelps, marveling at their agendaless play. They circled in the gravel and scaled the structure, hollering at no set interval into the morning air.

  Both of my elbows were covered in mosquito bites.

  It was Saturday, a normal workday for the men and women who tended to the city’s network of roads. They were likely out there already, wearing their orange vests and hats and collecting their generous hourly wage. What I lacked today in invoices and a map, I could make up for with the duties of a surrogate big brother. I unreclined my seat, turned the key to bring the car to life, and checked the clock. Yes. It was indeed a fine time to visit Ian.

  I found him sitting on the concrete steps with a piece of paper held in both hands in front of him.

  “Yesterday I was out here reading this book we’re all supposed to read for school and a van pulled up and this man got out.”

  “Did you run inside and scream that you were calling the police?”

  “No. I forgot everything. I just sat here and made like I didn’t see him and I was still reading my dumb red-fern book.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “I don’t know. Pants and a shirt.”

  “You should try to remember clothing. Also height and hair color and race. If you can guess age, that’s important too. Age can be hard. So can height if you’re sitting down there. So be sure to stand before you make your approximation.”

  “All he did was walk over and hand me this letter from my mom, then he drove away. And how am I supposed to read this stupid book now?”

  “I’d better take a look,” I said.

  He looked at me and then over at the yard where the kids had played but today were not. He began to bite his lower lip. The idea of secret mail carriers sounded familiar, but I didn’t know why. Nor could I explain my faith that the letter contained a thinly veiled code that, together, the boy and I would try and uncover this afternoon, sitting together on his porch with pencils, solving the puzzle.

  “She says not to show it to anyone.”

  “She means strangers,” I said.

  “No she doesn’t,” he said.
/>   august

  three

  i said it like, why not, Dad. Suggestion from couch to computer, where he was sitting and working. I downplayed my severe inner turmoil and distress. Why not hey let’s just why not go to the Arch or something? Out of the house, father and son.

  It cost us six dollars to park on the slanted cobblestone of the levee. I followed my father to the river’s edge, where we stood for a minute watching driftwood pass quickly from our left to right. The intermittent noise of mud-water sloshing onto the brick shoreline lent something to the moment, I wanted to call it naturalism, and it was tough not to appreciate the Mississippi for her onetime role as national lifeline, this huge muddy bitch of a river.

  Beginning uphill, we climbed the two long flights of stairs up to the Jefferson Memorial Park and Gateway Arch. A thin crowd milled about the lawn and aimed cameras into the sky; park rangers on horseback posed and smiled with tourists. I went to one leg’s base and ran fingers across the etchings that scarred the steel close to the ground.

  “Catenary curve,” he said. “The same wide as tall. People forget that.”

  I did not ask for his help just yet.

  We descended a sloping walkway, through metal detectors and into the sprawling subterranean Museum of Westward Expansion. While my father went for tickets, I walked among the exhibits. I peeked into replica tepees and mud huts and listened to animatronic actors describe the rigors of the prairie. I was looking closely at a stuffed buffalo when he appeared at my side.

  “Eighteen dollars for two adults. I don’t remember it being so expensive.”

  Not yet, I thought.