Loot the Moon

by Mark Arsenault

  For the slightest moment Scratch considered beating the man with the makeshift club. But the assassin was only stunned; Scratch was deeply wounded, and bleeding.

  And the enemy was armed with a real weapon. Scratch was armed with an arm.

  Instinct insisted: Run away.

  He flung the arm, flew out the door, rumbled down the stairs, out into the night. He ran with one hand over the hole in his forearm. He didn’t look back.

  seven

  The breakfast buffet began with stove-boiled Autocrat java, inky black and infused with coffee grounds in what the old man liked to call “chunky style.” The chrome toaster on the table was forty years old, same age as Billy, but it delivered four perfect shingles at a time. Not one of the thirty flapjacks piled chaotically on a tin plate was round; despite Billy’s best short-order cookery, the cakes had hardened into the shapes of Confederate states. On the table, arranged like a row of books, were four boxes of sugared cereal, a box of golden raisins, a half-gallon carton of skim milk, and a quart of orange juice. The bacon hardened on a greasy paper towel. The boy had arranged six triangles of seedy watermelon flat on a plate, like pizza slices. A butterscotch short-haired cat, with a potbelly and an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, relaxed sphinxlike on the table among the dishes with its front paws tucked invisibly beneath its bulk.

  Surrounding this feast were three generations of males with the same name.

  The eldest William R. Povich had parked his wheelchair at a short end of the rectangular table. In the late-morning sun, his startling blue eyes looked like those of an optimist, maybe a poet or an adventurer, or like the eyes of a young bridegroom. But sunken into the head of a living corpse, among the scars of old age, the jagged creases and pockmarks littered with white whiskers, the eyes shone like stolen goods.

  Across the table, boosted on two copies of the Providence Yellow Pages, sat the youngest William Povich, a second-grader with little white legs leopard-spotted with brown bruises. Bo hurt himself often because he rarely moved at less than full speed, and had not yet developed the grown-up pessimism that made people hesitate before they jumped off a shed with a pillowcase for a parachute, or tried to pilot a bicycle down a flight of stairs.

  The stuffed Mr. Albert Einstein, which had become some sort of security anchor for the boy, leaned against the orange juice, silently contemplating space-time, light speed, and the twin paradox. Billy didn’t understand what the kid saw in the doll, which the old man had bought for him over the Internet. The Einstein action figure did not talk or move. It did not use batteries; it lacked the kung fu grip. Did the kid even know Einstein had been a real person?

  Bo tore open a paper sugar pack saved from Dunkin’ Donuts and sprinkled the excess energy over his Frankenberries.

  “Ziggs put his tail in the butter,” the boy said. He giggled.

  “No one likes a tattletale,” the old man told Bo. The kid laughed and slapped a hand over his mouth. The old man shooed away the cat’s tail, then used a knife to scrape hair off the stick of soft butter.

  Billy laid a folder of documents on the table. His eyes dutifully passed over Adam Rackers’s arrest record, but the distractions prevented the words from actually entering his brain. He sighed and glanced around to clear his head. The giant white range had left the kitchen too warm. The ten-year-old cat sat pensively on the table, buttered tail silently slapping the cherry red laminate. Outside the window, cars lined the street for a service at Metts & Sons, the funeral parlor on the first floor of their old Victorian apartment house. Beyond the street, a parade field of green, broken up by paths and clumps of trees, stretched to the base of the old Cranston Street armory, a tremendous yellow-brick castle of gates and turrets.

  “His tail would taste like popcorn,” the boy said. He stroked the cat’s soft back.

  “Maybe that’s why he licks it sometimes,” said the old man.

  “I’m working,” Billy said.

  “We’re eating,” sassed the old man. “This ain’t the library.”

  “Can’t even chew gum at the library,” Bo said.

  “Where’s the horseradish?” the old man asked.

  “Puts hair on your belly,” Bo said, parroting what the old man had taught him to say whenever somebody mentioned horseradish.

  Organ music from the funeral home downstairs percolated up through the red-flecked black linoleum and vibrated into Billy’s bare feet.

  “Who’s dead down there?” the old man asked.

  Billy consulted an index card on the kitchen counter. “According to the schedule Mr. Metts sent up, this would be Mr. Crespie, of Eden Park. He was a foreman at the brewery.”

  “You knew him?”

  “I wrote the obituary.”

  The old man wheezed. He tapped a knife on his plate four times, sounding impatient. He said, “I want to go out and sit in the park.”

  “You know we can’t use the stairs during a funeral. It’s in the lease.”

  He moaned, “Are they gonna be long down there?”

  “How should I know?” Billy said. The cat slapped its tail back into the butter. Billy brushed the tail away and slid the butter dish out of range.

  “You wrote the obit,” the old man grumbled. “What kind of life did this guy have? Was he worth mourning for the full hour? Did he do anything worth remembering?”

  “He lived to ninety-two.”

  “Whoop-tee-damn-doo,” the old man said. He reached a trembling knife to the soft butter, scraped off a smear, and spread it on toast. “The lucky fool walked between the falling pianos for ninety-two years before something finally crushed him. Maybe he was Mr. Magoo.”

  “There’s cat hair on your toast,” Billy said.

  The old man took a huge, exaggerated bite. “Mmmmm,” he moaned. “Tasty!”

  Bo giggled. “I want some cat, too!”

  “Puts hair in your belly,” the old man said, mouth open, the toast circling inside a cage of tan teeth and blackened metal molars.

  “This guy Crespie—his son flew fighter jets for the Air Force,” Billy said. “Won some medals.”

  The old man swallowed with a little gag. He cleared his throat and then said, “Then I guess we’re lucky it ain’t the son’s funeral, ’cause we’d be stuck in here all day.” Some emotion that Billy could not identify had cut the old man’s voice ragged. He went on, “What the goddamn does it matter what the son did? Any idiot can be a father. Even monkeys hump by instinct.”

  “Pa,” Billy pleaded, weakly.

  “Why do you only write about dead people?” Bo asked.

  “Because he’s good at it,” the old man answered.

  Billy’s eyes widened at the compliment. When was the last time he had heard praise from the old man? “Because that’s my job,” Billy told his son. “I don’t do the investigating reporting I used to do. I’m an obituary writer. I write a lot of them.”

  “Did you write Mom’s?” Bo asked.

  Billy felt a wave of internal heat, and an invisible hand around his throat. “Not that one,” he said. He couldn’t look at the kid.

  “Why not?”

  After a beat of silence, the old man rescued Billy. “Meow!” he cried. Then he gasped. “Ohmigod! I think I did eat cat hair.” The boy laughed.

  Billy seized the distraction. “I need to read these documents for the case I’m working for Martin.”

  “Whatchu got there?” asked the old man.

  Billy counted the sheets of computer printout in his hand. “I got the five-page arrest record of the guy who shot Judge Harmony.” He thumbed quickly through the pages. “Martin is right about this guy—Adam Rackers wasn’t a regular street thug. He was a professional thief. Mostly B and E’s in unoccupied homes. Some shoplifting.”

  He flipped the page, then another.

  “Lots of shoplifting. But other than getting involved in a couple of bar fights—”

  “Which can happen to anyone,” the old man interrupted, with an evil smile.


  “—there’s no violence on his record. Not a single weapons charge, either.”

  Downstairs at the funeral, the gathering prayed aloud. Their muffled words bled through the floor in a mumble.

  “Just because he was never arrested for shootin’ somebody doesn’t mean he never did it before,” the old man said.

  “Meow,” said Bo. The cat answered him with a little whine. The boy laughed and crunched an open mouthful of cereal at Ziggs.

  “Still feels odd that this guy would suddenly shoot a judge,” Billy said. “Martin thinks he got paid to do it, and I’m beginning to think the same thing.”

  “Maybe it was personal,” the old man said. Billy couldn’t be sure if his father was trying to help, or just being argumentative. “Did this guy know the judge?”

  “Never had a case in front of him.”

  “Did he meet him in a bar? Did he sit behind him one day at McCoy Stadium? Did they have words over somebody’s eyes on somebody else’s wife? Did the judge threaten to have him arrested?”

  The cat popped up from the table, stretched, then jumped to the floor. It walked away like a runway model, crossing its feet in front of each other over an invisible line down the middle of the hall.

  This was an emergency for Bo. The kid slid off his seat, grabbed Einstein, and ran after the cat, calling urgently over his shoulder, “Ziggs wants to play!”

  “Keep an eye on him,” Billy ordered.

  “Don’t let him slip on that buttered tail,” the old man added. To Billy, he said, “Maybe the judge was blackmailing this guy. Maybe they were in some crime ring together, and so he killed him.”

  Billy squinted at his father a moment, and tried to remember the path of their argument. How the hell had they gotten here? “The judge was rich,” Billy said. “He made a fortune on the law books he wrote. If I had his money, I’d throw my money away.”

  “Or gamble it away,” the old man cracked.

  “And Gil Harmony was too honest …” Billy flipped papers in the folder. “Look at all these commentaries the judge wrote for the paper. Here’s one on juvenile justice. And this, on gang prevention. Here’s something on constitutional law … religion in politics. And he wrote about more than just the law. Judge Harmony rode the train twice a week for the past five years, to teach in Manhattan, and this essay is his plan to improve Amtrak service down the eastern seaboard. The guy was an expert on everything.” Billy stared at the paper, at the byline that read Gilbert D. Harmony. He said aloud to himself, “Martin was right, Judge Harmony was Mr. Perfect. He wasn’t part of a crime ring.” Billy stopped, lightly slapped his own cheek, as if to wake himself. “Why am I even arguing something so ridiculous with you?”

  The old man picked at the dangle of chicken skin under his chin. He looked away. “When I croak pretty soon,” he asked, “will you write my obituary?”

  “Pop—”

  “Because that rag you work for don’t have anybody else who can write a good one.” He looked at Billy. “You’ll be honest, won’t you?” The old man’s stare sent a cold tickle down Billy’s back, like a drip of ice water. “Because back in my youth, I walked around with lies stuffed in my pockets. Your mother could have told you that … Probably did.” He looked at Billy for confirmation.

  Billy did not flinch, did not even blink. He had accepted his father into his home after the old man’s stroke, but Billy would not discuss his dead mother with the man who had abandoned her in Billy’s youth.

  The old man sounded guarded. “So when I go, I want to be carried out on the truth. The lies, the affairs, everything—put it all in there. Okay?”

  He seemed to get older before Billy’s eyes. Not exactly like he was aging; more like he was beginning to decompose. Billy wasn’t sure if he could speak. “I’ll write it,” he heard himself say.

  Organ music rumbled through the floor again. The song was supposed to be a hymn, but played painfully slow, it sounded like a death march. The old man dipped his head and flashed a canine tooth at Billy, like a little dagger in the devil’s grin. “Long ago, people used to think that I was Mr. Perfect, too, just like your judge,” he said. “They all died disappointed.”

  eight

  Martin probably should have been listening to the testimony being offered to the court by the mother of the teenager who had died at the hands of Martin’s client. But there was nothing else Martin could do for his client, who sat beside him, already convicted of motor vehicle homicide.

  This was the gut-wrenching part of the sentencing hearing, the victim-impact statements, and Martin allowed himself to be distracted. He thought about June Harmony and her son, Brock. They would be on their way to Martin’s office by now, so that the three of them could walk together to the opening of Gil Harmony’s will. Martin had not seen Brock since the crash—actually, he realized, had not seen him since he was a teen. And though he knew Brock was now in his twenties, he dreaded having to look a fatherless little boy in the eye.

  Thoughts of Brock reminded Martin of his client, who, at twenty-seven, was just a few years older. He was an incurious roofer named Stokely, who seemed incapable of a single empathetic thought. Martin looked at him. Stokely was a pudgy son of a bitch, deeply tanned, with a buzzed haircut and a sour expression that made him seem eternally put out. He had worn blue jeans to his own sentencing, which had nearly given Martin a heart attack. Was he trying to get the maximum?

  They sat together at the defense table, a varnished maple rectangle as smooth as a mirror. At trial, the table had been cluttered with documents, transcripts, and notes. For sentencing, it was bare.

  At a podium a few feet away, the mother of the young man Stokely had run down addressed the court. She spoke slowly, in a low voice, about her boy. In the sausage-making process of criminal justice, the court always gave victims or their families the chance to testify about how the crime had wrecked their lives, before the judge pronounced the sentence.

  “ … and you never once during the trial showed remorse, Mr. Stokely, for what you’ve taken from my family,” she said.

  Stokely stared straight ahead, looking bored. Martin looked away.

  She’s right, Martin thought. In private conferences, Stokely had seemed contemptuous toward his seventeen-year-old victim, whom he vaguely seemed to blame for ruining Stokely’s life by dying under the impact of an SUV doing forty miles per hour on a sidewalk.

  “ … you have stolen sixty or seventy years of a young man’s life and forever changed the course of our family history … .”

  Martin dropped his hands in his lap and looked at the witness. She was trim, a little older than most moms of a teenager, maybe fifty-five. Her hair was cut in a perfect shoulder-length bob. She had worn no makeup to court and her eyes looked lifeless. Maybe she didn’t want to take the chance she’d cry and smear mascara over herself, or maybe she just felt lifeless. She stood stiffly at the podium and spoke from notes handwritten on sheets of paper that were ragged down one edge where they had been ripped from a spiral binder. She spoke directly at the side of Stokely’s head. He did not look at her.

  The mother’s grace awed Martin, and fed the disgust he held in his heart for his client. Martin had busted his ass for this guy, uncovering a crack in the chain of evidence with Stokely’s blood test the night of the accident. A cop had left the test sample unguarded for three hours in an unlocked cruiser. With a ferocious argument, Martin had the blood test thrown out of evidence. Prosecutors could not prove by science that Stokely’s blood had approximately the alcohol concentration of a Polynesian mai tai. Then Martin had negotiated a fair plea bargain with the prosecution. Some reasonable jail time for Stokely to think things over, but not so much that he couldn’t salvage the best part of his own life.

  The deal was just.

  His client had rejected it.

  “Don’t want justice,” Stokely had said. He had wanted Martin to get him off at trial.

  “ … my son was an industrious young man who was studying educat
ion. Being a teacher, that was Clarke’s high hope, not to conquer Wall Street or Mount Everest, just to teach children how to read … .”

  The prosecutor didn’t need a blood test to prove Stokely had been drinking all night. Not with the testimonies of bartenders and other patrons, and with Stokely’s own credit card receipt for seventy-five dollars in liquor, signed by Stokely in handwriting that looked like a kindergarten doodle.

  At trial, the prosecutor had pounded the facts. Martin could only pound the table. The Constitution provides that no matter how cold your heart and how terrible your crime, you deserve a competent and robust defense. If Martin could have won the case on some arcane technicality, he would have gone for the prosecutor’s throat. He gave Stokely a tenacious fight, and lost.

  Sometimes, despite the best efforts of everyone involved, justice prevails.

  He thought about Gil Harmony, and of justice. Martin hoped that justice didn’t consider that case closed, as the police did.

  Stokely sighed in boredom and blatantly checked his wristwatch. Martin blanched. What the fuck are you doing? Was he really that obtuse? Or was this a message to the court and to the grieving mother that he just didn’t care?

  The mother paused a moment, then raised her voice. “Am I bothering you, Mr. Stokely?” she asked. She drummed her fingernails on the podium. “You know what bothers me? You ran down my son from behind, so you never saw what he looked like. Well, I want you to see him.”

  She left her notes on the podium and grabbed a shoe box from the front row of the gallery. With her lips sealed with determination, she marched toward the defense table. Martin glanced to the judge, a rookie on the bench, who seemed startled by this breach of courtroom procedure. The judge hesitated, silent, jaw open. He reached for the gavel but seemed unsure if he should pound it.

  Stokely ignored the mother until she was beside him. He shot her an uninterested glance. “Not looking at your pictures, lady,” he mumbled.

  Calmly she said, “Meet my son, Clarke.”

  She flipped the lid off the shoe box and cast the contents over the table. Pale ash, as fine as talcum powder, flowed across the desk in a wave and poured into the laps of the two men. Particles swirled into the air, and seemed to come together as a ghost that brushed almost imperceptibly on bare skin.