Эд Горман: Moonchasers and Other Stories

So it was sort of like that now, feeding Roy. I mean, because he was so weak he couldn’t even hold a piece of cold meat in his fingers.

“It’s so goddamned cold in here,” he said.

On the bank Time and Temperature sign downtown about twenty minutes earlier the Temp had been 89.

Barney fed him the Twinkies and the Pepsi and I fed him the Oscar Mayer sliced bologna and dutch loaf. And then we both took turns feeding him the Cracker Jacks which Barney had said would be a good way to finish off the meal.

When he was finished eating, Roy said, “You boys bring the bandages and stuff?”

“Yessir,” I said. “We sure wouldn’t forget something like that.” And right then, just the way he gave me this almost imperceptible nod of thanks, he looked a whole lot like Mitch.

“You boys think you can clean a wound?”

“Sure,” Barney said.

I looked over at him and frowned. What the hell did we know about cleaning a wound?

“You just take the hydrogen peroxide and let it soak into some of those cotton balls I told you to get and then you just kind of clean the wound,” Roy said.

We cleaned the wound.

I’ll tell you, it was unlikely either Barney or I were ever going to get scholarships to medical school, the way we poured too much peroxide on the cotton balls and spilled the stuff all over, and the way we grimaced when we had to tear the blood-soaked part of his shirt away from the wound.

“Oh, God,” Barney said when we finally got a good look at the wound. So much for a quiet, steady manner.

I wanted to say oh, God, too, but I just bit down real hard on my lip and took one of the soaked cotton balls and put it up to the wound.

Where the bullet had gone in everything was kind of scabby and you could see green pus leaking from the hole.

In all, we went through eleven cotton balls. I got rid of as much of the scabbing as I found, and at least temporarily I stopped the pus from seeping.

And then we were done and Roy sat back against the wall and felt in his shirt pocket for a cigarette but he was all out so Barney handed over the Chesterfields he’d taken from the supermarket and said, “This was the only brand I could steal.”

“They’re fine. I appreciate it.” He got a cigarette in his mouth, looking a whole lot like Mitch just then, and then he took his Zippo out and thumbed it into lighting. He set the lighter down on the floor and I looked at it. Somebody had carved a skull and crossbones into it, with two little fake red diamonds for the eyes. It was the coolest lighter I’d ever seen.

“There’s one Twinkle left, Roy,” Barney said. “You want it?”

“You eat it, kid,” Roy said.

I laughed. “He was hoping you’d say that.”

Barney gulped it down in two bites.

Roy kept dragging on his cigarette but he did it with his eyes closed. His breathing was starting to get real noisy again and you could tell he was exhausted.

“You think you could bring me some more food tomorrow night?” Roy said. He kept his eyes closed.

“Sure,” I said. “But we can do better than that. We can bring you some rolls for breakfast.”

“Yeah,” Barney said. “From Emma’s Cafe. She makes ’em fresh every morning.”

Eyes closed, he shook his head very gently. “Somebody might see you in the daylight. You don’t want to make anybody suspicious. Wait till night to come out here.”

When he used the word “suspicious” my stomach knotted up. I kept thinking of old man Hamblin at the pharmacy just staring at all the money I had.

“Roy,” Barney said.

“Yeah?”

“Could I use your lighter?”

“Sure.”

“I really appreciate it,” he said, leaning forward and taking the lighter from where it sat on top of the pack of Chesterfields on the floor.

The way the three of us sat, we might have been around a campfire.

Barney picked up the lighter and stared at the skull and crossbones and a low whistle came from his lips. “Cool.”

Barney got a cigarette going and I got a cigarette going and then Barney said, “Roy?”

“Yeah.” Eyes still closed.

“Would you really have killed yourself if we’d brought the law back?”

Roy thought a long moment. “You want an honest answer?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t know if I got the guts to kill myself. I’ve thought about it all my life off and on, and one night when I caught my girlfriend in bed with this guy, I put a gun in my mouth but I couldn’t pull the trigger. I wanted to and I think in a strange way she wanted me to, too, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

And then he made a little grunting sound again and he took the cigarette from his mouth and jabbed it out on the floor. And then he gave out with this deep sigh that made his chest shudder.

“I don’t think I can talk anymore, boys. I need some sleep.”

“We’ll be back tomorrow night, Roy,” I said. “We’ll bring you better food, too.”

We left him, left the warehouse, and went back to town.

“You think he’s gonna die?” Barney said, just as we started down the tracks.

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe we should turn him in. Maybe that really would be doing him a favor.”

“What if he killed himself?”

“You heard him. He said he didn’t have the guts.”

“No, he said maybe he didn’t have the guts. There’s a difference.”

We came to Spring Street, my street.

“Night,” Barney said.

“Night,” I said, and started to walk away.

When I was out of the streetlight and walking in the shadows, I heard Barney say, “You really think he looks like Mitch?” and I called back, “Yeah, I think he looks a lot like Mitch,” and then we were both lost to our respective blocks, just footsteps now in the summer night.

Our house has a lot of gables and gingerbreading which should make it a Victorian, I guess, but my mom says it’s not really a Victorian, at least not a regular one anyway. She always says this whenever somebody visits us for the first time and says “I just love Victorian houses.” Most of us in the family just close our ears when she starts in.

Mom and Dad were in the living room with my eight-year-old sister, Debbie, watching the Late News with Earle Rochester who my dad says is a) a Democrat and b) a funny-looking gink who can’t keep his opinions to himself (“See how he sneers whenever he says the name Eisenhower?” he always says to my mom, by which you can guess that Clarence is a Republican).

Dad was sitting in the leather recliner, which is his sacred chair, and wearing his Purple Passion (as Mom calls them) Bermuda shorts and a sport shirt.

The first thing he said to me was, “How come you were buying hydrogen peroxide and boric acid and gauze and stuff like that at Hamblin’s tonight?”

He kept staring right at the TV, as if he wasn’t missing a word, but asking me his question and then waiting for an answer.

I was ready for him. On the walk home I’d thought up a good one. “Barney and I were going to fix up this tackling dummy like it got all beaten up and then hang a sign on it that said ‘This is what happens to bullies, Maynard’ but Barney got scared and chickened out.”

“You’re just begging Maynard to come after you again,” Clarence said.

I said good night to everybody and went upstairs. Things had gone much easier than I thought they would with Dad, I thought, as I went in the bathroom and peed and brushed my teeth and washed my face.

Mom had turned the fan on in my bedroom so it was going to be pretty good for sleeping.

I got the light on and stripped down to my underwear and picked up a new issue of Imagination, which had a lead novel by one of my favorite writers, Dwight V. Swain. I started to lie down when the door eased open and Dad stuck his head in.