Эд Горман - Moonchasers and Other Stories

He had on a straw fedora and a baby blue — colored summer weight suit and his usual big mean grin.

He went over to the fountain and had himself a drink and then flicked some water from his hand (everybody gets wet at that fountain) and then he took out this long pack of Viceroys and knocked one out on the edge of his fist and then he put it in his mouth and lit it and said, “Where’d you girls get all that money?”

“Huh?” Barney said.

“Last night at Hamblin’s. Hamblin told me all about it.”

“Found it,” I said.

“Found it where?”

“Laying near the crick.”

“What crick?”

“Out by the fairgrounds.”

“It was just laying there?”

“In a sack.”

“What kind of sack?”

“Paper sack.”

“How much was in it?”

“About three hundred dollars.”

“Where is it now?”

“At my house. My dad made me make up the money I spent from this savings account he keeps for me. He’s gonna take it to the chief tonight.”

“You could be in a lot of trouble.”

“I know,” I said.

But I knew better than that and so did Cushing. The Chief and Dad are in Rotary and Lions and Odd Fellows and the Masons together and twice a year they go hunting and fishing and they’re real good friends and so I’d practically have to kill somebody before the chief did anything to me. I guess that’s what Roy meant when he said I was respectable.

Cushing dragged on his cigarette a few times and swatted flies with his big hand a few times and just kept staring at us.

“You know what I think?” he said.

“What?” I said.

“That there’s more money somewhere and that you’re just not telling your dad about it.”

The shadows were getting longer and a yellow passenger train was just pulling into the depot, furious with August heat and oil and power, and the people sat in the windows looking out at our little town, city people most likely, wondering how folks could live in such a small place. Once in a while I’d see really pretty girls in those windows and I’d have dreams about them for long days after the train had pulled out.

Cushing looked at Barney now. “How about you ?”

“Huh?”

“You gonna tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“About the rest of the money.”

“About the rest of what money?”

“About the rest of the money by the crick.”

“He wasn’t lying, Tom wasn’t, Detective Cushing. We gave everything back except what we spent at Hamblin’s.”

“How about what you spent at Henry’s supermarket?”

“How’d you know about that?” Barney said.

“When old man Hamblin told me about you being in there with all that crisp, green cash I just naturally got curious. I went to every store in town that was open last night and asked if you girls had been in there.”

I guess that while he was one real big loud-mouthed showboat, Cushing was also a pretty good detective.

“So how about it?” Cushing said.

He was back to looking at me.

“How about what?” I said.

“How about telling me where the rest of the money is.”

I don’t know why but something about the way he said that — the words he chose, I mean — seemed odd to me but right then I didn’t have time to think about it. I just had time to say, “There isn’t any rest of the money. There’s nearly three hundred dollars in a sack at my house that my dad is taking over to the chief’s tonight.”

“So that’s how it’s gonna be, huh, girls?”

“Honest, Detective Cushing,” Barney said, getting that kind of whiny tone in his voice. “Tom’s telling the truth.”

Cushing held his cigarette up high and then dropped it straight down to the wet ground around the drinking fountain. Like he was dropping a bomb or something. And then he ground it out with the toe of his snappy black-and-white wingtips.

And then he stared at us.

“This is gonna get real bad, girls. Real bad.”

“What is?” Barney said.

“This whole thing. With the money.”

“But—”

Cushing held up his hand. “The last time I had a run-in with you little girls, everything went your way. The chief wouldn’t press charges and the juvenile officers didn’t see your breaking into that place as any big deal. It’s going to be different this time. And I think you know what I’m talking about.”

And then he left. No more words. Just left.

When Cushing had vanished on the other side of the bandstand, Barney said, “You think he knows about Roy?”

“I don’t know. But I think he thinks there’s a lot more money and that we have it.”

“You gonna tell Clarence about Cushing?”

“No, because if I tell Clarence he’ll start asking me a lot more questions.”

We sat quiet for quite awhile, just watching the town at supper-time, merchants closing down, rolling up their striped awnings and turning out the display lights in the windows. Every summer seemed to get shorter the older I got, and at warm day’s end there’s a melancholy about everything, long purple shadows and mothers calling their kids in for dinner, and I felt this kind of sadness I can’t explain, even though I was only fifteen I felt real old and I sensed that in just a few summers more all of us would be gone, I mean everybody I passed on the street young and old alike and all the people I loved including Mom and Dad and Gram and Debbie, all gone to ground and utterly forgotten with nobody to remember how beautiful the wine-colored dusk was on a snow-covered January night or how people laughed at Jack Benny on the radio or how neat it was to get a brand-new Ace Double Book or how the bonfire glowed on Homecoming night out at the football stadium or how lonely I felt the night Emmy Chambers told me that she liked Bobby Criker better than me or how much fun it was to chase fireflies with a jar on a July night with your aunt and uncle from Minneapolis sitting on the screened-in porch watching or how one spring night walking by the river I was so overwhelmed by the moonsilver water and the scent of apple blossoms and the friendly yips and yaps of neighborhood dogs that I knew absolutely positively that there was a God or how I sometimes had really corny dreams about saving some girl I loved from a burning house or how beautiful and neat and clean Main Street looked after a night rain — all those people and thoughts and memories would be dead. Mom and Dad would likely go first, and then all their friends and relatives, and then me and all my friends and relatives, and then Debbie and all her friends and relatives, generations born and generations dying until there was absolutely no trace of us left, almost as if we hadn’t existed, absolutely nobody who could remember us at all, the people of Somerton with all their wishes and dreams and desires and fears would be at best a rotted skeleton or two to be dug up three thousand years hence and looked at and shrugged over and then forgotten utterly once again.

“You all right?”

Barney brought me back. “I’m fine,” I said. But I wasn’t. I never am when I start thinking of eternity that way.

“What time we going out to see Roy?”

“How about seven?”

“Meet you by the tracks?”

“Fine. But let’s walk.”

“OK by me.”

“I’ll stop by Henry’s and pick up Roy’s stuff and meet you then.” I rode home. Douglas Edwards and the CBS News was on. Mom was serving the first sweet corn of the year along with broccoli and Jell-O. Usually Mom doesn’t let us eat in front of the TV — she’d read a piece in Parents magazine about how the American family was going to hell in a handbasket largely because of TV and rock and roll — but the heat evidently changed her mind for tonight at least, the living room being a lot cooler than the family room.