The Moonlight (17 page)

“We could leave it off,” she said.

“Sounds good to me.”

They saw the joke at the same time, and they both laughed.

That night she awoke once, very late.  It seemed as if, from one instant to the next, she was just awake, listening.  Except there was nothing to hear.  The loudest sound was the soft stir of Phil’s breathing.

Moonlight poured through the window, pale and cold, like the hand of Death pointing an accusation.  Beth sat up in bed, obedient to its summons, and saw that the light had fallen across a stain on the floor.  She hadn’t even noticed it before, or, if she had, she didn’t remember.

Now the stain was a dark, garish black, smeared with the moonlight as if it were still fresh—as if it were . . .

She lay down again, her heart pounding with an unfocused, senseless dread.  And then her mind seemed to go numb, and she went back to sleep.

In the morning it was like something recalled from childhood.  She noticed the stain, pale brown and ancient, almost worn away by time, as she got ready for her bath, and she smiled a little ruefully at the memory of her own fear.

“Sure, I can pound it out for you.  Five fifty, with the headlamp.  The paint’s in stock.  Bring it back tomorrow morning and I can have it for you by Tuesday.”

Phil stood in front of his car, beside a man in dark green coveralls who wore his beard cut straight across at the nipple line and probably weighed three hundred pounds.  They were contemplating the dented fender like generals over a field map.

Why had he bought this car?  What had possessed him?  What was so wonderful about it that he was shelling out that kind of money for a dimple?  He didn’t even know how he was going to make the payments.

He hoped Jack Matheny understood more about real estate than he did about car repairs.

“That’s what the insurance adjustor said:  five fifty, right on the button.”

The body shop owner nodded.  He knew all about insurance adjustors.

“Yeah, well, we all read the same price books,” he answered, with the air of revealing a professional secret.  “It’ll be five fifty anywhere you go—the difference is workmanship.  Look around my yard and see if you can find any bad paint jobs.  How much is your deductible?”

“Three hundred.”

“And you don’t know who did it?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

“Jesus, that’s tough.  But it always seems to work that way.”

The man never took his eyes from the fender, so Phil was left to wonder what he meant.  Was it an observation of the general injustice of life, or was it just his opinion that most hit-and-runs were some clown chewing up his paintwork on the garage door when he came home pie-eyed from a lodge meeting?

If that was it, Phil couldn’t argue.  He remembered making the call to the insurance company Friday afternoon—all he got was a chance to leave a message on their answering machine—but he couldn’t even remember discovering the accident.

In fact, there was precious little he could remember of that afternoon and evening, right up to the time he picked up Beth.  He had a vague recollection of taking a drive, just for the pleasure of being in his new car, but his memory of it was like a photograph that was too out of focus even to be recognizable.  Where had he gone?  What had he seen?  He had no idea.

He saw the dented fender as if for the first time when he showed it to Jack Matheny.  He had listened to himself spinning out the tale of how it had happened, and it was all news to him.  He had been telling the truth, or, at least, he had no consciousness of lying.  He was just another listener to his own account.  It was weird.

But, then, a lot of things had been weird lately.  Weirdness was beginning to lose its novelty.

“I’ll bring it by in the morning then,” he said.  “I don’t suppose you’ve got a loaner.”

This made the body shop owner laugh.  “Mister, if I started doin’ that, my insurance company ‘d have me out of business in a week.”

“That’s sort of what I thought you’d say.”

The body shop was just over the state line in Port Chester—Beth had warned him against having the work done in Greenley, where they charged you Rolls Royce rates even if you came in with a dented Subaru—and on the way home he stopped at the Carvel’s to get himself a soft ice cream cone.  Carvel’s was one of his recent discoveries about the quality of life on the Eastern Seaboard; there was the same sort of thing back in California, called Frosty Freeze, but this was better.  The only thing he really missed from California was the lettuce.

He stood out in the parking lot, leaning against the side on his car and eating his ice cream cone, considering with no small satisfaction the shape his existence was beginning to take.  It was two o’clock in the afternoon and Beth was at her apartment, packing a suitcase.  He would pick her up in an hour and take her back to the Moonlight.  Then he would drive her to work.  She would keep on paying her share of the rent until they saw how things were working out between them, but why shouldn’t things work out?  Lately things seemed to have gotten into the habit of working out.

Now if only he could find some way to keep the house.

He had gone down to Greenley City Hall for a look at the tax records, and the property was listed at a little under forty-five hundred dollars a year.  The heating bills for the past five years, carefully preserved in Jack Matheny’s realty office, averaged about nine hundred every winter—and that was with the thermostat kept just high enough to prevent the pipes from freezing.  With other utilities and general maintenance, he would be spending something like eight thousand dollars a year just to hold on.

He had seventy-five hundred dollars in the bank, including his inheritance.  And in his whole life he had never earned more than twenty-two hundred a month.

Still, he had to find a way.  It was becoming increasingly difficult for him to contemplate a future in which he would no longer own the Moonlight.  He didn’t give a damn how much he might make off the sale, it couldn’t be enough.

The Moonlight was like a hall of mirrors, full of strange, inexplicable distortions.  Things happened there he couldn’t explain—or, rather, for which the explanations were all too obvious but almost impossible to accept—but it didn’t matter.  The place scared the shit out of him sometimes, and that didn’t matter either.  In fact, its strangeness enhanced its value for him.  He felt privileged to own it, and in his whole life he had never before felt privileged.

So he would not part with it.  Somehow or other he would find a way of hanging on to it, because it would not let him go.

He finished his ice cream cone and got back into the car, rolling down the window to let the heat escape—that was something else different from California, although he wasn’t sure it was an improvement.  The summer weather was ferocious.  He wondered what the winters could be like.  In his whole life, Phil had never seen snow, and he didn’t know if he would be able to tolerate that kind of cold.

He parked in the lot behind Beth’s place and, before going up, went around to Feenie’s hardware to pick up a couple of lengths of garden hose, since the ones at the Moonlight, he had discovered, were full of cracks.  Then he took the stairs up to the apartment and rang the bell.

When Beth let him in he saw that she was already in her waitress uniform, which surprised him a little.  There was a suitcase standing beside the door, however, so at least she hadn’t changed her mind at the last minute.

There was also another woman, presumably the roommate, sitting on the sofa, wrapped in a pink bathrobe and balancing a cup of coffee in her lap.  She was short and chunky and about forty, with hair that was too violently black to be real, and Phil decided he didn’t like her much.  Perhaps that was how you always felt about your girlfriend’s roommate.

“So you’re him,” she said, as if to register her disappointment that Beth wasn’t going to live with Kevin Costner.

“Phil, this is Millie,” Beth said, just a little too quickly, like someone intervening to prevent a brawl.

But Phil liked to think of himself as a gentleman, so he smiled and offered his hand.

“Phil Owings,” he murmured.  “Pleased to meet you.”

These little courtesies seemed to make no impression, however, and Millie released his hand after the briefest contact.

“Maybe you could just take the suitcase back with you,” Beth said, in a peculiarly expressionless voice.  “I’ll just stay on here and go straight to work, and that way you won’t have to make two trips.”

“I don’t mind making two trips.”

“I still have a few things to do here.”

They regarded each other in silence for a moment and then Phil decided there was nothing to be gained by contesting the point, so he shrugged his shoulders and let it go.

“What time you do want me to pick you up after work?” he asked.

“Oh, well . . .”  Beth slipped her hands into the pockets of her black nylon skirt.  “Don’t worry about it—I can walk easy enough.”

“Not in the pitch dark you can’t.  Now come on, Beth, just tell me what time you want me to pick you up.”

This seemed to please her and she flashed a little smile at Millie, as if to say, “see?  I told you. . .”

“Eleven o’clock then,” she said.

“I’ll be parked in front.”

So he picked up the suitcase and gave Beth a kiss, feeling a little self-conscious about doing it in front of someone else.  He put the suitcase in the trunk of his car, right next to the garden hose.

And on the way home he entertained himself with trying to decide what Beth’s roommate could possibly have against him.  Maybe she resented the prospect of having to hunt around for the other half of the rent money.  Maybe she was one of those women who thought all men were evil.  Either way, he had the sense of having stepped into the middle of an argument.

He parked the car in the garage to keep it out of the sun and hung the garden hose up on a couple of big hooks on the back wall.  Then he got out Beth’s suitcase and took it up to their room.

Then he went down to the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee and smoke a cigarette while he refocused his mind on the problem of how to keep from having to sell the Moonlight.

It was his, dammit.  It was his, and he resented being forced out of his home by the utility bills.  It seemed a fundamental injustice that after finally coming to rest somewhere, somewhere he felt comfortable and safe, he should be expected to give it up, as if a man’s home were just some sort of envelope for the money it consumed or could bring in sale.

While he was sitting at the kitchen table, feeling more and more like the Okies in
The Grapes of Wrath
, he was startled to hear a sharp click somewhere behind him.

But there was nothing behind him except the empty pantry, the door to which, he noticed, was standing slightly ajar.

He hadn’t been in there since the first day, so probably Beth had looked inside and forgotten to close the door.  Except that he hadn’t noticed the door being open when he had come back.

He stood up and went over to close it, and then decided he would just stick his head in to make sure everything as okay.  Maybe something had fallen over—maybe that was what he had heard.

Except there was nothing inside to fall over.  He snicked on the light, and there was nothing inside at all except for the old gaming table and the empty shelves around all four walls.

Then why did it look so odd?

It took him perhaps thirty seconds of standing in the doorway to figure out that two rows of shelves against the left-hand wall were angled slightly out into the room, as if someone had taken hold of them at the point where they touched and given them a sharp pull forward.

He went in to investigate and, when he put his hand on one of the angled shelves, it moved quite easily.  They both seemed to be mounted on concealed rollers, and double hinged in the back so that they simply pulled forward and out of the way.

Behind them was a round metal hatch, like the door to a safe and about two feet across with a key lock to one side.  It probably
was
a safe, Phil decided.

He never went anywhere without the key ring he had received from Jack Matheny on that first day, but none of his keys fit this lock.  He was considering the merits of a crowbar when he turned around and saw a shiny brass key lying in the precise center of the gaming table.  It hadn’t been there when he came in.  He was quite sure there had been nothing on the table.

His heart was pounding violently when he picked up the key, and his hands shook so that it took him several seconds to fit it into the lock.  At last it slid into the barrel and, when he turned it, the tumblers fell into place with a faint clatter.

It had apparently been years since anyone had opened this door, because the hinges screamed in protest.

The compartment inside was perhaps a foot and a half square and about nine inches deep.  It contained a number of parcels, about the shape of bricks but a little smaller and wrapped in brown paper.  When Phil picked one up he was surprised by how light it felt.

He carried the parcel out into the kitchen, sat down again at the table, and started to look it over with the care of someone who expects to stumble into a booby trap.  The brown paper wrapping was sealed at the ends and along one side with duct tape, which here and there was beginning to curl at the edges.  Still, whoever had wrapped this wasn’t kidding, and it took Phil a good five minutes to strip the tape from one end.  He unfolded the end flap and found that the paper was about three layers thick.  Rather than fiddle with any more duct tape, he started to tear the paper along a straight line down the back.