Slippin' into Darkness

1:42 A.M.

The scene was a perennial favorite in the Elizabeth Montgomery TV movies that dominated the airwaves in the seventies. Elizabeth-she of the perky WASP nose and voluptuous WASP body and honey-blonde WASP hair-is alone in the house, and suddenly there’s a home invasion by four dangerous men. Peril, beer commercial. Titillation, tampon commercial. An ABC-TV Movie of the Week. Only Shutterbug wasn’t Elizabeth Montgomery. His hair was ginger-brown and kinky, his nose was flat and wide…and he couldn’t thumb a remote and escape this scenario.

A beer can whizzed past Shutterbug’s head. He jerked backward reflexively, a jumpy batter knocked easily out of the box.

Resembling a spacecraft from a very small planet, the beer can entered the living room. It soared across the pool table and then did a neat little dip, avoiding Griz Cody’s flailing hands as if they were deadly asteroids. Griz missed the catch by a good two inches. The beer continued on until it hit a wall as solid as the shields of the Starship Enterprise. By some measure of physics that no one in the room could begin to understand, the tab burst and suds showered Shutterbug’s stereo, which was pounding out the rhythm of some ersatz Beach Boys’ paean to beach babies in old L.A.

From the kitchen, Bat Bautista laughed.

“High and outside,” Griz Cody grunted, embarrassment coloring his face.

Bat sneered. “It caught the corner, easy. I haven’t lost my touch. Haven’t lost a second since high school. Still have an arm like Nolan Ryan’s.”

“C’mon, Bat. I’m thirsty.”

“Shit. You catch your beer like Derwin and Todd did, then. Bare-hand that little fucker. Or else you admit that the last one was a strike, and I’ll go easy with the next one, you wuss.”

“Like I said: high and out-”

Another can whizzed past Shutterbug’s head. Griz Cody made a pathetic dive for it. The sound of his knees popping was unfortunate percussion to the twangy surfer beat. Cody missed the catch by a mile. The house shook as he hit the floor. The beer can smacked against the CD player, and suddenly the ersatz Beach Boys were history.

There was a brief moment of silence.

“Hey!” Shutterbug’s voice quavered. “C’mon, now! This is my house!”

Nobody noticed Shutterbug’s dismay. Nobody even heard him. In fact, Todd Gould was still listening to the music even though the CD player had died. He was laughing at his own joke, singing “Breach baby breach baby” to the accompaniment of a nonexistent Fender beat.

Wild laughter erupted from the kitchen. Another beer sailed past Shutterbug and hit Griz Cody in the back, burrowing into the former football lineman’s flabby love handles, bouncing free as if launched from a sentient trampoline.

A startled yelp escaped from the human trampoline’s lips. He jiggled on the floor, his nearly feminine breasts seizing up. Then he swore and tried to rise, but his knees popped again and that only made him swear some more. But he kept at it, cartilage grinding audibly, one chubby hand on the floor, the other on a stereo shelf and- “Hey!” Shutterbug said. “Watch it!”-the shelf tore loose from the wall and sent a seven hundred and fifty dollar German turntable crashing onto the hardwood floor.

As Shutterbug watched, horrified, the tone-arm kicked off and swept to one side, leaving a long white scratch on the white pine floorboards.

Dead needle, too. The turntable had cost seven-fifty, but the needle itself was priced at-

“Think fast, ’bug!”

The words came from the kitchen. Shutterbug whirled, but the beer can was already there, a hard metal punch collapsing his solar plexus. Shutterbug caved in. He couldn’t breathe. He bumped the pool table. The eight ball tumbled into the side pocket as Shutterbug went down hard, cracking his head on the floor. He was out for a second or two, but just a second or two, because the first thing he was aware of when he came to was Todd Gould shouting, “Three Mississippi…four Mississippi…”

Shutterbug didn’t move. He had the wild idea that if he moved his head he would leave a big scratch on the floor and ruin his needle. Then he realized that idea was just plain crazy and he tried to move and found that he couldn’t. He lay there on the floor, prone and helpless as a bug turned on its back, Todd Gould’s face hanging over his like a big white moon.

Like a cue ball, Shutterbug thought. Todd was a cue ball and Shutterbug was a big black-

No. That was crazy, too. Shutterbug blinked back tears. Man, how it hurt. Not his gut, but his head. A divot of pain throbbed on his skull. The spot where his head had smacked the floorboards was-

“Five motherfucker!” Derwin MacAskill picked up the count. “Six motherfucker!”

– not floorboards, cement. That was right. It was a cement floor. And it wasn’t a beer can that had hit him, it was Joaquin “Bat” Bautista’s fist.

It had happened in Todd Gould’s basement. January, 1976. Blowout party to cap the end of football season. Todd’s parents gone. Bat Bautista’s spiked punch flowing freely. Everyone blitzed to the max. The basement door locked, the six of them there in a room that smelled like old newspapers and unspoken secrets.

The basement was split into two sections. The back half was a tangle of shadows and castoffs from the furniture store owned by Todd’s dad, and the other half, the section nearest the stairs, was a game room equipped with a pool table and old pinball machines that had been restored by Todd’s brother.

April lay on the pool table, so wasted on spiked punch that Shutterbug didn’t know if she was conscious or not. He was filming the things the guys did to her, one after another. They wanted him to film it. Hell, they probably would have kicked his ass had he had mustered the nerve to refuse. But he didn’t refuse. He had a hard-on and that particular six-inch portion of his anatomy was doing his thinking for him. He was excited about filming April. He had never been able to photograph her-apart from the shot of the cheerleader squad for the yearbook-and it was just too much to believe that he was actually getting her like this, forever, right down on film. First Bat, then Todd, then Derwin, then Griz, and maybe, if they were in a good mood, maybe they would let him…

It didn’t happen that way. Things never got that far. Griz Cody was too fucked up to get it up. His little dick hid under a fold of fat, because he was too fat even then. And he tried to make a joke out of it, slapping his dick against April’s thigh. And when no one laughed at that he pinched her, again and again, so hard that his fingers left red welts on her tanned flesh, so hard that her eyes came open and they were the color of a storm and she was suddenly with them in the basement, back from whatever hazy dreamland she had been visiting.

“Seven motherfucker!”

Griz’s fingers pinching the milky flesh of April’s breasts, almost as if he were jealous. The violent sound of his teeth clacking menacingly as his face moved over her nipples.

Shutterbug stepped forward.

The bank of movie lights playing over the shadows at the back of the basement as the camera falls to the pool table.

Shutterbug grabbing Griz Cody. “No!”

Bat Bautista’s fist smacking Shutterbug’s jaw.

The cold taste of cement floor.

“Eight motherfucker!”

April fully conscious, screaming bloody murder. Shutterbug swimming breathlessly through a deep underwater haze, the awful sound of April’s protests tearing over his skull like a hacksaw blade.

Trying to get up. Falling. Griz Cody’s face floating over his (like a big white moon like a cue ball), a little trickle of blood on Griz’s fat lips and an eight ball locked in his chubby grip. “C’mon, Shutterbug, it’s showtime! Get your ass off the ground. We want this in living color.” Shoving the eight ball in Shutterbug’s face. “I’m hitting the pocket, ‘bug!”

Hands on Shutterbug, pulling him to his feet. The heavy Kodak jammed in his hands and Shutterbug not even able to stand. Movie lights bleaching shadows, bouncing off the walls and broken furniture masked with dust. Shutterbug leaning against a pinball machine for support, the metal frame cool against the throbbing divot on the side of his head.

Todd and Derwin and Bat and Griz had been laughing then.

They were laughing now.

Laughing at him.

Shutterbug lay on the floor, his silk robe hanging open.

“Look at that bratwurst.” “Looks like a smoked bratwurst.”

“Shit. Looks more like a shriveled-up breakfast link to me.”

“Nine mother-”

There were no hands on Shutterbug now.

He was in his own house, and the year was 1994.

“ -fucker! Hey, Shutterbug’s gettin’ up!”

He was up. And Bat Bautista was in the kitchen, Shutterbug’s kitchen, not paying his host the slightest bit of attention. Bat was too busy chugging a Bud Dry, his head tipped back like a fucking-A tough guy.

Bautista’s white T-shirt barely contained his gone-to-seed belly.

Marvis’s muscles danced like snakes under his black silk robe. He looked like a boxer ready to go to war.

Bautista’s Adam’s apple ceased its bobbing. The beer can was empty. Bat crushed the can and started to lower it. His eyelids were fleshy hoods and there was a smile on his face.

He belched magnificently.

Three steps and Marvis was there. His left fist sank into that big belly, and Bat’s eyes popped open, a couple of eggs ready to do a Humpty Dumpty-nothing but startled whites. And then Marvis’s right fist came across, clipping the big man’s jaw.

Marvis felt the punch all the way up to his shoulder, and he found that the sensation was completely satisfying.

When the sensation faded, he saw that Bautista was down.

Griz Cody was passed out on the floor and made no comment, but Todd Gould-who had dispensed with the surf music in the heat of the moment-screeched a rebel yell.

“One motherfucker!” Derwin MacAskill chanted. “Two motherfucker!”

Bat Bautista didn’t rise. He lay on the floor, resembling nothing so much as a great heaving fish gasping its last on a bone-dry pier. He retched. Bits of cheeseburger and warm beer spilled out of his mouth and puddled on the gleaming tile in Marvis Hanks’s kitchen.

Marvis frowned. Ten bucks per square, that tile.

And then Derwin MacAskill slapped Marvis five, and it was the second time that he had been slapped five in eighteen long years.

“Ten motherfucker!” Derwin shouted. “Damn, Shutterbug! Damn!”