Moonchasers & Other Stories Read online

  "Just do your best, honey," which is what Mom usually said to stuff like that.

  "Let's see," I said.

  Debbie put her little face with the big thick glasses she had to wear up for me to see. There was a hole in the top row.

  "You still have the tooth?"

  "Upstairs."

  "Be sure and put it under your pillow."

  "How much do you think he'll leave this time?"

  "Maybe fifty cents."

  "Boy!"

  Last time she lost a tooth, Dad put a quarter under her pillow while she was asleep, then I went in my room and took a quarter from my Roy Rogers savings bank (I never got around to throwing things away, I guess) and then slipped it under her pillow, too.

  We went back to eating. After Douglas Edwards, the local news came on which of course set Dad off griping about how every single person in the news business was a Democrat if not a Communist. Dad had never forgiven the press for what they did—or what he said they did, anyway—to his idol Robert Taft. You know, when Ike "stole" the Republican nomination from him.

  The phone rang. Mom, who was on her way to the kitchen, got it and said, "For you, Tom."

  "Guess who's been cruising past my house?" Barney said. "Who?"

  "Who do you think? Cushing."

  "Cushing? You sure?"

  "Positive."

  "When you leave, go out the back door. And then go down the alley. I'll meet you at our old clubhouse."

  "Maybe he'll start cruising past your house, too."

  "I'll see you in twenty minutes."

  When I went back into the living room, a commercial was on so Dad was talking to everybody. "I took that money over to the chief and told him how you found it out by the crick and all. He wants you to stop in in the next couple days and talk to him."

  "Is he mad?"

  "Not mad but kinda disappointed, I think. That you didn't turn it in as soon as you found it. He said something I didn't even think about."

  "Like what?"

  "Like about that bank robber. The FBI thinks he's up in the northern part of the state but now the chief thinks maybe he's around here somewhere, the way you found that money and all. Anyway, if you'd brought the money in right away, the chief could've put some men on looking for the robber. Now the guy's probably long gone."

  I made a quick pit stop upstairs and in five minutes was ready to go.

  In the kitchen, I worked fast. I grabbed a paper sack from a drawer and dropped an apple in it, and then followed the apple with two slices of wheat bread, three slices of summer sausage, two bottles of Pepsi, a slice of Mom's chocolate cake with white frosting that I wrapped in wax paper, and some carrot sticks that Mom always kept in this plastic bowl. I didn't have to worry about them hearing me because the window air-conditioner sounded like a B-52 but I didn't want Mom to wander out in the kitchen and see me loading up and then start asking all these questions.

  I went out the back way, down the three back porch steps, under the clotheslines, past the dog house, along the row of garbage cans next to the small white garage whose shingles smelled as if they'd melted some in the heat, and out into the narrow gravel chalk-dust alley where I used to be Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Allan "Rocky" Lane and Lash LaRue, sometimes all on the same day.

  It took me twenty minutes to get to the clubhouse, which was this long-abandoned garage on the downwind side of the city dump which, as you might think, did not smell exactly wonderful during a windless sundown of eighty-six degrees. I'd smoked my first cigarette in this garage, and then got so sick that I couldn't get out of bed for a day, and got my first glimpse of a Playboy foldout which Barney's sixteen-year-old cousin Stan had copped from his dad's bureau drawer.

  The clubhouse resembled this old sagging weatherworn outhouse in this small field of burned grass and empty tin cans and jagged broken pop bottles.

  Barney was inside, squatted over in a shadowy corner with a bottle of Pepsi and a Lucky Strike. The last of the dusty sunlight peeped through the spaces between the boards. I'd brought along my old Boy Scout flashlight, which is the color a baby shits when he's got the trots, and I shined it all over the dirt floor. About the only thing to see were a couple of squirming night crawlers who looked like my light had just woken them up.

  "You see Cushing?" Barney said.

  "Huh-uh."

  "I didn't, either."

  I asked him for a cigarette and when I got it going, I told him what the chief had said, about the found money maybe belonging to the bank robber.

  "No wonder Cushing's following us," Barney said.

  "He probably thinks we can lead him to the robbery money."

  "And to the robber. Wouldn't he get some kind of award?"

  "Reward, Barney. You always say that. It's reward."

  "Up yours."

  "Spoken like a truly mature person."

  Barney said, "How we gonna get to Roy without Cushing finding out?"

  "We'll just have to be careful."

  He poked the sack. "You swipe him some pretty good stuff?"

  "He's probably so hungry he'd eat shoe leather."

  "You wanna go?"

  "Let's look for Cushing first."

  One nice thing about the clubhouse, you've got spy holes all over the place. I wish my house had a few spy holes, too. You never know when they'll come in handy.

  Barney took one wall and I took the other. We both looked for any sign of Cushing's car. But there was just blanched prairie and the burning malodorous city dump and small frame houses on this particular edge of town.

  So we went. We cut wide around the dump, Barney saying what he always said ("I'll bet there's a lot of valuable stuff in there if you just had the time to look through it all") and then saw the railroad tracks gleaming in the last few minutes of fiery sunlight.

  All that separated us from the tracks was a wide area of dusty gravel. We were just walking over to it when Barney said, "Oh, God! Look!"

  And there, maybe three hundred yards behind us, came Cushing's unmarked police car.

  "What'll we do?" Barney said.

  "Just calm down."

  "Huh?"

  "Just calm down, Barney, or he'll know something's wrong for sure. Just keep walking. But instead of turning up toward the tracks, we'll turn the other way to the crick."

  Cushing's tires made a lot of slow crunching noise on the gravel.

  He got alongside us, doing maybe five, six miles an hour, and said, "How're my little girl friends doing tonight?" He had on dark shades and he grinned like a killer.

  We didn't say anything. We just kept walking toward the hill that would eventually slope down to the crick. There was a pussy willow tree there that gave a lot of shade during the day.

  "You girls stop right there. I want to talk to you."

  I heard him jerk on his emergency brake and then get out of the car. You could smell the gas and oil and heat of the motor.

  He walked over in front of us. We'd stopped walking, just like he'd told us to.

  "The sack. What's in it?"

  "Nothing special," I said. Then, "We're going hiking tonight so we brought some food for a snack." I was getting so good at this lying business that I was starting to scare myself.

  He took the sack, opened it and then shoved his hand way down inside it. I thought of the time Johnny Worchester did that with this old sack he'd found near the crick one day and this giant milk snake was coiled up inside. Legend has it that Johnny filled his pants right on the spot.

  Cushing found the piece of chocolate cake. "Look here what I found." He grinned. "I always heard that your mom was a real fine cook, Tom."

  "She is."

  "Why don't I find out for myself and try this piece of cake?"

  "That isn't yours, Cushing, it's mine."

  "That's right, darling, it is your cake, isn't it?" At which point he took the cake and squeezed it in his fist, squishing and scrunching till there would be no way to separate the cake from the waxed paper. Now it wa
s just this little brown ball.

  He threw the cake back into the sack and then dropped the sack at my feet. "That story of yours is bullshit," he said.

  "What story?" I said.

  "About finding that money by the crick."

  "That's where we found it," I said.

  "You know where the rest of that money is, don't you?"

  "Rest of what money?" Barney said.

  "Rest of the bank robbery money, that's what money," Cushing said. "That's where you little girls are going tonight, isn't it? To get some more of that money?"

  "We're going for a hike," Barney said.

  "To Hampton Hill," I said.

  "Watch the stars," Barney said.

  "Have a little snack," I said.

  We were pissing him off and it was great. He just stood there, this bully-boy cop with his bully-boy gun and his bully-boy Hollywood shades, and he knew we were lying to him and there wasn't a goddamn thing he could do about it.

  "You girls have yourselves a real nice time tonight," he said.

  And right away I knew something was wrong, the sly way he said it.

  "I'll see you later."

  And then he turned around and walked back to his car and got in and drove away.

  I watched his tail lights flare as he turned the corner, then go out of sight behind the Solar Oil Company depot.

  Gone. Cushing was gone. And he shouldn't have been. Not that fast anyway. Not without ragging us a lot more than he did.

  "Pretty cool the way you stood up to him," Barney said. "Maybe he'll leave us alone now."

  "Barney, he's up to something."

  "Up to what?"

  "I don't know and that's what scares me."

  "Maybe he'll go talk to Clarence."

  "Nah. He wouldn't do that. He's up to something else."

  We walked and night lifted us up gently in the palm of its dark hand. The tracks thrummed again with the energy of distant trains and the jays and wrens and ravens sang their birdy asses off. It was cooler now, and so the night smelled not just of heat but of flowers and mown grass and fast chill creek water.

  We crossed the tracks and jumped over the water and went up the slope to the warehouse that sat silent all in deep shadow and moonlight.

  I felt nervous about everything but I couldn't exactly say why so I just kept walking to the warehouse, gripping the sack tighter.

  We went in through the front window the way we had last night and then walked the length of the floor to the closet.

  Roy wasn't there. I shined my Boy Scout flashlight all over the inside. There was no sign of him. Everything was gone except for two stubbed-out cigarette butts and dried red spots on the dirty, tiled floor. No doubt what the red spots were. Everything else he'd taken with him. Leaving no traces made sense, I thought. That way the cops would never know he'd even been here.

  But it all bothered me. Roy hadn't looked too good last night, certainly not good enough to travel. Not very far anyway.

  And then Barney said, "Listen."

  I didn't hear it at first, not with all the electricity humming in the power lines above us and the frogs by the creek and an airplane somewhere up by the round golden moon.

  But then I heard it.

  Some faint noise at the front of the building.

  Barney wasn't quite inside the closet. Now he peeked his head out the door.

  "See anything?" I whispered.

  He shook his head.

  We were getting spooked was all, I thought. Came in here and found Roy gone. No wonder we were getting spooked.

  And then I heard it again. Some faint scuffing sound somewhere at the front of the building.

  "In here," I whispered, pulling him into the closet.

  We waited in the darkness. Our breaths came in huge ragged gasps. We smelled of night and heat and sweat. Faintly, I could smell the food we'd brought Roy last night.

  The scuffing sound came closer.

  By now I knew what it was. Somebody walking across the floor, trying to be quiet.

  Then somebody said, voice echoing in the darkness of the empty warehouse, "You girls having fun in there?"

  "Shit," I said to myself.

  Cushing had followed us.

  We didn't make a big deal of it. I mean we didn't put our hands up or anything. We just walked out and stood in this little patch of moonlight with all the rat droppings crunching beneath our feet and then Cushing just came out of the shadows and said, "You girls are pretty easy to track. All I had to do was park my car on the other side of the oil depot and give you a few minutes and then start following you."

  He pointed to the left cuff of his buff blue summer suit. The cuff was all muddy. "Except I took a wrong step when I got to the crick." He smiled. "I should send you little ladies the cleaning bill."

  "How come you followed us?" Barney said.

  "No more of your bullshit, Okay?" Cushing said. "I'm sick and fucking tired of your bullshit. When I ask you a question this time, I want a straight fucking answer or there'll be hell to pay. You two little girls understand me?"

  He'd just exploded like that, no warning at all. He was a scary guy, no doubt about it.

  "Now," he said, "where's Roy Danton?"

  "Who's Roy Danton?" I said.

  He took one step forward and slapped me so hard I couldn't see for maybe a minute.

  The whole side of my face felt hot and numb and I couldn't get rid of the stars flashing in my eyes.

  "Where is Roy Danton?"

  I wasn't sure I could do it but I wanted to try. I opened my mouth, eager to see what I'd say next. "I don't know any Roy Danton."

  Before he could slap me again, Barney jumped in between us. "Leave him alone!"

  This time he grabbed Barney and shoved him all the way back into the closet where he bounced off the back wall and dropped to the floor. Then he grabbed me and started slapping again. Two, three times, hard vicious slaps. I saw more stars. I tried hitting back and kicking back but he was too big and too skilled, like some mutant older brother.

  "That's what this bag was for, wasn't it?" he said. "You were bringing Danton some food."

  He'd let me go now and I started backing up to the closet.

  Cushing took a flashlight from his jacket, a small silver one like Doc Anderson uses when he wants you to say Ahhh and look at your tonsils, and then he pushed past me and went into the closet.

  All I kept thinking of were the dried drops of blood on the floor.

  Cushing looked up and down, his flashlight like a giant firefly in the darkness, and Barney just sat on the floor and watched him and rubbed the back of his head where it had collided with the wall.

  I stood inside the door, to the right of Cushing, and that was how I saw the water drop from the ceiling to the top of Barney's head. Barney reached up and patted his head and then brought his finger away. There was a dark smear on the back of his fingers.

  I looked up. It wasn't water dripping from the ceiling. It was blood. And I had a pretty good idea whose blood it was, too.

  A few seconds later, Cushing found the blood from yesterday. He kept his light pointed down to the floor, right on it.

  He got down on his haunches for a closer look.

  "How bad was his wound?" he said.

  "Whose wound?" Barney said.

  For a moment, Cushing looked as if he was going to hit Barney again.

  "Do you little girls have any idea how much trouble you're in?"

  We didn't say anything.

  "This means Wayland, the juvenile detention home. You know the kind of boys you'll meet in that home? Did you hear about the stabbing they had there last year? Two kids just about your age stabbed to death in their sleep? And Wayland's just where you'll be going once I tell the chief that you've been helping that bank robber hide out."

  And right then another drop of blood fell. I saw Barney's head jerk up and his eyes scan the ceiling and his hand go up and touch his scalp again.

  Cushing had be
en watching me, not Barney.

  "Your old man won't be able to help you out of this one, believe me," he said. "And neither will the chief, even if he wants to, which he probably won't."

  Barney was staring at me and pointing to his head.

  "You've only got one choice," Cushing droned on. "And that's to tell me the truth. Tell me everything that happened. And then tell me where he was going when he left here."

  "Milwaukee," I said.

  "Milwaukee?"

  "He knows people there and when he left this morning, that's where he was headed."

  "He left this morning?"

  "Right."

  "What time?"

  "Just about dawn. That's what he said he'd do anyway."

  The lies were coming so good and so quick I was scaring myself again.

  "If he left this morning, how come you came out here tonight?"

  "He said he'd leave some money for us," Barney said.

  He was getting good at it, too.

  "Did he?"

  "No," Barney said, making himself look real dejected.

  Cushing smiled. "That's where you girls are naive. Trusting a bank robber like that."

  We were silent.

  "Milwaukee," Cushing said again. "He say who he knew there?"

  "Some name. I don't remember exactly," I said.

  "Try."

  "John," I said.

  "I thought it was Don," Barney said.

  "John or Don or something like that," I said.

  "John or Don or something like that, huh?" Cushing said, and then backhanded me hard enough to push me all the way across the closet floor. I banged my head against the back wall just the way Barney had.

  He turned off the light. "You little girls have yourselves a real nice hike."

  And then he left.

  He went out of the closet and back across the wide, moonlit floor and out the front window.

  We just sat there, frozen, listening to his footsteps recede, listening to him become just one more faint noise in the night. "Shit," Barney said.

  I got my Boy Scout flashlight out and aimed it up at one of the ceiling tiles, which were very wide and very dark, which was why the dripping blood hadn't shown.

  "Roy?"

  "Yeah," he said. "Be careful. This may be a trick. He may be right outside. One of you boys go watch for him, all right?"