Эд Горман - Moonchasers and Other Stories

In the moonlight, the railroad tracks shone silver for a quarter of a mile. The air smelled of hot creosote from the railroad ties that had baked all day in the sun. Between tracks and warehouse was a winding creek, along the dark banks of which you could smell summer mud and hear throaty frogs and see the silhouette of the willow tree bent and weeping.

“We’re gonna get our butts kicked,” Barney said, “if they catch us.”

Of course that’s what Barney said before just about everything we ever did. Everything that was any fun, anyway.

But I didn’t like to think uncharitable thoughts about Barney because he had it rough. His father had tried and failed in business several times. The family was pretty poor. And whenever his father quit going to his Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, he always got drunk for two or three days and beat up Barney’s mom pretty bad. A couple of times somebody had to call the chief of police and have him come over.

The warehouse was this big corrugated steel building with loading docks on both the west and east sides. There was a large window on the north end revealing the shadowy space where the office had been.

The window had long ago been smashed out, of course, and most of the exterior warehouse walls bore the chalk scrawlings of various kids — Class of ’58, BG + FH, I Luv Judy! The kind of stuff, I’m told by my army corporal and former Eagle Scout brother, Gerald, is proof positive of immature minds.

So there it sat like a big monument left behind by some alien species. When the warehouse was first closed down, back in ’56, kids of every age trooped out there to smash windows and hurl rocks at the steel walls, which were pretty obliging about making neat sounds when the rocks struck. But then the kids got sort of bored with the place and quit coming. Now they mostly spent time at the abandoned grain elevator on the west edge of town. The elevator was more fun because it was more dangerous. One kid had already fallen off the interior ladder and broken a leg and an arm. It was only a matter of time till some poor overenthusiastic kid got killed in there and so the place had developed a certain dark aura that the warehouse could never match.

As we were climbing through the office window, Barney said, “You don’t really think there are ghosts and stuff in here, do ya?” I just shook my head. Barney just kept moving.

We spent the first ten minutes inside walking around the front of the place and stepping on crunchy little rat droppings. It was pretty neat, actually, sort of like in those movies where they drop the atomic bomb and the few survivors walk around inside empty grocery stores and places like that and take everything they want.

Of course, there wasn’t much to take inside this warehouse.

I remember my dad, who owned the haberdashery in town, saying once that the two guys who built this warehouse had no head for business, which was why they went broke so fast. And their creditors must have cleaned them out because when we went through the door leading to the back, all we saw was this huge empty concrete floor with moonlight splashing through six dirty, broken windows.

“This is where I’m going to bring Janie Mills,” Barney said, “and screw her brains out.”

“Good idea,” I said, “and I’ll double with you and bring Sharon Waggoner.”

Barney had the grace to laugh. Janie Mills and Sharon Waggoner were the two most stuck-up girls in our class. They wouldn’t come out here with us if we had them at gunpoint.

The place smelled of dust and heat and rain-soaked wood and truck oil and a turd-clogged toilet somewhere that hadn’t been flushed in a long time.

“Hey!” Barney shouted suddenly.

And then laughed his ass off when the word echoed back to us through the moonlight and shadows.

“Hey!” I shouted, too, and listened as my own sound likewise began repeating itself.

This was another Somerton bust and we both knew it, which was why wey’sd both been shouting. Because there was nothing else to do. Because, as usual in Somerton, nothing was as it had been advertised. There were no spooks, no ghosts; and there were most definitely no voluptuous whores eager to free us from the prison of our virginity.

Barney took the Lucky Strike pack from the pocket of my short-sleeved shirt (we traded off the privilege of carrying the pack) and took a book of matches from his own shirt and lit up and that was when I saw the door move.

The door was way at the other end of the wide, empty warehouse floor, some kind of closet, I guessed. Barney’s match had pointed my eye in that direction and that was how I came to notice the partially open door move a few inches closer to the frame.

Or I thought I had, anyway. Maybe, because I was so bored, I just wanted to think that something like that had happened.

“Let’s go,” Barney said. “We still got time to hit Rexall for a cherry Coke.”

I nudged him in the ribs and nodded toward the end of the moon-painted floor.

“Huh?” he said out loud.

I whispered to him, “Somebody’s in the closet up there.”

He whispered back. “Bullshit.”

“Bullshit yourself. I saw that door move.”

Barney squinted his eyes and looked down the length of floor. He stared a long time and then whispered. “I didn’t see it move.”

“Somebody’s in that closet.”

And this time when he looked at me, I saw the beginnings of fear in his eyes.

You’re in a shadowy, empty building on the edge of nowhere and you suddenly realize that not too far away is somebody or something lurking in a dark closet. Probably watching every move you make.

“Let’s go,” Barney whispered.

I shook my head. “I want to find out who’s in there.”

Barney gulped. “You’re crazy.”

“No, I’m just bored.”

“You really gonna walk up there?”

I nodded and started walking.

At first it was sort of a lark. I could sense Barney behind me, watching with a kind of awe. That crazy sumbitch Tom was going to walk right up to that closet door, just the way Mitch would, and back here stood that A-1 chicken Barney. He would positively be ashamed of himself.

It was a great feeling, it really was. For the first twenty steps or so anyway.

Then I felt this sickening feeling in my stomach and bowels and a cold shudder went through me.

Hell, I wasn’t brave. I was just some dumb-ass fifteen-year-old from Somerton, Iowa, and if I really believed that somebody was in that closet then I should turn around and get the hell out of here.

“I’ll tell you, you’re one ballsy guy and I mean that,” Barney said.

And then I knew I would go over and open that closet door because Barney’s admiration was just too much to lose.

Besides, I was starting to convince myself that I had just imagined the door moving anyway.

We reached the metal door and I put my hand out and took the knob.

“God, Tom, you really gonna open it?”

For an answer, I yanked the door open.

And there, in the middle of the chill deep closet darkness, sitting with his back against the far wall, was a man holding in his left hand a big cop-style flashlight and in his right a big criminal-style pistol.

“God,” Barney said.

“Anybody else with you?” the man said. And right away he looked sort of familiar but I wasn’t sure why. He was a tall guy, a little on the beefy side, with a kind of handsome face and dark hair and the saddest eyes I’d ever seen on a man except for maybe my Uncle Pete when Doc Anderson told him that Aunt Clarice had only two months to live.

The guy was pointing the gun directly at me. Or so it seemed. “N-no, sir.”

“Howy’sd you boys find out about me?”

“We didn’t find out about you, sir,” I said. “I mean not till we got in the warehouse here.”