Эд Горман: Moonchasers and Other Stories

He stopped talking. He just stared at us a long dusty sad time and then he raised the gun and put the barrel of it right to his temple and said, “If you bring the cops back, I’ll end it right here. And that isn’t a bluff. And I’m sorry to put it on you like this but I don’t have any choices left in my life. I’m leaving it up to you to decide.”

Then there was just the dust and shadow and quiet of the closet and the sad (and I saw now) sort of crazy blue eyes of Roy Danton.

“You mean we can go?” Barney said.

“You can go.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Just walk right out of here?”

“Just walk right out of here.”

“And you won’t shoot us in the back?”

“And I won’t shoot you in the back.”

“Jeez,” Barney said.

We turned around and left the closet and walked the moonlit length of the warehouse floor, rat droppings crunching beneath our feet, without saying a word.

And then we started running like hell.

Five minutes later we were on the railroad ties and smoking Lucky Strikes and hurrying back to town. There was an owl on the night, and phantom clouds across the quarter moon, and a far rumbling train we could feel trembling in the tracks themselves.

“You think we’ll get a reward?” Barney said.

“Probably.”

“Whaty’sll you do with yours?”

“Save up for a car.”

“You think Clarence will let you have your own car when you’re sixteen?”

We always referred to our fathers by their first names. Clarence and George.

“Sure. Wouldn’t George let you have one?”

“Not since Kenny knocked up his girlfriend in the backseat of that old Plymouth George bought him for his birthday.”

“But Kenny and Donna are married.”

“Now theyy’sre married. But they weren’t then. And that’s what George got so pissed about. Kenny was supposed to go on to college. But now he’s working at the factory and he’s got two kids and he isn’t even twenty-one yet.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure Clarence’ll let me have a car.”

We walked a little more, both of us tossing rocks still warm from sunlight down the silver beams of tracks.

“You know who he looks like?” Barney said.

“Who who looks like?”

“Roy Danton. Who he looks like?”

And then we stopped. We were just at the junction where the tracks swung eastward and went around Somerton.

By now my clothes were stuck to me because it was not only a hot summer, it was a humid summer.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“Robert Mitchum.”

I nodded.

“That’s the only thing that sort of bothers me about turning him in,” Barney said. “It’s kind of like turning in Mitch.”

We just stared at each other for awhile, just a couple of small-town teenagers, neither one of us wanting to say what we felt, and consequently not saying anything at all.

We left the tracks and walked into town. The houses started right away, neat little blocks of them, living rooms all aglow with black-and-white picture tubes, an occasional Elvis record on the air from an upstairs bedroom window, a few front porch swings squeaking in the darkness.

“You see the way he made those faces when the pain got him?” Barney said.

“Yeah.”

“We’re doing him a favor, turning him in.”

By now we reached the town square. The shops and stores that surrounded it stayed open till nine because it was Friday night and night was about the only time farmers in the nearby towns could get in here.

The Dairy Queen was open, and so was Hamblin’s Pharmacy, and Henry’s Hawkeye Supermarket, and the big Shell station where they had four bays and where most of the drag-strip guys took their cars, and Seldon’s International TV (he took a lot of kidding about that “International” bit believe me) and the Western Auto store and the Earle’s Cigars and Billiards and four taverns so noisy they sounded like they were having jukebox wars inside or something.

People sat everywhere, on park benches and car hoods and curbsides, fanning themselves with paper fans of the sort that the funeral home gives you at wakes, with Jesus on one side and a message (plus the address and phone number) from the funeral parlor on the other.

The night smelled of cigar smoke and beer and heat and summer lightning and perfume. And there were old people and young people and pretty people and ugly people and rich people and poor people and people who loved each other and people who hated each other all caught up in those smells.

And Barney and I just stood on the corner across from the red brick building with the big Police sign over the double-wide front door... just stood and stared in through the front windows at the uniformed men on night duty.

“You really think he looks like Mitch?” Barney said.

“A little. Not a lot. But a little.”

“Wey’sd really get our butts kicked if we didn’t turn him in.”

“I know.”

“You really think he’ll kill himself if the cops come?”

“What am I, a swami? How would I know?”

But right away Barney got that patented hangdog look in his eyes, the one that makes you feel bad even when Barney’s at fault, and I said, in a lot more friendly way, “I guess I’m afraid he would. Kill himself, I mean.”

“Mitch would kill himself.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. No prison bars for him. I think he said that in one of his movies.”

“In several of his movies, actually.”

“Mitch would definitely do it. Definitely.”

I sighed. “I wish hey’sd killed somebody.”

“Huh?”

“Roy Danton. I wish he’d killed somebody.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause then it’d be easier to turn him in.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. Robbery’s pretty bad but it’s not like killing anybody.”

“I never thought of it that way, I guess.”

“So even though he’s a bad guy he isn’t a real bad guy. You know?” Barney shook his head. “I don’t want to turn him in either, Tom, but we gotta. We just gotta.”

“I know.”

“So let’s get it over with.”

The police station was real bright inside. And noisy. Phones were ringing and there was some kind of Teletype deal in the corner and it was clacking away and three uniformed men were rushing around, their rubber heels squeaking on the tile floors the way nurse’s shoes do in hospitals.

It was so cold from the air-conditioning that I nearly froze on the spot.

We walked up to the front desk where Sergeant McCorkindale normally sits only it wasn’t Sergeant McCorkindale, it was the new recruit named Meeks who wore glasses and was pudgy and was already getting bald.

“Hi, boys.”

“Hi,” I said.

“Help you with something?”

“We need to talk to Sergeant McCorkindale.”

“You don’t look like fishes to me.”

“Huh?” Barney said.

“Onliest people talking to Sergeant McCorkindale right about now would be the carp or the blue gill. He’s up to Kahler’s Lake fishing for two days.”

And right then I saw Cushing coming out of his office down the hall.

“Well,” he said, “look who’s here. My two favorite little girls.”

I suppose every town has a cop like Cushing, a real slick operator that all the ladies think is cute, and the kind of cruel and cunning man that other men are always sucking up to out of plain undignified fear.

Clarence always said that he used to feel sorry for Cushing, the way Cushing’s parents were both killed in that automobile accident when Cushing was just ten. But Clarence had long ago forgotten all about the accident and concentrated on what a jerk Cushing had grown up into.

Cushing was a decorated marine in Korea. He got home late from the war because of an injury to his leg and they had a parade just for him because not only was he a wounded war hero he’d also been the best high school quarterback this valley has ever seen.