Эд Горман - Moonchasers and Other Stories

“The cops?”

The man shook his head. “Ambulance. Murch had a heart attack.”

I ran home. Up the stairs. Murch’s place was locked. I had a key for his apartment in my room. I got it and opened the place up.

I got the lights on and went through each of the four small rooms. Murch was an orderly man. Though all the furnishings were old, from the ancient horsehair couch to the scarred chest of drawers, there was an obstinate if shabby dignity about them, much like Murch himself.

I found what I was looking for in the bathtub. Apparently the ambulance attendants hadn’t had time to do anything more than rush Murch to the hospital.

Caesar, or what was left of him anyway, they’d left behind.

He lay in the center of the old claw-footed bathtub. He had been stabbed dozens of times. His gray fur was matted and stiff with his own blood. He’d died in the midst of human frenzy.

I didn’t have to wonder who’d done this or what had given Murch his heart attack.

I went over to the phone and called both hospitals. Murch was at Mercy. The nurse I spoke with said that he had suffered a massive stroke and was unconscious. The prognosis was not good.

After I hung up, I went through the phone book looking for Brineys. It took me six calls to get the right one but finally I found Pete Briney’s father. I convinced him that I was a good friend of Pete’s and that I was just in town for the night and that I really wanted to see the old sonofagun. “Well,” he said, “he hangs out at the Log Cabin a lot.”

The Log Cabin was a tavern not far away. I was there within fifteen minutes.

The moment I stepped through the bar, into a working-class atmosphere of clacking pool balls and whiney country western music, I saw him.

He was in a booth near the back, laughing about something with a girl with a beehive hairdo and a quick beery smile.

When he saw me, he got scared. He left the booth and ran toward the back door. By now, several people were watching. I didn’t care.

I went out the back door after him. I stood beneath a window-unit air conditioner that sounded like a B-52 starting up and bled water like a wound. The air was hot and pasty and I slapped at two mosquitos biting my neck.

Ahead of me was a gravel parking lot. The only light was spill from the back windows of the tavern. The lot was about half full. Briney hadn’t had time to get into that nice golden Mercury convertible at the end of the lot. He was hiding somewhere behind one of the cars.

I walked down the lot, my heels adjusting to the loose and wobbly feel of the gravel beneath.

He came lunging out from behind a pickup truck. Because I’d been expecting him, I was able to duck without much problem.

I turned and faced him. He was crouched down, ready to jump at me.

“I’d still have a wife if it wasn’t for you two bastards,” he said.

“You’re a pretty brave guy, Briney. You wait till Murch goes somewhere and then you sneak in and kill his cat. And then Murch comes home and finds Caesar dead and—”

But I was through talking.

I kicked him clean and sharp. I broke his nose. He gagged and screamed and started puking — he must have had way too much to drink that night — and sank to his knees and then I went over and kicked him several times in the ribs.

I kicked him until I heard the sharp brittle sound of bones breaking, and until he pitched forward, still screaming and crying, to the gravel. Then I went up and kicked him in the back of the head.

A couple of his friends from the tavern came out and started toward me but I was big enough and angry enough that they were wary.

“Personal dispute,” I said. “Nothing to do with you boys at all.”

Then they went over and tried to help their friend to his feet. It wasn’t easy. He was a mess.

Murch died an hour and ten minutes after I got to the hospital. I went into his room and looked at all the alien tentacles stretching from beeping cold metal boxes to his warm but failing body. I stood next to his bed until a doctor came in and asked very softly and politely if I’d mind waiting in the hall while they did some work.

It was while the doctor was in there that Murch died. He had never regained consciousness and so we’d never even said proper good-byes.

At the house, I went into Murch’s apartment and found the shoebox and took it into the bathroom and gathered up the remains of poor Caesar.

I took the box down the stairs and out to the garage where I got the garden spade. Then I went over and in the starry prairie night, buried Caesar properly. I even blessed myself, though I wasn’t a Catholic, and then knelt down and took the rich damp earth and covered Caesar’s grave.

I didn’t sleep that night. I just sat up in my little room with my last quart of Canadian Ace and my last pack of Pall Malls and thought about Kelly and thought about Caesar and especially I thought about Murch.

Just at dawn, it started to rain, a hot dirty city rain that would neither cool nor cleanse, and I packed my bags and left.

The night it all started, the whole strange spiral, we were having our usual midweek poker game — four fortyish men who work in the financial business getting together for beer and bawdy jokes and straight poker. No wild card games. We hate them.

This was summer, and vacation time, and so it happened that the game was held two weeks in a row at my house. Jan had taken the kids to see her Aunt Wendy and Uncle Verne at their fishing cabin, and so I offered to have the game at my house this week, too. With nobody there to supervise, the beer could be laced with a little bourbon, and the jokes could get even bawdier. With the wife and kids in the house, you’re always at least a little bit intimidated.

Mike and Bob came together, bearing gifts, which in this case meant the kind of sexy magazines our wives did not want in the house in case the kids might stumble across them. At least that’s what they say. I think they sense, and rightly, that the magazines might give their spouses bad ideas about taking the secretary out for a few after-work drinks, or stopping by a singles bar some night.

We got the chips and cards set up at the table, we got the first beers open (Mike chasing a shot of bourbon with his beer), and we started passing the dirty magazines around with tenth-grade glee. The magazines compensated, I suppose, for the balding head, the bloating belly, the stooping shoulders. Deep in the heart of every hundred-year-old man is a horny fourteen-year-old boy.

All this, by the way, took place up in the attic. The four of us got to know each other when we all moved into what city planners called a “transitional neighborhood.” There were some grand old houses that could be renovated with enough money and real care. The city designated a ten-square-block area as one it wanted to restore to shiny new luster. Jan and I chose a crumbling Victorian. You wouldn’t recognize it today. And that includes the attic, which I’ve turned into a very nice den.

“Pisses me off,” Mike O’Brien said. “He’s always late.”

And that was true. Neil Solomon was always late. Never by that much but always late nonetheless.

“At least tonight he has a good excuse,” Bob Genter said.

“He does?” Mike said. “He’s probably swimming in his pool.” Neil recently got a bonus that made him the first owner of a full-size outdoor pool in our neighborhood.

“No, he’s got Patrol. But he’s stopping at nine. He’s got somebody trading with him for next week.”

“Oh, hell,” Mike said, obviously sorry that he’d complained. “I didn’t know that.”

Bob Genter’s handsome black head nodded solemnly.