Falls The Shadow

11

His earliest memories were of the three of them, running through the streets, the alleyways, playing hand games during church, rock paper scissors, the slap of Seamus’s two fingers on his wrist during the homilies, the feel of Kylie’s whisper in his ear as she plotted some daring piece of mischief. His mother surely suckled him, his father surely beat him, his sisters surely teased him and tickled him till he cried, but his family was something he suffered through until he could be with his friends. It was Seamus, Kylie, and Wayne, the three of them, always and forever, the trio at the heart of his life.

And he remembered, too, when they first discovered the old textile plant on the other side of the railroad tracks, in the shadow of the highway. As second-graders, they found that the plywood on one low window was shattered enough to climb through, and they spun around on the filthy factory floor, spinning in freedom with their arms stretched wide, until they were dizzy and collapsed laughing.

“Don’t tell anyone,” said Kylie. “This will be ours.”

“Our secret fort,” said Wayne.

And Seamus nodded, and Kylie laughed, and so they laid claim to the dank old place, and it became more home to them than their homes. Clubhouse, playground, sanctuary. The fort. The roof had collapsed, letting in, along with the pigeons, sufficient daylight so they could see comfortably during the day and allowing the smoke from their fires to rise out at night. And this is where they went, the three of them, Seamus, Kylie, and Wayne, to laugh, to play games, to tell stories, to smoke cigarettes when they were older, to drink beer and blow dope when they were older still.

Wayne was the wiry one, the funny one, quick with the joke or the rib. Seamus was bigger, yet meeker, less physical, more sensitive. Ashamed of his teeth, he would never smile, and with the dark beneath his eyes, he always appeared on the verge of tears. Kylie was the spark, pretty and slight. With her dark hair and darker eyes, she was the one with the ideas, the one who could make things happen, a girl full of fun and guile, able to look like the sweetest, most innocent thing on the outside while full of troubling schemes on the inside. And she liked to steal, shivered at the thrill.

She was the one who started them on shoplifting at the corner store, getting Wayne and Seamus to divert the old storekeeper while she stuffed cupcakes and candy down her skirt. And she was the one who started them on stealing bicycles from any kids who happened to leave them lying around unlocked. There were a dozen bicycles, useless and rusting, their tires flat, their bars covered in pigeon dung, leaning against the walls of the fort, a futuristic sculpture of decay. And she was the one who convinced Seamus to stand like a ladder before the open windows of empty houses so she and Wayne could slip in at night or during the shank of the afternoon to grab anything they found lying around. That’s how Seamus got the guitar he played incessantly back at the fort, how Wayne got the leather jacket that was way too big for him, how Kylie got hold of her first pack of cigarettes, swiping a whole carton from a kitchen on Palmer Street.

You could tell she was troubled, Kylie, the way she never ate and got all scrawny, the way she came to the fort with scabs up and down her arms. The first time, she said it was an accident, and after that first time they didn’t talk about it anymore. And you could see the need in her in the way she smoked her cigarettes. Once they got that first pack, and she felt the nicotine rush flow through her like a gift, she was obsessed with getting them, lighting them, smoking them. She inhaled so furiously it was as if she wanted to turn her whole body into ash. There was always a cigarette between her fingers, and she was always scrounging around for another one, and she always needed money to buy them, always.

Then, when they started with the beer, stealing first a couple bottles from Wayne’s father, it wasn’t long before Kylie, her eyes rimmed dark with mascara, was waiting in front of the Chinese take-out place, asking the male customers if they’d take her money and buy her a six-pack. Kylie liked to drink, she drank fast – while they were still cold, she said – and often until she got sick. One corner of the fort, next to the bikes, held a veritable mountain of cans and bottles.

But it was the reefer that changed everything for Wayne. And not just because it turned out to be the best of all ways to waste their days. Or because it started to get expensive, which forced them to be more brazen in their thefts. Or because Kylie took to it as if in marihuana she found what she had been looking for all along. No, for Wayne it was the reefer that changed everything, because it was under its influence that he first realized the truth of their relationship, one to the other.

They were the best of friends, that’s how they saw themselves, more like a family than their families themselves, brothers and sister to one another. And they discussed openly among themselves their boy-girl escapades. Seamus was pretty much useless with the opposite sex, but Wayne was sort of dating Erin McGill and had already been to third with her in Palmer Park. And Kylie always had boys chasing her, boys she would tease and play with and let play with her and then mock back at the fort with Wayne and Seamus as the three got wasted on beer.

But reefer felt different. They were twelve the first time they tried it, when Henry had given Wayne a couple of joints to get him started, and when they lit the first one, Seamus and Kylie went off into a fit of giggling, which pissed Wayne off, because nothing seemed to be happening to him. But the second time, when he hogged the reefer just to make sure it would have some effect, it hit him hard, the dizziness, the fear and paranoia. He closed his eyes, felt the world shift beneath him, feared he’d never recover, that what he had done to himself was permanent. He tried to get control, to fight off the nausea, and when he did, finally, when he opened his eyes, finally, it was as if the world had indeed changed.

He could see things he had never seen before. Kylie looked different, her pretty dark eyes, outlined by the mascara, were sadder than he ever remembered. And Seamus looked different, too, bigger, more handsome, as unreal as a movie actor, playing his guitar as if it were a part of him. And strangest of all, the air between them seemed to shimmer, as if something never before glimpsed had turned hard and real. When Kylie looked at Seamus, and Seamus looked back, it was as if Wayne could see exactly the emotion running between them, and he knew what it was, instantly. It was love. Seamus loved Kylie; Kylie loved Seamus. And the reality of it seemed to settle like a sharp pain into Wayne’s chest. And that was the first time, believe it or not, that Wayne realized, Erin McGill notwithstanding, that he himself was helplessly and hopelessly in love with Kylie, and that Seamus was not just a friend but an adversary.

He couldn’t tell her. How could he tell her? Kylie was his friend, more sister than his sisters, and then there was Seamus, who was always around when Wayne was with her. And what would he say anyway? So he didn’t tell her. Instead, back at the fort, they got high, or wasted on beer when they couldn’t afford the dope, and listened to Seamus play, and rolled around laughing at the rest of the world or poked sullenly at the fires they built at night.

The new plan for getting dope money came to them out of the blue. Kylie was waiting outside the Chinese joint, searching for someone to buy a six-pack for them, when the guy she propositioned, propositioned her right back. Her mind was quick enough to figure out the angle straightaway. She motioned to Seamus and Wayne before leading the man down the street, around the corner, over the railroad tracks, to the fort. And then, just when the creep thought he was going to get some underage action, the boys went at him, Wayne especially. They sent him away, bloodied and broke, and split between them two hundred dollars. It was so simple, so obvious, so safe, because the mark could never go to the police, could he? The next time it didn’t just happen, the next time Kylie cast her gaze like a weighted bass plug and reeled in a mark, and it went off as smooth as the pale skin on her lovely cheek.

And the thing of it, for Wayne, was that it excited him more than he wanted to admit, even to himself. Yes, he liked the huge boom box they bought with the money and kept down at the fort, and yes, he liked being high, like, all the time, but it was the thrill of it that hooked him, different from the other thieving they had done. The angry spurt of jealousy he felt when he saw the mark trying to make his Kylie. The fear that roiled his stomach as he and Seamus followed them across the railroad tracks to the patch of weeds outside the fort, not ever sure how the violence would unfold. The raw thrill of saving Kylie, the girl he loved, from some older man who was putting his hands on her, pulling her close, stroking her hair and rubbing her thigh and bringing his crusty lips close to her innocent mouth. And the fear on the mark’s face, yes, that, too, when they pulled him away, and began to rain on blows, and stripped him of his wallet, and stripped his wallet of cash.

And Wayne would always remember the look on Kylie’s face, flushed and triumphant and proud, and maybe disappointed, too, though that he didn’t understand. And then the way they sat together around the fire at the fort and smoked and laughed and hugged and were as they always were.

Until the one time it didn’t play out like they had planned. When they followed Kylie and the mark, and the mark started fiddling with her hair, started stroking her leg, drew her close, bent down to bury his face in her neck. They rushed in to pull them apart, but she stared at Wayne and Seamus, stared at them with dead eyes, and mouthed to them, clear as chalk on slate, “Go away.” And they did what she said, as they always did what she said, they left, the two of them, left her with the man, left like whipped dogs.

Wayne wanted to go back, to stop it, to stop her, but it was Seamus who kept him away. “It’s what she wants,” he said.

“She doesn’t want him,” said Wayne.

“Or us, or anything,” said Seamus. “She wants only nothing. This is just like the cutting and the drugs. But there’s nothing we can do about it, Wayne. There never has been.”

And so they stayed back, out of sight, just hearing the rude calls of the mark who wasn’t a mark anymore but had become a john. And when it was over, Wayne followed him back across the tracks and fell on him like a wolf and beat him bloody, beat him unconscious, beat him until Seamus pulled Wayne and his red fists off the lifeless figure.

That got the police involved. The man wasn’t dead, but it was close, and all of Fishtown was talking about it. And what they were talking about was that it was the three of them, the trio of degenerate friends, that had done it. The police brought them in, and put them in separate rooms, and laid into them like they were cop killers on the lam. But they said not a word. Wayne’s knuckles had been scraped playing basketball. Seamus had been playing basketball with Wayne that afternoon when Wayne fell on the concrete and ripped up his hand. Kylie didn’t know anything about it. And the guy was an outsider, and pretty soon some other horrific act of violence came to sweep up the neighborhood’s attention, and that was that. Nothing but suspicions.

But that was the end of them, the end of the trio, the end of the fort. They all knew that something had turned, and now beer or reefer or even sex wasn’t enough. So Kylie went off in search of something harder to help her escape from what had become of her life, something that would more easily take her out of herself, and Seamus and Wayne, they went along for the ride. For if that’s what she wanted, self-obliteration, that’s what they wanted, too.

And it wasn’t so hard to find.