York's Moon

by Elizabeth Engstrom

  “Bringing in the cops is a bad idea, York,” Sly said.

  “What about the people who love that guy?” Clover countered.

  “Love,” Sly scoffed. “I say we bury him and shut up about it.”

  “We think we should call the cops,” Clover said, crossing her arms over her chest defiantly and moving to stand closer to York.

  “Sly’s got a point,” York said. “Let’s sit on it for a while. He ain’t going nowhere. We don’t even need to say we knew he was there until we all start to smell him.”

  “In a while it’ll be dark,” Clover said. “You just going to leave him there by himself all night long?”

  “There’s footprints all around him,” Denny said, standing at the top of the pile of ties. “Pretty obvious people have been looking at his dead ass. Look what I found.”

  In his hand was a roll of cash with a rubber band around it.

  “Hey,” Sly said, tripping over himself to scramble up to see the money. “Let me see.”

  “Back off,” Denny said.

  “Oh, no,” Clover said. “York . . . ?” But as she turned to look at him, to beseech him to help the boys deal with their jealousies and greed, she saw something that disturbed her even more. “Hey,” she called to the guys who were squaring off at each other at the tie pile. Reluctantly, they looked down at her. She pointed with her chin, and they all looked.

  Ed, a toothless, smelly, alcoholic transient was headed their way, bedroll on his shoulder.

  Denny shoved the wad of cash into his pocket and then shoved Sly as he hopped down off the stack of creosote-soaked lumber. “Hey, Ed,” Denny said, then grabbed Clover and pulled her down onto his canvas with him.

  Ed looked as though he didn’t hear. He was short and thin and nervous. “York?” he said when he got close enough. “Hey, York?” He dropped his bed into the dirt, then stood humbly, wringing his black knit hat.

  “Hi, Ed,” York said.

  “Kin I stay a while?”

  “You sober?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Got the law after ya?”

  Ed was silent, twisting and twisting that poor hat. He was dirty, and hadn’t shaved, but somehow, his thick white hair looked clean and shiny.

  “You can’t be drinking and puking around here, Ed,” Sly said. “Last time you were here you puked on my bed. And then the law came down here and hassled us. You can’t be bringing the law down here anymore.”

  “York?” Ed said, trying to ignore Sly.

  “We live clean, Ed,” York said.

  “Just one night please? I got no drink. I need to sleep, just one night where I don’t hafta keep an eye out.”

  “One night,” York said, and Sly moaned his disapproval.

  Ed, his head down, not making eye contact with anybody, scuffled around until he’d cleared himself a little space, then threw down his bedroll, took off his shoes and climbed between the layers. He looked like a little gray-haired dog, snuggled down in his dog bed.

  Clover picked up the bag of day-old and disentangled herself from Denny’s amorous advances. “No,” Denny protested, trying to snag the bag away from her. “Not the gooey ones.”

  She parried him efficiently, stood up, brushed the dust and weed seeds from her uniform and walked over to Ed. “You probably shouldn’t eat much more sugar, Ed,” she said. “But I think there’s a bagel or two in there.”

  A grimy hand slipped out of the blanket and snatched the bag. The girl never saw his face.

  “Bless you, Clover,” York said.

  She smiled at him.

  Sly knelt down next to York and whispered harshly. “What about the . . . the . . .” He gestured toward the body and then toward Denny, his gestures falling, of course, on blind eyes.

  “Shhht,” York came back just as harshly. “It’ll all wait until morning.”

  He was wrong.

  ~ ~ ~

  When the moon was full up, Denny slipped out of his sleeping bag, pulled on his boots and then made for town, that roll of cash hot and urgent in his pocket.

  He felt free and happy and light as a hummingbird. He was putting one over on that stupid Sly, thanks to Ed’s intervention, and he was putting one over on that dead guy by taking his cash, and he was putting one over on God, for finding a windfall when God had never seen fit to give Denny anything worthwhile before. Ever.

  Except maybe the girl. Denny had lucked out on that, but he knew it wouldn’t last. She had a job and an apartment, and though she slept under his blanket with him some nights all night long, it was just because she was lonely and he was clean. Some nice girl like that was going to find herself a real boyfriend someday, and then she wouldn’t come around him anymore the way she did with her soft skin. But, hey, while it was handy, he would help himself.

  But, right now, there was only one thing on Denny’s mind, and it wasn’t quiff. It was steak. A big thick one, red inside and oozing juice with a baked potato dripping with butter and sour cream and a frosty Heineken he could suck right out of the bottle. Oh, yeah.

  He passed by the low-down no-name bar where most of who he knew hung out, and headed uptown—not too far, just far enough to get himself a good meal. Tomorrow night he’d start earlier, and he’d bring York. York could use a good steak dinner. York and the girl, yeah, he’d treat them both.

  Just before he opened the door to the steakhouse that had the dark, low-lit lounge where he could eat at the bar, Denny stopped to smell the night.

  He loved the night. He loved the fact that he, and others like him, were alone in the night while almost everybody slept. There was less mental static in the atmosphere. Heads were clearer, senses were heightened. He breathed in deeply through his nose and as he did, his eyes rested on the moon, smaller now, and higher up than when he first awoke. It wasn’t exactly full—tomorrow night the moon would be solid round—it still had a little flat spot on the upper right. Denny loved the moon. The moon was the main reason he slept outside—always had, even as a kid. When he turned over in the night, and his eyes flashed open for that instant, if he could see the moon, or the light that flowed from it that turned the world black and silver, he felt safe.

  It was a good omen indeed that there was a big moon tonight. He had money in his jeans, he had a nice rare steak in his immediate future, he had adventure in his soul, and he had a moon to watch over him.

  Life was sweet.

  In the men’s room, he washed his hands and face, finger-combed his brown hair away from his face, and then went into a stall to count the cash. The rubber band broke as he tried to slip it off the roll, the money unfurled and he almost dropped half of it into the toilet. So he sat down and counted it out into his lap.

  Six hundred and forty dollars in twenties.

  That was good, and that was very good.

  It was good because it wasn’t thousands. A man could have and lose six hundred bucks, no big deal. The dead guy could lose it, and Denny could have it. No questions, not like the questions that would be asked if the dead guy had five hundred thousand dollars on him or something like that. That would be serious business indeed. But six hundred and forty dollars? Nothing more than a solid week’s paycheck.

  So it was good because it wasn’t serious money, and it was very good because it was Denny’s.

  He folded the bills, stuffed them into his pocket and went in for his feast.

  The restaurant was closed, the lights dim and the chairs up on top of the tables. The lounge was still open but quiet. Two women sat at the end of the bar, smoking and talking intently. Two cowboys played pool at the far end of the room. The air in the place tasted foul.

  The jukebox was silent, and the rolled-and-tucked black vinyl booths and matching, low-wheeled chairs around small round tables spoke of a hundred affairs and a thousand heartbreaks.

  Denny looked at the two women, who were surely talking about men, and the two men, surely wishing they were with women, and he thought this was perhaps the loneliest place
on the planet.

  He sat at the bar, ordered his meal, then swiveled around and leaned against it with his Heineken in his hand. He watched the men play pool until they didn’t want him to watch them anymore. They were very clear about that.

  Denny didn’t want any trouble, so he turned back around and began watching the women. They didn’t even notice him.

  They weren’t old, but they had been used. Denny guessed that any women smoking and drinking alone together in a bar around midnight had problems he couldn’t even imagine. And they all revolved around being used and being tossed aside. He knew the feeling. He’d been tossed aside a few times by a few women, and he had learned. Do the tossing. Don’t never put yourself in a position to get tossed aside again.

  He reckoned that someday a woman would blindside him and hit him so hard and so fast that he didn’t see it coming, and when that happened, he’d fall deep into love and put himself at risk. And that would be fine, but until that happened, he kept his distance. The girl, Clover, she was starting to get under his skin a little bit—she was so damned cute!—but he could still walk away, no problem.

  The food came, and with it, a fresh beer, and he sliced into that rare beef and put the first heavenly bite into his mouth.

  He never got to the second one, nor the baked potato that was awash with butter, sour cream, chives and bacon bits, or the steaming fresh green hunk of broccoli that looked like something he’d been longing for, but hadn’t realized it until he saw it. No, Denny only got one bite of steak before the door opened and the shouting started.

  The door opened, and the first indication Denny had that trouble was about to erupt was when the worn-out blonde whispered to her companion, “Oh, shit.” Denny swallowed his steak and turned to look.

  A rangy-looking guy in a tank shirt, jeans, and a huge belt buckle, with long gray hair pulled back into a ponytail, came in. He had a couple days’ growth on his chin and a storm brewing behind brown eyes.

  “I ain’t talkin’ to you no more, Norman,” the blonde said. “I’m done cryin’, and I’m done beggin’ and I’m flat-out done with you.”

  “You come on home now, Christine,” Norman said in a very low voice. It was a voice Denny knew well. It was the voice of violence being held in control by the tiniest of fraying threads.

  “No, I told you.”

  “Come on, Christine. Stop all this now and come home to your children.” He moved slowly toward her, and Denny watched the man’s fingers curl.

  “She said she ain’t going,” the redhead said.

  Norman ignored her. “Christine?”

  “Go away,” Christine said.

  Denny looked at that lovely slab of meat on his plate and said good-bye to it. He knew that he couldn’t stand by and have this woman go home with this man, nor could he watch whatever steps that man was about to take in order to make her go with him. Whatever was going to happen, the steak and the potato and the broccoli wasn’t going to taste nearly as good when it was all over.

  Denny turned toward the situation. “Go home, Norman,” he said. “Cool off. She’ll come home when she’s ready.”

  “This ain’t about you,” Norman said, never taking his eyes off his woman.

  “You bring it into this place, you disturb my meal, you make it about me.”

  Christine flashed him a smile of gratitude, and that was just exactly the wrong thing for her to do.

  The cowboys, pool cues in hand, moved in closer. The girls huddled. Norman spun on his heel and gave Denny a punch in the side of the head that knocked him off his stool. One of the cowboys cracked Norman over the head with the cue, and got tossed onto the pool table for his trouble. The girls started screaming, the bartender came out from the back, took one look and skedaddled out of sight.

  Denny, eyes not working just exactly right, stood up. “Go on home, Norman,” he said again, and thought that was perhaps the wrong thing to say under the circumstances. Norman picked up the broken pool cue and came at Denny with it.

  Denny, younger and healthier, with adrenaline running hot, ducked and parried and danced Norman around a little bit, at least until the flashing red and blue lights shone through the small tavern windows.

  “Cops!” Christine yelled. Denny looked at her just at the wrong moment, and that fat stick of wood caught him square in the forehead.

  Vaguely, he heard sound swirling around him, mixed in with the thick black air, and he felt himself slowly falling through it. Someone was touching him, someone was pulling on his clothes, and he tried to speak, but his tongue was fumbled and there was cotton in his ears and everything seemed so far away. Oh, yeah, and his head hurt in a way it had never hurt before. This wasn’t like a headache; this was like a pain so large he saw it instead of feeling it. And he could feel the sounds. Too many sounds, too loud, echoing in his head until he thought he would puke. He had to get up. He had to get out of there. He had to get outside where it was cool, God he was hot, he had to get away from the noises, from the activity, he had to get out. Out under the comforting influence of the moon.

  Getting out was not as easy as he thought. His legs didn’t work right. He squirmed like a bug on the floor.

  Then a cool hand was on his head, and a rag so cold he thought it would burn him was on his forehead, and a soft voice cut through all the rest and it said, “Shhh, just relax.”

  He followed orders well, Denny did, and he was happy to follow these.

  A few minutes later, he opened his eyes and saw the redhead looking down at him. “Hi,” she said. “You going to be all right?”

  Denny didn’t know the answer to that.

  “Boy, you got a knot the size of a suckling pig up there where Norman cracked you.”

  A trembling hand found the knob on his forehead, and it felt as big as a handle, and it made him go weak in the knees again, even though he was lying flat on the floor, his head resting on something soft.

  “He stole your money,” the girl said, “and ran out the back. Christine went with him, the silly bitch.”

  Denny didn’t remember having any money worth stealing.

  “Cops said if you want to make a complaint, to call them.”

  Money. Money. The money! Oh, man. . . . No dinner, no money, no nothing but a doorknob in the middle of his forehead. He wanted to get up. She helped him.

  “I said I thought you ought to go to the hospital,” she kept talking, breathing bourbon breath into his face, “but someone said you lived by the railroad tracks and that you weren’t gonna die, so they just left you. Is that true? You live down by the tracks?”

  “Now I can’t pay for my meal,” Denny said, feeling the emptiness in his jeans pocket. He stood on unsteady legs, the redhead helping him. He felt like crying. “I wanted to pay for my meal.”

  “It’s okay, hon,” she said. “I paid for it, and I’ll get Christine to pay me back.”

  “I want to sit outside,” he said, and he leaned against her like an old drunk as they walked between the tables and out the door into the night.

  It wasn’t cool, it was still and kind of sticky. But it didn’t stink; at least it didn’t stink like cigarettes and stale beer. It stunk like the refinery and diesel fuel, but at least it stunk like outside and not like inside. He sat on the curb and she sat next to him for a few minutes until his head cleared and all that was left of the incident was an empty pocket and a severe headache.

  When he felt better, she walked with him to a pancake house, and they settled under the bright lights in a corner booth. She ordered coffee for both of them, then, as if she owned the place, walked behind the counter, got a damp cloth, filled it with ice, and brought it back to him for his forehead.

  The cold made him see floating globes of light for a moment, but then it felt good.

  “You’re kinda young to be living down by the tracks,” she said. “And cute. I bet you clean up real good. You’ve got that Tom Cruise thing going on about you, with that hair and that smile.”

  �
��I’m twenty-eight.”

  “I thought only old, has-been guys lived down there.”

  He had no answer for that, so he sipped his coffee. It made his headache worse.

  “Where’d you get that kind of money, living down by the tracks?”

  “Off a dead guy,” he said, then wished he hadn’t.

  “Yeah, okay, I’m just trying to be nice to you.”

  “You are nice. And pretty.” That made her smile shyly and look down at the pattern in the Formica. It was true, he realized, if she wouldn’t put so much dark red in her hair, she’d be prettier, but she was probably not yet forty, and she had a smile that lit up her whole face. “I mean it. A real dead guy. Fell off the train.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.” That’s enough talk about the dead guy, he thought. He should never have mentioned it. He wasn’t going to mention it again. “What’s your name?”

  “Brenda.”

  “I’m Denny. You married, Brenda?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Got anybody who’s likely to come in here and bust my head again over having coffee with you?”

  She smiled, that fine smile again. “Nope. Nobody.”

  He looked at her with mock suspicion. “You’re not seeing anybody?”

  She shook her head.

  “Pity,” he said, then picked up his coffee cup and clinked it with hers.

  “You’re young.”

  “Not that young.” He smiled with all the enthusiasm he had, which wasn’t much, considering the drumming that was going on inside his skull.

  “I liked that you stood up for Christine when you didn’t even know her.”

  “No good deed goes unpunished,” he said, then the drummers took a break to let the tubas in. They began a melancholy tune that soured his stomach. “I think I better go home.”

  “Come back to my place. I’ll make you cozy on the couch.”

  “Is it close?” Denny wasn’t sure he was up to walking far, maybe not even as far as his nest in Yorktown. But if he was alone, he could fall down or sit down and nobody would think anything but that he was drunk. But he didn’t want to make an ass of himself in front of Brenda, the nice redhead with the Crest Kid smile. On the other hand, he wouldn’t mind having a woman tend to his wounds for a day or two, either.