York's Moon

by Elizabeth Engstrom

  “Two blocks,” she said.

  “I’m yours.”

  She left two bucks on the table next to the soggy bar rag, and Denny leaned on her all the way back to her place, where he collapsed on the couch and was asleep before she could put a pillow under his head.

  ~ ~ ~

  Brenda got a small bag of frozen peas from the freezer and put them gently on the scary-looking lump on Denny’s forehead. Then she went into the bedroom, feeling kind of hyper and excited, and called her friend Suzanne to tell her about Christine, Norman, the pool cue, Denny, and especially about the wad of money and the dead guy down by the train tracks.

  Suzanne called her brother, who worked the midnight shift at the railroad. The brother thought this might be just exactly the right information to get himself promoted. He took a cup of coffee in to his supervisor, and they sat for a while, talking. The supervisor called security, and they all had a meeting about the politics and timing of when to call the police.

  ~ ~ ~

  Denny woke up, achy and disoriented with something warm and gushy on his face. Panicked, he ripped it off, and it hit the wall with a dull thwap. He sat up slowly, the thundering inside his head making his stomach queasy. After a moment, he remembered the redhead, and her kindness. He touched the egg on his forehead and wondered that his skull hadn’t cracked with the blow. Maybe it had.

  The moon shone through the lace curtains, casting thick shadows on the woman’s cheap furniture, and he thought of Clover, and what she would think if she saw him coming out of the redhead’s apartment in the morning while she was on her way to work. Women were funny about things like that. She’d never understand, despite his injured head, and he would find himself in a lose-lose situation. The redhead was too old for him, and he’d lose the good thing he had going with Clover.

  He stood up, waited for the dizziness to pass, then walked out of Brenda’s apartment, down the hall, down the stairs and into the night.

  He felt bad, like he ought to have left her a note, or some kind of a thank-you.

  Then he thought about the dinner he had been going to buy for York and Clover with that money, and about the other little things he’d thought he’d do for other folks, not to mention himself, with a windfall wad of cash like that, and he lost the nausea and dizziness in a rush of anger.

  York needed a new coat. Brenda needed—Brenda needed something, Denny was certain. Clover could use some new shoes. As long as he’d known her, she’d always worn those same sneakers, and the heels were worn down to the black. He hadn’t realized how much he planned to do good with that money for those who had done good for him in the past—how good he felt about himself with that six hundred and forty bucks in his jeans—until it was gone. Gone to Christine and Norman and their sicko, self-destructive ways.

  Well, dammit, stealing was nothing new to Denny, only he always stole stuff to support himself. This time he’d get a few things for some other folks for a change. The thought made his heart swell.

  He took a deep breath of the warm air, figured the time to be early morning by the taste of it—at least two hours to daylight, and decided if he was going to do something, he better get on with it. He willed the headache to take a hike, and then he headed uptown, toward Sears or one of those places like that, to do a little off-season Christmas shoplifting.

  ~ ~ ~

  About the time Denny busted through the skylight of Walmart, York’s useless eyes snapped open.

  He listened with heightened awareness, ever alert to intruders of both the human and the animal persuasion, creatures who could invade his territory and do harm to a bunch of defenseless old men. He heard nothing out of the ordinary, save the wheezy snoring of Ed getting his good night’s sleep.

  Must be that, York thought to himself. Ed’s here. That’s what’s different.

  He listened for a while longer, and heard Sly’s breathing. He didn’t hear Denny or Clover, but that didn’t surprise him. Clover was at her place, probably, and Denny usually slept with his head down inside his bag. It was a burden, being the protector of these souls, but somebody had to look out after them, and it might as well be him.

  He lay there for a while, feeling the adventuresome tug of the moon. He wanted to get up and wander around, but his wandering days were long behind him. Besides which, his internal calendar told him that a check would be waiting for him at general delivery, and he had to conserve his strength so he could walk all the way to the post office in the morning.

  He thought about that check and the good dry goods he could buy with that money: beans, and rice and corn and some dried meat and cheese.

  Money. He remembered Denny with a wad of money in his hand.

  The dead guy.

  Oh, yes, the dead guy, dammit all to hell. York, being the unofficial mayor of Yorktown as well as Father Confessor and all the rest, was going to have to deal with the dead guy sooner or later.

  He sighed.

  It seemed that challenges like these ought to be reserved for the young. He turned his sightless eyes to the heavens and implored the gods to grant him a little peace, a respite from all these moral decisions and challenges, from all these actions he had to take. He was old and it was time for him to rest. Wasn’t it enough that he was spending his time ministering to the restless ones?

  He’d spent his whole life ministering to restless souls. The first had been The Right Reverend Tecumseh Gittens, who stopped by the farm when York was just a boy. His mother had been dead for a year or so, and his father wasn’t getting sober anytime soon, so when the reverend asked him to come along and aid in the ministering, York didn’t even bother to close the front door behind him. It felt like the simple thing to do.

  Over the next couple of years, they worked together, the middle-aged preacher and the young farmhand, holding tent revivals and preaching gospel in the homeless missions and the hobo camps. Eventually, York began to believe the things they said, could see some of the fruits of their labors, and the ministering became a passion.

  One night, as they camped by a river somewhere in Ohio, the reverend lay down, put his head in York’s lap and told him that he loved him. York was surprised at the action, but not at the sentiment. He responded in kind, and then Tecumseh Gittens sat up, took York’s young face in his hands and said, “No, boy, I don’t think you understand. I mean I’ve fallen in love with you. I can’t deny it another minute.”

  York was too surprised to do anything but look at him, and then the reverend kissed him, full on the lips, with tongue and all. York endured it because he didn’t know what else to do, and when the reverend pulled back to gaze into his beloved’s eyes, York stood up, grabbed his bedroll and walked off. Behind him, he heard the reverend calling his name, and then he heard the reverend sobbing, but York never looked back. If there had been a door to walk through, he would have left it open, just like he had at his father’s place.

  He just kept on traveling, ministering, spreading the Good News, but kept himself to himself. He didn’t seek out the ladies—didn’t much have to, as they all sought him out—and certainly learned not to give the wrong impression to any man who liked his small-boned physique. He tried to resist the women—sometimes he could and sometimes he couldn’t—but he never settled down with one, something that he regretted on the occasional lonely night.

  When the weariness settled into his bones too harsh to ignore, York got off a freight train, threw his bedroll down and sat on it, saying to himself that he was going to stay put for a while. And he’d been in West Wheaton ever since. He kept waiting for Tecumseh Gittens to step down off a freight one of these days, but by now, of course, he was long dead.

  Still, the remembrance of that time and of his mother and of his inconsolable drunken father and the farm and his childhood gave him regrets and a simple restlessness that he tried to pray away.

  But imploring the nameless, faceless force that twirled the heavens didn’t help. Never had, never would. York figured that he kept doing
it just so that God didn’t forget that he was down here, living in the dirt next to the train tracks. He might be easy to overlook, there in the shadows, not much trouble, when there were so many others out making a real name for themselves. God must spend a lot of time and energy on those folks, because they surely needed it. York just needed the minimum of attention.

  And the minimum was all he got.

  That was just fine. He didn’t mind. He had all he needed, and he spent some good time alone with his God, trying to hear the answer to the riddle.

  He closed his eyes, listening to the night and hoping for the sound of his creator’s voice, dozed again, and he waited some more, but never got any closer to wisdom. Seemed he’d had a lot more wisdom, knowledge, and the firepower to use it all when he was younger.

  He kept up the dozing and the praying and the listening and the regretting until morning came, and Denny showed up rustlin’ like some damned walking rosebush with a half dozen plastic bags full of stuff, and not five minutes later, the law came wandering on down the road in a pack, looking for a dead guy and not happy at all to be finding one.

  ~ ~ ~

  Sly had been dreaming about sailing.

  He’d grown up in a sailing family, all preppy-looking people with white-toothed smiles. They wore red, white, and blue and spent evenings at the Yacht Club. His father had dark, Armenian blood, silver hair and eyes so deep brown you couldn’t see the pupils. His mother was tall and thin, with the palest of blue eyes and blondish hair she kept collected at the back of her neck with a ribbon. Young Sylvester and his baby sister Darla sailed dinghies in regattas when they were but tiny, and vacationed on yachts when they were teens. They wintered on the Italian Riviera and summered in the Hamptons. Sylvester went to prep school, but made the mistake of taking a year off to get some real life under his fingernails between prep school and college, and the Department of Defense wasted no time snagging him.

  While his friends at home were drinking martinis and boffing their tennis instructors, his real friends were with him in Vietnam, dying from snakebites, bullets that blew their eyes out, self-inflicted gunshots, and fear. When it got too much, Sly closed his eyes, ducked down in the mud and went sailing. While artillery shells exploded, raining flesh all around him, limbless men screamed, napalm exploded the jungle in the wake of the airplanes, and babies were sawed in half with automatic fire from his superior officers, Sly hoisted the main and let the wind carry him out into the bay.

  There was a certain feeling Sly had every time the boat left the dock. No matter what was about to happen, whether it was a week-long vacation with his family or a quick turn around the lake or a good-natured Hobie Cat competition, as soon as the boat left the dock, something inside the boy sighed, “Aaah. At last.” It was as if his body had ached to be floated, only he didn’t know it until it was happening. Floated and rocked. It was a natural feeling. It was a “way things are supposed to be” feeling.

  He came home from Vietnam wrecked. He had attitude, and had no reason to give it up. He never slept a night through. He hated everybody and had contempt for everybody else. All he wanted to do was smoke dope and watch television, a sneer being the only facial expression he had left. He didn’t know why he had to be one of the guys to live when such good guys died in his arms. He hated God and was going to devote his life to exactly that endeavor. He gave his sister her first joint, took her out to get drunk on her twenty-first birthday and she died of a heroin overdose five years later. His father died of a massive coronary the following year, and his mother died of loneliness, tranquilizers, and vodka a year after that. Their attorney sold everything, per Sylvester’s instructions, and put the family money in the bank, where it sat, untouched and accumulating, unless somebody was stealing it. Sly didn’t care. He didn’t want anything to do with it. It wasn’t his. Sly told the attorney he was going to the west coast, and that he’d be in touch, but his car broke down outside of West Wheaton, and he stayed in an ugly motel by the refinery until his pocket money ran out and then, as he was walking toward the tracks, thinking of hopping a freight, he found York. He still thought of himself as being “at the beach.” He was in California, after all. It wasn’t the Chesapeake, but, hell, it was . . . probably not much more than a day’s drive to the ocean.

  He felt responsible for the dissolution of the family. Three more deaths that God had caused. God should kill him instead of the good folk. That would make more sense. Even less sense was leaving him with all that money. It was ridiculous. Taking care of the family wealth was far more responsibility than he could live with.

  At York’s, Sly was only responsible for his own self.

  He never told anybody about his history. He never told anybody about his family, his money, prep school, or Vietnam. Well, he told people he was a veteran, and that’s about all, and that seemed to explain a whole lot to a whole lot of people, and he never could understand all of that. He felt as though people thought he’d been squeezed through a cookie press—that Vietnam had reduced him to some common denominator along with everybody else who came through that same experience. “A Vietnam vet, oh yeah, okay, now I get it.” And they looked at the lines in his face and the length of his gray hair and the attitude in his aura and nodded knowingly. “Now I get it,” they’d say.

  Get what?

  But he learned to hide within that guise, and then it was fine. People left him alone once they began to look at him as just another damaged, disturbed, and disposable Vietnam vet. He intimidated them, and that was just fine.

  The night terrors were the worst, when he would startle himself awake time after time after time, sometimes for hours before falling into a twitchy sleep just before dawn, flashes of antipersonnel mines exploding through his head.

  But the morning of the dead guy, just before the police poked him awake, he had been dreaming of sailing, something that happened every month on those three nights of the full moon. The sun was hot, the water was cold, the spray invigorating. He hauled in the main and leaned out over the side, tiller feeling strong and steady in his hand. The bow bounced on some chop left over from the water-skiers, and he grinned into the wind, feeling free and alive. He laughed out loud.

  And then a boot poked him in the shoulder.

  Oh, yeah. Real life.

  Dead guy.

  Second Day of the Full Moon

  “Lookee all them Walmart bags,” was the first that either of the lawmen said.

  “I got a receipt,” Denny said back.

  “Yeah, I just bet you do.”

  “Leave it,” Sheriff Goddard said to his young deputy, a kid with too much testosterone for his own good. The kid, Travis was his name, was always looking to turn a conversation into a confrontation, a situation into an event. He was spoiling to use those big muscles he acquired in the gym; he was itching to pull his gun, and one of these days he was going to, and that would be the end of Travis. Sheriff Goddard had told him more than once to cool himself, and he figured he would be telling the same thing to Travis in another ten years. Kids like that just flat-out don’t cool down until they’re in their forties.

  “Nasty bruise you got there,” the deputy said to Denny, ignoring his superior’s comments. “How’d you get a bruise like that?”

  “Leave it,” Sheriff Goddard said again. Travis was going to burn himself out. Or maybe the sheriff would end up pulling his gun on him before it was all over. Damned punks watching all that gun-happy television with all those macho big-city policemen shooting people in the streets gives kids ideas that even the police academy can’t wash ’em clean of. It was a problem. It was a problem for Travis, and that made it a problem for the sheriff.

  The sheriff walked down to where York was yawning and stretching and climbing out of his bed. “Morning, York,” he said. The two other men in suits followed him, leaving Travis to try to stare Denny down.

  “Morning, Sheriff. What brings you down here so early?”

  “Hey, yeah,” Sly said, sitting up a
nd rubbing his eyes. “How come you guys ain’t out eating your weight in donuts?” He looked the other two suits up and down and was about to ask what it was that they ate, when the sheriff spoke again.

  “Heard tell of a dead guy, York. You know anything about a dead body around here?” The radio on his belt squawked and he turned it down.

  “Can’t say as I have, Sheriff,” York said. “Dead guy? Think I’d have heard about that.”

  “That’s why I come to you first, York. You and me, we’ve always been square with each other.”

  “Always will be, Sheriff. This here’s a clean place. No dope, no booze, no crime.”

  “Awful lot of Walmart bags here,” the deputy said, and poked one of them with his shoe.

  The sheriff looked around, nodding, and smiling. York did run a clean camp, and Sheriff Goddard took all the credit. “These here guys are from the railroad.”

  “Nice to make your acquaintance,” York said, and took his time standing up, his old joints creaking, his bones aching. Once he was upright, he held out his hand, and each of the two men shook it in turn.

  “Samuel Greening,” one said, and his handshake was firm, dry, and crisp.

  “Mark Tipps,” the other one said, and his handshake was too brief, as if he didn’t want to touch York. Mark Tipps was not to be trusted, but the Green one was a-okay. So was the sheriff, but York knew that one of these days that idiot deputy would come on down here and make big trouble if he didn’t get his hand slapped hard enough and often enough. That Deputy Travis was the type of kid who’d never been spanked. And should have been. Regular and furious.

  “You boys hear about any deceased neighbors?” York called out to his camp mates.

  “Nope,” Sly said.

  “Nope,” Denny said.

  “What’s this?” the deputy said and poked a toe at the wad of blankets that was actually Ed.