secret place that even the saddest songs of his youth couldn’t reach. He hadn’t been this frightened in a long, long time. Fear was peeling his confidence layer by layer, like the skin of an onion, searching for the nervous kid that was still locked in his heart.
Four ghosts from the past stood on his front lawn. Above their heads, hanging from the limbs of fruitless mulberries planted by Shutterbug’s father, toilet-paper streamers danced on the warm April breeze.
Tonight the star of Shutterbug’s first 16mm short lay six feet under, and he knew with sickening certainty that this visit had something to do with her death. “Hey, Shutterbug, wanna go to the movies?” Once more, fugitive laughter chain-sawed Shutterbug’s confidence. These idiots were going to get him into trouble. Real trouble. Raising hell in the middle of the night. Talking about movies. Screaming about movies so everyone was sure to hear-
“C’mon, Shutterbug. We ain’t got no projector. We ain’t even got no movie. We knew your ass has got ’em both.”
“And popcorn! I bet you’ve got some gooood popcorn in there, too, and some goddamn real butter! C’mon, Shutterbug! Let’s go to the drive-in!”
“Yeah! Let’s go to the drive-in! Let’s have a world-fucking premiere!”
“C’mon, ’bug. We already got the beer!” Drunken cheers followed the last comment. Shutterbug’s fingers were frozen on the drape cord. Porch lights flared across the street. First at the Hamners’. Then at the Irbys’. Finally, at Mrs. Prater’s.
“Lights! Camera! Action!” came the cry from the front yard.
An empty bottle shattered on the cement driveway, just short of Shutterbug’s prized Jaguar. Shutterbug backed away from the window and bumped into the pool table. The cold brass frame was like dry ice on his palms. He turned quickly and caught the eight ball just as it was about to drop into the side pocket. He squeezed it, and it was so cold and so perfectly round and smooth in his hand that he had to drop it before he surrendered to the temptation to throw it through the window, at the men outside.
Anger had eclipsed his fear. And suddenly he was standing in the kitchen, hovering over the telephone without even remembering the trip from the living room. Jesus, he was frazzled. 911. That’s what he needed to do. Just dial it. Let someone else handle this. The cops. People like his father would know how to handle-
The doorbell chimed. Once. Twice. And then did nothing but chime.
“Ding dong the bitch is dead! C’mon! Let’s celebrate! Open up, Shutterbug!”
No, he couldn’t call the cops. They might want to enter the house. Once inside, they had the right to look around, didn’t they? That could spell disaster. And besides, Shutterbug’s uninvited visitors were drunk. They might tell the cops about the old 16mm loop. Or worse, they might make real trouble-insult the cops, force them to bust some ass or make some arrests. Shutterbug shook his head. He couldn’t let that happen. If he did, the idiots on the front lawn would be ticked at him for real.
And then they would most assuredly return on another night.
Shutterbug’s anger subsided. The forgotten fears of his youth resurfaced. He remembered the way the men on the lawn had treated him when they were boys. The bullying and the taunts he had endured, and all the rest of it. And now these same bullies were older, probably- most certainly- meaner. Now they were men, capable of so much more.
But Marvis had changed, too. He wasn’t a skinny punk anymore. He might still think of himself as Shutterbug, but now he was truly Big Marvis Hanks’s son. He had grown since high school. Put on some muscle. Health club membership and Bay to Breakers every year and all that.
The guys on the lawn had spent the intervening years drinking beer, going to seed.
Marvis weighed the situation, but he couldn’t convince himself that anything had really changed. The old fears were too strong. Besides, there were four of them. He reached for the phone. It rang before he could touch it, and he hated the terrified little gasp that escaped his Nautilus-constructed chest as he snatched up the receiver.
Mrs. Prater’s voice came at him in a trembling whisper. “Mr. Hanks? Are you all right over there?”
Shutterbug wanted to say, No, I’m not, but he I couldn’t do it. He couldn’t start the ball rolling. The last thing he needed was a cop on his doorstep when the video decks were whizzing busily in the basement, making copy after copy of Shelly Desmond’s latest porno sampler.
Erotica, dammit! Shutterbug corrected himself, only barely trapping the words inside, sparing old Mrs. Prater’s tender ears.
“Mr. Hanks. You there, Mr. Hanks? You want me to call the cops?”
The men were pounding on the front door now.
“ Babalu! Babalu ay yaaayyyy!”
“ C’mon, ’bug! Fuckin’Ayyyyyyy!”
“No, Mrs. Prater. Don’t call anyone.” Shutterbug barely whispered the words. “But thank you. And I’m sorry to wake you. This is all some kind of joke. Some old friends are a little drunk and they’re having a good time and… Well, I’m sorry the party got out of hand.”
Shutterbug hung up before Mrs. Prater could say another word.
He reached the front door in four long strides. Opened it. Recognized their sagging heavy faces, not at all like the faces he had photographed in 1976. Griz Cody. Todd Gould. Derwin MacAskill. Joaquin “Bat” Bautista. Members of the A-Squad Four jocks, each chosen as the best in his particular sport during Shutterbug’s senior year. One from football, one from track, one from basketball, and one from baseball. Shutterbug remembered the yearbook picture-four young guys, glowing grins, letterman jackets heavy with patches and medals, thumbs locked in frayed Levi’s belt loops. Bell-bottom jeans and shiny black boots.
“Hey, ’bug!” Griz Cody raised a fat hand, and Shutterbug was slapped five for the first time in eighteen long years. The simple slap was a one-way ticket to 1976.
Cody’s fingers curled, as if he were ready to grip an eight ball. “It’s showtime!” he laughed.
“Hanks!” The voice came from the other side of the street, and the men on the porch turned as one, “Hey, Hanks! You got trouble over there?”
The thick-shouldered black man who had spoken was dressed in his pajamas. He stood in the amber glow of a streetlight, a Louisville Slugger grasped in his big black hands.
Marvis recognized his neighbor, Joe Hamner.
“No trouble, man,” Derwin MacAskill said. “We just comin’ to visit our old homeboy here, is all.”
“That’s right.” Shutterbug tried to sound a little drunk but couldn’t pull it off. “No trouble, Joe. Sorry to bother you… We didn’t mean for the party to get out of hand.” The excuse now seemed welded to his lips. It just kept popping up, and it made him feel as if he were a little doll. Someone was pulling his string and the same words kept spilling out. The Shutterbug doll. It apologizes. It wimps out. It sweats. Smell its fear.
But the lousy excuse didn’t matter, because Joe Hamner was already heading for his front door. “Shit,” he began, tossing a string of curses over his shoulder. “I got to be on the yard at six. Get those assholes off your lawn. Hanks, or I’ll call the law.”
Todd Gould, the one-time track star, edged past Shutterbug. The yellow porch light reflected dully on Gould’s balding pate. “Man, you need to move to a better neighborhood,” Gould said through a smirk. “I couldn’t take having the black Charles Bronson for a neighbor.”
“Charles Bronson?” Derwin MacAskill followed Gould. “ Shee-it. You mean John Fuckin’ Shaft. He’s one bad mother-”
“Shut your mouth!” Griz Cody laughed, shouldering through the doorway.
And Joaquin “Bat” Bautista, bringing up the rear with six-packs of Bud Dry cradled in his big arms, added, “Well we can dig it!”
1:35 A.M.
Ice cubes crackled as The Six Million Dollar Man poured three fingers of Jack Daniel’s into his glass, the brittle sound playing sharp and hard off the cement walls of his fortress of solitude. Echoes, he thought, staring at the door that separated him from the world. Damn straight. I’ll tell you about echoes, friends.
