The full moon was so bright, the children ran away at bedtime. They slipped out the kitchen door and across the farmhouse porch and jumped into the silver yard. When Lillian called to them from an upstairs window, the boy, who was seven, and the girl, who was nine, ran among the blue shadows under the trees, darted out the gate to the moonlit precision of the vegetable garden, through the tractor shed and out the far side into the phosphorescent pasture, yipping and tumbling and racing. Lillian leaned on the sill and watched them run.
“You hear your mother?” Harmon hollered from the porch, and the children fell flat in the shining wet grass, pressing their hands over their mouths, panting with fear and pleasure. Their father started after them. When they heard his footsteps crunching through the shed, they broke from cover and ran on across the pasture. Lillian pushed away the curtain that fluttered against her face. “Lordy,” she murmured. “Look at that pretty moon.”
Harmon strode after the children, seized the tail of the boy’s pajama shirt and caught the girl’s thin, downy wrist. They dangled and twisted in his grasp, wild with laughter. “That’s enough,” he said quietly and led them back through the deep moonlight to the house. “Inside. Scoot.” Harmon held the screen door open, and they ran under his big arm into the kitchen. “Lillian, I got the kids. Lilly? You hear me?”
“Ummm . . .” She turned from the upstairs window.
“You hear me?”
“I hear you, Harmon.” She moved to the bedroom door as the children scrambled up the stairs. Lillian had soft, fat arms and shoulders and white, heavy legs, and her flesh rolled up from the open neckline of her blouse into the soft, deep creases of her throat. She had set her hair, clamping it flat to her head with criss-crossed bobby pins. The exposed contour of her skull seemed too small for her ponderous body.
In a little while, Lillian came down to the kitchen, stacked the supper dishes on the drainboard and left the pots and pans to soak. She took a grape soda from the refrigerator, drank one or two swallows and spiked the rest with vodka from a bottle in the cupboard under the sink. Then she crossed the kitchen and pressed against the screen door.
“Lordy. Lordy, lord. What a pretty night.” Lillian sipped at her drink and squinted toward the far corner of the porch. “Harmon?”
“Yup.”
“You there?”
“Yup.” He had pulled off his work boots and was sitting on an old army cot set up next to the clapboard siding. One of the dogs started tentatively up the steps, ears down and neck outstretched in supplication. “Git, git!” Harmon snapped his fingers. The dog leaped back and trotted away toward the barns. Harmon lay down, folded the musting pillow and punched it into place under his sun-blackened neck.
“It’s a real pretty night,” Lillian said.
“Yup.”
“You see it?”
“Yup. I see it.”
“Wouldn’t I just like to run out in that tall grass myself.” She pushed open the screen door and stood looking out. “I’d like to go over to Sycamore Park and ride in the speed boat with a whole book of tickets. That’s what I’d like.”
“Kids in bed?” he said.
“Yup.”
“They wash their feet?”
“Yup.”
Harmon eased over on the cot and faced the clapboards. His workday had begun in the cow barn at four-thirty in the morning and would begin again the next day at the same time. Lillian sat down on the steps and looked out across the yard and the still, moon-drenched shapes of the barns and the glistening fields beyond. She hummed to herself, took a few sips of her drink, set down the bottle and re-affixed the bobby pins in a curl over her ear. She patted the other pins appraisingly. In the distance where the highway ran out from town, occasional headlight beams arched across the horizon, and Lillian would stop humming and listen to the rise and fall of sound as the cars passed. One of them slowed down. There was a whine of changing gears on the turning at their corner, and lights bobbled over the pitted dirt road that led to the house. She sat up straight and intent. “Who’d that be?” She listened with her mouth open, eyes fixed on the approaching lights.
“That’s a Chevy. Could only be one person.”
“Donnie’s not the only one drives a Chevy.”
“Only one drives a sixty-one Chevy with a broke muffler.”
“I can’t hear nothing.”
“Two bits.”
The car stopped by the garage. “Hey! Anybody home?”
“That’s him,” Harmon muttered. “Mister Shiftless. Mister Bad News himself, in person.”
“Hey, Donnie. Hey, yourself!” Lillian called out. “It’s Donnie,” she told Harmon and pulled herself to her feet, catching her balance against the porch rail. “Here we are! Come ’round back!” she called again.
“God damn.” Harmon lay as he was, facing the clapboard wall. “Lilly, I don’t want no trouble tonight.”
“Mister Worry. Mister Worry.”
“Just take it easy. That’s all I ask. And I don’t want him hanging around late.”
Lillian’s younger brother came around the corner of the house, tall and bony, walking as he always did with slouched intensity, his arms slightly flexed, like a wrestler coming into the ring. There was a twitch to the articulation of his right hip. It had been smashed when Donnie fell from the back of a moving army truck and was hit by the next truck in the convoy. The corner of his mouth was held down in a wry grin where an indifferent intern had sewn him up after a fight in a roller-skating rink. His face and torso were zig-zagged with fine, filigreed scars from the glass of shattered windshields, and on his upper arm there was a puckered burn where Donnie had effaced a tattoo with a lit cigarette, on a bet. He had soft, damp, querulous eyes with long black lashes.
“Hey,” he said, grinning at his sister. “Hey, fat girl.”
She made a mild pass at his cheek, as if to slap him. “Don’t get fresh. I’ll fat-girl you.” She grinned back at him. “Where you been keeping yourself, stranger?”
“Harmon around?” He looked toward the porch.
“Where else you ’spect to find me?” Harmon answered.
“Hey there, sport.”
“Eh-yup.”
“How’s it going?”
“High, wide and out of your reach.”
Donnie winked at Lillian. “How’d you like a run into town?”
She frowned. “What for?”
“What for?” He shrugged. “A run into town, that’s what.”
“How come?”
“I’m asking you to take a run into town. That’s how come.”
“It’s not like you take me into town very often.”
“Suit yourself.” He half turned, as if to leave. “I got the top down.”
“Harmon?” Lillian asked.
“Now, wait a minute,” Donnie said quickly. “I didn’t exactly figure on Harmon wanting to run with me. Looks like he’s turned in.”
“Right the first time,” said Harmon.
“Well . . .” Lillian hesitated. She lifted her face as if she could feel the moonlight against her skin. She stepped to the corner of the house and looked toward the cream-colored Chevy, glinting in the driveway, the roof open to the sky. “Will it be late?”
“Woman, you want a run into town or not?”
“Okay. I’ll go. But just for a little while. Okay?”
Lillian hurried back inside, pulling out bobby pins as she went. She combed her hair in front of the mirror over the sink, pushing the curls into place across her forehead and into little puffs on her cheeks. “Ready!” she called, leaning close to the mirror to put lipstick on her tiny bowed mouth. “I’m coming!” She took a deep breath, grimaced, and tugged her skirt down over her hips and stomach. “Harmon, you want the kitchen light on or off?”
“Either way.”
She left the light burning and went out on the porch. “Don’t you fall asleep out here. You go up and get into bed. I’ll be back soon, honey.”
“Lilly!”
“What?”
“You take it easy. Hear?”
“Mister Worry. Mister Worry.”
Donnie had already gone to the car. Lillian stumbled after him. He stood by the open door to the driver’s seat. “Let’s go.” He dropped behind the wheel, turned the key with one hand while he slammed his door with the other and revved the engine. Lillian lowered herself into the passenger seat. He leaned across her impatiently, yanked her door shut, and the car shot forward, skidding up a wake of dust and pebbles. “Lordy!” she laughed. “Look out, everybody. Clear the track!”
They jounced onto the highway, tires squealing on the turn. Donnie lit a cigarette, inhaling and exhaling meaningfully before he spoke. “Why the hell you have to ask so many questions?”
Lillian bent forward, trying to look at her brother’s face, but he held his head to the front and would not look back at her. Then he chuckled and punched at the buttons on the radio.
“Donnie! Now you tell me!” she shouted over the explosion of drums and guitars.
“Wanta dance?” He slurred the car back and forth across the centerline, veering from side to side on the empty road to the beat of the music.
“Donald! You stop that!”
He pulled back into the right hand lane, turned down the radio and smiled as if he were enjoying some sly, secret joke. “How about it, scout? You wanta go scouting?”
“No. No, I don’t!”
“Oooo-wheee,” he crooned. “I can see him clear and square. Right down the barrel. Right there in that little old sight . . . tzing.”
“My God. Who you picking on now?”
“I’m not picking on nobody. He’s picking on me. Picking me clean.”
“I don’t want nothing to do with it.”
“Momma, Momma, Donnie won’t take me with him. Momma, Momma, make Donnie take me along.”
She didn’t answer. She sat stolidly, her small lipsticked mouth tight.
“Lilly, Lilly,” he chanted, “dressed in yellow, went to the meadow to meet her fellow. Lilly, Lilly, dressed in tan, fell in love with the garbage man . . .”
“You got nothing better to do?”
“Lilly, Lilly, dressed in black, made her drawers from a gunny sack.”
She didn’t smile. Donnie tilted his head and sucked smoke from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. “It’s that actor over to the playhouse that Verna’s been going with this summer.”
“Verna! You still pestering after Verna?”
“He’s leaving at the end of the week. I won’t get another night like tonight.”
“Christ Almighty. Leave them be. You don’t have no claim on Verna. She told me last spring she didn’t go with you no more.”
“That’s mighty interesting,” he said dangerously. “So you been talking about me behind my back.”
“Once! I saw her once, that’s all, downstreet. Hi there, stranger, I said. I don’t see you with my brother no more. No, she says, that’s done and finished. And that was all. Nobody was talking about you.”
“It’ll be done and finished,” he enunciated, “when I say it’s done and finished. And it’s gonna be finished my way.”
“You take me home. Right this minute.”
Donnie grabbed at her, digging his fingers into the ticklish nerves above her knee. She flailed, slapping at him, shrieking with giggles and pulling at her skirt to cover her legs. “No! I’m going home!”
He pulled his hand away and stepped on the gas. The Chevy bolted forward and streaked between the bright fields and the blue-gray hills. “We’re going scouting.”
“No, no, no, no!”
He cut the headlights and sped down the moonlit road. Lillian pitched against him. She groped at the dashboard, fumbling across his body for the switch, the wind slashing her hair over her face. He chopped at her wrist and held her away, lazily lifting his shoulder and cocking an elbow into her ribs.
“I promised!” She fought his arm “I promised Harmon.”
“I didn’t hear you promise Harmon nothing.”
“I promised him last time.”
Donnie slammed down on the brakes. Lillian collapsed against him, choked with laughter. “You’re gonna scare me out of my mind.”
“You coming with me?”
She shook her head and giggled wildly.
“Tell me who I am.”
Lillian didn’t answer. He gunned the engine, gathering speed with jolting, threatening thrusts at the accelerator. He made quick, vicious tickling jabs at her knee, her waist, under her arm.
“DONNIE!” she doubled helplessly.
“Tell me!”
“HAIL, EAGLE FEATHER,” she began, through her laughter, thrashing at his marauding fingers.
“Go on,” he commanded. “Go on.”
“HAIL, EAGLE FEATHER, CHIEF AND SCOUT. KING OF THE INDIANS. BRAVEST OF THE BRAVE. HAIL, EAGLE FEATHER! ALL HAIL!”
He slowed the car to a moderate speed and pulled on the headlights. “That’s more like it.”
“Christ Almighty . . .” Lillian sat up, raked her hair out of her face and wiped her eyes, catching her breath, breaking again and again into peals of laughter. “Whew!” she cried, wiped her eyes again, pulled at her bunched skirt and twisted blouse and groped for a fallen bra strap.
“We will now,” Donnie intoned, “proceed with all fine righteousness on our ordained trail, with a joyful prayer of thanks and goodwill toward everybody. Amen. And of the world to come. Amen and amen.” Lillian rocked beside him, her head thrown back, taking deep breaths to stop her laughter. He flicked his cigarette out of the car, and the sparks splashed on the highway behind them.
They came into town on the cemetery road. Gleaming obelisks, polished granite and pearled flights of angels shone through the iron bars of the tall fence. They went on past immaculate rows of quiet houses lit by the amber haze of streetlights, turned right at the parochial school and drove along the green. The stores were closed for the night—the supermarket, the five-and-ten, the drugstore, the Furniture Mart, Cheri’s Beauty Salon and Spinelli’s Jewelers. At one end of the green, the bronze sorrowing head of Lincoln looked down from its pedestal toward the little wooden bandstand and the memorial Sherman tank at the other end.
Some of the town boys were still cruising in their shiny cars, up one side of the green and down the other. A few had clustered in the empty plaza of the Texaco station, aimless in the summer night, leaning against each other’s fenders, smoking, not talking much, watching the street, shifting their loose stance from one leg to another. Donnie blinked his lights.
“Hey, Don!” One of them tooted his horn.
Donnie slowed. “Watch it, you guys. The patrol car’s parked in Wheelock’s driveway.”
The boys howled and cat-called. Somebody barked and ki-yi-ed. “Let’s shove off,” another one said. Donnie drove on. Lillian turned to look back.
“I didn’t see no patrol car at Wheelock’s.”
“That’s right.” He glanced in the rear view mirror and chuckled. “Watch ’em scatter.”
Lillian looked to the side toward the darkened storefronts. “I don’t know who the kids are anymore.”
They left town by the river road, passed the deserted ballfield, the gray hulk of the old bleachery and the humming maze of the power station.
“Why’re we going out here?” He didn’t answer. They turned up a cracked macadam road, Donnie sitting high and tense at the wheel, his eyes dipping from side to side as if scanning the underbrush for danger. The road opened out at the top of the hill into a clearing set with wooden tables and benches. “Hey,” she said. “It’s the Polish picnic ground.”
He maneuvered the car between the weather-warped tables. The headlights picked up a fieldstone barbecue pit, and Donnie swerved to the side. A leafed bough grazed the length of the Chevy. At the top of the clearing, he stopped and turned off the engine. They sat for a moment in the open car, adjusting their senses to the sudden quiet and the moonshadows around them. Lillian looked at him. “You crazy? What d’you want here?”
He got out, went to the rear and opened the trunk, moved a toolbox and the jack, unwrapped the folds of an oil-stained blanket and lifted out a rifle. He raised it and fit it snugly into his shoulder, swinging the barrel across the sky as though sighting a flight of birds. Then he held the rifle loosely against his leg, his shoulders relaxed and rounded.
“Donnie?”
He straightened, stamped his foot and snapped the rifle back to his shoulder. “Tzing . . . tzing,” he sang, his mouth pushed askew by the pressure of his cheek against the stock.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Lillian said.
“Come on. Let’s get going.”
“Get going where?”
“Hurry up.”
“This is the last time. Do you understand what I say?” She slapped the upholstery in rhythm with her words. “The very . . . last . . . time!” She heaved herself out of the car and stood uncertain on the irregular ground. There was a click-clack of the bolt opening and closing, and Lillian knew he had loaded the rifle.
“Come on. You’re slowing me up.” He went to the edge of the clearing and disappeared into the trees. Lillian labored after him. He had taken a narrow overgrown path where the moonlight hardly penetrated and moved ahead lightly and quickly in the semi-darkness.
“Donnie. Wait up.” A sinewy branch snapped back across her shins. She yelped and brought her hands up to protect her face. He waited, catching her arm as she drew close, and dragged her behind him through the interlaced underbrush. They came to an old wall. Donnie sprang nimbly to the other side, set his rifle down and pulled her over the tumbling stones.
“I gotta get my wind.” Lillian clutched at him, her feet slipping on slick moss. “Please, Donnie.”
“Hush!” He held her around the waist and steadied her. “Shut up that blubbering.”
He darted ahead again, leaving her swaying and top-heavy, one hand clutching a frail sapling. Leaves and bark peeled off in her grasp, and she struggled after him, following the moist crackle of his steps. She missed her footing twice and fell sharply on her knees. The tiny thorns of berry vines cut across her ankles, her face, her arms. “Dear Lord,” she panted. “Dear Lord.”
The trees thinned into scrub and blueberry bushes and sweet fern. She could see better now. Donnie was ahead in the clearing. He’d dropped into a crouch, the rifle close to his chest. He waited until she reached his side. “Keep low,” he ordered and hunched forward across an open shelf of rock. At the edge, he lay flat. Lillian hunched after him. “Down!” he told her. She crawled across the rock and lay next to him on her stomach. Stinging lines of sweat ran down her thorn-scratched skin, into her eyes, down her neck and into the bunched roll of her breasts. Around her heart and down one side a creasing cramp swelled and caught when she drew breath. “Lord have mercy!” She rested her wet forehead on her crossed arms.
He prodded her. “See? Now you see where we are?”
Far below the rock ledge was a large, gabled barn, painted red, that had once been a tobacco barn and was now a summer theatre. Donnie clipped a telescopic sight onto the rifle and cradled the barrel in the forked branches of a low scrub oak in front of him. “That’s the back exit, from the stage,” he said, lining up the rifle with a wide, sliding door. A hooded light over the door shone on a steep flight of wooden steps. At the opposite end of the barn, the wash of the lobby lights fanned out across flowerbeds lining the front walk, over the gravel driveway and up into thickly leafed maple trees. On the far side of a neatly trimmed privet hedge was a parking lot, gleaming with cars.
“See there,” Donnie nudged Lillian and pointed down into the dark theatre yard, which lay just out of range of the stage-door light. “See that VW? That beat-up old crate with the ski-rack? You see who’s sitting in that little old VW, just waiting to pass it around? You see?”
Lillian’s eyes smarted with salt sweat. “I can’t see nothing.”
“Miss Verna. Sweet Verna.”
“I can’t see nothing. How do you know?”
“I know, all right. I know.”
From inside the barn came the alternate sound of the actors’ words and the laughter of the audience. There was a momentary quiet, a final rise and fall of voices, then a rush of applause. The play was over. He turned his attention back to the rifle, steadying it against his cheek, flexing his left hand and soothing it along the cool metal of the barrel. “Any minute. Any minute now.”
“What’s he look like?” she whispered.
“He puts orange powder on his face and neck and black pencil marks around his eyes.”
“No fooling!”
“God’s truth.”
She wriggled closer to him and slid her arm across his back.
“That’s God’s truth,” he said. “That’s what actors do. And this one, fat girl, is a bad actor.”
“Yeah?”
“A bad actor . . . get it?”
She giggled. “A bad actor.”
“No one’ll miss him. One more bad actor.”
“One less, you mean.”
“That’s the ticket.”
“One less chicken-dick bad actor,” she whispered through her fingers, and they spluttered with laughter. A match flared in the VW with the ski-rack, and a cigarette glowed by the window. “She’s smoking,” said Lillian.
“If God in his sweet mercy had intended us to smoke, He would have put smokestacks on top of our heads. Amen and Amen.”
Lillian shook with stifled giggles and felt his suppressed laughter under her embracing arm and along her side where she pressed up against him. Then he held himself rigid, his muscles tight and primed. The stage door had opened.
“Any minute,” he told her. “Any minute. Soon’s he gets his pretty face washed.” Donnie waited, and she waited with him, pacing her breathing to match his. The cramp in her side rose and fell, and she took shallow breaths to control the little spasms of pain, forcing herself to lie still as she did.
Several people came down the wooden staircase from the stage door and strolled away into the darkness. Car doors opened and closed. A girl in shorts and bare feet came out, sat on the middle step and leaned on her knees. A boy in torn blue jeans joined her for a moment, then wandered off to the front of the building. A woman costumed in an evening dress peered out the door as she stripped long white gloves from her arms. She vanished back into the theatre, and three men appeared under the light.
“That’s him. That’s him!” Donnie hissed. Lillian felt a ripple of anticipation move down his body. She blinked her salty eyes and stared at the stage door.
“The young guy. The one holding the thermos bottle.” Donnie ran his tongue over his teeth and released the safety catch on the rifle. “There he is, by God, bigger’n brass. You ready, Lilly? I’m giving him a count of five. Five. Got it? Five, and no sooner.”
“Five. Yes. Five.”
He started counting, slowly and evenly. “One hundred . . . two hundred . . .” Lillian moved even closer against her brother’s side, her right arm still clasped across his back, holding him tightly, one heavy leg slung across his. Squirming, she slipped her other hand along his left arm, the arm that held the barrel, until she gripped his wrist. He steadied the sight and continued his measured count. “Three hundred . . . four hundred . . .” At the final count, she counted with him. “Five hundred!” Lillian wailed, and heaved up against his left arm, thrusting the barrel skyward just before the rifle cracked deafeningly. The bullet whispered through the tops of the tall trees that surrounded the red barn.
The girl on the steps jumped up and screamed. The men in the doorway ran to her, then they all went down the steps together into the theatre yard and stood close to each other, listening, looking around, speaking briefly and cautiously, their voices lost under the noise of cars leaving the parking lot. In a little while, they separated and moved on.
Donnie rolled onto his back and smiled, the rifle next to him, his eyes black in his moon-blanched face. Lillian, ears ringing, gave a low cry, sighed, put her head down on her arms and fell asleep. When all the cars had driven away and all the lights had gone out at the theatre, he woke her and they started back.