Shoot the Moon

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” comes the answer, in what Goodman judges to be the voice of a young woman.

  “Do you need help?” is all he can think to ask.

  She ignores his question and says instead, “Please don’t hurt me.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he assures her. “Do you need an ambulance?”

  “No,” she begs him. “Please don’t call-”

  “Okay, okay,” he says. He can now see that she’s young - maybe in her twenties, he guesses. Her hair is wet and matted, and her face looks puffy and is streaked with dirt. “Is there anything I can do?” he asks.

  There’s no answer, only the same low whimpering sound that first drew his attention to her.

  “Look,” he tells her, “you can’t stay in there. You’ll freeze to death.”

  Nothing.

  He tries to think of some way to coax her out. “If you don’t come out” - What, he wonders, by the count of three? - “I’ll have to call the police.”

  “No,” she sobs again.

  “Then come out,” he commands.

  It takes awhile, but finally she lowers her hands to her sides and uses them to push herself into a kneeling position, then a squat. He offers her a hand, but she rejects it, electing instead to crawl out by herself.

  Once she’s out in the open, she tries to stand, but he has to steady her, so wobbly is she on her feet. He suspects she’s his own height, but it’s hard to tell: She remains doubled over slightly, as though it hurts her to straighten up.

  “How long have you been in there?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Awhile.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” she says. “I got raped, beaten up, and left for dead.”

  For a moment, he thinks she’s kidding, but then he realizes she isn’t. “We’ve got to call the police,” he says.

  “No,” she says. “I only came out ‘cause you said you wouldn’t.”

  Which isn’t exactly how Goodman remembers it, but he lets it go. She does have a point.

  “A hospital?” he suggests.

  But she shakes her head. It seems pretty clear to him that she’s not a big fan of municipal institutions. “Would you like to come upstairs and wash up?” He fully expects her to reject this offer, too, but she says nothing. Taking this for ambivalence, he places one hand on her elbow. “Come on,” he says, “let’s get you out of the rain. You’ve had enough to deal with already; you don’t need to get pneumonia on top of everything else.”

  She makes a sound that comes out as half laugh, half sob. But when he applies gentle pressure to her elbow, she comes along.

  It’s obvious that she’s in a lot of pain, and they have to take the stairs slowly. Goodman unlocks the door to his apartment, turns the light on, and leads her in. He’s glad he straightened the place out, even if his visitor’s in no condition to notice.

  Immediately, Pop-Tart runs over and checks out the new arrival, who sags against the wall, resuming the position in which Goodman first saw her.

  “This is Pop-Tart,” Goodman says, wishing he’d given the kitten a more traditional name. “My name is Michael.”

  “I’m Carmen,” she says.

  In the light, he can see that there are dark circles around her eyes. Her face is bruised and flecked with dried blood, which Pop-Tart now begins to lick.

  “Hey you!” Goodman scolds him. “Leave her alone.” He lifts the cat and shoos him away before turning back to Carmen. “What can I get you?”

  “I think I need a bathroom,” she says. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  This time, she lets him help her up. He leads her to the bathroom and closes the door behind her. He shakes the rain off himself and sits on the edge of his sofa.

  He hears nothing from the bathroom, and the thought occurs to him that maybe he shouldn’t leave her alone in there: After what she’s been through, she might be suicidal. But then again, he figures, how much damage can she do to herself with one of his disposable razors?

  After a moment, he hears gagging sounds coming from the bathroom, followed by flushing noises. They provide strange reassurance that she’s all right, in a manner of speaking. When the sounds subside, he knocks on the door gently and asks, “You okay in there?”

  He gets a “Yup” in response.

  “Would you like to take a bath or a shower?”

  After a minute, she opens the door. She looks very pale, and her eyes are red. “A bath would be great,” she says, trying to force a smile.

  He gets her a couple of clean towels and his only bathrobe, then starts the water running for her.

  “Thank you, Michael,” she says. “You’re very sweet.” She goes into the bathroom and closes the door behind her, leaving Goodman and his kitten in the living room.

  “Well, Pop-Tart,” he says, “I guess it’s you and me on the floor tonight.”

  He will be only half-right, of course. Hours later, as Goodman struggles to find a comfortable position on the shag rug, wedged between the back of the sofa bed and the radiator, Pop-Tart and Carmen will be curled up together on the bed itself, deep in sleep.

  The rain that has fallen most of Monday night has tapered off to fine mist by the first light of Tuesday morning. Police Officers Charlie Walsh and Eddie Johnson have been on RMP duty since midnight - actually since 2335 Monday night, since that’s when the graveyard shift unofficially begins. Being on RMP duty means taking turns behind the wheel of a radio motor patrol unit, a blue and white police car, cruising the particular sector to which they’ve been assigned within the precinct and responding to whatever jobs the dispatcher puts out over the air.

  Because it’s been a rainy Monday night, the tour has been a quiet one. Monday nights are usually slow to begin with, what with the homeboys catching up on sleep and recuperating from the weekend. And rain always helps keep the perps indoors, where the potential for confrontation and mayhem is somewhat reduced.

  But quiet nights tend to be long nights, and Walsh and Johnson have already been through a total of eight containers of coffee, four slices of pizza, two doughnuts, and a pack and a half of cigarettes. Now, armed with a couple of buttered rolls and two pint-sized containers of Tropicana orange juice, they pull underneath the elevated West Side Highway on 125th Street. Johnson kills the headlights.

  “Hang a right,” says Walsh, who’s in the recorder’s seat. “Don’t wanna let anyone see us here and call IAD or something. Mayor might have to convene another commission.”

  “Right,” says Johnson. “God forbid we should eat breakfast.” He makes the turn and continues slowly north. To their left, the factories and apartment buildings of New Jersey are still shadows across the river; the only light is to the east, here all but blocked by the highway overhead.

  “Pull over there,” Walsh points, “by the end.”

  Johnson complies. Just as he brings the car up to the retaining wall, there’s a sudden movement off to the right, followed by the bark of a dog.

  “Get lost, Fido,” Johnson calls, mostly out of relief.

  “I once dated this woman, had a dog named Fido,” Walsh says. “Only she spelled it P-H-A-E-D-E-A-U-X. Said she’d read it somewhere, thought it was cute.”

  “Whadid the dog think?”

  “How the fuck should I know? Stupid dog prob’ly couldn’t spell.”

  There’s another bark, and this time they can make out the shapes of not one but two dogs, tugging at something heavy by the wall.

  Walsh and Johnson look at each other, one of those partner-to-partner looks that needs no words. Walsh takes the paper bag holding the rolls and juice and places it on the dashboard. Each man touches his weapon and reaches for his flashlight. With one noise, each opens his door and steps out of the car.

  As soon as the flashlights are trained on them, the dogs turn from whatever it is they’ve been pulling at.

  “Shoo!” Walsh shouts
, and they back off. It takes a kicking motion from Johnson to chase them.

  Slowly, the officers approach. Each holds his flashlight in his left hand, his right hand resting on his still-holstered weapon. But even before they get any closer, they both know full well they won’t be needing their weapons. The early-morning light is enough to show them the object that the dogs were fighting over.

  What they have found is the body of Russell Bradford.

  Goodman gives up sleep around six in the morning. He pulls himself to a standing position. His ribs hurt, and his hipbones ache from where they’ve been pressed into the cold, hard floor during the night. He figures he slept for two hours, all told.

  He looks over at the sofa bed and sees Carmen, face upturned, arms splayed to either side. A night’s sleep seems to have helped her as much as the loss of one has harmed Goodman. Her face still looks bruised in places, but the dark circles around her eyes are less pronounced. Her hair, dirty and matted when he’d first brought her in from the rain, now looks clean and soft. It is a jet black, set off by the whiteness of Goodman’s only set of sheets. Tucked against the curve of her waist is the opportunistic Pop-Tart, his eyes as tightly closed as hers.

  Goodman heads for the bathroom to shower, wondering how, in less than a week’s time, he’s gone from a single occupant to the head of a household of three.

  At the office of the Chief Medical Examiner at 520 First Avenue, the body of the young black male is fingerprinted prior to autopsy. The prints are analyzed for salient characteristics and reduced to an eleven-digit code, a combination of numbers and letters. That code is faxed to the New York State Department of Criminal Justice in Albany. Within an hour, a return fax has identified the individual from a prior arrest for farebeating.

  BRADFORD, Russell Dwayne

  NYSID# 31577890F

  DOB 1-12-80

  POB Bronx, NY

  Height 72 in.

  Weight 165 lbs

  Eyes Brn

  The autopsy is performed by Dr. Karen Swiddy. It is somewhere between the five hundredth and one thousandth she’s done: She lost track long ago.

  Some bodies stubbornly resist giving up the cause of death; a few succeed in refusing altogether, leaving the circumstances forever shrouded in mystery. Russell Bradford is not such a case. The two bullet holes in his upper back leave no doubt as to his last moments. By inserting a probe in the more superior of the holes, Dr. Swiddy is able to track the path of the bullet directly through skin and muscle and into the left chamber of the heart, where she recovers a deformed piece of lead. She initials it “S-l.” She places it on a scale and records its weight as 2.7 grams, just under a tenth of an ounce, but enough to end the short life of one human being.

  * * *

  His roommates finally having awakened, Goodman stands at his stove, preparing as complete a breakfast as his modest supplies will permit: oatmeal prepared in a combination of evaporated milk and water, toast with jam - he has no toaster, but by paying close attention, he uses the broiler of his oven to brown bread perfectly - and grapefruit Tang, poured over ice cubes. For Pop-Tart, hearty beef stew combined with some of the oatmeal mixture.

  It is only when she sits across from him over his card table that Goodman sees how very pretty Carmen is. The swelling on her face is gone; gone, too, is the dried blood. The bruises that remain look fairly superficial.

  “You look much better,” he tells her.

  “Thank you.” She smiles in such a way that her whole face seems part of the process - not just her mouth but also her eyes, her chin, even the line of her jaw.

  “You were lucky-” he starts to say, then realizes that’s stupid of him and so halts in midsentence.

  “No,” she agrees, “I was lucky. It could have been much worse. And at least I’ve learned my lesson.”

  “What lesson is that?” he asks between sips of grapefruit Tang.

  “That me and my old man are history.”

  “This was your father did this to you?”

  Carmen laughs, her mouth full of oatmeal. Goodman suddenly realizes that maybe oatmeal and grapefruit aren’t such a good combination. The acid from the grapefruit could curdle the milk in the oatmeal. But he knows better than to change the subject during a tale of rape and incest.

  “Old man means boyfriend,” she explains.

  Goodman wonders when they changed the meaning of the term, but says nothing.

  “Bad enough,” she says. “Stayed with him nearly six months. Smart, huh?”

  “We sometimes make mistakes,” he says.

  “Well, when I make them, I really make them!”

  “What do you do now?” he asks.

  “I go it alone, that’s for sure.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ll have to find a place.”

  The thought of her leaving as suddenly as she’s arrived catches Goodman off guard. He says, “You’re welcome to stay here until you-”

  She smiles her smile again. “You don’t have room for me,” she says, waving her arm in a circular motion that takes in the single area that is living room, dining room, library, bedroom, and kitchen.

  “Don’t be silly,” he says. “I’ve got a bad back, so I sleep on the floor a lot.”

  “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” she sings.

  “Nose as long as a telephone wire,” he completes the verse. It’s not for nothing he has a six-year-old.

  Carmen shakes her head. “I can’t do that,” she says.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t even know you.”

  “You know I’m not going to beat you up,” he says.

  Annise Bradford arrives at the corner of First Avenue and Thirtieth Street shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon. She’s cold and pale and shaking slightly. Even before the phone call, she knew something was wrong. She knew it when Russell didn’t come home last night, and then again when he still hadn’t shown up by midmorning. A neighbor told her how to call Central Booking, explaining that’s how she finds out when her husband’s been picked up. But Central Booking had no record of a Russell Bradford having been arrested.

  She’d called in sick to work and sat by the phone, waiting for it to ring. When finally it did, just before noon, it had taken her five rings to reach for it and lift it to her ear.

  “Hello,” she had said.

  “Mrs. Bradford?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Detective Morgan,” a voice had said, and in that instant she’d prayed that he was going to tell her that her son had been arrested - for anything, even murder. But he hadn’t told her that. Instead, he’d said that her son had been involved in an altercation, and asked if she could meet him at the corner of First Avenue and Thirtieth Street in an hour.

  This isn’t Annise Bradford’s first visit to the corner of First Avenue and Thirtieth Street. Nine years ago, she made this same trip. They’d led her into a room lined with square drawers. It had been cold, so cold that she couldn’t stop shivering. As she’d stood there, a man wearing a white lab coat had pulled open one of the drawers. On it had been the body of her husband, William. His skin looked like somebody had dusted him with powder. One side of his head was crushed in, and there was a yellow tag tied to one of his big toes.

  “Mrs. Bradford?”

  She turns and sees a black man in a business suit. He’s large enough to be a professional football player, but his shoulders sag just a bit, and his face is deeply lined from too many days like this.

  “I’m Stanley Morgan,” he says softly, and if she’d had any hope whatsoever that her son was still alive - had simply been arrested for some unspeakable crime-that hope ends now.

  She follows him inside, through the doors of the office of the Chief Medical Examiner. They stop at the reception desk, where he signs the logbook for both of them.

  Sensitivity training has come and stamped its mark upon the bureaucracy, and the gentleman who meets them today wears a tan suit and a
striped tie. Instead of being taken into a cold room full of drawers, they are led to a pleasant office, where she is given a seat at a gray metal desk. There the gentleman in the tan suit places a photograph in front of her. It is, of course, a photograph of her firstborn child, Russell. His eyes are closed, and he appears to be sleeping. As she studies his face, large drops of water begin to cover and gradually obscure his features, creating the impression that he’s slowly sinking away from her, down toward the bottom of some deep pool.

  It takes Annise Bradford a moment to realize that the drops are her own tears.

  “If I’m going to stay here, even for just a few days, it’s only fair that I help out with the rent when I get some money,” Carmen tells Goodman Tuesday afternoon.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “I’ve got to pay the rent whether you stay or not.” He doesn’t bother telling her that he’s already two weeks late paying it.

  “Then let me help with the food, or something.”

  “You help any way you like,” he says. “Just don’t worry about it.”

  “No,” she says. “I insist.”

  And though she seems earnest enough, he also notices that she’s in no hurry to venture outside. He guesses she’s still traumatized from the experience with her “old man,” and he decides not to say anything about it, to give her a little time. But by five o’clock, when Goodman announces he’s going to take a walk to buy a couple of things for dinner, Carmen is still wearing his bathrobe - though he’s offered to lend her some of his clothes - and makes no move to join him.

  At the store, he buys a box of spaghetti, a jar of sauce, some greens for a salad, and a crusty bread. $6.69. He walks past a liquor store on the way home, stops a full block later, doubles back, and picks out a bottle of Chianti, $5.43.

  He remembers a game he and his brother Alan used to play when they were boys. It was called rock-paper-scissors. On the count of three, both players would extend their right hands in the shape of certain designated objects: a fist was a rock, a flattened palm a piece of paper, two spread fingers a pair of scissors. There were predetermined rules proclaiming which object would win in head-to-head combat: Rock crushes scissors; paper covers rock; scissors cut paper. The winner of each encounter got to give the loser a “noogie” - a punch in the forearm with the middle knuckle of the fist extended to cause surprising pain.