The Moonlight (3 page)

“This is it,” he said, dropping the ignition keys into his jacket pocket as he opened the car door.  He stepped outside into the perpetual shade of the front patio and examined the façade of the building as if he’d never seen it before—it was a way to avoid having to look at Philip Owings’ face while he took in that first sight of his legacy.  “I have the keys here somewhere.  Let me get your bag.”

But Owings didn’t want to go inside, not just yet.  Jack followed him around while he paced off the road frontage and examined the detached building that had been Harve Wickham’s garage—the gas pump from which they had found him dangling was still there, although the tank had been drained even before the finance company came and repossessed all his tools.  The big double doors were padlocked, if only to keep the ’possums out.

In what had once been patches of lawn the grass was waist high, with wide, razor-sharp leaves, so that you might have thought you were in the Everglades.  Grass and weeds were forcing their way up through the asphalt driveway, which was crumbling at the edges like stale piecrust.  They walked along the little path between the main building and the garage to the back.

Just a couple of months before Pearl Harbor, George Patchmore had presented his patrons with what was intended to be the Moonlight Roadhouse’s crowning jewel, the open air dance floor.  Today it was just a vast rectangle of empty concrete, spiderwebbed with cracks, the work of nearly fifty New England winters.  Every five or six paces around the perimeter were ten-foot-high iron poles from which, so legend had it, Japanese lanterns had once swayed with each little breeze.  The bandstand still occupied one corner, although its white paint was just a memory and the wood itself was spongy with rot.

Some people said the Japanese lanterns had been a bad omen, which perhaps they were in that Year of Our Lord 1941, but, in any case, the dance floor had been the old Moonlight’s last blinding flash of pride and glory before the long decline.  The dancing stopped when the war began—gas was rationed and the roadhouse was just too far to come.  Eventually people got out of the habit, and by VE Day George could hardly afford to keep his doors open.

But he hung on.  For another ten years he scraped along somehow—largely, one gathered, on the strength of a bad reputation.  The roadhouse had always been that sort of place:  a speakeasy back in the Twenties and then, when George took it over in the Thirties, a haven for the little forbidden pleasures of life.  In the fat times there had usually been a poker game going in the pantry, and nobody had any trouble finding accommodating ladies who always seemed to have a key to one of the upstairs bedrooms.  It was just over the state line, so the bad guys from Westchester County and even Manhattan had been frequent patrons.  In those days hoods were celebrities, and people used to come for a drink and a dance and to look for faces they had seen in the newspapers.

All of this had continued, in a shadowy way, right into the mid-Fifties.  George had surrendered his liquor license in 1948—just what murky sort of trouble he had gotten into never was clear.  The whores were gone.  The gangsters Jack was not so sure about.

There were always stories.  If somebody needed to have a package collected, the word was he left it with George.  At any given time, rumor had it, there might be a hot car in the garage, just waiting for a new paint job.  Probably nastier things went on that Jack never heard anything about, but then he wouldn’t.

So the Moonlight Roadhouse, even in its decline, was the town’s bad conscience.  Probably a lot of people had been relieved when George collapsed in 1955, while waiting in line to buy stamps at the post office, and Jack’s dad started hunting around for a tenant to supplement George’s social security benefits.

Jack’s dad, Lord love him, had been a good real estate man, but with the best will in the world he had had a hard time getting the Moonlight even to pay for itself, let alone for George’s decades-long convalescence.  First there was a restaurant, with French food and high prices, but that lasted a scant two years before going belly up.  Then some idiot with romantic ideas had tried to re-open the place as a roadhouse and lasted about six months.  Then, for about six or seven years it had been a motel catering to an ever-seedier clientele—that ended in a scandal which had shocked even George.

There had been other businesses over the years, and long periods when the property lay empty, the doors locked and the windows shuttered.  It was during one of these that they had found the little girl, the daughter of some New York society doctor, tied and gagged in the cellar and in an advanced state of decay.

And then, about four years after that, Harve opened his service station.  A month later, his wife took their kids and left, never to be heard from again.  Six months later, Harve tied one end of his belt to the awning over his brand new Exxon gas pump and just slid off into oblivion.  He had figured it pretty carefully—when the paperboy found him the next morning his feet were dangling only about four inches above the ground.

Harve, not surprisingly, was the last tenant.

Afterwards, Jack sometimes wondered if that first day Philip Owings hadn’t guessed there was something tragic about his inheritance.  He saw him now in memory, standing in the middle of the ruined dance floor, his eyes, reflecting a kind of helpless dejection, fixed on the lightless house.  Or maybe he was just beginning to realize that the Moonlight wasn’t going to finance his retirement.

“Let’s have a look inside,” he said, like a man about to open a coffin.  Jack had the keys out of his pocket before Owings could change his mind.

Phil Owings stood in the door, watching the real estate agent’s car pull out of what was now his driveway.  When it reached the road, and the right turn signal was flashing, he waved, although he was perfectly sure Jack Matheny couldn’t have seen.  Then he stepped back inside and let the door swing shut behind him.

He lit a cigarette as he stood in the foyer and dropped the spent match onto the bare hardwood floor, where there was plenty of dust to cushion its fall.  Through a wide entranceway he could see into the main room, which might once have been a dining room or a bar, and where the few remaining pieces of furniture were covered with sheets which had grown yellow with accumulated age.

He would have his smoke, and then he would go upstairs and pick himself out a bedroom and go to work.  He couldn’t turn the place inside out in an afternoon, but at least he didn’t have to sleep in the dirt.

There were things the agent hadn’t told him—he was sure of that.  He just had a sense of something withheld, but that was not a new experience.  People were always not telling him things, particularly if he had a right to know them.

He walked into the main room looking for an ash tray.  There didn’t seem to be one, but it was so gloomy in there, even after he had snicked on the light, that he probably just couldn’t see it.  The back wall seemed to be one long series of windows, all shuttered from the outside, with a pair of double doors leading, he assumed, to the patio in the back that Matheny had said used to be a dance floor, and now just collected dead leaves.  Where were the snows of yesteryear?

“I know just how you feel, brother,” he said, out loud, with a little shock of surprise at the sound of his own voice.

“I’ll have to watch that,”
he thought. 
“I’ve probably just been living alone too long.”

Too long, or not long enough.  Not long enough to get used to it, although it had been nearly a year since Judy walked out on him, and he had been alone, for all practical purposes, a long time before that.

Well, he hoped she was happy with her truck salesman.

You lose your job, you lose your wife—little by little, things had been dropping away from him.  So, when he found he had inherited a little something from a great uncle he had never heard of, there wasn’t a thing in the world to hold him in California.  He just packed a bag, cleaned out what was left of his bank account, sold his car and left his apartment, on which he owed for two months, for the landlady to worry about.  It was like being swept off the face of the earth.  It was great.

And now this—the Moonlight Roadhouse that was.  Well, it had to be worth something.

“It ain’t much, but it’s home.”

Was that really him talking?  He had to get hold of himself.  He couldn’t afford to screw up anymore.

And the first order of business was to find an ashtray.

There was a kitchen downstairs, and a huge pantry lined along all four walls with empty shelves.  In its center, oddly enough, was a round table covered in felt that had probably once been green but was now a kind of mossy black.  It looked as if it had been occupying that precise spot for a hundred years.

A gaming table—in the pantry?  What had old Uncle George been running up here in rural Connecticut, some sort of primitive version of Atlantic City?

But at least there was an ash tray.  It was made of heavy glass and shaped like a drinks coaster, and when he picked it up it pulled away some of the felt from the table, revealing its original emerald green.  He took it back out to the kitchen and rinsed the dust off under the sink.

Embedded in the glass at the bottom, in colors unfaded by time, was an advertising logo with a picture of a little blue house half blocking an enormous, garish yellow moon, and across the bottom, in letters as red as blood, were the words “MOONLIGHT ROADHOUSE, Greenley, Conn.”

Phil ground out his cigarette and lit another, carrying the ash tray cradled in his hand as he explored the rest of the house.

There wasn’t much—for some reason the building looked larger from the outside.  Upstairs there were six bedrooms marshaled in rows of three along either side of a narrow hallway.  Each bedroom came furnished with an ancient white porcelain sink against one wall, an iron double bedstead, a chest of drawers, painted brown, and a wooden wardrobe about the size of a phone booth.  At the end of the hallway was the one and only bathroom.

The stairway led up to a third story, and Phil had to use his keys to open the door at the top.  A bedroom, a bathroom, and a tiny kitchen with its own antique refrigerator, the kind with legs and a little louvered stovepipe on top.  The plug was lying on the floor about six inches from its wall socket and there was nothing inside.

This must have been George Patchmore’s private apartment.  Phil felt a sudden curiosity, a sense of having at last found some approach to the man whose heir he had become, seemingly at random, as if he had won a lottery he hadn’t even been aware of entering.  And then he remembered how many other businesses had occupied these premises, and how many other people must have lived in these three little rooms in the thirty-five odd years since the Moonlight had closed its doors.  It stood to reason, there could hardly be any trace of him left.

But he looked anyway, fighting down the sense that he was invading someone’s privacy—after all, this house and everything in it, including its secrets, now belonged to him.

There was nothing much.  At the bottom of the chest of drawers he found a leather belt, cracked and brittle with age.  There were about five copies of
National Geographic
in the night table, all of them dating from the 1930s.  Except for three or four metal clothes hangers, the closet was empty.

And then he noticed, on the inside of the closet door, a calendar with a drawing of one of those Esquire girls on a windy day, with her skirt blown up high enough to show her garterbelt.  He started to smile at this quaint piece of cheesecake until he noticed the date on the calendar page:  June, 1941.

Would George Patchmore and all succeeding tenants have found the view past this lady’s nylons so appealing that they would have left her hanging there for nearly fifty years?  It gave him the creeps just to think about it.

He had thought, at first, that he might move in up here, but in one of those decisions that have more to do with instinct than thought, he decided against it.  He would clean out a room on the second floor instead.  These attic rooms were probably hot as hell at night, and he would prefer to have his meals in the kitchen downstairs.  He would prefer the sense of occupying the whole house rather than just this little garret.  And, besides. . .

He picked one of the second floor bedrooms at the end of the hall, the one where he could turn left straight out the door and be in the bathroom.  In his apartment in California, the one in which he had spent all four years of his married life and the months after, he had made a sharp left turn into the bathroom, so this new arrangement had the virtue of familiarity.

In a utility closet downstairs he found a carpet sweeper that looked as if it might have belonged to Dolly Madison—a vacuum cleaner of any vintage would have been too much to hope for—so he took it upstairs with him, along with a broom, a dustpan, and a couple of dust rags from the interior of a pile which was itself covered with dust.  He threw open the bedroom window and, after he had recovered from the blinding sunlight that poured in like a conquering army, started in on the furniture.

After an hour he was reasonably pleased.  Since, God knows, Peggy had never shown much interest in the Domestic Arts, he had kept the edge on his housekeeping skills.  The place wouldn’t be a hundred percent until he’d had a chance to pick up a few things at the super market—a can of Pledge, for one—but at least he would be able to stand sleeping here.