Moonchasers & Other Stories

by Ed Gorman

  "So?"

  "So I want to help him. I don't want him to go through what I did."

  "You know him or something?"

  "No."

  "Just some guy whose daughter was raped and killed and the suspect hasn't been apprehended."

  "Right."

  "And you want what?"

  "I've got money and I've got time. I quit my job."

  "But what do you want?"

  "I want us to go after him. Remember how you said that I'd changed and that I didn't even know it?"

  "Yeah, I remember."

  "Well, you were right. I have changed."

  He stood up and started laughing, his considerable belly shaking beneath his Valvoline T-shirt. "Well, I'll be goddamned, Robert. I'll be goddamned. I did make a man out of you, after all. So how about having a beer with me?"

  At first—it not being 9:00 a.m. yet—I hesitated. But then I nodded my head and said, "Yeah, Slocum. That sounds good. That really sounds good."

  THE WIND FROM MIDNIGHT

  For Ray Bradbury

  Even with the windows open, the Greyhound bus was hot inside as it roared through the rural California night. Plump ladies in sweat-soaked summer dresses furiously worked paper fans that bore the names of funeral parlors. Plump men in sleeveless T-shirts sat talking of disappointing baseball scores ("Them goddamn Red Sox just don't have it this year; nossir they don't") and the Republican convention that had just nominated Dwight Eisenhower. Most of the men aboard liked Ike and liked him quite a bit. These men smoked Lucky Strikes and Chesterfields and Fatimas and more than a few of them snuck quick silver flasks from their hip pockets.

  In the middle of the bus was a slender, pretty woman who inexplicably burst into tears every twenty miles or so. It was assumed by all who watched her that she was having man trouble of some sort. A woman this pretty wouldn't carry on so otherwise. She'd been deserted and was heading home to Mama was the consensus aboard the Greyhound.

  Traveling with the pretty woman was a sweet-faced little girl who was obviously the daughter. She was maybe five or six and wore a faded white dress that reminded some of First Communion, and patent-leather shoes that reminded others of Shirley Temple. For the most part she was well-behaved, the little girl, stroking and petting her mama when she cried, and sitting prim and obedient when Mama was just looking sadly out the window.

  But fifty miles ago the little girl had gone back to use the restroom—she'd had a big nickel Pepsi and it had gone right through her—and there she'd seen the tiny woman sitting all by herself in one corner of the vast backseat.

  All the little girl could think of—and this was what she whispered to her mama later—was a doll that had come to life.

  Before the bus pulled into the ocean-side town for a rest stop, the little girl found exactly four excuses to run back there and get another good peek at the tiny woman.

  She just couldn't believe what she was seeing.

  A lot of passengers hurried to get off the bus so they could stand around the front of the depot and get a good look at her. In the rolling darkness of the Greyhound, they hadn't really gotten much of a glimpse and they were just naturally curious, this kind of people.

  She didn't disappoint them.

  She was just as tiny as she'd seemed and in her plain white blouse and her navy linen skirt and her dark seamed hose and her cute little pumps with the two-inch heels; she looked like a five-year-old who was all dressed up in her mama's clothes.

  Back on the bus they'd argued in whispers whether she was a dwarf or a midget. There was some scientific difference between the two but damned if anybody could remember exactly what that was.

  From inside the depot came smells of hamburgers and onions and french fries and cigar smoke, all stale on the still summer air. Also from inside came the sounds of Miss Kay Starr singing "The Wheel of Fortune." Skinny white cowboys clung like moths to the lights of the depot entrance as did old black men the color of soot and snappy young sailors in their dress whites and hayseed grins.

  This was the scene the tiny woman confronted. And in moments she was gone from it.

  The cabbie knew where the carnival was, of course. There would be only one in a burg like this.

  He drove his rattling '47 Plymouth out to the pier where the midway and all the rides looked like the toys of a baby giant.

  He drove her right up to the entrance and said, "That'll be eighty-five cents, Miss."

  She opened her purse and sank a tiny hand into its deep waiting darkness.

  She gave him a dollar's worth of quarters and said, "That's for you."

  "Why, thank you."

  She opened the door. The dome light came on. He noticed for the first time that she was nice-looking. Not gorgeous or anything like that. But nice-looking. Silken dark hair in a pageboy. Blue eyes that would have been beautiful if they weren't tainted with sorrow. And a full mouth so erotic it made him uncomfortable. Why if a normal-sized man was to try anything with a tiny woman like this—

  He put the thought from his mind.

  As she started to leave the cab, he just blurted it out. "I suppose you know what happened here a month ago. About the—little guy, I mean."

  She just looked at him.

  "He stole a gun from one of the carnies here and raced back to his hotel room and killed himself." The cabbie figured that the tiny woman would want to know about it, her being just like the little guy and all. To show he was friendly, the cabbie always told colored people stories about colored people in just the same way.

  The cabbie's head was turned in profile, waiting for the woman to respond.

  But the only sound, faint among the crack of air rifles and the roar of the rollercoaster and the high piping pitch of the calliope, was the cab door being quietly closed.

  A lady with a beard, a man with a vagina. A chance to get your fortune told by a gypsy woman with a knife scar on her left cheek. A sobbing little blond boy looking frantically for his lost mother. A man just off the midway slapping hard a woman he called a fucking whore bitch. An old man in a straw hat gaping fixedly at a chunky stripper the barker kept pointing to with a long wooden cane.

  Linnette saw all these things and realized why her brother had always liked carnivals. She liked them for the same reason. Because in all the spectacle—beautiful and ugly, happy and sad alike—tiny people tended to get overlooked. There was so much to see and do and feel and desire that normal people barely gave tiny people a glance.

  And that's why, for many of his thirty-one years, her brother had been drawn to midways.

  He told her about this one, of course, many times. How he came here after a long day at the typewriter. How he liked to sit on a bench up near the shooting gallery and watch the women go by and try and imagine what they'd be like if he had had the chance to meet them. He was such a romantic, her brother, in his heart a matinee idol worthy of Valentino and Gable.

  She'd learned all this from his infrequent phone calls. He always called at dinner time on Sunday evening because of the rates and he always talked nine minutes exactly. He always asked her how things were going at the library where she worked and she always asked him if he was ever going to write that important novel she knew he had in him.

  They were brother and sister, and more, of course, which was why, when he'd put that gun to his head there in the dim little coffin of a room where he lived and wrote—

  She tried not to think of these things now.

  She worked her way through the crowd, moving slowly toward the steady cracking sounds of the shooting gallery. A Mr. Kelly was who she was looking for.

  A woman given to worry and anxiety, she kept checking the new white number ten envelope in her purse. One hundred dollars in crisp green currency. Certainly that should be enough for Mr. Kelly.

  Aimee was taking a cigarette break when she happened to see Linnette. She'd spent the last month trying to forget about the dwarf and the part Ralph Banghart, the man who ran the Mirror Maze, had played i
n the death of the dwarf.

  And the part Aimee had played, too.

  Maybe if she'd never gotten involved, never tried to help the poor little guy—

  Aimee lit her next Cavalier with the dying ember of her previous Cavalier.

  Standing next to the tent she worked, Aimee reached down to retrieve the Coke she'd set in the grass.

  And just as she bent over, she felt big male hands slip over her slender hips. "Booo!"

  She jerked away from him immediately. She saw him now as this diseased person. Whatever ugliness he had inside him, she didn't want to catch.

  "I told you, Ralph, I don't ever want you touching me again."

  "Aw, babe, I just—"

  She slapped him. And hard enough that his head jerked back and a grunt of pain sounded in his throat.

  "Hey—"

  "You still don't give a damn that little guy killed himself, do you?"

  Ralph rubbed his sore cheek. "I didn't kill him."

  "Sure you did. You're just not man enough to admit it. If you hadn't played that practical joke on him—"

  "If the little bastard couldn't take a joke—"

  She raised her hand to slap him again. Grinning, he started to duck away.

  She spit at him. This, he didn't have time to duck away from. She got him right on the nose.

  "I don't want you to come anywhere goddamn near me, do you understand?" Aimee said, knowing she was shrieking and not caring.

  Ralph looked around, embarrassed now that people were starting to watch, shook his head and muttered some curses, and left, daubing off the spittle with his white soiled handkerchief.

  Aimee tossed her cigarette into the summer dry grass and started looking around for the dwarf woman again.

  She just had this sense that the woman had somehow known the little guy who'd killed himself.

  Aimee just had to find her and talk to her. Just had to.

  She started searching.

  Mr. Kelly turned out to be a big man with an anchor tattoo on his right forearm and beads of silver sweat standing in rows on his pink bald pate.

  At the moment he was showing a woman with huge breasts how to operate an air rifle. Mr. Kelly kept nudging her accidentally-on-purpose with his elbow. If the woman minded, she didn't complain. But then the woman's boyfriend came back from somewhere and he looked to be about the same size but younger and trimmer than Mr. Kelly so Mr. Kelly withdrew his elbow and let the boyfriend take over the shooting lessons.

  Then Mr. Kelly turned to Linnette. "What can I do for ya, small fry?"

  Linnette always told herself that insults didn't matter. Sticks and stones and all that. And most of the time they didn't. But every once in a while, as right now for instance, they pierced the heart like a fatal sliver of glass.

  "My name is Linnette Dobbins."

  "So? My name is Frank Kelly."

  "A month or so ago my brother stole a gun from you and—"

  Smiles made most people look pleasant. But Mr. Kelly's smile only served to make him look knowing and dirty. "Oh, the dwarf." He looked her up and down. "Sure. I should've figured that out for myself."

  "The police informed me that they've given you the gun back."

  "Yeah. What about it?"

  "I'd like to buy it from you."

  "Buy it from me? What the hell're you talkin' about, small fry?" Mr. Kelly was just about to go on when a new pair of lovers bellied up to the gallery counter and waited for instructions.

  Without excusing himself, Mr. Kelly went over to the lovers, picked up an air rifle and started demonstrating how to win the gal here a nice little teddy bear.

  "A dwarf, you say?"

  Aimee nodded.

  "Jeeze, Aimee, I think I'd remember if I'd seen a dwarf woman wanderin' around the midway."

  "Thanks, Hank."

  Hank then got kind of flustered and said, "You think we're ever gonna go to a movie sometime Aimee, like I asked you that time?"

  She touched his shoulder tenderly and gave him a sweet quick smile. "I'm sure thinking about it, Hank. I really am." Hank was such a nice guy. She just wished he were her type.

  And then she was off again, moving frantically around the midway, asking various carnies if they'd seen a woman who was a dwarf. Hank's was the tenth booth she'd stopped at.

  Nobody had seen the woman. Nobody.

  "So why would you want the gun your brother killed himself with, small fry?"

  From her purse, Linnette took the plain white number ten envelope and handed it up to Mr. Kelly.

  "What's this?" he said.

  "Look inside."

  He opened the envelope flap and peeked in. He ran a pudgy finger through the bills. He whistled. "Hundred bucks."

  "Right."

  "For a beat-up old service revolver. Hell, small fry, you don't know much about guns. You could buy a gun like that in a pawn shop for five bucks."

  "The money's all yours."

  "Just for this one gun?"

  "That's right, Mr. Kelly. Just for this one gun."

  He whistled again. The money had made him friendlier. This time his smile lacked malevolence. "Boy, small fry, I almost hate to take your money."

  "But you will?"

  He gave her a big cornball grin now and she saw in it the fact that he was just as much a hayseed as the rubes he bilked every night. The difference was, he didn't know he was a hayseed.

  "You damn bet ya I will," he said, and trotted to the back of the tent to get the gun.

  "I'll need some bullets for it, too," Linnette called after him. He turned around and looked at her. "Bullets? What for?"

  "Given the price I'm paying, Mr. Kelly, I'd say that was my business."

  He looked at her for a long time and then his cornball grin opened his face up again. "Well, small fry, I guess I can't argue with you on that one now, can I? Bullets it is."

  The carnival employed a security man named Bulicek. It was said that he was a former cop who'd gotten caught running a penny ante protection racket on his beat and had been summarily discharged. Here, he always smelled of whiskey and Sen-Sen to cut the stink of the whiskey. He strutted around in his blue uniform with big half-moons of sweat under each arm and a creaking leather holster riding around his considerable girth. His best friend in the curly was Kelly at the shooting gallery, which figured.

  Aimee avoided Bulicek because he always managed to put his hands on her in some way whenever they talked. But now she had no choice.

  She'd visited seven more carnies since Hank and nobody had seen a woman dwarf.

  Bulicek was just coming out of the big whitewashed building that was half men's and half women's.

  He smiled when he saw her. She could feel his paws on her already.

  "I'm looking for somebody," she said.

  "So am I. And I found her." Bulicek knew every bad movie line in the world.

  "A woman who's a dwarf. She's somewhere on the midway. Have you seen her?"

  Bulicek shrugged. "What do I get if I tell ya?"

  "You get the privilege of doing your job." She tried to keep the anger from her voice. She needed his cooperation.

  "And nothing else?" His eyes found a nice place on her body to settle momentarily.

  "Nothing else."

  He raised his eyes and shook his head and took out a package of cigarettes.

  Some teenagers with ducks ass haircuts and black leather jackets—even in this kind of heat for crissakes—wandered by and Bulicek, he-man that he was, gave them the bad eye.

  When he turned back to Aimee, she was shocked by his sudden anger. "You think you could talk to me one time, Miss High and Mighty, without making me feel I'm a piece of dog shit?"

  "You think you could talk to me one time without copping a cheap feel?"

  He surprised her by saying, "I shouldn't do that, Aimee, and I'm sorry. You wanna try and get along?"

  She laughed from embarrassment. "God, you're really serious aren't you?"

  "Yeah, I am." He
put out a hand. "You wanna be friends, Aimee?"

  This time the laugh was pure pleasure. "Sure, Bulicek. I'd like to be friends. I really would. You show me some respect and I'll show you some, too."

  They shook hands.

  "Now, about the dwarf you was askin' about?"

  "Yeah? You saw her?" Aimee couldn't keep the excitement from her voice.

  Bulicek pointed down the midway. "Seen her 'bout fifteen minutes ago at Kelly's."

  Aimee thanked him and started running.

  Linnette had a different taxi driver this time.

  This guy was heavy and Mexican. The radio played low, Mexican songs from a station across the border. The guy sure wore a lot of aftershave.

  Linnette sat with the gun inside her purse and her purse on her lap.

  She looked out the window at the passing streets. Easy to imagine her brother walking across these streets, always the focus of the curious stare and the cold quick smirk. Maybe it was harder for men, she thought. They were expected to be big and strong and—

  She opened her purse. The sound was loud in the taxi. She saw the driver's eyes flick up to his rearview and study her. Then his eyes flicked away.

  She rode the rest of the way with her hand inside her purse, gripping the gun.

  She closed her eyes and tried to imagine her brother's hand on the handle, on the trigger.

  She hoped that there was a God somewhere and that all of this made sense somehow, that some people should be born of normal height and others, freaks, be born with no arms or legs or eyes.

  Or be born dwarfs.

  "Here you are, lady."

  He pulled over to the curb and told her the fare.

  Once again, she found her money swiftly and paid him off.

  He reached over and opened the door for her, studying her all the time. Did it ever occur to him—fat and Mexican and not very well educated—that he looked just as strange to her as she did to him? But no, he wouldn't be the kind of man who'd have an insight like that.

  She got out of the cab and he drove away.

  Even in a bleak little town like this one, the Ganges Arms was grim. Fireproof was much larger than Ganges on the neon sign outside, and the drunk throwing up over by the curb told her more than she wanted to know about the type of man who lived up there. She couldn't imagine how her brother had managed to survive here six years.