York's Moon

by Elizabeth Engstrom

  York’s Moon

  Elizabeth Engstrom

  York’s Moon

  Elizabeth Engstrom

  IFD Publishing, P.O. Box 40776, Eugene, Oregon 97404 U.S.A. (541)461-3272

  www.ifdpublishing.com

  Discover other titles from IFD at Smashwords.com or from your favorite eBook distributor.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Art, Copyright © Alan M. Clark 2015

  eBook Design, Eric Witchey

  First eBook edition, Copyright © 2015 Elizabeth Engstrom, IFD Publishing

  eBook epub format edition ISBN: 978-0-9965536-0-5

  First print edition, Copyright © 2011 Elizabeth Engstrom and Tekno books

  First print edition, Tekno Books hardcover, ISBN 13: 978-1-59414-928-3; ISBN 10: 1-59414-928-3

  Print Edition Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: PS3555.N48Y67 2011

  Originally Printed in the United States of America

  Books by Elizabeth Engstrom

  When Darkness Loves Us

  Black Ambrosia

  Nightmare Flower

  Lizzie Borden

  Lizard Wine

  The Alchemy of Love

  Suspicions

  Black Leather

  Candyland

  The Northwoods Chronicles

  York’s Moon

  Something Happened to Grandma

  Baggage Check

  Word by Word (editor, with John Tullius)

  Imagination Fully Dilated (co-editor)

  Imagination Fully Dilated vol. II (editor)

  Dead on Demand (editor)

  Mota 9: Addiction (editor)

  Pronto! Writings from Rome (editor, with John Tullius)

  Ship’s Log: Writings at Sea (editor, with John Tullius)

  Lies and Limericks (editor, with John Tullius)

  How to Write Sizzling Sex Scenes

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to Al Cratty, my sweet, exceedingly patient husband.

  Acknowledgments

  A book is the culmination of inspiration from so many. I’d like to thank John Saul, Mike Sack, Susan Palmer, Karen McGowan, Bob Keefer and Maggie Doran for starters. Students, friends, family: you have no idea how far the wind carries the seeds you sow.

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Contents

  Start

  First Day of the Full Moon

  Second Day of the Full Moon

  Third Day of the Full Moon

  End

  About the Author

  Connect with the Author Online

  Other eBooks from IFD Publishing

  First Day of the Full Moon

  It wouldn’t be right to say that the whole thing began when Clover found the dead guy in the weeds. Clearly, malfeasance had been afoot long before, but up until that moment, life in Yorktown was as it had been for years.

  “Shhht. Here she comes.” York leaned his head back against the dirt and gravel hillside and felt the low vibration. He loved that vibration. It brought back memories of being young and adventuresome, of being light of spirit and easy of conscience. Those were the days when a young man could ride the rails in relative safety and earn himself a life. “A couple miles off yet. She’s late.” He pulled back the frayed cuffs of his layered coat, sweater, shirt, and thermals and consulted the battered watch on his thin wrist. It had stopped two years earlier, but York, being blind, didn’t know that. He had to keep up appearances, so he consulted the dead watch and repeated himself. “Real late.”

  “Stupid government,” said Sly. He rubbed his long gray hair out of his eyes with a frustrated hand. “Trains are the key to our salvation, and the government’s ruining them. The government’s going to ruin this country. Atlas is just gonna shrug and we’ll all be in for it.”

  “Yeah, yeah, shut the fuck up,” said Denny.

  “Hey,” York said. York didn’t like that kind of language. He wished they would be quiet so he could enjoy the vibration and the anticipation of the train yet again. As long as the trains came by, as long as York heard them, felt them, remembered them, he wasn’t dead yet. “I toil in a garden of souls, Lord,” he said raising his sightless eyes to the sky, “and though my back grows weary, the harvest remains meager.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Denny. He poked a square forefinger out of a hole in his too-small knit gloves and felt around under the square of canvas he was lying on. He, too, felt his heart pump a little harder when the train came by. No matter how many trains had come down those tracks in the years he’d lived with York, the wonder of the giant machinery making its way always brought out the little boy in him. He recognized that feeling in the others, too. “Wonder where Clover is,” he said.

  Nobody answered him because just then the Western Express blew its customary three blasts on the horn. York smiled, a snaggletoothed, raggedy-faced smile, and raised his hand in a return salute. The train rambled by on its early-evening run, kicking up dust and sparks from the tiny fire it was Sly’s job to tend.

  “Idiot!” Sly screamed at the huge metal wheels as they ground by, their rails rocking loosely. He scrambled around to find something to shield the fire, but, of course, by the time he grabbed a nasty, crumpled old sheet of corrugated tin, the train was long past and whistling on down the road. “Trying to make up the time,” Sly said. “Blow us off the planet on its way. Stupid government.” He kicked at the coals and threw the tin back onto a pile of junk. “Coffee’s ready, York.”

  The smart thing would have been for Sly to make a permanent shield for the fire out of the sheet metal, but Sly wasn’t smart, York didn’t see the problem, and Denny didn’t care. One day Clover would fix it, Sly would find something else to scream about, York would never know the difference, and Denny still wouldn’t care. Their system worked.

  And it had worked thus far for York and the ever-changing landscape of his companions for a dozen years or more. Yorktown was known in the rail riding community as a safe place, where you kept your weapons to yourself and your foul language inside your mouth. Where there was a pretty girl, sometimes, who would talk about girl things in a girl voice and bring back memories of different times and different places and women that had been of those times and places long past. But you kept your hands to yourself. You shared your food and others shared theirs with you. You didn’t steal, you knew right from wrong, and you behaved yourself.

  Not like most of the hobo camps around the country, where any one of the denizens would slit your throat for the price of a jug—or these days, a fix. Where rats would chew holes in your clothes while you slept. Where keeping your hands to yourself wasn’t an issue; you were more likely to be beaten and raped as you slept.

  Yorktown was safe from the prying eyes of those wal
king the street above, with its barrier of tall tangle of blackberry canes. A slim path wound down through those towering brambles, down the hill from the street to their little city, walled with stack and stacks of newspapers pilfered from the mission donation box by the gas station. These newspapers, over the years, with the rain and the sun, became solid walls, tough as brick, and as the bottom layers composted away, the walls sank and eventually had to be fortified on top with fresh bundles. Yorktown was a maze of walls about three feet high. Each citizen had his own bedroom, a not-so-private latrine had been dug off to the west, a jug of water dripped into the dirt not far from the fire pit and the coffeepot, and a guest area was available for the occasional visitor. A half dozen old, cracked white buckets littered the yard and were available as seats for visiting dignitaries.

  Yorktown was safe all right, and men dropped in on a regular basis, but they didn’t stay. It was too much like home. Or church. These folks were on the road because they wanted their freedoms, and most of them would never understand that their kind of freedom was also its own kind of prison.

  York, Sly and Denny were the only true free ones, or so York liked to think. They had government, they had laws, they had punishments and disciplines. York looked upon Sly and Denny as his children, and he tried to do right by them. He was their father, their mentor, their governor, their teacher, judge and landlord, all in one. Just like a dad.

  And they were young enough to be his boys, too. York had lost count of the seasons, but he reckoned he was nearing his seventies, if not already among them. His sight had begun to dim twenty years previous; too many years in the California sun had burned his eyes right through.

  Sly was the first to join York on anything resembling a permanent basis. A man disappointed in life, who one day set down his wallet and his car keys and walked away. His anger had changed from volatile to showmanship over the years; he still acted angry because it was the only way he knew how to act, but York didn’t think Sly was really all that angry anymore. He had nothing to be angry about. Sly was middle aged and healthy, tall and thin, with dark, dark eyes and a swarthy complexion that took kindly to the hot sun. His hair, once dark, had silvered, and his once-handsome face had hardened until his nose seemed beaked and his lips too thin. Sly adored his conspiracy theories, and wasn’t above spending his evening making up new ones, though he was still able to go out and work a day job now and then when they needed something serious. Sometimes he just did it to prove to himself that he still could. He’d go up into town and sign on for a labor crew for a day, and come home with a fistful of cash and, like as not, a fresh smell, having found himself a bath and haircut. Nothing makes a man feel like a man more than bringing home the bacon. And when Sly got to crying, which he sometimes did, York would gently suggest that he go do a little work for some boss somewhere and rekindle his appreciation for his freedom. It always worked.

  Denny showed up half a dozen summers ago. Denny was a young rat yet, seemed like so many of the rail riders were young’uns. Maybe that was because York had outlived most of his cronies, maybe because life didn’t have much to offer the young ones anymore. Denny never worked. Sometimes he came home with things, and sometimes money, and York knew that Denny stole, but he never stole from York or Sly, and so he didn’t cross any boundaries set up in Yorktown. Denny was a young stud, sturdily built, with lots of thick, light-brown hair and a beautiful set of naturally white teeth. Girls gravitated to his easy smile and his shy demeanor, but Denny wasn’t the settling-down type, and so he mentioned that to every one of them almost as soon they met. It kept life less complicated.

  Clover liked Denny, and they’d been something of an item for the past year or so, although Clover had a lot of good common sense and wasn’t about to do anything permanent with one of the losers who lived down by the tracks. She had a job and she kept her own place in town. She never let any of them into it, though, and kept pretty closemouthed about who she was and what she did. Sometimes York’s heart ached for her. He’d never seen her with his traitorous eyes, but she was as pretty a soul as he’d ever come across, giving him a part of her paycheck every week, making sure they all had toothbrushes and vitamins and something to eat besides roasted rodent. They were pretty self-sufficient, but sometimes they were so lonely it even made York want to cry along with Sly. Then the girl would come tripping down the trail through the berry bushes, her gait unmistakable, and the air would lighten up, and they would encourage her to read to them, or to tell them stories, or just talk in her sweet girl voice.

  If York had a wife, or a daughter, or a granddaughter, he’d want them all to be like Clover. They all loved her, and they all dreamed about her, but Denny was the only one who ever touched her. Maybe because he was allowed. York had never tried; he didn’t know about Sly. They all tried to concentrate on other things while Denny and the girl sneaked off for some privacy together, but it didn’t work. Those were perhaps the loneliest of times. But then they’d come back, and the girl would be bubbly and giggly and they’d all imagine it was them that made her that way, and that lightened the mood considerably.

  York wasn’t alone in his ministry. He’d never have been able to do all he had done in this place without the girl, God bless her.

  Life was good, stable, sweet, and freedoms were assured.

  Until the afternoon that Clover found that dead guy. It was a full moon, of course it was a full moon, it had to be. Full moons were always trouble. York knew a full moon without having to see one. Full moons tugged on the tide of reason, and nobody was quite in their right mind during a full moon. It was the first evening of the July full moon when the Western Express screeched down the rails and that guy hit the ground and rolled to within a hundred feet of Yorktown.

  He wasn’t quite dead at first. He moaned, and that’s how she found him.

  She’d just come down the hill, still wearing her pink donut-shop uniform, hair tied up in a ponytail, worn-out sneakers and bare legs, toting a bagful of day-old, when she stopped mid-step and said, “What’s that?”

  “What?” Denny said, rousing himself at the sound of her voice.

  “You didn’t hear that?”

  “C’mere with them donuts,” Denny said.

  “Over there,” the girl said, pitched the bag to Denny and stomped through the weeds.

  A low moan wavered across the dry litter, and this time everybody heard it. Then he coughed, and it was a jelly cough that put Denny right off the raspberry-filled donut he’d been about to bite.

  Sly was up and running ahead of the girl the minute he heard it. Somebody in trouble. Somebody in bad trouble. “I’ve heard dead guys before,” he said, leaping over trash and stumbling up and over the pile of old railroad ties. “I’ve seen lots of them in Vietnam, both the dead and the dying. This one’s almost there.”

  York sat up and listened, his nose twitching in the wind. He smelled trouble, and it reached farther than the man who lay dying in the weeds. “Tell me what you find,” he commanded in a whisper that only Denny heard. “Crushed chest, broken bones, mashed-up face.”

  Denny dropped the jelly-filled donut into the bag and tossed it aside. He sat up, stood, and brushed dust off his ragged Levis and ran his dusty fingers through his hair.

  “Thrown from the train,” York said. “By a big man wearing a red-and-blue-plaid shirt. I seen it. I seen it all in a dream.”

  “He’s dead,” Sly yelled. “Dead as hell.”

  “Full moon,” York whispered.

  “We need to call an ambulance,” Clover said.

  “He’s way past an ambulance,” Sly said. “Dude needs a hearse.”

  “York?” Denny asked, worried. Somebody needed to get control of this situation before it controlled all of them.

  York reshuffled his stack of old sofa cushions, lay back, and sighed. “Hold on to your hats, boys,” he said. “We’re in for a ride.”

  Sly and Clover came stomping back through the weeds. “We need to put a sheet or something o
ver him,” she said. “His face is all mashed up. There’s flies.”

  “You know about dead people?” Sly asked nobody in particular. “They’re so quiet. They’re so still. I don’t think I could ever get used to dead people.”

  “I gotta see,” Denny said, and wandered off.

  “Maybe I should just go call the cops,” Clover said.

  “No, no, God, no, fuck no,” Sly said.

  “Your language.”

  “Yeah, sorry, York, no, no cops,” Sly said. “Don’t call the cops. They’ll start files on all of us. I don’t want to be in a government computer.”

  “He’s got family somewhere,” Clover said. “They need to know about him.”

  “It’s what they’ve been waiting for,” Sly said. “There’s always someone just sitting around waiting for one of us out here to screw up so they can arrest us and clean out our place here and put in a parking lot or some kind of a development or something.”

  “Yeah, this is really valuable land,” Clover said with a smirk. “Right next to the railroad tracks.”

  “You know they don’t like us,” Sly said. “You call the government about that dead guy, and we’re all as good as locked up in jail forever. They’ll blame it all on us. Murder One, kids.”

  “No, they won’t,” Clover said. “We don’t know anything about that guy.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Call the cops,” York said.

  “What?” Sly said. “You’re kidding.”

  “We didn’t kill him. We don’t know anything about him. Call the cops, they’ll come investigate, and everything will be fine,” York said. He knew the chances were slim that they’d be able to escape the moon that easily, but it was worth a try.

  “Yeah, Sly, we can’t just bury him,” Clover said. “People will be looking for him.”

  “Who?” Denny asked from the field. “Why would they look here?”

  “The people who killed him know where they dumped him,” York said. “And they don’t know that he is dead.”