Moonchasers & Other Stories Read online

  He took out a pack of Cavaliers and tamped one down on the pack and then put it to his mouth and took out this really nice silver Zippo.

  "So how can I help you two?" He apparently had other things to do. Now he sounded as if he just wanted to rush us out of here.

  Barney's gaze strayed over to mine. We had the same thought. We couldn't tell Cushing about Roy Danton because if Danton didn't kill himself, Cushing would be glad to do it for him.

  "He said he'd help us with this term paper we're gonna write next year," I said.

  "Yeah, about the police."

  Cushing grinned. He couldn't let an opportunity like this go by. "So you nice little girls are also A students, huh?"

  A students? God, Barney and I together barely got passing grades. If they'd given courses in Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Mitchum, we would have been hailed as geniuses. But unfortunately our school board was hopelessly square.

  Cushing lit his cigarette. He was still looking us over. You got the impression that he'd have liked to start beating on us right then and there.

  But all he said was, "Why don't you girls go on home? We're busy."

  And with that, he turned around and went back to his office. Meeks said, kind of sheepish, "He just gets in a bad mood sometimes."

  And right then I liked the hell out of Meeks because he was the same kind of geek we were, fist fodder for all the Cushings in the world.

  "Thanks, Meeks," I said.

  "Yeah," Barney said. "Thanks."

  When we were outside in the steaming night again, Barney said, "You know, if God gave me permission to kill three people you know who I'd name?"

  "Cushing and who else?"

  "Cushing, Cushing and Cushing."

  I laughed. "Me, too."

  Barney nodded to Hamblin's Pharmacy down the block. "We'd better hurry up if we're going to get Danton that stuff."

  "I was thinking," I said.

  "Yeah?"

  "I'll bet if Danton didn't have that bullet in him, he could kick the living shit right out of Cushing."

  "With one hand tied behind his back."

  "And blindfolded."

  "Let's go," Barney said, "and get that stuff."

  "Yeah," I laughed. "Like good little girls."

  Hamblin's was where I first read Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Bloch and John D. MacDonald and Mickey Spillane so even given the fact that Mr. Hamblin, the shriveled-up little guy who owns it is something of a grouch, I'll always like the place. There's a soda fountain with twelve stools where one day Patty Lake accidentally leaned against my arm with one of her breasts and I fell in love with her for the whole school year; and the magazine stand where Popular Photography once had a nude shot of a very pretty young woman, and she wasn't even African; and the sacred wire paperback rack that kind of creaks when you turn it around; and the sandwich board where Ina makes the most incredible tuna salad sandwiches I've ever had, no offense Mom.

  I was hoping Becky Martin would be working, Becky being not only the tallest girl in junior class but the most beautiful, too, reminding me a lot of Dana Wynter in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, who even two years later I still had a sort of crush on.

  But Becky wasn't working, Hamblin himself was.

  He was up on a stepladder putting boxes of storage away. I guess it was a sign of our growing maturity that neither Barney nor I smirked or poked each other when we saw it was boxes of Kotex he was putting away.

  "Help you, boys?"

  "Need some things, Mr. Hamblin," I said.

  "Be right down."

  A few minutes later he was behind the counter, this rabbity bald little guy who always reminded me of Andy Clyde who was Hopalong Cassidy's sidekick in the movies, and he got the first two items, bandages and gauze, and set them up but then he stopped all of a sudden, wiping his hands on his clean white apron and said, "Boric acid?"

  "Yes, Mr. Hamblin."

  "This for your folks?"

  "Huh?" Barney said.

  "Your folks. Is this stuff for your folks?"

  "Yeah," I lied. "Yeah. My dad fell down and—"

  "—broke his leg," Barney said.

  Barney could sometimes be real dumb. My dad Clarence came into Hamblin's at least once a day. And when he wasn't sporting a broken leg—

  "At least we think it's broken," I said. "You never can tell with a broken leg. One minute it's broken and the next it's—"

  "And the next it's what?" Hamblin said. "Huh?" Barney said.

  By now Hamblin was watching us very carefully. "You're up to something, aren't you?"

  "Huh?"

  "Your pop don't have a broken leg any more than I do, does he?"

  "Huh?"

  "I ain't talkin' to you, Barney. I'm talkin' to Tom."

  "No, sir," I said, "he doesn't have a broken leg. We're just getting this stuff so we can learn first aid."

  "You two troublemakers learn first aid? For what? So you can patch up all the people you play jokes on?"

  "We don't do that anymore, Mr. Hamblin."

  "No, sir, we don't," Barney said.

  "We want to join the Civil Air Patrol and one of the requirements is that you learn first aid."

  "Civil Air Patrol, huh?"

  "Yessir," I said. Actually, I had a cousin over in Cedar Rapids who was in the Civil Air Patrol, and he got up before dawn three mornings a week and went out to this little office on top of the broadcast booth at the football stadium and scanned the sky with his binoculars. He was supposed to be looking for Russian bombers that had somehow gotten through our radar but what he mostly saw was UFOs. According to him there were a lot more UFOs than most people realized.

  "I'm going to give you boys this stuff but if I find out that you pulled any practical jokes on anybody tonight—"

  "We don't do stuff like that anymore," I said. "We're in high school now."

  We ordered six more items, all medical-type stuff, and Hamblin slammed each one down as he set it on the glass top of the display case.

  He put it all in a paper bag and then without thinking I opened my fist, the one I had all the new green money inside of, and then the money all fluttered to the ground.

  "God!" Barney said. And we were both on the floor picking it up.

  I kept looking up at Hamblin. He kept staring at all the fifties and twenties in disbelief.

  "Where'd you boys get money like that?"

  "Huh?" Barney said.

  "Savings," I said. "I've been saving my Christmas money for the past five years and here it is."

  Which he didn't believe at all, of course. Not at all.

  I took a twenty and paid him but he took it without looking at it, his eyes still fixed on all the other bills fanned out in my hand.

  I stuffed the bills in my pocket and watched Hamblin go down to the cash register and punch the amounts up. The register bell dinged when the cash drawer opened. Barney started to say something but I shook my head.

  Hamblin came back with my change, counted it out and handed over the bag.

  "Your pop at home, Tom?"

  "Yes, sir."

  And that was all he said. But of course he didn't have to say any more at all.

  I picked up the bag and Barney and I walked out.

  Barney said, "Old man Hamblin's gonna call Clarence."

  "I know."

  "And Clarence is gonna have a lot of questions for you when you get home tonight."

  "I know."

  "And then the cops are gonna find out about Roy."

  "I know."

  "Sonofabitch," Barney said, "I don't want to see the cops get Roy, do you?"

  "I sure don't," I said.

  We went inside Henry's Hawkeye Supermarket and did the grocery shopping fast, getting stuff Roy could eat without cooking, cold cuts and Roman Meal bread and Hostess cupcakes and freezing Pepsis from the cooler and then Barney said, "You go ask the checkout girl to help you find something."

  "Huh?" I said, sound
ing just like Barney.

  "Go on."

  So I did. She was the only employee I could see anywhere in the store. She helped me find paper lunch sacks, which I made a big fuss about needing desperately. I kept wondering what Barney was doing.

  Then he was back and said, "Well, I'd better be going, Tom. George wants me home early tonight."

  So we all went up to the lanes and she checked us out and Barney kept giving me this look I'd never seen before and without knowing quite why, I knew I wanted to get the hell out of there and fast.

  On the street, Barney said, "I got 'em."

  "Got what?"

  "Cigarettes. Three packs. Chesterfields. I couldn't reach anything else. That's why I had you distract her."

  There's this older kid, Lem, who usually buys cigarettes for Barney and me. He's real poor and sort of ugly and everybody laughs at him but he's actually a good guy and he has a six-year run of Amazing Stories and we pay him a dime every time he buys us a pack. But we didn't have time for Lem tonight.

  We walked fast going back to the warehouse. And we walked a little scared.

  The warehouse was just as dark as we'd left it. We climbed in through the window and went over to the closet. "Roy, Roy, we're back."

  The door was still open but there was no answer from the darkness inside. No flashlight clicked on, and there wasn't any noise, either, that cramped pained noise Roy made every time he breathed.

  "Roy?" Barney said.

  No answer.

  "Here," I said, handing Barney the sack of groceries.

  "What're you gonna do?"

  "Go in there. See what's wrong."

  We both stared at the dark, dark closet.

  I took two, three steps into the closet. I couldn't see anything.

  The dust made me sneeze. What I didn't need now was an allergy attack.

  And then I tripped over something and fell forward, putting my hands up flat against the back wall.

  I stood there panting, sweating.

  And then I heard him. It was real faint but I knew right away it was him because of the labored, reedy sound of his breathing. "You okay?" Barney said.

  "Get in here," I said.

  By the time Barney made it into the closet, I was on the floor picking up the flashlight and getting it clicked on and shining the beam in Roy's face.

  If he hadn't been breathing, I would have thought he was dead. One afternoon a few years back Barney and I snuck into the back of the Devlin Mortuary and peeked at two corpses old man Devlin had laid out on gurneys. It was pretty gross, the pasty fish-belly color of the flesh, that is, and the way they didn't move at all. But then I guess when you think about it, that's what being dead means, that you don't move. Never again.

  "Hold this," I said to Barney and gave him the flashlight.

  He kept the beam on Roy. I grabbed one of the Pepsis and got it open and put the bottle to Roy's lips and forced a little into his mouth.

  It took him maybe a full minute but his eyes finally came open. And then it was maybe another twenty seconds before he showed any signs of recognizing us. His wound was starting to take its toll. He looked real pale and there was a kind of crust on his lips and his sweat was cold-looking and greasy and, to be honest, he kind of smelled pretty bad. That's one thing movies can't give you—smell. When John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd and Al Capone die up there on the screen, the audience doesn't have any idea of how bad they smell.

  "Hey, slugger," Roy said to me.

  "We got your stuff," Barney said.

  Roy raised his eyes to Barney. Even that seemed to take a lot of effort. "Thanks, kid."

  So we fed him. Barney propped the light up on top of the money sack and sat on one side of Roy and I sat on the other. We put the grocery sack between us and took turns feeding him, the way we once fed a hawk. We were out in the woods one bright fall morning and we heard this big booming gun go off and it was this hunter of course and then we heard something fall into the bushes beside us and it was this hawk. He was all covered with blood and his dark eyes were frantic and wild and we were scared for him and scared for us because we didn't know what to do. And so we just grabbed all these colorful autumn leaves and made him this little bed and he just sat there staring up at us and we tried feeding him grass and we tried feeding him leaves and Barney even dug up some night crawlers with his fingers but the hawk wouldn't eat any of them and so all we could do was pet him and say soft little things to him like the soft little things you say to sick kitties and we knew he was dying and he knew he was dying and then he started twitching and shuddering and making these tiny scared noises and so Barney picked him up and put him in his lap, not caring about the blood or anything, and sort of started rocking him, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth till I had to say, very softly, "Barney, I think he's dead" and Barney looked down at the unmoving bird and said, "You're a fucking liar, Tom, he isn't dead!" but he was dead, of course, the poor bastard, and so I took him from Barney's hands, lifted him real gentle, and all the time I did Barney just kept screaming at me "You're a fucking liar, Tom! That's what your fucking problem is, buddy-boy! You're a fucking liar!" And I took the hawk down to the river bank where the earth was softer and I scooped out this grave with my hands and I put him in it and even all the way down to the blue run of river, even above the jays and the owls and the ravens, I could hear Barney crying.

  So it was sort of like that now, feeding Roy. I mean, because he was so weak he couldn't even hold a piece of cold meat in his fingers.

  "It's so goddamned cold in here," he said.

  On the bank Time and Temperature sign downtown about twenty minutes earlier the Temp had been 89.

  Barney fed him the Twinkies and the Pepsi and I fed him the Oscar Mayer sliced bologna and dutch loaf. And then we both took turns feeding him the Cracker Jacks which Barney had said would be a good way to finish off the meal.

  When he was finished eating, Roy said, "You boys bring the bandages and stuff?"

  "Yessir," I said. "We sure wouldn't forget something like that." And right then, just the way he gave me this almost imperceptible nod of thanks, he looked a whole lot like Mitch.

  "You boys think you can clean a wound?"

  "Sure," Barney said.

  I looked over at him and frowned. What the hell did we know about cleaning a wound?

  "You just take the hydrogen peroxide and let it soak into some of those cotton balls I told you to get and then you just kind of clean the wound," Roy said.

  We cleaned the wound.

  I'll tell you, it was unlikely either Barney or I were ever going to get scholarships to medical school, the way we poured too much peroxide on the cotton balls and spilled the stuff all over, and the way we grimaced when we had to tear the blood-soaked part of his shirt away from the wound.

  "Oh, God," Barney said when we finally got a good look at the wound. So much for a quiet, steady manner.

  I wanted to say oh, God, too, but I just bit down real hard on my lip and took one of the soaked cotton balls and put it up to the wound.

  Where the bullet had gone in everything was kind of scabby and you could see green pus leaking from the hole.

  In all, we went through eleven cotton balls. I got rid of as much of the scabbing as I found, and at least temporarily I stopped the pus from seeping.

  And then we were done and Roy sat back against the wall and felt in his shirt pocket for a cigarette but he was all out so Barney handed over the Chesterfields he'd taken from the supermarket and said, "This was the only brand I could steal."

  "They're fine. I appreciate it." He got a cigarette in his mouth, looking a whole lot like Mitch just then, and then he took his Zippo out and thumbed it into lighting. He set the lighter down on the floor and I looked at it. Somebody had carved a skull and crossbones into it, with two little fake red diamonds for the eyes. It was the coolest lighter I'd ever seen.

  "There's one Twinkle left, Roy," Barney said. "You want it?"

  "
You eat it, kid," Roy said.

  I laughed. "He was hoping you'd say that."

  Barney gulped it down in two bites.

  Roy kept dragging on his cigarette but he did it with his eyes closed. His breathing was starting to get real noisy again and you could tell he was exhausted.

  "You think you could bring me some more food tomorrow night?" Roy said. He kept his eyes closed.

  "Sure," I said. "But we can do better than that. We can bring you some rolls for breakfast."

  "Yeah," Barney said. "From Emma's Cafe. She makes 'em fresh every morning."

  Eyes closed, he shook his head very gently. "Somebody might see you in the daylight. You don't want to make anybody suspicious. Wait till night to come out here."

  When he used the word "suspicious" my stomach knotted up. I kept thinking of old man Hamblin at the pharmacy just staring at all the money I had.

  "Roy," Barney said.

  "Yeah?"

  "Could I use your lighter?"

  "Sure."

  "I really appreciate it," he said, leaning forward and taking the lighter from where it sat on top of the pack of Chesterfields on the floor.

  The way the three of us sat, we might have been around a campfire.

  Barney picked up the lighter and stared at the skull and crossbones and a low whistle came from his lips. "Cool."

  Barney got a cigarette going and I got a cigarette going and then Barney said, "Roy?"

  "Yeah." Eyes still closed.

  "Would you really have killed yourself if we'd brought the law back?"

  Roy thought a long moment. "You want an honest answer?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "I don't know if I got the guts to kill myself. I've thought about it all my life off and on, and one night when I caught my girlfriend in bed with this guy, I put a gun in my mouth but I couldn't pull the trigger. I wanted to and I think in a strange way she wanted me to, too, but I couldn't. I just couldn't."

  And then he made a little grunting sound again and he took the cigarette from his mouth and jabbed it out on the floor. And then he gave out with this deep sigh that made his chest shudder.

  "I don't think I can talk anymore, boys. I need some sleep."

  "We'll be back tomorrow night, Roy," I said. "We'll bring you better food, too."