The Move To Darna
by Steven Gillis
Sam has on the iPod Cleo gave him. Zombie tunes, old shit. (”Tell Her No.” “Time Of The Season.” “She’s Not There.”) He surveys the scene, makes sure everything’s in order. His suit is used, bought on the cheap though it looks good, charcoal grey, not too shiny. His shirt is white and tie soft blue. His hair cut, his collar rubs at the back of his neck, he pulls the edge away when he thinks no one is watching.
Sunday. The signs are posted on the corners and the front lawn, people from the east side come, the newlyweds and local school teachers, shift supervisors at Builder’s Circle and assistant managers at Burger Supreme. Sam gets the third-rate houses to show from the Shakumot listings, the ones on Pizerfeld or Litchmount with ceilings blistered by water damage, without garages, the toilets sending up a sour backdraft of sulphur and bile from the pipes below.
At twenty-four, there are few things he knows less about than houses, is working today only because Cleo insists, is trying as always to be compliant. Darna arrives in the middle of the day. Sam is in the kitchen, handing out information sheets near the stove as she glances in from the doorway and heads upstairs. Although it’s summer, she wears a long dark overcoat, unbuttoned and hanging well below her knees. Her legs are thin, her calves flat and bare. She has on a pair of once white sandals, the bottoms leather rather than rubber, not made for walking any real distance. She carries a grey backpack over her right shoulder, enters the rear bedroom, removes the pack and holds it against her chest.
By four o’clock nineteen people have come and gone. The house is without furniture. Sam tells those who ask to imagine the couch, the coffee table, bookshelf and color tv. He collapses the sign out front, loosens his tie, pulls at his collar, returns and checks the kitchen, chains the back door, flicks off the lights. Upstairs he makes sure nothing is out of place, no water running in the bathroom, the shades drawn and windows locked. He leaves shortly after that, fishing car keys from his pocket and without finding Darna hidden in the closet.
Knees up, she sits scrunched, her back braced, comfortable in the stillness.
The front door closes, the sound of a car starting and driving off, the smell of cedar and something else surrounding her, a lemony astringent she doesn’t mind and makes her feel clean. A minute later she unzips her pack, roots about for what cans of food she has left, some corn and a box of spaghetti.
She takes the food downstairs to the kitchen, along with the one metal pan she owns and lights the stove, eating at the sink. Afterward, she washes the clothes she’s wearing and those carried in her pack - two pairs of jeans, one wrap skirt, three t-shirts, some underwear and socks - then sets them to dry on low in the oven.
Upstairs again, she showers, rinses her hair, rubs down her arms and legs and stands in the tub until almost dry. The window in the bedroom is shaded. She looks out, cautious, searching for Berit, half expecting to find him there. Through a different window, six years ago, she watched her mother sitting inside a red pickup truck with Jack Barell. On the second floor of the Mozzy Inn, Darna was told to sleep with her back to them in the opposite bed while they made muted monkey love. She woke, fourteen, watching the pickup slip from the parking lot and turn toward the highway, her mother’s hand visible against the outer door, yellow-white and tapping the panel to Willie Nelson singing, ‘Always On My Mind.’
Her clothes are almost dry when she returns to the kitchen. She removes them from the oven, spreads them on the counter. The house is warm, and naked, she feels the air around her, beneath her arms and between her legs, the beads of water on her skin like fingers tracing down along the surface of some smooth abandon.
Sam in shorts, in a blue longsleeved t-shirt with the words, ‘Ski the Ute’ across his chest. He pushes the cuffs up to his elbows, stands outside the door, his old Cutlass left at the curb. After midnight, he unlocks the Shakumot latch box and flips the bolt in the door. “Shit man,” he imagines what Donnie and Gill will say, can hear them cracking wise, having warned him before, laughing when he confessed to studying for his real estate license, asking “Who’s idea was that man? What’s wrong with Buy The Book? What about painting this summer?” They’d grab at their crotches and crow, “Whipped, whipped, whipped!”
Cleo has thick blonde hair worn short, cut in a pageboy which accents the roundness of her cheeks, and would have done the same for her eyes were they not a bit to blue, already wild and bright, like an aqua jewel rubbed and polished by sands a million years old. Last summer, Sam went to The Handle Bar after work where Cleo spotted him sketching on the white pad he brought with him. An hour later they were driving downtown in Cleo’s new red convertible.
“My mom has money,” she said this while shifting Sam’s hand from first to second to third. “My dad used to,” she pinched at his wrist and laughed. On Fillmore, they stopped at an ATM where Cleo drew out two hundred dollars, handed it to Sam and told him where to go. She used her cellphone to make a call, had Sam circle the block twice until she pointed, “There.” A kid in a blue hooded sweatshirt came over and Sam handed him the money, receiving in exchange a grey plastic vile filled with sweet black hash. Cleo’s apartment was in Cloverton Gates, but she wanted to go to Sam’s instead, nearer the University, two rooms rented on the third floor of an old Cope Cod. “I hate it that I could never live in a place like this,” she hung on his arm, did a sort of pirouette with her right leg out. She’d a flat marble pipe, fitted with a small gold screen. The hash was soft, when smoked the ashes kept their form. Cleo sat cross-legged, folded, asking Sam about Art School and what he planned to do after, wondering if he’d ever shown or sold his work, was he looking to teach or travel, and “What next? What next? What next?”
Of her own ambitions, she told him, “Not to worry,” and kissed him deep and long, her tongue dancing atop his teeth. Two weeks later he was living at her place. “Here’s how I see things going,” Cleo said. She bought him a sweater, a pair of Ferragamos and grey Domani slacks. So charmed, Sam appreciated the attention, tried to please her, reveled in her intensity, how she
beat and howled, “Oh daddy! Daddy!” when they fucked. He met her friends who treated him well enough, some more than others, and all with a wink toward Cleo as Sam in his new outfit stood dutifully nearby.
Darna upstairs, wakes to a fumbling of keys, hears the door open and shut and someone stumble through the dark. Quietly, on reflex, she gathers her stuff, sticks everything back in her pack, crawls to the window and checks to see if she can get down to the street. Careless - “Fuck, fuck!” - she can’t believe she didn’t look before, finds in the dark only the flat of the house, no trees near enough or even a drainpipe from which to shinny and run. She sniffs the air, checks for scents, somehow sure if Berit’s found her she’ll recognize his smell and know, despite the height, she has to jump.
Alarmed, she imagines Berit calling up to her in that basso boombox voice of his - “Come out, come out wherever you are!” - knows he would not have a key, would have to smash a window to get in, and who’s downstairs then? She turns, listens for more sounds, squints toward the hall. How safe the house had felt before, she thinks, and what a joke, the breach between reality and first impressions. Soon after her mother began sleeping with Jack Barell, bringing him in from Feelhur’s Pub like a big dog lost, Darna was amused by Jack’s drollery, the soothing peal of his soft southern accent, how gently he placed his large hips in the motel’s rickety old furniture. The illusion created was that of a well mannered, good old boy, though within the week things changed, Jack no longer asking but ordering Darna about, sending her off for cigarettes, teaching then telling her to fix him a drink. A few days before leaving with her mother, Jack came in to pee while Darna was in the shower.
“Shit, Darn, save me some of that hot water,” he said, then groaned, “Aw hell. Aw hell,” as if the inconvenience was his and the sacrifice of joining her a noble gesture.
Berit, too, was the same song sung. When they met, Darna was working a few hours a night at Marchino’s Restaurant, washing vegetables, pealing and dicing in the rear of the kitchen. She sat by the screen door, comfortable in the slight breeze as Berit came around back, more clever than the others who showed up when the restaurant was closing and Marco the manager had time to run them off. Berit appeared during the dinner rush, his face an inch from the screen, gabbing at Darna as she concentrated on the vegetables. “I know you,” he said that first night, and whether or not he did the line came easy.
“You were in the park right? The other day. Smoking. You were, I mean. You
looked good.”
She ignored him mostly, did not answer or even turn her head. He could see her smile though at his jokes, and when he asked for a carrot, and later for a tomato, and whatever chicken and meat came back on a plate, she gave it to him. He wore a brown corduroy coat, the material smoothed with age, the fit tight across his shoulders which were broad, his jaw outlined by whiskers. He had fat, bear paw hands which touched her gently on the flat of her back as they walked together. Berit talked her out of the shelters, showed her the buildings he knew and went to crash, his hands eventually exploring her firm and grasping, his fingers strong, his arms as he lifted her through windows she learned to open, squeezing into places she’d better sense than to be.
Sam stands in the dark, the hollow of the front room without its furniture somehow indecent. Cleo is in his head again, complaining about his failure to sell the place, her disappointment covering old ground. “What am I to do with you?” she asked, and when he tried to comfort her, she pushed him away, called him, “Painter boy,” flipped a hand toward the new Sony plasma tv her mom sent over, all 50 inches with a 3000:1 contrast ratio, 29.8-80 KHz, 1366×768 native resolution, and “Dishnet, Sam. You see that? What is it you don’t get?”
He flicks the overhead light on then off, not wanting to attract attention.
Heel to toe, he walks with arms out in front of him toward the kitchen. The effort makes him feel foolish, and stopping, he turns on the small light above the stove, tells himself if the cops come and ask why he’s here, he’ll show his Shakumot ID, say he couldn’t sleep and wanted to go over a few ideas for selling the place and hope they believe him.
The stove’s light shines into the kitchen, yellow through the dark, the effect similar to shades found in an Edward Hopper painting. Sam unclips his cellphone, sets it beside the refrigerator, glances at the rear door, sees the shadows on the wood, the way the light from the stove effects each pane of glass, the subtle variance, the kitchen in different stages of gossamer glow. Cleo wouldn’t notice this, he thinks. Dancing on her toes, she has no interest in small details, no patience for capturing moments which might otherwise go unnoticed. Last month, as Sam struggled with a canvas, the shapes refusing to come together the way he imagined in his head, to a point he worried what he first saw was never really there at all, Cleo came to the basement studio at the School of Art, and standing beside him, laughed. “What is it?”
“What?”
“You. This!”
He stared back at the painting, and then at Cleo, her blond hair bobbed above her eyes, her face round and neck square. The image at the top of his piece had a similar circle placed on the edge of a cube, the other shapes arranged beneath in a way which may or may not have been the body of a woman. “I don’t get it,” Cleo poked at Sam’s arm, refusing to take his frustration seriously. “I mean it’s an abstract. You can’t get it wrong. Come on, come on.” She tugged at him, determined to talk of different things, to make sure he wasn’t late for Shakumot and got a good house this time to sell.
The light drifts across the tips of his sneakers. He looks from the door over to his left, away from the refrigerator and his cell phone, across the counter toward the sink. For a second he’s still distracted by Cleo and what he sees doesn’t register, the unexpectedness of what’s there. At any other time the sight would be quite normal, but not now, not in an otherwise empty house where nothing of the sort should have been there. Confused, he takes a step closer, stops, reaches out, then draws back his hand, inches forward again and picks up the can of corn.
Darna moves silently from the window, considers slipping into another room, checking the opposite side of the house for a better way to get out. The idea makes sense, and still she hesitates, nervous and tired and why couldn’t everyone just leave her alone for one God damn night? She takes two steps toward the hall then changes her mind. If the owners or realtors have hired a guard, he’ll leave soon, she tells herself, hopeful if not completely convinced. She slides closer to the door, her head in the hall, the light below producing shadows. She waits, then hears below a series of sounds, a discordant sequence of notes meant to replicate music, followed by a tinny sort of clang. The notes repeat themselves, again and again, without interruption.
Sam is sure there must be a logical explanation, and yet he can’t think of one. He’s about to switch on the overhead light when his cell phone rings and he jumps straight up, dropping the can to the floor. He bends and picks it up, places it on the counter, flips on the main light then turns and stares at his phone.
Finally the ringing stops. Darna wonders why the person didn’t answer, and then all at once she mouths the word, “Shit!” sits in the doorway, thinking about the other noise she heard. Her pack between her legs, she searches through her belongings for the can of corn.
“That’s twice,” she tells herself, two times she’s been careless here tonight and why? She leans her head back against the door frame, remembers something she read in a book a few months ago while ducking into the library out of the cold. “To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the Self.”
She thinks about this, the suggestion that there are no accidents, only choices on different levels made, her leaving the corn neither conscious nor unconscious but somewhere in between. “Yeah, but none of that explains why.” She closes her pack, convinced her carelessness was not deliberate, the corn not indicative of some secret desire to get caught. Why would she do that, give herself away after going to so much trouble to hide?
She stands and listens while the person below moves into the front room, comes closer to the stairs, a shadow coiling around the banister before retreating. Silence, then seven muted notes and a voice from the kitchen saying, “It’s me. I know. I couldn’t answer. I put it down and couldn’t find it. Because it was dark. At the house. The one on Douchester. That’s right, the one I showed today.”
The main kitchen light goes off, the remaining glow barely reaching the landing. Darna thinks back to that afternoon as she arrived and noticed a man in a suit, a boy really, only a few years older than she, how later, as she hid in the closet, she thought of him again, how misplaced he seemed, tugging at his collar and shuffling his feet. Although she only glimpsed him for a second, his presence in the house put her at ease. “Good karma,” she thought then, inexplicable and sweet, and remembering again the corn, she comes closer to the stairs.
Sam says, “Cleo,” says, “Cleo,” says “Of course not, Cleo. No.” He sits with his back against the refrigerator, his legs bent and drawn up like two bony mountains. The can of corn is beside the sink, ignored for the moment, the mystery of its appearance surrendered to the great list of things he’s never been able to explain. Cleo’s voice enters his head, stirs about as bees in a hive. “What did I say?” she wants him to tell her. (”What did I say!”) He isn’t sure how to answer, is no good at this sort of thing, the finality required, like dragging boots in an effort to stop a speeding train. He pushes his right hand through his hair, the phone against his cheek. “I don’t know. I can’t,” he replies in monotone, his words soft. He wants to say more but she’s talking at him again, catching him in a whirlpool of sound. In bed the other night, just after Cleo came to the studio and mocked his painting, Sam feigned sleep as she climbed on top of him, pinning his shoulders with her hands. He pictured her above him with his eyes closed, her head tipped to the side, her body curled like a cat about to pounce. Uncertain before, he saw his painting complete, the images shifting and reformed. Cleo too, was transmuted, turned into someone he didn’t recognize. He waited, then opened his eyes, reached for her gently, trying to let her know, but she was already rolling away, not understanding, angry with him for failing to satisfy her. She gave him her back, said “Just forget it, Sam,” and turned on the tv.
He looks from the kitchen, through the minor light above the stove and toward the darkness in the front room. “Cleo,” he repeats into the phone, says “Cleo,” says “Cleo,” and puts a hand to his face. Her caw continues, urgent as always. She speaks over him, chimes “Sam, Sam, Sam!” a wind setting kites to soar. The shadows and light on the panels of glass in the back door remain varied hues of yellow, silver and blue. Sam climbs to his feet, stands and spots his own reflection in the glass, tries to place himself, feeling neither inside or out. Cleo barks, the same energy used to seduce him repelling him now. He thinks of the painting he’s just finished, his canvas redone on a clean white surface, the merging of new colors and contours, and bending to sit again, he stops, the tint in the glass playing tricks on him. He sees a shape behind shapes, an image appearing, shades inside shadows over his shoulder, giving way to hidden forms.
Darna on the landing, hears the boy on the phone say, “I can’t, Cleo. No.
Because. I can’t.” His pleading is the sound a deer might make, all anxious and apologetic. A need she thinks, and moves two steps further down. The first time Berit hit her, hard with the flat of his hand, the blow landed flush across her cheek, her head snapping and her feet slipping from beneath her. He grabbed her wrists as she fell away, pulled her back as if reeling a fresh catch to shore. His shirt smelled of cigarettes, pine cones and sweat. He held her until she stopped squirming, whispering down into her hair, “Come on now, Darn. You know, don’t you? You can’t leave me no choice like that.” The night before she hadn’t returned to the park, had stayed late at Marchino’s, helping bus tables, working early shifts, too, the last few weeks, cleaning up after lunch and getting ready for dinner, pocketing forty bucks for her effort. Berit laughed at the sight of such cash, said “Shit, girl,” and had her give him twenty. He came around in the dinner rush, twice got her in trouble with Marco, who in his starched white shirt and black matador’s vest snapped like a little papillon dog. “No more of this, you understand?”
Darna takes another three steps down, pauses to listen again as Sam in rhythm says, “I know, I know, I know, I know,” exactly like that part from the old Bill Withers song. A week ago she took what money she managed to save and rented a room at the Econo Lodge. Berit waited only a night before barging through the back door at Marchino’s, two busboys along with a junior chef waving a wet silver cleaver pushing him out again into the alley. Marco cursed and shook his fist, asked Darna afterward if she was ok, then fired her with a weary, “Sorry, sorry, sorry. You can’t work here no more.”
The light from the kitchen creates shadows down near the last step. Darna’s bare toes approach the floor as if entering a cool pool of water. She hears again the boy’s voice, abiding and soft, tips her head back as if listening to music, wonders why the first time Berit hit her in the park she didn’t leave for good. She remembers how he held her tight, the pain in her jaw and sore stretch of muscle already stiffening her neck as she tried to squirm free but couldn’t. An animal trapped, she gave way while Berit placed his lips atop her head and worked his hands beneath her shirt.
“Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle.” Darna sets her feet on the floor and waits, as if testing the surface, the glow from the kitchen balanced against the darkness at the top of the stairs. The house is stuffy, sealed tight. She thinks back to Jack in the shower, his hands hard and how hot the water then. She didn’t scream, did not drive her heel down and call for her mother. Did not run when Berit said, “Come on now, girl,” the second time he hit her, pushing her against a tree, turning her around afterward and asking, “You like that?” Sour between her legs, she didn’t answer, stared off instead toward the red tails of cars on Mercer Street swimming away at steady speeds.
“If I could,” Sam says as Darna nears the kitchen and thinks to herself, “Yes? What?” She steps from the stairs into the front room, passing through a gauzy grey curtain of night. Sam turns from where he’s been staring at the panes of glass in the rear door and watches, startled, on the verge of shouting. The phone remains against his ear. Darna comes and takes it from him, switches it off and sets it on the counter. The can of corn is visible near the sink. She imagines the house furnished, sees herself carrying a brown bag of groceries, Sam in the front room finding something for the stereo, one of the old tunes she likes, Credence Clearwater or James Brown. She smiles, for the first time in a long while, there in the middle of the floor, the light from the stove a beacon.
Sam looks back at her, an apparition, an image culled from a painting he’s only dreamed of creating. She touches his cheek and he doesn’t mind, moves closer, trusting, surprisingly so, inexplicably happy. Darna, too, knowing then, it almost doesn’t matter when from behind there’s a crash of glass and the back door breaking, a basso voice booming like that singer in the old Temptations song, “You’re frightened and confused/Which way will you choose/You want your mama.” She hears from the porch, “Darn! Darn! Darn!” and stepping out of the light, her thinly soled sandals atop the glass, she slips into shadows before Sam can reach her, running.