In the dead space between the floor and the drawer’s runner, Amy found a box wrapped in yellow paper. A box with her name on it.
The smell of April’s favorite perfume burned in Amy’s nostrils as she tore through the paper and removed the lid. April’s cheerleading sweater lay before her, the dark wool still bearing stains from the mayonnaise Amy had smeared there in 1976. A withered condom clung stubbornly to one sleeve. Amy took the sweater out of the box, uncovering a dark blue cheerleading skirt with pleats as sharp as long knives.
A wave of emptiness washed over her, and she couldn’t stand it. She buried her face in blue wool. When the first sob wracked her chest, an eight ball, heavy and black, spilled from the wool folds and smacked the edge of the drawer, the sharp sound an unmistakable twin to the harsh crack of a judge’s gavel.
* * *
Amy sat on the bedroom floor for a long time. And then she found herself standing in the kitchen with the phone in her hands, and she couldn’t remember it ringing any more than she could recall answering it.
“You listening?” Doug Douglas asked.
Of course she was listening. She had heard every word. She had known that those words were coming as soon as she opened the box, but that didn’t mean she had to find an answer to them.
“I know you heard me. Now you do like I said, and don’t waste time. When you’re done, you’ll find April’s ’76 yearbook in a bookcase in the living room, third shelf from the bottom, next to those books out reincarnation. Turn to page 131. You’ll find another map and another key.”
“I’m not going to do this, Doug. You can forget it. You’re sick. You’ll have to keep your fantasies to yourself.”
“I was afraid you’d say that. Listen to this.”
Another voice came on the line. “I’m sorry Amy. He got me while I was in the shower…. What does want? Why is he—”
“Ethan?” Amy’s voice was desperate. “Is that you? Are you okay?”
But Ethan was gone. Only Doug’s laughter remained. “Don’t fret. He’s okay…for now. I told you that you’d do what I said. Now remember: third shelf from the bottom in the living room bookcase, page 131 of the ’76 Lance & Shield. You do like I said, and then you get in your little Mercedes and….” He laughed. “Well, you get in that fancy car of yours and you follow the yellow brick road.”
“Then it will be over?”
“Yeah. Then it will be over.”
3:23 A.M.
Evening was just as it should be. Whiskey in his belly, mixing with pills. Jack Daniel’s and Halcion—any idiot would realize that it was a deadly combination, but it wasn’t doing much for the man with the brain of a machine.
Ensconced in his fortress of solitude, medicated big-time, and Steve Austin felt that he was in the throws of a caffeine rush. He didn’t want to be known as The Six Million Dollar Man, but he had to face the fact that he shared the cyborg gentleman’s steel-belted constitution.
Shit. Nothing was happening, and April’s pills were nearly gone. Since her death he had gobbled Halcion like candy, and he hadn’t slept once. Not one night, not one minute. And how long had he been on the pills before that? Since January, maybe December. Yeah, December, because he remembered that Christmas lights had been blinking on April’s fake tree the first time he took the pills. He remembered the sparkling eruptions of light and color flashing before his eyes like broken circuits misfiring in a self-destructive machine, remembered watching green electrical cords garrote fake tree branches while he fell asleep for the first time in nineteen years, for the first time in April Destino’s arms.
The pills were little miracles in December. The Six Million Dollar Man was on them steady, three or four each time he visited April’s trailer. The pills, and April’s arms, had delivered him to the land of dreams.
That wasn’t quite right. Singular, not plural. The land of dream. His dream of April Louise Destino, the girl who had become his own private dreamweaver. But now the pills weren’t working anymore, and The Six Million Dollar Man couldn’t sleep. It was a simple proposition: if he couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t dream.
He knew about placebos, but this was ridiculous. Because if the Halcion wasn’t working now, what did hat mean?
Steve knew about the special bonds some people hared. Even though he had never experienced those things the way other people did, he could recognize he signs. A clear gleam of eye shared by lovers, words spoken with nothing more than a simple glance, thoughts shared in the silence of a held breath. Steve had felt those things when he lay sleeping in his dreamweaver’s arms, lost in his dream. Only there. And now, despite his best efforts, he worried that it was all over. Full system shutdown. Access blocked, big-time. Maybe his crazy speculation was right on target. Maybe Halcion couldn’t crack the sleep barrier. Maybe, instead, it had been the combination of Halcion and the comfort of April’s arms, her mind fogged with the drug, her brain in tune with his, that had allowed him to find his way into the dream.
But now his dreamweaver was dead. Dead and cold on a warm April night. Brain waves flat on a gray ocean, cerebrospinal fluid making jelly of her brain.
The link had dissolved.
Steve stared at the yearbook that lay open on his lap. April’s message—Dream a little dream of me!—was still on the page. In all honesty, he couldn’t remember if it had been there before tonight.
Sure, he hadn’t looked at his yearbook in a long time. And, sure, he had to admit that he’d forgotten most of the messages written on those slick pages. And, sure, April had a key to his house, and she might have written the message during one of her visits. But maybe, just maybe…
Dream a little dream of me. It was such a simple instruction. The Six Million Dollar Man threw his head back and laughed the mirthless laugh of a machine. April might as well have asked him to find a cure for cancer.
He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t dream.
But if there was something left of April, even after death…if there was anything left…and if this message was physical proof of it…
Tonight’s topic: messages from the dead. Steve Austin supposed that weirder things happened. Most people laughed at them, and some people pimped them with little concern for the truth—new-age spiritualists pulling tricks that had been old in the days of the table knockers, writers who scribbled for newspaper tabloids, and those who traveled the tabloid TV circuit claiming that they had been kidnapped by space aliens. There existed, in this land of dreams, a great number of preachers who claimed to heal every malady from hemorrhoids to cancer with a single touch. They coexisted with those who had seen Elvis at Burger King, and those who knew who really assassinated JFK (and why), and those who said that Walt Disney lay in cryogenic sleep beneath the Matterhorn in Anaheim, California, the joyous screams of generation upon generation of American children ringing in his dead ears.
Such claims made a ghost story seem just a tad ordinary.
A ghost story. Maybe that was what this was shaping up to be. The Six Million Dollar Man was tired. His battery was worn down. He longed to step from his cold mechanical world into the realm of shadow and faith that his dreamweaver had inhabited. He was so hungry for a dream that he prayed it was possible. Because if this wasn’t a ghost story, if what he had shared with the adult April Destino was nothing more than a pathetic drug habit, then his brain was truly fried.
If that were the case, the scribbles in his old yearbook had it right.
Forever, and always.
3:26 A.M.
Doug Douglas was certain of one thing: he was hungry. He’d had a quick bite at Mickey D’s around seven, but he’d been too nervous to have his usual order. No way he could confront Amy with four Big Macs, three orders of fries, two apple turnovers, and a chocolate shake (cut with a cup of double-sweet coffee to provide a little caffeine kick) stewing in his guts. The flat little cheeseburger he’d settled on was now a blob of mush that had given up residence in his stomach for a one way trip through his intestines. The meal,
if it could be thought of as such, was little more than a distant memory.
Worse than that, there wasn’t anything appetizing in the kid’s refrigerator—no ice cream in the freezer, nothing but fruits and vegetables and whole wheat bread in the regular fridge. Doug couldn’t make anything out of that. He couldn’t even make a mayonnaise sandwich because the kid didn’t own a jar of mayonnaise. And the kitchen cupboards made Mother Hubbard look like a survivalist stocked up for Armageddon. The kid didn’t have any potato chips. No microwave popcorn, no pretzels, no peanuts, no cookies. There wasn’t even any of that healthy crap, like granola bars or trail mix. The only snack food Doug could find was a bag of those awful rice cake things that tasted like Styrofoam.
The pale little cakes looked kind of like flat marshmallows. Doug tried to get used to the idea, because his gut was complaining like a monster truck with a bad muffler. But then he spotted that despised word on the wrapper. “Unsalted,” he whispered, shoving the package back into the cupboard. “I’m not eating unsalted Styrofoam.”
It was probably better that he didn’t eat anything, anyway. Fear had a way of flushing his system, and he couldn’t stand to spend valuable time malingering on the porcelain throne tonight. Not until it was over with Amy. Not until he could forget about her trying to cross him up.
But the kid didn’t have to know that. “No wonder you’re so skinny,” Doug said. “There isn’t enough in this kitchen to keep an anorexic rat alive.”
The kid wasn’t skinny, though. There was muscle on him, muscle that reminded Doug of the days when he was a one hundred and seventy-five pound gung-ho high school jock who practically lived on the baseball field. Doug had been something to see, back then.
Amy’s lover was something to see, now. He looked pretty funny even with the muscles—naked, dripping wet, tied to a chair and all.
After pulling the kid out of the shower and punching him a few times so he’d stop screaming, Doug had tied him to an armchair in the living room using a bunch of neckties that he found in a briefcase by the front door.
Doug had wondered what the kid did with all those ties. He had imagined all kinds of things. The kid tying up Amy. Amy tying up the kid. He began to think that maybe he’d missed photographing something really interesting.
But then he’d found the kid’s business card in the briefcase. Ethan Russell was the kid’s name. He was a tie salesman at a department store. Kind of a stupid job. But, hey, Doug was a bricklayer. That wasn’t much better. And right now he was a bricklayer on workman’s comp.
The kid grunted, trying to say something through a wadded Armani that was held in his mouth by a wide Serica knotted behind his neck. His arms were tied to the arms of the chair with a couple psychedelic paisley numbers that might have been cut from a dead hippie’s miniskirt. His legs were secured by gray ties shot through with little dribbles of metal-flake orange. Doug thought the latter combination of colors was particularly revolting. He had pissed that same bright orange just weeks ago, when he’d been gobbling antibiotics for a kidney infection.
The kid strained against the ties. Doug wished he wouldn’t do that. The knots were plenty tight, probably cutting off the kid’s circulation. Sure it was uncomfortable. But if the kid kept on struggling, it would mean that he wanted to put up a fight.
“I never learned to tie a tie,” Doug said. “Sorry about my knots—they’re not very good either. Anyway, with ties I always use those clip-on things. Amy used to give me a hard time about it. I remember at the senior prom….”
Doug let it go at that. He didn’t like the disgusted look that had bloomed on the kid’s face at the mention of Amy’s name. Doug knew the kid couldn’t imagine Amy with a fat slob, and he didn’t want to tell the kid his life story.
He didn’t have the time. His life story wasn’t worth the time, anyway.
And it was all Amy’s fault. Not just his life, but the damn kid. April had figured that a richy like Amy would crumble at the very mention of blackmail, but Doug had known better. Amy wasn’t like that. She wouldn’t give up without a fight. Just like in the old days, she would go along, buying time, looking to weasel her way out of trouble.
Like she was doing now. Threatening to walk out on the whole thing. Pulling little tricks. Doug wondered if the lot manager at April’s place had really bothered Amy, or if she’d made the whole thing up. April had one of those portable phones. He could imagine Amy leaning through the doorway with the phone in her hand, pressing the doorbell so he’d hear it. He could imagine that very easily.
Doug’s stomach complained. He pulled open a couple of drawers. Nothing. Herb tea and vitamins and silverware. An ice-cream scoop and a pie cutter. Jesus. What did the kid need with an ice-cream scoop when he didn’t have any ice cream? Why did he have a pie cutter when he probably never ate any pie?
Ethan Russell grunted. The necktie that secured his right wrist started to give. The chair rocked back and forth.
The bricks in the kid’s belly were flexed for serious business. Bulging veins road-mapped his arms. Doug Douglas had once had arms like that. Once upon a time, he’d had bricks in his belly, too.
“It’s not that I hate you or anything,” Doug said. “It’s just Amy. I know she’s not going to do what I tell her. I know she’s going to try to screw it up. I’m really sorry, but I can’t let that happen. I can’t let her walk all over me like that.” He laughed, short and hard. “You understand. I bet you know how she is. You tell her to do something, she does something else.” He shook his head. “I mean, she’s not going to do what I want her to do, so why should I do what she wants me to do?”
Doug felt funny with the pie cutter in his hands. It was silver and had little roses on the handle. It kind of reminded him of the trowel he used when laying bricks, except the edges were very dull and it was way too small. And there were those faggy roses, too.
The kid struggled.
Doug’s stomach rumbled. He wasn’t happy. He was hungry, and his belly was a beach ball that had been scarred by a couple of hernia operations, and he hadn’t been one hundred and seventy-five pounds of base-running muscle in a long, long time.
The bricks in Ethan Russell’s belly heaved.
The pie cutter caught the light. The silver roses gleamed between Doug’s big fingers.
Doug blushed, making a tight fist around the roses.
He found a whetstone in the silverware drawer.
Metal whispered against stone in the quiet apartment.
Doug’s stomach growled. He went to work.
3:31 A.M.
The old piece-of-shit Ford truck takes the turn too hard and everyone yells—Griz Cody behind the wheel, Bat Bautista riding shotgun, Todd and Derwin and Marvis slouching in the back. Twelve-packs of screamin’ cold Bud Dry slide across the scarred bed toward the rear of the truck and Marvis is afraid that the tailgate is going to disintegrate because it’s pockmarked with rust and looks like it is suffering the advanced stages of leprosy. But the tailgate doesn’t have leprosy and it doesn’t disintegrate because it was made in Detroit by real American working men with union jobs and that means it is made of sterner stuff and can stand up to whole kegs of beer let alone miniscule and nearly powerless cans. So the twelve-packs slam against the tailgate and ricochet toward Marvis and Todd and Derwin just as the truck makes another sharp turn, this time onto a gravel road. Marvis is so drunk and high his teeth are numb and he can’t even feel the wind whipping his face or the itchy flakes of white powder under his nose—drunk as a house nigger on the day the massa died his daddy says—and the truck shudders out of the turn and he loses hold of the projector and it skids across the bed and threatens to batter the tailgate just like the beer did but a renegade twelve-pack heads it off, ramming the projector with all the intensity of a particularly vicious defensive lineman in a Bud Bowl commercial, stopping it cold in its tracks.
And those beers will never amount to anything, Marvis knows it, because his daddy says that sports ruin young be
ers and rob them of bright futures and hardly any of them ever get to be in a Bud Bowl. Derwin MacAskill doesn’t know that, Marvis’s daddy says, became he’s a Stepin Fetchit lawn-mowing kind of Negro who makes the rest of us ashamed. Marvis worries that his daddy spoke through his lips but it doesn’t seem likely because Derwin is laughing high and long at the Bud Bowl lineman caroming around the truck and Marvis would laugh like Derwin but Marvis’s father is in his head saying that lawn-mowing black idiot laughs like a baboon and someone should teach him some manners because he is an embarrassment. Marvis chuckles at that assessment because he is nothing like a baboon and certainly wouldn’t be mistaken for one under any circumstances but he can see that Derwin does kind of resemble an ape if you look at him the right way. He is not like butterscotch Marvis he is really black. Black as unsweetened chocolate and black as Guinness Stout. And then Marvis’s chuckling ends because it tickles his numb lips and he notices that Derwin’s laughter is gone because Griz Cody has put the pedal to the metal and the truck is roaring and Griz is roaring a rebel yell, damned ignorant cracker, Marvis’s father shouts, damned stupid redneck doesn’t he know that grit-eating cracker army was stomped into the ground back in 1865? And Todd chimes in with a rebel yell and even Derwin chimes in because he’s a lawn-mowing baboon, that stupid burrhead doesn’t even know what he’s doing that nigger needs to be taught a lesson! Marvis even thinks about shouting but his daddy is in his head and his lips are numb and he only manages a squeak like a little church mouse, like a little insectile shutterbug.
And even the horrible percussion of gravel battering the wheel wells is more joyous than Marvis’s impotent laughter. The gravelmetal sound is like the brittle rattle of gunfire and it scares Marvis and his balls shrivel up and hide inside his belly and then the next sound really scares him because it is the unmistakable sound of ancient Detroit-manufactured truck bumper smacking chain-link gate. The gate doesn’t give because it is American made just like the truck and the lock doesn’t give because it is a Masterlock and also known for purebred American toughness that cannot be challenged by a wide array of weapons with impressive calibers but the chain that secures lock to gate was unfortunately manufactured in Mexico and it pops as easy as a Tijuana wetback’s cherry. Marvis finds himself whispering, “God those people mess around with that Spanish Fly and they have too many kids and they put every damn one of them to work in some foundry turning out mile upon mile of inferior chain.” And his father agrees. It’s because they’re Catholics and you know about the Catholics with guns in their basements and orders from Rome to drive the rest of us straight into the gutters through overpopulation and they’ll all end up in this country every one of them with our jobs because they can break right through every chain at every border crossing and they know it because they planned it that way and that’s why they made the links weak.
Slippin' Into Darkness Page 8