Эд Горман - Moonchasers and Other Stories

“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 been 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?”

“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.