Slide - Kyle Beachy [86]
“And marvel?” I asked.
“That's right.”
Behind him, some of the others raised hands in greeting. I nodded and continued down the sidewalk.
The pool house was dark, as was the pool itself. I could hear voices, though, a series of syllables wrapped in our Missouri cadence of reluctant twang. As I got closer I saw them: beastly ogre, lithe vamp, and fallen sage.
My God, did I smell awful.
I shut the fence gate behind me. The deck was dry. I stepped over the rafts and recliners that had been dragged ashore and took a seat at the table with my three arbiters. Gray faces, shadowed. They had stopped talking when I reached the gate, leaving a silence of the sort I could tell was my responsibility to break. Marianne pulled on her cigarette and we heard the crispy burn of tobacco and paper backed by the slosh of pool drainage system. My eyes went from my old friend, shirtless and weary-eyed, to the girl and her long, knobby-knuckled fingers raised to hold her smoke. I brushed a mosquito away from my face and looked at Edsel. Countenance of cardboard.
“These pictures are nothing. You've got nothing.”
“Don't be a fool,” he said.
The beard had grown back into something thick and bushy. I maintained steady eye contact and labored to project calm disinterest. He leaned back in his chair, raised his hands to his head, elbows out. He wore a T-shirt with cutoff sleeves, those ridiculous arms flexing convulsively. How selfish and paranoid his arms were tonight, hoarding strength like this, taunting our own meager limbs.
Marianne reached for the ashtray and snuffed her cigarette. “Just to be clear, Potter, anyone over twenty-one who has sexual intercourse with a person less than seventeen is guilty of statutory rape in the second degree.”
“Didn't ask. Did not ask you a question.”
No shadows could conceal the truth of tonight's caucus. Stuart lit another cigarette and passed it to her. I knew of this girl's drive to alienate wealthy, generous Stuart from his closest male friend. Lithe and prettier than I had previously admitted, she was circling, closing in on her lame, confused kill.
“You should know also that our state of Missouri defines sexual intercourse as any penetration, however slight. Whether or not there's emission.”
“Don't like you,” I said. “Never have. Don't trust you. Don't like looking at you. Don't think I'd mind if you disappeared forever.”
“That's plenty” Stuart said.
In the moments that followed, there was momentum gathering. I was certain we all felt it. The force had been revealed the first time I saw the photographs at the game. Plain envelope opened to reveal images of stark confirmation, heavy iron ball set into motion along this steady downhill road. And now details were falling into place, exit ramps were closing, alternatives erased as part of this narcotic certitude.
I felt something tickly on my arm and waved it away. If the lights were indeed turned off to keep away mosquitoes, why wasn't the citronella candle lit? I waved away another one.
“We're looking at a blackmail of the classic model,” Edsel said. “Industry standard.”
I could sense a smirk beneath the beard. As with Marianne, there was little ambiguity to the ogre this evening. I had told him I feared him and I meant it in every possible way. He was first and foremost an asshole, but he was also a plotter, a man who found happiness in the creation and performance of schemes, which admittedly required commitment and a strong sense of organization.
“I will give you a list of demands you will have to meet. You don't meet them, the pictures will go first to your father, then to Derrick Hoyne, former State Senator John Dunleavy the Ladue police department, and whoever else I can come up with.”
“You conniving son of a bitch.”
“All the names you want, bucko. Blow off steam.”
Time passed loudly. How foolish I'd been to think the spinning I had heard these past nights, that not-unpleasant whirring from the shadows, was plot. Such was my inexperience with the device. In actuality, that sound was freedom, rotating contingencies,