Moonchasers & Other Stories

by Ed Gorman

  "Can we go, Dad?" my son, Rob, said. "It's so boring here."

  Boring? I'd once tried to explain to his mother how good I felt when I was at the track. I was not the miserable, frightened, self-effacing owner of Advent Tax Systems (some system—me and my low-power Radio Shack computer and software). No . . . when I was at the track I felt strong and purposeful and optimistic, and frightened of nothing at all. I was pure potential—potential for winning the easy cash that was the mark of men who were successful with women, and with their competitors, and with their own swaggering dreams.

  "Please, Dad. It's really boring here. Honest."

  But all I could see, all I could think about, was Wendy. I hadn't seen her since my one visit to jail. Then I noticed that she, too, had a child with her, a very proper-looking little blond girl whose head was cocked at the odd and fetching angle so favored by her mother.

  We saw each other a dozen more times before we spoke.

  Then: "I knew I'd see you again someday."

  Wan smile. "All those years I was in prison, I wasn't so sure." Her daughter came up to her then and Wendy said: "This is Margaret."

  "Hello, Margaret. Glad to meet you. This is my son, Rob." With the great indifference only children can summon, they nodded hellos.

  "We just moved back to the city," Wendy explained. "I thought I'd show Margaret where I used to come with my father." She mentioned her father so casually, one would never have guessed that she'd murdered the man.

  Ten more times we saw each other, children in tow, before our affair began.

  April 6 of that year was the first time we ever made love, this in a motel where the sunset was the color of blood in the window, and a woman two rooms away wept inconsolably. I had the brief fantasy that it was my wife in that room.

  "Do you know how long I've loved you?" she said.

  "Oh, God, you don't know how good it is to hear that."

  "Since I was eight years old."

  "For me, since I was nine."

  "This would destroy my husband if he ever found out."

  "The same with my wife."

  "But I have to be honest."

  "I want you to be honest."

  "I don't care what it does to him. I just want to be with you."

  In December of that year, my wife, Donna, discovered a lump in her right breast. Two weeks later she received a double masectomy and began chemotherapy.

  She lived nine years, and my affair with Wendy extended over the entire time. Early on, both our spouses knew about our relationship. Her husband, an older and primmer man than I might have expected, stopped by my office one day in his new BMW and threatened to destroy my business. He claimed to have great influence in the financial community.

  My wife threatened to leave me but she was too weak. She had one of those cancers that did not kill her but that never left her alone, either. She was weak most of the time, staying for days in the bedroom that had become hers, as the guest room had become mine. Whenever she became particularly angry about Wendy, Rob would fling himself at me, screaming how much he hated me, pounding me with fists that became more powerful with each passing year. He hated me for many of the same reasons I'd hated my own father, my ineluctable passion for the track, and the way there was never any security in our lives, the family bank account wholly subject to the whims of the horses that ran that day.

  Wendy's daughter likewise blamed her mother for the alcoholism that had stricken the husband. There was constant talk of divorce but their finances were such that neither of them could quite afford it. Margaret constantly called Wendy a whore, and only lately did Wendy realize that Margaret sincerely meant it.

  Two things happened the next year. My wife was finally dragged off into the darkness, and Wendy's husband crashed his car into a retaining wall and was killed.

  Even on the days of the respective funerals, we went to the track.

  "He never understood."

  "Neither did she," I said.

  "I mean why I come here."

  "I know."

  "I mean how it makes me feel alive."

  "I know."

  "I mean how nothing else matters."

  "I know."

  "I should've been nicer to him, I suppose."

  "I suppose. But we can't make a life out of blaming ourselves. What's happened, happened. We have to go on from here."

  "Do you think Rob hates you as much as Margaret hates me?"

  "More, probably," I said. "The way he looks at me sometimes, I think he'll probably kill me someday."

  But it wasn't me who was to die.

  All during Wendy's funeral, I kept thinking of those words. Margaret had murdered her mother just as Wendy had killed her father. The press made a lot of this.

  All the grief I should have visited upon my dead wife I visited upon my dead lover. I went through months of alcoholic stupor. Clients fell away; rent forced me to move from our nice suburban home to a small apartment in a section of the city that always seemed to be on fire. I didn't have to worry about Rob anymore. He got enough loans for college and wanted nothing to do with me.

  Years and more years, the track the only constant in my life. Many times I tried to contact Rob through the alumni office of his school but it was no use. He'd left word not to give his current address to his father.

  There was the hospital and, several times, the detox clinic. There was the church in which I asked for forgiveness, and the born-again rally at which I proclaimed my happiness in the Lord.

  And then there was the shelter. Five years I lived there, keeping the place painted and clean for the other residents. The nuns seemed to like me.

  My teeth went entirely, and I had to have dentures. The arthritis in my foot got so bad that I could not wear shoes for days at a time. And my eyesight, beyond even the magic of glasses, got so bad that when I watched the horse races on TV, I couldn't tell which horse was which.

  Then one night I got sick and threw up blood and in the morning one of the sisters took me to the hospital where they kept me overnight. In the morning the doctor came in and told me that I had stomach cancer. He gave me five months to live.

  There were days when I was happy about my death sentence. Looking back, my life seemed so long and sad, I was glad to have it over with. Then there were days when I sobbed about my death sentence, and hated the God the nuns told me to pray to. I wanted to live to go back to the track again and have a sweet, beautiful winner.

  Four months after the doctor's diagnosis, the nuns put me in bed and I knew I'd never walk on my own again. I thought of Donna, and her death, and how I'd made it all the worse with the track and Wendy.

  The weaker I got, the more I thought about Rob. I talked about him to the nuns. And then one day he was there.

  He wasn't alone, either. With him was a very pretty dark-haired woman and a seven-year-old boy who got the best features of both his mother and father.

  "Dad, this is Mae and Stephen."

  "Hello, Mae and Stephen. I've very glad to meet you. I wish I was better company."

  "Don't worry about that," Mae said. "We're just happy to meet you."

  "I need to go to the bathroom," Stephen said.

  "Why don't I take him, and give you a few minutes alone with your dad?" Mae said.

  And so, after all these years, we were alone and he said, "I still can't forgive you, Dad."

  "I don't blame you."

  "I want to. But somehow I can't."

  I took his hand. "I'm just glad you turned out so well, son. Like your mother and not your father."

  "I loved her very much."

  "I know you did."

  "And you treated her very, very badly."

  All his anger. All these years.

  "That's a beautiful wife and son you've got."

  "They're my whole life, everything that matters to me."

  I started crying; I couldn't help it. Here at the end I was glad to know he'd done well for himself and his family.

&n
bsp; "I love you, Rob."

  "I love you, too, Dad."

  And then he leaned down and kissed me on the cheek and I started crying harder and embarrassed both of us.

  Mae and Stephen came back.

  "My turn," Rob said. He patted me on the shoulder. "I'll be back soon."

  I think he wanted to cry but wanted to go somewhere alone to do it.

  "So," Mae said, "are you comfortable?"

  "Oh, very."

  "This seems like a nice place."

  "It is."

  "And the nuns seem very nice, too."

  "Very nice." I smiled. "I'm just so glad I got to see you two."

  "Same here. I've wanted to meet you for years."

  "Well," I said, smiling. "I'm glad the time finally came."

  Stephen, proper in his white shirt and blue trousers and neatly combed dark hair, said, "I just wish you could go to the track with us sometime, Grandpa."

  She didn't have to say anything. I saw it all in the quick certain pain that appeared in her lovely gray eyes.

  "The race track, you mean?" I said.

  "Uh-huh. Dad takes me all the time, doesn't he, Mom?"

  "Oh, yes," she said, her voice toneless. "All the time."

  She started to say more but then the door opened up and Rob came in and there was no time to talk.

  There was no time at all.

  MOTHER DARKNESS

  The man surprised her. He was black.

  Alison had been watching the small filthy house for six mornings now and this was the first time she'd seen him. She hadn't been able to catch him at seven-thirty or even six-thirty. She'd had to try six o'clock. She brought her camera up and began snapping.

  She took four pictures of him just to be sure.

  Then she put the car in gear and went to get breakfast.

  An hour and a half later, in the restaurant where social workers often met, Peter said, "Oh, he's balling her all right."

  "God," Alison Cage said. "Can't we talk about something else? Please."

  "I know it upsets you. It upsets me. That's why I'm telling you about it."

  "Can't you tell somebody else?"

  "I've tried and nobody'll listen. Here's a forty-three-year-old man and he's screwing his seven-year-old daughter and nobody'll listen. Jesus."

  Peter Forbes loved dramatic moments and incest was about as dramatic as you could get. Peter was a hold-over hippie. He wore defiantly wrinkled khaki shirts and defiantly torn Lee jeans. He wore his brown hair in a ponytail. In his cubicle back at Social Services was a faded poster of Robert Kennedy. He still smoked a lot of dope. After six glasses of cheap wine at an office party, he'd once told Alison that he thought she was beautiful. He was forty-one years old and something of a joke and Alison both liked and disliked him.

  "Talk to Coughlin," Alison said.

  "I've talked to Coughlin."

  "Then talk to Friedman."

  "I've talked to Friedman, too."

  "And what did they say?"

  Peter sneered. "He reminded me about the Skeritt case."

  "Oh."

  "Said I got everybody in the department all bent out of shape about Richard Skeritt and then I couldn't prove anything about him and his little adopted son."

  "Maybe Skeritt wasn't molesting him."

  "Yeah. Right."

  Alison sighed and looked out the winter window. A veil of steam covered most of the glass. Beyond it she could see the parking lot filled with men and women scraping their windows and giving each other pushes. A minor ice storm was in progress. It was seven thirty-five and people were hurrying to work. Everybody looked bundled up, like children trundling to school.

  Inside the restaurant the air smelled of cooking grease and cigarettes. Cold wind gusted through the front door when somebody opened it, and people stamped snow from their feet as soon as they reached the tile floor. Because this was several blocks north of the black area, the jukebox ran to Hank Williams Jr. and The Judds. Alison despised country western music.

  "So how's it going with you?" Peter said, daubs of egg yolk on his graying bandito mustache.

  "Oh. You know." Blond Alison shrugged. "Still trying to find a better apartment for less money. Still trying to lose five pounds. Still trying to convince myself that there's really a God."

  "Sounds like you need a Valium."

  The remark was so—Peter. Alison smiled. "You think Valium would do it, huh?"

  "It picks me up when I get down where you are."

  "When you get to be thirty-six and you're alone the way I am, Peter, I think you need more than Valium."

  "I'm alone."

  "But you're alone in your way. I'm alone in my way."

  "What's the difference?"

  Suddenly she was tired of him and tired of herself, too. "Oh, I don't know. No difference, I suppose. I was being silly I guess."

  "You look tired."

  "Haven't been sleeping well."

  "That doctor from the medical examiner's office been keeping you out late?"

  "Doctor?"

  "Oh, come on," Peter said. Sometimes he got possessive in a strange way. Testy. "I know you've been seeing him."

  "Doctor Connery, you mean?"

  Peter smiled, the egg yolk still on his mustache. "The one with the blue blue eyes, yes."

  "It was strictly business. He just wanted to find out about those infants."

  "The ones who smothered last year?"

  "Yes."

  "What's the big deal? Crib death happens all the time."

  "Yes, but it still needs to be studied."

  Peter smiled his superior smile. "I suppose but—"

  "Crib death means that the pathologist couldn't find anything. No reason that the infant should have stopped breathing—no malfunction or anything, I mean. They just die mysteriously. Doctors want to know why."

  "So what did your new boyfriend have to say about these deaths? I mean, what's his theory?"

  "I'm not going to let you sneak that in there," she said, laughing despite herself. "He's not my boyfriend."

  "All right. Then why would he be interested in two deaths that happened a year ago?"

  She shrugged and sipped the last of her coffee. "He's exchanging information with other medical data banks. Seeing if they can't find a trend in these deaths."

  "Sounds like an excuse to me."

  "An excuse for what?" Alison said.

  "To take beautiful blondes out to dinner and have them fall under his sway." He bared yellow teeth a dentist could work on for hours. He made claws of his hands. "Dracula; Dracula. That's who Connery really is."

  Alison got pregnant her junior year of college. She got an abortion of course but only after spending a month in the elegant home of her rich parents, "moping" as her father characterized that particular period of time. She did not go back to finish school. She went to California. This was in the late seventies just as discos were dying and AIDS was rising. She spent two celibate years working as a secretary in a record company. James Taylor, who'd stopped in to see a friend of his, asked Alison to go have coffee. She was quite silly during their half hour together, juvenile and giggly, and even years later her face would burn when she thought of how foolish she'd been that day. When she returned home, she lived with her parents, a fact that seemed to embarrass all her high school friends. They were busy and noisy with growing families of their own and here was beautiful quiet Alison inexplicably alone and, worse, celebrating her thirty-first birthday while still living at home.

  There was so much sorrow in the world and she could tell no one about it. That's why so many handsome and eligible men floated in and out of her life. Because they didn't understand. They weren't worth knowing, let alone giving herself to in any respect.

  She worked for a year and a half in an art gallery. It was what passed for sophisticated in a Midwestern city of this size. Very rich but dull people crowded it constantly, and men both with and without wedding rings pressed her for an hour or two alo
ne.

  She would never have known about the income maintenance job if she hadn't been watching a local talk show one day. Here sat two earnest women about her own age, one white, one black, talking about how they acted as liaisons between poor people and the social services agency. Alison knew immediately that she would like a job like this. She'd spent her whole life so spoiled and pampered and useless. And the art gallery—minor traveling art shows and local ad agency artists puffing themselves up as artistes—was simply an extension of this life.

  These women, Alison could tell, knew well the sorrow of the world and the sorrow in her heart.

  She went down the next morning to the social services agency and applied. The black woman who took her application weighed at least three hundred and fifty pounds which she'd packed into lime green stretch pants and a flowered polyester blouse with white sweat rings under the arms. She smoked Kool filters at a rate Alison hated to see. Hadn't this woman heard of lung cancer?

  Four people interviewed Alison that day. The last was a prim but handsome white man in a shabby three-piece suit who had on the wall behind him a photo of himself and his wife and a small child who was in some obvious but undefined way retarded. Alison recognized two things about this man immediately: that here was a man who knew the same sorrow as she; and that here was a man painfully smitten with her already. It took him five and a half months but the man eventually found her a job at the agency.

  Not until her third week did she realize that maintenance workers were the lowest of the low in social work, looked down upon by bosses and clients alike. What you did was this: you went out to people—usually women—who received various kinds of assistance from various government agencies and you attempted to prove that they were liars and cheats and scoundrels. The more benefits you could deny the people who made up your caseload, the more your bosses liked you. The people in the state house and the people in Washington, D.C., wanted you to allow your people as little as possible. That was the one and only way to keep taxpayers happy. Of course, your clients had a different version of all this. They needed help. And if you wouldn't give them help, or you tried to take away help you were already giving them, they became vocal. Income maintenance workers were frequently threatened and sometimes punched, stabbed, and shot, men and women alike. The curious thing was that not many of them quit. The pay was slightly better than you got in a factory and the job didn't require a college degree and you could pretty much set your own hours if you wanted to. So, even given the occasional violence, it was still a pretty good job.