Эд Горман - Moonchasers and Other Stories

Staring off.

Ma knew about it all along of course but she wouldn’t do anything about it. Wouldn’t admit it probably not even to herself. In psychology, which I took last year at the junior college, that’s called denial. I even brought it up a couple times but she just said I had a filthy mind and don’t ever say nothing like that again.

Which is why I broke into that store that night and left Dad’s billfold behind. Because I knew they’d arrest him and then he couldn’t force Ellen into the bed anymore. Not that I blame Dad entirely. Prison makes you crazy no doubt about it and he was in there four years the first time. But even so I love Sis too much.

“Own flesh and blood,” Ma says again lighting up one of her menthols and shaking her head.

I look into the rearview mirror at Sis’s eyes. “Wish I could make you smile,” I say to her. “Wish I could make you smile.”

But she just stares out the window.

She hasn’t smiled for a long time of course.

Not for a long time.

I never paid much attention to their arguments until the night he hit her.

The summer I was twenty-one I worked construction upstate. This was 1963. The money was good enough to float my final year and a half at college. If I didn’t blow it the way some of the other kids working construction did, that is, on too many nights at the tavern, and too many weekends trying to impress city girls.

The crew was three weeks in Cedar Rapids and so I looked for an inexpensive sleeping room. The one I found was in a neighborhood my middle-class parents wouldn’t have approved of but I wasn’t going to be here long enough for them to know exactly where I was living.

The house was a faded frail Victorian. Upstairs lived an old man named Murchison. He’d worked forty, years on the Crandic as a brakeman and was retired now to sunny days out at Ellis Park watching the softball games, and nights on the front porch with his quarts of cheap Canadian Ace beer and the high sweet smell of his Prince Albert pipe tobacco and his memories of WWII. Oh, yes, and his cat, Caesar. You never saw Murch without that hefty gray cat of his, usually sleeping in his lap when Murch sat in his front porch rocking chair.

And Murch’s fondness for cats didn’t stop there. But I’ll tell you about that later.

Downstairs lived the Brineys. Pete Briney was in his early twenties, handsome in a roughneck kind of way. He sold new Mercurys for a living. He came home in a different car nearly every night, just at dusk, just at the time you could smell the dinner his wife, Kelly, had set out for him.

According to Murch, who seemed to know everything about them, Kelly had just turned nineteen and had already suffered two miscarriages. She was pretty in a sweet, already tired way. She seemed to spend most of her time cleaning the apartment and taking out the garbage and walking up to Dlask’s grocery, two blocks away. One day a plump young woman came over to visit but this led to an argument later that night. Pete Briney did not want his wife to have friends. He seemed to feel that if Kelly had concentrated on her pregnancy, she would not have miscarried.

Briney did not look happy about me staying in the back room on the second floor. The usual tenants were retired men like Murch. I had a tan and was in good shape and while I wasn’t handsome girls didn’t find me repulsive, either. Murch laughed one day and said that Briney had come up and said, “How long is that guy going to be staying here, anyway?” Murch, who felt sorry for Kelly and liked Briney not at all, lied and said I’d probably be here a couple of years.

A few nights later Murch and I were on the front porch. All we had upstairs were two window fans that churned the ninety-three-degree air without cooling it at all. So, after walking up to Dlask’s for a couple of quarts of Canadian Ace and two packs of Pall Malls, I sat down on the front porch and prepared myself to be dazzled by Murch’s tales of WWII in the Pacific theater. (And Murch knew lots of good ones, at least a few of which I strongly suspected were true.)

Between stories we watched the street. Around nine, dusk dying, mothers called their children in. There’s something about the sound of working-class mothers gathering their children — their voices weary, almost melancholy, at the end of another grinding day, the girls they used to be still alive somewhere in their voices, all that early hope and vitality vanishing like the faint echoes of tender music.

And there were the punks in their hot rods picking up the meaty young teenage girls who lived on the block. And the sad factory drunks weaving their way home late from the taverns to cold meals and broken-hearted children. And the furtive lonely single men getting off the huge glowing insect of the city bus, and going upstairs to sleeping rooms and hot plates and lonesome letters from girlfriends in far and distant cities.

And in the midst of all this came a brand-new red Mercury convertible, one far too resplendent for the neighborhood. And it was pulling up to the curb and—

The radio was booming “Surf City” with Jan and Dean — and—

Before the car even stopped, Kelly jerked open her door and jumped out, nearly stumbling in the process.

Briney slammed on the brakes, killed the headlights and then bolted from the car.

Before he reached the curb, he was running.

“You whore!” he screamed.

He was too fast for her. He tackled her even before she reached the sidewalk.

Tackled her and turned her over. And started smashing his fists into her face, holding her down on the ground with his knees on her slender arms, and smashing and smashing and smashing her face—

By then I was off the porch. I was next to him in moments. Given that his victim was a woman, I wasted no time on fair play. I kicked him hard twice in the ribs and then I slammed two punches into the side of his head. She screamed and cried and tried rolling left to escape his punches, and then tried rolling right. I didn’t seem to have fazed him. I slammed two more punches into the side of his head. I could feel these punches working. He pitched sideways, momentarily unconscious, off his wife.

He slumped over on the sidewalk next to Kelly. I got her up right away and held her and let her sob and twist and moan and jerk in my arms. All I could think of were those times when I’d seen my otherwise respectable accountant father beat up my mother, and how I’d cry and run between them terrified and try to stop him with my own small and useless fists...

Murch saw to Briney. “Sonofabitch’s alive, anyway,” he said looking up at me from the sidewalk. “More than he deserves.”

By that time, a small crowd stood on the sidewalk, gawkers in equal parts thrilled and sickened by what they’d just seen Briney do to Kelly...

I got her upstairs to Murch’s apartment and started taking care of her cuts and bruises...

I mentioned that Murch’s affection for cats wasn’t limited to Caesar. I also mentioned that Murch was retired, which meant that he had plenty of time for his chosen calling.

The first Saturday I had off, a week before the incident with Pete and Kelly Briney, I sat on the front porch reading a John D. MacDonald paperback and drinking a Pepsi and smoking Pall Malls. I was glad for a respite from the baking, bone-cracking work of summer road construction.

Around three that afternoon, I saw Murch coming down the sidewalk carrying a shoebox. He walked toward the porch, nodded hello, then walked to the backyard. I wondered if something was wrong. He was a talker, Murch was, and to see him so quiet bothered me.

I put down my Pepsi and put down my book and followed him, a seventy-one-year-old man with a stooped back and liver-spotted hands and white hair that almost glowed in the sunlight and that ineluctable dignity that comes to people who’ve spent a life at hard honorable work others consider menial.