Эд Горман - Moonchasers and Other Stories

Patrol is something we all take very seriously in this newly restored “transitional neighborhood.” Eight months ago, the burglaries started, and they’d gotten pretty bad. My house had been burglarized once and vandalized once. Bob and Mike had had curb-sitting cars stolen. Neil’s wife, Sheila, was surprised in her own kitchen by a burglar. And then there was the killing four months ago, man and wife who’d just moved into the neighborhood, savagely stabbed to death in their own bed. The police caught the guy a few days later trying to cash some of the traveler’s checks he’d stolen after killing his prey. He was typical of the kind of man who infested this neighborhood after sundown: a twentyish junkie stoned to the point of psychosis on various street drugs, and not at all averse to murdering people he envied and despised. He also knew a whole hell of a lot about fooling burglar alarms.

After the murders there was a neighborhood meeting and that’s when we came up with the Patrol, something somebody’d read about being popular back East. People think that a nice middle-sized Midwestern city like ours doesn’t have major crime problems. I invite them to walk many of these streets after dark. They’ll quickly be disabused of that notion. Anyway, the Patrol worked this way: each night, two neighborhood people got in the family van and patrolled the ten-block area that had been restored. If they saw anything suspicious, they used their cellular phones and called the police. We jokingly called it the Baby Boomer Brigade. The Patrol had one strict rule: you were never to take direct action unless somebody’s life was at stake. Always, always use the cellular phone and call the police.

Neil had Patrol tonight. He’d be rolling in here in another half hour. The Patrol had two shifts: early, 8:00–10:00; late, 10:00–12:00.

Bob said, “You hear what Evans suggested?”

“About guns?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Makes me a little nervous,” I said.

“Me, too,” Bob said. For somebody who’d grown up in the worst area of the city, Bob Genter was a very polished guy. Whenever he joked that he was the token black, Neil always countered with the fact that he was the token Jew, just as Mike was the token Catholic, and I was the token Methodist. We were friends of convenience, I suppose, but we all really did like each other, something that was demonstrated when Neil had a cancer scare a few years back. Bob, Mike and I were in his hospital room twice a day, all eight days running.

“I think it’s time,” Mike said. “The bad guys have guns, so the good guys should have guns.”

“The good guys are the cops,” I said. “Not us.”

“People start bringing guns on Patrol,” Bob said, “somebody innocent is going to get shot.”

“So some night one of us here is on Patrol and we see a bad guy and he sees us and before the cops get there, the bad guy shoots us? You don’t think that’s going to happen?”

“It could happen, Mike,” I said. “But I just don’t think that justifies carrying guns.”

The argument gave us something to do while we waited for Neil.

“Sorry I’m late,” Neil Solomon said after he followed me up to the attic and came inside.

“We already drank all the beer,” Mike O’Brien said loudly.

Neil smiled. “That gut you’re carrying lately, I can believe that you drank all the beer.”

Mike always enjoyed being put down by Neil, possibly because most people were a bit intimidated by him — he had that angry Irish edge — and he seemed to enjoy Neil’s skilled and fearless handling of him. He laughed with real pleasure.

Neil sat down, I got him a beer from the tiny fridge I keep up here, cards were dealt, seven card stud was played.

Bob said, “How’d Patrol go tonight?”

Neil shrugged. “No problems.”

“I still say we should carry guns,” Mike said.

“You’re not going to believe this but I agree with you,” Neil said.

“Seriously?” Mike said.

“Oh, great,” I said to Bob Genter, “another beer-commercial cowboy.”

Bob smiled. “Where I come from we didn’t have cowboys, we had ‘mothas’.” He laughed. “Mean mothas, let me tell you. And practically all of them carried guns.”

“That mean you’re siding with them?” I said.

Bob looked at his cards again then shrugged. “Haven’t decided yet, I guess.”

I didn’t think the antigun people were going to lose this round. But I worried about the round after it, a few months down the line when the subject of carrying guns came up again. All the TV coverage violence gets in this city, people are more and more developing a siege mentality.

“Play cards,” Mike said, “and leave the debate society crap till later.”

Good idea.

We played cards.

In forty-five minutes, I lost $63.82. Mike and Neil always played as if their lives were at stake. All you had to do was watch their faces. Gunfighters couldn’t have looked more serious or determined.

The first pit stop came just after ten o’clock and Neil took it. There was a john on the second floor between the bedrooms, and another john on the first floor.

Neil said, “The good Doctor Gottesfeld had to give me a finger-wave this afternoon, gents, so this may take a while.”

“You should trade that prostate of yours in for a new one,” Mike said.

“Believe me, I’d like to.”

While Neil was gone, the three of us started talking about the Patrol again, and whether we should go armed.

We made the same old arguments. The passion was gone. We were just marking time waiting for Neil and we knew it.

Finally, Mike said, “Let me see some of those magazines again.”

“You got some identification?” I said.

“I’ll show you some identification,” Mike said.

“Spare me,” I said, “I’ll just give you the magazines.”

“You mind if I use the john on the first floor?” Bob said.

“Yeah, it would really piss me off,” I said.

“Really?”

That was one thing about Bob. He always fell for deadpan humor.

“No, not ‘really’,” I said. “Why would I care if you used the john on the first floor?”

He grinned. “Thought maybe they were segregated facilities or something.”

He left.

Mike said, “We’re lucky, you know that?”

“You mean me and you?”

“Yeah.”

“Lucky how?”

“Those two guys. They’re great guys. I wish I had them at work.” He shook his head. “Treacherous bastards. That’s all I’m around all day long.”

“No offense, but I’ll bet you can be pretty treacherous yourself.”

He smiled. “Look who’s talking.”

The first time I heard it, I thought it was some kind of animal noise from outside, a dog or a cat in some kind of discomfort maybe. Mike, who was dealing himself a hand of solitaire, didn’t even look up from his cards.

But the second time I heard the sound, Mike and I both looked up. And then we heard the exploding sound of breaking glass.

“What the hell is that?” Mike said.

“Let’s go find out.”

Just about the time we reached the bottom of the attic steps, we saw Neil coming out of the second-floor john. “You hear that?”

“Sure as hell did,” I said.

We reached the staircase leading to the first floor. Everything was dark. Mike reached for the light switch but I brushed his hand away.

I put a ssshing finger to my lips and then showed him that Louisville Slugger I’d grabbed from Tim’s room. He’s my nine-year-old and his most devout wish is to be a good baseball player. His mother has convinced him that just because I went to college on a baseball scholarship, I was a good player. I wasn’t. I was a lucky player.