The Moonlight

by Nicholas Guild

  Chapter 5

  June 21, 1990

  “Louise, I’m takin’ the dog.”

  Leo Galatina stood on his porch, hooking a chain leash to the collar of his ancient black poodle, waiting for an answer. God damned woman, she might let someone know she was alive in there.

  “I’m takin’ the dog for a walk, dammit!”

  Still no answer. Leo shrugged in resigned disgust and started down the porch steps. It was the same each evening: he and the dog went out for a little stroll after dinner, no more than forty minutes there and back, and Louise never came out to see them off. She would wait until they were gone and then come out and park her fat ass on one of the wicker porch chairs so she could be there waiting like God’s vengeance when they got back, but she always hid in the bathroom when they left. It was because of the dog—she was slighting the fucking dog. Goddam stupid bitch.

  He paid her good money to look after them, but all you had to do was screw a woman a couple of times—just a couple of times—and she starts giving herself airs like she’s lady of the manor. She didn’t like the dog because once in a while the dog forgot himself and did his business on the carpet. Well, the dog was old, so what did she expect? The dog had been his wife’s, so if it was such a thing for her to clean a little shit off the carpet once in a while she could find herself another job.

  Goddam bitch.

  Anyway, she took care of things nice, and for an old broad she wasn’t such a bad piece of ass, so maybe it was okay about her hiding in the bathroom every time he went out with the dog.

  She was down in his will for a quarter of a million—what the fuck, she was the last woman Leo Galatina was ever going to get it up for.

  Leo glared at the dog with something like hatred. His wife had bought it as a puppy, saying they needed some company now that they were old, and five weeks later the damn woman had fallen down dead of a stroke. And ever since, Leo Galatina, who used to be a pretty tough guy, had to take the stupid poodle out four times a day so it can sprinkle the bushes.

  A car passed on the road, dark red, shiny as a new dime. He watched as it pulled around the bend and disappeared. The sound of its engine died away almost at once, as if it had stopped just up ahead. One of the neighbors must have brought a new car home. Well, they could all afford it.

  Leo lived in the smallest house on his street, but he could have bought and sold everyone on Mill Road twice over. He was a rich old man and, although his wealth did not show in his manner of life, he took a pride in it. He took an even greater pride in just being old, in having lived so long when so many of his friends and enemies—and especially his enemies—had been rotting in the earth for decades. But he, Leo Galatina, expected to die in his bed, surrounded by his family, having taken the sacrament and unburdened his soul of its many sins. Why not? He had nothing to fear from his enemies anymore. His enemies were all dead.

  “Come on, dog. Let’s go.”

  On Mill Road you could hear the traffic on the freeway that ran parallel to it only sixty or seventy yards north, but the road itself had hardly any traffic. He had seen one car tonight already, but he might not see another before he came home again.

  He would walk the dog to Birch Tree Lane and back, which was three quarters of a mile in each direction. That was enough at his age. Then he would watch television with Louise until nine o’clock, and then he would go to bed. Louise would bring him a glass of warm milk, no different than as if he was a baby, and she would sit on the edge of his bed in her nightdress and wait for him to drink it. She knew just how to be nice to a man and, if he could manage to get it up, she would take the nightdress off and come into bed with him. Sometimes she would anyway.

  What the hell, she was paid to be nice to him. There wasn’t another housekeeper in Fairfield County who got anything like her salary. And she was in his will. She could damn well afford to take her nightdress off once in a while.

  Bitch.

  Sure enough, the red car was parked in the Crockers’ driveway, its hood just visible as it emerged from the shade into the last of the sunlight. Leo Galatina only made the identification and then glanced away. The habits of a lifetime kept him alert, but he would have been ashamed to admit to any curiosity about his neighbors. Except for their names, they were strangers to him, in some cases even after twenty years. They knew who he was—or, more to the point, who he had been—and they had never wanted to know any more.

  So screw the pack of ’em, fuckin’ Yankee Doodle pansies.

  There were no sidewalks, and all the front lawns along Mill Road were guarded by fences of one kind or another, so you walked on the tarred gravel, long since worn to a smooth silver gray. Leo had a bad leg, the result of a gunshot wound he had received in his forties, and part of the reason for these evening strolls was to keep it exercised. But the leg meant that he couldn’t walk very fast—a mile and a half in forty minutes did not exactly qualify him for the Olympics. Anyway, at his age he was lucky he could walk at all. He was fine as long as he kept an eye out for traffic, and there was never much traffic.

  A squirrel, clinging to the side of a tree not five feet away, watched as they passed. The dog looked at it longingly through rheumy eyes but did not even bark. The dog was nearly eleven years old and well past it. They were both past it, Leo reflected. They were both as good as dead.

  It had been over three months since the last time he had got it on with Louise, and she was beginning to get a little impatient. So tonight he would take it slow and easy, and maybe this time he could keep his battery charged up enough to make it happen. He tried to concentrate on remembering what she looked like naked, but it was an effort. Funny, there were women he had fucked sixty years ago who were more real to him now.

  It would be better to live without women, except that then you were as good as dead. Leo considered the decay of his own lust with a kind of horror. No, you had to go on with it. When you stopped being a man you might as well shoot yourself.

  So much was desire mixed up with the fear of death—Leo had only to think of his own son to be struck by the truth of it. Leo Jr., who was nearly sixty, had just divorced his second wife and had two mistresses jockeying to be Number Three. Plus the damn fool was only fifteen months away from bypass surgery. You’d think he only messed around with women to give himself something to worry about. And that was probably it.

  What made a man cling this way to life? At eight-six Leo Galatina had no answers. He only knew that it was so.

  This part of town was full of little creeks and ponds, and somewhere in the distance he could hear the frogs croaking. The road was completely in shade now, for the sun was just an angry red ball that showed itself between the trees. It was already seven thirty, but the daylight would last until almost nine, by which time Leo Galatina expected to be in bed, holding Louise’s breasts in his hands.

  When he reached Birch Tree Lane he turned around and started back toward the house. He was already feeling tired—it wasn’t going to be any good with Louise tonight.

  From somewhere ahead of him he could hear the growl of a car engine, but he could tell by the sound that it wasn’t going fast. People didn’t drive fast on this road, because there were too many children and dogs and old men. A second later the car came around the bend in the road just ahead. It was the dark red one that had driven past his house and then parked in the Crockers’ driveway.

  He reached into his jacket pocket and then remembered that he hadn’t carried a gun in twenty years. There hadn’t been any need. There wasn’t any now.

  The car drove slowly toward him, its tires whispering against the bare asphalt. When it drew parallel, the window on the passenger side rolled down and a man leaned out as if he wanted to ask the way. He was in his middle thirties, probably, and was dressed in a brown suit. Leo was sure he knew him from somewhere but couldn’t place him, which was surprising because Leo had a good memory for faces.

  The man smiled. It wasn’t a very nice smile.

 
“Leo Galatina, am I right?” He laughed, as if he’d made a very funny joke. “Of course I’m right.”

  Leo didn’t say anything. He could feel his bowels turning to water—if this was a hit, he figured he had maybe three or four seconds to live.

  But apparently it was just a tourist with a sense of humor. The window rolled back up and the car started forward again.

  Leo’s heart was pounding in his ears and he was short of breath. The son-of-a-bitch had scared him. He turned around to get the license number—he still had a few friends; he thought he might just have them teach the little shit a lesson—but the car was already far enough away that all he could make out for sure was that it had one of those temporary paper plates the car salesmen give you scotch taped to the rear window.

  Who the hell was that guy? He hardly knew a soul anymore who was under the age of sixty, so you’d think he’d remember a young punk like this one. He knew him from somewhere.

  All at once he was visited by the ghost of a memory—not a name or an association, only a feeling. It was fear.

  He hadn’t been afraid just because he thought the guy might come up with a gun. That too, but not only that. He had been afraid because the face. . .

  And not just the face. The voice too. He could hear that voice coming from some dark corner of his mind—not any words, just the voice . . . The mocking voice out of some terrifying, half-hidden memory.

  Whoever he was, he was no joker.

  The car slowed down and stopped, so maybe the guy really was lost. Leo didn’t look back—somehow he didn’t dare look back—but he could hear the car turning around in someone’s driveway.

  He wanted to run, but what was the point of running? The car wasn’t more than a hundred feet behind him, and with his leg if he tried to run he would probably fall straight over on his face.

  He wouldn’t even be able to climb over the fences that everybody had up to protect their god damned front lawns.

  There was no time—no time.

  Leo could hear the car’s engine revving behind him. He knew exactly what they planned to do, and he was just too hobbled with age to get away.

  God dammit, if they were going to do a number on him they should stop trying to spook him with their fucking motor noises and get it over with. The fucking bastards, he wouldn’t even give them the satisfaction of turning around to look.

  And then he remembered. That young guy’s face came back to him from his own youth—a million years ago, and more. Still young, the way the dead are always young. Still young because a memory does not age.

  Leo turned around. He saw the car hurtling toward him, in the shaded light a blood-red monster closing for the kill.

  And his mind flashed through astonishment to fear to a terrible anger. It was not right. It was not to be borne.

  “Charlie, you shit—you dead shit,” he shouted, his voice hoarse with rage, even as death swept toward him with gathering speed. “Get out o’ the fuckin’ car. I kill you, Brush. You fuck.”

  And all he could see was the face behind the windshield, laughing at him.

  Chapter 6

  It was one of those days when you had to get up early to spend it waiting around the house. The phone company had said that if he called after eight in the morning they could tell him when the installer was coming—morning or afternoon, that was their idea of “when”—but the girl he got in Customer Service couldn’t even find him on her list. Maybe the installer had a different list. Maybe he just wouldn’t show up.

  It had been the same in California, every time.

  But sometimes the gods are kind, and it was only eleven o’clock when he saw the phone truck pulling into his driveway.

  “Where do you want it?” the installer asked. He was in middle fifties, with the kind of build that suggested he didn’t spend a lot of time climbing up power poles, but he seemed an easy-going type. Probably he had been doing this same job, day after day, since high school.

  Where did he want the phone? He hadn’t given the matter any thought.

  “The bedroom or the kitchen,” the installer volunteered. “Those are the usual places if you only want one.” The checked his list. “And that’s all you’re down for. Of course, there’s always the TV room.”

  “The kitchen,” Phil said quickly. He hated the idea of a phone going off two feet from his ear in the small hours of the morning, and he didn’t even own a TV.

  The installer nodded approvingly. “Then it’s a cinch, ’cause there’s already a line in there. I’ll be done in twenty minutes.”

  That was fine. The man had hardly been inside the door for two minutes and Phil could hardly wait to be rid of him—and not because he found anything distasteful about the installer, or because he wouldn’t enjoy a little company, but from the feeling which now constantly assailed him that he never was alone within these walls, that anyone else made an uncomfortable third.

  For days the sense of some presence in the house had been accumulating in his mind. A second pack of cigarettes had disappeared, after he had found the first one, crumpled and empty, on a table outside on the dance floor—twice now he thought he had seen someone out there in the dark. And at night there was the noise from the room above, too soft for the tread of a living human being yet inexplicable as anything else.

  Sometimes he felt almost as if he himself were the second occupant of the Moonlight. Or as if this other only occupied some corner of his mind. The thoughts that kept coming unbidden into his head—not his thoughts, not really his, for all that he was thinking them. . .

  “I remember now!” the installer announced triumphantly as he leaned across the kitchen counter to unscrew the plate over the phone jack. “I put the phone in here for the last customers. A man and his wife—the guy was runnin’ a service station. I should’ve remembered the minute I saw the gas pump outside. Jeez!”

  In the next moment he was lost in contemplation of the skein of colored wires that had popped out from behind the little metal plate.

  “I hope you have better luck, though,” he went on at last, in a murmur that suggested he might be talking to himself.

  “Pardon?”

  For a long time there was no answer.

  “The phone lines.” The installer brushed his finger across the exposed ends of the wires, making them dance like a child’s toy. “I was back here about half a dozen times—they kept hearing strange voices, like they got connected to the wrong party. The last time I was here the guy’s wife had already moved out, but I don’t suppose it was over the phone service.”

  He laughed good-naturedly at the recollection of this domestic calamity, too distant in time to have any meaning except as the set-up for a joke.

  “There—so much for that!” With the triumph of a man who has solved a knotty technical problem, he fitted the plate back on and inserted the screw into the center hole. “You got your own phone, or you want me to get you one out of the truck?”

  When Phil shook his head, the man nodded sagely and started for the door. Then he stopped and turned around.

  “What color?”

  “Color?”

  “The phone—what color?”

  Phil looked around at the kitchen, which looked just as it must have looked in George Patchmore’s time.

  “Black,” he said.

  “Black?” The installer sounded as if he could hardly believe his ears. “I ain’t even sure I got a black one with me. I’ll have to check.”

  Five minutes later the truck had pulled out of the driveway, and Phil was left alone with two new phone books and his shiny black phone.

  Whom should he call? It seemed a shame to just leave the thing sitting there. He had to call somebody. Beth? Would her roommate be asleep? He decided he didn’t care whether she was or not—it was not a case in which roommates had any rights worth considering. He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and started looking for the phone number he had been carrying around for a week and had never had occasion to use
. He hoped he hadn’t lost it.

  No, there it was. In his hand was a ragged slip of paper with Beth’s writing on it: “Beth Saunders 665-4759.” In spite of himself, he was impressed by its odd formality. How many Beths did she think he knew?

  He picked up the receiver and cradled it against his ear. The index finger of his left hand wavered uncertainly over the “6” button.

  “Put down the phone, Phil,” the voice said. For a second or two he wasn’t sure where it had come from. He actually began to look around the room. “Put it down, Phil.”

  He put it down. His heart was beating painfully in his chest, and he was frightened. Strange voices over the phone lines—sure. Except that this voice was oddly, terrifyingly familiar. He was sure he had never heard it before in his life, but that didn’t make any difference. He knew it.

  The phone man was having him on. That was it. His truck was probably parked a quarter of a mile down the road, and he had tapped into the main line. Waiting, knowing nobody leaves a new phone alone. The story about the man and his wife and the voices had all been set-up.

  The guy was probably laughing his ass off, right that minute.

  He would complain to the company—right now. He would fix the son-of-a-bitch. He would get him fired.

  He opened the phone book do find the number. He picked up the receiver again.

  “Go look in your mailbox, Phil.”

  This time he dropped the receiver, so that it bounced against the kitchen counter, and he had to use both hands to put it back on its cradle.

  “Oh shit,” he whispered, his hands trembling as they held the receiver down, as if by main force. Who the fuck did he think he was kidding. That wasn’t the installer’s voice.

  The voice went with the dark shape out on the dance floor, with the footsteps over his head at night, with the missing packs of cigarettes. When he heard it again, he would know who he was talking to.

  “Oh goddam fucking Jesus.”

  “Go look in your mailbox, Phil.”