Эд Горман - Moonchasers and Other Stories

The headlights died. Briney sat in the dark car smoking a cigarette. I could tell he was staring at us.

Murch just sat there with Caesar on his lap. I just sat there waiting for trouble. I could sense it coming and I wanted it over with.

Briney got out of the car and tried hard to walk straight up the walk to the porch. He wasn’t a comic drunk, doing an alcoholic rhumba, but he certainly could not have passed a sobriety test.

He came up on the porch and stopped. His chest was heaving from anger. He smelled of whiskey and sweat and Old Spice.

“You think I don’t fucking know the shit you’re putting in my old lady’s mind?” he said to Murch. “Huh?”

Murch didn’t say anything.

“I asked you a fucking question, old man.”

Murch said, softly, “Why don’t you go in and sleep it off, kid?”

“You’re the goddamned reason she went to her mother’s last week. You told her to!”

And then he lunged at Murch and I was up out of my chair. He was too drunk to swing with any grace or precision but he caught me on the side of the head with the punch he’d intended for Murch, and for a dizzy moment I felt my knees go. He could hit. No doubt about that.

And then he was on me, having given up on Murch, and I had to take four or five more punches while I tried to gather myself and bring some focus to my fear and rage.

I finally got him in the ribs with a good hooking right, and I felt real exhilaration when I heard the air whoof out of him, and then I banged another one just to the right off his jaw and backed him up several inches and then—

Then Kelly was on the porch crying and screaming and putting herself between us, a child trying to separate two mindless mastodons from killing each other and—

“You promised you wouldn’t drink no more!” she kept screaming over and over at Briney.

All he could do was stand head hung and shamed like some whipped giant there in the dirty porch light she’d turned on. “But honey...” he’d mumble. Or “But sweetheart...” Or “But Kelly, Jeez I...”

“Now you get inside there, and right now!” she said, no longer his wife but his mother. And she sternly pointed to the door. And he shambled toward it, not looking back at any of us, just shuffling and shambling, drunk and dazed and sweaty, depleted of rage and pride, and no longer fierce at all.

When he was inside, the apartment door closed, she said, “I’m real sorry, Todd. I heard everything from inside.”

“It’s all right.”

“You hurt?”

“I’m fine.”

“I’m real sorry.”

“I know.”

She went over to Murch and touched him tenderly on the shoulder. He was standing up, this tired and suddenly very old-looking man, and he had good gray Caesar in his arms. Kelly leaned over and petted Caesar and said, “I wish I had a husband like you, Caesar.”

She went back inside. The rest of our time on the porch, the Brineys spoke again in whispers.

Just before he went up to bed, Murch said, “He’s going to kill her someday. You know that, don’t you, Todd?”

This time I was ready for it. Six hours had gone by. I’d watched the late movie and then lay on the bed smoking a cigarette in the darkness and just staring at the play of streetlight and tree shadow on the ceiling.

The first sound from below was very, very low and I wasn’t even sure what it was. But I threw my legs off the bed and sat up, grabbing for my cigarettes as I did so.

When the sound came again, I recognized it immediately for what it was. A soft sobbing. Kelly.

Voices. Muffled. Bedsprings squeaking. A curse — Briney.

And then, sharp and unmistakable, a slap.

And then two, three slaps.

Kelly screaming. Furniture being shoved around.

I was up from the sweaty bed and into my jeans, not bothering with a shirt, and down the stairs two at a lime.

By now, Kelly’s screams filled the entire house. Behind me, at the top of the stairs, I could hear Murch shouting down, “You gotta stop him, son! You gotta stop him!”

More slaps; the muffled thud of closed fists pounding into human flesh and bone.

I stood back from the door and raised my foot and kicked with the flat of my heel four limes before shattering the wood into jagged splinters.

Briney had Kelly pinned on the floor as he had last week, and he was putting punches into her at will. Even at a glance, I could see that her nose was broken. Ominously, blood leaked from her ear.

I got him by the hair and yanked him to his feet. He still wasn’t completely sober so he couldn’t put up the resistance he might have at another time.

I meant to make him unconscious and that was exactly what I did. dragged him over to the door. He kept swinging at me and occasionally landing hard punches to my ribs and kidney but at the moment I didn’t care. He smelled of sweat and pure animal rage and Kelly’s fresh blood. I got him to the door frame and held him high by his hair and then slammed his temple against the edge of the frame.

It only took once. He went straight down to the floor in an unmoving heap.

Murch came running through the door. “I called the cops!”

He went immediately to Kelly, knelt by her. She was over on her side, crying crazily and throwing up in gasps that shook her entire body. Her face was a mask of blood. He had ripped her nightgown and dug fierce raking fingers over her breasts. She just kept crying.

Even this late at night, the neighbors were up for a good show, maybe two dozen of them standing in the middle of the street as the whipping red lights of police cars and ambulance gave the crumbling neighborhood a nervous new life.

Kelly had slipped into unconsciousness and was brought out strapped to a stretcher.

Two uniformed cops questioned Briney on the porch. He kept pointing to me and Murch, who stood holding Caesar and stroking him gently.

There was an abrupt scuffle as Briney bolted and took a punch at one of the cops. He was a big man, this cop, and he brought Briney down with two punches. Then he cuffed him and took him to the car.

From inside the police vehicle, Briney glared at me and kept glaring until the car disappeared into the shadows at the end of the block.

Kelly was a week in the hospital. Murch and I visited her twice. In addition to a broken nose, she’d also suffered a broken rib and two broken teeth. She had a hard time talking. She just kept crying softly and shaking her head and patting the hands we both held out to her.

Her brother, a burly man in his twenties, came over to the house two days later with a big U-Haul and three friends and cleaned out the Briney apartment. Murch and I gave him a hand loading.

The newspaper said that Peter James Briney had posted a $2500 bond and had been released on bail. He obviously wasn’t going to live downstairs. Kelly’s brother hadn’t left so much as a fork behind, and the landlord had already nailed a Day-Glo For Rent sign on one of the front porch pillars.

As for me, the crew was getting ready to move on. In two more days, we’d pack and head up the highway toward Des Moines.

I tried to make my last two nights with Murch especially good. There was a pizza and beer restaurant over on Ellis Boulevard and on the second to last night, I took him there for dinner. I even coerced him into telling me some of those good old WWII stories of his.

The next night, the last night in Cedar Rapids, we had to work overtime again.

I got home after nine, when it was full and starry dark.

I was walking up the street when one of the neighbors came down from his porch and said, “They took him away.”

I stopped. My body temperature dropped several degrees. I knew what was coming. “Took who off?”

“Murch. You know, that guy where you live.”