position and looks dead but for the smile on his face and Marvis sees that and says uh-uh not me I don’t want no more.
Because Marvis doesn’t need it. He hands Griz Cody the loop of film. Derwin is running around, jumping dead speaker poles, and finally he jumps the fence and climbs a decaying jungle gym and hoots at the bright white square of light. Marvis joins him, climbing the monkey bars, wrapping his arms and legs around them until he’s not quite sure he’ll remember how to untangle himself. He watches as the white square becomes a blot of color and he hears Derwin scream, “FOCUS. FOCUS!” Focus comes switchblade quick and Marvis is surprised when he doesn’t see his name he sees Todd Gould’s basement and April Destino on that pool table and the colors have faded over the years as old 16mm is wont to do and April’s skin is almost parchment yellow and her young gray eyes are tired and defeated but still as gray as gun powder as cold as granite, and the pool table felt is almost brown, almost the color of a sick man’s shit.
Marvis looks away. Sees the hard circle of light pouring from the projector. Sees the truck with Todd and Griz leaning against the grille, gone-to-seed asses planted on the bumper. Can’t see Bat Bautista rooted in the shotgun position but can imagine him there, imagine his frozen smile as he watches himself rape April Louise Destino.
“Bat’s up!” Derwin yells. “All right! Go man go!” But Shutterbug doesn’t turn to see. He has his eye on the truck, on the projector, on the hard circle of light spilling from the lens, on the cold slivers of ghostly ectoplasm steaming from the vent grille mounted next to the collection wheel. And behind it he can see forever, forever in the cold slivers of light. “Look at Todd! Fool used to have hair on his head! Get ’er, Todd boy, get ’er!” Shutterbug sees the silhouettes of Chevy if-this-vehicle’s-rockin-don’t-bother-knockin vans and muscle cars-Cougars and Mustangs and Barracudas and Trans-Ams. And silhouettes inside the cars, he sees them, too. Passion-wrapped shadows and it ain’t just a concept he can see them clearly. The girls from his wall are in those cars. He can smell the scents they wear, scents he has memorized so thoroughly that he can pick them out over the smells of fresh motor oil and stale popcorn and the electric sizzle of car heaters. And those beautiful girls are watching the world premiere of his film while eager hands explore their bodies, eager tongues and lips brush their young skin.
Derwin screams. “Yeah man! Look at me! Man! Hard-body! Eighteen and ready! Oh man the bitch is in trouble now!”
“What kind of trouble?” Todd wants to know. “She need a lawn mowed or something?”
“Shut up, asshole! Just you shut up your motherfucking bald self! You watch close and see what a real man got!”
Shutterbug wants to know how to be a real man but he doesn’t turn to look. He can’t take his eyes off the cars, all the dark passionshadows staring at him from behind half-fogged windshields dappled with dead bugs. He knows they aren’t real. Not the muscle cars, not the tangled bodies, not the crushed yellow jackets and broken moths. Wrapped in the monkey bars, he tells himself that they are only illusions. They are ghosts from 1976 and they would never come here again because the part of them that loved this place is dead. But Shutterbug also knows that he sees them, and he sees what his film is doing to them even if they are only shadows he sees how they react to the freak show on the big screen. He sees how it drives them wild in their big cars, how they tear at each other in the hard light of April’s torment, how they kiss with shadow lips and bite with shadow teeth.
He can almost hear their joyous screams and the name of the film must be April Destino Goes to Hell.
Four men. A beautiful girl. A brown felt hell with pockets full of brimstone.
And then Shutterbug does hear a scream and it comes from Griz Cody and it rides over Derwin’s laughter and Todd’s howls of derision. “The bitch!” Griz screams. “The bitch!” And it is as if he actually forgot what happened, actually convinced himself over the years that he had shoved his limp cock into April Destino and she had loved it and loved him, convinced himself that he had not ended up slapping her with his limp dick and pinching her like a sick fuck until his self-loathing rose to a point he couldn’t control and his fat fist closed around an eight ball.
“What a man!” bald Todd chides.
“Ain’t another like him!” lawn-mowing Derwin says.
Griz Cody’s fist slams against the projector. It tumbles. Crashes. A metal arm snaps off and is caught in a tangle of skunk cabbage and the smell is pure licorice, pure black because the projector’s light is gone and the shadows are gone behind it. Gone. The cars and the vans and the ghosts of 1976 are torn to bits and gone.
But the scream remains, though it doesn’t belong Griz Cody. Shutterbug thinks that it is April screaming her lungs out in the dark basement because she is trapped there and wrecked on spiked punch and now they are raping her with an eight ball. But the truck lights bloom and he realizes that he is screaming because he can’t squirm free from the cold grip of the monkey bars. The shadows are gone but they won’t let him go. And Derwin helps him, laughing at first but then with genuine concern in his voice he helps Shutterbug back to the truck, Shutterbug scrambling there on hands and knees, tearing his palms on hard gravel tears that spill from
April’s granite eyes.
“The bitch,” Griz Cody mutters. “The bitch.”
Todd and Derwin trade Sonny Liston stares and Shutterbug is sure they are going to tear into each other for the cracks they made about being bald and mowing lawns. But Bat Bautista steps down from the shotgun position. “It’s okay,” he says, his lips hardly moving, the grin still frozen on his face. He keeps saying that it is okay and Shutterbug doesn’t know if he is talking to Todd and Derwin or to Griz or to all of them. “This wasn’t any fun,” Bat says. “The bitch is dead and she ruined it for us. But we’ll get her. She wasn’t ever anything. We’ll go to the graveyard. Piss right on her grave.”
Griz laughs. “Hell no. We’ll do better than that. We’ll dig the bitch up. We’ll-”
“You sick cracker,” Derwin says. “You always was sick and you always will be.”
“No,” Griz goes on. “Remember the big fiberglass cow on top of that dairy on Springs Road? Remember how we used to steal it every year and put it up on the top of the high school?”
“Yeah,” Todd says, scratching his bald head. “Yeah?”
“We’ll put her coffin right up on top of the high school,” Griz says. “Prop her up like Jack-in-the-fuckin’-Box. Right up there for God and everybody to see”
“Yeah!” Todd says. “Yeah!”
“I don’t know,” Derwin whispers. “I’m all for pissing on her grave, but I don’t know if I’m up for this digging her up shit.”
Shutterbug can’t believe someone actually spoke those words in the world he has known. He can’t believe it. He bends to the one-armed projector and takes the reel. The old film slaps against his wrist in the warm breeze. And then he finds himself saying, “No… No.”
But they are already at the cemetery when he says it.
The four jocks stand a good distance away. From Shutterbug’s perspective they look like the shadow people of 1976. But he knows they are not shadow people or ghosts because he can feel their fright.
Derwin says, “Somebody already did it, man. Some sick fuck already dug her up.”
“Who?” Todd wants to know.
“Too weird.” Griz Cody’s knees pop as he bends down. He hands something to Bat Bautista. Gingerly.
“Broken beer bottle,” Bat says. “Somebody’s been out here playing graveyard baseball.”
“They still play that?” Derwin asks.
“Somebody does,” Bat says.
Shutterbug wants to ask who it was. He wants to know what graveyard baseball is. He wants to know why there is a hole in the ground where April should be. He wants to ask these questions, and he wants to join the four men who brought him to this place, but he realizes that he can’t, because he can’t move. He looks down.
Shadows pool at his feet like thick snakes, pouring, spilling, twining around his ankles.
The shadows gasp and exhale and the sound is a low whistle. Shutterbug screams. Truck lights flare. The thick snakes collapse, but the shadows remain in the light.
Not snakes. Human arms.
The wounded man with arms like snakes draws a heavy breath and doesn’t move again. He is on his back and his thick arms extend from his sides and his palms are open to the night sky above. He exhales and the sound is a low whistle. A bandana of blood circles his forehead, coursing from his scalp and filling the hard wrinkles above his white eyebrows.
The others are talking but Shutterbug cannot take his eyes off the wounded man. He watches the man’s
