York's Moon

by Elizabeth Engstrom

  “That’s Ed,” Sly said. “He’s tired.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Nope,” York said. “He snored all night long.”

  “There you are,” Clover said, and all heads turned to see her, makeup perfect, hair glossy and pinned back behind her ears, smiling and carrying two bags of donuts, wearing a fresh pink uniform. “Missed you this morning, Sheriff. This here is day-old, but I believe there might be one of your favorites in there.”

  Her eyes naturally went to Denny, and her mouth fell open as she took in the knot on his forehead and the bruise around it that was sliding down and blackening both eye sockets. She gasped and put her hand to her mouth.

  Denny smiled at her, winked, and just nodded slightly as if to say, It’s okay—we’ll talk about it later.

  “Why, thanks, Miss Clover,” Sheriff Goddard said, reached into the bag and pulled out a maple cruller. Clover tore her eyes from Denny and handed the sheriff a napkin.

  “Bring coffee too?” the deputy said, pulling a chocolate donut out of the bag.

  “Sly here’ll make you a good cup of coffee,” Clover said, giving Deputy Travis a disdainful look. Clover didn’t like the deputy any more than anybody else did. He was always trying to touch her with some sleazy sleight of hand.

  “No thanks,” the deputy said.

  “No thanks,” Sly said.

  “You men here to see about the dead guy?” Clover asked.

  Old Ed wasn’t as asleep or as tired as everyone assumed, because as soon as Clover said that, there was a flurry of activity under that hump of blankets, and then it rose up on itself and took off running, that dirty gray blanket flapping behind.

  He needn’t have run; nobody chased him, but he never looked back. They all just watched. Deputy Travis didn’t even twitch his gun hand.

  “Ed have anything to do with the dead guy?” Sheriff Goddard asked.

  “No,” York said. “Dead guy fell off the train yesterday.”

  “He was pushed,” Sly said. “Murdered.”

  “Now how come you didn’t come to me with this news yesterday, York?”

  “Didn’t want no trouble,” York said.

  “Well, too bad, old man,” the deputy said. “You just made yourself a whole new package of trouble by not reporting this.”

  The sheriff shook his head in disgust. The deputy always acted as if he were in some kind of a movie. The sheriff looked at Sly. “Want to show us?”

  Sly led the way around the little walls built up of stacks of old newspapers that defined their camp, over the heap of ties and along the tracks, following the mashed-down trail in the weeds where they’d all gone to gawk at the deceased intruder the evening before. Poor weeds hadn’t even had a chance to recover before Sly, Denny, two cops, and two railroad guys tramped over them one more time on their way to gaze at the corpse. Soon there’d be the medical examiner, ambulance guys, doctors, more cops, more railroad guys and only God knew who else.

  Clover stayed back with York. She didn’t need to see it all again; she was fairly certain any change in the guy’s condition had been for the worse.

  “Looks like Denny went shopping,” she said casually. “Wonder what he bought with all that cash. Wonder how he got that bump on his head.”

  But York had his mind on other things, one of them being the parade of people through his little personal hometown and how he, as unofficial mayor, was going to receive them. How does a hosting dignitary act? Ought he put out some red carpet, or haul up a banner? “Welcome to Yorktown,” it would say, “home of the dead guy.” Maybe there ought to be a wine tasting and craft fair to boot. Jeez. Just exactly what he didn’t need.

  And more of what he didn’t need was about to show up in the person of the mayor of West Wheaton, California, the real town that Yorktown was unofficially attached to. That mayor was all about big business, and there was no doubt in York’s mind that he and his little crew of unsightly good guys was a burr beneath the saddle of Mayor Milo Grimes. The mayor had his fingers in lots of real-estate-development pies, or so York had heard over the years, but the mayor was way too crafty to let any of his conflicts of interest show. Digging for dirt was one thing; pushing it in the faces of the townspeople was another thing.

  And one of the things all his soccer moms would like would be for him to get rid of the damned bums living down by the railroad tracks. They were crazed on drugs and ate babies for breakfast, the diseased, vermin-laden scum. The white-toothed, sandy-haired, clean-cut children of West Wheaton had to give that nasty area of town a wide berth, but of course, all kids were curious, and the moms were forever worried that one of their precious ones would be overcome by their own lack of good sense someday, and go on down there by the tracks to see what all the fuss was about. Everybody knew that those kids would never be seen alive again. It hadn’t happened yet, in all the decades York had been at his camp, but somehow, generations passed in town and the rumors, true to their nature, never got smaller.

  And now it had happened. A dead guy had been found in the hobo camp.

  Life was about to get messy indeed.

  “York?” Clover said.

  “Hmmm?”

  “Think y’all’re gonna have to move?”

  “Hope not, missy,” York said, impressed again with her intuition, but he did indeed think they were all going to have to move. He’d been meaning to go down to the county records place to find out just exactly who owned this property so that he could get permission to camp on it, but he had never got around to it. Probably belonged to the railroad. He never really thought he’d still be here, all these years later. But as his sight failed and his world narrowed, well, all that was left for him was to go on the public dole and live in some old fart’s home. That wasn’t for York. He had to be out under the moon until the day he died.

  “It wouldn’t be so bad, you know,” Clover said, as if she sensed his mood of impending doom. “We could get us a house together, all of us. Ed could even stay there when he came through town. Sly could work now and then, and with my wages and your pension . . .”

  York knew she meant well, but it sounded like death to him. Worse than death. Torture. Her voice trailed off as if she thought about the reality of it and it didn’t sound all that great to her, either.

  “I know what,” Clover said. “Let’s go to the post office. It’s time for your check.”

  “We ought to wait to see what happens over yonder,” York said.

  “They’ll be at that all day long, York. C’mon. Get yourself up. Get your blood moving. Let’s go shopping. That always makes you feel better.”

  He didn’t jump at the offer, but he didn’t refuse it, either, and Clover knew he just needed a little coaxing.

  “I’ll help you put your shoes on.” She reached into the bag, pulled out a reasonably fresh cinnamon-raisin bagel and handed it to the old man while she rooted around looking for his boots. York had a sturdy pair of lace-up leather boots that still had most of their soles on. He didn’t do a lot of walking. His socks had holes in the toes. “After all these folks are out of here,” she said, watching him munch the bagel with his store-bought teeth as she laced up his boots, “we’ll do some laundry. Your socks are about to knock me out.”

  “Don’t know what I’d do without you, girl,” York said around a bite of bread.

  “You’d get by, just like you always have,” Clover said, “but there’s no need to be thinking along those lines, because I’m here today, and today’s all we’ve got.”

  She grabbed him by both hands and planted her feet next to his boot toes, and hauled on him until he stood full up. He would never stand straight again, but he could get vertical. She smoothed over his hair in the back, and tugged at his clothes to make him look a little more presentable, then she grabbed his arm and got him moving up the path toward town. York was sliding backwards, health-wise. Seemed as though he had lost a little of his will, and was content to just sit and shout orders, but if he didn’t move, h
e would die. Sly and Denny never seemed to figure that out, so it was up to Clover to make sure York stayed healthy.

  “Laundry and a bath, York,” she said from behind him, a hand on his back. She didn’t exactly push him up the path, but she kept him leaning uphill.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said between wheezing breaths.

  Clover had to be very careful about where she drew the lines in her ministry work with these hobos. She was tempted to take them back to her place, and cook for them and do their laundry and let them use her shower, but that wasn’t a good idea. It was bad enough, according to her mother, that she took vitamins, dental floss, and day-old down to them. “That’s a bad element down there, Clover,” Eileen would say while she squirted raspberry filling into those donuts. “You’re wasting your time.”

  But Clover didn’t see it as a waste of her time at all. She liked these guys, and they needed her. Maybe she was wasting something by sleeping with Denny all the time, having that deliciously slurpy sex like they did, but that couldn’t be bad—it only made her feel pretty.

  “Someday you’re going to wake up and you’ll be forty years old,” her mother said. “You’ll be used up and have nothing to show for it but a drawer full of dust rags that used to be donut-shop uniforms.”

  Clover thought her mom ought to know about those things, in that that’s exactly what Eileen had to show for her life. Never married, one illegitimate daughter, and worked in the same damned donut shop almost her whole life. First as early-morning cook, then as a waitress, and now she managed the bakery in the back. The shop had changed hands twice in the five years since Clover started working there right out of high school, and had been sold more times than her mother could count since she’d been there right out of high school, but even new owners knew good workers when they saw them. And every time the minimum wage went up, they each got a raise.

  Clover wasn’t doing anything important at the donut shop, besides flirting for tips. But she was doing important stuff down by the railroad tracks. It didn’t matter to her what the future held. That was something for the old people to be thinking about. She knew she’d never end up living down by the tracks. Not when she could waitress as good as she did.

  She made small talk with York as they walked slowly, laboriously, up the hill. The path was only wide enough for single-file walking, so Clover put her hands on York’s back and kept up the steady pressure, alerting him to any rocks or holes that might make him stumble. On both sides of the path, blackberry brambles rose up much higher than Clover’s head. York kept an old pair of rusty garden shears and throughout the summer, somebody—Sly or Denny or Clover—would grab those shears and go whacking on the brambles, but it was a never-ending job. Tendrils were always trying to bridge the gap and trip anybody who ventured down to the tracks.

  Clover and York made it to the top of the hill, waited a moment for York to catch his breath, then moved slowly toward town, stopping frequently to rest. Clover chattered on about the shop, catching him up on all the soap-opera news of her coworkers. Then she moved on to thinking about what they were going to buy at the store that would keep, and not be too heavy to carry, and would be healthy and yet a little bit of a treat for the guys. Clover always threw in five or ten dollars a week to help tide them over between York’s monthly pension checks.

  York, Sly and Denny were her project, and it was a work in progress.

  “You’re going to have to see a doctor pretty soon, Daddy,” she said. She only called him Daddy when it was just the two of them, privately together. It made her feel good to be able to call somebody Daddy, and York didn’t seem to mind. In fact the first time she did it, it just popped out natural-like, and it stopped York in his tracks. Then he smiled, and that was all there was to it. Now and then she called him that, and it was a nice little thing they shared that made them both feel good.

  Once in a while Clover wondered if York had any daughters, but if he wanted to talk about that kind of stuff, he would. She didn’t want to ask. One of the reasons they lived the way they did was because they wanted to erase their histories, and Clover was a bright-enough girl to have figured that out first thing.

  “No doctors for me,” York said. “When the lord wants me, I’ll just go.”

  Clover didn’t know too much about much, but she figured he had bad lungs, probably a bad heart, and it wasn’t going to be long before York couldn’t make it up the hill at all. She wondered if he’d make it through the next rainy, cold winter, and she got a shiver at the thought of tripping down that trail some morning and seeing that the dead guy with flies on his face was York.

  They picked up his check at the post office without any fanfare. Clover made a mental note to find out what it would take for her to pick up his government check when he was no longer able to do that. Then they went shopping, but they were only able to do a little bit before York was ready to give out. He grew faint in the produce section, so she left the cart mid-aisle and walked him out of the store. She sat him down on the sidewalk, feet in the gutter, and though she didn’t like to see him there like that, she needed to finish her business inside and get back to him. When she had more than she could comfortably carry, she fetched him and they began the slow walk back toward the tracks, York complaining between wheezy breaths that he ought to be shouldering the load instead of making the lady carry his stuff.

  “I’m going to the Goodwill to get you some new clothes,” she said. “I’ll take Denny. And maybe we’ll get you a new cooking pot to boot.”

  He nodded, and bumped up against her in appreciation. That was all the pay Clover needed to keep her going for another season.

  The coroner’s car was sitting at the top of the hill when they rounded the last corner, along with a couple of other cars. And a local television news van.

  York was beginning to see black globes float around the dull gray of his vision, and he wanted to make it down to his bedroll before he passed out, fell, and hurt himself permanently. He took it slowly and carefully, despite his impulse to hurry and get down there, and he made it down the path to his great relief. Maybe next time he wouldn’t go to the store. He’d get his check and have somebody else do the shopping. Or maybe he’d fashion up some kind of a mailbox and get the mailman to deliver that damned check. Or something. He had a month to figure out something.

  A lot could happen in a month.

  A lot had happened in the hour or so that they were gone. Pieces of yellow tape with black lettering on it were strung up around the place, and suits with walkie-talkies wandered around.

  York didn’t have the energy to deal with it. He slowly lay down on his bed, instead of collapsing on it as he’d like, listened to Clover stash the food, and concentrated on breathing. It was all he could do, damn this worn-down body anyway. Even when Sly came running up, jumping over the railroad ties and all, out of breath with excitement, York had no energy to give to him. He lay quietly breathing and listened as Sly filled Clover in on all the details of what they’d missed.

  And York was right. The mayor was there, supervising the removal of the dead guy’s carcass. The mayor was not smiling in front of those TV cameras.

  York closed his eyes and watched the colors swirl around his oxygen-starved brain as he tried to think of a Plan B. He had no Plan B. If he was evicted—and sure as the sun rose in the east he would be—he had nowhere to take his merry band of freedom-loving friends.

  “They’re leaving,” he heard Sly say, and he heard the slamming of car doors, and the starting up of engines. Then he heard footsteps, big footsteps from two big men, coming down the path, and he didn’t even have the energy to open his sightless eyes as a courtesy.

  “Going to have to ask you to take your show on the road, York,” the sheriff said.

  York had no answer for that.

  “He okay?” the sheriff asked someone.

  “We just got back from town,” Clover answered. “He’s pretty worn out.”

  “Can you get him up to th
e mission or something for a couple of days? The mayor and the railroad guys aren’t happy about a murder down here, and, well, I’d just like it if you all found another place to be for a week or so. I don’t want anybody to get hurt, if you know what I mean.”

  York knew exactly what he meant, and it wasn’t a threat, it was the truth. The railroad guys who weren’t thugs knew a few thugs, and they could definitely do some midnight harm to three bums living in the weeds, and nobody would ask any questions after, either.

  “I’ll try,” Clover said.

  “The mission,” Denny said, and spit in disgust. Nobody liked the mission. It was dirty.

  “I’ll hear a little respect out of your face,” Deputy Travis said, “or I’ll take a look at all those Walmart bags there under your blanket. Something tells me that you, that lump on your head, and that broken Walmart skylight all have something in common. So don’t give me no lip, you hear, ace?”

  Denny didn’t respond.

  “We’ll vacate,” York said. “Might take me a little while.” Just saying that made the colored globes float around again.

  “Take your time, York,” the sheriff said. “I’ve got no trouble with you. But there’s bound to be some vigilante talk in town. Besides that, whoever killed that guy might be back to make sure there weren’t any witnesses, and I’d like you to be well gone before that happened.”

  “I’ll see to them, Sheriff,” Clover said, bless her heart.

  There was a long pause, long enough for York to open his eyes and look around out of habit. He couldn’t see anything but vague shapes in the grayness. “Walk me up to the car, Clover,” the sheriff said, and one pinkish shape moved toward the two brownish shapes and they all disappeared behind the wall of brambles.

  “The mission,” Denny said again.

  “I ain’t going to no mission,” Sly said. “I hate that fucking place. It’s full of fools and assholes. The food’s bad, the preaching makes me itchy, and the beds are lumpy. I’m not going.”

  “Whatcha got in those bags, Denny?” York asked.