“Flashlights” by Zack Bean
Fall 2007, Volume 31, Number 2
The year of my first kiss, ninety-nine people were murdered in Little Rock. Danger hovered over our lives like a cloud, and violence was in the air we breathed. I was playing shortstop in a 14-and-under coed fall softball league, and occasionally a spray of distant gunshots mingled with the infield chatter. We pounded our gloves and spat in the dirt and pulled our caps low to shield our eyes from the glare of the lights. Sometimes on the way home I’d see the big sedans gliding like sharks down city streets, their headlights sweeping across yards and alleys, flushing out small animals with glittering eyes. Weekends I ran with my brother Mac and his friends. After dark we’d hike to the quarry behind my house, where we’d sit around getting high and telling lies and tossing empty bottles down into the bauxite pits. Once we walked all the way out to the overpass and Mac dropped a rock onto a car passing below, just for the hell of it. The rock crashed through the windshield with a sick crunch, and the car skidded and fishtailed into the median. It was a good year to be bad; life seemed brutal and sexy and short, and we rushed to drink it down. When I got a chance to sneak under the bleachers with a big-hipped brunette eating a purple snow cone, life exploded into something else entirely.
This was September. After a summer of baseball, the softball seemed unnaturally large in my hand, and I had trouble wrapping my fingers around it. My throws across the infield were hard and wild, often coming up short, but our first baseman could dig them out of the dirt. Angela knew how to stretch and scoop, how to keep her head down and stay with the low ball. She lived right across the street from the ballpark, and so, like me, she was more at home on the diamond than in her own house. She had those big thighs that are singular to the type of athletic girls who play soccer and softball, and years later I would find myself roaming the intramural fields at the local University, looking for those same thighs on other girls. In the dugout between innings, Angela would brush off her jersey and re-apply her mascara and lipstick, something the other girls made fun of her for. I recall two in particular, skinny girls both named Sarah, who sat at the end of the bench and giggled in a conspiratorial manner. Slut, they whispered, and looked to me for confirmation. But I liked the ruby-colored lips, the dark lashes, the blue with a hint of silver around the eyes, like the sky just before dawn. I leaned against the chain link fence and concentrated on the game.
I’ve always loved community ballparks, the unsupervised kids who play in the sandbox and suck down pixie sticks, the cheap hot dogs and nachos with canned cheese sauce, the pounding of feet on metal bleachers when the team needs a rally. After our games, I usually didn’t feel like walking home alone, so I would hang around the ballpark until it closed, watching the adult league games. Those teams were filled with fat, tattooed men who kept packs of cigarettes in rolled in their shirt sleeves. They blasted long foul balls that sailed into the woods behind the left field line, and the concession shack gave a free snow cone to anyone who shagged one down. I usually got two or three a night.
One night I had gotten my snow cone and was walking away from the shack when a hand tapped me on the shoulder. I’d been on cloud nine all evening, because our team had won a tight game on a two-out double that I hit in the seventh. I turned around and saw Angela standing there. She had changed into blue jeans and a black halter, and she’d put on dangly silver earrings that girls weren’t allowed to wear during the game. “You going to share that with me?” she asked.
“Take the whole thing,” I said. “I’ve already had one tonight.”
We walked down the right field fence, towards the empty little league field. I reached down and picked up a piece of gravel, tossed it idly from hand to hand. The whole park was dirt and little chunks of granite gravel except for the fields. Behind us, the ping! of an aluminum bat, then an eruption of shouts and cheers.
“Does your dad play here or something?” Angela asked.
“No. My dad’s at work,” I said.
“My dad’s in left field,” she said. “He’s the one who makes me play in this stupid league.”
“You’re pretty good,” I said, but she just shrugged.
I was close enough to smell the baby powder on her skin, along with a hint of vanilla. Our arms brushed a couple of times as we walked; she didn’t smile but didn’t make space either. It occurred to me that Mac would know what to do. He was sixteen, and had done things with girls that I hadn’t even thought of yet. I knew because sometimes I could hear his girlfriends through the thin walls, a high pitched-laugh or a sharp gasp or the rhythmic creaking of a mattress. He loved all girls, black white, short or tall, thin or fat, as long as they gave him what he wanted, and they always did. He was as concerned as I was about my lack of experience with the opposite sex, probably more. I felt lucky to have him as a brother.
Angela and I stopped walking when we were parallel with the right fielder. We shouldn’t have stopped, I thought, because now I didn’t know how to start us walking again.
“Some of the other girls on the team are jealous of you,” I said.
“The Sarahs don’t know anything,” she said. “They’re still virgins, just babies. I’ve had sex twice.”
She pushed her hair behind her ear and looked out at the field as she said this. I didn’t have an answer for that one, so we stood silently for a couple of minutes before Angela walked away with my snow cone. “See you around,” she said. I wondered if I’d done something wrong.
<hr>
For several years, Mac and I had been sneaking out to the quarry after midnight. I suppose there wasn’t really much sneaky about it, since our father worked third shift at a plant making ball bearings, and Mac and I were home alone six nights a week. Perhaps part of the pleasure of these adventures came from the illusion that we were getting away with something. We took a shortcut through the woods because there was always trouble prowling the streets, and we kept our flashlights turned off most of the way to save batteries, and because it was more fun in the dark. On moonless nights we stumbled over fallen branches and protruding rocks, waving our hats in front of us to knock down the spider webs.
Sometimes we’d meet up with a couple of other guys from the neighborhood to play a game called flashlights. The game went like this: At the beginning, everyone scattered into the dark. Each of us had a flashlight, and the object was to catch someone else in your flashlight’s beam. Of course, as soon as you turned on your flashlight, everyone knew where you were, so the trick was to keep moving, and click your flashlight on only briefly, only when you were certain you knew where someone was. It was basically a souped-up version of hide-and-seek, with everyone constantly hiding and seeking. We ran full out over dirt and rocks, leaping over divots and skirting the ridges of steep embankments of blast zones where the earth opened below like a giant mouth. The landscape was dotted with small mountains of rocks that were great for climbing or hiding in, basins that we could dive into and sprawl flat out in to avoid detection, and bulldozers and backhoes that had always looked as if they had been vacated in the middle of a job. The game always left me sweaty, covered in dirt, and physically exhausted. Sometimes I stopped midway through and climbed a pile of rocks while the others were still playing, so that I could sit and watch as little pieces of the world around me blinked in and out of existence.
Mac and I went to the quarry alone on the night that I gave Angela my snow cone. We sat above a large bauxite pit smoking cigarettes and then flicking the butts down without extinguishing them, so that we could watch the glowing cherries’ long dance to the bottom. Mac was telling me about Jack Kerouac’s trip across the country, and wouldn’t it be great if he and I could get in a car and drive to California some day. “Just think if we had a van,” I said. I hadn’t mentioned Angela yet; I was waiting for the right moment.
After we’d exhausted the topic of Kerouac and cross country trips, I did finally tell Mac about Angela, to ask him what I should have done. He made me recount every thing that happened, stopping every few sentences to ascertain some detail I hadn’t mentioned, like was she wearing lip gloss, and did she lick the snow cone or bite it. “You have to learn to keep a tally of these things in your head,” he told me. When I got to the part where she said she’d had sex twice, Mac whistled. He remained silent for a moment, then put a hand on my shoulder.
“Listen, Bro. Sounds like you did all right, except maybe you shouldn’t have let her take your snow cone. Rule number one: you’re better than her. You’re always better than her, no matter who she is. You want to hook up with this Angela girl, it has to be that you’re doing her a favor, not the other way around. Establish that, then just get her alone.”
“What if I don’t get another chance?” I asked.
“She’ll be back,” Mac said.
The next week, I didn’t say hello to Angela before our game, I didn’t smile at her or look at her during warm-ups, I sat on the other end of the bench in the dugout. I tried to convince myself I was better than her, but this made me feel like a fraud. So I just did my best to ignore her, and concentrated on my own performance. I noticed that the other team had made the mistake of putting their weakest player in right field. That worked okay in baseball, but a smart softball coach would put a big slow girl behind the plate, where nobody could hit the ball past her and then take extra bases while she chased it down. I closed my stance and hit two triples down the right field line. After the game, I hung around the ballpark to watch the adults as was my habit. I pretended not to notice that Angela, who had went home and changed clothes since the game, continually hovered somewhere in front of me , never behind. Her father’s team was not even playing that night. After I got my first free snow cone of the night, I caught her looking at me. I nodded, and she came and sat next to me on the bleachers.
“I’ll be back. Hold this, but don’t eat any of it,” I said, handing her the snow cone. I trotted off to the bathroom and tried to piss, even though I didn’t need to. I would’ve stayed away longer, but the bathroom carried that peculiar stench characteristic of public restroom facilities, the odor of damp cinderblock mixed with a few decades’ accumulation of stale urine. When I returned to my seat, Angela was still there with my snowcone, though I couldn’t tell if she had eaten any of it or not. She tried to hand it back to me.
“Oh, just keep it,” I said. “I don’t want it anymore.”
We sat in silence for several seconds, but it felt okay, like it was my silence. When it got awkward, Angela spoke up.
“You really smoked that right fielder tonight. Was that on purpose?”
“Of course,” I said, keeping my eyes on the field. Then I turned to her. “Do you have any cigarettes?”
We went out to the woods behind left field, as if we were searching for a foul ball. I checked behind us to make sure her father wasn’t around. Everyone knew why kids went to the woods. Angela said little and nibbled at her snow cone. A freckle-faced boy of about ten was kicking around the weeds out there. “Don’t get snake bit,” I told him. He continued to poke and prod the weeds in our vicinity, and I could see he wasn’t going to leave us alone, so we began circling around the outfield in the woods, towards the smaller baseball field that squatted behind the right field fence of the adult field.
We were about halfway around the outfield when a loud crash resounded through the air. It was one of those late summer storms that drops down out of nowhere and blows open the sky. The thunder was so close we could feel it, and in the instant it took for us to recognize what was going on, Angela grabbed my arm. Suddenly we were being pelted by big pellets of water.
“Come on!” I said, taking her hand. We jogged around behind the outfield fence, then emerged from the bushes behind center field and ran in the alley between the small field and the large field. The players and umpires had all made for the dugouts, and the fans were huddled together beneath the overhang of the concession shack. By the time we made it to the bleachers by the kiddy field, we were soaked to the bone. We hunkered beneath the bleachers all the same, where we were hidden from view of the adult field by a large sign on the right field fence that advertised a local construction company. A flash of lightning backlit a cloud above us, and for an instant it looked like something solid, like a great floating lantern tethered to the Earth by a thread of blue fire.
Angela was still holding her snow cone. The water plastered her hair to her head, which made her face appear disproportionately large. Her mascara and eye shadow were bleeding down her face, and her lipstick was smudged and stained from the snow cone. “Oh, god,” she said, putting her free hand to her face.
I laughed and took her wrist. “You look beautiful,” I said, which was the truth. This seemed to startle her. She spread her lips in an open-mouth smile, and we drew close.
I didn’t know where to put my hands, and I cursed Mac for not having told me. He’d taught me other things I didn’t need to know yet – he’d drawn diagrams of female anatomy and showed me where to rub or lick, and he’d stolen one of our grandmother’s bras and made me practice unsnapping it until I could do it blindfolded with one hand behind my back. But he’d never told me where to put my hands when kissing a girl, and as many times as I’d imagined this moment, I’d never thought of that detail. I rubbed my hands up and down her back for a few seconds before moving one hand up the back of her neck and into her hair, and resting the other on the small of her back.
I remember the surprise of her tongue, frozen and purple, like a slippery grape popsicle inside my mouth. And there was the strangeness of feeling someone else’s teeth with my own tongue, like little pieces of undercooked corn. I delighted in this discovery, but even as the moment was passing, I felt a tinge of sadness at the thought that I would never have another first kiss; this was it. The rain thudded down onto the bleachers above us in huge droplets, exploding into a fine spray that came through the slats between the benches and fizzled down around us. I shut my eyes. I wished I could step outside of myself, to see what we looked like.
I wanted the night to last forever, so I invited Angela over to our house. After the rain stopped and the skies cleared, she went home and told her parents she was staying the night with a girlfriend. I strolled home alone, thinking about my life. The clouds thinned, and a few glimmering stars poked through the night sky. On the way home, a golden retriever loped across someone’s lawn to meet me, then returned to the yard and rolled over onto its back so that it could wriggle in the wet grass. In the house behind the dog, the windows flickered in a blue glow from a television inside, where someone was probably curled on the couch, having a perfectly ordinary night. Somewhere in the distance, a barrage of gunshots went off. When I got home, I told Mac everything that had happened. I told him that Angela was coming over. He winked.
“High five little bro,” he said.
I don’t know what my expectations were for that night – I hadn’t imagined exactly what would happen when Angela came over, only that it would be somehow magical, something special. When she did arrive an hour later, I saw that she had changed clothes again. For some reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on, this disappointed me.
“Got anything to eat?” she asked.
I microwaved us all some frozen burritos and made a pitcher of purple kool-aid with extra sugar. She only ate half of her burrito, so Mac took the rest without asking. I was eager to get his opinion of her, but if he was impressed, he didn’t show it. I suggested we all play Yahtzee!, but Mac said that was a lame idea, so instead I looked for a movie to watch. I popped in The Natural, which I’d recorded from television one Sunday afternoon a couple of years earlier. Mac sat in Dad’s old recliner, where he leaned back and tossed a Nerf football up in the air repeatedly. I cozied up next to Angela on the couch and put my arm around her.
I never knew what a boring movie The Natural could be until that night. I had watched it several times before and had loved it, but that night, I found myself impatient. This was made worse by the fact that I had recorded it on TV, so the movie was interrupted by two-year-old commercials and promos for the ‘91 Series between the Braves and Twins (which the Twins won, 4-3). This rekindled my anger at Lonnie Smith for blowing the series with a base-running error in the eighth inning of game seven. I vented my fury anew, and Angela sighed. Mac gave me a look that said cut it out. We’d lost the remote to the VCR some months ago, so I found myself walking across the room to fast-forward through the commercials. The pace still seemed too slow, however, and soon I was fast-forwarding through the boring parts of the movie as well, explaining the plot as I went. After a few minutes, I just turned the damn thing off.
“This is boring,” I said. “Let’s go to the bauxite pits.”
“The quarry? What for?” Angela asked.
Mac slapped the football in his palm. “Man, little bro, you sure know how to impress a lady. I can’t think of a better place for a first date than a giant hole in the ground surrounded by piles of rocks.”
“I’ll get the flashlights,” I said. “We’ll have a game.”
I gathered the flashlights. We had two nice Maglights, the sleek and heavy flashlights favored by policeman for their reliability and their dual function as a blunt clubbing instrument. One of the Maglights was a Christmas present from dad, the other Mac had stolen from a security guard at a Def Leppard concert a couple of years earlier. I gave my Maglight to Angela and brought a large and clunky yellow plastic flashlight of Dad’s for myself. This would be the first and only time that I took a girl to the quarry. Looking back, I suppose I was excited to share a place that was so important to me, that it was a little like sharing a piece of myself. Mac led the way down the path through the woods, and I followed with flashlight on for Angela’s sake, explaining the rules of the game on the way there. When we came to the clearing at the edge of the quarry, Mac reached up and shook an overhanging branch, and a shower of water rained off the leaves and down onto our heads. “Game on!” he shouted, then there was the soft thudding of his footsteps racing away. I leaned over and kissed Angela’s cheek. “Be careful,” I whispered, and then I scrambled through the mud into the darkness.
Of course, Mac and I had no trouble lighting her up. Here she was trying creep behind a heap of rocks, and there she was crouching behind the tread of a Caterpillar machine, still slick with water from the recent rain. It seemed a little like the Angela show, where a spotlight flickered on her every thirty seconds or so, while Mac and I ran circles around her in the dark, the beam of her flashlight only able to find the empty space we had occupied a second before. With our years of experience, it was a little too easy. We knew where all the best places to hide were, and how to create a misdirection by turning on our flashlights and swinging them one way with our arm while moving our bodies in the opposite direction. After a few minutes, Mac let himself appear in Angela’s beam.
“Got me,” he said. “You’re getting better.”
I was circling behind them both, running full speed along the edge of one of the smaller pits closest to the highway when I turned my ankle in the mud and slipped down. I let out a sharp cry, something like a yelp, and then I tumbling down into the hole, the tiny rocks biting into my shoulders and arms as I rolled. The pit was not very deep, but I was still surprised when I stretched out and found my body intact after I rolled to a stop. Above, Mac shouted my name.
“I’m down here!” I cried.
It was pitch black in the hole, and I had dropped my flashlight. I began feeling around for it, running my hands over the wet rock around me. I stopped when I felt a strange lump in the rock around me, something cold and greasy and oddly sticky beneath my fingers. The synapses fired and in an instant of nightmarish recognition, something stirred in the deep haunts of my subconscious and I shuddered. I knew what I was touching before I believed it.
I jerked my hand back, wiped it on my jeans, then immediately wished I hadn’t. Two lights flashed on above me, and I looked up and saw the silhouettes of Mac and Angela against a night sky sparsely dotted with stars. Angela screamed.
“Holy shit,” Mac said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
I looked over and saw, curled up beside me, a black boy in a Chicago Bulls jersey, his face frozen in astonishment. The back of his head had been blown off, and my probing fingers had found the mess of hair and brains and congealed blood that now glistened in light Mac was shining down on us. The dead kid was about my age. I jumped to my feet but immediately my ankle gave out and I fell back down again. This time I got up slower, testing my weak ankle, thinking only of climbing out, of what was above me.
“Help me get out!” I called.
Mac carefully scaled down the slope that I had tumbled down. He kept his back to me as he climbed down, foot first, searching for something to grab onto with his hands. When he got to the bottom, he walked over and squatted above the body. He reached out and touched the adam’s apple with his fingers, and for a second I was afraid he was going to lift the gold chain the kid wore around his neck.
“You know him?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Some gangbanger.” When he turned and looked me in the eyes, I could already sense the distance that would open between us, as if he were already receding into the future, leaving me forever hobbling behind. I wanted to reach out to him, but I didn’t know how.
“We should get out of here,” he said.
The climb was slow and arduous. I had to keep one arm around Mac’s shoulders, and each time I planted my left foot a surge of pain tore through my ankle. It was twenty-five feet up to the top of the hole, but my ankle was useless after the first fifteen. I willed it to be strong, to carry me out, but it was like Jello beneath my weight. I wrapped my muddy arms around his Mac’s neck and he hoisted me onto his back, and inch by inch he pushed us up with his legs. Where he found the strength for this task, I don’t know. Maybe he knew that the only way I was getting out of that hole was on his back. I clenched my jaw and hung on.
For those moments, my world shrunk down to the ten feet between us and the top of the hole, where the jittery light shone down from Angela’s shaking hand. The next day, I would learn that the dead kid in the pit wasn’t a gangbanger at all, but an honor student named Vincent Walker who sat three seats behind me in Algebra class, and who was unlucky enough to be the brother of a petty drug lord involved in a turf war with some members of a gang called Hoover Nation. I would feel bad for not recognizing him, and wonder if he would have recognized me if our roles were reversed. In two weeks, I would come home and find Mac and Angela in bed together, her shirtless, and I would bludgeon Mac across the face with a Trophy, breaking his nose, and then he would spring right back up and pin me down and lean over me, dripping his blood all over my face, screaming Are you happy now! This is my blood – are you happy? – And things would never be quite the same between us. But that all came later. Right then, at the mouth of that poor kid’s grave, all I knew was that I was hanging on to my brother, that it was his sweat I tasted on my lips, and that slowly, somehow, we were rising.
Zack Bean earned his MFA from Penn State in 2006. This is his first published story. He is currently at work on a novel.