Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

He shrugged. “I likes me some Foo.”

He said it just like that. The last thing she had expected to do that night was laugh.

“You could do better?” she said. “At sorting out a life?”

“Someone else’s, or my own?”

“Someone else’s.”

She remembered the way he watched her smile. The way he had tried to be cool, deliberate and deliberating, with his shrug and a quick glance back at the station. “I’m going to be taking my forty in about a half hour.”

“Is that really such a good idea?” she said. “Drinking a forty-ounce malt liquor on the job?”

“Radio code,” he said. “For my midnight lunch.”

They sat in the front seat of his patrol car, parked at the base of the twin waterfalls, splitting his tuna sandwich and watching the cascades spill out from beneath great caps of white ice.

She turned over beneath the cooled sheet, stretching a little, the muscles in her legs still pleasantly sore. This tussling between them, the struggle that manifested itself during sex, was like a play that mysteriously exposed the true hearts of its actors, revealing the tension in his, and the suspense in hers.

She couldn’t feel him with her knee, and, opening her eyes, found him sitting at the foot of the bed. She watched him there, his broad, bare back, his face turned toward the window where the air conditioner blew its red ribbon. All new to her, this relationship thing. She was trying hard not to see every little mood change of his in terms of their success or demise. “Where are you?”

He looked back at her, not all the way. “Thinking about my mother,” he said. “Living alone here. Dying alone. How I should have been with her.”

They were on the new double bed in his old bedroom. The queen bed in the master bedroom across the hall was stripped to the mattress and box spring, as though his mother’s body had been taken away just that morning.

The caffeine from the rum and Coke kept the alcohol pumping through him, the closest thing she had to a truth serum. This empty hour after sex was the only time he was vulnerable. She was learning how to navigate him. Asking the obvious next question — Why weren’t you with her? — would have shut him right down. Besides, these misgivings about his mother’s death were one reason he kept dragging his feet about selling her house. Which was fine with Tracy. Anything to keep him in Black Falls longer. Anything to give her more time.

She sat up with the sheet. “How did you get out in the first place?”

“Ah,” he said, “that’s a fun story.” He turned down the air conditioner, lowering the volume of the rattling windowpane, then came back to lie down beside her. “The mill closed while I was in high school. Someone realized that Black Falls was suffering this ‘brain drain,’ meaning that everyone who could get out of town — the smarter kids, the motivated ones — was leaving and never coming back. Why the town wasn’t getting anywhere. So to break the cycle, they came up with a plan. The Black Falls high school student graduating that next year with the highest grade point average would receive a full scholarship to a Massachusetts state university — with only one catch. It was a doozy. The recipient had to promise to return to Black Falls after graduation and work and live in the town for a minimum of five years. Like Black Falls ROTC, in a way. Not legally binding, but for a son or daughter of the town, a pledge.” He was on his back, telling this story to the ceiling. “So they ran bake sales and bottle drives, they had pancake breakfasts and raffles, got sponsors, anything they could do to raise money. Pinty got behind it, figuring the town needed something to rally around as a ray-of-hope project in that first post-mill year. My mother didn’t have much money, so this was my only real shot at affording school. And I busted my ass. And won it. I was the first, and, it turned out, only ‘Black Falls Scholar.’ Went to UMass Amherst, the honors program there, did my four years, graduated — and then never came back.”

“No.”

“Yep.”

“Oh my.”

“I jumped bail, basically. Sounds terrible, but honestly, I didn’t plan it. Just that, when the time came, I couldn’t bear to go back.”

“But — your mother.”

“I know.” He nodded. “I know. She said no one ever gave her a hard time about it. It had been four years since I’d won — people forget. Besides, things were getting worse fast, and the town had enough to worry about. Letting Pinty down was the worst part. How I did that to him, I still don’t know.”

“Obviously, he forgives you. I mean, just the way you two were standing together at the parade. You’re like the son he never had.”

“Yeah, well.” Donny shifted on the bed. “Actually, Pinty did have a son.”

“He did?”

“You know at the diner, that one big wall with all the crap about the town?”

“Sure. Maps, old postcards, photographs.”

“There’s a portrait of an Army Ranger in uniform?”

“That’s Pinty’s son?”

“Gregory.”

“Really? Was it Vietnam?”

“No. Yes — he fought in Vietnam. But he died after coming back. On a foam mattress in a friend’s basement in Montague. With a needle in his arm.”

She covered her open mouth. “Pinty’s son ?”

“So, with my father having been his partner, Pinty watched out for me growing up. My mother couldn’t always hold everything together, so he helped me. Wanted big things for me.” Donny laughed once through his nose. “Yeah. I’m a model son.”

He was off the bed fast, turning the air-conditioning back up, standing before the blowing vent. It surprised her, hearing him talk like this. “You couldn’t have stayed with her forever.”

“No? Probably not. But where does the debt end?”

“I don’t know. But if you ever figure it out, please tell me. I’m still paying. Every single day.” It never occurred to Tracy that they had this in common: single-parent mothers. “I mean, she’s deaf, okay? But she’s totally self-sufficient, she can do everything for herself. Except run the farm single-handedly. Now, could she hire help? Of course she could. But she would much rather guilt me into staying. The truth is, she’s afraid of being alone. Do you know she doesn’t even ask where I go these nights? ‘A friend’s house’ is all I tell her. Never once has she pressed. She knows damn well by now it’s a guy. That her only daughter is ‘running around.’” She smiled. “But to force the issue might piss me off, and give me that nudge I need to go away. My mother lives basically in fear of me, the most unhealthy relationship possible. I mean — can you imagine if I ever came right out and told her I was sleeping with a Black Falls cop?”

Donny said, “All the more reason not to.”

“I guess.” She rolled over onto her hip, turning more toward him. “Are there other reasons? Myself, I wouldn’t mind holding hands in public, even just once.”

“Because it’s best.”

“Best — for you? I don’t see how it’s best for me.”

“This is a small town. The other cops don’t like me much.”

“Well, that’s dramatic,” she said. “I mean, I kind of liked sneaking around at first. It’s getting a little old now. Sometimes it seems like this way just makes it easier for you to break it off with me when the time comes.”

He checked her, maybe looking for a smile. She didn’t have one for him.

“You never wanted to get mixed up with a local girl,” she said. “Did you. You’re so afraid of getting trapped here. Of winding up like everyone else.”

She watched him brood on that, and noticed that he didn’t tell her she was mistaken. “This arrangement is unfair to you,” he said. “I know that. But I’ve been up front—”