The Moonlight (5 page)

The biggest patch was right by the entrance.  After about an hour he had chopped over a quarter of it down to an uneven stubble, and his shoulders were killing him.  His undershirt was soaked through and he was quite sure he would never be able to straighten his legs again.  Clearly, this was all going to take much longer than he had thought.

Phil needed a rest.  He went around to the back, where the house itself threw a comforting shadow across the old outdoor dance floor, found one of the metal lawn chairs that were scattered around like fallen leaves, and sat down.

He was tired.  He lit a cigarette and pulled another lawn chair over so he could put his feet up on it.  There wasn’t a breath of wind, and somewhere in the distance he could hear an odd mechanical sound which he finally decided was probably a bullfrog.  He was in serious danger of falling asleep, a prospect which did not appall him.

Even the pain in the shoulders had something luxurious about it.  His boss at the Arlo Finance Company, his last place of employment, had been rumored to be an avid gardener.  Was this what it felt like for those rich guys, taking Saturday off to putter around in the yard?  Phil glanced back at the gloomy facade of the old Moonlight Roadhouse that was, with his flaking paint and peeling gutters, and it made him sad to think that he was probably going to end by selling it.  He would have money then—for the first time in his life, a substantial wad of cash that might just be enough to buy him some kind of chance in life—but he rather liked owning the Roadhouse.  It made him a property owner.  A home owner.  He hated the idea of parting with it.

The cigarette had burned down all the way to his fingers, and he hadn’t even touched it. He had simply forgotten.  He shook off the long, curving ash, stamped out the butt under his heel, and lit another, smoking this one with deliberate concentration.

By the middle of the afternoon, with a half-hour break for lunch, he had the one large patch of lawn all chopped down to stubble.  He raked the cut grass into a heap on the driveway, where it looked like a haystack, and got out the mower.  By the time he was finished, and the grass from the mower had been added to the heap, his lawn looked approximately like a lawn again, trimmed to a uniform two inches, and the color of buckskin.  He didn’t know what to do to make it green—maybe that was something which would take care of itself.

The heap of cuttings was a puzzler.  Did you put that out with the garbage?  It didn’t seem likely.  He went back to the garage, looking for a basket or something to put it all in, and then he remembered the tarp.  When he had it all raked onto the tarp, and the four corners knotted together to make a bundle like Santa Claus’s bag, he started to look around for someplace to dump it out.

There were woods on three sides of the property.  Phil didn’t know whether they were his woods or someone else’s or nobody’s, but, since there weren’t any other houses about, he was prepared to take possession.  He carried the tarp a good fifty feet back through the trees, where he was sure no one would be able to see it, and dumped it out.  All the time he kept on the lookout for snakes.  It was getting toward dusk and, anyway, he didn’t like woods.  They gave him the creeps.

When he was finished he put the tools away and went into the house to take a shower.  Everything hurt, every inch.

The shower made him feel better.

There were still things he needed from the store, and he didn’t feel like cooking dinner, but he didn’t know whether he was up to walking the mile into Brookville.  He decided he wasn’t and made a peanut butter sandwich and a cup of coffee in the kitchen.  While he ate standing up he thought about the waitress at the Lobster Pot.

He had never been much of a success with women.  His girlfriend in college, who had dumped him after he dropped out.  Two whores:  one, in San Diego, had stolen his billfold and the other, in the Philippines, had given him the clap.  And Peggy. In thirty-five years, that had been it.

Peggy had arguably been the worst disaster of the lot.  She had married him because she was tired of clerking in the Rite-Aid drugstore and had left him for a used truck salesman who was already paying alimony to two ex-wives.  He wished the guy luck, because Peggy’s idea of hot sex was a no-frills quickie twice a month.

“Find one like our calendar girl.”

Had it been
him
saying that?  It was his voice—he could even hear the words vibrating in his throat—but it took him a few seconds to place the reference.  Yes, of course.  The calendar on the closet door up on the third story. 
Our
calendar girl?

He put his half-eaten sandwich down on the kitchen counter, his appetite gone.  Suddenly he didn’t care that his muscles felt like they were made of wood.  His mind was playing games with him.  He needed to be around people—he needed to get out of this house.  The walk into town would do him a world of good.

And it did.  By the time he was halfway there his legs had loosened up enough to stop hurting.  By the time he reached the sole traffic light that marked the center of Greater Metropolitan Brookville, he had stopped being afraid.

Even a village as small as this seemed to have seedy neighborhoods.  As you turned the corner, after the pharmacy and the bank, you were aware of a certain drop in caste—there was a video rental place and a bar and then the sidewalk abruptly stopped, as if the municipal planners had decided that enough was enough.

Phil studied the sun-faded posters in the video store, most of them for movies he had never heard of and wouldn’t want to see: 
Texas Chain-Saw Massacre II
,
The Summoning
,
Revenge of the Super Vixens
,
Portnoy Returns
.  The sign on the door said “CLOSED,” and from the look of the place that might be a permanent condition.  Small wonder.

The bar was better, if only because it was open for business.  There was a narrow horizontal band of window, edged in bright green, through which were visible a collection of house plants hanging suspended in green plastic pots.  The plants seemed like an attempt to capture a more upscale class of patrons, but they looked as if they badly needed watering so perhaps the gentry had stayed away.

Phil was not generally a great frequenter of bars, but he had to go somewhere so he went inside.  The juke box was playing a prehistoric Neil Sadaka record—
”My heart, my heart, my heart’s in a whirl/I love I love I love my little Calendar Girl. . .”
—which struck him as almost too promising an omen.  For the rest there were the customary tables, bar stools, neon signs above the mirrored bar advertising various brands of domestic beer.  There were lots of people, men and women, in all manner and conditions of life, dressed as if they had just come from work.  They looked like they belonged there.  This was a place for the locals.

Well, at least for the time being, he was a local too.  He ordered a beer and looked around at the tables, but they all seemed to be occupied.  Sitting on a stool at the bar always made him feel self-conscious.

“You just passing through?” the bartender asked him.  He was a big man, in his late sixties but undiminished, who looked as if he might have been a boxer once—his nose, at least, had been broken, probably more than once.  And then, as if by way of apology, “we don’t get many new faces in here.”

“You know the old Moonlight Roadhouse?”

“Sure.”  For some reason the bartender’s face appeared to darken.  “I had my first job there, as a busboy during the War.”

Somehow it didn’t seem to be a pleasant recollection.

“I own it,” Phil said, trying hard not to make it sound like a boast.  “I inherited it—I just moved in yesterday.”

“You kin to old George Patchmore?”

“Some kind of nephew.  I’d never heard of him until a week ago.”

“I’ll be damned.”

The bartender didn’t seem to want to talk anymore.  He moved to the other end of his bar and started polishing glasses, leaving Phil to wonder what sort of local taboo he had violated.  Or maybe it was simply that Uncle George hadn’t been universally loved.

But after a while he was having a good enough time.  The television over the bar was running a tape of yesterday’s baseball game, and someone was always feeding quarters into the juke box.  Phil fell into conversation with a guy who worked in the hardware store around the corner, who seemed to have a lot he wanted to get off his chest about home repairs—it was an education just to listen.

He was working on his third beer when a couple of women came in wearing white, long-sleeved blouses and black rayon skirts.  They were waitresses from the Lobster Pot, which was across the street, and one of them was
his
waitress.

She seemed to recognize him and smiled.

“Hi!” she said, hopping up on the stool next to him.  “We missed you tonight.”

Phil, who was not used to being picked up by pretty ladies, didn’t know what to say at first, so after a few seconds, when he hadn’t answered, she turned away, as if looking for the bartender.

“Did you just get off?” he managed at last.  It was stupid—why else would she be here in her uniform?—but at least he was talking.

She turned back to him, rediscovering his existence as a pleasant surprise.

“Eleven o’clock,” she said.  “We close at eleven.  We could’ve just as easily closed at ten tonight.”

She cast her eyes at the ceiling in comic dismay.

“Will you let me buy you a drink?”

She would never know how much it cost him to ask, but as he waited for her crushing refusal she just smiled and said, “Sure.  Why not?  Dave—a Coors!”

Was it really eleven o’clock already?  Was he really having a drink with the woman of his dreams? 
Find one like our Calendar Girl.
  Well, it would appear that he had.

By the standards applied by the rest of the world, she probably wasn’t anything extraordinary, but Phil wasn’t the rest of the world.  The rest of the world doubtless was spoiled rotten.  The rest of the world hadn’t been thrown over by Peggy.  To Phil she looked marvelous.  He found himself wondering, if only just for an instant, if her hair was that faded honey-color naturally or if she dyed it, and then he decided he didn’t give a damn.

“You live around here?” she asked, and then remembered that they had had that conversation before.  “That’s right—you just moved in or something. 
I
remember.”

And then she laughed, which was a delicious sound, full of promise.  When she laughed she looked as if she understood everything about you, that you had the biggest letch in the world for her, and that she thought it was just fine.

“I’m still cleaning out the cobwebs,” he said, as if to apologize for not inviting her straight home to his motel-style double bed.  “It’s the old Moonlight Roadhouse.  It seems that nobody’s lived there for years.”

“That big spooky place up the road?”

“That’s it—that describes it perfectly.  The big spooky place up the road.”

Why did he sound as if he had taken offense?  After all, it wasn’t exactly the Old Homestead.

“I just inherited it from some uncle,” he said quickly.  “I never knew anything about him, so it was like being struck by lightning.  A week ago I lived in California, and now I live here.”

“I hear California’s nice.  I bet you want to go back.”

She smiled, but there was something almost pleading in her eyes, as if it really mattered to her.

“Not really.”

Her beer came, so there was a little pause as she tasted it and adjusted the napkin so that the glass was placed precisely in its center.

“So—you’re living there?” she asked, as if she just wanted to get it straight for her records.

“For the time being, I guess.  Until they sell it or. . .  God knows.”

And then she laughed, just for a second and kind of deep in her throat, and looked at him from underneath her eyebrows in that way some women have.  And he just knew. . .

“Well,” she said, and laughed again, “my place is closer.”

. . . . .

And it was.  Beth—in their own good time they had gotten around to first names—lived in two rooms and a kitchenette, right over the hardware store.  They had another couple of beers and went there.

“My roommate is on the night shift at Grand Union.  She gets back at six a.m.”

Beth smiled a little uncertainly.  It was her way to telling him she couldn’t ask him to stay the night.  That was all right.  Phil still hadn’t recovered from his astonishment over being there at all.

“You want a cup of coffee?”

When he tried to answer, he found his mouth was dry.

He didn’t really know what to do.  His experience was limited—at the age of twenty he had lost his virginity in a car parked by the beach in Santa Monica, and Peggy had held out until their honeymoon in Las Vegas.  He wasn’t clear about how to proceed when the lady invites him up for the implied purpose of a little heavy breathing.  He wasn’t sure of the etiquette.  Whores didn’t count.

But in the end it was all perfectly straightforward.  While they were waiting for the coffee to brew, she went into what was presumably the bedroom and changed into a rayon kimono.  When she brought out the cups, she leaned over where he was sitting on the sofa and kissed him.  After a little preliminary fumbling, during which he discovered that she had not a blessed thing on under the kimono, they moved on to the bedroom.