Casting Shadows Everywhere

by L. T. Vargus

  He checked the room with his light as well, and we moved through another door into the house to inspect its contents. Nick flashed his light again, and swung it past a dishwasher, sink, cabinets and empty spots cut into the counter where a stove and fridge should be. Again, the room was completely empty aside from the clusters of dust hugging along the edges of everything. He sighed loudly.

  “Well, we done it this time,” he whispered. “We busted into an abandoned property.”

  He stood and moved quickly down the hallway, not bothering to conceal the sound of his footsteps. He wiggled his light into a few more rooms.

  “Fuck!”

  He yelled, which startled me. I mean, it made sense that the house was empty, but I needed more time than that to adjust out of silent mode.

  “So it’s abandoned?” I said, still squatting and whispering.

  “It’s a foreclosure, most likely. Usually we can avoid ’em because of the for sale signs, but there are so many foreclosed homes right now that a lot of them aren’t even for sale. There are just tons of empty houses settin’ out there. Just rottin’ away.”

  I stood up and brushed some of the dirt off from crawling under the garage door.

  “So do we go on to the next one?” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “My only rule is one house per night. Once you enter one home, you’re done, whether you find anything or not. We might as well check it all out, though. Just in case.”

  The upstairs was empty aside from a couple cans of smurf blue paint in one of the bedroom closets. It was a weird place. Ornate designs covered the carpet throughout in a really classless way, like a Vegas casino had vomited everywhere. The basement door had a clasp for a padlock on it, which Nick undid so we could take the steps down.

  “Why would you need to lock the basement from this side?” I said.

  “Who knows?” he said.

  We passed through the door, and I noticed that the other side also had a padlock clasp, so you could lock it from either side. Weird. As we ventured out into the open concrete of the basement floor, Nick started laughing. He shined his light along the ceiling. I had no idea what was so funny.

  “Someone has already cleaned this place out,” he said. “See that? The plumbin’ is all ripped out. Most of it, anyway. The copper pipes. Someone sold ’em for scrap.”

  He sighed again and slapped the glass block basement window over his shoulder like he was giving it a high five.

  “We picked a real winner tonight, Jake.”

  We filed back up the stairs and milled around in the kitchen for a minute. Nick seemed to be trying to calm himself down.

  “Eh... It happens,” he said. “You can’t win ’em all. And it always could’ve been much, much worse.”

  “Why’d you think to try the garage door like that, anyway?” I said.

  “I could see that it was bent, and there were black marks, too, like someone had slammed into it. The lockin’ mechanisms on older doors like these use these long flat bars that get bent really easily. I figured if someone hit this door with a car hard enough to dent it like that, one side or the other might be a little wonky.”

  My plan worked. We walked out as he explained it all, and I left the garage door unlocked. He was too distracted explaining himself to notice. I was thinking I might bring Beth back to this empty house at some point. I didn’t know whether or not Nick would care, but my instinct was to hide it from him, so I did.

  * * *

  School was only a half day today for some kind of teacher in-service thing. Half days are always weird. All the kids just roam around town all afternoon like nomads. Looking for action.

  I didn’t really feel like going home, you know, so I kind of followed along with this group of kids. They were all these computer nerd types that play role playing games and stuff. I know a couple of them from my food science class. Trevor and David.

  We kind of meandered for a while until someone mentioned food.

  “Let’s go to 7-11,” David said. So we did.

  I grabbed some Little Debbies and Funyuns. I think seeing that guy in my Psychology class eating them all the time made me want to get them. Having had them again, I can confirm that they are not great.

  Trevor bought not one, but two flavors of Doritos and one of those shitty little apple pies.

  “This is my secret recipe,” Trevor explained. “You gotta crunch up the Cool Ranch Doritos and then pour them into the bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos. Like a seasoning.”

  “And the pie?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Does the apple pie figure into the recipe?”

  “Oh no. The pie is more of a palate cleanser,” he said.

  David also got Doritos. They seemed to be really into Doritos, actually, now that I look back on it.

  Anyway, we just roved around downtown eating this terrible food. Gorging ourselves with sugar and saturated fat.

  This other kid got this like cheeseburger hot dog. It’s like a burger dog with gooey American cheese inside of it that sits in the damn rotisserie for who knows how long. 89 cents. He slathered it up with a bunch of Miracle Whip, too. Like three packets. Unbelievable.

  We wandered a long time. Walked down these train tracks for quite a ways and wound up behind this sewage treatment plant with a humongous swirling tank of, I believe, turds. There’s this giant metal arm stirring this big open tank of brown sludge. Gurgling. Churning. I assume it’s human shit, but I guess it seems pretty weird, right? It was all fenced up, so we observed it from afar.

  “You guys think any of that poop is ours?” This kid, Aaron, asked.

  “I hope not,” Trevor said. “I don’t like to think about my turds mixing with a bunch of Stranger Turds.”

  We crossed this wooden bridge and wove our way through a grave yard along the edge of the woods. There was an oversized headstone for a guy named Benjamin Blood that served as a decent conversation piece. Yeah, yeah. The Curious Case of Benjamin Blood and all that.

  Eventually I kind of splintered off from the group and headed home. When I got to my apartment, Beth was sitting outside on the astroturf swathed front steps, her face all puffed and red. Her pale blue eyes fastened on mine for a second and then flicked to the ground. She looked so sad.

  “Can I come in?” she said.

  This was not how I envisioned Beth’s first trip to my house going. We sat on the edge of my bed and didn’t say much. She cried some. I tried to ask her what was wrong, but she didn’t want to talk about it.

  “I will tell you,” she said. “I promise I will. But not today.”

  Thinking back now, I guess I was pretty caught up in the drama of it all ’cause I didn’t even get embarrassed of my dumb room or how crappy my house is compared to hers and all of that.

  I mean, Jesus. It’s not much of a bedroom. The frayed bedspread with sky blue and pink boxes on it. (Thanks, Mom!) The red carpet that looks like it belongs in a 1986 funeral home. The weird scratches and grooves along one wall that look like an animal desperately tried to claw through it at some point. The brown water stains on the ceiling. The sulfur smell wafting in from the bathroom.

  Yep. Those are just some of the features that made our apartment a must-rent.

  Beth scooted up onto the edge of the bed and rotated her shoulders toward me a little bit.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For always being here for me.”

  She brushed her hair out of her eyes and went on.

  “Even when I’m a mess like this. Or especially when I am, I guess. You’re always there when I need you.”

  “Oh...” I said. “Well, you’re welcome, you know.”

  She leaned forward and kissed me. Just a peck on the lips. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. Or move. Or breathe. I think I almost went into convulsions.

  She leaned back and laughed. Maybe I looked funny or something. The look in her eye kind of changed
all of a sudden. She leaned in and kissed me again, but this was not a peck. It was aggressive. Her mouth dropped open as she approached in a way that reminded me of a fish.

  Warm. Tongue action. Moisture.

  Not really sure how to say this. I mean, it was awesome, you know. I felt good. And I was kind of in disbelief that it was really happening. But all I could think about was that I was going to need to towel off the lower half of my face after this. She was getting all juicy and drooling all down my chin and stuff. Seriously. I don’t want to complain, but... Entirely too much saliva.

  Maybe there’s something not ladylike about the whole thing, which I know is an odd thing to say. Seriously like a weird, old-fashioned thing to say, but I already said it, so...

  She seemed happy enough after that, so I was glad and all. I mean, I was still excited and everything. I don’t know.

  Maybe sometimes when you want something for long enough, once you have it, it can’t even seem real somehow. Does that make sense? Maybe. Maybe not.

  We watched Dr. Phil after that. He told some parents who spoil their teenage daughters to “get real.”

  Chapter 15

  ANOTHER NIGHT. ANOTHER HOUSE. IT was a big Tudor place in a cluster of rich-looking houses nestled among an otherwise shitty neighborhood. In fact, it was the big steel fence and gate surrounding the home that initially piqued our interest.

  I crawled through the dark on all fours, hands and feet bobbing and scrabbling. I clamped my flashlight between my teeth like a pirate’s blade.

  The bursts of light brought me pictures of wall-to-wall yellow shag carpet and those shitty tan couches with prints of like a stream and a water wheel at a mill or something on them. Hideous. The TV looked like one of those huge wooden ones from the late 70s or early 80s. The décor did not exactly convey any promise of concealed riches, but I supposed you never know for sure.

  I wouldn’t say I moved more quickly than before, really, but now I moved with more confidence somehow. I felt no real fear, I think. Just excitement and anticipation and all of that. I’d put in some reps. My brain was wired to do this now.

  I shuffled down the final hallway, swinging my lamp about like a lightsaber. All the rooms came up empty. We’d wound up at another place with no one home somehow. That foreclosure aside, Nick seemed to have a knack for picking houses.

  I double-checked the bedroom — still empty, obviously — and circled back to the back door where Nick was waiting. (We’d spent about twenty minutes peeling off screens only to find locked windows. Then Nick tried the rear door. Unlocked. I think it wasn’t even closed all the way.) Now the real search began in earnest as we picked through the heaps of junk looking for valuables.

  We started in the bedroom, Nick dumping the dresser drawers and the few wooden boxes on the dresser top. He sifted, paused to look over an item and went back to sifting. Nothing of interest.

  After a look under the bed revealed only cobwebs, I slid open the drawer in the bedside table. A string of beads rested in there that, for a split second, I thought were large pearls. Next to that were two more balls, metal this time, on a string. My hand moved to them but stopped short. Something made me hesitate.

  “What are these?” I said.

  Nick leaned over to peer into the drawer. He laughed.

  “Those are ben wa balls.”

  “Oh,” I said. “What’s that?”

  He laughed again. He pointed to the metal balls.

  “Well... you stick those in the girl’s cooter.”

  (“Cooter.” People actually say that, and some of them are even related to me. Unbelievable.)

  “And then there on the right you got some anal beads,” he said. “I think you know where those go.”

  Yikes. We didn’t speak for a moment.

  “What the hell is wrong with people?” I said.

  Nick shrugged.

  * * *

  Further tearing through the house failed to reward us, though we didn’t find any more creepy sex toys, at least. We dug through the kitchen a second time. Nick grew more and more agitated. He didn’t say anything, but I could read it in the deepening folds and creases on his face.

  I got the sense that we were about to give up on this one — the gated English Tudor full of thrift store furniture, I mean — and Nick’s slumped shoulders seemed to confirm that notion. For whatever reason, though, we decided to check the garage.

  It was one of those garages cluttered with junk, but I still saw it as soon as he opened the door. The street light angling through the window made a rectangle of light that stretched across the garage. It provided just enough illumination for me to make out the silhouette of the dial and handle protruding from the box shaped item overhead. Balanced on a stack of boards laid across the exposed beams above us was a small safe.

  “A safe in the garage?” I said. “Up in the rafters?”

  Nick grimaced.

  “What?”

  I had just assumed that he’d seen it, too, and it felt a little weird that he’d failed to. The pupil had outdone the master for once. I pointed to the safe. His jaw dropped, and he wiped at his lips with the back of his hand.

  “Good fuckin’ eye,” he said and clapped me on the shoulder.

  We circled under the safe like sharks closing in on a surfer with a scraped knee.

  Nick’s body language changed entirely. His chest swelled, and his posture righted itself. He took long strides, pacing back and forth, eyes glued to the safe.

  “The only question now,” he said, “is how we gonna get the goddamn thing down?”

  It was a fair question. The safe was about ten-to-twelve feet up, and there was no ladder in the garage. The only thing tall enough to stand on and reach it was the top of a work bench nowhere near close enough to be of any help.

  “Get on my shoulders,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m gonna have to actually stand on your shoulders to able to reach.”

  “I know.”

  I stooped, and he stepped the first foot onto my shoulder.

  “This is like some cheerleader shit right here,” he said.

  He jammed the heel of his hand into the top of my head, presumably for balance, and swung his other foot up. His feet straddled my neck, digging into those muscles between the neck and shoulder. You know how kids jam their fingers there in gym class to hit some pressure point and fuck each other up? It felt like that, basically. And then when he stood up, it felt like a horse digging his two stupid hooves into those muscles. I made some kind of grunting noise.

  “You alright?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  I clasped my hands around his ankles and prepared myself for the physical exertion of rising with a human being standing on me. My legs locked up as I stood, like my knees just wouldn’t uncoil for a second, but I pushed a little harder and got through it. He wobbled a little and grabbed one of the beams to catch himself.

  “Alright,” he said. “Take one pace forward.”

  I obliged. He put his hands on the safe and sort of patted around the bottom and sides as he considered how to proceed.

  “Little closer,” he said.

  I shuffled forward a bit. He leaned a little, his feet grinding that much further into my shoulders, and hugged around the safe. It was high enough that he was kind of just hugging it to his face more than anything. The embrace only lasted a few seconds. He pulled back, repositioned himself and hugged it again.

  “Damn,” he said. “Ain’t got no leverage.”

  Again, he released the safe and leaned back on the beam. He paused a moment, mopping at his mouth again with the back of his hand.

  “So what are we gonna do?” I said. “’Cause if you could make it snappy... That’d be tremendous.”

  “I’m thinking. Believe it or not, I don’t want to drop the fuckin’ thing on your foot,” he said.

  I pictured my foot smashed flat like in a cartoon. Then I pictured it
again but this time it just exploded into a bloody spray.

  “Well, I can respect that,” I said.

  “You’d drop me,” he said.

  For a second I’d actually believed he’d been concerned with the welfare of my feet.

  “We’ll get it,” he said. “This is like the ultimate. I fuckin’ love safes. Ain’t no way we’re leavin’ this thing behind.”

  He tapped a hand on the beam as he thought.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “Waiting,” I said.

  He leaned forward again, and by now it felt like he was wearing golf spikes. I was certain that my shoulders were bleeding.

  He fumbled at the boards holding the safe up, his fingers crawling along the edges and latching around each side of one corner. He strained to lift, and the board rose an inch. The safe didn’t budge. He let go and the board slammed back down.

  “OK, this will work,” he said. “Take three paces forward.”

  He ducked down as I moved under the board.

  “Just keep a hold of my ankles, alright?” he said.

  “OK.”

  “I gotta do a fuckin’ military press type deal,” he said. “And I might lose my balance a little.”

  He popped up, carrying some of the momentum of the drive of his legs into the board as his hands connected with it and drove one side straight up. The safe slid off the tilted surface and crashed to the floor a few feet away from us. It was loud as hell, but it landed safely. (Pun intended.)

  I’m proud to confirm that no feet were harmed during this production. Actually, the crazy thing was that the safe also took no damage at all.

  I kneeled and Nick climbed down from my shoulders. Suddenly that cliché about the weight of the world lifting from your shoulders made a lot more sense. I felt so light. I brushed some of the grit away from where his feet had been.