Moonchasers & Other Stories

by Ed Gorman

  "Help you do what?"

  "Kill my father."

  Now Parnell shook his head. "Jesus, kid, are you nuts or what?" Richard stood up. "Are you busy right now?"

  Parnell looked around the room again. "I guess not."

  "Then why don't you come with me?"

  "Where?"

  When the elevator doors opened to let them out on the sixth floor of the hospital, Parnell said, "I want to be sure that you understand me."

  He took Richard by the sleeve and held him and stared into his pale blue eyes. "You know why I'm coming here, right?"

  "Right."

  "I'm coming to see your father because we're old friends. Because I cared about him a great deal and because I still do. But that's the only reason."

  "Right."

  Parnell frowned. "You still think I'm going to help you, don't you?"

  "I just want you to see him."

  On the way to Bud Garrett's room they passed an especially good-looking nurse. Parnell felt guilty about recognizing her beauty. His old friend was dying just down the hall and here Parnell was worrying about some nurse.

  Parnell went around the corner of the door. The room was dark. It smelled sweet from flowers and fetid from flesh literally rotting.

  Then he looked at the frail yellow man in the bed. Even in the shadows you could see his skin was yellow.

  "I'll be damned," the man said.

  It was like watching a skeleton talk by some trick of magic.

  Parnell went over and tried to smile his ass off but all he could muster was just a little one. He wanted to cry until he collapsed.

  You sonofabitch, Parnell thought, enraged. He just wasn't sure who he was enraged with. Death or God or himself—or maybe even Bud himself for reminding Parnell of just how terrible and scary it could get near the end.

  "I'll be damned," Bud Garrett said again.

  He put out his hand and Parnell took it. Held it for a long time. "He's a good boy, isn't he?" Garrett said, nodding to Richard. "He sure is."

  "I had to raise him after his mother died. I did a good job, if I say so myself."

  "A damn good job, Bud."

  This was a big private room that more resembled a hotel suite.

  There was a divan and a console TV and a dry bar. There was a Picasso lithograph and a walk-in closet and a deck to walk out on.

  There was a double-sized water bed with enough controls to drive a space ship and a big stereo and a bookcase filled with hardcovers.

  Most people Parnell knew dreamed of living in such a place. Bud Garrett was dying in it.

  "He told you," Garrett said.

  "What?" Parnell spun around to face Richard, knowing suddenly the worst truth of all.

  "He told you."

  "Jesus, Bud, you sent him, didn't you?"

  "Yes. Yes, I did."

  "Why?"

  Parnell looked at Garrett again. How could somebody who used to have a weight problem and who could throw around the toughest drunk the barrio ever produced get to be like this. Nearly every time he talked he winced. And all the time he smelled. Bad.

  "I sent for you because none of us is perfect," Bud said.

  "I don't understand."

  "He's afraid."

  "Richard?"

  "Yes."

  "I don't blame him. I'd be afraid, too." Parnell paused and stared at Bud. "You asked him to kill you, didn't you?"

  "Yes. It's his responsibility to do it."

  Richard stepped up to his father's bedside and said, "I agree with that, Mr. Parnell. It is my responsibility. I just need a little help is all."

  "Doing what?"

  "If I buy cyanide, it will eventually be traced to me and I'll be tried for murder. If you buy it, nobody will ever connect you with my father."

  Parnell shook his head. "That's bullshit. That isn't what you want me for. There are a million ways you could get cyanide without having it traced back."

  Bud Garrett said, "I told him about you. I told him you could help give him strength."

  "I don't agree with any of this, Bud. You should die when it's your time to die. I'm a Catholic."

  Bud laughed hoarsely. "So am I, you asshole." He coughed and said, "The pain's bad. I'm beyond any help they can give me. But it could go on for a long time." Then, just as his son had an hour ago, Bud Garrett began crying almost imperceptibly. "I'm scared, Parnell. I don't know what's on the other side but it can't be any worse than this." He reached out his hand and for a long time Parnell just stared at it but then he touched it.

  "Jesus," Parnell said. "It's pretty fucking confusing, Bud. It's pretty fucking confusing."

  Richard took Parnell out to dinner that night. It was a nice place. The table cloths were starchy white and the waiters all wore shiny shoes. Candles glowed inside red glass.

  They'd had four drinks apiece, during which Richard told Parnell about his two sons (six and eight respectively) and about the perils and rewards of the rent-a-car business and about how much he liked windsurfing even though he really wasn't much good at it.

  Just after the arrival of the fourth drink, Richard took something from his pocket and laid it on the table.

  It was a cold capsule.

  "You know how the Tylenol Killer in Chicago operated?" Richard asked.

  Parnell nodded.

  "Same thing," Richard said. "I took the cyanide and put it in a capsule."

  "Christ. I don't know about it."

  "You're scared, too, aren't you?"

  "Yeah, I am."

  Richard sipped his whiskey-and-soda. With his regimental striped tie he might have been sitting in a country club. "May I ask you something?"

  "Maybe."

  "Do you believe in God?"

  "Sure."

  "Then if you believe in God, you must believe in goodness, correct?"

  Parnell frowned. "I'm not much of an intellectual, Richard."

  "But if you believe in God, you must believe in goodness, right?"

  "Right."

  "Do you think what's happening to my father is good?"

  "Of course I don't."

  "Then you must also believe that God isn't doing this to him—right?"

  "Right."

  Richard held up the capsule. Stared at it. "All I want you to do is give me a ride to the hospital. Then just wait in the car down in the parking lot."

  "I won't do it."

  Richard signaled for another round.

  "I won't goddamn do it," Parnell said.

  By the time they left the restaurant Richard was too drunk to drive. Parnell got behind the wheel of the new Audi. "Why don't you tell me where you live? I'll take you home and take a cab from there."

  "I want to go to the hospital."

  "No way, Richard."

  Richard slammed his fist against the dashboard. "You fucking owe him that, man!" he screamed.

  Parnell was shocked, and a bit impressed, with Richard's violent side. If nothing else, he saw how much Richard loved his old man. "Richard, listen."

  Richard sat in a heap against the opposite door. His tears were dry ones, choking ones. "Don't give me any of your speeches." He wiped snot from his nose on his sleeve. "My dad always told me what a tough guy Parnell was." He turned to Parnell, anger in him again. "Well, I'm not tough, Parnell, and so I need to borrow some of your toughness so I can get that man out of his pain and grant him his one last fucking wish. DO YOU GODDAMN UNDERSTAND ME?"

  He smashed his fist on the dashboard again.

  Parnell turned on the ignition and drove them away.

  When they reached the hospital, Parnell found a parking spot and pulled in. The mercury vapor lights made him feel as though he were on Mars. Bugs smashed against the windshield.

  "I'll wait here for you," Parnell said.

  Richard looked over at him. "You won't call the cops?"

  "No."

  "And you won't come up and try to stop me?"

  "No."

  Richard studied Parnell's fac
e. "Why did you change your mind?"

  "Because I'm like him."

  "Like my father?"

  "Yeah. A coward. I wouldn't want the pain, either. I'd be just as afraid."

  All Richard said, and this he barely whispered, was "Thanks."

  While he sat there Parnell listened to country western music and then a serious political call-in show and then a call-in show where a lady talked about Venusians who wanted to pork her and then some salsa music and then a religious minister who sounded like Foghorn Leghorn in the old Warner Brothers cartoons.

  By then Richard came back.

  He got in the car and slammed the door shut and said, completely sober now, "Let's go."

  Parnell got out of there.

  They went ten long blocks before Parnell said, "You didn't do it, did you?"

  Richard got hysterical. "You sonofabitch! You sonofabitch!" Parnell had to pull the car over to the curb. He hit Richard once, a fast clean right hand, not enough to make him unconscious but enough to calm him down.

  "You didn't do it, did you?"

  "He's my father, Parnell. I don't know what to do. I love him so much I don't want to see him suffer. But I love him so much I don't want to see him die, either."

  Parnell let the kid sob. He thought of his old friend Bud Garrett and what a good goddamn fun buddy he'd been and then he started crying, too.

  When Parnell came down Richard was behind the steering wheel. Parnell got in the car and looked around the empty parking lot and said, "Drive."

  "Any place especially?"

  "Out along the East River road. Your old man and I used to fish off that little bridge there."

  Richard drove them. From inside his sport coat Parnell took the pint of Jim Beam.

  When they got to the bridge Parnell said, "Give me five minutes alone and then you can come over, okay?"

  Richard was starting to sob again.

  Parnell got out of the car and went over to the bridge. In the hot night you could hear the hydroelectric dam half a mile downstream and smell the fish and feel the mosquitoes feasting their way through the evening.

  He thought of what Bud Garrett had said, "Put it in some whiskey for me, will you?"

  So Parnell had obliged.

  He stood now on the bridge looking up at the yellow circle of moon thinking about dead people, his wife and many of his WWII friends, the rookie cop who'd died of a sudden tumor, his wife with her rosary-wrapped hands. Hell, there was probably even a chance that nurse from Enid, Oklahoma, was dead.

  "What do you think's on the other side?" Bud Garrett had asked just half an hour ago. He'd almost sounded excited. As if he were a farm kid about to ship out with the Merchant Marines.

  "I don't know," Parnell had said.

  "It scare you, Parnell?"

  "Yeah," Parnell had said. "Yeah it does."

  Then Bud Garrett had laughed. "Don't tell the kid that. I always told him that nothin' scared you."

  Richard came up the bridge after a time. At first he stood maybe a hundred feet away from Parnell. He leaned his elbows on the concrete and looked out at the water and the moon. Parnell watched him, knowing it was all Richard, or anybody, could do.

  Look out at the water and the moon and think about dead people and how you yourself would soon enough be dead.

  Richard turned to Parnell then and said, his tears gone completely now, sounding for the first time like Parnell's sort of man, "You know, Parnell, my father was right. You're a brave sonofabitch. You really are."

  Parnell knew it was important for Richard to believe that—that there were actually people in the world who didn't fear things the way most people did—so Parnell didn't answer him at all.

  He just took his pint out and had himself a swig and looked some more at the moon and the water.

  SEASONS OF THE HEART

  For Charlotte MacLeod

  In the mornings now, the fog didn't burn off till much before eight, and the dew stayed silver past nine, and the deeper shadows stayed all morning long in the fine red barn I'd helped build last year. The summer was fleeing.

  But that wasn't how I knew autumn was coming.

  No, for that all I had to do was look at the freckled face of my granddaughter, Lisa, who would be entering eighth grade this year at the consolidated school ten miles west.

  For as much as she read, and when she wasn't doing chores she was always reading something, even when she sat in front of the TV, she hated school. I don't think she'd had her first serious crush yet, and the girlfriends available to her struck her as a little frivolous. They were town girls and they didn't have Lisa's responsibilities.

  This particular morning went pretty much as usual.

  We had a couple cups of coffee, Lisa and I, and then we hiked down to the barn. It was still dark. You could hear the horses in the hills waking with the dawn, and closer by the chickens. Turn-over day was coming, a frantic day in the life of a farmer. You take the birds to market and then have twenty-four hours to clean out the chicken house before the new shipment of baby chicks arrives. First time I ever did it, I was worn out for three days. That's when my daughter, Emmy, read me the Booker T. Washington quote I'd come to savor: "No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as writing a poem." Those particular words work just as well as Bengay on sore muscles. For me, anyway.

  The barn smelled summer sweet of fresh milk. Lisa liked to lead the animals into the stalls; she had her own reassuring way of talking to them in a language understood only by cows and folk under fourteen years of age. She also liked to hook them up.

  The actual milking, I usually did. Lisa always helped me pour the fresh milk into dumping stations. We tried to get a lot of milk per day. We had big payments to make on this barn. The Douglas fir we'd used for the wood hadn't come cheap. Nor had the electricity, the milking machines or the insulation. You've got to take damned good care of dairy cattle.

  I worked straight through till Lisa finished cleaning up the east end of the barn. This was one of those days when she wanted to do some of the milking herself. I was happy to let her do it.

  Everything went fine till I stepped outside the barn to have a few puffs on my pipe.

  Funny thing was, I'd given up both cigarettes and pipe years before. But after Dr. Wharton, back in Chicago when I was still with the flying service, told me about the cancer, I found an old briar pipe of mine and took it up again. I brought it to the farm with me when I came to live with Emmy. I never smoked it in an enclosed area. I didn't want Lisa to pick up any secondhand smoke.

  The chestnut mare was on the far hill. She was a beauty and seemed to know it, always prancing about to music no one else seemed to hear, or bucking against the sundown sky when she looked all mythic and ethereal in the darkening day.

  And that's just what I was doing, getting my pipe fired up and looking at the roan, when the rifle shot ripped away a large chunk of wood from the door frame no more than three inches to my right.

  I wasn't sure what it was. In movies, the would-be target always pitches himself left or right but I just stood there for several long seconds before the echo of the bullet whining past me made me realize what happened.

  Only then did I move, running into the barn to warn Lisa but she already knew that something had happened.

  Lisa is a tall, slender girl with the dignified appeal of her mother. You wouldn't call either of them beauties but in their fine blond hair and their melancholy brown eyes and their quick and sometimes sad grins, you see the stuff of true heartbreakers, a tradition they inherited from my wife, who broke my heart by leaving me for an advertising man when Emmy was nine years old.

  "God, that was a gunshot wasn't it?"

  "I'm afraid it was."

  "You think it was accidental, Grandad?"

  "I don't know. Not yet, anyway. But for now, let's stay in the barn."

  "I wonder if Mom heard it."

  I smiled. "Not the way she sleeps."

&nb
sp; She put her arms around me and gave me a hug. "I was really scared. For you, I mean. I was afraid somebody might have—Well, you know."

  I hugged her back. "I'm fine, honey. But I'll tell you what. I want you to go stand in that corner over there while I go up in the loft and see if I can spot anybody."

  "It's so weird. Nobody knows you out here."

  "Nobody that I know of, anyway."

  She broke our hug and looked up at me with those magnificent and often mischievous eyes. "Grandad?"

  She always used a certain tone when she was about to ask me something she wasn't sure about.

  "Here it is. You've got that tone."

  Her bony shoulders shrugged beneath her T-shirt, which depicted a rock-and-roll band I'd never heard of. They were called the Flesh Eaters and she played their tapes a lot.

  "I was just wondering if you'd be mad if I wrote it up."

  "Wrote what up?"

  "You know. Somebody shooting at you."

  "Oh."

  "Mrs. Price'll make us do one of those dorky how-I-spent-mysummer-vacation deals. It'd be cool if I could write about how a killer was stalking my Grandad."

  "Yeah," I said, "that sure sounds cool all right."

  She grinned the grin and I saw both her mother and her grandmother in it. "I mean, I might 'enhance' it a little bit. But not a lot."

  "Fine by me, pumpkin," I said, leading her over to the corner of the barn where several bales of hay would absorb a gun shot. "I'll be right back."

  I figured that the shooter was most likely gone, long gone probably, but I wanted to make sure before I let Lisa stroll back into the barnyard.

  I went up the ladder to the hayloft, sneezing all the way. My sinuses act up whenever I get even close to the loft. I used to think it was the hay but then I read a Farm Bulletin item saying it could be the rat droppings. For someone who grew up in the Hyde Park area of Chicago, rat droppings are not something you often consider as a sinus irritant. Farm life was different. I loved it.

  I eased the loft door open a few inches. Then stopped.

  I waited a full two minutes. No rifle fire.

  I pushed the door open several more inches and looked outside. Miles of dark green corn and soybeans and alfalfa. On the hill just about where the mare was, I saw a tree where the gunman might have fired from. Gnarly old oak with branches stout enough for a hanging.