Slide - Kyle Beachy [81]
“There's an official term for what you're doing there,” he said.
I left the photos in my lap and stared intently at the field. Ball goes here, you move here, back up this man.
“Potter.”
“Dry humping,” I said.
“I was thinking statutory rape.”
There is no mystery to the past. At any time you could stop and glance behind you and see the steps, how this then this, this, and now here you were. I was at the Meet ‘n’ Greet Happy Hour sympathizing for the failed ogre, poor failed Edsel, and admitting things to him that I should not have admitted. He was failing so badly at legitimate business that he relapsed into his natural state of assholery to dangle filthy notions of the developmentally disabled in front of me like some reverse bait, some catalyzing atrocity on a string. I was fleeing and stumbling headfirst to the safety of home and the angel next door, Edsel's first success of the night.
“How did he get there?” I said. “A cab? He hailed a cab, said Arbor Drive and step on it. And he carries a camera around with him?”
“Not the most important thing, here.”
“That devious piece of. My God, I reached out to him, Stubes! I saw him fail. I watched it happen. And he turns that around? Uses failure to catch me off guard? What kind of person? And you're friends with this ogre shit? Fine. That's fine. But you have to listen to me on one thing. This was not sex. I will stand by this all night long.”
“Those pictures would seem to basically obliterate doubt.”
“Explain that neither of us removed underpants.”
“You are on top of her like some ravenous beast. Look at the poor girl. She looks like a victim.”
I flipped through the pictures. We were standing. Next we were horizontal in the grass, legs flat. Zoe looked small and helpless beneath me, and there was no pleasure in what could be seen of the girl's face. Next her little shoeless feet were flat on the ground, knees up and bent. I looked like some invading army between her legs. Next I was holding one of them, lifting it to my waist.
“I am not a bad person. I have done bad things but I am mostly good. I am overall good. I'm not a rapist.”
“I know that,” he said. “Except, also, yes you are.”
“What am I supposed to do here? How many copies of these pictures exist? They should be mine, shouldn't they? They're of me. This is me, my body, a private moment. Edsel. Goddammit all. I have to find him, don't I? I'll face him and demand he hand over the pictures. This is not his concern, this private moment. But Jesus, Stubes, he's so big. What if he says no? I can't possibly overpower him.”
“Fighting with him will get you nothing but hurt,” he said.
“I've never felt so helpless in my life. Come on, Stubes. You two are friends. Aren't you? My stomach, Jesus. Talk to him for me. These pictures should mean nothing to him. Okay, it's funny, isn't it? We'll have a laugh over it. Jesus. Stuart. I said he was trouble. Didn't I? I said, what's that asshole doing at the pool house.”
“If I'm you, Potter, I might accept that he has the pictures. You can't change that. You can't un-statutory rape this girl. Edsel is treating the pictures as a commodity with a value yet to be determined. He knows he has something and he wants something else. The only power you have here is doing what you can to give Edsel what he wants. He has proposed a sit-down with the four of us together, a frank, levelheaded examination of the situation as it stands.”
A new beer vendor had a mustache with tips pinned by sweat to his cheeks. Above center field, the jumbotron flashed words and chants. I had a terrible image of my father and Derrick Hoyne dining together at Sportsman's Park, an amicable neighborly meal until the photographs appeared on the restaurant's TV I saw my mother and Nancy Hoyne in their book club, each woman holding an album full of these pictures. I tasted puke, anxious in