It wouldn’t be right to say that the whole thing began when Clover found the dead guy in the weeds. Clearly, malfeasance had been afoot long before, but up until that moment, life in Yorktown was as it had been for years.
“Shhht. Here she comes.” York leaned his head back against the dirt and gravel hillside and felt the low vibration. He loved that vibration. It brought back memories of being young and adventuresome, of being light of spirit and easy of conscience. Those were the days when a young man could ride the rails in relative safety and earn himself a life. “A couple miles off yet. She’s late.” He pulled back the frayed cuffs of his layered coat, sweater, shirt, and thermals and consulted the battered watch on his thin wrist. It had stopped two years earlier, but York, being blind, didn’t know that. He had to keep up appearances, so he consulted the dead watch and repeated himself. “Real late.”
“Stupid government,” said Sly. He rubbed his long gray hair out of his eyes with a frustrated hand. “Trains are the key to our salvation, and the government’s ruining them. The government’s going to ruin this country. Atlas is just gonna shrug and we’ll all be in for it.”
“Yeah, yeah, shut the fuck up,” said Denny.
“Hey,” York said. York didn’t like that kind of language. He wished they would be quiet so he could enjoy the vibration and the anticipation of the train yet again. As long as the trains came by, as long as York heard them, felt them, remembered them, he wasn’t dead yet. “I toil in a garden of souls, Lord,” he said raising his sightless eyes to the sky, “and though my back grows weary, the harvest remains meager.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Denny. He poked a square forefinger out of a hole in his too-small knit gloves and felt around under the square of canvas he was lying on. He, too, felt his heart pump a little harder when the train came by. No matter how many trains had come down those tracks in the years he’d lived with York, the wonder of the giant machinery making its way always brought out the little boy in him. He recognized that feeling in the others, too. “Wonder where Clover is,” he said.
Nobody answered him because just then the Western Express blew its customary three blasts on the horn. York smiled, a snaggletoothed, raggedy-faced smile, and raised his hand in a return salute. The train rambled by on its early-evening run, kicking up dust and sparks from the tiny fire it was Sly’s job to tend.
“Idiot!” Sly screamed at the huge metal wheels as they ground by, their rails rocking loosely. He scrambled around to find something to shield the fire, but, of course, by the time he grabbed a nasty, crumpled old sheet of corrugated tin, the train was long past and whistling on down the road. “Trying to make up the time,” Sly said. “Blow us off the planet on its way. Stupid government.” He kicked at the coals and threw the tin back onto a pile of junk. “Coffee’s ready, York.”
The smart thing would have been for Sly to make a permanent shield for the fire out of the sheet metal, but Sly wasn’t smart, York didn’t see the problem, and Denny didn’t care. One day Clover would fix it, Sly would find something else to scream about, York would never know the difference, and Denny still wouldn’t care. Their system worked.
And it had worked thus far for York and the ever-changing landscape of his companions for a dozen years or more. Yorktown was known in the rail riding community as a safe place, where you kept your weapons to yourself and your foul language inside your mouth. Where there was a pretty girl, sometimes, who would talk about girl things in a girl voice and bring back memories of different times and different places and women that had been of those times and places long past. But you kept your hands to yourself. You shared your food and others shared theirs with you. You didn’t steal, you knew right from wrong, and you behaved yourself.
Not like most of the hobo camps around the country, where any one of the denizens would slit your throat for the price of a jug—or these days, a fix. Where rats would chew holes in your clothes while you slept. Where keeping your hands to yourself wasn’t an issue; you were more likely to be beaten and raped as you slept.
Yorktown was safe from the prying eyes of those walking the street above, with its barrier of tall tangle of blackberry canes. A slim path wound down through those towering brambles, down the hill from the street to their little city, walled with stack and stacks of newspapers pilfered from the mission donation box by the gas station. These newspapers, over the years, with the rain and the sun, became solid walls, tough as brick, and as the bottom layers composted away, the walls sank and eventually had to be fortified on top with fresh bundles. Yorktown was a maze of walls about three feet high. Each citizen had his own bedroom, a not-so-private latrine had been dug off to the west, a jug of water dripped into the dirt not far from the fire pit and the coffeepot, and a guest area was available for the occasional visitor. A half dozen old, cracked white buckets littered the yard and were available as seats for visiting dignitaries.
Yorktown was safe all right, and men dropped in on a regular basis, but they didn’t stay. It was too much like home. Or church. These folks were on the road because they wanted their freedoms, and most of them would never understand that their kind of freedom was also its own kind of prison.
York, Sly and Denny were the only true free ones, or so York liked to think. They had government, they had laws, they had punishments and disciplines. York looked upon Sly and Denny as his children, and he tried to do right by them. He was their father, their mentor, their governor, their teacher, judge and landlord, all in one. Just like a dad.
And they were young enough to be his boys, too. York had lost count of the seasons, but he reckoned he was nearing his seventies, if not already among them. His sight had begun to dim twenty years previous; too many years in the California sun had burned his eyes right through.
Sly was the first to join York on anything resembling a permanent basis. A man disappointed in life, who one day set down his wallet and his car keys and walked away. His anger had changed from volatile to showmanship over the years; he still acted angry because it was the only way he knew how to act, but York didn’t think Sly was really all that angry anymore. He had nothing to be angry about. Sly was middle aged and healthy, tall and thin, with dark, dark eyes and a swarthy complexion that took kindly to the hot sun. His hair, once dark, had silvered, and his once-handsome face had hardened until his nose seemed beaked and his lips too thin. Sly adored his conspiracy theories, and wasn’t above spending his evening making up new ones, though he was still able to go out and work a day job now and then when they needed something serious. Sometimes he just did it to prove to himself that he still could. He’d go up into town and sign on for a labor crew for a day, and come home with a fistful of cash and, like as not, a fresh smell, having found himself a bath and haircut. Nothing makes a man feel like a man more than bringing home the bacon. And when Sly got to crying, which he sometimes did, York would gently suggest that he go do a little work for some boss somewhere and rekindle his appreciation for his freedom. It always worked.
Denny showed up half a dozen summers ago. Denny was a young rat yet, seemed like so many of the rail riders were young’uns. Maybe that was because York had outlived most of his cronies, maybe because life didn’t have much to offer the young ones anymore. Denny never worked. Sometimes he came home with things, and sometimes money, and York knew that Denny stole, but he never stole from York or Sly, and so he didn’t cross any boundaries set up in Yorktown. Denny was a young stud, sturdily built, with lots of thick, light-brown hair and a beautiful set of naturally white teeth. Girls gravitated to his easy smile and his shy demeanor, but Denny wasn’t the settling-down type, and so he mentioned that to every one of them almost as soon they met. It kept life less complicated.
Clover liked Denny, and they’d been something of an item for the past year or so, although Clover had a lot of good common sense and wasn’t about to do anything permanent with one of the losers who lived down by the tracks. She had a job and she kept her own place in town. She never let any of them into it, though, and kept pretty closemouthed about who she was and what she did. Sometimes York’s heart ached for her. He’d never seen her with his traitorous eyes, but she was as pretty a soul as he’d ever come across, giving him a part of her paycheck every week, making sure they all had toothbrushes and vitamins and something to eat besides roasted rodent. They were pretty self-sufficient, but sometimes they were so lonely it even made York want to cry along with Sly. Then the girl would come tripping down the trail through the berry bushes, her gait unmistakable, and the air would lighten up, and they would encourage her to read to them, or to tell them stories, or just talk in her sweet girl voice.
If York had a wife, or a daughter, or a granddaughter, he’d want them all to be like Clover. They all loved her, and they all dreamed about her, but Denny was the only one who ever touched her. Maybe because he was allowed. York had never tried; he didn’t know about Sly. They all tried to concentrate on other things while Denny and the girl sneaked off for some privacy together, but it didn’t work. Those were perhaps the loneliest of times. But then they’d come back, and the girl would be bubbly and giggly and they’d all imagine it was them that made her that way, and that lightened the mood considerably.
York wasn’t alone in his ministry. He’d never have been able to do all he had done in this place without the girl, God bless her.
Life was good, stable, sweet, and freedoms were assured.
Until the afternoon that Clover found that dead guy. It was a full moon, of course it was a full moon, it had to be. Full moons were always trouble. York knew a full moon without having to see one. Full moons tugged on the tide of reason, and nobody was quite in their right mind during a full moon. It was the first evening of the July full moon when the Western Express screeched down the rails and that guy hit the ground and rolled to within a hundred feet of Yorktown.
He wasn’t quite dead at first. He moaned, and that’s how she found him.
She’d just come down the hill, still wearing her pink donut-shop uniform, hair tied up in a ponytail, worn-out sneakers and bare legs, toting a bagful of day-old, when she stopped mid-step and said, “What’s that?”
“What?” Denny said, rousing himself at the sound of her voice.
“You didn’t hear that?”
“C’mere with them donuts,” Denny said.
“Over there,” the girl said, pitched the bag to Denny and stomped through the weeds.
A low moan wavered across the dry litter, and this time everybody heard it. Then he coughed, and it was a jelly cough that put Denny right off the raspberry-filled donut he’d been about to bite.
Sly was up and running ahead of the girl the minute he heard it. Somebody in trouble. Somebody in bad trouble. “I’ve heard dead guys before,” he said, leaping over trash and stumbling up and over the pile of old railroad ties. “I’ve seen lots of them in Vietnam, both the dead and the dying. This one’s almost there.”
York sat up and listened, his nose twitching in the wind. He smelled trouble, and it reached farther than the man who lay dying in the weeds. “Tell me what you find,” he commanded in a whisper that only Denny heard. “Crushed chest, broken bones, mashed-up face.”
Denny dropped the jelly-filled donut into the bag and tossed it aside. He sat up, stood, and brushed dust off his ragged Levis and ran his dusty fingers through his hair.
“Thrown from the train,” York said. “By a big man wearing a red-and-blue-plaid shirt. I seen it. I seen it all in a dream.”
“He’s dead,” Sly yelled. “Dead as hell.”
“Full moon,” York whispered.
“We need to call an ambulance,” Clover said.
“He’s way past an ambulance,” Sly said. “Dude needs a hearse.”
“York?” Denny asked, worried. Somebody needed to get control of this situation before it controlled all of them.
York reshuffled his stack of old sofa cushions, lay back, and sighed. “Hold on to your hats, boys,” he said. “We’re in for a ride.”
Sly and Clover came stomping back through the weeds. “We need to put a sheet or something over him,” she said. “His face is all mashed up. There’s flies.”
“You know about dead people?” Sly asked nobody in particular. “They’re so quiet. They’re so still. I don’t think I could ever get used to dead people.”
“I gotta see,” Denny said, and wandered off.
“Maybe I should just go call the cops,” Clover said.
“No, no, God, no, fuck no,” Sly said.
“Your language.”
“Yeah, sorry, York, no, no cops,” Sly said. “Don’t call the cops. They’ll start files on all of us. I don’t want to be in a government computer.”
“He’s got family somewhere,” Clover said. “They need to know about him.”
“It’s what they’ve been waiting for,” Sly said. “There’s always someone just sitting around waiting for one of us out here to screw up so they can arrest us and clean out our place here and put in a parking lot or some kind of a development or something.”
“Yeah, this is really valuable land,” Clover said with a smirk. “Right next to the railroad tracks.”
“You know they don’t like us,” Sly said. “You call the government about that dead guy, and we’re all as good as locked up in jail forever. They’ll blame it all on us. Murder One, kids.”
“No, they won’t,” Clover said. “We don’t know anything about that guy.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Call the cops,” York said.
“What?” Sly said. “You’re kidding.”
“We didn’t kill him. We don’t know anything about him. Call the cops, they’ll come investigate, and everything will be fine,” York said. He knew the chances were slim that they’d be able to escape the moon that easily, but it was worth a try.
“Yeah, Sly, we can’t just bury him,” Clover said. “People will be looking for him.”
“Who?” Denny asked from the field. “Why would they look here?”
“The people who killed him know where they dumped him,” York said. “And they don’t know that he is dead.”
“Bringing in the cops is a bad idea, York,” Sly said.
“What about the people who love that guy?” Clover countered.
“Love,” Sly scoffed. “I say we bury him and shut up about it.”
“We think we should call the cops,” Clover said, crossing her arms over her chest defiantly and moving to stand closer to York.
“Sly’s got a point,” York said. “Let’s sit on it for a while. He ain’t going nowhere. We don’t even need to say we knew he was there until we all start to smell him.”
“In a while it’ll be dark,” Clover said. “You just going to leave him there by himself all night long?”
“There’s footprints all around him,” Denny said, standing at the top of the pile of ties. “Pretty obvious people have been looking at his dead ass. Look what I found.”
In his hand was a roll of cash with a rubber band around it.
“Hey,” Sly said, tripping over himself to scramble up to see the money. “Let me see.”
“Back off,” Denny said.
“Oh, no,” Clover said. “York . . . ?” But as she turned to look at him, to beseech him to help the boys deal with their jealousies and greed, she saw something that disturbed her even more. “Hey,” she called to the guys who were squaring off at each other at the tie pile. Reluctantly, they looked down at her. She pointed with her chin, and they all looked.
Ed, a toothless, smelly, alcoholic transient was headed their way, bedroll on his shoulder.
Denny shoved the wad of cash into his pocket and then shoved Sly as he hopped down off the stack of creosote-soaked lumber. “Hey, Ed,” Denny said, then grabbed Clover and pulled her down onto his canvas with him.
Ed looked as though he didn’t hear. He was short and thin and nervous. “York?” he said when he got close enough. “Hey, York?” He dropped his bed into the dirt, then stood humbly, wringing his black knit hat.
“Hi, Ed,” York said.
“Kin I stay a while?”
“You sober?”
“Not exactly.”
“Got the law after ya?”
Ed was silent, twisting and twisting that poor hat. He was dirty, and hadn’t shaved, but somehow, his thick white hair looked clean and shiny.
“You can’t be drinking and puking around here, Ed,” Sly said. “Last time you were here you puked on my bed. And then the law came down here and hassled us. You can’t be bringing the law down here anymore.”
“York?” Ed said, trying to ignore Sly.
“We live clean, Ed,” York said.
“Just one night please? I got no drink. I need to sleep, just one night where I don’t hafta keep an eye out.”
“One night,” York said, and Sly moaned his disapproval.
Ed, his head down, not making eye contact with anybody, scuffled around until he’d cleared himself a little space, then threw down his bedroll, took off his shoes and climbed between the layers. He looked like a little gray-haired dog, snuggled down in his dog bed.
Clover picked up the bag of day-old and disentangled herself from Denny’s amorous advances. “No,” Denny protested, trying to snag the bag away from her. “Not the gooey ones.”
She parried him efficiently, stood up, brushed the dust and weed seeds from her uniform and walked over to Ed. “You probably shouldn’t eat much more sugar, Ed,” she said. “But I think there’s a bagel or two in there.”
A grimy hand slipped out of the blanket and snatched the bag. The girl never saw his face.
“Bless you, Clover,” York said.
She smiled at him.
Sly knelt down next to York and whispered harshly. “What about the . . . the . . .” He gestured toward the body and then toward Denny, his gestures falling, of course, on blind eyes.
“Shhht,” York came back just as harshly. “It’ll all wait until morning.”
He was wrong.
~ ~ ~
When the moon was full up, Denny slipped out of his sleeping bag, pulled on his boots and then made for town, that roll of cash hot and urgent in his pocket.
He felt free and happy and light as a hummingbird. He was putting one over on that stupid Sly, thanks to Ed’s intervention, and he was putting one over on that dead guy by taking his cash, and he was putting one over on God, for finding a windfall when God had never seen fit to give Denny anything worthwhile before. Ever.
Except maybe the girl. Denny had lucked out on that, but he knew it wouldn’t last. She had a job and an apartment, and though she slept under his blanket with him some nights all night long, it was just because she was lonely and he was clean. Some nice girl like that was going to find herself a real boyfriend someday, and then she wouldn’t come around him anymore the way she did with her soft skin. But, hey, while it was handy, he would help himself.
But, right now, there was only one thing on Denny’s mind, and it wasn’t quiff. It was steak. A big thick one, red inside and oozing juice with a baked potato dripping with butter and sour cream and a frosty Heineken he could suck right out of the bottle. Oh, yeah.
He passed by the low-down no-name bar where most of who he knew hung out, and headed uptown—not too far, just far enough to get himself a good meal. Tomorrow night he’d start earlier, and he’d bring York. York could use a good steak dinner. York and the girl, yeah, he’d treat them both.
Just before he opened the door to the steakhouse that had the dark, low-lit lounge where he could eat at the bar, Denny stopped to smell the night.
He loved the night. He loved the fact that he, and others like him, were alone in the night while almost everybody slept. There was less mental static in the atmosphere. Heads were clearer, senses were heightened. He breathed in deeply through his nose and as he did, his eyes rested on the moon, smaller now, and higher up than when he first awoke. It wasn’t exactly full—tomorrow night the moon would be solid round—it still had a little flat spot on the upper right. Denny loved the moon. The moon was the main reason he slept outside—always had, even as a kid. When he turned over in the night, and his eyes flashed open for that instant, if he could see the moon, or the light that flowed from it that turned the world black and silver, he felt safe.
It was a good omen indeed that there was a big moon tonight. He had money in his jeans, he had a nice rare steak in his immediate future, he had adventure in his soul, and he had a moon to watch over him.
Life was sweet.
In the men’s room, he washed his hands and face, finger-combed his brown hair away from his face, and then went into a stall to count the cash. The rubber band broke as he tried to slip it off the roll, the money unfurled and he almost dropped half of it into the toilet. So he sat down and counted it out into his lap.
Six hundred and forty dollars in twenties.
That was good, and that was very good.
It was good because it wasn’t thousands. A man could have and lose six hundred bucks, no big deal. The dead guy could lose it, and Denny could have it. No questions, not like the questions that would be asked if the dead guy had five hundred thousand dollars on him or something like that. That would be serious business indeed. But six hundred and forty dollars? Nothing more than a solid week’s paycheck.
So it was good because it wasn’t serious money, and it was very good because it was Denny’s.
He folded the bills, stuffed them into his pocket and went in for his feast.
The restaurant was closed, the lights dim and the chairs up on top of the tables. The lounge was still open but quiet. Two women sat at the end of the bar, smoking and talking intently. Two cowboys played pool at the far end of the room. The air in the place tasted foul.
The jukebox was silent, and the rolled-and-tucked black vinyl booths and matching, low-wheeled chairs around small round tables spoke of a hundred affairs and a thousand heartbreaks.
Denny looked at the two women, who were surely talking about men, and the two men, surely wishing they were with women, and he thought this was perhaps the loneliest place on the planet.
He sat at the bar, ordered his meal, then swiveled around and leaned against it with his Heineken in his hand. He watched the men play pool until they didn’t want him to watch them anymore. They were very clear about that.
Denny didn’t want any trouble, so he turned back around and began watching the women. They didn’t even notice him.
They weren’t old, but they had been used. Denny guessed that any women smoking and drinking alone together in a bar around midnight had problems he couldn’t even imagine. And they all revolved around being used and being tossed aside. He knew the feeling. He’d been tossed aside a few times by a few women, and he had learned. Do the tossing. Don’t never put yourself in a position to get tossed aside again.
He reckoned that someday a woman would blindside him and hit him so hard and so fast that he didn’t see it coming, and when that happened, he’d fall deep into love and put himself at risk. And that would be fine, but until that happened, he kept his distance. The girl, Clover, she was starting to get under his skin a little bit—she was so damned cute!—but he could still walk away, no problem.
The food came, and with it, a fresh beer, and he sliced into that rare beef and put the first heavenly bite into his mouth.
He never got to the second one, nor the baked potato that was awash with butter, sour cream, chives and bacon bits, or the steaming fresh green hunk of broccoli that looked like something he’d been longing for, but hadn’t realized it until he saw it. No, Denny only got one bite of steak before the door opened and the shouting started.
The door opened, and the first indication Denny had that trouble was about to erupt was when the worn-out blonde whispered to her companion, “Oh, shit.” Denny swallowed his steak and turned to look.
A rangy-looking guy in a tank shirt, jeans, and a huge belt buckle, with long gray hair pulled back into a ponytail, came in. He had a couple days’ growth on his chin and a storm brewing behind brown eyes.
“I ain’t talkin’ to you no more, Norman,” the blonde said. “I’m done cryin’, and I’m done beggin’ and I’m flat-out done with you.”
“You come on home now, Christine,” Norman said in a very low voice. It was a voice Denny knew well. It was the voice of violence being held in control by the tiniest of fraying threads.
“No, I told you.”
“Come on, Christine. Stop all this now and come home to your children.” He moved slowly toward her, and Denny watched the man’s fingers curl.
“She said she ain’t going,” the redhead said.
Norman ignored her. “Christine?”
“Go away,” Christine said.
Denny looked at that lovely slab of meat on his plate and said good-bye to it. He knew that he couldn’t stand by and have this woman go home with this man, nor could he watch whatever steps that man was about to take in order to make her go with him. Whatever was going to happen, the steak and the potato and the broccoli wasn’t going to taste nearly as good when it was all over.
Denny turned toward the situation. “Go home, Norman,” he said. “Cool off. She’ll come home when she’s ready.”
“This ain’t about you,” Norman said, never taking his eyes off his woman.
“You bring it into this place, you disturb my meal, you make it about me.”
Christine flashed him a smile of gratitude, and that was just exactly the wrong thing for her to do.
The cowboys, pool cues in hand, moved in closer. The girls huddled. Norman spun on his heel and gave Denny a punch in the side of the head that knocked him off his stool. One of the cowboys cracked Norman over the head with the cue, and got tossed onto the pool table for his trouble. The girls started screaming, the bartender came out from the back, took one look and skedaddled out of sight.
Denny, eyes not working just exactly right, stood up. “Go on home, Norman,” he said again, and thought that was perhaps the wrong thing to say under the circumstances. Norman picked up the broken pool cue and came at Denny with it.
Denny, younger and healthier, with adrenaline running hot, ducked and parried and danced Norman around a little bit, at least until the flashing red and blue lights shone through the small tavern windows.
“Cops!” Christine yelled. Denny looked at her just at the wrong moment, and that fat stick of wood caught him square in the forehead.
Vaguely, he heard sound swirling around him, mixed in with the thick black air, and he felt himself slowly falling through it. Someone was touching him, someone was pulling on his clothes, and he tried to speak, but his tongue was fumbled and there was cotton in his ears and everything seemed so far away. Oh, yeah, and his head hurt in a way it had never hurt before. This wasn’t like a headache; this was like a pain so large he saw it instead of feeling it. And he could feel the sounds. Too many sounds, too loud, echoing in his head until he thought he would puke. He had to get up. He had to get out of there. He had to get outside where it was cool, God he was hot, he had to get away from the noises, from the activity, he had to get out. Out under the comforting influence of the moon.
Getting out was not as easy as he thought. His legs didn’t work right. He squirmed like a bug on the floor.
Then a cool hand was on his head, and a rag so cold he thought it would burn him was on his forehead, and a soft voice cut through all the rest and it said, “Shhh, just relax.”
He followed orders well, Denny did, and he was happy to follow these.
A few minutes later, he opened his eyes and saw the redhead looking down at him. “Hi,” she said. “You going to be all right?”
Denny didn’t know the answer to that.
“Boy, you got a knot the size of a suckling pig up there where Norman cracked you.”
A trembling hand found the knob on his forehead, and it felt as big as a handle, and it made him go weak in the knees again, even though he was lying flat on the floor, his head resting on something soft.
“He stole your money,” the girl said, “and ran out the back. Christine went with him, the silly bitch.”
Denny didn’t remember having any money worth stealing.
“Cops said if you want to make a complaint, to call them.”
Money. Money. The money! Oh, man. . . . No dinner, no money, no nothing but a doorknob in the middle of his forehead. He wanted to get up. She helped him.
“I said I thought you ought to go to the hospital,” she kept talking, breathing bourbon breath into his face, “but someone said you lived by the railroad tracks and that you weren’t gonna die, so they just left you. Is that true? You live down by the tracks?”
“Now I can’t pay for my meal,” Denny said, feeling the emptiness in his jeans pocket. He stood on unsteady legs, the redhead helping him. He felt like crying. “I wanted to pay for my meal.”
“It’s okay, hon,” she said. “I paid for it, and I’ll get Christine to pay me back.”
“I want to sit outside,” he said, and he leaned against her like an old drunk as they walked between the tables and out the door into the night.
It wasn’t cool, it was still and kind of sticky. But it didn’t stink; at least it didn’t stink like cigarettes and stale beer. It stunk like the refinery and diesel fuel, but at least it stunk like outside and not like inside. He sat on the curb and she sat next to him for a few minutes until his head cleared and all that was left of the incident was an empty pocket and a severe headache.
When he felt better, she walked with him to a pancake house, and they settled under the bright lights in a corner booth. She ordered coffee for both of them, then, as if she owned the place, walked behind the counter, got a damp cloth, filled it with ice, and brought it back to him for his forehead.
The cold made him see floating globes of light for a moment, but then it felt good.
“You’re kinda young to be living down by the tracks,” she said. “And cute. I bet you clean up real good. You’ve got that Tom Cruise thing going on about you, with that hair and that smile.”
“I’m twenty-eight.”
“I thought only old, has-been guys lived down there.”
He had no answer for that, so he sipped his coffee. It made his headache worse.
“Where’d you get that kind of money, living down by the tracks?”
“Off a dead guy,” he said, then wished he hadn’t.
“Yeah, okay, I’m just trying to be nice to you.”
“You are nice. And pretty.” That made her smile shyly and look down at the pattern in the Formica. It was true, he realized, if she wouldn’t put so much dark red in her hair, she’d be prettier, but she was probably not yet forty, and she had a smile that lit up her whole face. “I mean it. A real dead guy. Fell off the train.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.” That’s enough talk about the dead guy, he thought. He should never have mentioned it. He wasn’t going to mention it again. “What’s your name?”
“Brenda.”
“I’m Denny. You married, Brenda?”
“Not anymore.”
“Got anybody who’s likely to come in here and bust my head again over having coffee with you?”
She smiled, that fine smile again. “Nope. Nobody.”
He looked at her with mock suspicion. “You’re not seeing anybody?”
She shook her head.
“Pity,” he said, then picked up his coffee cup and clinked it with hers.
“You’re young.”
“Not that young.” He smiled with all the enthusiasm he had, which wasn’t much, considering the drumming that was going on inside his skull.
“I liked that you stood up for Christine when you didn’t even know her.”
“No good deed goes unpunished,” he said, then the drummers took a break to let the tubas in. They began a melancholy tune that soured his stomach. “I think I better go home.”
“Come back to my place. I’ll make you cozy on the couch.”
“Is it close?” Denny wasn’t sure he was up to walking far, maybe not even as far as his nest in Yorktown. But if he was alone, he could fall down or sit down and nobody would think anything but that he was drunk. But he didn’t want to make an ass of himself in front of Brenda, the nice redhead with the Crest Kid smile. On the other hand, he wouldn’t mind having a woman tend to his wounds for a day or two, either.
“Two blocks,” she said.
“I’m yours.”
She left two bucks on the table next to the soggy bar rag, and Denny leaned on her all the way back to her place, where he collapsed on the couch and was asleep before she could put a pillow under his head.
~ ~ ~
Brenda got a small bag of frozen peas from the freezer and put them gently on the scary-looking lump on Denny’s forehead. Then she went into the bedroom, feeling kind of hyper and excited, and called her friend Suzanne to tell her about Christine, Norman, the pool cue, Denny, and especially about the wad of money and the dead guy down by the train tracks.
Suzanne called her brother, who worked the midnight shift at the railroad. The brother thought this might be just exactly the right information to get himself promoted. He took a cup of coffee in to his supervisor, and they sat for a while, talking. The supervisor called security, and they all had a meeting about the politics and timing of when to call the police.
~ ~ ~
Denny woke up, achy and disoriented with something warm and gushy on his face. Panicked, he ripped it off, and it hit the wall with a dull thwap. He sat up slowly, the thundering inside his head making his stomach queasy. After a moment, he remembered the redhead, and her kindness. He touched the egg on his forehead and wondered that his skull hadn’t cracked with the blow. Maybe it had.
The moon shone through the lace curtains, casting thick shadows on the woman’s cheap furniture, and he thought of Clover, and what she would think if she saw him coming out of the redhead’s apartment in the morning while she was on her way to work. Women were funny about things like that. She’d never understand, despite his injured head, and he would find himself in a lose-lose situation. The redhead was too old for him, and he’d lose the good thing he had going with Clover.
He stood up, waited for the dizziness to pass, then walked out of Brenda’s apartment, down the hall, down the stairs and into the night.
He felt bad, like he ought to have left her a note, or some kind of a thank-you.
Then he thought about the dinner he had been going to buy for York and Clover with that money, and about the other little things he’d thought he’d do for other folks, not to mention himself, with a windfall wad of cash like that, and he lost the nausea and dizziness in a rush of anger.
York needed a new coat. Brenda needed—Brenda needed something, Denny was certain. Clover could use some new shoes. As long as he’d known her, she’d always worn those same sneakers, and the heels were worn down to the black. He hadn’t realized how much he planned to do good with that money for those who had done good for him in the past—how good he felt about himself with that six hundred and forty bucks in his jeans—until it was gone. Gone to Christine and Norman and their sicko, self-destructive ways.
Well, dammit, stealing was nothing new to Denny, only he always stole stuff to support himself. This time he’d get a few things for some other folks for a change. The thought made his heart swell.
He took a deep breath of the warm air, figured the time to be early morning by the taste of it—at least two hours to daylight, and decided if he was going to do something, he better get on with it. He willed the headache to take a hike, and then he headed uptown, toward Sears or one of those places like that, to do a little off-season Christmas shoplifting.
~ ~ ~
About the time Denny busted through the skylight of Walmart, York’s useless eyes snapped open.
He listened with heightened awareness, ever alert to intruders of both the human and the animal persuasion, creatures who could invade his territory and do harm to a bunch of defenseless old men. He heard nothing out of the ordinary, save the wheezy snoring of Ed getting his good night’s sleep.
Must be that, York thought to himself. Ed’s here. That’s what’s different.
He listened for a while longer, and heard Sly’s breathing. He didn’t hear Denny or Clover, but that didn’t surprise him. Clover was at her place, probably, and Denny usually slept with his head down inside his bag. It was a burden, being the protector of these souls, but somebody had to look out after them, and it might as well be him.
He lay there for a while, feeling the adventuresome tug of the moon. He wanted to get up and wander around, but his wandering days were long behind him. Besides which, his internal calendar told him that a check would be waiting for him at general delivery, and he had to conserve his strength so he could walk all the way to the post office in the morning.
He thought about that check and the good dry goods he could buy with that money: beans, and rice and corn and some dried meat and cheese.
Money. He remembered Denny with a wad of money in his hand.
The dead guy.
Oh, yes, the dead guy, dammit all to hell. York, being the unofficial mayor of Yorktown as well as Father Confessor and all the rest, was going to have to deal with the dead guy sooner or later.
He sighed.
It seemed that challenges like these ought to be reserved for the young. He turned his sightless eyes to the heavens and implored the gods to grant him a little peace, a respite from all these moral decisions and challenges, from all these actions he had to take. He was old and it was time for him to rest. Wasn’t it enough that he was spending his time ministering to the restless ones?
He’d spent his whole life ministering to restless souls. The first had been The Right Reverend Tecumseh Gittens, who stopped by the farm when York was just a boy. His mother had been dead for a year or so, and his father wasn’t getting sober anytime soon, so when the reverend asked him to come along and aid in the ministering, York didn’t even bother to close the front door behind him. It felt like the simple thing to do.
Over the next couple of years, they worked together, the middle-aged preacher and the young farmhand, holding tent revivals and preaching gospel in the homeless missions and the hobo camps. Eventually, York began to believe the things they said, could see some of the fruits of their labors, and the ministering became a passion.
One night, as they camped by a river somewhere in Ohio, the reverend lay down, put his head in York’s lap and told him that he loved him. York was surprised at the action, but not at the sentiment. He responded in kind, and then Tecumseh Gittens sat up, took York’s young face in his hands and said, “No, boy, I don’t think you understand. I mean I’ve fallen in love with you. I can’t deny it another minute.”
York was too surprised to do anything but look at him, and then the reverend kissed him, full on the lips, with tongue and all. York endured it because he didn’t know what else to do, and when the reverend pulled back to gaze into his beloved’s eyes, York stood up, grabbed his bedroll and walked off. Behind him, he heard the reverend calling his name, and then he heard the reverend sobbing, but York never looked back. If there had been a door to walk through, he would have left it open, just like he had at his father’s place.
He just kept on traveling, ministering, spreading the Good News, but kept himself to himself. He didn’t seek out the ladies—didn’t much have to, as they all sought him out—and certainly learned not to give the wrong impression to any man who liked his small-boned physique. He tried to resist the women—sometimes he could and sometimes he couldn’t—but he never settled down with one, something that he regretted on the occasional lonely night.
When the weariness settled into his bones too harsh to ignore, York got off a freight train, threw his bedroll down and sat on it, saying to himself that he was going to stay put for a while. And he’d been in West Wheaton ever since. He kept waiting for Tecumseh Gittens to step down off a freight one of these days, but by now, of course, he was long dead.
Still, the remembrance of that time and of his mother and of his inconsolable drunken father and the farm and his childhood gave him regrets and a simple restlessness that he tried to pray away.
But imploring the nameless, faceless force that twirled the heavens didn’t help. Never had, never would. York figured that he kept doing it just so that God didn’t forget that he was down here, living in the dirt next to the train tracks. He might be easy to overlook, there in the shadows, not much trouble, when there were so many others out making a real name for themselves. God must spend a lot of time and energy on those folks, because they surely needed it. York just needed the minimum of attention.
And the minimum was all he got.
That was just fine. He didn’t mind. He had all he needed, and he spent some good time alone with his God, trying to hear the answer to the riddle.
He closed his eyes, listening to the night and hoping for the sound of his creator’s voice, dozed again, and he waited some more, but never got any closer to wisdom. Seemed he’d had a lot more wisdom, knowledge, and the firepower to use it all when he was younger.
He kept up the dozing and the praying and the listening and the regretting until morning came, and Denny showed up rustlin’ like some damned walking rosebush with a half dozen plastic bags full of stuff, and not five minutes later, the law came wandering on down the road in a pack, looking for a dead guy and not happy at all to be finding one.
~ ~ ~
Sly had been dreaming about sailing.
He’d grown up in a sailing family, all preppy-looking people with white-toothed smiles. They wore red, white, and blue and spent evenings at the Yacht Club. His father had dark, Armenian blood, silver hair and eyes so deep brown you couldn’t see the pupils. His mother was tall and thin, with the palest of blue eyes and blondish hair she kept collected at the back of her neck with a ribbon. Young Sylvester and his baby sister Darla sailed dinghies in regattas when they were but tiny, and vacationed on yachts when they were teens. They wintered on the Italian Riviera and summered in the Hamptons. Sylvester went to prep school, but made the mistake of taking a year off to get some real life under his fingernails between prep school and college, and the Department of Defense wasted no time snagging him.
While his friends at home were drinking martinis and boffing their tennis instructors, his real friends were with him in Vietnam, dying from snakebites, bullets that blew their eyes out, self-inflicted gunshots, and fear. When it got too much, Sly closed his eyes, ducked down in the mud and went sailing. While artillery shells exploded, raining flesh all around him, limbless men screamed, napalm exploded the jungle in the wake of the airplanes, and babies were sawed in half with automatic fire from his superior officers, Sly hoisted the main and let the wind carry him out into the bay.
There was a certain feeling Sly had every time the boat left the dock. No matter what was about to happen, whether it was a week-long vacation with his family or a quick turn around the lake or a good-natured Hobie Cat competition, as soon as the boat left the dock, something inside the boy sighed, “Aaah. At last.” It was as if his body had ached to be floated, only he didn’t know it until it was happening. Floated and rocked. It was a natural feeling. It was a “way things are supposed to be” feeling.
He came home from Vietnam wrecked. He had attitude, and had no reason to give it up. He never slept a night through. He hated everybody and had contempt for everybody else. All he wanted to do was smoke dope and watch television, a sneer being the only facial expression he had left. He didn’t know why he had to be one of the guys to live when such good guys died in his arms. He hated God and was going to devote his life to exactly that endeavor. He gave his sister her first joint, took her out to get drunk on her twenty-first birthday and she died of a heroin overdose five years later. His father died of a massive coronary the following year, and his mother died of loneliness, tranquilizers, and vodka a year after that. Their attorney sold everything, per Sylvester’s instructions, and put the family money in the bank, where it sat, untouched and accumulating, unless somebody was stealing it. Sly didn’t care. He didn’t want anything to do with it. It wasn’t his. Sly told the attorney he was going to the west coast, and that he’d be in touch, but his car broke down outside of West Wheaton, and he stayed in an ugly motel by the refinery until his pocket money ran out and then, as he was walking toward the tracks, thinking of hopping a freight, he found York. He still thought of himself as being “at the beach.” He was in California, after all. It wasn’t the Chesapeake, but, hell, it was . . . probably not much more than a day’s drive to the ocean.
He felt responsible for the dissolution of the family. Three more deaths that God had caused. God should kill him instead of the good folk. That would make more sense. Even less sense was leaving him with all that money. It was ridiculous. Taking care of the family wealth was far more responsibility than he could live with.
At York’s, Sly was only responsible for his own self.
He never told anybody about his history. He never told anybody about his family, his money, prep school, or Vietnam. Well, he told people he was a veteran, and that’s about all, and that seemed to explain a whole lot to a whole lot of people, and he never could understand all of that. He felt as though people thought he’d been squeezed through a cookie press—that Vietnam had reduced him to some common denominator along with everybody else who came through that same experience. “A Vietnam vet, oh yeah, okay, now I get it.” And they looked at the lines in his face and the length of his gray hair and the attitude in his aura and nodded knowingly. “Now I get it,” they’d say.
Get what?
But he learned to hide within that guise, and then it was fine. People left him alone once they began to look at him as just another damaged, disturbed, and disposable Vietnam vet. He intimidated them, and that was just fine.
The night terrors were the worst, when he would startle himself awake time after time after time, sometimes for hours before falling into a twitchy sleep just before dawn, flashes of antipersonnel mines exploding through his head.
But the morning of the dead guy, just before the police poked him awake, he had been dreaming of sailing, something that happened every month on those three nights of the full moon. The sun was hot, the water was cold, the spray invigorating. He hauled in the main and leaned out over the side, tiller feeling strong and steady in his hand. The bow bounced on some chop left over from the water-skiers, and he grinned into the wind, feeling free and alive. He laughed out loud.
And then a boot poked him in the shoulder.
Oh, yeah. Real life.
Dead guy.