Эд Горман - Moonchasers and Other Stories

He let go.

And then I let go, too, my entire hand and wrist so numb from pain that I didn’t feel the letter flutter from my grasp.

There it was on the floor—

And I was bending to pick it up—

And Cushing was bending to pick it up—

But before either of us got to it, the mayor stooped — no small feat, given his gut — and retrieved it from the floor.

He held it up and read aloud, “To the Governor.”

Cushing glared at me and I glared right back.

“Your Honor,” the mayor said, “somebody wrote you a letter.”

And the mayor of this fair city personally hand-delivered my letter to the governor for me.

“What’s this?” the governor said.

But the mayor was already stepping to the podium and giving a little 1-2-3 test to the public address system.

Cushing stared at the letter in the governor’s hand. For a second, I had the sense that he was going to jump the governor and rip the letter from him. Cushing looked highly pissed and at least a little bit crazy.

With the mayor already going into his introduction of the governor — “One of the favorite sons in this land of plenty of ours” — all Cushing and I could do was go back to our seats.

Which we did.

When I looked at the governor again, he was opening the envelope.

He took out the letter—

Unfolded it—

Scanned it quickly—

And just then the mayor said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you our own beloved governor!”

The band played. And grown-ups applauded. And teenagers tried to make it look as if they were applauding. And babies cried because all the hoopla was scaring the hell out of them. And a cop turned on a siren. And several of the town dogs standing on the edge of the square started barking.

And the governor just kept reading and rereading the letter.

Just the way I’d wanted him to.

Everything died down, finally.

The governor stepped up to the podium, adjusted the microphone to his own height, the entire PA system ringing with the adjustment, and then he leaned forward and held the letter up for all the crowd to see and then he said—

“Over the years, I’ve noted that no matter what the occasion or what the event, there’s always somebody who tries to spoil it. Out of envy or spite or plain mendacity, they want to ruin a splendid event that everybody else is enjoying. A few minutes ago somebody handed me this letter — and I’ll tell you, I’ve never read such a pack of lies in my life. And if you don’t mind, I’m going to take care of this matter right now.”

And right then and right there, our own beloved governor of our own beloved state ripped the shit out of the letter I’d sent him.

White pieces of paper fluttered to the ground and our own beloved governor said, “Now I want to thank you for inviting me here and letting me have the honor of handing out these awards to these fine citizens of yours.”

To be honest, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the rest of the ceremony. I only knew that the few times I looked at Cushing, he was smirking.

And when the governor went to shake my hand, Cushing, who was right behind me, kicked me so hard in the ankle I could barely stand up.

Autumn came and with it all the pleasures of that season — the smoky air, the Indian summer sunlight, the ring of the school bell in the crisp morning, the snap and crackle and glow of the bonfire on the prairie night at the Homecoming ceremony behind the stadium, and all the quick excited laughter of the little kids scurrying along the street on Halloween night, tripping on their too-long costumes and hoping that Mrs. Grundy was still giving out shiny new quarters, and shoving Tootsie Rolls and Clark bars and sticky sweet popcorn balls into their mouths — my favorite season.

The new girl came to school and she was almost painfully pretty and just as painfully stuck-up. I went up to her twice and tried to introduce myself but she saw me coming and then pretended to fall into deep conversation with the other stuck-up girl she was walking down the hall with. Stuck-up girls have this secret club they all belong to, and it runs coast-to-coast.

Then in the mornings on the way to school, you’d suddenly see skins of ice on the creek water, and the wraith of your breath as you spoke. Dad had his two best months ever at the store in September and October, Mom finally got the wall-to-wall carpeting she’d always wanted (a combined birthday-anniversary-Christmas gift, Dad explained) and Debbie got her first boyfriend, this very shy chunky kid who walked her home from school every night and then took off like an arrow whenever he saw me or Mom.

Somerton itself changed, too. The town square, for instance, had a naked and lonely look, shorn as it was of blooming trees and growing foliage. Litter skittered across the dead, brown grass and the bandstand took on the look of a home that had been mysteriously (and perhaps violently) abandoned. Even a little Dixieland music was preferable to this.

A few store owners started putting up Christmas decorations in early November, with the expected number of old ladies complaining about it — “Show some proper respect. The Lord’s birthday is in December, not November” — and there was the expected number of letters in the local paper about how crass Christmas had become.

Hunting season opened and while I could never kill an animal that way, I had to admit there was something thrilling about the stalking part of it, all dressed up in red-and-black checkered caps and jackets and armed with a long rifle and creeping through the fallen cornstalks and along the frozen creek and up the red clay hills, the air pure and fine and chill, and the chestnut roans beautiful as they ran the pasture land nearby.

And you’re no doubt wondering about Barney and Cushing.

As of November 10, Barney still hadn’t spoken to me. We had several classes a day together, we had the same lunch period, we took the same route home, but Barney always managed to avoid me.

His friendship with Cushing ended right after the governor’s appearance. At least I think it did. At any rate, you never saw him with Cushing anywhere. About the only person you ever did see Barney with was a country kid that everybody was always pretty cruel to, a cross-eyed boy who wore Big Mac bib overalls and who had a bad stutter. Jennings, his name was.

As for Cushing, he got himself a snazzy new aqua Plymouth two-door and gave the gossips some very good news by dating the town’s only femme fatale, a very dramatic divorcee named Babe Holkup, who had once been the exclusive property of one R. K. “Buddy” Holkup, former high school football great and now resident of Ft. Madison Penitentiary because he kept taking home samples from the bank where he worked. Babe, whose real name was actually Elberta, divorced Buddy when he still had five years to go on his sentence. About this same lime, at least according to the gossips I mentioned above, Elberta also started wearing falsies and hose without seams. And getting threatening letters from Buddy. It all sounded like one of those old George Raft movies they play on late-night TV. The times Cushing saw me, he just smirked a bit. He didn’t call me a girl anymore and he didn’t try to look scary. He just moved on. Apparently he didn’t think I was any kind of threat to him.

And I guess I wasn’t, not until I had the dream, the strangest dream of my life.

Here was Mitch and here was Roy and damned if they didn’t look more alike than I’d even thought.

And Mitch said, “It’s time you grow up, Tom. It’s time you do right by Roy.”

Well, first of all, I’d never had a movie star in my dreams before, so that part of it was startling enough, especially since it was Robert Mitchum himself.