Casting Shadows Everywhere

by L. T. Vargus

  * * *

  Holy balls! Perhaps fortune favors the bold even harder than I thought. Last night I made up my mind to enter into the world according to Nick — without question a ballsy move. Well, that technically doesn’t start until Friday, but I’m apparently already reaping the benefits of my newly declared boldness.

  It went a little something like this.

  I smushed some clay into a vague bowl shape for my ceramics project in art class. Beth is way better at art stuff than me, so she was already at the point of glazing her bowl. She slathered some goop onto her clay with a paint brush.

  “What are you doing this weekend?”

  I shrugged.

  “Nothing really.”

  Beth rotated her bowl and applied more glaze.

  “Wanna go to the movies or something?” she asked.

  I played it cool. Thought about it for a minute.

  “Sure.”

  Okay, that’s a lie. I wasn’t cool at all. When she asked me, I almost choked to death on my tongue I was trying to say “yes” so fast. I spit out a lot of gibberish-y syllables. Something like “Eeeeyeuhyuheyeyeuheyeyes. Yes.”

  She laughed, but not like she was laughing at me. Sometimes she looks at me when she laughs, and I know somehow that we are together. She even put her hand on my arm.

  I don’t want to read too much into things like that, though. I don’t want to let my expectations get way out of control and set myself up for the biggest disappointment ever.

  This is good, though. I mean, I’m not 100% clear on whether or not she considers this a date, but I figure it has to be a step in the right direction regardless. She could ask any-goddamn-body to go to the movies with her. Six billion people on the planet. Any of them. She asked me.

  The hardest part will be not hyperventilating to the point of passing out during the trailers and missing the movie. No, really, I’ve never had to be nervous around Beth before. I always thought I had no chance, so... But damn. I suddenly have everything to lose. I hope I don’t screw this up.

  Oh yeah. ’Where are they now? Update’ on Troy Summers: Troy is on crutches now. I assume it’s some kind of football related injury. It’s always tough to see a promising, young athlete sidelined like that, but I somehow found a way to hold back the tears. The real downside? If the injury was severe, I probably would have already heard about it. So he probably just sprained an ankle or something. Ah, well. Pretty funny to watch him hobble around in any case.

  And back to the most important point: Beth asked me to the movies.

  Boom.

  Chapter 7

  I WALKED TO NICK’S AFTER school. Talk radio blared from his apartment so loud I could hear it from a couple doors down. I climbed the staircase to their door, knocked and heard someone say to come in.

  Walking through the kitchen, I could see Nick reading about Hare Krishnas on the green La-Z-Boy again. That seemed dumb. I didn’t understand why he’d crank up the radio and read a book.

  As I entered the living room, however, I saw Donnie leaned over an ancient stereo on the giant wooden spool they use as a coffee table. An unlit cigarette dangled from his lip. He shushed me as soon as I stepped into his view, even though I hadn’t made any noise. He pointed at the radio. I took a second to actually listen and realized it wasn’t talk radio. Donnie was listening to a police scanner.

  “We’ve got a four-zero-six in progress on Lovell Street,” Donnie hissed at me. He had crazy eyes.

  “What’s a four-zero-six?” I said. I felt the need to whisper, but I felt pretty stupid about it.

  “A B-and-E, man,” Donnie said. He read the blank expression on my face. “Breaking and entering. Jesus, kid.”

  “Oh...”

  I scratched my chest even though it didn’t itch.

  “Where’s Lovell Street?” I said.

  Donnie’s brow furrowed. He looked at Nick.

  “Where is Lovell Street?” he said.

  Nick didn’t respond verbally. He rolled his eyes.

  “I think it’s up toward the North side,” Donnie said. His hands shot out to his sides like an umpire signaling safe. “Listen!”

  Cops droned on with lots of codes I didn’t know. Donnie shushed me again even though the scanner was the only noise in the room. I had always wondered who the people were that actually sat around listening to police scanners, and somehow Donnie totally made sense in that role.

  Nick sighed and headed for the kitchen. I followed.

  “Is he on drugs or something? His eyes look insane,” I said. I talked in that gravelly register just above a whisper so Donnie wouldn’t hear.

  “What? Oh, I doubt it. He goes apeshit over the police scanner every couple months. Gets all manic and eventually asks me to hide it from him.”

  Nick scooped several spoonfuls of coffee into the machine while he talked.

  “He can’t handle it for some reason. I think it’s the anticipation. Always waitin’ to see what happens next. And it never ends. There’s always another crime unfoldin’ somewheres, you know? Somethin’ about that sets him off. You want some coffee?”

  “Huh? No.”

  Nick flipped the switch, and the coffee machine purred and dripped, suddenly wet with life.

  “So I take it you has chosen the dark side.”

  “Wha... Oh, right. More lessons, yeah.”

  “Figured you would.”

  A loud gasp erupted in the other room, and Donnie ran into the kitchen. His feet thudded across the wood floor like the heads of sledgehammers.

  “Four-eight-eight! Four-eight-eight in progress!” he said. “And it’s no more than a mile from where we stand right now.” White strings of goo fluttered in the corners of his mouth when he spoke. Froth.

  “Calm down,” Nick said, pouring some coffee. He looked at me. “That’s a petty theft. Four-eight-eight.”

  Donnie lost interest with us and ran back to his precious scanner.

  Nick scooted himself up to sit on the counter with his mug of black coffee in his hand. His feet dangled off the edge, which made him seem like a little kid.

  “Tonight you leave the world you know.”

  He took a long sip from his mug.

  * * *

  We parked outside of a public tennis court. It was dark now, and street lamps glowed high above us, but the houses along the rest of the block seemed to hide in the shadows under tall pine trees.

  Nick handed me a pair of brown cloth gloves. I guess I just stared at them for a second while he slid his own on, so he finally said:

  “For fingerprints.”

  Part of me wanted to protest, wanted to turn back, but I didn’t. I’d made my choice. I chose this. I wanted this. Didn’t I?

  I put the gloves on. The fabric felt softer than I’d imagined. It felt right.

  He tied a black dew rag around his head and gave me a Corona Light baseball hat. I wore it backwards. Not ’cause I was trying to look cool or anything. I have a triangular shaped face, so the bill of a baseball hat somehow makes me look like a weird banjo-playing hick or something. I hate it. Aviator sunglasses are a no-go as well.

  Sigh.

  Anyway, we crept out onto the sidewalk. It was the strangest feeling. I mean, Nick hadn’t directly said what we were doing, but I knew it’d involve breaking and entering AKA a four-zero-six. I think it was so over-the-top absurd to me that I didn’t even get as nervous as I probably should.

  My limbs seemed far away and partially numb. It felt like walking around in a dream.

  We circled behind a pale blue modular house and trudged through the Virginia creeper sprawling along the home’s perimeter. Things progressed quickly from there.

  Nick popped the screen out of a back window like he’d done it a million times before. He shined his small flashlight into the window and swung it around the room. It was quick, but I could make out a washer and dryer.

  He pushed his face to my ear and whispered.

  “When we get inside, just squat down
and stay perfectly silent. Let your eyes and ears adjust. Then I will make the first move.”

  He pushed the bottom sash of the window up and hesitated for a moment. (Jesus! Remind me to lock my damn windows.) He turned off the flashlight and clenched it between his teeth, then he pulled himself up and disappeared headfirst into the opening. Aside from the faintest hiss of the window sliding open, all of his moves had been silent.

  I pulled myself up, mimicking his headfirst motion. There is something very much insane about moving face-first into the pitch blackness of a foreign private residence. I felt like I was watching myself do it. I mean, I knew on some level that I was the one doing it, yet it was like it wasn’t really me. Like some important part of me had just shut down, but the rest was somehow still going.

  I leaned forward into the darkness. My hands stretched out into black nothing before eventually touching on the cool linoleum floor. I eased my way in and kneeled down like he said. My jeans rustled a bit as they slid over the window sill, and it reminded me of the sound of a fingernail scraping dried food off of denim, but other than that I kept everything pretty quiet.

  Apart from the crickets outside, I couldn’t hear or see anything. It’s weird how quickly deprivation (and adrenaline) sharpen the senses.

  So the first thing I sensed upon settling inside was the stench of cat piss. Yep. Kitty litter, dude. Cat whiz possesses a certain tang that is very recognizable no matter the circumstances. Eventually I also detected a few notes of some kind of liquid laundry detergent odor.

  Nick touched my shoulder to let me know he was kneeling to my right. We squatted there for what seemed like an hour. A couple of times I got a little panicky, but it went away as fast as it came upon me. I sometimes felt like maybe I was breathing loud.

  It wasn’t until I wiped the back of my wrist across my brow that I realized I was soaked with sweat. That seemed weird. Like I was physically panicking, but the me part had mostly stayed numb to it or something. Maybe that’s what courage is sometimes, though. Being too overwhelmed to even feel the fear.

  Something poked the side of my neck and worked its way up to my ear. Fingers. Nick grabbed the back of my head so he could find his way to lean in and whisper again.

  “I’ll go check it out. Wait here.”

  My eyes had adjusted enough now that I could somewhat sense him moving away from me, a faintly darker black moving through the rest of the black, but that was about it. (How many shades of black can there really be?)

  I waited. My heart hammered in my chest. Blood throbbed through my veins. I sat in this dark dream world in a cloud of kitty piss. (You’d think you might get used to the cat pee smell eventually, but I did not.) And I realized this was exciting, hiding here in some stranger’s house. That it might be the most exciting thing I’d ever done. Life pumped through me like it never had before. When you’re a kid everyone tells that you anything is possible, and that you can do anything you truly want and all that shit. This was the first time in my life that I felt in my gut that anything was possible. Anything.

  The sound of footsteps thumped outside the room. Loud. Hard. No attempt to conceal themselves. And they were getting closer. I pictured a large bald man wearing a navy blue bath robe and sporting a double barreled shotgun.

  “It’s all clear.”

  It was Nick. The beam from his flashlight danced into the room and blinded me for a second before he twirled it away from my eyes.

  “No one is home. Come on out.”

  I walked out toward the circle of light shining down on beige berber carpet in the hallway. Nick smirked.

  “We mighta picked a dud, man. Not lookin’ good.”

  I followed him into a bedroom.

  “Here.”

  He handed me the flashlight. I shined it on an oak dresser while he pulled the drawers out one by one and dumped them on the floor. Once or twice he stooped to sift through the pile at his feet, but he didn’t find anything of interest.

  “What about the TV?” I said, gesturing to the dresser top. “It’s got to be worth something.”

  Nick sighed.

  “First of all, that shit is from about 1998. Second of all, are you goin’ to discretely lug that monster out of here?”

  “Oh. Yeah, that’s a good point.”

  “Come on.”

  We strode out into the kitchen. He opened the fridge and surveyed the scene a while. After a long moment, he grabbed a block of cheddar and took a huge bite out of it. He chewed in silence a moment before our eyes met and this all became very amusing to him. He burst into a laughing fit. We’re talking full on spit-flying, crazy-eyed, mental hospital style giggle fest. That’s the thing about Nick. He doesn’t laugh very often, but once something gets him started, he has a hard time stopping.

  He kept laughing as he flung the contents of a couple kitchen drawers onto the floor, silverware and cutlery crashing and clanging everywhere. I guess I kind of zoned out for a second as he kept at it, but the next thing I knew he had gone from laughing to screaming.

  “Where is it!”

  He scooped up a handful of butter knives and spoons and hurled them in the general direction of the microwave and coffee machine.

  “Where’s all the good shit!”

  His breath heaved through clenched teeth. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone more angry. There was an entitled quality — almost like a whine — to his shouting that reminded me of a toddler, except if toddlers were like violent, filthy, full grown man-beasts or something.

  He chucked things around a bit more. The toaster flew. The coffee carafe shattered. The potato masher skittered across the ceramic tiles.

  Finally he just jumped straight up and down and reached under the bandana to clench two fistfuls of his hair.

  Several full-throated screams rolled out of him. No words. Just primal screams. Seriously. Most ridiculous tantrum ever. It kind of freaked me out.

  And just like that he went dead silent. His arm darted out and up to open a small cabinet above the fridge. He tossed a dishwasher manual aside, and ran his finger tips along the shelf bottom. His hand emerged holding a bracelet and a second sweep turned up a ring.

  He tossed his head back and laughed.

  “Gold.”

  His eyes locked with mine, and he looked about as crazy as Donnie with the scanner. The word “euphoric” seems right. It rarely does, I’d say. It’s not like I’m over here just tossing “euphoric” around left and right or something.

  “Every time. I fuckin’ knew it! If the jewelry ain’t in the bedroom, it’s in the kitchen.”

  On the ride home he elaborated on all of this. We drove around the weird suburbs outside of town. Row after row of identical box houses.

  “It’s all about attention to detail. Do you know how I knew which window to pick?”

  I thought about it.

  “Nope.”

  “Because I saw the dryer vent. A laundry room is just about the perfect point of entry. That shit is always vacant, and it’s usually got stuff like a furnace or water heater that would make any of my noises less suspicious.”

  That made sense.

  “You don’t seem to make any noises,” I said. “You’re like a damn ninja.”

  He smirked.

  “And why do you think I picked the blue house instead of the nicer lookin’ yella house next door or the big brick house across the street?”

  I didn’t bother to actually think about it this time.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  He flicked the ash off the tip of his cigarette out the Malibu’s window and brought the smoldering tube back to his lips.

  “The yella house had a security alarm sticker in the front window. Coulda been a fake, of course, or their subscription to ADT could be expired or whatever, but it don’t really matter. It ain’t worth the trouble in any case. The brick house had a dog pen off to the side. Again, we don’t know the details, but we don’t need to. Why mess with the possibility of a Rottweiler w
hen we don’t have to?”

  “So why the kitchen?”

  “Huh?”

  “The jewelry. You said if it’s not in the bedroom, it’s in the kitchen.”

  “Ah. Right. Well, I can’t say for sure, you know, but my theory is that they are plannin’ to sell it. I mean, if it’s like a treasured ring, you keep it in a jewel box in your bedroom, right? Like if it’s a luxury item or whatever you want to call it. But if you’re thinkin’ about pawnin’ it, it becomes a utilitarian item. Your main concern now is that you don’t want to misplace it, so you put it in the room with all of the other useful items — the kitchen.”

  I nodded.

  “Weird.”

  “I guess if it was a man, he might even put it in the garage, but men don’t really have all that much jewelry, you know?”

  His voice trailed off now, like he was lost in an imaginary garage full of Rolexes and gold chains or something.

  He swept his arm in front of the windshield, gesturing to the cul-de-sac around us like those perpetually smiling women on the Price is Right revealing a set of designer sofas.

  “See all that? All these boxes is just settin’ there. Waitin’. Waitin’ for us to come along and take all the shiny shit out of them.”

  He smiled.

  I gazed out at the modular homes and tried to imagine how he must see them, like rows of presents waiting under the tree. Each one full of surprises. Like the whole world was just waiting to be explored. Plundered. Like he was just going to take whatever he wanted from it and nobody could stop him.

  “Do you kind of get it now?” he said. “How they teach you to feel powerless when you could do anything? How they want to tell you about what’s right and wrong and make you feel all small?”

  “I think so.”

  “There ain’t no right or wrong. None of it means nothin’. There is just things that happen.”

  We turned onto a dirt road cutting through a cornfield. Everything went silent aside from the periodic tinks of tiny rocks hitting the car.

  “Out of all of the trillions of years of the Earth’s history, you might be alive for one 70 or 80 year period. That ain’t so long. You should be out ready to burn this motherfucker to the groun’ while you can. But they somehow get you all scared and hung up on these stupid ideas.”