Moonchasers & Other Stories Read online

  "I'll go watch," Barney said.

  It took Roy several minutes to get down. He was dirty and sweaty and he looked even weaker than he had yesterday. He clutched his satchel of bank money tight against his wound. Some of his blood was smeared on the satchel.

  In case you're wondering how he got up and down, he had a rope tied to a paint-splattered aluminum stepladder he'd found. After he used the ladder to climb up to the beams above the ceiling panels, he pulled the ladder up behind him.

  "I wondered if you boys could keep our little secret so I thought I'd better get up there in case the law came looking for me," he said, as he started in on the food.

  He didn't eat much and that's one way I knew he was worse than he'd been last night. When you're real sick, you lose your appetite. He was in a lot of pain. Every few seconds a spasm would come and make him groan.

  When he was done trying to eat, he took the pack of Chesterfields Barney had stolen and put one in his mouth.

  He took out his Zippo. He got the lighter to his cigarette but when he tried to flick the spark up—

  The lighter tumbled from his hands, a dim flash of metal in the weak dusty beam of my flashlight. The lighter made a metallic chinking sound when it hit the floor.

  I picked it up right away and lit his Chesterfield for him. "Thanks," he said, weakly.

  Pretty soon, he was unconscious again and as I sat there staring at him in the beam of my flashlight, I saw that even when he was sleeping he looked a lot like Mitch.

  I picked up the flashlight and moved the beam real close to his wound and got a good look at it. The pussy stuff covered the blood now like an oil slick. His whole body trembled. The smell was awful.

  I knew what I was seeing, of course. I was seeing a man in the final stages of his life. I felt sorry as hell for him.

  "Barney?" I said.

  A moment later he was in the doorway. "Look at him."

  "God, he looks terrible."

  "You know what we have to do?"

  "Yeah. How long you think he's got?"

  "I don't know," I said. "But not long if we don't get an ambulance and a doctor real soon."

  We took a last look at Roy. He just sat there. His body was still twitching, his right leg especially. Even his eyelids, closed in sleep, twitched a little.

  Then we got out of there.

  We were going to get Roy some help and right then we didn't think of him having to stand trial or going to prison or anything. We just wanted him to live.

  We were a few hundred yards from the warehouse when the two shots rang out somewhere behind us in the prairie night.

  And then I was running, running faster than I ever had in my life, down to the creek and across the grassy flat to the warehouse, and then straight up to the warehouse window. Barney was right behind me.

  By the time I reached the closet, my lungs were heaving so hard I thought I might throw up.

  Then I knelt next to Roy and played the flashlight over his face and chest. Touched the artery on his neck. Touched the artery in his wrist.

  "He's dead, isn't he?" Barney said.

  "Yeah."

  "Sonofabitch. Money's gone, too."

  I looked. He was right. The money satchel was gone.

  I brought the light down Roy's torso, to see where he'd been shot. The first wound had been in his side. This one was right in his chest. There was a tiny black hole right in the center of this huge blooming flower of blood.

  I shone the light to the floor where his right hand lay turned up, his gun grasped in his fingers.

  I thought of him being unconscious when we left, of him being so weak that he couldn't hold his lighter up.

  There was no way he'd come to and grabbed his gun. Even a dumb teenager like me could figure out what had happened here.

  "Cushing killed him in cold blood and then put that gun in Roy's hand," I said.

  "And took the money."

  "And took the money."

  I guess until then the whole thing had been an adventure. When you grow up in a small town like Somerton, you keep hoping that something really remarkable will happen to you. And it sure did for us, finding Roy and all, and bringing him food and helping him hide out.

  But now it was different. Now it was scary. One day outside one of the downtown taverns I saw two drunks get into it so viciously that one bit a piece of an ear off the other. Nobody could seem to get them apart. Finally, the tavern owner had to get out a hose and spray them down the way he would have two angry dogs. I remember thinking that for all the movie violence I'd seen, I really didn't know much about the real thing—the way men beat on each other with a frenzy and a relish that makes me sick inside.

  The way Roy had been killed made me sick inside. The way Cushing made me sick inside.

  "What're we gonna do?" Barney said.

  "Tell the chief."

  "Everything?"

  "Everything."

  Barney and I took one last look at Roy, bloody and waxen and dead, propped up sad and awkward against the wall. There was just this silence, a deeper silence than I'd ever heard before, and then I figured out what I was listening to—eternity. That's what I was hearing, something I'd always heard about but never heard for myself before. Eternity.

  iii

  On the way in, Barney and I decided to tell our dads first—and let them tell the chief. It would be better that way, at least for us, even though telling Clarence and George wasn't going to be easy.

  There was a fight on TV when I reached the front porch. Clarence was a boxing fanatic. He sat there in those purple Bermudas of his and whaled away at empty air just like he was Marciano whaling away at an opponent. He liked Negro boxers fine, especially if they reminded him in any way of Joe Louis, whom he inevitably called "poor Joe Louis," but for some reason he hated Mexican fighters. Maybe a Mexican beat him up once or something.

  Anyway, that was the scene when I got home that night, Clarence alone in the living room in his purple Bermudas throwing lefts and rights and jumping up and down in his recliner and grunting and groaning loud enough to make the family cat look real spooked.

  Mom and Debbie were long gone, of course. They knew better than to watch Clarence at the fights.

  Anyway, Clarence in his purple Bermuda shorts and throwing punches with great and noisy abandon—he turned and looked at me and said—

  "Somethin' wrong, son?"

  "I need to talk to you, Dad."

  "Son, there's a fight on."

  "I know there's a fight on."

  "It's Hurricane Jackson. He's getting ready to throw his bolo punch."

  "Dad—"

  His attention roamed back to the screen where two Negroes were pounding on each other.

  "Dad—"

  Glancing over at me desperately: "Son, is it anything that can wait?"

  "No, Dad, I'm sorry but it can't."

  "Is this real serious or something?"

  "Real serious, Dad."

  "You want me to get your mom?"

  "No, Dad. I just want to talk to you. Alone."

  "Then let's go out to the kitchen. I need a beer."

  So we went out to the kitchen and sat down and—

  He had a beer and I had a Pepsi.

  "So, son, what is it?" Clarence said as we sat in the kitchen where it was at least ten degrees hotter than the living room. The kitchen was great in the winter but in the summer it was a sweat box with only one tiny window for a breeze.

  "You know that money I told you I found?" I said.

  "Uh-huh."

  "I didn't find it. Somebody gave it to me."

  "Gave it to you? Who gave it to you?"

  So I told him. Every single bit of it, right up to tonight where we left Roy dead in the warehouse.

  "And Cushing killed him?"

  "Yessir."

  "And it wasn't self-defense, you don't think?"

  "Nosir, Roy couldn't even hold up his lighter a few minutes earlier."

  "So Cushing mur
dered him in cold blood?"

  "Yessir."

  "And then took the money?"

  "Yessir."

  "You don't have any doubt about that?"

  "Nosir."

  He pawed sweat from his face. "You're going to be in a lot of trouble, son."

  "Yessir."

  "Why the hell'd you help out a bank robber, anyway? And don't tell me it was because he looked like Robert Mitchum. That's the craziest goddamn thing I've ever heard of." He shook his head.

  "Jesus, Mary and Joseph, because he looked like fucking Mitch?'"

  Until that very moment in my young life, I had never heard Clarence use the F word. And issuing from his lips, it sounded both more vile and more silly than it ever had before.

  "Chief Pike'll probably bring charges against both you and Barney."

  "I know."

  "This is going to be pretty embarrassing at the Rotary."

  "I'm sorry, Dad."

  "A goddamn bank robber. Haven't I raised you better than that?"

  "Yessir."

  And then we heard the first sirens, loud and near on the hot dark night.

  "They're probably going to get the body."

  "Yessir."

  He swigged more beer. "You let me go talk to Pike first. I'll tell him everything and then I'll call and have you come down."

  "All right."

  "He won't be happy when I tell him about Cushing. He's got a blind spot for that guy. Thinks he walks on water. I guess it's because his own son died in that tractor accident awhile back and Cushing sort of fills the void. And Cushing's own folks died in that car accident when he was ten."

  "Yessir." He stood up. "I'm going to go get ready. Put on a clean shirt and all."

  "Yessir."

  "I'm also going to tell your mother."

  I nodded.

  He stood looking at me for a long time in silence then he shook his head and left the kitchen.

  I went into the living room. I could feel this awful sadness come over me. I just kept thinking of Roy and how sad and frail he looked when he dropped the lighter because he'd been too sick to hold it up—

  And right then I became aware of the lighter in my pocket. I dug it out and then turned on the floor lamp and held the lighter up to the round yellow bulb.

  It was Roy's, the Zippo with the skull and crossbones designed into the silver surface. I must have stuck it in my pocket after I lit his cigarette. I shoved it back in my pocket. I wasn't going to mention it to anybody. It was something I intended to keep.

  Clarence came down with Mom right behind him. They looked the way they usually do at funerals, grim in a very formal way. Clarence had on a short-sleeved white shirt and a dark pair of pants. He reeked of Old Spice. He walked over to me and said, "I'll call you in a little while."

  I nodded.

  Clarence went over and gave Mom a quick small peck on the cheek and then went out, the screen door banging behind him.

  Mom went over and sat primly on the edge of the couch. I could tell she wanted to talk. I could also tell she didn't know what to say.

  After a time, she cleared her throat and said, "You've hurt your father very deeply."

  "I know."

  "He has to maintain a certain reputation in this town."

  "I know."

  "And he's worried that you might—

  "I know what he's worried about, Mom. That I might have to go to reform school."

  And then she broke into tears and in the light from the floor lamp she looked suddenly old and haggard and even more frail than Roy had there at the last, and so I went over to her and took her in my arms and held her and just let her cry the way Clarence would have in this circumstance. There really wasn't much else I could do.

  Every few minutes while we waited, I'd touch the lighter and think of Roy dying and I'd get sad all over again. I'd never see him or hear him again. That's the strange part. How people just vanish from your life like that. Forever.

  Just after eleven, the phone rang. Mom insisted on getting it. After she spoke a few words standing next to the stairway, I knew she was talking to Clarence.

  She still looked pretty old, as if some kind of age transformation had taken place just in the last hour and a half.

  Then she said, "Your father wants to speak with you," and held the phone out to me.

  Clarence said, "You'd better get your butt over here fast. This isn't turning out the way I thought."

  "I'm not sure what that means."

  "I can't explain right now, son. But you get over here to the police station right now."

  "How about Barney?"

  "You let Barney's folks worry about Barney. Right now my only concern is you."

  "Yessir."

  This late at night, the old town was pretty neat. Almost nothing moved, all the cars were parked, all the people were inside, and the streetlight shadows gave everything the texture and depth of a very gentle painting of a small town all asleep.

  I rode my bike through the empty town square and down the block past all the storefronts where the mannequins watched me go. Only the taverns were open, big hot smoky machines grinding out chilly neon light and jukebox wisdom and hard desperate laughter. As I went by I smelled yeasty beer and dirty cigars.

  There was a Channel 3 station wagon parked in the No Parking space in front of the police station. Up on the top of the steps stood Chief Pike and Detective Cushing being interviewed by a whole gaggle of reporters. Everything was a blaze of light and a click and clack of still cameras and motion picture cameras. The mayor was there and all the city council and maybe six local gendarmes in uniform and—

  And Barney.

  He stood right between Pike and Cushing.

  And as I dropped my bike on the sidewalk and started walking toward the front of the station, Barney started talking into this microphone this reporter had put in his face.

  "How does it feel to be a hero, Barney?"

  A hero? What the hell was going on here? All I could think of was how strange Clarence had sounded on the telephone, how he'd said, "This isn't turning out the way I thought."

  And then Chief Pike saw me and shouted, "Look! There's our other hero now!"

  Fifty faces turned to look at me. Me—the most self-conscious guy I knew. Even walking up in front of a class to read a paper makes me sick to my stomach. All those eyes staring, staring—and right at me.

  And the reporters deserted Pike and Cushing and Barney and came running down the stairs toward me.

  I wasn't sure what to do. I wanted to run but I knew I'd better not do that.

  "How does it feel to be a hero?" asked this guy in a bow tie and straw hat.

  "I'm afraid I—" I started to say.

  Flashbulbs went nova in my face. I was blinded.

  "No need to be modest," another reporter said. "Detective Cushing told us all about it. How you and Barney called him and told him where to find Roy Danton. You boys are heroes!"

  "Too bad Detective Cushing didn't find the money, though," said a third reporter.

  "Danton hid it somewhere around here, you can be sure of that," an auxiliary cop named Michaelson said. He was one of Cushing's friends, or liked to pretend he was anyway. But mostly he was a fat, pushy jerk.

  My sight was starting to come back.

  I raised my eyes and looked up the stairs to Barney. He just shrugged, seeming just as confused about all this as I was.

  "Even without the money, though," the reporter with the bow tie said, "you boys'll get some kind of reward. You just wait and see."

  And then I felt an arm slide around my shoulder and when I turned my head I saw Clarence.

  "How does that boy of yours make you feel?" asked a reporter. "Proud. Darned proud."

  "Let's get a picture of you two just like that," said a photographer.

  Then they all started snapping pictures.

  And then somebody had the notion of me and Clarence going up the steps for a group shot. And after the group sho
t—

  "How about you two boys standing over there on either side of Detective Cushing? We'll get a good shot of just you three."

  It was all kind of like a movie, real and unreal at the same time, especially the part where Barney and I stood on the step beneath Cushing so he could put his hands on our shoulders.

  "That's great! Just great!" cried the photographer. "Now if I could just get you boys to smile a little!"

  Cushing dug his hands into our shoulders and leaned down and whispered, "I saved you two little assholes from going to reform school. So smile!"

  So we smiled. Or tried to, anyway, but right now all I could think about was what a clever sonofabitch Cushing was, one hell of a lot cleverer than I ever would have thought.

  And when the reporters were through with us they concentrated on Cushing alone. They sounded like high school girls cooing over Elvis.

  "Were you scared going into that dark warehouse when you knew somebody like Roy Danton was in there?"

  "Well, scared, sure, but that's what the folks in this community pay me to do."

  "How'd you finally bag him, Detective Cushing?"

  Another self-effacing shrug. "Just kind of snuck up on the closet where my two good friends Tom and Barney told me he'd be. Then I just told him that I was giving him twenty-five seconds to come out with his hands above his head or I'd be coming in."

  "He say anything to that?"

  Boyish grin. "Well, yes, he did say something to that but it sure isn't something I could repeat here."

  "Then what happened?"

  "Well, a policeman's only as good as his word. I'd warned him that I'd be coming in and that's just what I did. I kicked the door open and went in."

  "Is that when he shot at you?"

  He nodded. "One shot was all he had time to get off. That's when I killed him."

  Barney and Clarence and I stood there and watched this Academy Award performance and I'm sure we were all thinking the same thing. Good ol' Cushing was going to have it every which way he wanted it. He'd killed a man in cold blood and he'd stolen nearly $50,000 in cash yet he was being treated as a hero.

  And the only two people who could testify against him couldn't say a word because by now nobody would believe them. They were all running after Cushing like kids after a Fourth of July float.