The Collected Ed Gorman Volume 1 - Out There in The Darkness

  THE COLLECTED ED GORMAN

  VOLUME 1

  OUT THERE IN THE DARKNESS

  INTRODUCTION

  Ed Gorman is a terrific writer, and you’re going to have a wonderful time reading these stories.

  Now what? That’s seventeen words. Pete Crowther, who asked me to write this introduction, has given me to understand that introductions to the volumes he publishes run in the neighborhood of a thousand words. That’s not a bad neighborhood, you wouldn’t be afraid to wander there after dark, but the seventeen words I’ve written leave me with nine hundred and eighty-seven words to write, and what am I going to write to take up the slack? I mean, I’ve already said everything I really have to say on the subject. Here are some stories. Read them, and leave me alone. What else is there to say?

  Well, I’ll think of something. I am, after all, a professional writer. It is in the nature of a writer to think of something, and it is the hallmark of a professional to then do something with it.

  And meanwhile, I’m heartened by the fact that the mere process of thinking about thinking of something has stretched us to…ha! 187 words.

  Let’s see now. I’ve already told you to read the stories. But here’s a question: Should you read them one right after the other, or should you spread them out over a period of weeks or months?

  It’s an interesting point. The short stories of an individual author aren’t meant to be read en bloc, and may suffer from such treatment. Gulp them all down at one sitting and their inevitable similarities could make them seem stale or repetitive.

  And little things can rankle. Long ago I read a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, and halfway through I noticed a curious way in which she was repeating herself. A character in one story had lead-colored eyes. A character in another story had eyes the color of gun metal. And so on, and it struck me that this lady was working her way through the whole catalog of base metals. Call me, I said to myself, when you get to antimony.

  On the other hand, it is when one reads a whole book of stories that a writer’s themes emerge. The very similarities in stories that are essentially different give the reader an insight into who the writer is and what he’s about. (And this is particularly valuable for a reader who aspires to become a writer himself. Immerse yourself in the stories of a particular writer—ideally one whom you admire—and you begin to get a clue how he does it.)

  So it’s up to you, Gentle Reader. Gulp these stories down, if that’s your pleasure, one right after the other.

  Or take your time, and spread them out over a week or a month. If you can.

  469 words. Almost halfway there. I told you this would work!

  Oh, I know what I could do. The last resort of reviewers from time immemorial. Just go through the stories, one by one, and find something to say about each of them. That’s how we approached book reports in school, summarizing the plot to prove we’d read it, and reviewers still do that, and probably for that very reason.

  Not I. I read all of these stories over the past week—and several were ones I’d read years before, and still re-read with pleasure. But you’re going to have to take my word for it. They don’t need my comments, and they’re not going to get them.

  And even so, we’re up to 596 words.

  I did notice a couple of things, reading these stories. (You’ll notice them yourselves, you don’t need me to point them out to you, but too bad. I’ve got words to write here.)

  There’s an abiding nostalgia in many of these stories, a sweet recollection of youth in what seemed (but only seemed) a simpler, easier time. There’s a glimpse of the writer in many of the young characters, of the enthusiasm for genre fiction in the boy who would grow up to write genre fiction.

  There’s a recurring theme of addictive behavior—alcoholism, compulsive gambling—and its unshakable effects on the children of addicts.

  And there is, most interestingly, an insistence on acknowledging the humanity of all of the characters, even the villains.

  “If we could read the secret history of our enemies,” wrote Longfellow in Driftwood, “we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

  (And yes, that’s Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the Nineteenth Century American poet whose reputation has waned over the years— unjustly, I would say. A generation force-fed “Evangeline” in grade school can perhaps be expected to dismiss its author out of hand. A look at Longfellow reveals not only a gifted and disciplined poetic craftsman but a very appealing intellect and sensibility. Do I digress? Indeed I digress, and this particular digression has brought me just past the 830-word mark.)

  The secret history of our enemies. To know all may not be to forgive all, unless one is a candidate for canonization, but it does take a lot of the pleasure out of hating, doesn’t it?

  If Ed Gorman had never written a single story or novel, the world of American genre fiction would be the poorer for it. But his place in it would be assured all the same.

  As a reviewer, as an essayist, as an editor and publisher, as a pure-D champion of the writers and writings he loves, the man has had and continues to have an enormous influence. The boy for whom Gold Medal novels were important has become a man for whom good writing remains vitally important, and he has shared his enthusiasm for it in a genuinely important fashion.

  Now all that may or may not be important to you, Gentle Reader. You have a book of stories in your hand, and in a moment or two you’ll get down to the happy business of reading them. But, by taking a moment to point out this other side of Ed Gorman, I’ve done something that’s comparably important, if only to me.

  I’ve gotten us fifty words past the thousand-word mark. So this is where I get off.

  See ya!

  Lawrence Block

  Greenwich Village, November 2006

  MOONCHASERS

  For my son Joe from the old man with love and pride

  And for Robert Mitchum

  “There are men who can lust with parts of themselves.

  Only their brain or their hearts burn and then not completely.

  There are others, still more fortunate, who are like the filaments of an incandescent lamp.

  They burn fiercely, yet nothing is destroyed.”

  —Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust

  1

  Yes, sir, it was just about the best sort of summer you could ask for, when you were fifteen, that is, and it was 1958 and you were living in Somerton, Iowa, which is forty miles due east of Waterloo, where just a month earlier I’d seen Buddy Holly, Little Richard and Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps all perform at the Electric Light Ballroom.

  Of course, neither Barney nor I let on that it was a good summer because if there is one thing that Barney and I liked to do it was bitch about living our lives out in Somerton. Pop. 16,438. There were maybe five pretty girls our age, none of whom would have a damn thing to do with us, and one mean and muscular seventeen-year-old named Maynard whom Barney and I had in some way offended (if Maynard wanted to be pissed at anybody, it should have been his parents for giving him that name). Fortunately for us, Hamblin’s Rexall had a good supply of science fiction magazines and Gold Medal suspense novels and Ace Double Books. And the Garden Theater likewise had the usual good supply of movies with monsters in them. And Robert Mitchum.

  That was the big thing Barney and I had in common. Sure we liked Amazing and Fantastic with all those nifty Valigursky covers, and sure we liked all those teen monster movies with all those Southern California bikini girls, and sure we thought that Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift and the late James Dean were really cool, but the coolest guy of all was Robert Mitchum. The Garden brought back Thunder Road for a week and Barney and I went four days running.

  And the same for when the Garden brought back Night of the Hunter and Blood on the Moon. We were there because Mitch was there.

  Anyway, that’s sort of the picture of how things were in our lives before that hot August night when Barney and I walked along the railroad tracks out on the east edge of town, smoking on a fresh contraband package of Lucky Strikes, and sipping at two ice-dripping eight-cent bottles of Pepsi.

  We’d pretty much decided that this was going to be the night we broke into the abandoned warehouse and found out just what was in there. According to most of the little lads in Somerton, the warehouse was home to various kinds of spooks. Older kids, who didn’t just have driver’s ed learner permits like ours, took a different slant. They said that the migrant workers from the next town over snuck their daughters in there at night and ran a whorehouse that put all others to shame.

  In the moonlight, the railroad tracks shone silver for a quarter of a mile. The air smelled of hot creosote from the railroad ties that had baked all day in the sun. Between tracks and warehouse was a winding creek, along the dark banks of which you could smell summer mud and hear throaty frogs and see the silhouette of the willow tree bent and weeping.

  “We’re gonna get our butts kicked,” Barney said, “if they catch us.”

  Of course that’s what Barney said before just about everything we ever did. Everything that was any fun, anyway.

  But I didn’t like to think uncharitable thoughts about Barney because he had it rough. His father had tried and failed in business several times. The family was pretty poor. And whenever his father quit going to his Alcoholics
Anonymous meetings, he always got drunk for two or three days and beat up Barney’s mom pretty bad.

  A couple of times somebody had to call the chief of police and have him come over.

  The warehouse was this big corrugated steel building with loading docks on both the west and east sides. There was a large window on the north end revealing the shadowy space where the office had been.

  The window had long ago been smashed out, of course, and most of the exterior warehouse walls bore the chalk scrawlings of various lads—Class of ‘58, BG + FH, I Luv Judy! The kind of stuff, I’m told by my army corporal and former Eagle Scout brother, Gerald, is proof positive of immature minds.

  So there it sat like a big monument left behind by some alien species. When the warehouse was first closed down, back in ‘56, kids of every age trooped out there to smash windows and hurl rocks at the steel walls, which were pretty obliging about making neat sounds when the rocks struck. But then the kids got sort of bored with the place and quit coming. Now they mostly spent time at the abandoned grain elevator on the west edge of town. The elevator was more fun because it was more dangerous. One kid had already fallen off the interior ladder and broken a leg and an arm. It was only a matter of time till some poor overenthusiastic kid got killed in there and so the place had developed a certain dark aura that the warehouse could never match.

  As we were climbing through the office window, Barney said, “You don’t really think there are ghosts and stuff in here, do ya?”

  I just shook my head. Barney just kept moving.

  We spent the first ten minutes inside walking around the front of the place and stepping on crunchy little rat droppings. It was pretty neat, actually, sort of like in those movies where they drop the atomic bomb and the few survivors walk around inside empty grocery stores and places like that and take everything they want.

  Of course, there wasn’t much to take inside this warehouse.

  I remember my dad, who owned the haberdashery in town, saying once that the two guys who built this warehouse had no head for business, which was why they went broke so fast. And their creditors must have cleaned them out because when we went through the door leading to the back, all we saw was this huge empty concrete floor with moonlight splashing through six dirty, broken windows.

  “This is where I’m going to bring Janie Mills,” Barney said, “and screw her brains out.”

  “Good idea,” I said, “and I’ll double with you and bring Sharon Waggoner.”

  Barney had the grace to laugh. Janie Mills and Sharon Waggoner were the two most stuck-up girls in our class. They wouldn’t come out here with us if we had them at gunpoint.

  The place smelled of dust and heat and rain-soaked wood and truck oil and a turd-clogged toilet somewhere that hadn’t been flushed in a long time.

  “Hey!” Barney shouted suddenly.

  And then laughed his ass off when the word echoed back to us through the moonlight and shadows.

  “Hey!” I shouted, too, and listened as my own sound likewise began repeating itself.

  This was another Somerton bust and we both knew it, which was why we’d both been shouting. Because there was nothing else to do. Because, as usual in Somerton, nothing was as it had been advertised. There were no spooks, no ghosts; and there were most definitely no voluptuous whores eager to free us from the prison of our virginity.

  Barney took the Lucky Strike pack from the pocket of my short-sleeved shirt (we traded off the privilege of carrying the pack) and took a book of matches from his own shirt and lit up and that was when I saw the door move.

  The door was way at the other end of the wide, empty warehouse floor, some kind of closet, I guessed. Barney’s match had pointed my eye in that direction and that was how I came to notice the partially open door move a few inches closer to the frame.

  Or I thought I had, anyway. Maybe, because I was so bored, I just wanted to think that something like that had happened.

  “Let’s go,” Barney said.”We still got time to hit Rexall for a cherry Coke.”

  I nudged him in the ribs and nodded toward the end of the moon-painted floor.

  “Huh?” he said out loud.

  I whispered to him, “Somebody’s in the closet up there.”

  He whispered back. “Bullshit.”

  “Bullshit yourself. I saw that door move.”

  Barney squinted his eyes and looked down the length of floor. He stared a long time and then whispered, “I didn’t see it move.”

  “Somebody’s in that closet.”

  And this time when he looked at me, I saw the beginnings of fear in his eyes.

  You’re in a shadowy, empty building on the edge of nowhere and you suddenly realize that not too far away is somebody or something lurking in a dark closet. Probably watching every move you make.

  “Let’s go,” Barney whispered.

  I shook my head. “I want to find out who’s in there.”

  Barney gulped. “You’re crazy.”

  “No, I’m just bored.”

  “You really gonna walk up there?”

  I nodded and started walking.

  At first it was sort of a lark. I could sense Barney behind me, watching with a kind of awe. That crazy sumbitch Tom was going to walk right up to that closet door, just the way Mitch would, and back here stood that A-l chicken Barney. He would positively be ashamed of himself.

  It was a great feeling, it really was. For the first twenty steps or so anyway.

  Then I felt this sickening feeling in my stomach and bowels and a cold shudder went through me.

  Hell, I wasn’t brave. I was just some dumb-ass fifteen-year-old from Somerton, Iowa, and if I really believed that somebody was in that closet then I should turn around and get the hell out of here.

  “I’ll tell you, you’re one ballsy guy and I mean that,” Barney said. And then I knew I would go over and open that closet door because Barney’s admiration was just too much to lose.

  Besides, I was starting to convince myself that I had just imagined the door moving anyway.

  We reached the metal door and I put my hand out and took the knob.

  “God, Tom, you really gonna open it?”

  For an answer, I yanked the door open.

  And there, in the middle of the chill deep closet darkness, sitting with his back against the far wall, was a man holding in his left hand a big cop-style flashlight and in his right a big criminal-style pistol.

  “God,” Barney said.

  “Anybody else with you?” the man said. And right away he looked sort of familiar but I wasn’t sure why. He was a tall guy, a little on the beefy side, with a kind of handsome face and dark hair and the saddest eyes I’d ever seen on a man except for maybe my Uncle Pete when Doc Anderson told him that Aunt Clarice had only two months to live.

  The guy was pointing the gun directly at me. Or so it seemed. “N-no, sir.”

  “How’d you boys find out about me?”

  “We didn’t find out about you, sir,” I said. “I mean not till we got in the warehouse here.”

  He asked our names and we told him.

  And then for the first time I saw him get all seized up and heard him give out with a hard little grunt, the way you do when somebody hits you in the stomach. Or when you’re in an awful lot of pain.

  He tried to sit up and still keep both his gun and his flashlight on us but he wasn’t having an easy time of it. I knew right away it was because of the blood all over the side of his dirty white shirt, and the green pussy stuff that was all mixed up in it.

  I’d seen enough gangster movies to know what was going on here, especially when I let my eyes wander over to the big canvas bag sitting maybe half a foot from him, just on the edge of the light.

  “You going to kill us?” Barney said.

  Which was just like something Barney would say.

  The guy just looked at Barney and said, “You got any candy bars or anything like that on you?”