Noir

by Christopher Moore

  “Witness,” Clarence said. He holstered his gun, checked his watch. “Turn the car around. I’ll help you get him in the trunk. We need to report in.”

  * * *

  Bailey hung up the phone, turned to Hatch. “Washington says that Clarence and Potter lost the subject. When they got back to the Bohemian Grove the other girl was gone. She was rescued by a thin man with a gun. I’d guess her bartender boyfriend. Washington thinks they may have taken the subject.”

  “What are our orders?” Hatch was shaving. They were sharing a motel room in the Marina District. Businessmen. On business, they told the desk clerk.

  “Same as before. Find and return the subject, process any witnesses.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “First we find her friend. We try the lesbian club on the Embarcadero.”

  “After breakfast, right?”

  “Now,” said Bailey. “Washington said highest priority.”

  “So we’re going to go to a nightclub at eight in the morning? Do you ever think Washington doesn’t know what they’re doing?”

  “Yes,” said Bailey. “Get dressed. We go now.”

  “I don’t see why we can’t have breakfast,” said Hatch.

  “Now,” said Bailey. “I can’t tell you why.”

  Hatch knew, because Bailey had told him, that there had been three bodies pulled from the wreckage at Roswell. Three subjects. The general had brought one to California, and the other two were at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where medical teams were studying them. What Bailey knew, that Hatch didn’t know, was that one of the two subjects in Ohio had woken up.

  * * *

  Sometimes a guy’s past is like a stone around his neck that drags him so far down in the dark, he’ll never see light again if he doesn’t find a moment to cut it loose. My moment came on the road outside the village of Jenner on the coast, where I bought some gas at a little store and grabbed a Coke and some cheese crackers for Stilton to hold her over.

  I pulled out and headed back the way we’d come. I got the Ford up to third gear and patted my shirt pocket for a smoke. No luck, lost somewhere in the woods, I guess. Maybe when I was lifting the moonman. Without a word from me, the Cheese checked the glove box and came up with half a pack of Pall Malls. She tapped out two.

  “Got a light, mister?”

  I fished my Zippo out of my pants pocket and handed it to her. She lit the pair and handed one to me. We smoked. This was that moment, when I needed to cut loose my past . . .

  “Look, Stilton, before, I was a louse. I’m really sorry—”

  “Sorry? You kidding? You ask a lot of guys to carry a dead, wet moonman through the woods they’d be barfing up their toenails.” She leaned over and gave me a smoky smooch on the cheek.

  I wanted to throw her across the seat and hammer her like Martin Luther on the church door, such was the power of forgiveness, but I wasn’t done confessing. (It does occur to me that perhaps it was best that I never heard back from the seminary as a kid, though.)

  “Look, that’s sweet, but I swore to myself that if I got you back, I’d come clean. I don’t want to lie to you anymore. I was never a soldier. I didn’t go to war. Spent the war welding ships at Hunters Point and I slept in a warm, dry place with no one shooting at me every night. I hurt my foot in a warehouse accident the day before Pearl Harbor. I’m a phony. A coward.”

  “I see no evidence of that.” Sip of Coke, drag on her smoke. “None. Never have.”

  “But I lied to you.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “I let you think I served, fought, but I didn’t.”

  “You would have, if you could, right?”

  “Yeah, I tried to sneak into the service. Left home in Idaho to come here, to see if the navy might take me. And I never even wrote my folks. I couldn’t. I lost two brothers in the war. I couldn’t go back after that.”

  “Because you thought it would be better on your folks to lose three sons?”

  “That’s nothing like you went through.”

  All of a sudden tears sort of shot down her face and I almost drove into a ditch before I looked back at the road. “Hey, don’t cry, Toots. It’s okay.”

  And she hauled off and punched me in the arm at the same time she let out a big sob and a little hint of a smile. “You jerk.”

  I’ll take that. I deserved it.

  She sniffled, wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “Look, Sammy, I don’t want to lie to you, either. Thing is, the whole husband-killed-in-the-war, yeah, that happened. But I didn’t turn into a grieving mess for the rest of the war. I barely knew the guy. We’d been going out a couple of weeks when he got called up. I was just out of high school, and James, that was his name, he says he can’t go off to war and not have anyone to come home to, so he asks me to marry him. I said yes. It was the right thing to do, right? That’s what everyone told me. He was an okay guy, but I hadn’t even run him through the books to see if he’d pencil out as a husband. So I did the right thing and in a few days he went off to boot camp and I saw him once again before he shipped out to the Pacific. That was it. He wrote me all the time, and I wrote him, too, but I didn’t even know what to say to him. He met my folks at the wedding, for Christ’s sakes. Everyone acted like I was supposed to make this nice little home for us, keep the home fires burning, but it was all fake. We didn’t have a life together, we didn’t even have a place together. I was still living with my folks. So when I got the chance to work at the shipyard I took it, and I moved to Richmond, and nights I went home to a room in a residency hotel where I shared a bathroom with seven other girls. It was okay, I guess. The pay was good, I learned how to do something useful. Well, useful during the war, anyways. On the weekends a bunch of us girls would come into the city, have some fun. After he was killed, coming into the city, talking to the boys who were shipping out, that’s what I looked forward to. I was lonely and alone and it made me feel special. I didn’t love James. He was a guy I knew who didn’t make it back. There were a lot of them. So much for the tragic, heartbroken war widow, huh? Pretty horrible, huh?” She wasn’t crying anymore. She was kind of daring me to shoot her down. Petulant, I guess.

  “I think you’re pretty swell,” I said.

  “No you don’t.”

  I looked up ahead, where there was a turnout, so I wouldn’t hit a tree or go into the river if I pulled off, and so I did. I pulled off and I set the parking brake and I turned to her.

  “Yeah, I do,” I told her. “And forget about before, all about before. I know I’ve only known you a week, but it’s long enough to know that I want to know you another week, and another week after that, and as many weeks as there are, that’s how many weeks I want to know you. That’s how swell I think you are.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” I released the brake and put the car in gear and pulled back on River Road.

  I drove for a little bit and she held her Coke in her lap like a kid holding a kitten.

  “Me too,” she said.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Okay then,” I said. And I drove some more. We passed back by the Bohemian Grove driveway and I hunched down a little. I couldn’t help it.

  “I’m also somewhat wanted by the law for knocking out a cop and walking away from a work detail.”

  “The cop that was in the car before?”

  “Nah, a different cop. Long time ago.”

  “Was he a jerk to you?”

  “Made fun of my foot.”

  “Ah, he had it coming.” And she patted my knee in sympathy.

  We drove for a minute, quiet, sort of basking in the sweetness of it.

  “You know,” I said, “maybe if you’re nice, later on I’ll let you touch the stick of sorrow.”

  She snorted a laugh. “That is the worst come-on line I ever heard.”

  “I don’t know, you were crying the last time.”

  “So were you, tough g
uy.”

  “That is not tr—”

  But I didn’t get to finish, because there was a noise right behind my head, like a bird hitting the windshield, except it was the back window, and when I turned, when the Cheese turned, he was there—right there—his big, black, almond eyes staring in the window, his little tree-frog hands against it. He was making a frantic chirping noise.

  “Holy crap!” said the Cheese, diving up on the dash, and I let loose a very manly scream myself and tried not to wreck the car.

  The moonman was alive.

  22

  Nonplussed

  The Cheese and I were more than somewhat nonplussed. I pulled the Ford off the road and we sat there, staring straight ahead, listening to him back there.

  “Maybe he’ll go off into the forest,” said the Cheese. “Just give him some time.”

  I sneaked a peek out of the corner of my eye. The moonman was looking right back at me, his little gray mug only a foot away, which was closer than I am strictly comfortable being with a creature from outer space. He made a clicking noise.

  “He’s not going away,” I said.

  “You think he’s sore I put him in the ice machine?”

  I sneaked another peek.

  “I can’t tell. He looks the same as when he was dead, except he’s moving.”

  “Well do something,” she said.

  “I am doing something. I’m thinking.”

  “That’s not doing something.”

  I wanted to tell her he was her moonman, so she could do something, but that was not the check I just wrote by professing unending weeks of love for her, more or less. So, while the moonman chattered, I tried to put myself in his place. If I were a moonman, and I suddenly woke up in a strange rumble seat on a strange planet, what would I want? I thought of when I have been the only one of a kind in a bunch of different guys. When I was on the welding crew with all the black guys, Lone Jones gave me a sandwich. The first time I went into Chinatown at night, Eddie Moo Shoes bought me an eggroll, and both those guys were still pals.

  “Give him one of your cheese crackers,” I told the Cheese.

  “Yeah?” she asked, looking at the last of her Nabs, reclining in cellophane on her lap. She picked it up with two fingers, cranked the window down just enough to get her hand through, then closed her eyes and held the cracker out the window with all of the caution of sliding a cheeseburger through the bars to a bear.

  I watched the whole thing from my side. The moonman stopped chattering. Reached out with his thin little tree frog fingers. Yeah, I call them that because there were little round pads on the end of his fingers. I don’t know if they were sticky, because until a minute before I didn’t think he would be needing them for anything, especially wrangling cheese and peanut butter crackers.

  “Does he like it?” asked the Cheese, who still had her eyes scrunched shut like she was at a creature feature and Boris Karloff was about to strangle some hapless dame who had a sprained ankle.

  “He’s sniffing it, I think,” I said. “Although he doesn’t really have a nose.”

  The moonman looked directly at me, which gave me a case of the willies that shook me to my very scrotum, but he seemed to be saying, “What’s the tune, June?” Or would have been if he were a jazzy cat like Moo Shoes.

  I gestured for him to try giving it a taste, with my best mime of give it a taste and chew like you have lips. (If the moonman had lips, they were very minimal indeed.)

  So he gave it a lick, with a very black and shiny tongue, and a second later popped the whole thing in his mouth and appeared to swallow it whole. He then reached around and tapped on the window through which the Cheese had just handed the cracker.

  “What’s he doing?” she asked.

  “He wants another one,” I told her. “And you can look. He just ate it, normal-like.”

  “Does he look ticked off?”

  “Nah, although he has no lips, no nose, and when he blinks, a little window-washing membrane seems to go across his eye like a frog. I’d say from his expression he thinks you are swell.”

  “I don’t have any more.”

  “Maybe we should get some real chow,” I suggested, like it was as natural as could be to have a live moonman in the rumble seat.

  “I’ll bet he’s thirsty,” said the Cheese. “I drank my Coke.”

  That was it, then. I put the Ford in gear, revved her up, and threw some gravel as I popped the clutch and headed out. Just as I hoped, my takeoff threw the moonman back in the rumble seat. In fact, he looked a little worried as we went, his little froggy hands clutching on the edge of the seat, his eyes just over the edge.

  “You’re scaring him,” said the Cheese.

  “Good. We’re even then.”

  We were going to need someplace where we could eat outside—a burger stand or something. We blew past another gas station and through a dreary forest town called Guerneville, where I took a right because a sign said it would take us back to the city. Maybe ten minutes, then, over the river, winding through the redwoods, the Cheese checking on the moonman the whole time, signaling him to hang tough and be strong, signaling everything is okay, using her best Rosie the Riveter we can do it mimes through the back window. We pulled into a little burg called Sebastopol, which was a metropolis by Sonoma County standards, as it had more than one stoplight and even a hardware store, which did us no good at all. I slowed down and the Cheese mimed to the moonman to stay down, which he picked up on; he ducked down so only the mound of pink kimono wrapped around his head was visible to the world.

  “He gets it,” said the Cheese. “He understands.”

  “Sure,” I said. “You gotta figure he has some smarts. He came from outer space in a flying saucer.”

  “But he crashed,” she said. “We could have the village idiot of moonmen here.”

  “Just because a guy isn’t a great driver, does not make him a dim bulb. Besides, he might not even have been driving.” This was my first time defending a moonman, so I was still getting my pitch down. Then it hit me. “You know, usually, when a guy comes back from the dead, we show him a little more respect.”

  She turned on me with a very sour face, and I could feel she was winding up to call me nine kinds of creep for flipping a Jesus card, but then I saw the sign.

  “Look, burgers!” Big red letters at the top of a tall sign, in among a row of roadside shops—shiplap boxes with dirt pullouts large enough for about six cars each, a souvenir stand, a liquor store, the burger joint, and a junk shop next to a little fenced-in junkyard with piles of stoves and washing machines and hubcaps strung on wires. I pulled in between the burger joint and the junk shop so we weren’t in front of the window.

  “I’ll go in,” I said. “You stay with the moonman.”

  Before she could answer, the moonman vaulted out of the rumble seat and was sort of wobbling off. He walked kind of funny, or it looked funny to me, like someone was working him with strings, but then I thought maybe I should cut him a break.

  “Hey, hey, hey, buster,” said the Cheese as she jumped out of the car and took off after him. “You hold on.” Without a word, she caught him by the shoulders and steered him back to the car. She was fearless. A few minutes ago she couldn’t bear to watch him eat a cheese cracker; now she was manhandling—or, you know, dame-handling—him. “Go,” she said to me, waving me in. “I want two burgers, medium, everything but onions, some fries, and a Coke. One for the moonman.”

  “That all?”

  “I wouldn’t complain if you came back with a pack of smokes and a pint of Old Tennis Shoes.”

  “Got it,” I said. I sort of stumbled a little myself, looking back as I headed into the burger joint. She was putting Pookie O’Hara’s fedora on the moonman, which fit perfectly, with enough brim to cover his big shiny eyes, and she got the pink kimono on him, belted and draped in such a way so that if you were not looking closely, you would think he was just a perfectly normal moonman in a cop’s hat wearing a
floor-length pink kimono.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, when I came out with our sack of snacks, the moonman and the Cheese were not there. I flirted with panic a second before I spotted her bright polka-dot dress across the lot at the junk shop. She was waving me on, like everything was fine, so I shrugged and went over to the liquor store, where I picked up a pack of smokes and a pint of whisky as instructed. If we get out of this alive, the Cheese and I should probably think about cutting back on the sauce, I thought.

  Back at the car the Cheese was holding a cardboard box full of junk and wearing a big smile.

  “Look, he picked out a bunch of stuff.”

  The moonman stood next to her, looking excitedly at the box. It held parts of old radio parts, doorbell batteries, a screwdriver, rusted pliers, a bunch of parts from things I didn’t recognize, and a tarnished cornet with one working valve.

  “Hey, he likes jazz,” I told her, trying to be enthusiastic.

  “We got the whole box for a buck and a quarter. You should have seen him, he was running around that junkyard like he was the boss, his little kimono trailing behind him. Pointing at this and that, chirping and clicking to beat the band.”

  The moonman clicked and chattered to back her up. I noticed a skinny guy in overalls coming out of the junk shop to give us the hairy eyeball again. I could guess what had happened. He didn’t even see the moonman. The Cheese bounced into his junk shop out here on the tapered end of the turd of Shit’s Creek, and he was stunned by her radiance, his mouth watering like a squirrel licking his nuts, while the moonman ransacked his wares. Now he was coming to his senses. I understood.

  “We’d better eat these down the road, doll,” I said, returning the hayseed’s hairy eyeball in kind.

  “I’ll put the junk in the rumble seat and he can ride up here with us,” she said.

  “Put the junk up here with us,” I said.

  With the junk between us, and the moonman in the back, I headed down the road a few miles to a shady spot under a huge oak tree at the edge of a pasture. I parked the car and a picnic was had. Me and the Cheese sat on the blanket munching our burgers, while the moonman sat over by the fence with his box of junk, chirping and clicking and having a grand old time. Some Holsteins stood nearby chewing grass and whatnot and doing other cow things, such as standing by the fence looking content and chewing some more.