Moonchasers & Other Stories

by Ed Gorman

  I looked at Karen.

  She shrugged.

  They left, back into the gloom, voices receding and fading into the sounds of crickets and a barn owl and a distant roaring train.

  "You think they're up to something?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  We stood with our shoes getting soaked and looked at the green green grass in the headlights.

  "What do you think they're doing?" Karen asked.

  "Deciding what they want to tell us."

  "You're used to this kind of thing, aren't you?"

  "I guess."

  "It's sort of sad, isn't it?"

  "Yeah, it is."

  "Except for you getting the chance to punch out Larry Price after all these years."

  "Christ, you really think I'm that petty?"

  "I know you are. I know you are."

  Then we both turned to look back to where they were. There'd been a cry and Forester shouted, "You hit him again, Larry, and I'll break your goddamn jaw." They were arguing about something and it had turned vicious.

  I leaned back against the car. She leaned back against me. "You think we'll ever go to bed?"

  "I'd sure like to, Karen, but I can't."

  "Donna?"

  "Yeah. I'm really trying to learn how to be faithful."

  "That been a problem?"

  "It cost me a marriage."

  "Maybe I'll learn how someday, too."

  Then they were back. Somebody, presumably Forester, had torn Price's nice lacy shirt into shreds. Haskins looked miserable.

  Forester said, "I'm going to tell you what happened that night."

  I nodded.

  "I've got some beer in the backseat. Would either of you like one?"

  Karen said, "Yes, we would."

  So he went and got a six-pack of Michelob and we all had a beer and just before he started talking he and Karen shared another one of those peculiar glances and then he said, "The four of us—myself, Price, Haskins, and Michael Brandon—had done something we were very ashamed of."

  "Afraid of," Haskins said.

  "Afraid that if it came out, our lives would be ruined. Forever," Forester said.

  Price said, "Just say it, Forester." He glared at me.

  "We raped a girl, the four of us."

  "Brandon spent two months afterward seeing the girl, bringing her flowers, apologizing to her over and over again, telling her how sorry we were, that we'd been drunk and it wasn't like us to do that and—" Forester sighed, put his eyes to the ground. "In fact we had been drunk; in fact it wasn't like us to do such a thing—"

  Haskins said, "It really wasn't. It really wasn't."

  For a time there was just the barn owl and the crickets again, no talk, and then gently I said, "What happened to Brandon that night?"

  "We were out as we usually were, drinking beer, talking about it, afraid the girl would finally turn us in to the police, still trying to figure out why we'd ever done such a thing—"

  The hatred was gone from Price's eyes. For the first time the matinee idol looked as melancholy as his friends. "No matter what you think of me, Dwyer, I don't rape women. But that night—" He shrugged, looked away.

  "Brandon," I said. "You were going to tell me about Brandon."

  "We came up here, had a case of beer or something, and talked about it some more, and that night," Forester said, "that night Brandon just snapped. He couldn't handle how ashamed he was or how afraid he was of being turned in. Right in the middle of talking—"

  Haskins took over. "Right in the middle, he just got up and ran out to the Point." He indicated the cliff behind us. "And before we could stop him, he jumped."

  "Jesus," Price said, "I can't forget his screaming on the way down. I can't ever forget it."

  I looked at Karen. "So what she heard you three talking about outside the party that night wasn't that you'd killed Brandon but that you were afraid a serious investigation into his suicide might turn up the rape?"

  Forester said, "Exactly." He stared at Karen. "We didn't kill Michael, Karen. We loved him. He was our friend."

  But by then, completely without warning, she had started to cry and then she began literally sobbing, her entire body shaking with some grief I could neither understand nor assuage.

  I nodded to Forester to get back in his car and leave. They stood and watched us a moment and then they got into the Mercedes and went away, taking the burden of years and guilt with them.

  This time I drove. I went far out the river road, miles out, where you pick up the piney hills and the deer standing by the side of the road.

  From the glove compartment she took a pint of J&B, and I knew better than to try and stop her.

  I said, "You were the girl they raped, weren't you?"

  "Yes."

  "Why didn't you tell the police?"

  She smiled at me. "The police weren't exactly going to believe a girl from the Highlands about the sons of rich men."

  I sighed. She was right.

  "Then Michael started coming around to see me. I can't say I ever forgave him, but I started to feel sorry for him. His fear—" She shook her head, looked out the window. She said, almost to herself, "But I had to write those letters, get them there tonight, know for sure if they killed him." She paused. "You believe them?"

  "That they didn't kill him?"

  "Right."

  "Yes, I believe them."

  "So do I."

  Then she went back to staring out the window, her small face childlike there in silhouette against the moonsilver river. "Can I ask you a question, Dwyer?"

  "Sure."

  "You think we're ever going to get out of the Highlands?"

  "No," I said, and drove on faster in her fine new expensive car. "No, I don't."

  THE UGLY FILE

  The cold rain didn't improve the looks of the housing development, one of those sprawling valleys of pastel-colored tract houses that had sprung from the loins of greedy contractors right at the end of WWII, fresh as flowers during that exultant time but now dead and faded.

  I spent fifteen minutes trying to find the right address. Houses and streets formed a blinding maze of sameness.

  I got lucky by taking what I feared was a wrong turn. A few minutes later I pulled my new station wagon up to the curb, got out, tugged my hat and raincoat on snugly, and then started unloading.

  Usually, Merle, my assistant, is on most shoots. He unloads and sets up all the lighting, unloads and sets up all the photographic umbrellas, and unloads and sets up all the electric sensors that trip the strobe lights. But Merle went on this kind of shoot once before and he said never again, "not even if you fire my ass." He was too good an assistant to give up so now I did these particular jobs alone.

  My name is Roy Hubbard. I picked up my profession of photography in Nam, where I was on the staff of a captain whose greatest thrill was taking photos of bloody and dismembered bodies. He didn't care if the bodies belonged to us or them just as long as they had been somehow disfigured or dismembered.

  In an odd way, I suppose, being the captain's assistant prepared me for the client I was working for today, and had been working for, on and off, for the past two months. The best-paying client I've ever had, I should mention here. I don't want you to think that I take any special pleasure, or get any special kick, out of gigs like this. I don't. But when you've got a family to feed, and you live in a city with as many competing photography firms as this one has, you pretty much take what's offered you.

  The air smelled of wet dark earth turning from winter to spring. Another four or five weeks and you'd see cardinals and jays sitting on the blooming green branches of trees.

  The house was shabby even by the standards of the neighborhood, the brown grass littered with bright cheap forgotten plastic toys and empty Diet Pepsi cans and wild rain-sodden scraps of newspaper inserts. The small picture window to the right of the front door was taped lengthwise from some long-ago crack, and the white siding ran with rust fr
om the drain spouts. The front door was missing its top glass panel. Cardboard had been set in there.

  I knocked, ducking beneath the slight overhang of the roof to escape the rain.

  The woman who answered was probably no older than twenty-five but her eyes and the sag of her shoulders said that her age should not be measured by calendar years alone.

  "Mrs. Cunningham?"

  "Hi," she said, and her tiny white hands fluttered about like doves. "I didn't get to clean the place up very good."

  "That's fine."

  "And the two oldest kids have the flu so they're still in their pajamas and—"

  "Everything'll be fine, Mrs. Cunningham." When you're a photographer who deals a lot with mothers and children, you have to learn a certain calm, doctorly manner.

  She opened the door and I went inside.

  The living room, and what I could see of the dining room, was basically a continuation of the front yard—a mine field of cheap toys scattered everywhere, and inexpensive furniture of the sort you buy by the room instead of the piece, strewn with magazines and pieces of the newspaper and the odd piece of children's clothing.

  Over all was a sour smell, one part the rain-sodden wood of the exterior house, one part the lunch she had just fixed, one part the house cleaning this place hadn't had in a good long while.

  The two kids with the flu, boy and girl respectively, were parked in a corner of the long, stained couch. Even from here I knew that one of them had diapers in need of changing. They showed no interest in me or my equipment. Out of dirty faces and dead blue eyes they watched one cartoon character beat another with a hammer on a TV whose sound dial was turned very near the top.

  "Cindy's in her room," Mrs. Cunningham explained.

  Her dark hair was in a pert little ponytail. The rest of her chunky self was packed into a faded blue sweatshirt and sweatpants. In high school she had probably been nice and trim. But high school was an eternity behind her now.

  I carried my gear and followed her down a short hallway. We passed two messy bedrooms and a bathroom and finally we came to a door that was closed.

  "Have you ever seen anybody like Cindy before?"

  "I guess not, Mrs. Cunningham."

  "Well, it's kind of shocking. Some people can't really look at her at all. They just sort of glance at her and look away real quick. You know?"

  "I'll be fine."

  "I mean, it doesn't offend me when people don't want to look at her. If she wasn't my daughter, I probably wouldn't want to look at her, either. Being perfectly honest, I mean."

  "I'm ready, Mrs. Cunningham."

  She watched me a moment and said, "You have kids?'"

  "Two little girls."

  "And they're both fine?"

  "We were lucky."

  For a moment, I thought she might cry. "You don't know how lucky, Mr. Hubbard."

  She opened the door and we went into the bedroom.

  It was a small room, painted a fresh, lively pink. The furnishings in here—the bassinet, the bureau, the rocking horse in the corner—were more expensive than the stuff in the rest of the house. And the smell was better. Johnson's Baby Oil and Johnson's Baby Powder are always pleasant on the nose. There was a reverence in the appointments of this room, as if the Cunninghams had consciously decided to let the yard and the rest of the house go to hell. But this room—

  Mrs. Cunningham led me over to the bassinet and then said, "Are you ready?"

  "I'll be fine, Mrs. Cunningham. Really."

  "Well," she said, "here you are then."

  I went over and peered into the bassinet. The first look is always rough. But I didn't want to upset the lady so I smiled down at her baby as if Cindy looked just like every other baby girl I'd ever seen.

  I even touched my finger to the baby's belly and tickled her a little. "Hi, Cindy."

  After I had finished my first three or four assignments for this particular client, I went to the library one day and spent an hour or so reading about birth defects. The ones most of us are familiar with are clubfoots and cleft palates and harelips and things like that. The treatable problems, that is. From there you work up to spina bifida and cretinism. And from there—

  What I didn't know until that day in the library is that there are literally hundreds of ways in which infants can be deformed, right up to and including the genetic curse of The Elephant Man. As soon as I started running into words such as achondroplastic dwarfism and supernumerary chromosomes, I quit reading. I had no idea what those words meant.

  Nor did I have any idea of what exactly you would call Cindy's malformation. She had only one tiny arm and that was so short that her three fingers did not quite reach her rib cage. It put me in mind of a flipper on an otter. She had two legs but only one foot and only three digits on that. But her face was the most terrible part of it all, a tiny little slit of a mouth and virtually no nose and only one good eye. The other was almond-shaped and in the right position but the eyeball itself was the deep, startling color of blood.

  "We been tryin' to keep her at home here," Mrs. Cunningham said, "but she can be a lot of trouble. The other two kids make fun of her all the time and my husband can't sleep right because he keeps havin' these dreams of her smotherin' because she don't have much of a nose. And the neighbor kids are always tryin' to sneak in and get a look at her."

  All the time she talked, I kept staring down at poor Cindy. My reaction was always the same when I saw these children. I wanted to find out who was in charge of a universe that would permit something like this and then tear his fucking throat out.

  "You ready to start now?"

  "Ready," I said.

  She was nice enough to help me get my equipment set up. The pictures went quickly. I shot Cindy from several angles, including several straight-on. For some reason, that's the one the client seems to like best. Straight-on. So you can see everything.

  I used VPS large format professional film and a Pentax camera because what I was doing here was essentially making many portraits of Cindy, just the way I do when I make a portrait of an important community leader.

  Half an hour later, I was packed up and moving through Mrs. Cunningham's front door.

  "You tell that man—that Mr. Byerly who called—that we sure do appreciate that two-thousand dollar check he sent."

  "I'll be sure to tell him," I said, walking out into the rain. "You're gonna get wet."

  "I'll be fine. Goodbye, Mrs. Cunningham."

  Back at the shop, I asked Merle if there had been any calls and he said nothing important. Then, "How'd it go?"

  "No problems," I said.

  "Another addition to the ugly file, huh?" Then he nodded to the three filing cabinets I'd bought years back at a government auction. The top drawer of the center cabinet contained the photos and negatives of all the deformed children I'd been shooting for Byerly.

  "I still don't think that's funny, Merle."

  "The ugly file?" He'd been calling it that for a couple weeks now and I'd warned him that I wasn't amused. I have one of those tempers that it's not smart to push on too hard or too long.

  "Uh-huh," I said.

  "If you can't laugh about it then you have to cry about it."

  "That's a cop-out. People always say that when they want to say something nasty and get away with it. I don't want you to call it that anymore, you fucking understand me, Merle?"

  I could feel the anger coming. I guess I've got more of it than I know what to do with, especially after I've been around some poor goddamned kid like Cindy.

  "Hey, boss, lighten up. Shit, man, I won't say it anymore, okay?"

  "I'm going to hold you to that."

  I took the film of Cindy into the darkroom. It took six hours to process it all through the chemicals and get the good, clear proofs I wanted.

  At some point during the process, Merle knocked on the door and said, "I'm goin' home now, all right?"

  "See you tomorrow," I said through the closed door.


  "Hey, I'm sorry I pissed you off. You know, about those pictures."

  "Forget about it, Merle. It's over. Everything's fine."

  "Thanks. See you tomorrow."

  "Right."

  When I came out of the darkroom, the windows were filled with night. I put the proofs in a manila envelope with my logo and return address on it and then went out the door and down the stairs to the parking lot and my station wagon.

  The night was like October now, raw and windy. I drove over to the freeway and took it straight out to Mannion Springs, the wealthiest of all the wealthy local suburbs.

  On sunny afternoons, Mary and I pack up the girls sometimes and drive through Mannion Springs and look at all the houses and daydream aloud of what it would be like to live in a place where you had honest-to-God maids and honest-to-God butlers the way some of these places do.

  I thought of Mary now, and how much I loved her, more the longer we were married, and suddenly I felt this terrible, almost oppressive loneliness, and then I thought of little Cindy in that bassinet this afternoon and I just wanted to start crying and I couldn't even tell you why for sure.

  The Byerly place is what they call a shingle Victorian. It has dormers of every kind and description—hipped, eyebrow and gabled. The place is huge but has far fewer windows than you'd expect to find in a house this size. You wonder if sunlight can ever get into it.

  I'd called Byerly before leaving the office. He was expecting me.

  I parked in the wide asphalt drive that swept around the grounds. By the time I reached the front porch, Byerly was in the arched doorway, dressed in a good dark suit.

  I walked right up to him and handed him the envelope with the photos in it.

  "Thank you," he said. "You'll send me a bill?"

  "Sure," I said. I was going to add "That's my favorite part of the job, sending out the bill" but he wasn't the kind of guy you joke with. And if you ever saw him, you'd know why.

  Everything about him tells you he's one of those men who used to be called aristocratic. He's handsome, he's slim, he's athletic, and he seems to be very, very confident in everything he does—until you look at his eyes, at the sorrow and weariness of them, at the trapped gaze of a small and broken boy hiding in there.