Moonchasers & Other Stories

by Ed Gorman

  Love,

  Chris Tomlin.

  Not even good old Ms. Sandstrom could penetrate my stupor. I know she charged into my office a few times and made some nasty threats—something about my not returning the call of one of our most important customers—but I honestly couldn't tell you who she wanted me to call or what she wanted me to say.

  About all I can remember is that it got very dark and cold suddenly. The lights blinked on and off a few times. We were having a terrible rainstorm. Somebody came in soaked and said that the storm sewers were backing up and that downtown was a mess.

  Not that I paid this information any particular heed.

  I was wondering if she'd call him Thursday night. I took it as a foregone conclusion that she would have lunch with him on Friday. But how about Thursday night?

  Would she visit him in his hotel room?

  And come to think of it, why had she chosen me over Chris Tomlin? I mean, while I may not be a nerd, I'm not exactly a movie star, either. And with Chris Tomlin, there wouldn't have been any penny-pinching for a down payment on a house, either.

  With his daddy's millions in pharmaceuticals, good ole Chris would have bought her a manse as a wedding present.

  The workday ended. The usual number of people peeked into my office to say the usual number of good nights. The usual cleaning crew, high school kids in gray uniforms, appeared to start hauling out trash and run roaring vacuum cleaners. And I went through my usual process of staying at my desk until it was time to pick up Laura.

  I was just about to walk out the front door when I noticed in the gloom that Ms. Sandstrom's light was still on.

  She had good ears. Even above the vacuum cleaner roaring its way down the hall to her left, she heard me leaving and looked up.

  She waved me into her office.

  When I reached her desk, she handed me a slip of paper with some typing on it.

  "How does that read to you, Donaldson?"

  "Uh, what is it?"

  "A Help Wanted ad I may be running tomorrow."

  That was another thing Miss Hutchison, my fourth grade teacher, had been good at—indirect torture.

  Ms. Sandstrom wanted me to read the ad she'd be running for my replacement.

  I scanned it and handed it back.

  "Nice."

  "Is that all you have to say? Nice?"

  "I guess so."

  "You realize that this means I'm going to fire you?"

  "That's what I took it to mean."

  "What the hell's wrong with you, Donaldson? Usually you'd be groveling and sniveling by now."

  "I've got some—personal problems."

  A smirk. "That's what you get for reading your wife's mail."

  Then a scowl. "When you come in tomorrow morning, you come straight to my office, you understand?"

  I nodded. "All right."

  "And be prepared to do some groveling and sniveling. You're going to need it."

  Why don't I just make a list of the things I found wrong with my Toyota after I slammed the door and belted myself in.

  A) The motor wouldn't turn over. Remember what I said about moisture and the fuel pump?

  B) The roof had sprung a new leak. This was different from the old leak, which dribbled rain down onto the passenger seat. The new one dribbled rain down onto the driver's seat.

  C) The turn signal arm had come loose again and was hanging down from naked wires like a half-amputated limb. Apparently after finding the letter this morning, I was in so much of a fog I hadn't noticed that it was broken again.

  I can't tell you how dark and cold and lonely I felt just then. Bereft of wife. Bereft of automobile. Bereft of—dare I say it?— self-esteem and self-respect. And, on top of it, I was a disciple of defeatism. Just ask my co-worker Dick Weybright.

  The goddamned car finally started and I drove off to pick up my goddamned wife.

  The city was a mess.

  Lashing winds and lashing rains—both of which were still lashing merrily along—had uprooted trees in the park, smashed out store windows here and there, and had apparently caused a power outage that shut down all the automatic traffic signals.

  I wanted to be home and I wanted to be dry and I wanted to be in my jammies. But most of all I wanted to be loved by the one woman I had ever really and truly loved.

  If only I hadn't opened her bureau drawer to hide her pearls. . . .

  She was standing behind the glass door in the entrance to the art deco building where she works as a market researcher for a mutual fund company. When I saw her, I felt all sorts of things at once—love, anger, shame, terror—and all I wanted to do was park the car and run up to her and take her in my arms and give her the tenderest kiss I was capable of.

  But then I remembered the letter and. . . .

  Well, I'm sure I don't have to tell you about jealousy. There's nothing worse to carry around in your stony little heart. All that rage and self-righteousness and self-pity. It begins to smother you and. . . .

  By the time Laura climbed into the car, it was smothering me. She smelled of rain and perfume and her sweet tender body.

  "Hi," she said. "I was worried about you."

  "Yeah. I'll bet."

  Then, closing the door, she gave me a long, long look. "Are you all right?"

  "Fine."

  "Then why did you say, 'Yeah. I'll bet?"

  "Just being funny."

  She gave me another stare. I tried to look regular and normal. You know, not on the verge of whipping the letter out and shoving it in her face.

  "Oh, God," she said, "you're not starting your period already are you?"

  The period thing is one of our little jokes. A few months after we got married, she came home cranky one day and I laid the blame for her mood on her period. She said I was being sexist. I said I was only making an observation. I wrote down the date. For the next four months, on or around the same time each month, she came home crabby. I pointed this out to her. She said, "All right. But men have periods, too."

  "They do?"

  "You're damned right they do." And so now, whenever I seem inexplicably grouchy, she asks me if my period is starting.

  "Maybe so," I said, swinging from outrage to a strange kind of whipped exhaustion.

  "Boy, this is really leaking," Laura said.

  I just drove. There was a burly traffic cop out in the middle of a busy intersection directing traffic with two flashlights in the rain and gloom.

  "Did you hear me, Rich? I said this is really leaking."

  "I know it's really leaking."

  "What's up with you, anyway? What're you so mad about? Did Sandstrom give you a hard time today?"

  "No—other than telling me that she may fire me."

  "You're kidding."

  "No."

  "But why?"

  Because while I was going through your bureau, I found a letter from your ex-lover and I know all about the tryst you're planning to set up.

  That's what I wanted to say.

  What I said was: "I guess I wasn't paying proper attention during another one of her goddamned sales meetings."

  "But, Rich, if you get fired—"

  She didn't have to finish her sentence. If I got fired, we'd never get the house we'd been saving for.

  "She told me that when I came in tomorrow morning, I should be prepared to grovel and snivel. And she wasn't kidding."

  "She actually said that?"

  "She actually said that."

  "What a bitch."

  "Boss's daughter. You know how this city is. The last frontier for hard-core nepotism."

  We drove on several more blocks, stopping every quarter block or so to pull out around somebody whose car had stalled in the dirty water backing up from the sewers.

  "So is that why you're so down?"

  "Yeah," I said. "Isn't that reason enough?"

  "Usually, about Sandstrom, I mean, you get mad. You don't get depressed."

  "Well, Sandstrom chews me out but sh
e doesn't usually threaten to fire me."

  "That's true. But—"

  "But what?"

  "It just seems that there's—something else." Then, "Where're you going?"

  My mind had been on the letter tucked inside my blazer. In the meantime, the Toyota had been guiding itself into the most violent neighborhood in the city. Not even the cops wanted to come here. "God, can you turn around?" Laura said. "I'd sure hate to get stuck here."

  "We'll be all right. I'llhang a left at the next corner and then we'll drive back to Marymount Avenue."

  "I wondered where you were going. I should have said something." She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

  That boil of feelings, of profound tenderness and profound rage, churned up inside of me again.

  "Things'll work out with Sandstrom," she said, and then smiled. "Maybe she's just starling her period."

  And I couldn't help it. The rage was gone, replaced by pure and total love. This was my friend, my bride, my lover. There had to be a reasonable and innocent explanation for the letter. There had to.

  I started hanging the left and that's when it happened. The fuel pump. Rain.

  The Toyota stopped dead.

  "Oh, no," she said, glancing out the windshield at the forbidding blocks of falling-down houses and dark, condemned buildings.

  Beyond the wind, beyond the rain, you could hear sirens. There were always sirens in neighborhoods like these.

  "Maybe Ican fix it," I said.

  "But, honey, you don't know anything about cars."

  "Well, I watched him make that adjustment last time."

  "I don't know," she said skeptically. "Besides, you'll just get wet."

  "I'll be fine."

  I knew why I was doing this, of course. In addition to being rich, powerful and handsome, Chris Tomlin was also one of those men who could fix practically anything. I remembered her telling me how he'd fixed a refrigerator at an old cabin they'd once stayed in.

  I opened the door. A wave of rain washed over me. But I was determined to act like the kind of guy who could walk through a meteor storm and laugh it off. Maybe that's why Laura was considering a rendezvous with Chris. Maybe she was sick of my whining. A macho man, I'm not.

  "Just be careful," she said.

  "Be right back."

  I eased out of the car and then realized I hadn't used the hood latch inside. I leaned in and popped the latch and gave Laura a quick smile.

  And then I went back outside into the storm.

  I was soaked completely in less than a minute, my shoes soggy, my clothes drenched and cold and clinging. Even my raincoat.

  But I figured this would help my image as a take-charge sort of guy. I even gave Laura a little half-salute before I raised the hood. She smiled at me. God, I wanted to forget all about the letter and be happily in love again.

  Any vague hopes I'd had of starting the car were soon forgotten as I gaped at the motor and realized that I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at.

  The mechanic in the shop had made it look very simple. You raised the hood, you leaned in and snatched off the oil filter and then did a couple of quick things to it and put it back. And voila, your car was running again.

  I got the hood open all right, and I leaned in just fine, and I even took the oil filter off with no problem.

  But when it came to doing a couple of quick things to it, my brain was as dead as the motor. That was the part I hadn't picked up from the mechanic. Those couple of quick things.

  I started shaking the oil filter. Don't ask me why. I had it under the protection of the hood to keep it dry and shook it left and shook it right and shook it high and shook it low. I figured that maybe some kind of invisible cosmic forces would come into play here and the engine would start as soon as I gave the ignition key a little turn.

  I closed the hood and ran back through the slashing rain, opened the door and crawled inside.

  "God, it's incredible out there."

  Only then did I get a real good look at Laura and only then did I see that she looked sick, like the time we both picked up a slight case of ptomaine poisoning at her friend Susan's wedding.

  Except now she looked a lot sicker.

  And then I saw the guy.

  In the backseat.

  "Who the hell are you?"

  But he had questions of his own. "Your wife won't tell me if you've got an ATM card."

  So it had finally happened. Our little city turned violent about fifteen years ago, during which time most honest working folks had to take their turns getting mugged, sort of like a rite of passage. But as time wore on, the muggers weren't satisfied with simply robbing their victims. Now they beat them up. And sometimes, for no reason at all, they killed them.

  This guy was white, chunky, with a ragged scar on his left cheek, stupid dark eyes, a dark turtleneck sweater and a large and formidable gun. He smelled of sweat, cigarette smoke, beer and a high sweet unclean tang.

  "How much can you get with your card?"

  "Couple hundred."

  "Yeah. Right."

  "Couple hundred. I mean, we're not exactly rich people. Look at this car."

  He turned to Laura. "How much can he get, babe?"

  "He told you. A couple of hundred." She sounded surprisingly calm.

  "One more time." He had turned back to me. "How much can you get with that card of yours?"

  "I told you," I said.

  You know how movie thugs are always slugging people with gun butts? Well, let me tell you something. It hurts. He hit me hard enough to draw blood, hard enough to fill my sight with darkness and blinking stars, like a planetarium ceiling, and hard enough to lay my forehead against the steering wheel.

  Laura didn't scream.

  She just leaned over and touched my head with her long, gentle fingers. And you know what? Even then, even suffering from what might be a concussion, I had this image of Laura's fingers touching Chris Tomlin's head this way. Ain't jealousy grand?

  "Now," said the voice in the backseat, "let's talk."

  Neither of us paid him much attention for a minute or so. Laura helped me sit back in the seat. She took her handkerchief and daubed it against the back of my head.

  "You didn't have to hit him."

  "Now maybe he'll tell me the truth."

  "Four or five hundred," she said. "That's how much we can get. And don't hit him again. Don't lay a finger on him."

  "The mama lion fights for her little cub. That's nice." He leaned forward and put the end of the gun directly against my ear. "You're gonna have to go back out in that nasty ole rain. There's an ATM machine down at the west end of this block and around the corner. You go down there and get me five hundred dollars and then you haul your ass right back. I'll be waiting right here with your exceedingly good-looking wife. And with my gun."

  "Where did you ever learn a word like exceedingly?" I said.

  "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"

  "I was just curious."

  "If it's any of your goddamned business, my cellmate had one of them improve your vocabulary books."

  I glanced at Laura. She still looked scared but she also looked a little bit angry. For us, five hundred dollars was a lot of money.

  And now a robber who used the word "exceedingly" was going to take every last dime of it.

  "Go get it," he said.

  I reached over to touch Laura's hand as reassuringly as possible, and that was when I noticed it.

  The white number ten envelope.

  The one Chris had sent her.

  I stared at it a long moment and then raised my eyes to meet hers.

  "I was going to tell you about it."

  I shook my head. "I shouldn't have looked in your drawer."

  "No, you shouldn't have. But I still owe you an explanation."

  "What the hell are you two talking about?"

  "Nothing that's exceedingly interesting," I said, and opened the door, and dangled a leg out and then had the
rest of my body follow the leg.

  "You got five minutes, you understand?" the man said.

  I nodded and glanced at Laura. "I love you."

  "I'm sorry about the letter."

  "You know the funny thing? I was hiding your present, that's how I found it. I was going to tuck it in your underwear drawer and have you find them. You know, the pearls."

  "You got me the pearl necklace?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Oh, honey, that's so sweet."

  "Go get the goddamned money," the man said, "and get it fast."

  "I'll be right back," I said to Laura and blew her a little kiss.

  If I hadn't been sodden before, I certainly was now.

  There were two brick buildings facing each other across a narrow alley. Most people drove up to this particular ATM machine because it was housed in a deep indentation that faced the alley. It could also accommodate foot traffic.

  What it didn't do was give you much protection from the storm. By now, I was sneezing and feeling a scratchiness in my throat. Bad sinuses. My whole family.

  I walked up to the oasis of light and technology in this ancient and wild neighborhood, took out my wallet and inserted my ATM card.

  It was all very casual, especially considering the fact that Laura was being held hostage.

  The card would go in. The money would come out. The thief would get his loot. Laura and I would dash to the nearest phone and call the police.

  Except I couldn't remember my secret pin number.

  If I had to estimate how many times I'd used this card, I'd put it at probably a thousand or so.

  So how, after all those times, could I now forget the pin number?

  Panic. That's what was wrong. I was so scared that Laura would be hurt that I couldn't think clearly.

  Deep breaths. There.

  Now. Think. Clearly.

  Just relax and your pin number will come back to you. No problem.

  That was when I noticed the slight black man in the rain parka standing just to the left of me. In the rain. With a gun in his hand. "You wanna die?"

  "Oh, shit. You've got to be kidding. You're a goddamned thief?"

  "Yes, and I ain't ashamed of it, either, man."

  I thought of explaining it to him, explaining that another thief already had first dibs on the proceeds of my bank account—that is, if I could ever remember the pin number but he didn't seem to be the understanding type at all. In fact, he looked even more desperate and crazy than the man who was holding Laura.