“Yeah?”
“We need to do it again. One more picture.”
My throat felt horribly dry. It was difficult to swallow. “Of who?”
“We'll split the money, alright? More for the person in the picture.”
“So who's it gonna be?”
“Depends on how much money you want.”
“I'll take the pictures.”
Ben shrugged. “Good enough. Seventy-thirty?”
“Yeah, alright.”
He passed me the camera. I'd never held it before; it was a lot heavier than it looked.
“So... uh... what kind of picture should we take?”
Ben gnawed thoughtfully on his lip. “We can't give too much away, but... got to get his attention, right?”
“I guess so.”
“So let's do something... enticing.”
“Like what?”
It was too weird to talk about. Ben and I were really close, we always had been, but this was different. It was one thing to pee in front of someone or talk about jerking off or whatever, it was quite another actually taking erotic photos of your best friend. The first time, that stupid picture of his ass, that had just been a joke, like flashing somebody for laughs. This was more serious. I remember the weird feeling it gave me in the pit of my stomach.
Ben's hands were trembling a little. He shook them out and took a deep breath. “Fuck it,” he said, and began to strip.
I wasn't sure what to do, if I should watch or not. I looked through the camera lens, as if lining up a shot. It was easier that way, I felt invisible. Distant somehow, almost like I was already looking at a picture and not at a real live person. I tried to think of Ben as just another image from one of our magazines.
He stopped just short of going all the way, kicking off his jeans and crossing his arms. I lowered the camera and looked at him, standing there in his briefs. “Tightie whities?” I remember laughing, though I was probably wearing the same myself. It was all my mom would buy for me. Boxers were for rich kids.
“Shut the hell up and take the pictures,” he snapped.
I took three pictures. They printed out, hiss hiss hiss, one after the other. Ben shrugged on his jacket, though his scrawny legs were still bare. We looked at the photos together, leaning over with our elbows on the counter and our chins in our hands. We peered down together at the trio of shots.
I remember how I tried to rationalize it, make it like it wasn't such a big deal, like nothing had changed. But it was different. I'd been looking at my friend through the eyes of desire, as though I'd wanted him, and it was screwing with my head. Ben shuffled through the pictures, not paying my struggle any attention.
“Hell, let's just give him all three,” he finally said, shrugging his shoulders and scooping up the photos. “Let him know we're for real.”
“Are we?”
“What?”
I swallowed hard. “Are we for real? I mean... do you really wanna do this?”
He looked at me, eyes all flat and hard. “I am doing it, Connie. You bailing on me?”
I shook my head and looked away. Something about his expression was just too intense. “Nah, man... I'm in.”
Ben nodded, and smiled at me. He tucked the pictures in his pocket and was out the window before I could say another word..
* * *
Ben and I didn't see much of each other for awhile. I wasn't avoiding him, exactly, but there was a distance between us now that hadn't been there before. I could feel the pictures, kind of sense them somewhere out there, waiting for the old man to find them. I had this nasty feeling down in my stomach that everything was going to go wrong. Or maybe I didn't, maybe I just remember it that way now because of how everything turned out. It's hard to say for sure.
I stayed home mostly, hiding in my Mom's trailer. Not that it was much of a home. Her dope dealer boyfriend was always over; they'd screw for a while, get high, then screw some more. There wasn't much privacy in a trailer, not one like ours with thin walls and no locks on the doors. She didn't care what I saw or heard, much less what I did. Mom wasn't really aware of me anymore; I was just a ghost haunting the place, just that shape drifting by. She wasn't much of the maternal sort.
Eventually, Ben tracked me down, found me hanging out behind the diner across the street. He didn't say anything, just handed me three folded-over ten dollar bills.
I took them. “Mailbox?” I asked.
He nodded.
“And seventy for you?”
“That was the deal, yeah.”
“Was there anything else?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
He shrugged. “Another one of those fruity envelopes.”
“With a note inside?”
He nodded.
“Okay, so what did he say?” My heart was thundering, my pulse pounding in my ears like a fist pounding on a car window.
Ben made a face. “Bunch of shit, man, don't worry about it. Point is, I was right. He wants more pictures.”
“Yeah?”
“Says he'll pay extra for... you know... more.”
We didn't look at each other for a while. I stared off towards the trailer park. Ben kicked his ratty shoes in the dusty earth.
He chewed his thumbnail. “So?”
I shrugged. “Whatever.”
“What you up to?”
“Nothing in particular.”
Ben didn't look at me. “Wanna go make some money?”
I bit my lip hard. I thought I could almost taste blood. “Guess so. Why not, right?”
Ben nodded. “Why not.”
We started heading towards the woods at the far edge of the trailer park. I guess we were both trying not to think too hard about what we were going to do.
I stuck my hand in my pocket and felt the money there. That strange rough feeling of paper money, like you could feel the clothy stitched quality of the paper. It felt dirty, torn and wrinkled by a hundred folds. It felt like waste paper, like a used tissue or something – like nothing anybody could ever value.
“He gave us a hundred dollar bill, you know.” Ben piped up. “I had to break it at the gas station downtown. My cousin works there. No questions asked sorta deal. He looked at me real funny though.”
“Probably thought you'd stolen it.”
“Probably.”
“You think he'd tell anyone?”
Ben snorted. “He grows weed in his basement, he's not going to rat us out.”
We didn't talk much after that on our way into the woods. The summer sun above was like a blister in the sky. We pulled ourselves up through the broken window and into the RV. The air was musty and close, the light dusky with all the shades pulled down. We looked at each other for a long while.
“Come on,” said Ben. He got out the camera and shoved it into my hands.
I swallowed. “You come on.”
Ben grinned, but the grin was half a sneer. All those years we'd been friends, as well as I thought I knew him, I really couldn't even guess what he might be thinking.
“Just do it.” I said.
I tried not to look when he pulled down his underpants. I could feel heat rising in my cheeks. His thing was right there, right in front of me. And here we were, alone in the woods. I stared at it from behind the safety of the camera lens. It looked like mine, but not. A little longer, a little slimmer, Curved gently to one side. His balls looked smooth, one noticeably larger than the other. I'd seen it before, of course, we jerked off together in this very RV once, staring at the same pages of the same magazines. But even that hadn't been like this. There was something between us then, the pages of the magazine up like a curtain in our minds. Now there was nothing, only the naked eye of the camera.
I started taking pictures of my friend.
We didn't talk afterward. He got dressed and gathered up the pictures. He left, alone, to go put them in the mailbox. I went the other way, back to the trailer park, with no company but the sound of blood
rushing in my ears.
* * *
Two days later, Ben brought me another thirty bucks. It was just too easy. We did it again almost right away and it was easier still. It got easier every time we did it. I made a hundred and fifty dollars in two weeks. I hid the money under my mattress. Taking pictures of Ben became a kind of routine. It became normal somehow. My turn eventually came. Ben told me that it would excite the old man to see someone new, so I did it. I did what Ben told me to do, just as I had always done.
It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It was just the two of us out there in the lonely RV, Ben not saying a word, huddling behind the camera like I'd done. It was almost like I was alone. We made the pictures, I put my clothes back on, and we were done. Took about ten minutes. Seventy dollars in ten minutes. I knew guys who couldn't make that in a week working steady, bagging at the grocery store or whatever.
I felt rich for the first time in my life.
I didn't spend a penny of it, not ever. I still can't explain why. I think somehow that it meant a lot more just to have it, to know that I possessed it. Ben, on the other hand, spent it all, usually within a day of getting the money it would be gone. He bought all sorts of things, some clothes and food but mostly just stupid shit. Dumb useless crap. It was like he was trying to get rid of it, spending it just because he could, on anything he could, as if he didn't even want it. I warned him not to attract so much attention, but he told me it didn't matter. And of course it didn't. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared about us. Nobody except Victor Barnes.
We never talked about him, never said his name. If he needed to be referred to, we called him “the old man.” His letters got longer and longer. I saw them, but couldn't ever bring myself to read them. Ben kept them all; he poured over them obsessively when he thought I wasn't paying attention. I preferred not to think of him, or what he was doing with the pictures we sent him. It was just too weird, you had to make it simple in your head. I would tell myself that the mailbox was magical. Pictures went in and turned into money, like there didn't have to be anybody else involved.
School started again. Mom broke up with her dealer and he sent her to the hospital, where she traded her dope habit for a prescription painkiller addiction. Dad called once from jail. We didn't talk long. He didn't want to tell me anything about what it was like inside and I didn't want to tell him what was happening to me outside. He told me that he loved me, but it was more reflex than emotion. I said the words back, but they were hollow. They didn't mean anything. Nothing meant anything that year. Nothing was real except being in the RV with Ben.
“Does it feel different?” I set the camera aside and put the little stack of pictures on the counter.
Ben pulled up his jeans and buttoned them. “Does what feel different?”
“You know. School.”
“Not really. Why?”
“It feels different to me. Like I'm not really there, you know?”
“Nah. Feels the same to me. It's a drag, I don't think about it.”
“Yeah, I guess not.”
He looked through the pictures, shuffling them like a deck of cards. He tossed a few aside and slid the others into an envelope. We'd bought envelopes, nothing so fancy as the old man's, but better than nothing. We had bought film too, another full cartridge for the camera. Ben had drummed his fingers on the hard plastic. Like printing money, he told me.
I scooted up on the countertop and pulled out the drawer beneath to rest my feet on. There was a magazine inside, something from our stash. I picked it up and flipped idly through it, gazing blankly at the naked women. I didn't come out here to look at them much anymore. It just didn't seemed right for some reason. Maybe I'd just lost interest. It was a hardcore magazine; there were pictures of two people doing it. I looked at the man, searching for some trace of myself. What would it be like to be him? I wondered if I could ever be like that.
Ben was lacing up his shoes. Outside the RV the sun was going down.
I tossed the magazine aside. “How much longer are we going to do this, Ben?”
“Do what, Connie?” he parroted my name back sarcastically.
“You know. This. I mean, eventually he's gonna get bored of us, right? I mean, how many different ways can we do this?”
“Don't sweat it, man. I've been thinking.”
“And?”
He tugged open the RV door and set one foot down on the first step before he answered. “We'll just have to do something to keep him interested, right? I mean, shit, not like he's got much choice. We're the only game in town.”
“Makes sense, I suppose.”
“Yeah.”
Ben stayed there for a moment, one foot inside the RV and one out. He stood bathed in the radiance of the setting sun. His skin seemed to glow with an unnatural fire, it was like he was burning. He looked at me and the reflected sun turned his eyes to sparks, like reflections off bright hard stone. And then he went out into the world.
I followed.
The woods around us were all aflame with the sun, shimmering and golden as though we'd stepped out onto the surface of an alien planet. I hurried after Ben.
“How long do you want to keep going?”
He said something I didn't catch, hacking through a patch of brambles with his sleeve pulled up over his fingers.
“Huh?”
“I said I'm not going back.”
“Back where?” I struggled after, plucking thorns from my shirt.
“The way it was before. I'm not going back.”
“What makes you think the old man won't cut us off?”
“He won't.”
“I wanna read the letters.”
“Huh?”
“The old man's letters, I wanna read 'em.”
“Connie. You don't.”
“Shit, Ben, what's the big secret?”
“You just don't want to read them. Trust me.”
And then we were out, pushing through the last of the shrubs and into the tangle of the overgrown field behind the old man's place.
Ben went right for the mailbox. I jogged after him. “I think he's gonna get bored.”
The sun was dipping down behind the house by the time we crossed the field. We stood there in the shadow of the old mansion. There was something in the mailbox already. A package wrapped in plain brown packing paper. There were no addresses or names on it, only two words written in fine-point pen in the top left corner: My Boys. Ben swapped our envelope for the package. He flashed a grin at me, and I know right away that he'd been expecting this. He'd known it would be here. Chances were, he already knew what was inside.
“Trust me, Connie. He won't be bored.”
* * *
It was a video camera.
We opened it that night in the RV by the glow of a dying flashlight. It was packed naked in crumpled old newspapers that tumbled out like scurrying rats and crunched under our feet when we moved. Ben lifted out the camera. Its blank glass eye caught the flashlight beam and winked at us. My skin crawled; it felt like he was watching us through the lens somehow, even with the camera off he could still see. I fished out the lens cap from the bottom of the box and snapped it back in place.
It was an older camera, maybe ten years out of date, but it seemed to have been kept in good enough condition. It would have looked like it was fresh out of the box if not for the slight signs of wear on the hand-strap and the fading of the little symbols on the buttons.
“What are we supposed to do with it?” I asked.
“Come on, Connie. You know.”
I nodded.
“You in?” His face looked ghoulish in the flashlight glow.
I swallowed. My throat was horribly dry.
“Connie?”
I thought of my mother, strung out and fucked up back in the trailer. I thought of my father sleeping in some cramped jail cell. I thought about the old man hiding in that big house like some terrible secret made real. I thought about a lot of things.
?
??Connie?” Ben said one more time, but softer, more inquisitive.
“Yeah. I'm in.”
We agreed that we would make the film as soon as possible. Tomorrow. We would do it tomorrow, sometime late at night after everybody in the trailer park was asleep, when nothing in the world might see us.
I went to bed as soon as I got home, but I couldn't sleep. I took out the money hidden under my mattress and counted it slowly. It was a lot of money for me, more than I'd ever had. But, at the same time, not so very much in the grand scheme. It wouldn't last long out in the world. I tried not to question my decision, to just think of the money.
I didn't sleep too well that night.
* * *
I still think about it sometimes, even after all these years. Making that video with Ben. It's strange, I don't really remember it very well. You'd think, of everything that happened, that it would be the one thing I'd be sure to remember. But there are only images, fragments, only isolated moments. The feel of Ben's bare shoulder under my hand. The way his eyelashes fluttered the moment before I kissed him. The heat of his body against mine. How he clutched at my thigh and whispered into my ear. The unblinking red light of the video camera.
I don't think I ever watched the video. Maybe later, years later when it was all being dredged up, I might have seen a fragment of it, been shown by somebody. But not then, I couldn't have watched it then. I hardly believed that I was doing it at the time, it was all like a dream, like sleepwalking. Maybe that's why I don't remember it too well. Maybe it was just too distant.
There was a moment, just after we turned off the camera and put our clothes back on, there was one small moment in which I felt... I don't know. The feeling was too expansive and complicated to put into a single word. It was a kind of power, something surging through me like searing energy. It was a fearful sensation, like all my insides were on fire and I might burn right through and leave nothing but a white hot afterglow.
Ben put the videotape in brown bag and wrapped it up. “He's going to send us more blank tapes.”
I nodded.
He stood there by the door, not quite looking at me, and I sat on the floor, not quite looking back. Neither of us knew what to say. It felt like everything was happening so easily, like everything was falling into place and spinning wildly out of control, both at once.
Ben went to take the package to the old man's mailbox and again I went with him. The wood seemed absolutely still in the summer twilight. The air was cool and clean. Crickets chirped and thrummed in our wake as we moved through the long grass. The gray-blue sky was alive with soundless bats, tumbling and whirling after mosquitoes like scraps of dark cloud caught in a storm.